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Education Course 2000WHAT IS MARXISM? |
His writings have been dissected by the establishment in the seats of learning around the world in order to discredit them.
While we learned about the kings and queens of Europe, schoolchildren in the Stalinist countries had texts by Marx on the curriculum.
From the shanty towns of Latin America to the guerrilla camps of the ANC in South Africa, his ideas have been claimed by many people. His ideas have also been distorted by many people claiming to be Marxists.
Why are his ideas so influential? How can a man writing in the 19th century have anything relevant to say about the society we live in today?
Marx together with Engels are considered the founders of scientific socialism, they provided a theoretical method which explained how human society had developed and provided an analysis of capitalist society.
They challenged the idea that human development is merely accidental, that society develops without rhyme or reason.
Their ideas at the time were like a political earthquake as they rocked all other accepted philosophical and political ideas to their foundations.
The Communist Manifesto is one of the most enduring documents of all time. Written in 1848 it still features on the best sellers list in the year 2000.
This education course hopes to outline the development of Marxist ideas from their birth to the present day. The aim is to see how the ideas have developed over the last 150 years and gain an insight into the method of analysis. The biggest mistake made in approaching Marxs ideas is to treat them as some sort of dogma, as ideas set in stone. The whole point about Marxism and the dialectical method is that the basic ideas are developed and built on as a result of the concrete experience of the working class, its struggles and its organisations.
This course will outline how the jigsaw fits together in the development of socialist ideas. Explaining some of the major events that have shaped the ideas and society.
We hope it will be a foundation for comrades who no doubt will want to study further particular events or times.
We understand that in this day and age with full time working and family responsibilities many comrades have limited time to read or even attend discussions. There will be an introduction to each section and we will try and provide material which takes account of this; i.e. providing short pamphlets or reproducing shorter articles or chapters from books at least to give a basic idea of the subject.
A study pack will be produced in advance for each session
If you are interested in taking part in all or some of the sessions you can contact us here.
How did Marx become a Marxist? Or in other words how did he reach the theory of historical materialism.
Marx and Engels arrived at their conclusions both through a critique of existing philosophical, political and economic theories and through their observations of the concrete development of capitalism and the working class.
They pursued an explanation of how society develops, from one form to another, e.g., slavery to feudalism; feudalism to capitalism and concluding that the driving force for the whole development is the struggle of classes. As stated in the Communist Manifesto
" The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of the class struggle.".
Marx and Engels had sketched out the principles of scientific socialism by 1846, but it was the revolutionary wave which swept Europe in 1848 which first saw the working class begin to appear as the only force capable of abolishing private property and carrying through the socialist revolution. The experience of these revolutions, although a defeat for the working class, deepened the political understanding of Marx and Engels. They understood that ideas were nothing without parties capable of organising the working class for their historic role of carrying through socialism. They were both active in trying to build political parties and organisations which would, using their analysis , overthrow capitalism.. They were the main initiators of the First International, which was the first international workers organisation, formed in 1864.
Who remembers the band in the 1980s launched by Jimmy Somerville called the Communards? Their first album called Red has on the cover the band standing beneath the red flag. The name of the band was a tribute to the workers and urban poor of Paris who in March 1871 in Marx's words "stormed the heavens" and gave to the world for the first time the political form at last discovered under which to work out the emancipation of labor.
The workers and poor took power in Paris establishing the Paris Commune, a form of workers state. Previously Marx had put forward the theoretical position of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here for the first time in action he could see what type of organisation the working class would create in order to take power and run society. The workers held Paris for 71 days before being defeated. This experience was studied by all Marxists. It was this experience which helped Lenin and the Bolsheviks decades later to understand the role of the soviets in Russia as an alternative workers state.
Throughout its history, capitalism has experienced a process of constant change and gone through different stages and phases. A decisive change took place at the turn of the 20th century with the development of imperialism, defined by Lenin as the highest stage of capitalism. This involved the concentration of capital in a handful of advanced capitalist countries who carved up the world between them. The rest of the world was dominated by these powers, economically, politically and militarily. Practically the entire continent of Africa was divided into colonies of the European powers. China, while not directly colonised, was carved up into "spheres of influence of the imperialist powers. The formally independent countries of Latin America were completely dominated by Britain and later by the USA. Imperialism represented the extension of capitalism to the whole world, but in a situation where the vast majority of the worlds population experienced dependent capitalism, where the wealth of their countries was sucked out into the imperialist countries. This economic super-exploitation continued after the colonial countries had won formal political independence, and still continues under different forms today.
The development of imperialism also represented the end of the progressive role of capitalism. The world entered the epoch of wars and revolutions, which will continue until capitalism is overthrown on a world scale.
The imperialist epoch implied major changes in the strategy and tactics of the international workers movement. The central change was that the socialist revolution came directly onto the agenda not only in the most advanced countries, but in all countries. It was now impossible to break out of backwardness and underdevelopment without breaking with capitalism.
Imperialism also created the material basis for the development of reformism in the workers movement in the imperialist countries. It was Lenin who took the lead in rethinking the Marxist approach to a whole series of questions in the new conditions of the imperialist epoch the attitude to imperialist and other wars, the national question and the colonial question.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was the first revolution of the imperialist epoch. Marxists had previously considered that what was on the agenda in Russia was not a socialist revolution, but what is called a democratic, bourgeois revolution which would like the French revolution overthrow the Tsar and bring to power the new capitalist class. The thinking behind this was that to carry through socialism it would need the creation of large scale production and with it the creation of a big industrial working class. Russia was a backward mainly rural country. But the living experience of the revolution showed that things were more complicated than that. The driving force of this revolution the working class, backed up by peasant revolts. In other countries particularly Britain, France and Germany, the emerging capitalist classes had moved to overthrough the Monarchy aristocracy and feudalism in order to develop capitalism. In Russia bourgeoisie(capitalist class) showed itself to be more afraid of the working class than of the autocracy, hence incapable of leading the democratic revolution.
In 1905, the "dress rehearsal" for 1917, the working class which was a small minority of the population was not yet capable of leading the revolution to victory. But the experience of the revolution opened up a debate among Marxists as to the nature of the next revolution that everyone knew was coming and the role that the different classes would play in it. Trotsky was the first to put forward the idea that the coming revolution would be a socialist revolution led by the working class. Lenin held the position that the revolution would be led not by the bourgeoisie but by the working class in alliance with the peasantry, but was less clear concerning the nature of the revolution, i.e. on the type of economic system that would be established. The Mensheviks stuck to the schema that the revolution would be bourgeois-democratic, hence led by the bourgeoisie.
Twelve years later these theories were tested out in practice in 1917. Lenin and Trotsky came together on the basis that the working class had to take power in Russia even although it was an economically backward country and start the socialist revolution, but that this revolution could only be completed by the victory of the socialist revolution in advanced capitalist countries in Europe. On this basis the Bolshevik Party won a majority in the Soviets and led the working class to power in October. But before this could happen sharp political struggles were necessary within the Bolshevik Party itself.
Lenin and Trotsky were to their very core internationalists. They were clear that the fight for socialism had to be international. They didnt believe that the revolution in Russia would survive unless workers in other countries took power. They set up the Communist International in 1919, the aim was to build communist parties throughout the world to help workers in other countries to carry through socialism. From the betrayal of the old political parties who supported the war, new communist parties were born. With a successful revolution behind the International, the most revolutionary workers gravitated to the new Communist International. The hopes of Lenin and Trotsky were strangled by the "socialism in one country theory" put forward by Stalin. The Comintern ceased to be based on the struggle for the world socialist revolution and became the instrument for defending the interests of the bureaucratic elite which had taken power in the Soviet Union. A whole series of betrayals of the international working class followed. In 1943 the Communist International was wound up by Stalin. We study what went wrong?
By 1929, Trotsky one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution was exiled by Stalin. He used the relative freedom he had in exile to organise the International Left Opposition, which saw itself initially as a faction seeking to correct the course of the Comintern. When the Comintern and the German CP pursued the disastrous sectarian policies which divided the German working class and helped Hitler to come to power, and then failed to draw any balance-sheet of their errors, Trotsky concluded that the Comintern was unreformable and issued a call for new parties and new International. In a period marked by unrelenting defeats of the working class, when it was "midnight in the century", Trotskys hopes of winning significant forces to the new International were disappointed. When the Fourth International was finally founded in 1938, its sections were, with a few exceptions, very weak. Nevertheless the programme of the Fourth International maintained the revolutionary programme of the Comintern abandoned by Stalinism as well as enriching this programme by the lessons of the previous 15 years. Those Trotskyists organised around this programme, few as they were, assured the continuity of revolutionary Marxism during and after the Second World War.
Last year we had splashed across our TV screens, scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down, to mark the 10th anniversary. This session deals with why the Berlin Wall went up. How did the countries of Eastern Europe become satellites of the USSR?
Until the Second World War, on a world scale only the Soviet Union had abolished landlordism and capitalism. The Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union came out of the war strengthened, with a third of the world having a political system in its image. How was this possible and what effect did it have internationally?
The Peoples Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949. The world's biggest country had freed itself from imperialist domination and at the same time broken from capitalism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, direct domination by the European colonial empires was brought to an end. In other countries, particularly in Latin America, revolutionaries fought against the more indirect economic forms of imperialist domination, particularly by US imperialism.
The struggle of the colonial peoples inspired a generation of youth in the imperialist countries. While the US intervened in Vietnam. John Lennon sang "Give Peace a Chance". On the continent of Africa guerrilla armies calling themselves Marxist fought for independence from their imperialist rulers..
With the victory of the Cuban Revolution in "Americas backyard", Fidel Castro and Che Guevara became household names.
What lay behind the developing colonial revolutions? Many of these movements abolished landlordism and capitalism in their countries, but was it socialism? And if not what was the economic and political system?
From the Second World War in 1945 until the recession of 1974, capitalist growth in what is called the advanced capitalist countries had continued year on year. Over 30 years there had been no major recessions. This allowed both the capitalists and the workers leaders in these countries to promote the idea that capitalism had solved the problem of economic boom and then bust which Marx argued was built in to the capitalist economic system. Therefore Marx was wrong! The economic crisis of 1974 changed all that. Furthermore, the recession occurred in a situation where there had already been big workers struggles in France, Italy and Britain, and where the overthrow of semi-fascist and military regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece was under way. The highest point of the working-class radicalisation in Europe was the Portuguese revolution in 1974-75, which raised the spectre of the working class taking power in a Western European country.
We will look at how this recession was a turning point for both the capitalists and the working class. With the help of the reformist parties the working-class upsurge of 1968-75 was brought to an end. This prepared the ground for a change in capitalist economic policy which was best represented by Thatcher and what is commonly called neoliberal ideas i.e.: nothing should stand in the way of making profit, there should be no constraints on capitalism, e.g., trade unions. This has developed to its logical conclusion with the World Trade Organisation arguing that governments should not be allowed to interfere in the economy of their own country because they dont always act in the best interests of free market capitalism.
Gorbachov launched Perestroika as an attempt to reform the economy of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had abolished capitalism and their economic system was a planned economy, with state ownership instead of private ownership of industry and commerce. But as Trotsky explained decades before in "Revolution Betrayed", without workers democracy and with a bureaucratised state apparatus this would act as a huge weight to slow and frustrate economic development. Gorbachov was attempting to find a way to boost economic development and reform the planned economy without the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union losing its privileged position.
He didnt bank on the political effects of Perestroika which opened up political discussion in what had been totalitarian states. The so called peoples revolutions of Eastern Europe led to the collapse of the planned economy in the Stalinist states and the return of capitalism. We look at what effect this has had on these countries, on the ideas of socialism and how we deal with the frequently tossed accusation from the capitalists, that socialism failed.
This entire course has one aim. To arm a new generation of socialists with the ideas and analysis necessary to aid the working class to change society. We will learn from the struggles of our brothers and sisters from different times and across different continents. We have one thing in common, the fight for a new society to end exploitation, famine and poverty. A society that would allow human beings to develop to their full potential.
This final session will look at the fight for socialism internationally and what are the main tasks for us in Scotland, within the International Socialist Movement and in the Scottish Socialist Party.