No Marxist

[Kalifornia]

Marxists uphold Marx and his conclusions, rather than upholding the dialectical method he used to reach those conclusions.

This seems to treat Marx's conclusions as absolutes, rather than seeing things as constantly changing, this seems to result in people looking at things in a static posture, and dogmatically upholding things Marx said in his works, rather than looking at society and the struggles taking place in it, and deciding on the right approach to handling these contradictions.

For example, many Marxists denounce Mao focusing on the peasantry and claim that workers are the revolutionary force, yet, if one studies the contradiction in China at that time, the main contradiction was between the landless peasants and the rulling class, as the working class was relatively small.

Now how can you be a Marxist , as Marx did not have an absolute program, and would not want the class struggle to be squandered by those who uphold concrete absolutes, but rather to have lead those who absolutely study the concrete conditions and apply the strategy to end the contradiction.

For example, due to Marx living in racist imes, He was a racist, however a Dialectical Materialist would say I do not uphold Marx, but rather, I uphold his Method, yet if you are a Marxist it seems to say you agree with everything he said, yet if marx said everything is in constant change, how can his ideas, based on conditions he saw so long ago, all remain valid?

[Prairie Fire]

Marxists uphold Marx and his conclusions, rather than upholding the dialectical method he used to reach those conclusions.


These things are not mutually exclusive. One can uphold the specifics of one of Marx's historical stances as correct in relation to a historical incident, and still use the dialectical materialist method to come to conclusions on their contemporary circumstances.

Also, most of the theory still applies. In regards to economic theory, how much of Marx's work is no longer valid? The specific examples given may be a bit dated, but what is obsolete (if anything)?



This seems to treat Marx's conclusions as absolutes, rather than seeing things as constantly changing, this seems to result in people looking at things in a static posture, and dogmatically upholding things Marx said in his works, rather than looking at society and the struggles taking place in it, and deciding on the right approach to handling these contradictions.


Again these things are not mutually exclusive.

Also, events today generally still play out as they did in the class paradigm of Marx's time. We can't help it if Marx's analysis and tactics stay relevent even to this day.

The specific players have changed, but the mechanisms of the class society are still reacting and still yielding the results that Karl Marx foresaw.




For example, many Marxists denounce Mao focusing on the peasantry and claim that workers are the revolutionary force, yet, if one studies the contradiction in China at that time, the main contradiction was between the landless peasants and the rulling class, as the working class was relatively small.


One can make the same argument for Albania, where socialist revolution took place, and the proletariat was miniscule.

The issue is not just the class composition and the pressing contradictions of the day,though.

It is not simply a matter of who can be mobilized to fight;it is a matter of who can build a socialist society when it is all said and done.

The peasantry (in China and elsewhere,), while a non-antagonistic class to the working class and exploited in their own right, can't further revolutionary social transformations without becoming the proletariat themselves.

Lenin divided the Peasanrty into parts; the wealthy peasants who own land and exploit labour are petty-bourgeoisie, as are the middle peasants who own their own plots and work them, because both of these strata of peasants are selling the surplus generated by the land (and labour), rather than labour time. For this reason, they have the same short-comings as the petty-bourgeoisie at large.

The landless peasants are, for all intents and purposes, proletarian, but that soon changes after a triumphant revolution and subsequent land re-distribution. Once given their own plot, they have no material basis that would incline them towards continuing revolution or social ownership from that point on.

While the peasantry is quick to resort to arms in revolutionary situations, their shortcomings as a whole are that they do not rely on social production to meet their needs. Once their landlords and other feudal exploiters are removed, and once land is redistributed (as it was in China) and they acquire an individual plot, then they have the means to provide for themselves and their family in perpetuity, and they no longer give a moments thought to the fate of the society at large.

Your analysis is similar to the way that many in the new left looked at the Lumpenproletariat, and drew the conclusion that this was the class for revolution, because this class was impoverished and needed to have their needs met.

