[The following article appeared in the March 21 issue of International Viewpoint, a fortnightly magazine published in Paris under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.]
There is a strange paradox about the place of Marxism in the world today, 100 years after Marx's death. Its influence in society seems greater than ever. Never have so many roundtable discussions, academic conferences, books, and magazine and newspaper articles been devoted to Marx as on the occasion of this centenary.
Never have so many heads of state and governments, so many leaders of mass parties throughout the world claimed to be guided by Marx's ideas. But at the same time, never has there been so much talk about a crisis of Marxism," about its "irreversible decline," or even "death."
In fact, Marxism represents a union of two movements, a theoretical one and practical one. It is necessary to look at these two movements to determine what the balance sheet of Marxism is today.
On the one hand, Marxism has a rigorously scientific side, which respects all the laws of scientific work. Throughout his life, Marx remained a scientist; he had nothing but contempt for anyone who concealed or falsified facts or the results of investigations under any pretext whatsoever, including "we mustn't discourage the militant workers.
Only truth is revolutionary
Marx continued his scientific work, in particular, because he was convinced that only truth is revolutionary. It was his conviction that workers struggles could never come to fruition, that is, could never lead to the building of a classless society on a world scale, unless they were continually enlightened by the results of a scientific analysis of reality and its development.
On the other hand, Marxism also involves a devotion to liberation that is no less rigorous and demanding. Before Marx, philosophers and social scientists were generally content to interpret the world. For Marx, the aim of science was to transform the world and to do so with a clear purpose.
It was necessary, through revolutionary action, to eliminate all social conditions in which human beings were enslaved, miserable, mutilated, alienated beings. It was necessary to build a society in which the free development of every individual would be essential to the development of all. To this aim Marx remained faithful to his last breath.
These two objectives of Marxism, the scientific explanation of social development in all its ramifications and the achievement of the most thorough-going liberation ever conceived of, were so bold that the major accusation made against Marx, which is still the main one today, is that he was the last of the utopians. The claim is that such a vast scheme could never be realized.
To this accusation, those who believe in heaven add that Marx was guilty of the sin of pride, that he founded a "religion of humanity," a claim that is in total contradiction to the fundamentally critical, and constantly selfcritical character of Marx's teachings. But these people argue that Marx created a religion without God, and that, therefore, in seeking to do an excess of good works, he ended up finally doing inordinate evil.
Toiling humanity, which is suffering and struggling to break its chains, can hardly share such skeptical, resigned, and cynical judgments. It will not reconcile itself to its chains on the basis of an argument that it cannot be known whether they can ever be completely broken. The proposal that it would be better to put a little oil under the manacles than file through them and throw them into a ditch will never satisfy those enchained men and women who prefer to rise up against slavery. As long as humanity endures, this breed of revolutionists will never disappear.
Marxism withstands test of time
A hundred years after Marx's death, what is the balance sheet of the two sides of Marxism?
As regards its effectiveness in analysis and in scientifically predicting events, the balance sheet is entirely positive. If we compare the world of 1843 with that of 1983, and if we ask ourselves whether the transformations that have occurred are those that Marx predicted, if they are the result of the nature of bourgeois society and the contradictions rending it, as he taught us to understand them, the answer has to be "yes," without any significant qualifications.
Marx understood, better than any scientist or moralist of his time, the mighty and terrible impetus of the technological revolutions that are inherent in the capitalist mode of production. They arise from private ownership, the market economy, competition, and the insatiable drive to extort more and more surplus value from living labor in order to accumulate more and more capital (dead labor).
This was a portentous dynamic because it contained a promise of liberating labor, through automation, from all uncreative, tiring, and alienating work. It was a terrifying one because it was leading to the periodic transformation of the productive forces into forces of destruction that were undermining man and nature and threatening to destroy the entire planet.
Evolution of capitalist society
Marx understood that competition would lead to the development of monopolies, which in turn would become locked in fiercer and fiercer competition. The small capitalists would be ruthlessly absorbed or crushed by the big ones.
Bourgeois society would evolve toward becoming a pyramid, with a great majority of wage earners at its base and at the top in every country a few dozen giant firms and financial groups. And rising above that on the international scale there would be a few hundred "multinationals" that would lay down the law for all the bourgeois states, and embroil all workers and all peoples in a monstrous machinery in which everything was subordinated to their individual profit drives.
Marx understood that this machine was going to break down periodically, that the capitalist system would give rise at regular intervals to economic crises and wars, whose cost would eventually become unbearable and then fatal. How foolish today those prophets look who claimed during the 1950s and 1960s that capitalism had at last exorcised its devils, that is, was going to guarantee full employment, continued growth and a constantly rising standard of living, as well as enduring peace.
