Theory and Practice in Marxism

[p018] Theory and Practice in Marxism By C. IN the course of the development of the Marxist movement, each generation has had to re-discover the essence of the Marxist method for itself. Searching for solutions to the new problems arising for the working class in its own time, the revolu- tionary vanguard must take the basic ideas handed down to it and give them back their original meaning by developing them in relation to the new reality. In the struggle to build a conscious working-class leadership, propositions which had become empty formulas are refilled with their revolutionary content. The definition of Marxism as the unity of theory and practice has a profound meaning which is periodically forgotten. When the Marxist move- ment loses sight of its true role, principles and their concrete application are treated as if they were utterly divorced, existing on, different planes. Principles then become mere abstract truths, out Smith of time and space, with the aid of which reality can be described, while practice turns into routine activity, conforming to traditional recipes. Today, imperialism encounters new crises; . the ideologies of Social-Democracy and Stalinism are, increasingly clearly, incapable of providing any leadership for the world working class. The Marxist movement, in re-equipping itself to resolve this crisis of leadership, must consider these questions anew. Those who openly or covertly revise the funda- mental concepts of Marxism start by destroying their connection with the class struggle. This article looks at the general relation of theory to activity and tries to show how Marxist theory and revolutionary practice, far from corresponding to each other in a fixed and passive way, determine each other through mutual contradiction. Marxism is not a theoretical system, but a living process. Theory is Practice ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ At the most elementary level, thought and action, or their rudimentary ancestors, are directly identical. Living matter fights to transform a hostile environment into a new kind of order within itself. In a process which is both activity and a sort of consciousness, the organism constantly adjusts itself to achieve survival in spite of the constant changes in its surroundings. Then organisms evolve with specialised nervous systems; instinctive be- haviour patterns are ‘built-in’ as reactions to various situations. The species ‘learns’ to respond in appro- priate ways, through the operation of natural selection. The human child, until it learns the necessary social norms of behaviour, does not reflect on its relationship with its environment. Consciousness is still inseparable from the activity of keeping alive, and cannot examine the purpose of this activity. Although he spends his life in constant conflict with nature, primitive man is completely integrated with his natural surroundings. At the human level, individual animal activity has been transformed into social practice. Learning is now not a matter of individual heredity, but of the conscious transmission of traditional methods of production, embodying past experience. Thought is thus an aspect of the

[p019] 136 material struggle for food, clothing and shelter. Speech, general concepts, logical reasoning, science and art evolve as the strategy of the war against nature. Human labour, the collective activity of produc- tion, is attuned to the rhythm of nature. Life is shaped by natural forces beyond the reach of man. These forces can only be affected by carrying out the correct magical rituals. But primitive man is not the slave of nature, for he himself is a part of its operation. Like the child, he cannot consider himself divorced from _ the activity of getting a living, which is productive labour. And since production is a co-operative process, involving the whole community, no one can think of himself except as a part of society. The basic identity of thought and action, of theory and practice, is found at all levels of experience. There can be no such thing as a thoughtless, purely physical, human action. Every bodily movement involves some mental change which relates it to the history of society. Thought itself is an activity which is manifested in physical changes in the brain. Its subject is the relation of the thinker to the rest of the material LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 world and to the society with which he has active material connection. But even at the most elementary stage, thinking and acting are implicitly in opposition. The act is always concrete, a response to a specific situation, aimed at achieving a particular goal. The thought, desire or question which precedes it, itself follows from a million other acts, similar or dissimilar, successful or unsuccessful, performed in other situations by the same or by other actors. The thought has a general, universal character, which comprises an infinity of concrete actions and is in contradiction with any one of them. An action is the reply to a question posed to the actor by his environment. When completed, it has altered this environment in ways which must then be compared or contrasted with the desired goal. All activity, even when unsuccessful, is thus essentially creative. Question and answer, desire and act, thought and deed, are potentially opposed in their unity. It is through this opposition, this