Unfortunately, as with the case of the Peasantry above, no one ever took the analysis further than that, into the potential of the Lumpen to build a new society post-revolution. Considering that the Lumpen meet their needs as individuals again, and usually in a parasitic manner reminiscent of the bourgeoisie, there is still no economic foundation for the material interests of the Lumpen to lean towards socializing wealth and production for the good of anyone other than themselves.

Regardless of the size of the working class ( And now China has the largest proletariat in the world; the peasantry, as a class, has largely been destroyed by the mechanisms of capitalism itself, as feudal relations are destroyed to make room for new markets to expand into,) in a particular country, Marx was correct in his initial analysis that the proletariat is the only class capable of eneacting thorough and lasting change, because the proletariat relies upon social production for their bread and butter.

You can't operate a factory with only one persyn, and even if you could, there would still need to be other factories in operation in order for the society to be producing all of the commodities recquired and wanted by the individual. In this way, the fate of an individual proletarian is tied at the hip with the rest of their class.

The survival and prosperity of the individual proletarian relies on the rest of the society each doing their part in their respective industries, and this is what gives the proletariat their dynamic revolutionary role found in no other class on Earth to date.

While there are several classes and demographics that can be mobilized to take up guns in a revolutionary situation, only the proletariat has the necessity to build a society based on the common good.

I'm not saying refrain from mobilizing other non-antagonistic classes and strata; I'm saying know your priorities and build your base among the working class, because post-revolution the rest will disperse or will become open liabilities and exploiters in their own right.



Now how can you be a Marxist , as Marx did not have an absolute program, and would not want the class struggle to be squandered by those who uphold concrete absolutes, but rather to have lead those who absolutely study the concrete conditions and apply the strategy to end the contradiction.




Again, you keep stepping over the fact that these things are not mutually exclusive.

Of course any true Marxist worth their salt analyzes a situation scientifically and acts accordingly, but as I said. most of the conclusions drawn by Marx about the workings of capitalism and the bourgeois state are still applicable.

Of course, as Marx says in the Manifesto of the Communist party, specific measures aimed at expropriating the bourgeoisie from country to country will vary as the material conditions of these countries do, but he then goes on to put forward measures that will be generally applicable in the advanced imperialist countries, and all of them still are.

Much of the cause and effect of capitalism is preserved intact since the time of the industrial revolution. A few mechanisms to delay the inevitible (Keynesian economics, social security and public assistance, etc) do not over-all do much to invalidate this.



yet if you are a Marxist it seems to say you agree with everything he said,


If you uphold the method established by Karl Marx, the dialectical materialist method, then objectively you are a Marxist, wether or not the historical conclusions that he came to are still valid.

If you uphold the science of natural selection, then you are objectively a Darwinist, wether or not you agree with the persynal inclinations of Charles Darwin ( who was religious, despite his theory later becoming a key rationalization of athiesm).



yet if marx said everything is in constant change, how can his ideas, based on conditions he saw so long ago, all remain valid?


Again, how severely have the conditions changed?

You use an example of prevailing social attitudes at the time (ie. casual racial discrimination) as a sign of the leaps and bounds between our contemporary society and his, but you have yet to analyze the socio-economic foundations still at heart of every capitalist class society and bourgeois state. How radically different are they functioning today, as compared to 200 years ago?


If anything, the only thing that has changed is that Capitalism is no longer in a state of viability, but in a state of decay. Also, while Marx often refered to the measures needed to expropriate the bourgeoisie in the advanced imperialist countries, now these measures are even more generally applicable, as capitalism itself has rooted out and destroyed vestigial feudal relations that persisted in the former colonial countries, in order to create new markets to exand into, new pools of labour, etc.

The model of Bourgeois and proletarian of the advanced imperialist countries in the time of Marx has now become the norm in every state on the planet earth.

Again, I will not budge another centimetre, until you cite concrete examples of how the socio-economic analysis contained in Kapital and the economic writings of Marx are no longer valid.


Now, that said, no one is suggesting that if the theories do become invalidated by present conditions that we shouldn't adjust our theory and practice accordingly (many of us have, to varying degrees, in the wake of the post-cold war world). This is science.

