Dear friends,
I recently had a debate with a renowned Marxist scholar about socialism
and socialist revolution. His name is Prof. Paresh Chattopadhyay – Indian by
birth, teaches political economy at the University of Montreal, Canada. He may
not be so well known among political activists; but among Marxist scholars, he
is very well known and very highly respected as an authority on the works of
Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. The debate has appeared in Frontier, a weekly political journal published (in print and
online) from Kolkata, India. I want to make the three texts – two by
Chattopadhyay and one by me – available to the readers of this blog:
(1) Chattopadhyay published a short critical comment on an article, the
content of which was an adulatory appreciation of the contribution of Che
Guevara to socialist revolution. Chattopadhyay opined that Cuban socialism of
Che and Fidel Castro was not Marxian socialism.Here is the link.
(2) I criticized Chattopadhyay for not telling us what revolutionaries
like Lenin, Mao and Che should and could have done other than what they did in
the absence in their respective countries of an industrial proletariat that
formed the majority of the population. I also expressed doubt about the
validity of Marxian socialism in the 21st century. Here is the link.
http://www.frontierweekly.com/articles/vol-47/47-7/47-7-PCs%20Critique%20of%20Socialism.html
(3) Chattopadhyay responded to my criticism. Here is the link.
Below I am reproducing only the second and the third text.
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What is to be done?
PC’s Critique of ‘Socialism’
Saral
Sarkar
Paresh Chattopadhyay (PC) is right in almost all
points [Frontier, August 3-9, 2014]. The question that must now be asked
is: Does it make any sense at all to still try to create socialist society that
Marx and Engels had envisioned? I do not know whether PC has somewhere
written on this question. If not, then it is essential that he does. For it is
too simple to criticize every socialist of the 20th century—from Lenin to Mao
and Che Guevara—without saying what they should and could have done to build a
socialist society that would have gotten Marx's approval, whom they all
regarded as their Guru—something other or more than what they did in order to
create a socialist society. Also, PC's awe-inspiring scholarship is of little
use unless he presents his conclusion as to the question "what is to be
done today".
I think Marx's vision of revolution and socialism was
flawed from the very beginning. But it was and it still is too difficult for
Lenin and all socialists up until today to say that openly. The monumental
analytical and theoretical work of Marx and Engels had achieved such a
overwhelming intellectual hegemony among the radical and anti-capitalist
educated people that hardly anybody dared to do so. And those few who did dare
to criticize Marxist theory, even mildly, was denounced as traitor,
deviationist, reformist, revisionist etc. etc. And they never had a chance to
get a fair hearing. That is the normal effect of hegemony.
But today it is easier to realize and say
without being persecuted or denounced that Marx and Engels had erred on several
questions:
(1) The most important of them is the agency question.
The great majority of workers did not and still do not have the ability to
understand, let alone analyze, the complex ways in which the world functions
and the direction in which it is moving (there are of course some exceptions).
The majority of them has been and still are totally worn down in the process of
earning money to feed themselves and their family. That has been and is the
reality. It has therefore always been nonsensical, untruthful and only fashionable
to assert that the revolution will happen under the leadership of the
proletariat. The leadership necessarily had to come from the educated
revolutionary middle class, from people like Lenin, Mao, and Guevara, and they
had to be the vanguard.
In the 19th century, maybe, the proletariat formed the
majority of the population in England, Germany, and France. But not in Russia
(not to speak of China or India). But, in Russia, there were people like Lenin;
and in the early 20th century, in China there were people like Mao. Should they
have sat back and waited until the industrial proletariat became the majority?
If Marx and Engels had lived longer, would they have advised Lenin and Mao to
sit back and wait?
(2) Marx and Engels could not have known in their days
what we know since after their death, particularly what we know today. That is
why they also erred in thinking that the proletariat will be farther
revolutionized through their growing impoverishment. The opposite happened in
history.
(3) They had little knowledge of human nature. They
erred in thinking that the proletariat had no fatherland. The First World War
proved them thoroughly wrong. The colonialists and imperialists of Europe and
America enabled their own proletariats to enjoy a share in the plunder of the
colonies, which they gladly did.
(4) In the 19th century, Marx and Engels, and in the
greater part of the 20th century Lenin, Mao, Guevara and all rank and file
socialists were justified in believing in eternal development of science and technology,
and hence in eternal development of productive forces. We know today that there
are limits to growth, limits to the development of science, technology and
productive forces. We cannot blame the masters and their followers for not
knowing what we know today. But we must severely criticize the die-hard
Marxists of our times for still stubbornly refusing to see these limits.
To sum up, the analysis of reality and the vision of
socialism we have received from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Guevara etc. have
largely become obsolete. But since capitalism will definitely ruin the whole
world unless overcome, some newly conceived socialism must become the
goal of all radical people's movements of today. This new socialism—which
should be called the scientific socialism of the 21st century (the
Marxian socialism being the Utopian)—must be based on the knowledge and
understanding of the world that we have acquired since the publication of the
book Limits to Growth (1972). This knowledge and understanding is a call
for a paradigm shift in our thinking and activity.
As for revolution, I would like to quote Walter
Benjamin. He wrote:
"Marx says revolutions are the locomotive of
world history. But perhaps it is entirely different. Revolutions are perhaps
the attempt of humanity travelling in a train to pull the emergency
brake."
If it was not true when Benjamin wrote this, it is
true roday. In the same sense, another German author, Carl Amery, wrote, in the
general sense: Political activists have till now tried to change the world in
various ways. The point however is to preserve it.
What is to be done? Our task is to preserve the
biosphere and change the world.
-----------------------------------------
On Saral Sarkar’s Socialism
Paresh
Chattopadhyay
We feel greatly honoured that such an eminent
individual as Saral Sarkar (SS for short) living far away from India has taken
notice of my humble work on socialism appearing in a Kolkata weekly. In the
following lines we try to deal with what we consider as the most important
points of his important contribution.
First a summary account of what he says. In his view
we have criticized every socialist of the twentieth century – most prominently,
Lenin,Mao and Che (LMC for short) – for building socialism without the approval
of Karl Marx. SS faults us for not saying what else they should have
done. We are asked to show what is to be done to-day.
Marx’s vision was flawed from the start, he continues,
but LMC were inhibited to declare it openly. Those who differed –the
revisionists- had never a chance to do that. Now is the chance to show the
errors of Marx.
What errors are these? These are: (1) workers lack the
ability to understand and analyse how the world functions. They are too worn
down by their effort to earn money and and support their families. It has been
always “nonsensical, untruthful, and only fashionable” to assert that
revolution will happen under the leadership of the proletariat. The leadership
has to come from the educated revolutionary middleclass, people like LMC
forming the vanguard. In the backward countries like Russia and China should
Lenin and Mao have waited till the workers get the majority?
(2)Mistaken in believing that the proletariat will be
further revolutionized through growing impoverishment. The opposite has
happened.
happened.
(3) Marx had little knowledge of human nature. The
colonialists and imperialists enabled the proletariat a share in the plunder.
(4) Finally he does not spare LMC also, who are
faulted for believing in eternal development of science and technology, and
productive forces. But there are limits to growth. Due to the then ignorance,
these revolutionaries could be exonerated, but not their die-hard Marxist
followers. Now is the time for a new socialism, the true scientific socialism -
not utopian à la Marx-Engels. This will preserve the biosphere in a desirable
way.
We may now be allowed to intervene. In SS’s narrative
there are at least two factual problems. First, it is not true that nobody
among people like LMC dared to express opposition to the “flawed vision” of
Marx. Lenin while declaring that a socialist revolution could begin in a
backward land, also said that this idea was outside the vision of Marx and
Engels, which in effect meant that their vision was too narrow to envisage the
total historical perspective of socialist revolution, (and hence “flawed”).
The second concerns Marx’s perspective of proletarian
revolution being propelled by workers’ increasing impoverishment according to
the author. This is the thesis of so-called “absolute impoverishment “ of the
workers under capitalism ascribed to Marx. Now, it is undeniable that
Marx for a brief period had the tendency to adhere to this idea.The origin of
this idea, however, goes back to Engels in his earliest writings on the English
workers, as Engels himself wrote many years later. In those early writings on
the workers’ situation Engels maintained that workers’ wage, as the exchange
value of their labour(power), translated into the absolutely necessary
subsistence for the life and reproduction of their labour. Marx, coming later
to his study of political economy, followed Engels in this regard. Lassalle
took it over and formulated what is called the “iron law of wages”. But this
idea of absolute impoverishment had a very short existence in Marx. By the time
he started his more mature works, culminating in CAPITAL, it vanished
altogether. Already in his 1847 lectures to the German workers, Marx observes
that in a period of rapid accumulation of capital wages may rise, though
capital’s profit rises more rapidly. Capitalists will “allow the working class
to take a portion of the increasing capitalist wealth, and remain content with
forging for itself the golden chain by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its
train”. In CAPITAL vol.1, in the chapter on ‘buying and
selling of labour power’ he declares that “labour power contains, from the
point of view of value, a moral and historical element, which differentiates it
from other commodities”.
Leaving this aspect of impoverishment of the workers,
this poverty has another and more profound meaning in Marx, ignored by most of
Marx’s readers. In his 1857-58 notebooks Marx holds “living labour as the complete
denudation of all objectivity, bare, purely subjective existence, labour as
absolute poverty, poverty not as shortage, but as complete exclusion from
objective wealth”.(This reminds one of an image which Rabindranath had created
in one of his musical compositions which with some modification could be stated
thus: seated in front of a vast sea of nectar these labourers are allowed
to drink only poison). In other words, wage/salaried labour
excluded from the means of production is as such in absolute
poverty . In his very first 1861-63 manuscript Marx calls wage/salaried
labourers (manual or mental) “pauper”, whatever the level of remuneration. The
very fact that you have to sell your only ‘property’ labour power in order to
survive, is sufficient to qualify you as absolutely poor, a pauper..Very aptly
Marx cites Shakespear in his master work:” you take my life when you take the
means whereby I live”. This aspect of wage or salaried labour, this wage
slavery escapes the notice of most of us. This is a part of mind set imbibed
through the capitalist relations. As an illustration, we bring in the justly
famous humanist, the economist Amartya Sen, a rare bird in the profession. Sen
justly considers market relation, that is, commodity production playing a
liberating role in a conservative society such as India. But wage labour
as a specific form of slavery does not appear in his otherwise
valuable work on human freedom.Like most of us he seems to accept
it as normal. In ancient Greece, even Aristotle, generally considered to
be the greatest thinker of European antiquity, thought human slavery as
normal. He called slave an animated tool. Indeed, as the young Marx and
Engels wrote, “the ideas of each epoch are the ideas of the ruling class”.
Now it is clear that SS at least implicitly considers
the correctness of the revolutionary undertakings of LMC for building socialism
and Marx wrong. As regards the prototype of these endeavours, the October
revolution followed by the establishment of Russian socialism in a
backward land, his views, he should be glad to know,were initially shared by
some of the most informed minds of the last century- E. H. Carr, I.
Deutscher and P. M. Sweezy all of whom pronounced Lenin right ,
and Marx wrong in his prognostication of socialist revolution taking
place only in a situation where certain objective and subjective conditions
exist , and those conditions can exist only in advanced capitalist lands.
(We return to those conditions in a moment). Then what happened in fact is well
known. The evaporation of the house that Lenin built, followed by those who
followed him, showed at least one thing: a clear refutation of his position.
Marx remains to be tested.
It is clear, here we have two very different notions
of socialism, LMC’s and Marx’s, with an unbridgeable gap in between. The first
type is a system imposed on the society at large by a hierarchically formed
vanguard who claims to know the real interest of the rest of society, mainly
the labouring people, better than the affected. The very basis of the second
type is exactly the opposite. It is the self emancipation of the
labouring people : “Emancipation of the working classes must be conquered
by the working classes themselves” , so Marx (1864). If the working class
is incapable of fulfilling this task,so much the worse. “The working class is
either revolutionary or it is nothing” so Marx in a letter to a friend(1865).
Equally, there is irreconcilable difference between the very meaning of
socialism held by the first group and that held by Marx and Engels.
Socialism of the first group signifies and has shown in practice a
society ruled by a strong state with standing army and bureaucracy, headed by a
single party with central planning, with no individual (private) property in
the means of production, but with commodity production and wage labour intact.
Because of the continuing production based on wage/salaried labour,(which
automatically implies the existence of commodity production) this society as a
matter of fact is a form of state capitalism. And politically, in spite of big
talks by Lenin about following the Paris Commune model of free
election and recall of all officials, the very opposite has turned out to
be the case. In these single party strictly controlled societies there is
no really free election , not to speak of recall, and no dissenting
political view is tolerated. The opposite is the case with the second meaning
of socialism. In this meaning socialism or communism (no distinction in Marx
and Engels)signifies,in terms of the new society after capital(ism), a society
of free individuals or an association of free and equal individuals with
collective ownership of means of production along with the disappearance of all
the instruments of exploitation and repression such as state, commodity,
wage/salaried labour.
A socialist revolution does not come about by any
body’s order, or desire of a Lenin, or even Marx’s. A social revolution like
the great French Revolution of 1789-93, which is epochal and not something
momentary, requires over a long period, a certain maturity of the social
conditions preparing the ground. In Marx’s classic statement, too dismissively
abandoned by instant revolutionaries, no social formation ever disappears
before having exhausted all the possibilities of development of its
productive forces, and new , higher relations of production do not appear
before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of
the old society itself. In their absence all attempts at social revolution will
be Don Quixotism. It would be like trying to ripen a green jackfruit by
repeatedly boxing it. In the absence of such conditions any attempt to
change society could only be undertaken by a determined group of ‘professional
revolutionaries’ as the self-anointed ‘vanguard’, independently of the will of
the society’s great majority, a kind of Blanqui-ism. And indeed all the
so-called socialist revolutions of the last century,highly approved by SS, have
been minority revolutions. Towards the end of his life, Engels summed up
the past revolutionary experiences: “ All revolutions up till now were minority
revolutions. Even when the majority took part , it did so – wittingly or
unwittingly – only in the service of a minority; but because of this, or simply
because of the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority , this
minority acquired the appearance of being the representative of the whole
society.” Here we are speaking exclusively of socialist revolution
followed by socialism since SS’s discourse is on these subjects.
As regards the point raised by SS that workers lack
the ability to understand and analyse how the world functions, and that they
are too worn down by their effort to earn money and support their families, we
can only say that a social revolution is not an every day event.A revolution
cannot be summoned at will.Revolutions arise spontaneously in moments of
crisis, when the situation becomes unbearable, and the same worn down ordinary
people become revolutionaries. Trotsky in his great “History of the
Russian Revolution” vividly describes the spontaneous beginning of the Russian
Revolution in February 1917,initiated not by any party or leader, but by
the most downtrodden and oppressed section of the proletariat of Petrograd
– the women textile workers.
As a matter of fact twentieth century socialism is a
great myth. There has been no socialist revolution and no socialism in an
emancipatory sense. Those lands were just not ready at all for the rise
of such a society. They were ready only for bourgeois revolution
destroying all the pre-capitalist relations along with freeing themselves
from colonialism and imperialism, and thus preparing for the advent
of a totally new society.The Russian Revolution was the last bourgeois
revolution in Europe.
Regarding SS’s hasty dismissal of Marx, let us cite
the following lines from an eminent Dutch scholar Mark
Blaug:”Marx has been reassessed ,revised, refuted and buried a thousand times but
he refuses to be relegated to intellectual history .For better or worse , his
ideas have become part of the climate of opinion within which we all think”.
However, Marx is not indispensable for a social revolution. Marx or no
Marx, social revolutions have taken place and will take place springing from
the very soil of a society divided into antagonistic classes. How many
revolutionaries knew even the name of Marx in the Paris Commune, ditto for the
uprising of the millions of labouring people in February, 1917 in Russia?
Sep 07 2014
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