The prolonged depression gripping the international capitalist economy today is a striking confirmation of the correctness of Marx's scientific analysis. He understood that, whatever partial and temporary advantages humanity might derive from this system, the wage and semiwage workers were going to rise up in cohesive masses against this monstrous machine. That is, it was from the class struggle of wage labor against capital that the potential would arise for transforming the world to achieve the liberation of every man and woman.
This struggle would first take the form of a spontaneous revolt, without any clear consciousness of the aims to be achieved or the means by which to achieve them. It would go through a gigantic labor of organization, of cooperation and learning class solidarity on all levels. It would lead finally to conscious revolutions, guided by the experience accumulated. This process would be propelled by objective needs and by an understanding of political needs. It would be furthered by the Marxist program itself.
Historic advance of working class
In view of the great tasks of these revolutions, it was inevitable that there would be partial and even total defeats. The working class would examine its victories and its defeats in a ruthlessly critical way. It would continually have to retake ground that seemed to be definitely won in previous periods, until this vast historic movement of the rise, decline, and renewed rise of class consciousness and proletarian revolution led to the building of socialist society on a world scale.
Of all of Marx's analyses and projections, it is unquestionably this vision of the historic advance of the working class that is the most impressive. At the time the Communist Manifesto was published, there were no more than 100,000 trade-union members in the entire world, about 10,000 socialists, and at most a few hundred communists. And all of them were in half a dozen countries. Today, there is no country in the world, not even the smallest island in the Pacific or the most remote corner of equatorial jungle, where capitalism, impelled by its irresistible drive to expand, has been able to establish a factory, a harbor, or a store employing men or women for wages that unions have not sprung up.
Throughout the world, there are now hundreds of millions of workers in unions; and this rise of the union movement has been accompanied by the formation of parties proclaiming themselves socialist that have tens of millions of sympathizers, or tens of millions of people who vote for them. Out of this, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of communists who proclaim themselves Marxists. As regards the self-critical tendency of proletarian revolutions, you just have to open your ears to hear expressions of it in tens of thousands of factories, workshops, offices, commuter trains, and subways throughout the world.
A movement for liberation
But what is the balance sheet of Marxism as a movement for liberation? It is no less impressive. But it is also distinctly more contradicto- гу.
Thanks to the stimulus given by Marx and
Engels and their followers, the workers fighting and organizing against the bourgeoisie have gained a clearsightedness that has enabled them already to partially transform the world by making some advances toward liberation.
The following are some of the main gains that have been made: The fight for the reduction of the workday has gone on from cutting down a workweek of 72 hours and more to a battle for the 35-hour week, which we can and will win. There has been a no less intense struggle to extend solidarity to our most exploited and oppressed brothers and sisters — women, youth, the unemployed, the immigrant workers, the national minorities, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly.
There are also the efforts that have been made to extend this class solidarity on a world scale. This is a difficult but not an unrealistic task, as shown by the movements in solidarity with the Cuban, Indochinese, and Central American revolutions, coming after the earlier movements in the interwar period.
Finally, there are the first victorious socialist revolutions, inspired in particular by the thought of Lenin - from the October Revolution in Russia to the Yugoslav, Chinese, Cuban, and Indochinese revolutions. All of this is a reality in today's world, even if these gains will not be definitively established as long as international capitalism lasts. We can already say that if it had not been for Marx and Engels, today's world would be a very different and far more inhuman place than it is.
Social democracy and Stalinism
However, their vision of the emancipation of humanity has not been realized anywhere in its entirety. The two mass currents into which the real workers movement is divided, reformist Social Democracy and Stalinism (with the Eurocommunist subcurrent gradually shifting from the latter to the former) have both come to a resounding failure.
Social Democracy has not moved forward one inch toward abolishing capitalism through reforms. The present capitalist crisis, with its train of unemployment and poverty, the hunger that exists in the so-called third world, the threat of nuclear extermination that hangs over the human race, are sufficient testimony to this failure.
While the Stalinist bureaucracy was able to usurp the fruits of the most gigantic revolutionary effort ever undertaken by a working class, it has ended up in a total impasse. The society that has emerged from victorious revolutions has not led to socialism but has remained frozen midway between capitalism and socialism. In addition, in all cases, save in Cuba, a despotic bureaucracy rules, blocking any further advance toward socialism. This bureaucracy subjects the workers to obvious oppression, and in every country where it exists and throughout the world, it more effectively discredits socialism, communism, and Marxism than any bourgeois propaganda has ever been able to do.