That said, when something is objectively correct, it is objectively correct, even if it remains so for generations.

No one is suggesting that we follow everything Marx said uncritically, even if it is incorrect. What we are asking is, what is no longer correct? Which analysis no longer holds water?

[ZeroNowhere]

The Earth is now a cube, and the sun revolves around it.

[graymouser]

Marxists uphold Marx and his conclusions, rather than upholding the dialectical method he used to reach those conclusions.

This seems to treat Marx's conclusions as absolutes, rather than seeing things as constantly changing, this seems to result in people looking at things in a static posture, and dogmatically upholding things Marx said in his works, rather than looking at society and the struggles taking place in it, and deciding on the right approach to handling these contradictions.

For example, many Marxists denounce Mao focusing on the peasantry and claim that workers are the revolutionary force, yet, if one studies the contradiction in China at that time, the main contradiction was between the landless peasants and the rulling class, as the working class was relatively small.

Now how can you be a Marxist , as Marx did not have an absolute program, and would not want the class struggle to be squandered by those who uphold concrete absolutes, but rather to have lead those who absolutely study the concrete conditions and apply the strategy to end the contradiction.

For example, due to Marx living in racist imes, He was a racist, however a Dialectical Materialist would say I do not uphold Marx, but rather, I uphold his Method, yet if you are a Marxist it seems to say you agree with everything he said, yet if marx said everything is in constant change, how can his ideas, based on conditions he saw so long ago, all remain valid?
The core of Marx's ideas remain valid because the main thing that he studied - the contradictions between workers and capitalists - remains the main force in the world situation. A hundred and fifty years is not a terribly long time; it took capitalism longer than that to go from its embryonic form to the full-blooded version that was only beginning to exist when Marx studied it in England.

When you talk about Mao in China, it doesn't seem to be with an historical understanding of the difference between peasant's movements and workers' movements. Marx noted that the working class was fundamentally different from every previous exploited class, because they were summoned together in very large groups (in factories etc), and because their interests were collective - all the workers own the factories - rather than individualist - all the peasants each own their own land, in the example of a peasant uprising. It doesn't take a thoroughgoing socialist revolution which will resolve all the incomplete democratic tasks to do land reform. A proper bourgeois-democratic revolution would, in theory, do fine for that.

In fact, that's pretty much what the Second International thought about the "backward" countries in the early 20th century. They needed their own bourgeois-democratic revolutions, and then everything would work itself out just fine. That's actually the logic of your position on China, but it's not right, because it fails to understand that capitalism is a world system, and the young bourgeoisie in China was incapable of growing, itself, into a sufficiently developed version of capitalism to support land reform and so on. So all the democratic tasks actually fall to the workers' movement - through a combined democratic and socialist revolution. That's Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution in a nutshell, and it's based upon looking at contradictions on a global, not a national, scale.

You can't look at things after capitalism solidified in the major imperialist countries on this sort of country-by-country level, it's a tremendous mistake. It's why national liberation movements have failed even after what seemed like success, with many former colonial countries becoming politically independent but economically remaining dominated by one imperialism or another.

So I think you've managed to miss the point of Marx's method entirely, by trying to apply it in the wrong situations and in the wrong way. In part that's why the work Marx and Engels did during their lifetimes was so important: while it is not a finished critique of modern society, it gives us a starting point from which we can work forward (and I think much of the important work in this was done by Lenin and Trotsky) to develop a consistent critique of modern conditions rather than ahistorically looking at one isolated country for the "main contradictions."

[RED DAVE]

For example, many Marxists denounce Mao focusing on the peasantry and claim that workers are the revolutionary force, yet, if one studies the contradiction in China at that time, the main contradiction was between the landless peasants and the rulling class, as the working class was relatively small.This is, for Marxists never the case. Our politics are, or should be, always, the politics of the working class. Yes, the working class in China was small; and the peasantry was much larger. But the landlord class was smaller than the working class, and the capitalist class was smaller still.

