EDUCATION WHAT IS MARXIST THEORY FOR?

A Marxist movement is apt to be attacked from two sides. Intellectuals see the militant participation in strikes and lock-outs and cannot connect this with anything in their own experience. So we get the charge of “mindless militancy’! Militant workers are equally puzzled by our stress on discussion, on argument, on theory. ‘What good .is theory to us?’ they ask. ‘We want action.’

At the centre of Marxism is the belief that theory which -does not issue in action is’ mere talk; and that action which is not guided by theory is in the end always condemned to failure. But how does Marxist theory guide Marxist action?

This is the question which I want to ask in these articles.

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. The operations of society appear as a set of impersonal happenings which impinge on men and dictate to them, whereas in fact ‘what. happens in society is always the outcome of human intentions, decisions and actions.

The young Karl Marx learnt from the philosopher Hegel. that it is human. activity, the power of setting oneself purposes .and carrying them out rationally, which makes men different from all other beings in the universe. But of course, what men set out to achieve and what they want, are often very different from what they actually achieve and what they get.

So they come to see society and human institutions, such as the state, not as the products of human agency, but.as powers with an independent existence. Man appears to himself the plaything of non-human forces, part of a system whose laws operate independently of what he thinks and wills. This is what Hegel called ‘alienation’. But Hegel thought that all this came about because of the inadequacies of human thinking. .

Men are enslaved by these alien powers because they have not progressed far enough intellectually. Marx argued that this alienation is created by the working of the economic and social system. ‘Alienation’ is not a word which described “men’s mistakes about their relation to society; it is a word which describes their real situation in capitalist society.

_ Under capitalism the vast majority of men, the industrial -working class, do not and cannot have lives that are genuinely their own. They have to sell their labour power to an -employer in order to live. The employer expends their lives in making such goods as he hopes will satisfy the demand. The lives of. working people are turned into somebody else’s property and become something ‘alien’ to them, first in the form of their working day which is given to another, and then in the form of the goods which they make, which belong to ‘the employer an dare sold as he wills and as he can, and finally in the form’of the social system which exists only by virtue of their work. but whose chief effect so far. as the ‘working class themselves are concerned: is the loss of their -own. lives.

It is worth remarking that this essential loss of control over -one’s own life occurs under capitalism (and under earlier -systems of exploitation) even when capitalism appears temporarily to be alleviating its ordinary ills of poverty, unemployment and war. Even under boom conditions the workers’ life is dictated to him by others. °. , See dominated by a power which takes shape as the power of money, the power of ownership of the means of production. Men appear to themselves as helpless, because they are in the grip of a system which makes their labour power into a commodity, which needs their labour to produce as ‘he system demands and their consumer power to buy as the system demands.

The satisfaction of real human need disappears as a purpose. In one sense all men are equally victims of the system. What happens to the capitalist depends upon its workings as much as what happens to the worker. But the important difference is in what happens.

‘The possessing class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-estrangement’ wrote the young Marx. ‘But the former is comfortable in this self-estrangement and finds therein its own confirmation, knows that this self-estrangement is its own power, and possesses in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself annihilated in this self-estrangement, sees in it its impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.’

Because of this the working class is the only class that has the will and the need to abolish capitalism. The only solution to its problems is the abolition of the system, in order to ‘create a society in which human activity is not deformed into a commodity, and in which men begin to shape their own lives. This is the starting point of Marxism, but it is a starting point which already rules out any attempt to solve working-class problems by finding some way out within the system.

, The question that is raised is how human activity can become an effective means of ending the system altogether.

‘The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1928’

(Oxford University Press, 38s.)

‘The Prophet Unarmed’ is the second volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of the man he calls ‘the representative figure of pre-Stalinist Communism and the precursor of post-Stalinist. Communism’. It carries the story from the end of the civil war and commence-_ ment of the New Economic Policy to Trotsky’s deportation from Russia as the first Five-Year Plan was beginning.

The book runs to over 470 pages and is full of meat... Much new material has been wsed, especially papers in the Trotsky archives now at Harvard University. It is hard to select what to comment on in particular in a book which is so obviously a ‘must’ for every student of Soviet affairs, of the international labour movement or of:-Marxism. ©...

Deutscher shoots down the legend of Trotsky the romantit and shows us how it was Trotsky who faced most hardheadedly the objective necessities facing the Soviet economy in the early 1920s. He was the pioneer of planned industrial expansion, which he saw as the only solution both to the problem of strengthening the worker-peasant alliance and to that of making Soviet Russia a firm basis for the world revolution.

His fight for workers’ democracy was closely connected with Oo his fight for planning. He saw that democracy was no luxury, but an essential, and this awareness saved him ‘from the terrible mistake made. by some of his followers in 1928-1929, when they imagined. that Stalin’s turn to industrialization meant that all was now as they had striven for it to be. Trotsky understood that, in his own phrase, in politics it is not only what is done but who does it, and how, that matters. .In contrast, however, to the Workers’ Opposition leaders,

Trotsky in tackling the economic ‘problems of Soviet Society, ‘wrestled with a real dilemma’, whereas they ‘seized only one of its horns and clung to it’. He was never a believer in telling the workers what they might like to hear regardless of whether it was true or not. ‘Say what is’ was a principle he triéd to follow steadily, whatever the temporary disadvantages.