It is in this failure and nowhere else that we can find the source of the so-called crisis of Marxism about which there is such a storm of hot air being raised these days. It is not a crisis of Marxism but a crisis of the practice of a bureaucratized workers movement, as well as the crises of the bureaucratized post-capitalist societies. These crisis are, moreover, going hand in hand with a more and more open abandonment of Marxism by the leaders of these movements, which in its way confirms that Marx has nothing to do with it.
Capitalism the source of war
Applying the Marxist method and criteria to analyze these crises leads to four conclusions.
1. In the first place, it would be entirely wrong to look for the origins of these crises in the ideas of Marx. Marx's greatest contribution to the understanding of the history of societies is that in the last analysis it is social existence that determines consciousness and not the reverse. To imagine that the Social Democrats' capitulation to the first imperialist world war and their subsequent aid to the capitalist counterrevolution, followed by the crimes of Stalin and the capitulation of the reformists and the Stalinists in their turn to Hitler, were the consequence of imperfections in the writings of Marx, an extra comma or an absent adjective, borders on the ridiculous.
The great tragedies of the 20th century are the work of capitalism, not of Marx. They can only be explained as the outcome of clashes between hundreds of millions of human beings, of conflicts in the material interests of great social classes or sections of classes. In this context, ideas — both "good" and "bad" — play a role, to be sure, but hardly the main one.
2. Furthermore, it is just as wrong to look for the ultimate source of Stalin and the deviation of the victorious socialist revolutions in the Slavic soul, the Mongol conquest of Russia, or the little power-hungry sadist who lies sleeping in all of us, awaiting only the proper conditions to come to a violent awakening.
The secret of the victory, as well as of the degeneration, of the Russian revolution lies in the last analysis in the contradiction between the ripeness of the objective conditions for the world revolution - the world crisis of capitalism that began in 1919 — and unripeness of the objective conditions for building socialism in Russia and China, as well as the unripeness of the subjective conditions for achieving revolutionary victory on a world scale. For a long period this produced deviations in the course of the world revolution, and the negative consequences are far from being overcome.
Crisis of Stalinism
3. Thus, the vitality of Marxism was demonstrated in the most striking way by the fact that it was able to offer the most precise analytical methods for explaining what happened to Social Democracy and Stalinism.
Specifically, it is the Marxist criticism of the bureaucracy in the workers movement, of bureaucratic dictatorship, and bureaucratized transitional societies that is the most scientific, the most thorough, and the one that most points the way toward real historical solutions.
To the great surprise and the no less great horror of all reactionary forces in the world, from the Kremlin to Washington, and including the Vatican and the right-wing "dissidents," a growing part of this Marxist critique is coming from the East European countries and China themselves. This is just the beginning of a reawakening that is full of promise.
4. The final thing we see is that for 30 years a real mass movement has been under way to overcome in practice the crisis of Stalinist
" (which has nothing in common "Marxism,' with real Marxism and "living socialism" (which has nothing in common with socialism).
This is what we call the antibureaucratic political revolution. It reached its highest point so far in the 1980-81 revolutionary upsurge in Poland. It is to the historic credit of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International that they predicted this revolution and they were the only ones who prepared for it.
The victory of the political revolution will in no way mean a restoration of capitalism. After the inevitable groping, this movement will lead to the triumph of planned, democratically centralized self-management in the economy. That is, to use Marx's own words, it will lead to the rule of the associated producers.
With respect to the state, this revolution will lead to a system of workers self-administration based on the most extensive pluralist socialist democracy, that is, the rule of workers councils, under which the state will immediately begin to wither away. It will be the councils that govern. The revolutionary party essential to the establishment of this system will confine itself to offering political guidance and never try to substitute for them.
Revolution in imperialist countries
Moreover, periodically the workers in the industrialized capitalist countries have also advanced along the same road to emancipation, with inevitable ups and downs in the process. This has happened in Russia in 1917, in Germany in 1918, in Hungary in 1919, in Italy in
1920, in Spain in 1936, in Italy again in 1948 and 1969, in May 1968 in France, and in Portugal in 1974-75.
The liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples is little by little taking the same direction, under the influence of partial industrialization and the emergence of the proletariat as the major class within them.
These are then the three sectors of the world revolution in which history is painfully working its way toward the only positive solution to the crisis of humanity — the rule of workers councils, a world socialist federation in which all the men and women on our planet will finally be able to take control of their lives, will eliminate war forever, end the production of weapons of mass destruction, and put an end to the exploitation of labor and to political oppression.
This is what the Fourth International is striving for. It is for this that Karl Marx did his titanic work. From the moment that historic movement achieves its first victory in an industrially advanced country, all the chatter about a "crisis of Marxism" will be forever ended.