The crucial mistake on the part of the Maoists wasto divorce the urban struggles of the working class and the rural struggles of the peasantry. This is a mistake that the Bolsheviks, placed in a very similar situation did not make. They understood that even in the backward conditions of Russia, the working class had to be the leading class of the revolution. This lesson was lost when the counter-revolution occurred in Russia and a section of the petit-bourgeoisie became the ruling class. This eventually morphed, virtually bloodlessly, into full-scale capitalism.

In China, thanks to the Maoists, who should have led the working class to victory (the working class was in revolt in the cities int he late 1940s. the Maoists told them to go back to work) the triumph of a multi-class regime was immediate, which morphed into capitalism even faster than in Russia.


Now how can you be a Marxist , as Marx did not have an absolute program, and would not want the class struggle to be squandered by those who uphold concrete absolutes, but rather to have lead those who absolutely study the concrete conditions and apply the strategy to end the contradiction.I assume that this gobbledy-gook is a justification for the Maoists seizing power themselves in the absence of the working class.


For example, due to Marx living in racist imes, He was a racist, however a Dialectical Materialist would say I do not uphold Marx, but rather, I uphold his Method, yet if you are a Marxist it seems to say you agree with everything he said, yet if marx said everything is in constant change, how can his ideas, based on conditions he saw so long ago, all remain valid?I assume this is a justification for the Maoists, in China and elsewhere, abandoning the working class as the leading class of the revolution.

RED DAVE

[pranabjyoti]

Marxists uphold Marx and his conclusions, rather than upholding the dialectical method he used to reach those conclusions.

This seems to treat Marx's conclusions as absolutes, rather than seeing things as constantly changing, this seems to result in people looking at things in a static posture, and dogmatically upholding things Marx said in his works, rather than looking at society and the struggles taking place in it, and deciding on the right approach to handling these contradictions.

For example, many Marxists denounce Mao focusing on the peasantry and claim that workers are the revolutionary force, yet, if one studies the contradiction in China at that time, the main contradiction was between the landless peasants and the rulling class, as the working class was relatively small.

Now how can you be a Marxist , as Marx did not have an absolute program, and would not want the class struggle to be squandered by those who uphold concrete absolutes, but rather to have lead those who absolutely study the concrete conditions and apply the strategy to end the contradiction.

For example, due to Marx living in racist imes, He was a racist, however a Dialectical Materialist would say I do not uphold Marx, but rather, I uphold his Method, yet if you are a Marxist it seems to say you agree with everything he said, yet if marx said everything is in constant change, how can his ideas, based on conditions he saw so long ago, all remain valid?
Lenin (on Who are the friends of the people and how they oppose social-democrats) clearly said that a true Marxist only takes the method from Marx, nothing other than that.
Kindly try to understand that all Marxists (and anti-Marxists) don't have the mental capability and what you just said is true only for "half-boiled Marxists", not about true Marxist.
At present China, the working class isn't a small factor and it's now a well grown capitalist country, the main contradiction is between workers and capitalists.

[scarletghoul]

The OP is correct. It's a great point and certainly one that we should all agree with.

Though the definition of the word 'Marxist' varies. At the time of the BPP, 'Marxists' were generally those in the CPUSA, SWP, or whatever, and those groups did dogmatically apply Marx's conclusions without considering his method. The same is true of many Marxist groups today. But the other day I was reading some Lukacs and he defines DM as the essence of Marxism or something, and by that definition Huey Newton would be a Marxist while the CPUSA would not.

Unfortunately there are still many of these unthinking 'Marxists' around .. like those who criticise the Nepali Maoists for not following some exact stencil from 1917 Russia .. Thankfully however the correct practice overshadows these people.

