Marx Against the Peasant, by David Mitrany

[p025] Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism. By D. Mitrany. Collier Books, 11s. 6d. The ‘dogma’ against which Mit- rany’s book, here reprinted from the 1951 edition, is directed, is the Marxist theory that the peasantry cannot be a consistently revolutionary class in modern society. Marxists have insisted that the peasantry, based as it is on independent ownership of land, is not one of the fundamental forces of capitalist society, the whole tendency of which is to differentiate the peasantry, subordinate (peasant) farming to big business, and to drive more and more peasants into the proletariat, the only real revolution- ary force. Mitrany maintains that the experi- ence of history since Marx has shown this to be entirely false. The par- ticular requirements of agricultural production gave the small unit actual advantages in many cases, thus pre- serving the peasantry’s independence: ‘Experience would almost suggest that often it is the smallholder and not the capitalist farmer who could best satisfy the Marxist demand for scientific, prolific cultivation.’ The coming together, in the imperialist epoch, of the mass struggle against ‘feudal relations in backward countries on the one hand with the growth of the world proletarian revolution on the other, created special problems of tactics and strategy for Marxists. The ‘feudal reaction’ in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, when the reactionary ruling classes made use of remaining serf-like relations to super- exploit the peasant in the production of grain for the world market, pro- voked peasant movements of revolt, as in Rumania when 10,000 were killed in the rising of 1907. These special problems of the period of imperialism, problems requiring specific and detailed study by Marxists (of the kind made by Lenin on the agrarian question in Russia) must be seen in terms of the whole stage of capitalist develop- ment and the class struggle of which they are part. It is quite against the spirit of Marxism simply to read off the results of this - strife against general statements by Marx and Engels. In each country, from this analysis of the real situation and real struggles of the peasantry, flow. the

[p026] 64 strategy and tactics of the Marxist party. Mitrany quotes Lenin’s very clear statements: ‘The proletarian said to the peasants (in 1917): we shall help you to reach “ideal” capitalism, for equal tenure is the idealising of capitalism from the point of view of small producers. At the same time we will prove to you its inadequacy and the necessity of passing to the cultivation of land on a social basis.’ Mitrany lays great stress on the extensive land distribution in Ru- mania and Bulgaria in the years following the First World War. In Rumania, for instance, the area owned by peasants rose from 58 per cent to 88 per cent of all arable land. These reforms were intended to stem revolt. In this they were successful. But surely this means that the peasantry was not able to carry through a revolution. Their ‘land reform’, in fact, perpetuated and intensified the backwardness of these countries. Only in the country where a successful proletarian revolution coincided with the peasant revolt was a great advance in the productive “forces possible. That the peasantry under Stalinism suffered a fate for for many years as bad as those in Eastern Europe certainly does not help sustain Mitrany’s thesis. In fact, of course, all this helps Mitrany to arrive at what is really a very hack- LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 neyed theme: 1917 in Russia was the counterpart of the bourgeois revolu- tion in the West. What we have seen since 1917 is really ‘a vast peasant uprising over half of Europe and most of Asia. The Communist part in it was acci- dental and has remained artificial.’ It is this fundamental strength of the peasants which has led to the need for repression against them in the USSR in order to preserve the dogma of proletarian revolution and Com- munism. The Mensheviks said that there could only be a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia. This would have the support of the peasantry. Proletarian revolution was an adventure and would be swamped in Russian backwardness. Lenin and Trotsky rejected the idea of a bourgeois-fed revolution in Russia in the imperialist epoch. The solution of the democratic tasks would lead to proletarian dictatorship; this would achieve its socialist aim along- side the international revolutionary proletariat. Instead of starting from the whole international character of imperialism and of the working class whose revolution against it began in 1917, Mitrany extends the Menshevik thesis on to a global scale. The specific problems of betrayal of working-class leadership from 1918 onwards, the struggle against Stalinism for a new Marxist leader- ship, all this is disqualified by his method of procedure: the revolutions that have occurred are in backward, peasant countries. Stalinism is Marxism (this is the favourite trick of anti-Marxists), and the behaviour of Stalinist governments shows that Marxism is nothing but a dogma which happens to be able to take. advantage of peasant revolutions. There are very strong connections between the trends of thought of the bourgeoisie and the development of revisionism within the Marxist movement itself. The revolutions in China, Yugoslavia and Cuba, as well as the course of the revolution in Russia, have produced revisionist ideas about the ‘inevitability’ of certain trends about a _ changed relation between the proletariat and other classes, about the relation between theory and the class struggle, about the relation between the revolutions in backward (peasant) and advanced countries, etc. Menshevism and other early revisionist trends in Marxism became necessary to bour- geois thought internationally, in order to ‘explain’ the worid after 1917. Modern revisionist trends should be analysed in relation to these faithful servants of the bourgeoisie, of whom Mitrany is a good example. For this reason, his book should be read. The recent publication of Lenin’s early works on the ‘peasant’ problem provides the best possible set of ‘companion’ volumes, if that is the right word. CS.

[p027] REVOLUTIONARY THEORY in class struggles, and in ‘theory’, in the analysis of concrete historical events. Lenin carried revolution- ary socialist theory into the imperialist stage of capitalist society’s evolution, and ‘discovered’ democratic centralism, the form of organization of the revolutionary party. It was this which enabled the proletariat in Russia to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to establish the first socialist state. Trotsky carried revolutionary theory into the stage of the ‘death agony’ of capitalist society and ‘discovered’ the Fourth International, the form of organization of the revolutionary party internationally through which the establishment of socialist society would be completed by the overthrow by the proletariat of the bourgeoisie and of the bureaucratic clique in the Soviet Union and in the other deformed workers’ states. These four main components of revolutionary theory are clearly ‘discoveries’ of different kinds. But all are essential parts of it. Revolutionary theory is strictly scientific, that it to say that it conforms more exactly to changing reality with each new ‘discovery’ that is made; it is also uncompromisingly revolutionary, that is to say that it is concerned with struggling with and changing that reality. It does not combine these characteristics fortuitously, but because at each stage in the evolution of capitalist society, the scientific socialists set themselves the task of disclosing all the existing forms of antagonism and exploitation in the society, of tracing the separate development of each of these and of enabling the proletariat by means of correct slogans and firm leadership to abolish all these forms of antagonism ‘and exploitation. Thus scientific socialism, or Marxism, involves, not the passive contemplation of social phenomena, the so-called objective description of society which is carried out by the ‘positivist’ sociologists, but a continuous struggle for a better erder of society. AN EXISTENTIALIST REVISIONIST OR A REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST? So far this article has been no more than an abstract explanation of revolutionary theory. But, as Lenin never tired of pointing out, the truth is always concrete. I shall try now to show this theory in action, to demonstrate its practical application to the present struggles of the Marxist movement. I shall examine the ideas and activities of one Alasdair MacIntyre, a professional philosopher and a former member of the Socialist Labour League, who is presently engaged in a campaign against the Socialist Labour League and against Marxism. Talented though he may have been, Alasdair MaclIntyre is an individual of no particular import- 65 ance in the Labour movement, and his attacks against Marxism are unlikely to be very effective. Nevertheless, the social group to which he belongs, the processes of development through which he went, the discipline in which he is trained, the methods he uses, all of these are of much wider significance than the individual. And it is with these that I shall be concerned. To leave error unrefuted, Marx told Hyndman, is to encourage intellectual immorality. To uncover the intellectual libertinism of Alasdair MacIntyre is to strike a blow for revolutionary theory and for intellectual morality. During the time he was a member of the Socialist Labour League, for about 12 months until June 1960, MacIntyre wrote a number of political articles and pamphlets. Before joining the League he had already written some works of professional philo- sophy, and in addition had made some contributions to the writings of the New Left and the New Reasoner groups. Since leaving the League he has written a number of political articles also. I shall try to trace the course of his political development in these writings. And on this basis, too, I shall venture to predict his future path. Shortly before the Second National Conference of the League in June 1960 MacIntyre joined the minority faction of which Behan was the leader. At the Conference MacIntyre spoke as one who ‘adhered firmly’ to the policy of this faction: ‘the question confronting us in the League at the moment,’ he said, ‘is whether the perspectives of our political work should be laid down and limited by work inside the Labour Party, or whether . . . we confront the working class with a much more realistic political alternative.’ The alternative for which he and the other members of the faction stood, was the setting up of an open revolutionary party. As another member of the faction expressed it: ‘The Labour Party has become the left-arm of capitalism .. . it is a petty-bourgeois, anti-working class party.’ This policy was defeated at the Conference, with only one delegate voting in favour. The Conference voted overwhelmingly for a resolution affirming that the Labour Party was a working-class party, on which a reactionary bureaucracy had been imposed through the pressures of imperialism. Shortly after the Conference all the remaining members of the faction resigned from the League, presumably with the aim of pursuing their policy. It is worth recording what happened to these ‘open revolutionaries’. In a very few weeks the group had dispersed: Behan attempted to set up a Syndicalist organization and has since left politics completely. MacIntyre is now the editor of Socialist Review and co-editor of International Socialism, both of which journals take the position that the Soviet Union is a ‘state capitalist’ society. ‘Neither Washington

[p028] 66 nor Moscow but International Socialism!’ is their slogan. These are journals which have tiny circu- lations, but what is more interesting is to note the kind of ‘socialism’ for which their editor now stands. The former ‘open revolutionary’ is now the supporter of the mildest of reforms from within the Labour Party. Revolution is now out of date, he argues, because ‘the character of British industry and with it the character of the British working class has changed ...” He predicts the ‘Americanisation’ of the British political scene in the next decade, i.e., the complete disappearance of ‘class’ politics. Workers, instead of attempting to improve their conditions through political pressure on the state through strikes will get their representatives to negotiate directly with the employers. ‘Many socialists do not realise the size and importance to workers of the welfare schemes operated by industry nowadays,’ he states parenthetically. What strikes do take place will be led by people with no political commitments. And, finally, the clearest statement of his changed position: ‘We of the left’ (no longer ‘of the the working class’, or ‘of the revolutionary movement’, it may be noted, but merely a vague geographical location). ‘We of the left . . . can fight in the same party [as the Labour Right] for such radical [sic!] reforms as Anthony Crosland’s reforms for the educational system and proposals for really punishing redistributive taxation * These, MacIntyre argues, are not ‘milk and water proposals’ they are real ‘class war’ measures.3 (But isn’t the class war over already? Sh... don’t ask awkward questions!) What is one to conclude from such a remarkable somersault? Is the metamorphosis now complete? Has the revolutionary caterpillar of 1960 become the reformist butterfly of 1962? Is middle-aged respect- ability already overcoming youthful impetuosity? There is, of course, no reason why MacIntyre should not have changed his views. And when he did, it was his plain duty to say so; truth must come first. But he still regards himself as a Marxist (he made this clear to readers of Twentieth Century recently). ‘Was a Christian. Am not,’ he explained. ‘It is less misleading when asked if I am a Marxist to say “yes” rather than “no”. But other Marxists have been known to say “no””4 And whatever personal definition of the term ‘ Marxist’ MacIntyre may have, it must surely include the duty of explain- ing to his former comrades, and to his present associates, how he came to change his mind so completely. As a professional philosopher he is well equipped to do this; but I fear that no such explana- tion will be made. For if there is one thing clear above all else, it is that Alasdair MacIntyre is not 3. Socialist Review, April 1962, p. 8. 4. Twentieth Century, Vol. 170, No. 1011, Autumn 1961, p. 29. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 and never has been a Marxist in any recognised sense of the word. He is and has been a petty- bourgeois subjectivist, a philosophical idealist, a Christian existentialist and a right-wing revisionist. He has in the past in some of his political writings made use of a few Marxist phrases and of a method of reasoning which bears some superficial resemblance to Marxist dialectics. During the time he was a member of the Socialist Labour League he made some tentative approaches towards a more revolu- tionary position. But for reasons which I shall try to explain he stopped far short of becoming a revolutionary Marxist. It is one of the signs of the weakness of the Marxist movement that his views although basically idealist were not criticised at the time. Had this been done it is possible that MacIntyre might have been able to change his outlook. Criticism is not only a right but a duty which rests upon all members of the Marxist movement. This criticism must not be mere abuse and name calling, as has been the Stalinist practice — nor Should it be conducted in a narrow sectarian and dogmatic spirit. There must be a willingness to examine fresh ideas while refusing to abandon any of the basic principles of Marxist theory. This means that there can be no lowering of standards to meet those in the movement who lack theoretical training. It is the duty of all revolutionaries to acquaint themselves with theory just as it is the duty of the movement to provide facilities for the education of members suited to their requirements. Marx expressed his views on this question in a letter criticising the Gotha Programme of the German Workers’ Party in 1875. ‘It is my duty,’ he wrote, ‘not to give recognition even by diplomatic silence to what is in my opinion a thoroughly objectionable programme tending to democratise the party .. . if they [ie., the Party’s leaders who were followers of Lassalle] had been told from the begin- ning that there would be no bargaining on principles they would have had to be content with a programme of action or a plan of organisation for common action. Lenin took up a similar attitude in his forthright criticism of Plekhanov’s Draft of the Programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902. ‘The entire character of the programme,’ he wrote, ‘is in my opinion the most general and basic defect of this draft, one that makes it unacceptable. Specifically it is not the programme of a party in a practical struggle, but a prinzipiener- kldrung (declaration of principles); it is a pro- gramme for students . . .°6 5. Karl Marx, letter to Wilhelm Bracke, May 5, 1875, Selected Works, Vol. II, 1942, p. 553. Lawrence and Wishart. 6. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol, VI, Moscow, 1961, p. 58.

[p029] REVOLUTIONARY THEORY THE ‘ PHILOSOPHER’ MACINTYRE Although MacIntyre himself has remained an idealist and made no use of Marxist dialectics, his work and activity must be analyzed from a material- ist standpoint and dialectically. In this way he can still help the Marxist movement to learn some important lessons. He has belonged to a number of different organizations: to the Anglican Church, the Communist Party, the New Left, the Socialist Labour League, and now to the state capitalist grouping. During these vicissitudes he has always made a clear distinction between his political and his professional writing. With changes in his political allegiances there have been some changes in the ‘form’ of his political writings; but he has never wavered in his allegiances to the school of idealist philosophy in Britain, which draws its inspiration from Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. For MacIntyre philosophy is ‘the patient description and classification of all those ways of using language that are of logical importance’.? This means that he has been concerned with descriptions of the language used by Christian theologians in talking about their beliefs. He accepts the ‘fact’ of the existence of religions without questioning the material basis of capitalist society - in which religion acts as a part of the ideological superstructure. He discusses religion simply as a system of ideas without any reference to the forms of exploitation which it seeks to justify and maintain. Thus: ‘the only apologia for a religion is to describe its content in detail: and then either a man will find himself brought to say ““My Lord and my God” or he will not’.8 There is no reference to ‘social classes’, or to ‘class Struggles’ in any of his ‘philosophical’ writing. Instead he is concerned with whether ‘visions’ pro- vide a sufficient basis for believing in religion, or if they do not what is the place of ‘visions’ in religious thinking? In another place he discusses the ‘problem’ of survival of life after death and decides that this is still an open question because the evidence is not really adequate. But for those who wish to ‘believe’ MacIntyre advises that they should choose the Christian belief in bodily resurrection rather than the Platonic doctrine of immortality.9 He follows the same method in a discussion of Freudian psychoanalytic theory; here he is concerned not with the ‘truth’ of the theory, i.e., its correspond- ence with reality, but with a discussion of ‘logical status’ of the term ‘unconscious’. And all that this implies is a comparison of the way the term is used in ‘ordinary speech’ and in ‘Freudian theory’.!0 7. “The Logical Status of Religious Belief’, in R. G. Smith (Ed.), Metaphysical Beliefs, 1957, p. 172. 8. Op. cit., 1957, p. 205. 9. Mind, LXIV, 1955, p. 389. 10. The Unconscious, 1958, p. 93. ‘to which he belongs. 67 The method of logical positivism, the ‘school’ of philosophy to which MacIntyre adheres, is thus a doubly idealist one. They do not even maintain that consciousness determines being, as did the 19th Century philosophers whom Marx criticized in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Instead they ignore being com- pletely, and attempt to explain consciousness in terms of consciousness. That is to say they do not attempt to explain theories such as those of the Freud: his work is ana- lysed by McIntyre not scientifically, in its class origins and place in the development of human know- ledge, but in terms of _ the meanings of words. theologians or of Freud, by reference to the real world in which these theories exist, as part of the ideology of the ruling class. Instead they try to explain them by reference to accepted meanings of words, i.e., to the ideology of the class which deter- mines these meanings. MaclIntyre’s own history epitomizes that of the class He has tried to come to grips with the problems of the real world; but he is the prisoner of the idealist concepts of the petty- bourgeoisie. He has stretched his arms through the bars and succeeded in touching the real world from different sides, But all he has succeeded in doing finally is to define subjectively the limits of his existence as an idealist philosopher in an objectvely capitalist world. Finally, he has resigned himself to being a prisoner. Good behaviour brings promotion to those who accept the limits of capitalism and work on its behalf. This does not mean, of course, that this is necessarily the fate of all intellectuals today. THE ‘NEW LEFT’ MACINTYRE From the Hungarian Revolution which exploded in 1956 shock tremors were sent out all over the world. In Britain it caused the defection of some of the Communist Party’s intellectuals and drove them to an adulterous union with Christians, existentialists and film producers. Working together furiously they begot the New Left; like a flower growing on a dung heap this burst open suddenly into full maturity

[p030] 68 and at once began to rot. Though claiming to be socialist theoreticians and internationalists the New Left were more interested in William Morris and Tom Mann than in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; and they were more concerned with morality than materialism. These were the influences under which Alasdair MacIntyre, who had been wandering in a Christian morass for some years, came back into politics. This helps to explain his development. His article ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ expresses every possible kind of political confusion. It contans many pseudo-Marxist phrases, and even some pseudo-Marxist quotations. How can we make human actions and human desires intelligible, the author asks? By relating them to the existing class struggles? Oh no! That would be too banal and too jargonistic for MacIntyre. His answer is: ‘by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like’. There is an example of how this idealist method works in a later passage: Stalinism and liberalism have this in common, he concludes, they both follow moral: codes which are ‘forms of alienation rather than moral guides’. Stalinists seek power, rationalizing this by the ‘ultimate justifying end’. The liberals also seek power justifying it by the desire for ‘immediate pleasure’.!! This is the kind of super- ficial comment which looks clever but explains nothing; it provides the proletariat with no slogans for the overthrow of either the bourgeoisie (the ‘ liberals’) or the bureaucracy (the ‘ Stalinists’). One may ask on the evidence of this article what led the author to join the Marxist movement even temporarily? It seems likely that the answer lies in his revulsion from the intellectual limitations and prejudiced blinkers of the New Left, rather than any understanding of class struggles and participation in them. Thompson and Saville had already declared Trotskyism and Stalinism to be opposites and equivalents: both stale, dogmatic, orthodox and stunted.!2. But MacIntyre was not satisfied, he was still looking for the answer to his problems. They were the wrong problems as it happened. By mistake he came to the right place. THE ‘MARXIST’ MACINTYRE Whatever the reasons may have been, MacIntyre joined the Socialist Labour League in 1959, and the work produced while he was a member must be examined more carefully. He was, at first, full of enthusiasm; he spoke at meetings, sold papers, wrote articles and pamphlets. Until he joined the minority 11. New Reasoner 8, Spring 1959, pp. 89-98. 12. J. Saville & E. P. Thompson, The New Reasoner, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1957. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 faction, which was shortly before he resigned, he appeared to have no basic disagreements with the theories or policies of the League. He has never really explained his position to this day: his speech at the Conference was a mere mechanical repetition of the statements of other members of the faction and it was quite out of character. It did not follow on from his previous positions in any way. Neither then nor since has anything been written about MaclIntyre’s resignation and the views he expressed in his articles and pamphlets. Controversy is the life-blood of the Marxist movement. As has been stated already, criticism is both the right and duty of all Marxists. The fact that there has been no criticism of MacIntyre means that there is a whole page missing in the Marxist movement’s education programme. Without an understanding of MacIntyre’s deviations and the reasons for his Tesignation it will be impossible to come to grips with the layer of middle-class intelligentsia from which he came, or to advance socialist theory. The main weakness of all his work was that he saw Marxist theory, not as a weapon of class struggle, but as an intellectual key which opened the way to the solving of otherwise baffling problems. Thus he never writes from the point of view of the working class itself, for whom class struggle is the essence of its existence, but from the point of view of an impotent outside observer advising the working class. The problems he is really concerned with are his own problems: or rather those of the class to which he belongs, and not those of the working class. Thus he writes: “We can begin from the feeling of helplessness which many workers have . . . They feel that their lives are shaped and dominated by powers and forces ’ far beyond their control . . . whereas in fact what happens in society is always the outcome of human intentions, decisions and actions.13_ (My emphasis— J.B) This is a quotation from a pamphlet he wrote which was supposed to be for the Marxist education of workers. In it what sets out to be no more than a paraphrase of Marx’s views on historical materialism becomes an idealist revision of materialism. Where MacIntyre writes ‘human’ Marx had written ‘men’. Where MacIntyre writes of ‘intentions, decisions and actions’ Marx had written that ‘the material pro- ductive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production . . . and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’. Marx begins from the fighting, MacIntyre begins from the feeling of helplessness. MacIntyre does not write of the domination of the ruling class over the workers but of ‘a power which takes shape as the power of 13. What is Marxist Theory for?, 1960, p. 6.

[p031] REVOLUTIONARY THEORY money, the power of ownership, the power of production’, He invariably prefers an abstract formulation to a concrete one. But truth, as has been said already, is not abstract but concrete. Although it is important to make these points about the basic ideological weaknesses from which MacIntyre began in the Marxist movement, it is necessary also to examine the weaknesses of the movement into which he came. He was, as he wrote, ‘ready to live and work in the working class movement and learn from it, revising his concepts all the time in the light of his and its experience’. This was probably true, he hoped to find in the Socialist Labour League the perfect organization in which he could do this. He wrote in the same pamphlet: ‘as workers become increasingly guided by theory as intellectuals become increasingly close to the class struggle, so the two groups become one. This is our continual experience in the Socialist Labour League as it was in the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks’.!4 This was what he had hoped to find in the Socialist Labour League and what he clearly after a time ceased to find. He had formed a romantic picture of the League, he failed to under- stand the processes of history and struggle through which it had emerged in its present form. He never succeeded in integrating himself completely into it. And he clearly began soon to have doubts both about himself and about the organization. These are expressed in another article written at about the same time: ‘All of us will pass through phases in which both rightly and wrongly we sharpen the line between ourselves and others. This self-imposed isolation is a feature of every normal adolescence. It is also a normal experience in political organisations in which the first experience of membership and friend- ship gives way dialectically to a consciousness of distance between oneself and others.’15 This is clearly a subjective statement of his own reactions to being a member of the Socialist Labour League; there is no necessary dialectic in this process. This is what Hegel called the ‘shallow misuse and the barrenness of modern so-called philosophic construction’!® which misuses dialectics for its own purposes. It is significant that not once in this pamphlet What is Marxist Theory For? is there any reference either to democratic centralism or to the Fourth International. The pamphlet sets out not to pose concrete problems and possibilities of struggle, but to ‘explain’ historical materialism and dialectics in simple non-technical terms. But his pamphlet succeeds only in presenting an abstract, 14. Op. cit., p. 12. 15. Freedom and Revolution, Labour Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Feb.-Mar. 1960, p. 22. 16. Cited by C. Slaughter in ‘In the Workshop of the Revolution’, Labour Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1952, p. 34. 69 impractical, non-dialectical, idealist statement. This is what Lenin would have called a ‘commentary’ on Marxism and not a weapon to be used in practical struggles. If this pamphlet had been criticized at the time it appeared in a comradely fashion it is possible that MacIntyre might have come closer to a revolutionary point of view. The matter should. certainly have been taken up, and all those who were in the League at the time are equally responsible. As it turned out, however, this pamphlet represented the high water mark of his Marxism; from then on he was racing out to sea on an ebb tide and with a following wind. It is doubtful whether he could have been diverted. In the article, ‘Freedom and Revolution’, which he contributed to LasBour REVIEW at this time, there is clear evidence of the same misuse of dialectics to which reference was made above. He writes about ‘freedom’, not in the context of the proletariat struggling as a class to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but in that of the ‘individual’ (an abstraction) asserting himself against ‘society’ (another abstraction). The model he presents of the proletariat is not of a Struggling class, but of a large number of separate individuals all moving along the same pre-destined ‘grooves’; the processes of capitalist education are described, not as part of the ideology of the ruling class, but as a means by which a few lucky individuals climb a ‘ladder’ which takes them into another ‘groove’. MacIntyre had contributed an article on ‘ Deter- minism”!7 some five years before to a journal of professional philosophy; and the ‘method’ is the same in both cases. There he had concluded that ‘determinism’ and ‘consciousness’ were opposed; rationality excluded any possible kind of causation in social phenomena, since a man who understands why he is acting in a particular way can change to act differently. In the earlier article ignorance of Marxism had, perhaps, led to his being unable to explain how human behaviour is both ‘determined’ (i.e., caused by certain laws) and at the same time ‘free’ (i.e., guided by a choice which is made realistic by a knowledge of the laws). The recognition of ‘necessity’, in other words, is the means of achieving ‘freedom’. MacIntyre is concerned all the time, not with the concrete reality of social classes in struggle, but with the abstract fiction of individuals in isolation. His Lasour Review article contains the same kind of false, non-dialectical logic, although it is expressed in the latter case in some of the formal trappings of dialectics. This is, however, what Hegel called: ‘nothing but the inaneness of the dialectically treated matter’.18 The method of dialectics used by Marx is that which examines capitalist society as 17. Mind, Vol. LXIV, 1957, p. 28. 18. Quoted by C. Slaughter, op. cit., p. 34.

[p032] 70 something which is changing and developing by reason of its internal contradictions and which has to be studied objectively. Marx himself maintained that one of the best descriptions of his method was that of the Russian professor whom he quoted in the afterword to the first German edition of Capital. “Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only indepen- dent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but on the contrary determining that will, conscious- ness and intelligence . . . he proves at the same time both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another. order into which the first must inevitably pass.”19 In other words this method requires capitalist society to be studied as if it were a living thing made up of inter-dependent parts. It requires men to be studied not as separate, abstract, suffering atoms, but as living, active and struggling social classes. As Engels wrote about this method: ‘the Marxist method of history puts an end to philosophy [he meant what we could call “speculation”] in the realm of history . . . It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections out of our own brain, but of discovering them in the facts’.20 Scientific socialists do not ‘make up’ the concepts of their science, all that they do is to take careful note of what is happening in the world before their eyes and express it in clear terms. This is not the method adopted by MacIntyre. His idealism and his misuse of dialectics is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the article: ‘Freedom and Revolution’. His concept of freedom is not in the concrete and historical struggles of the oppressed proletariat against their oppressors, the bourgeoisie. It is rather the Utopian concept of the absence of all the constraints which society imposes on the choices, intentions and desires of individuals. He discusses the meaning of the term a ‘free man’. He is not simply the man who gets what he wants, MacIntyre argues, because he might be a drug addict, acting under physiological con- straint. He is the man who has discovered the kind of life in which ‘fundamental desires, intentions and choices are made most effective; in which is most agent and least victim’.2! But all of this is nothing but the most banal and narrow-minded humanitarian liberalism. It has nothing in common with Marxist scientific socialism. MacIntyre is not concerned with the ‘necessity’ of another order of society. Some of the most fundamental statements on ‘freedom’ are to be found in Lenin’s discussion of the nature of the state and of the transition to com- munism (State and Revolution), and in Trotsky’s 19. Capital, Vol I, Moscow, 1961, p. 18. 20. From ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion, Moscow, 1957, p. 205. 21, Op. cit., p. 20. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 discussion of the nature of the state in the Soviet _ Union (The Revolution Betrayed). There is no reference to either of these. MacIntyre warns his readers against the use of ‘false abstractions’ while himself committing this error. He sets up such straw men of his own invention as ‘the individual’ and ‘the collective’ in order to knock them down again. But he leaves standing such ‘solid’ abstrac- tions as ‘substantial democracy’, ‘grooves’, ‘ladders’ and ‘expresso bars’. He writes about how ‘we’ can liberate ‘ourselves’, not how the proletariat can overthrow the capitalist state. He is concerned throughout with the dilemma of the individual, not the problems of the class. Although arguing for the existence of a vanguard party and the need for democratic centralism in it, he does so from idealist premises. These are required not to provide leader- ship for the class struggles of the proletariat, but to provide a sanctuary in which the individual revolu- tionaries find protection from ‘alien class pressures’,22 and so maintain their revolutionary principles pure and undefiled. This article might be compared with Hamlet without the ghost—and without the Prince, too. The ‘necessity’ of class struggle is omitted; and the ‘need for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the precondition for the ‘freedom’ of Communism is forgotten. Soon after this article was written, at some time in the Spring of 1960, although still formally a member of the League, and without ever having expressed open disagreements with its policy, MacIntyre’s retreat from Marxism turned into a frantic scurry. The lonely long distance runner began to yearn for the company of his ‘liberal’ friends. The apostle of freedom began to find the cross of the revolution an intolerable burden to carry. He had begun to believe that the defeat of the revolution had already occurred; revolutionaries were really sectarians and fanatics. He looked for and soon found an ‘honourable’ passport to the outer world. The article entitled ‘Breaking the Chains of Freedom’*} was written at this time. It earned him the displeasure of one of his former New Left companions, the ex-Stalinist Edward Thompson, for whom the epithet ‘ Trotskyite’ was still a term of contempt.4 But there was no longer any real disagreement between MacIntyre and the New Left. When he wrote the article he was still in the Socialist Labour League, but by the time it was published he had resigned. Here he is concerned with a subject much nearer to his own interests than the vanguard party of the proletariat; he sets out to scold the British university intellectuals for their 22. Ibid, p. 21. 23. In E. P. Thompson (Ed.), Out of Apath 1960, pp. 195-240. paihy, 24. Ibid., p. 14.

[p033] REVOLUTIONARY THEORY political apathy. His use of an artificially constructed dialectic is even wilder than before: he leads an oddly assorted troupe of dancers in which are to be found Tom Paine, Engels, Cicero, Byron, Karl Popper, Wordsworth, Malraux, Pavlov, Lord Milner, Zhdanov and Uncle Tom Cobleigh, through the highly improbable steps of the MacIntyre reel. And at last when the whole company is in a state of confusion he organizes an impromptu game of “Take your pick’. You must choose, he tells them, between Keynes and Trotsky. But he does not present the choice correctly: his Keynes is a solid figure, a man who made a fortune and was the ‘intellectual guardian of the established order’. He is not for MacIntyre, the ideologist of right-wing reformism, a scoundrel and a hypocrite who made a fortune for himself on the Stock Exchange, but a ‘man of attractive personality and great natural gifts’. And his Trotsky is a shadowy abstraction; he is presented as the defender of ‘human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort’; not as the tireless fighter against capitalist oppression and Stalinist vilification, the founder of the Fourth International, the upholder of the cause of inter- ’ national socialism, the leader of the international proletariat. But then MacIntyre had already decided on which number his choice would fall. A fellow- ship at Oxford University may not be quite the equivalent of a peerage; but it is least better than an ice-pick embedded in one’s skull.25 THE ‘ STATE-CAPITALIST ’ MACINTYRE It is clear that Alasdair MacIntyre is still moving, and although the general direction of his movement can be seen quite clearly, his final destination is by no means so easily distinguished. At any rate his adherence temporarily to the minority faction in the Socialist Labour League, his espousal of the demand for an ‘open revolutionary party’ and his subsequent retreat to liberal reformism, should be more intellig- ible. By the Spring of 1960 he had ceased to accept the need for a vanguard party or for democratic centralism and the Fourth International. These were decisions expressed in his writing at the time, but which he had reached personally and without ever having discussed them. His problem now was: how to make an unobtrusive and ‘honourable’ departure from revolutionary politics. He had come to reject Marxism and so had no wish to establish a platform of his own from which to fight for his views within the revolutionary movement. Ever a believer in formal dialectics, however, he went through the motions of fighting. He used one of his famous ‘ladders’ to climb from one ‘groove’ to the next: out 25. Ibid., p. 240. 71 of the ‘groove’ of revolution and material hardship, into the ‘groove’ of ‘reformism’ and personal advancement. He mounted the platform of the ‘minority faction’ because it provided him with an easy way out of the Marxist movement. As soon as he was out and ‘free’ from restraint, he jumped down to continue his journey alone. The last two years have been spent in finding a justification for his own personal position and a vantage point from which to attack the Marxist movement. The ‘state capitalists’ were happy to provide both. MaclIntyre’s editorship of Socialist Review and International Socialism provides him with a very congenial political position. The sponsors of these journals are able to give the maximum of individual freedom with the minimum of responsibility to their editors, since they have no policies to propound and no organi- zations to which they must report. The form taken by MacIntyre’s attack on Marxism could have been predicted from the beginning. It is an anthology of the views of every reformist from Kautsky, Plekhanov and Bernstein to Strachey and Anthony Crosland. The proletariat will reach spontaneously the consciousness necessary in order to change society through its experience in the existing mass organizations: Labour Party, trade unions, CND, etc. Thus the need for a party pro- viding leadership and subjecting its members to revolutionary discipline is denied; the need for a consistent scientific theory, too, is abolished. This means that the ‘elder Marx’, the materialist and the revolutionary, must be rejected and replaced by an imaginary ‘young Marx’, idealist and Utopian. Lenin was both too practical and too theoretical for the fine visionaries and shameless empiricists of International Socialism. His conceptual categories, to quote MacIntyre, ‘. . . imprison thought and make effective action impossible’.26 Trotsky, too, was a Sterile theorist who ‘attempted to substitute’ ‘an a priori scheme of things for the actual complex reality whenever he comes to a point made difficult by his own theory’.2? In this way, having abandoned Marxist theory, the way is open for subjectivism and reformism, for the most opportunist concessions to the bourgeoisie to be made under the cover of empty but left sounding phrases. The working class is adjudged to be no longer ‘revolutionary’, when it is in fact these wordy charlatans themselves who have abandoned the revolution in favour of ‘radical ’ politics and bourgeois prizes. The idealism of these ‘philosophers’ leads also to the acceptance of a fatalistic and defeatist attitude towards history. In 1924, in Russia, MacIntyre now maintains, there was no viable alternative to Stalin; the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was inevitable then, he 26. International Socialism, Vol. 8, Spring 1962, p. 33. 27. Ibid.

[p034] 72 claims, just as his own capitulation to the Right wing is inevitable today. Engels must have had similar characters in mind when he wrote: ‘In philosophy and in all other historical sciences the old fearless zeal for theory has disappeared completely along with classical philosophy. Inane eclecticism and anxious concern for career and income, descending to the most vulgar job-hunting, occupy its place. The official representa- tives of these sciences have become the undisguised ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state— but at a time when both stand in open antagonism to the working class.’28 Alasdair MacIntyre’s progress can be traced not only in the grandiloquently titled but obscure journals of minute political coteries, but also in the popular journals of the bourgeois intelligentsia. His articles appear from time to time in The Listener and he reviews books on religion and philosophy for The Guardian and The New Statesman; there may still be a career waiting for him as a television pundit and week-end philosopher. In a recent issue of The Twentieth Century he ‘proved’ that Marxism and Christianity had a great deal in common. Provided that Christians took up some of the ‘radical’ causes—poverty, peace, etc.—with which Marxists had been particularly associated in the past, there was, however, no need for the God- lovers to fear a take-over bid. ‘From time to time’, he writes, ‘issues arise such as that of apartheid, or those raised by the Campaign for Nuclear Dis- armament. Christians find themselves working side by side with Marxists and other non-Christians on a basis of deep agreement’. (My emphasis—J.B.)29 What deep agreement can there be, one may ask, between those who stand for materialism and for the overthrow of the existing order on the one hand, and those who stand for class exploitation and pro- vide the idealist disguise for this exploitation on the other? Our former revolutionary finds this agree- ment in the similarity of the Marxist concept of ‘alienation’ and the Christian concept of ‘original sin’! 28. Op. cit., p. 266. 29. Op. cit., p. 36. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 The purpose of this and similar articles is clear. It is to provide comfort and reassurance for the bourgeoisie. In a troubled world where Communism is no longer a ‘spectre’ but a tangible danger, the cathedral charlatans and the old parish witch-doctors can no longer provide this; a self-professed Marxist who is also a philosophy don at Oxford, is a much more effective tranquilizer. ‘ Marxists will remain few in number’, he tells them. ‘Christians are much more numerous and this fact alone makes it probable that the very small traffic between the two doctrines will be largely one way’ (meaning that Marxists will be converted to Christianity, but not vice versa). However it does not really matter very much what the bourgeoisie thinks—except of course to those who depend on them for commissions and promo- tions. There is an objective logic about the revolu- tionary process which ignores the incantantions of priests and philosophy dons. The class struggle cannot be exorcized by the methods of the logical positivists; Wittgenstein has not ‘explained’ Marx. It is not the meaning of words that is being questioned, it is the reality of things that is being demonstrated. There comes a stage in the develop- ment of the revolutionary process when the pro- letariat is faced with these alternatives: either to take power in the state into its own hands, or to sur- render once more to the oppression of a discredited ruling class. Marxists will place themselves at the head of all those fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist state and the ending of all exploitation. The yelping of the bourgeoisie’s philosophical poodles will go unnoticed. It is important, however, that the vanguard party of the proletariat should prepare itself in advance for the taking of power by the proletariat. It can do so only by paying the most meticulous attention to tneory. As Trotsky wrote from his exile in Prinkipo in 1930: ‘The most remote and it would seem abstract disagreements, if they are thought tothe end will sooner or later be expressed in practice, and the latter allows not a single mistake to be made with impunity.30 There is no room for existentialist or other revisionism in the Marxist party. 30. Permanent Revolution, 1930, p. 1. POSTSCRIPT: Unfortunately, MaclIntyre’s latest effort appeared as we were going to press. It is an article in the magazine Socialist Review of which MacIntyre is one of the editors. The title of this article “The Sleepwalking Society’ refers not to some new society being set up by MacIntyre and his friends, but to ‘ Britain in the Sixties’. If we could be sure that this journal was readily available to all our readers, we would rest content by recommending it as the finest possible epilogue and conclusion to this analysis of MacIntyre’s adventurous career on the Lefi, but things being what they are we feel tound to make some brief comment. In this article MacIntyre waxes very enthusiastic over the strength and ability of the ‘large class of top managers and executives whose influence extends from the Treasury to ICI, from the National Coal Board to the Insurance Companies’. These men

[p035] ‘THE THEORETICAL FRONT’ rule our lives and ‘ They are, compared with the old capitalist class, extremely well-informed and extremely able’. As against this, MacIntyre shows that he has looked with a very different eye at the working class: ‘More than this, they have an extremely docile working class to deal with.’ Just as the monopolies concentrate their power and draw the labour bureaucracy closer to their service, so does MacIntyre develop a healthy respect for their ability. Just as the class struggle takes inspiring turns in Spain, Germany and Portugal, alongside a critical phase for the French bourgeoisie, so does MacIntyre find it possible to refer to the workers as ‘extremely docile’. What was the special type of docility which brought the capitulation of the dock employers? Are the motor car employers worried over profits because of the docility of their workers? Are the strikes and demonstrations on behalf of the nurses the actions of docile workers? And does not MaclIntyre’s rubbish provide a cover for the real facts, that the leaders of the workers’ organizations are betraying the members and refusing to mobilize the strength of the working class? MacIntyre goes further: ‘The old Marxist view that capitalism could never provide consumer power sufficient to use up all that was produced is made completely obsolescent in a capitalism of continually expanding investment and continually expanding consumption.” Not only have the economic con- tradictions of capitalism been overcome, but the capitalist control of education and the mass media (an old friend) create ‘an attitude of apathy and acceptance towards the political status quo’, Once again MacIntyre excuses his own capitulation and pessimism by attributing it to the working class, of which he knows nothing. His article concludes with an inspiring message for the socialists of 1962: ‘And this means that no isolated political question can hope to impinge greatly on working class conscious- ness. Not even that of the Bomb. So we come back full circle (!) to Aldermaston ’62, and the answer to our question of why demonstrations can make so little impact is that they are running counter to our whole way of life and not simply to official policy about the Bomb.’ The fact that the issue of CND bids fair to provoke a major historical crisis in the Labour Party is presumably of no account, bears no relation to ‘working class consciousness’. The downright pessimism and fatalism of this article is the consequence of MaclIntyre’s whole method. Instead of finding a place in the proud struggles of the working class against the capitalist system, he has gone deeper and deeper into that ‘moral wilderness’ from which he temporarily and accidentally strayed ‘sleepwalking’ perhaps). Perhaps he will again find the good shepherd. 73 Questions in Parliament D. N. Chester and Nona Bowring ‘Its authors . . . have done an extra- ordinarily thorough job; they outline the history of Question Time, from the first recorded question . . . and they examine the thing as it happens now—readably and vividly, without the arid jargon that sometimes mars books based on massive research.’ TOM DRIBERG, M.P., in REYNOLDS NEWS 35s net Wilkes and Liberty A SOCIAL STUDY OF 1763 To 1774 George Rudé ‘Immense research, clarity of expression, firm grasp of the essential questions, combine to produce a book of creative originality. Mr. Rudé’s book is, in appearance, slight and unpretentious. Its lesson is shattering. He has put mind back into history and restored the dignity of man.’ A. J. P. TAYLOR, in THE GUARDIAN Frontispiece 30s net OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

[p036] 74 LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962