process of mutual questioning, that theory and practice develop each other, absorbing and generalising ever growing bodies of experience, giving man greater and greater powers of control over nature. Theory versus Practice ‘For thought’s the slave of life, and life’s time’s fool’ The growth of society and the productive forces leads at a certain stage to the division of human beings into classes. A leisured group separates out which, by living on the product of the labour of the rest of society, is enabled to develop the political, scientific, artistic and religious forms of civilisation. Mental and physical labour are distinguished as different aspects of human activity, performed by different orders of being. Class society was an essential stage in the progress of humanity. The separation of theory from practical activity enabled thought to reflect on practice and to drive forward the accumulation of scientific and technical knowledge at an_ ever- increasing rate. It made possible the progress of culture and its development to a stage where man’s conquest of at least his immediate surroundings on this planet is now within his grasp. The price paid for this necessary episode in human history is tremendous. It must be measured. in the sufferings of millions of slaves, serfs and wage- workers, whose lives have been crushed beneath the weight of exploitation and oppression. Prevented from participating in cultural development except: as its victims or at best as passive onlookers, they have seen the results of their labour removed from their control. But the culture of the ruling class itself is distorted and fragmented. The cultural monopoly of a small leisured minority cuts off theory from its practical meaning and divides the thinker from the social roots of his thought. Human beings, unlike everything else in the universe, produce their own material conditions of life and thus themselves. But the needs of exploiting classes prevent this being understood by thinkers in class society. Theory divorced from the practical process of production is unable to provide conscious understanding of the way in which man creates himself in mastering natire. The relations of material production are seen as the product of thought instead of the other way round. Religion and philosophy are the ideological pro- ducts of class society. ‘This state, this society, produce religion, a reversed world-consciousness, because they are a reversed world.’! The oppression and restriction of society are given a divine status 1. Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philo- sophy of Right, in Marx and Engels, On Religion, p. 41.

[p020] THEORY AND PRACTICE IN MARXISM enshrined in religious institutions. The actions of men are explained in terms of a super-human, extra- terrestrial power. Philosophy is an attempt to ‘explain’ the world, both natural and social, purely in terms of thought, from outside reality. In striving for objective know- ledge, the philosopher must try to create concepts which are not biased by the antagonism and dis- tortion of society. But ideas are now concerned, not with the interests of society as a whole, but with the conflicting interests of different social classes. Through its ideologists, the ruling class must justify its power and exploitation and ‘represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form’.2 Plato’s ‘noble lie’, pretending that the existing social set-up is in some way a law of nature, pervades every aspect of cultural life. The philosopher is thus, without knowing it, viewing the world in the distorting mirror of class society and giving theoretical expression to conflicts between various propertied classes. These are fought out in terms of philosophical and religious ideas, around which the political and economic struggles are organised. . The world was never altered by philosophy as such. For the mass of human beings, life remained unaffected. Practical activity meant, and still means, conforming to social norms, which maintain the system of exploitation. Philosophy, however, not only imagined that it moulded society and that human freedom could only be attained through its paths: it considered itself to be self-creating and self- subsisting. Each new philosophical or religious trend had to explain its necessity by showing that its predecessors had been in error. Each regarded itself as absolute. The philosophers and artists of class society have striven to grasp the truth about reality, but they can only do this in a one-sided and upside-down way. Philosophy tries to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of reality through the process of abstrac- tion. It thinks that appearance obscures the truth, which could be reached only in the realm of thought. However, the philosophers could not see that errone- ous methods of thought arise from the need to conceal the class relations of society, and so philo- sophy searched in vain for the mysterious answer to life’s problems. Philosophy, science and art continually raise questions which could undermine the social order. Guided by the methods of natural science, materialist thinkers collide every day with the barrier separating thought and action, and find themselves in conflict with the superstitious and religious guardians of class rule. 2, Marx and Engels: The German Ideology, p. 41. 137 But although philosophical materialism ‘explained’ the world in terms of matter, this was itself an abstraction, excluding human activity and history. It could not resolve the contradictions within society or account for the existence of its own struggle against false ideas. Materialism before Marx, and mechanical materialism since his day, have always ended by veering over to the opposite philosophical pole. Beginning by suspecting all knowledge except that based on sense-impression, these ‘materialists’ turned to rejecting the possibility of any objective know- ledge of reality at all. The thinkers and poets of ancient Greece lived in a period when the forms of thought were still being moulded by class division and commodity produc- tion. From the naive attempts of the pre-Socratic scientists and philosophers to understand the world practically, Plato and Aristotle formulated ideas which express the need of a slave-owning class to maintain its power. The Platonic Ideas and Aris- totle’s Forms took the explanation for the nature of the world away from experience. The fixed concepts of medieval scholasticism mirrored the static and hierarchical structure of feudalism. At first, philosophy was feared by dog- matic authority as being corrosive to the theological cement holding society together. Eventually, how- ever, it was harnessed in the service of Church and State, and Aristotle was interpreted so that reason could give support to faith. Capitalism, the last form of class rule, pushes the distortion of thought to its extreme. Theory now becomes the private thoughts of isolated thinkers. From this standpoint, knowledge is broken up into separate ‘facts’, whose connection is the product of thought alone. Christian dogmatism had to be displaced by the ideologists of the bourgeoisie. The rationalism of the enlightenment held up to the measure of reason social norms previously unquestioned. Reason thus considered came from ‘within’ the consciousness of the reasoner; nature and society were ‘outside’. At the period of bourgeois revolution this opposi- tion of reason to reality was a driving force for change. The world had to be made into what it ought to be. Corruption, oppression, superstition were irrational impositions on humanity, and must be removed if reality was to be made reasonable. But the political victory of the bourgeoisie posed severe problems for this outlook: the sharp edge of reason could not be allowed to cut too deep, for no more revolutions were required. The abolition of feudal property forms cleared the way for new methods of exploitation which had to be shown to be themselves in accord with reason’s canon. In Britain, where the first bourgeois revolution was followed by compromise with the aristocracy,

[p021] 138 rationalism was transformed into empiricism. In Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, English philo- sophy went through a development from sceptical materialism to positivism, which accepts existing conditions and prohibits any questioning of them. The arena of action of reason is removed far from the everyday world, where ‘common sense’ is left to reign supreme. In accord with a social system in which everything and everybody is given a quantita- tive expression as a sum of money, science must strive to reduce all qualitative differences to mere quantity. Locke English philosophy deveiops from sceptical materialism to positivism The world is seen as a machine, whose separate parts interact without altering each other. There is a finite number of fixed qualities—mass, position, velocity, energy—each at a certain quantitative level, and these quantities are related by mathematical formulae, which science has to discover. Political economy was the supremely bourgeois science. Human society is divested of all its human aspects. An economic machine is driven forward by the search for profit, and only this ‘hidden hand” is required to guide society. The relation between human beings is established solely through the sale and purchase of commodities. As the capitalist mode of production passes its zenith and loses its revolutionary and progressive momentum, bourgeois art, science and philosophy exhibit the gulf between thought and reality more and more. Philosophy, which once posed itself questions of vital importance for human progress, becomes a word-game, the sport of desiccated dons. Bourgeois thinking separates means from the ends they are meant to serve. It measures the value of a line of action in terms of its efficacy for some immediate practical purpose, whose necessity is itself unquestioned. Technique, developed to its highest point by the vast expansion of capitalist industry, is unrelated to its end-product. The more formally rational technique becomes, the greater the effect it has on society and yet the less it is capable of conscious control in the interests of humanity, LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 Le., the less ‘rational’ are its ends. Formalism is the logical counterpart of empiri- cism. Thought itself, totally cut off from life, must be made to obey pre-arranged rules. Logic becomes an abstract recipe for correct thinking, independent of what is to be thought. Just as a commodity is sold for a given sum of money, irrespective of the use to which it is put, so logic, ‘mind’s coin-of-the- realm’, is concerned with pure thought-forms, emptied of all content. In this method of thought, the abstractions through which the world can be understood must be cleansed of all contamination with the reality with which they deal. Abstraction is the ‘processing’ of the raw material of experience. Knowledge is thus no more than a superficial and relative summary of things. Logical thinking must be unaffected by any influence outside its form, and especially by the object thought about. ‘Objective’ thought is thus thought without object. Instead of content, ideas are given ‘facts’ to arrange. These atoms of information are supposed to be entirely unconnected. They are received as sense-impressions, and then strung together on hypo- theses, like beads. Formal logic confronts the world with a pre- determined set of rules. The validity of these can, of course, not be questioned within the system. Claiming to comprehend the separate objects of the universe in its categories, eliminating all contradic- tion between them, it is incapable of explaining itself. Cutting itself off from living reality, reason shrivels and dies. Attempting to fashion a set of theoretical tools which will cope indifferently with any job, it ends by coping with none. Any question worth asking is dismissed as meaningless by the formalists. Since the rules of logic, like common sense, are themselves the unconscious product of society, this mode of thought, taking itself for granted, can never question the existing social order. Completely dis- rupted by any minor change, it tries to settle down again, adopting the new set-up as ‘common-sense’. Empiricism and formalism are thus well adapted to the needs of those political trends which seek to alter particular aspects of society, reforming parts of the social mechanism so that the process of exploitation can run more smoothly. The following of established recipes can produce nothing new. Out of the sceptical attack on the dogmatism of the feudal epoch, a new, bourgeois dogmatism has emerged. The pragmatist tries to identify formal theory immediately with practice. In a world of conflict and crisis, this means the denial of theory altogether. The rational methods of natural science flatly con- 3. Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 148,

[p022] THEORY AND PRACTICE IN MARXISM tradict the lunacy of social life. In the epoch of the H-bomb, the fruits of scientific thought are geared to a social system which threatens to destroy the human race. The effect of bourgeois society on culture is felt by many sections of the intellectuals, In one way or another, attempts are made to crash through the barrier between thought and practical reality or to build a bridge over it. But, imprisoned in his petty- bourgeois isolation, the thinker or artist is powerless to solve the problems which he feels or knows confront him. The meaningless and absurd appear to offer an escape from the rigid rules of formal logic. The bourgeois revolutionary concept of reason has been turned inside-out. Reason is now located in an inhuman external world. Freedom is to be achieved only within the individual and in opposition to reason. Emotional life is regarded as essentially the arena of irrational forces. Counterposing his inner life of freedom to the slavery of the outside capitalist world, the subjectivist still finds himself conditioned and determined by that same world. However deep 139 his anguish, he cannot solve these practical problems in the world of private thought or feeling. Indeed, irrationality and subjectivism are reactionary ten- dencies, used to prevent the political resolution of the crisis of mankind in the epoch of imperialist decay, for they are employed to build movements of violent desperation to break the power of the labour movement. The disease and corruption of modern culture reflect the death agony of world capitalism. They are the symptoms of the decay of a whole social system and its ruling class. Their cure can only be achieved in the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism.4 4. Some of the ideas of this section are related to those of Max Horkheimer contained in his book The Eclipse of Reason. However, despite his critique of modern thought, and his demonstration that a return to older philosophies is impossible, he remains on the philo- sophical level. This is connected with his evident dis- illusionment with the labour movement, and mass action in general. However, there is much of interest to Marx- ists in his work. Theory and Practice Re-united ‘Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in different ways: the point, however, is to change it. It was in the Germany of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where the bourgeoisie was economic- ally and politically backward, that bourgeois philo- sophy reached its highest point. Since their revolu- tion was only ‘in the head’, the Germans were capable of taking it further than their British or French counterparts—but only in theory. Kant, Fichte and Hegel were able to draw the theoretical lessons of the French revolution as far as they could reach. Pulling together the rationalist and empiricist threads, Kant posed anew the problem of knowledge divorced from practice. Asking ‘How is knowledge possible?’, his ‘critical philosophy’ separated the categories of thought and the rules of logic from their objective content. Things ‘in themselves’ were beyond the boundary between thinking and reality. Any attempt to cross this frontier was doomed to fall into contradiction. All the properties, inter- relationships and development of reality are supplied by reason in the process of cognition. Hegel abolished the ‘thing-in-itself’, exposing it as a nullity. Thought and its object were unified in a contradictory whole. In his upside-down, mystical, idealist way he explored the results of the separation of theory and practice. The categories of thought arise from the objective world. They are historical stages in the unfolding of the Idea. Far from being external to reality, they are its very being, essence and notion. The concrete object is infinitely connected with everything else in the world and with its own past and future. It is reached through a process of abstraction which penetrates the surface between appearance and essence. When Hegel says that the world is Mind, he is expressing the interconnection between thought and its object, and affirming the ability of thought to master reality. Hegel saw that men had been acting without grasping the real meaning of their actions. The understanding of this process was the task of philo- sophy, which could thus bring thinking into con- formity with objective reality. History spoke through the philosophic method. Philosophy was the autobiography of the human spirit. While this led Hegel to reactionary political con- clusions, it enabled him to see the nature of formal thought. Truth was not a static object but an historical process, developing through a series of approximations. Hegel does not discard previous philosophies but absorbs them into his system in negating them. The world was not a machine as the empiricists contended. It was an organic whole, whose inter-

[p023] 140 related parts made each other what they were, through conflict and contradiction. Dialectical logic, unlike formal logic, does not deal with separate objects which must be classified into exclusive categories. It is the nature of reality itself. It can see its own development as part of the growth and interrelationship of the object it deals with. But, although Hegel sees the one-sided character of previous philosophy and investigates its hitherto unconscious connection with historical reality, he only sees it philosophically. That is, he can only consider theoretical answers to theoretical problems. His tremendous achievement was to bring together all the contradictions of philosophy and prepare the way for their resolution. Marx, by turning towards the working class and its revolutionary role in modern society, was able to demolish this theoretical barrier. Philosophy was abolished. Starting with Hegel’s grasp of the contradictory connection between thought and history, Marx sought the social force which could eliminate the obstacle to human freedom. This obstacle, he found, was not theoretical but economic: the exploitation and oppression of class rule. And the force which would smash it was the united power of the working class. The proletarian masses, the producerg of wealth, would become the active element in social development. The problems which philosophy had posed for thousands of years were only the ideological refiec- tion of practical economic and political problems. Their solution lay, not in the realm of pure thought, but in the revolutionary transformation of the social order by the action of the workers. In showing how false ideas arose from the con- flicting material relationships in class society, Marx was able to break through the forms of thought in which the power and interest of propertied classes had been mystically enshrined. A_ consistent materialist world outlook could be developed, free from the distortion of class society. For this method of viewing reality was able to see its own material basis in the working class. A scientific understanding of history becomes possible from this point of view. Philosophy could not formulate historical laws without raising the question whether such laws would not limit and determine human action and thought, including that of the philosopher. Marxism, as the revolutionary theory of the working class, can answer this question. Like the working class, the Marxist movement is both a product of capitalist society and part of the struggle to destroy it.° 5. The so-called sociology of knowledge (as formulated by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia) has to grapple with this basic contradiction. Mannheim, fol- lowing Alfred Weber, finds in the intelligentsia a group LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 Marxism studies the world objectively, not in the formal sense of claiming to be ‘independent’ of reality, but in active connection with it. The objective social conditions are not viewed as un- changeable ‘facts’, but as problems to be solved, as obstacles whose nature and history must be grasped so that they may be overcome. The contradictions inherent in capitalist society are seen as opportunities for the conscious intervention of Marxists. The latter are, therefore, not trying to impose prefabricated theories on reality, but to understand it through the process of transforming it. Scientific objectivity is thus not a standpoint of aloofness, from which all passion must be antiseptic- ally removed. The working-class struggle, an essential part of capitalism, is the only viewpoint from which society can be comprehended. The philosophic attitude, even in its popular sense, implies a passive acceptance of reality, whatever its defects. That is why every attempt by bourgeois commentators or by revisionists within the Marxist movement to turn Marx into a philosopher, destroys the essence of his thought. Marxism is not merely a theory, but a social movement in which theory plays a uniquely central part. The Utopian socialists had seen the desirability of replacing the anarchy and degradation of bour- geois society with a system based upon collective ownership and control of production. But, since they could not found their ideas on the struggle of the working class, they did not reach beyond the level of philosophy. Their blue-prints for a better world remained mere wishful thinking. Unlike all previous revolutions, notably the bourgeois revolution, the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat is the basis for the emancipation of humanity from all class division. This liberation has to be a conscious process. The communist movement is the struggle to bring about under- standing by the working class of its role in history. In contrast to the bourgeoisie, which could develop its mode of production within the womb of feuda- lism, the working class needs an organised party to lead its fight for power to control its conditions of life. The independent action of the working class can be developed and the class made conscious of its strength only through an all-round theoretical, political and industrial struggle, led by a disciplined vanguard. which he alleges is able to understand how thought is affected by the social position of the thinker, and to ‘correct’ the consequent distortion. This group, he thinks, ‘subsumes in itself all those interests with which social life is permeated’ (page 40). However, this view is itself related to the social position of those engaged in the reformist ‘social engineering’, which a particular phase of imperialism made possible.

[p024] THEORY AND PRACTICE IN MARXISM The Marxists ‘have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’.6 Marxism generalises the long-term interests of the working class. This generalisation is a historic process com- bining scientific analysis and practical activity with the assembly and selection of the human material to carry them out. The Marxists have the task of laying bare the reality of social relations which capitalism keeps hidden. This task is at the same time theoretical and practical. By giving leadership to the workers in day-to-day battles with the employing class, Marxists bring the nature of capitalist exploitation into the open. Against all the ideological weapons of the ruling class, ranging from the Daily Sketch to the University of Oxford, the revolutionaries must wage a constant war to show how only the united struggle of the workers to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie can take the human race forward. The workers. are driven to revolt by the conditions of life to which they are condemned by capitalism. Uniting as a class, they challenge the power of capital. This unconscious or partly conscious con- flict between wage-earners and employers continues as an integral part of the economic system, and implicit in the workers’ struggle is the overthrow of bourgeois society. But without the Marxists, it would be led into channels which would accommo- date it within the social framework of capitalism. Marxism combines theory and practice, not in a passive or peaceful way, but in mutual contradiction. Practice is not mere activity, following set routines, but is itself a theoretical process, constantly checking and re-checking itself. Its concrete, detailed char- acter does not isolate it from theory but gives expression to general theoretical concepts. Its theoretical basis brings it into closer relationship with social reality. Every detail of revolutionary practice must reflect the overall objectives of the movement and the class it fights to lead. The unity of theory and practice is thus never completed, the gulf between them never bridged. Marxism is a self-critical process, which does not ‘explain’ the world from the outside but strives to reflect in practice the essence of the class struggle itself. Marxism cannot be conceived without struggle against revisionist trends in the Marxist movement. It is a battle for leadership of the labour movement against ideas and tendencies representing alien class forces. The pressures of capitalist society, particu- larly in its highest, imperialist phase, lead to attempts to adapt the movement to existing society. One such adaptation is to withdraw from the difficult tasks posed for socialists behind a screen of abstraction. In defending its theoretical and practical traditions, 6. Communist Manifesto. 141 Marxism is not protecting dogma. Social changes within capitalism constantly place new problems before revolutionaries which cannot be evaded by the recitation of ancient texts. The method of Marxism springs from the reality of class conflict, and is kept alive only through the daily contact with that reality. The revisionists claim to take account of the ‘facts’ of changing reality, as against ‘dogmatism’ and ‘subjectivism’. But a revolutionary programme embodies the needs of the working class under new conditions, not by throwing the old ideas overboard, but only on the basis of those ideas. As the conscious expression of the workers’ struggle, Marxist principles are capable of grasping in theory and practice the changes which imperialism under- goes. The development and enriching of Marxism is the battle to link it with the consciousness of the working class in action. Marx and Engels conducted fierce polemical struggles against petty-bourgeois trends in their time. Starting with their break with the Young Hegelians, they fought ideas which implicitly or explicitly denied the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state, the role of the working class in this task and the need to organise the working class vanguard. It was through this constant fight that their analysis of capitalism developed. Not content with merely proving their opponents wrong, they showed the social roots of these errors. Lenin looked at his battles with Menshevism, and with Trotsky’s pre-war conciliation of: Menshevism, against the background of imperialism. Both the revisionism against which he fought and the fight itself were essential aspects of the highest Stage of capitalism in an epoch of wars and revolutions. When Lenin’s opponents denounced him as ‘subjectivist’, they were trying to separate the Marxist party from the struggle it had to lead. As Trotsky later wrote: ‘My conciliationism was derived from a certain social revolutionary fatalism. I believed that the logic of the class struggle would compel both factions to pursue the same revolution- ary line. The great historical significance of Lenin’s stand was still unclear to me at that time, his policy of irreconcilable ideological demarcation and, where necessary, split, for the purpose of uniting and steeling the backbone of the truly revolutionary party.’ Men like Kautsky and Plekhanov, for all their great scholarship, did not rise above the level of philosophy. That is to say, they remained observers and commentators on history and class struggle, ‘using’ Marxist theory to explain them. Thus they unconsciously and passively adapted their theory to the power of capital. Lenin’s battle for the Third International, both 7. L.D. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, p. 49.

[p025] 142 before and after October 1917, manifested even more clearly the inseparability of Marxist theory and revolutionary practice. The struggle to defend the Soviet Republic, militarily and economically, was for Lenin completely fused with the international fight against the right-wing and centrist labour leaders. And this fight to split the world labour movement away from those who made it safe for imperialism had to be combined with the work of winning the leadership of the working class through united struggle for concrete demands. Both oppor- tunist and sectarian trends had to be combatted in the building of the International. When Trotsky took up the defence of the traditions of Bolshevism against Stalin’s attack, he had the same combined method. The theoretical analysis of Stalinism, both its anti-working class policies and its social origins in the Soviet bureau- cracy, was part of the fight to build a political movement which could carry on Lenin’s work. The factional conflict in the middle twenties and the work to build the Fourth International in the thirties were concerned precisely with the relation between the critical situation of world capitalism and the theoretical and practical crisis of the Marxist movement. , The struggle against revisionist trends in the Fourth International today is again around this central question. Those who see in the post-war world ‘automatic’ and ‘irreversible’ tendencies for the bourgeois state to be overthrown without the conscious intervention of Marxist leadership, turn Marxism into philosophy—and so destroy it. They pragmatically identify theory with the description of the surface appearance of particular events. Their LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 activity can only be reduced to trailing behind the established labour or nationalist leaderships, who in turn tether the working class to the power of world capital. The power of Marxism, its capacity to become ‘a material force’, results from its relation to the working class. Marxism has the essential role in the history of the twentieth century. Only the international Marxist movement can provide the working class with the conscious scientific under- standing of its power as an independent force to reshape society. The building of that movement is thus the highest point of theory and of practice. Communism will not return to the primitive con- ditions which preceded the history of class society, but will embody in a conscious, planned way all the gains made by humanity. In the same way, Marxism unifies theory and practice without discarding the conquests of philosophy, which was the expression of their separation. The working class will achieve power only by negating philosophy, while grasping in practice the theoretical advances which the separation of theory from practice brought forth. Communist man will make his own social life consciously. Natural science will no longer conflict with an irrational social environment, but will be rationally controlled in the service of man. : The working class, through its conscious vanguard, must become the heir to the science, art and philo- sophy which class society has produced. The titanic struggles, to grasp the reality of the natural world and of man himself, of the Aristotles, Shakespeares, Hegels and Einsteins will be taken to a new and higher level by the socialist revolution.

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