[sologdin]

Dialectical Materialist would say I do not uphold Marx, but rather, I uphold his Method

which is what, precisely?

consider lukacs, in history and class consciousness:



Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.


ok. not bad. but then:



It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.


uh...ok. that aside, a decent example of the "method" here:



The methodology of the natural sciences which forms the methodological ideal of every fetishistic science and every kind of Revisionism rejects the idea of contradiction and antagonism in its subject matter. If, despite this, contradictions do spring up between particular theories, this only proves that our knowledge is as yet imperfect. Contradictions between theories show that these theories have reached their natural limits; they must therefore be transformed and subsumed under even wider theories in which the contradictions finally disappear.

But we maintain that in the case of social reality these contradictions are not a sign of the imperfect understanding of society; on the contrary, they belong to the nature of reality itself and to the nature of capitalism. When the totality is known they will not be transcended and cease to be contradictions. Quite the reverse. they will be seen to be necessary contradictions arising out of the antagonisms of this system of production. When theory (as the knowledge of the whole) opens up the way to resolving these contradictions it does so by revealing the real tendencies of social evolution. For these are destined to effect a real resolution of the contradictions that have emerged in the course of history.


counterposed against this might be lichtheim's comments in "interpretation of marx's thought," itself in from marx to hegel:



it was no part of marx's intention to found yet another political movement, or another "school of thought." his prime purpose as a socialist was to articulate the practical requirements of the labor movement in its struggle for emancipation. his theoretical work was intended as a "guide to action."

[...]

it is arguable that both the "orthodox" codification undertaken by engels, and the various subsequent "revisions," have their source in marx's own ambiguities as a thinker.

[...]

the "dialectical" materialism, or monism, put forward [by engels] has only the remotest connection with marx's own viewpoint [...] it was engels who was responsible for the subsequent interpretation of "marxism" as a unified system of thought destined to take the place of hegelianism, and indeed of classical german philosophy in general [...] the subsequent emergence of soviet marxism was mediated by plekhanov and lenin, and differs in some respects from engels' version, e.g., injection of larger doses of hegelianism, but also in the introduction by lenin of a species of voluntarism which had more in common with bergson and nietzsche than with engels' own rather deterministic manner. in this sense, leninism has to be regarded as a "revision" of the orthodox marxism of engels, plekhanov, and kautsky.

[...]

soviet marxism is to be understood as a monistic system sui generis, rooted in engels' interpretation of marx, but likewise linked to the pre-marxian traditions of the russian revolutionary intelligentsia.

[...]

the transformation of marxism from a revolutionary critique of bourgeois society into the systematic ideology of a non-revolutionary, or post-revolutionary, labor movement in western europe and elsewhere, this contrasting, though parallel development in the soviet orbit presents itself as additional confirmation of our thesis.

[...]

the dialectic of perception and natural environment cannot in marx's view be compressed into a formula, for "reason" is itself historical and its interaction with nature is just what it appears in history. [...] the notion that this anthropological naturalism is anchored in a general theory of the universe finds no support in marx's own writings there is no logical link between it and the "dialectical materialism" of engels and plekhanov, any more than there is a necessary connection between marx's pragmatic view of conscious mental activity as an aspect of praxis and the epistemological realism of lenin.

[...]

the transformation of marx's own naturalism into a metaphysical materialism was a practical necessity for engels and his followers, without being a logical one. it was required to turn "marxism" into a weltanshauung.

[...]

to grasp the full extent of this intellectual disaster, it is necessary to see what marx intended [...] the grounding of historical materialism in philosophical materialism does not necessarily entail the further step of suggesting that human history is set in motion and kept going by a "dialectical" process of contradiction within the "material basis." [...] marx's own historical research stressed the radical discontinuity of the historical formations [such as asiatic mode, ancient, feudal, &c.]. [...] the notion of a dialectical "law" linking primitive communism, via slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, with the mature communism of the future, was once more the contribution of engels.

[...]

unlike hegel, marx does not treat history as the unfolding of metaphysical substance, and unlike comte he does not claim to be in possession of an operational key which will unlock every door. [...] the statement that socialism grows "necessarily" out of capitalism is simply a way of saying that economci conflict poses an institutional problem to which socialism supplies the only rational answer. [...] the "relentless onward march of civilization" is a comtean, not a marxian, postulate.

