What is left of Marxism?

A. L. Rowse

The influence that Karl Marx has had on the 20th century is simply astounding, or even fantastic when you consider that there were other thinkers who were as penetrating and as prescient as he was, or even more so, who have had not one tithe of his influence or none at all. De Toc- queville, who was at least as penetrating about society, has had very little; John Stuart Mill offers immeasurably more hope with his emphasis on freedom and the value of the individual, his hatred of the subjec- tion of women and insistence on their equality with men — very relevant to the world of Islam today. Yet where is Mill's in- fluence compared with Marx's? The world would be a much better place if it listened to John Stuart Mill instead of Marx.

Marx dismissed him contemptuously with the remark that his eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding country. It is like his dismissal of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', with 'Why don't they say what they really mean, "Infantry, Cavalry, Ar- tillery"?' Or again his dismissal of the peasantry with 'the idiocy of rural life.' I prefer rural to urban life today; and I fear it must be admitted that, though Marx had genius, he was personally rather nasty.

There remains the problem: why has he had such a prodigious influence? The answer is largely that — like Ford or Mor- ris, or Marks and Spencer — he was on an upward-moving escalator. The people at large, the working classes, were everywhere coming to the forefront of society, and their affairs, wellbeing, interests, claims, demands, etc have become the main con- cern of politics all over the world. He made himself the most insistent and consistent, the most systematic and tireless voice of all that, intellectually as analyst, dogmatically as prophet. I am not saying that he was right — we can all point to where he was wrong; but he was more relevant to what was coming about than anybody else. I think that that partly explains the extra- ordinary phenomenon.

There is a very useful vulgar cliché: we must be careful not to empty out the baby with the bath-water. There may still be something in Marx's analysis of society that remains relevant and useful to us, when `While I'm down here, will you marry me?' much of the prophetic element has drained away, been falsified by events. As a historian I have found Marx's way of look- ing at history illuminating and fruitful — as Tawney (though a religious idealist) did; other people have had penetrating insights into the determining influence of economic factors, the distribution of property, the structure of classes and the conflicts of in- terest between them, the formative effect of those forces upon men's thinking, the for- ming of ideologies in accordance with them, etc. Some of this appears in the work of Harington, which attracted Tawney to write about him. We might say that much of it is already there, or implied, in Aristo- tle's Politics.

So I begin by making a distinction bet- ween the analytical side of Marx and the dogmatic, between the intellectual con- tribution Marx had to make and that of the prophet, the practical politician (though not very successful in his time), the prophet of social revolution. Actually, it is difficult to disentangle the two, they are so inter- twined and dependent on each other in his case. And, of course, he is to be criticised and faulted on both sides, like any other thinker — Burke, for instance, whom I find much more congenial. Still, the social revolution has taken place, or is visibly tak- ing place, all round us: Marx wasn't so far out there. Again that helps to explain the phenomenon. We can all too easily be aware of the faults in his prognosis, the ways in which, his forecasts and expectations have turned out to be wrong in detail. No social thinker should be so certain and dogmatic as to what is going to happen; a historian realises that things often turn out differently from what we expect. That is to say, especially the surface events of history; but it does not mean that one may not be able to tell the way the stream is going, the general direc- tion. Here Marx was right enough, but be would have done well to be more scepticah like Burke or de Tocqueville, who also saw very well how things were going in their time. Marx had the insight to see the doinin; ating importance the working classes would come to have — so, as a matter of fact; more agreeably had Matthew Arnold. But the two sides of Marx's mind were in con- flict. The active revolutionary who had taken part in the movements of 1848 n13A7 him simplify the issue into a struggle het ween Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, meaning industrial workers. This position, taken up for practical purposes, made him 0ver, simplify the complexity of class relation', and conflicts, and deformed his intellectual statement of the matter. In fact, he never, a° completed his intended analysis of class; h, 01 dogmatism led him astray and all those ., us who were influenced by Marxism 1 tellectually — as I very much was, in com- mon with my generation. Perhaps a Pe,• sonal confession will make the point clea` When I wrote my Politics and the Youar nSeti Generation I expected, as a good Mxl,sh; that — since the working classes were t

majority of the nation — the day would came when they would realise their own in- terest and form the basis of a permanent Labour majority in Britain. So far my ex- pectation has not been fulfilled: large sec- tions of the working class vote Tory, and not a few middle-class people vote Labour. But what about the future? I may merely have been premature.

Marx thought that capitalism — like other forms of social and economic organisation in history — would come to an end. He was ambiguous about whether it would end by revolution or evolution. Lenin was altogether more dogmatic a Marxist, and yet he ended his life very near to despair at the way things were going. Workers' control' proved a complete failure, of course, like running an army from the ranks, an ideological illusion. War-time Communism' was strangling and starving the USSR. Lenin was forced to in- troduce the New Economic Policy with its gradualism — he contemplated ten years of it and called for piece-work wages and TaYlorism, i.e. payment in accord with pro- ductivity. Communism has never been able to solve its economic problem: look at the

USSR or Poland today. Or Czechoslova- kia which under capitalist democracy was

the most efficient and prosperous country In Central Europe; and now . . .! If this is what Lenin, the most dogmatic of Marxists, was forced to recognise, what had been so Wrong with Fabian gradualism after all?

Trotsky too was reduced to something near despair. He wrote, 'It is absolutely self- evident that if the international proletariat as the result of the experience of our en- tire

r, epoch and the current new war P939-1945] — proves incapable of master- ing society, this would signify the founder- ing. of all hope for a socialist revolution, for lt. is impossible to expect any other more favourable conditions for it.' But of course they are incapable of mastering society, or even running anything constructively, as Trotsky knew in his heart of hearts, when he let fall the phrase, the 'congenital in- capacity of the proletariat to become a rul- ing class.' But of course: QED. The revolu- tionary proletariat has been everywhere led by lower middle-class types, when it has not been led by an upper-class one like Lenin. (Ernest Bevin was exceptional: capable of leadership,

a great man, but not a Marxist and certainly not a revolutionary.)

Trotsky, like Lenin, arrived at some very tentative conclusions at the end of his life then to what point all the certainty ea, rher? He committed himself to the theory' of world revolution, and they all expected the Marxist revolution, following arx, to take place in the most highly in- a_ ustrialised country, favourably Germany. The real revolution that took place there was Hitler's, who had a far better grasp of "ne Psychology of the German masses than ever h. the respectable (in spite of an il- gitiMate child by a serving woman in the _Ouse) upper middle-class Marx. Hitler cer- lainly knew what was what about the Ger-

man people — as Mussolini knew about the Italians, and Stalin the Russians.

Marx's outlook, like Trotsky's, as Jews, was perhaps naturally cosmopolitan, inter- nationalist, and omitted what has been and is the strongest political force in the world

— nationalism, and one might add religious communalism, rather than communism. Look at India, the Middle East, North Africa, or even Northern Ireland. No wonder the hopes placed upon Marx's In- ternational vanished like smoke in 1914; or consider the cynical game Stalin played with the Third, Communist, International, sub- jugating it simply to Russian national in- terests. Not many ideological illusions in that quarter! Stalinism, with its murders of millions, including hundreds of thousands of believing Communists, of most of Lenin's colleagues, must have made Marx turn in his grave in Highgate cemetery. He can never have expected such barbarism, what Shostakovich calls 'the extermination machine.'

Marx put forward the blissful theory of

— after the proletarian revolution — 'the withering away of the state.' Not much evidence of the withering away of the state in the USSR or any country under the heel of Communism; but instead a society hamstrung by bureaucratisation, retarded of free movement, piling up armaments and nuclear power. Power, the exertion of force

— that is what is basic in history, and the post-Revolution history of Russia is con- tinuous with its 19th-century history with its interventions then in Poland, Hungary etc: `the jackboot of Europe.'

Except that Tsarism was more civilised. Exile to Siberia? When one reads the cor- respondence of Lenin, one sees that he was quite well-placed in exile there for getting on with his work: books, company, discus- sion, as if one might be rusticated for the winter in Maine or Alaska. The Tsar Nicholas I interposed personally to withdraw Tolstoy from front-line fighting, to safeguard the life of a promising writer. What a contrast with Stalin and the Marxist treatment of the arts and sciences — the deformation of science with the official patronage of the nonsense of Lysenko about genetics, Stalin's personal stopping of Shostakovich from creating any more operas after his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — we might have had a dozen. In music it is more possible to cover one's tracks than in literature or the other arts, but Shostakovich has told us that every one of his symphonies is a tombstone.

And Communist architecture, and pain- ting, all under the blight of 'social realism', the constant criticism according to Party orthodoxy by third-rate bureaucrats — it all means the brutalisation of the arts. But such lowering of standards is to be expected when the people come into their own — as one sees it everywhere in the history of the 20th century compared with the 19th, the appalling record of civilised Germany, for instance, the contrast of even the Kaiser's Germany with Hitler's. One observes the same brutalisation everywhere, with the decline of the upper classes and their more civilised standards, and with the people in power.

Marx can hardly not have seen that, with the spectacle of what happens when the people get on top, as in the course of the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Com- mune. With his revolutionary fixation he heartily approved; he cannot have cared much about the humane side of things, any more than Lenin did. I do not find much humanity in either: conservative sceptics witness Burke or Shakespeare — are much more sensitive about cruelty in human af- fairs, and realise how thin the crust of civilisation is and, when it is broken through, what cruel dark waters are beneath. Letting loose the flood waters of revolution produces only far more suffering than what went before.

When people argue that Communism in Russia has slightly advanced the standard of living of the masses in general, the answer is plain. With the development of modern technology standards of living are, and can be, improved immensely; they would have been much more so in Russia but for the dead weight of Communism upon their economy: it doesn't work, and they cannot get it right without throwing Communism over. (Oddly enough, it was Bukharin who held that decline in produc- tivity always accompanied revolution. QED. The reason is obvious.) Witness Poland, witness China. It is pro- bable that the Chinese experience is more important in the long run than what hap- pens anywhere else. The Chinese form one fifth of the human race, occupying the largest area of the earth under a stable civilisation for the longest stretch of time. It is of world importance that they seem to be turning their back on Communism with the realisation that — after some achievements which could have been arrived at anyway, as in Russia — it does not work.

What is left of Marxism intellectually? Nothing is left of all the philosophis- ing, the inverted Hegelian dialectic with its `principal laws of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; the law of the interpenetration of opposites; the law of the negation.'* Thus Engels: what chaff all this is, Marx's Kritik der Kritischen Kritik, Engels' Die Heilige Familie, Lenin's Dialec- tical Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. It is all a game, like Lenin's favourite chess, useful only as mental exercise. There is no point in any of it, valueless like most philosophising, as even the philosophers themselves realise today, in the wake of the sainted Wittgenstein.

The most obvious lacuna in the Marxist Weltanschauung is in regard to psychology, and that renders its view of historical pro- cesses far too simple and rigid. Basically, Marx's is a rationalist psychology, the assumption being that people are rational and follow their interests when they recognise them. Historians and practical politicians know that that is not all true. All through history we recognise people who act against their interests even when they know quite clearly what they are. Often they do not know. Historians realise that men are capable of rationality, but for much of the time are quite irrational, act from all kind of emotional motives or none, from prejudice, vanity, stupidity, envy (odd that academics, so full of it, should not recognise its importance as a force in history!), psychotic motives, etc. Burke realised all this very well; Marx, hag-ridden by Hegel and German philosophical idealism, hardly at all.

I have always named this defect in idealist thinkers 'the Rationalist Fallacy.' It is possible to detect a certain rationale in history — the determining factors of geography offer a case in point; one does not need to be completely sceptical and see no patterns at all — as the disillusioned Liberal, H.A.L. Fisher, confesses in his History of Europe — but the processes of history are subtle, complex and winding, with many reactions and returns, differing rhythms and tempi. It falsifies history to impose a sociological straitjacket upon it, contrary to its very nature.

There goes along with this a middle-class idealisation of the masses, as with Rosa Luxemburg (she was right to condemn Lenin's terrorism), Lukacz, Gramsci, Nit- witz, and all. None of that idealistic nonsense with a real proletarian like Ernest Bevin, or — for that matter — with D. H. Lawrence or me: we know.

Interestingly enough, Marxism has a point in observing that ethical standards and moral conduct do vary to some extent from class to class. And some fruitful in- sights come from a Marxist approach to the arts, literature for example. We can all see that the literature of a given time is an ex- pression of the society of that time, the character of its social order, with ideas, values, prejudices, limitations appropriate

*David McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 12. to it. This is reflected not only in the nature and content of the literature — dominant epic, drama or novel, chronicle or history — but also .in the aesthetic form. LiterarY forms have their own internal evolution, but this again is influenced by, and even ex- presses or reflects, the external influences of society and social factors. These matters can be profitably followed up, as they were by that admirable historian of literature, Sir Leslie Stephen, in his English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century.

So we see that something useful remains, provided that we use it empirically, subtly and undogmatically. We might conclude that there is often something in the analysis, which is then ruined by theorising and systematising into dogma in the appalling manner of German philosophy. Most econ- omic historians, I fancy, would agree that much was valuable in Marx's description of the Industrial Revolution and his analysis of industrial processes and relations in the first volunie of Capital. Then, when he got on to theory, transcending the labour theory of value into his theory of surplus value — which involved assuming the whole character of a given society — he found it impossible to arrive at a satisfactory work- ing theory, as conventional economists didwithin the assumptions and limitations they accepted. They accepted them as if true for all times and places, like the laws of mathematics. They are not, and orthodox economics seems to be in as much confu- sion as Marx left his economic theories in. He at least came to appreciate their histori- cal relativism; that is why he could never clinch the theory, left it unfinished, and the last volume of Capital a history of what theories of value had been.

A historian would conclude then that to systematise what may be useful insights and erect them into philosophic structures is always mistaken, in the manner of German 19th-century philosophy — a blind alley, I have always regarded its portentous in- fluence as intellectually disastrous. For Ger- many it was an element in the actual disaster diagnosed by the historian, Friedrich Meinecke, in Die Deutsche Katastrophe. It is this Germanhp ilosophis- ing element that was the worst side of Marx intellectually and has led to such deforma- tion in the Marxist tradition. When I was young I used to subscribe to the periodical Unter dem Banner des Marx- ismus; beneath its stacks of paralytic,. abstractions one could recognise nothing 01 the real world at all. No wonder Hitler had little difficulty in putting his foot through, such cardboard structures. A dose 01 Hume's scepticism, or of the Englishem: piricism Marx so much despised, wcalt,c: have done him all the good in the world,' but then he would not have been recognisably Marx, or done so much damage in it. For myself, 1 have absorbed just so Much of Marxism as was useful to the historian', and, to a lesser extent, the understanding 01 class interests and their conflicts which oc- cupy so much of the field of politics.