Demagogic reform ‘Thus, in 1927, Stalin suddenly introduced the seven-hour day, though no basis existed for it and all current planning assumed a longer working day. The Trotskyists pointed out the demagogic character of this ‘reform’—and this frankness ot theirs was used to discredit them among the unthinking sections of the working class.

But Trotsky did not always adhere to his principle. During . the period 1924-1926, after the defeat and disbandment of the original Left Opposition, he ‘lived to fight another day’ in the . party, and that meant making such concessions as repudiating » Eastman’s book ‘Since Lenin Died’, with its pioneer exposure of Stalinism for Western readers.

Deutscher’s pages on the reasons for Trotsky’s passivity in these years are of exceptional value. He shows that Trotsky was fully aware, after his experiences of 1922-1923, that the apathy into which the Soviet working class had sunk was not something that would soon wear off, and that the power of ‘the machine’ to kill incipient opposition movements was immense; and he refused to share the heady optimism with which Zinoviey and Kameneyv, new-baked oppositionists, embarked in 1926 on their short-lived struggle in alliance with him.

‘Additional factors in his passivity were his recurent ill-health and his alarm at the ‘support’ any sally by him against the leadership received from anti-Bolshevik elements. And when the break of Zinoviev and Kamenev with Stalin did at last enable him to escape from isolation, the needs of this alliance compelled him to keep silence fora whole year on the As a negro Communist, the late , George Padmore was active in the work of the League Against Imperialism Which the Stalinists set up in 1927. There was much to criticize in that organization, but nevertheless the deliberate fading-out of it in the middle 1930s marked a deeper stage in the degeneration of the Stalinized Communist movement—and Padmore reacted sharply against this.

In the days of the Left Book Club, Padmore was one of. the few who. tried to develop a Marxist approach to world politics, resisting the ‘People’s Front’ confusion spread by that disastrous concern. His book ‘Africa and World Peace’ (1937) was an important contribution to understanding the realities of imperialist politics, to which all too little attention was given in those days by sincere but muddled left-wingers.

On the ability of General Franco to use Moorish troops against the Spanish Republic, for instance, Padmore wrote: ‘The People’s Front programme in Spain did not once mention the question of colonies .... Had the People’s Front Government: made a gesture to the Moors by pointing out to them that the new régime was the defender of: their economic, political and social interests, then we feel certain that Franco would never have been able to have deceived these African tribesmen into supporting his cause.

‘This failure on the part of the People’s Front Government is the political reflexion of its class composition. While we recognize that such a régime represents an advance. over a feudal-clerical administration, it is nevertheless an imperialist government. And exactly because the:People’s Front. Government has not broken with the: poalicy:.of imperialism. it is unable to carry out an anti-imperialist..policy in the colonies, which alone. can convince. the colonial-:masses that People’s -_ Front Governments are fundamentally different from other ‘ bourgeois régimes.”

“4 Published by: The'’ < 186 Clapham: High “St.,°1 Swe dl - Registered at the GPO as a ‘Sewopeper key questions of the Chinese revolution. :

Another important section of the “book discusses- Trotsky’s reconsideration of the ‘Soviet Thermidor’ idea, a process not completed until after the end of the period with, which this volume deals. All through the 1920s he and his adherents had fought the bureaucracy for its tendency to yield to the rich peasants and the new bourgeoisie, and had indeed seen the bureaucrats as objective agents of those social forces, who might lead Russia back to capitalism. Stalin’s ‘left turn’, with the liquidation of the rich peasants and final crushing out of the private sector by the State sector, cut clean across this conception as a continuingly valid one.

The emergence of the ex-worker bureaucrats as a social force in their-own right (so far as internal Russian factors were concerned) necessitated a new look at the Marxist analysis of what had gone wrong with the revolution and how it must be put right. This Trotsky was to complete in 1936 with his classic study ‘The Revolution Betrayed’.

‘Not by politics alone’

Several reviewers have already drawn attention to the: chapter called ‘Not by politics alone . . .’ (after an essay of Trotsky’s) in which Deutscher reviews his subject’s ideas and activities in the cultural field. Trotsky’s amazing manysidedness and the respect in which he was consequently held by writers and scientists was a potent cause of envy and’ resentment among those of his colleagues who ‘prided themselves on their narrowness as on their virtue’.

His defence of artistic freedom anl exposure of the half-. baked idea of ‘proletarian culture’ made him deadly enemies . amongst the parvenu officials for whom the revolution meant first and foremost power to dictate their will on all matters to . all and sundry and to set up their pet notions as idols to be worshipped with a straight face even (and especially) by those who knew better. Brian Pearce