[the last donut of the night]

Unfortunately there are still many of these unthinking 'Marxists' around .. like those who criticise the Nepali Maoists for not following some exact stencil from 1917 Russia .. Thankfully however the correct practice overshadows these people.

in b4 shitstorm

[Zanthorus]

Here's a funny and seemingly not well known fact: Marx tended to employ his own method quite a bit. In general, Marx's propositions are consonant with his method, and the failure of these propositions or their abandonment amounts to the failure and abandonment of Marxism. And no, I'm not particularly impressed by Lukacs. I'd be more inclined to agree with:


2. Marxism, in the only valid sense of the word, is faced today by three main groups of adversaries. First group: those bourgeois who claim that the mercantile capitalist type of economy is the ultimate one, that its historical overcoming by the socialist mode of production is a false perspective, and who, very consistently, completely reject the entire doctrine of economic determinism and class struggle. Second group: the so-called Stalinist communists, who claim to accept Marxist historical and economic doctrines even though putting forward demands (in the advanced capitalist countries too) which are not revolutionary but identical to, if not worse than, the politics (democracy) and economics (popular progressivism) of the traditional reformists. Third group: the professed followers of the revolutionary doctrine and method who however attribute its present abandonment by the proletarian majority to initial defects and deficiencies in the theory; which needs, therefore, to be corrected and updated.
Negators – falsifiers – modernizers . We fight all three, but today consider the modernizers to be the worst.

3. The history of the Marxist left, of radical Marxism, or more precisely, of Marxism, consists of a series of battles against each of the revisionist “waves” which have attacked various aspects of its doctrine and method, setting out from the organic monolithic formation which roughly corresponds with the 1848 Manifesto. Elsewhere we have covered the history of these struggles inside the three historic Internationals: fought against utopians, workerists, libertarians, reformist and gradualist social-democrats, syndicalists of the left and right, social-patriots, and today against national-communists and populist-communists. This struggle, in all its phases spanning four generations, is the heritage not of a few big names, but of a well-defined, compact school, and in the historical sense, of a well-defined party.

4. This long and difficult struggle would loses its connection with the recovery to come if, rather than drawing the lesson of “invariance” from it, we accepted the banal idea that Marxism is a theory in “continuous historical elaboration” which needs to adapt and draw lessons from changing circumstances. Invariably such is the justification used to excuse all the betrayals, of which there has been such abundant evidence, and every revolutionary defeat.- International Communist Party (Il Programma Comunista), The Historical Invariance of Marxism

[scarletghoul]

Here's a funny and seemingly not well known fact: Marx tended to employ his own method quite a bit. In general, Marx's propositions are consonant with his method, and the failure of these propositions or their abandonment amounts to the failure and abandonment of Marxism.
You're missing the point completely. The point is that the objective conditions have changed since Marx's day, and therefore we can not just use his conclusions but have to come up with our own.

Of course, many things are still the same and we can use the same conclusions as Marx in these instances, but many things have also changed and require new analysis.

There are also examples of Marx (+ Engels Lenin etc etc) simply being incorrect. For example, Marx thought the revolution would first appear in the most advanced countries. His use of 'oriental despotism' is a product of ignorance it seems. And so on. Dialectics of Nature by Engels is a great example: if you read it for its scientific conclusions you will not gain much as its mostly unoriginal and sometimes based on incorrect scientific ideas of the time, but if you read it as an example of the dialectical materialist method in action it is excellent.

[thriller]

"If anything is certain, it is that I am not a Marxist" - Karl Marx.

[ZeroNowhere]

"If anything is certain, it is that I am not a Marxist" - Karl Marx.
'If anything is certain, I did not mean by that what you think I mean by that.'

- Karl Marx, circa 2000 AD.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Just because someone can be wrong on some things, doesn't mean they aren't right on others.

[scarletghoul]

Just because someone can be wrong on some things, doesn't mean they aren't right on others.
Such profound words, and totally relevant too.. :laugh: