15.10.1998

Apologetics behind fog of philosophy

Jack Conrad replies to Phil Watson

Phil Watson takes me to task on the thorny issue of the USSR (Weekly Worker October 8). This is all to the good and very welcome. We communists do not fear sharp differences in the least. They are natural in any vibrant and healthy political organism. Through the clash of contending ideas and approaches we can strengthen and advance our collective knowledge and thus move further towards the truth.

The comrade quotes nothing more of mine other than a short passage, less than a paragraph, from my review of The fate of the Russian Revolution, a collection of articles in the main by Max Shachtman, published earlier this year by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. This is it in its entirety:

“[With the first five-year plan] the bureaucracy finally separated itself from any proletarian vestiges, launching a ‘second revolution’ from above and forced industrialisation. Living standards plummeted. Millions died. The Communist Party was decimated and transformed into an organ which existed to promote the cult of Stalin. Here, in the first five-year plan, was the qualitative counterrevolutionary break” (Weekly Worker August 20).

Comrade Watson objects. It might all “sound blissfully straightforward” - but such a description of the USSR is “partial, one-sided and false”. Not, it should be noted, that our comrade makes any attempt to present his argument in a straightforward manner, blissful or otherwise. Moreover he declines to provide any historical evidence in order to refute even my above quoted thumbnail sketch. Did the bureaucracy separate itself from “any proletarian vestiges”? Did living standards not “plummet”? Did millions not die? Was the Communist Party not thereby “decimated” and transformed into a Stalinite cult? Was not the ‘second revolution’ a qualitative “counterrevolutionary break”? Ignoring the actual overall picture which must be established in our minds theoretically with constant reference to events, comrade Watson substitutes a socialist palliation.

He appears to be preaching from the book of denial. The questions I raise are central and demand an unambiguous answer. They reach to the essence of the Soviet Union as a form of non-proletarian socialism. Wishing them away by feebly labelling them “partial, one-sided and false” gets us nowhere in terms of our collective knowledge. If they are “partial, one-sided and false”, that needs to be shown and proven with hard facts. Sadly our comrade does his utmost to obscure these questions and almost everything else with philosophical evasion. He cannot tell us anything definite about the real history of the USSR and its laws and social contradictions. He deploys abstractions. The technique is old and thankfully discredited. Gerry Healy took it to a fine art. It is called turning Marxism on its head - what is a ruthless materialist and revolutionary criticism of everything that exists becomes an impenetrable, but hollow, apologia. To the ignorant, the credulous or the half educated it might appear that what comrade Watson is putting forward is the height of profundity. Actually, as we will show, it does not amount to a pile of beans. What the comrade writes is “partial, one-sided” and in the last analysis “false”.

Comrade Watson has made a stunning discovery. Ideology. Apparently the “majority of CPGB members”, including myself, have completely failed to take on board this question. We are seemingly to be numbered amongst those poor souls “mired in decades of mechanical epistemology” - that is, a mechanical theory of knowledge - whose logic inevitably “becomes circular and thus reified”. Our intentions in theorising about the USSR, may be or may not be “honest” in “intent”. Yet without taking account of the role of ideology - for example the “brief ascendancy of utopianism” that was unleashed with the launch of the first five-year plan - we can never “mediate or surmount the social whole”: ie, our theory can at best only be partial and one-sided.

The role of ideology as a material force is hardly a new discovery. No one is trying to avoid the “fact that everything which motivates men must pass through their brains” (F Engels MECW Vol 26, London 1989, p373). On the contrary. From the most primitive of times people have acted - and therefore in one way or another changed material reality, on the basis of the most ignorant superstitions and beliefs. In its own unique way the same applies to the Soviet Union’s leaders and its population. What is primary though? Materialists say that nature, objective reality and its contradictory laws, are in the last analysis primary. The laws that undermined Soviet society were more than a mere “blocked” mediation of the ideals of Marxism-Leninism. They exerted themselves as an external necessity as a series of apparent accidents - the product as waste, endemic shortage, worker sabotage, evaporation of the population surplus, production for its own sake, etc.

Let us do our best to set down comrade Watson’s case against Jack Conrad (I shall answer or comment upon areas of disagreement and agreement in passing but leave my substantive criticism to the end). There is a “paradox”, says comrade Watson. Throughout most of its existence the Soviet Union “remained trapped inside a system whereby social and political hegemony had become alienated from the broad ranks of the proletariat”. This is very anodyne stuff, not to say an alibi. Soviet workers lost far more than “social and political hegemony”. Why not tell the truth and say the Soviet workers as a whole were with the first five-year plan reduced to an exploited slave class and subjected to a ruthless political repression which atomised them to a degree almost unparalleled in history? It is certainly beyond doubt that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union bureaucracy “continued to exercise control in the name of Marxism-Leninism”. But for what purpose and in whose interests?

Comrade Watson places great, if not primary, emphasis, on this ideology. We have already mentioned the undeniable and well documented “brief ascendancy of utopianism” that accompanied the onset of the first five-year plan. The comrade quotes the historian, Sheila Fitzpatrick, vis-à-vis the role of the “iconoclastic and belligerent youth movement” which was “instinctively hostile to most existing authorities and institutions” (S Fitzpatrick The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 Oxford 1982, p130). Frankly, he could have quoted Jack Conrad to the same effect. “The first five-year plan was launched on a short, though genuine, wave of popular enthusiasm among urban workers, especially the young” ..., etc, etc (J Conrad ‘Genesis of bureaucratic socialism’,part two Weekly Worker January 9 1997).

Armed with his Fitzpatrick quote, comrade Watson confidently takes his sling-shot at Jack Conrad. I am no Goliath. He is no David. Apparently the use of what passed for Marxism-Leninism by the bureaucracy, the “iconoclastic and belligerent youth movement”, etc, “represents” for Jack Conrad “an enigma, [a paradox? - JC] or at best an empty formulation”. My supposed “starting point” is the “Soviet product and its essentially alienated circuit through society”. It therefore “seems methodologically acceptable” for Jack Conrad to “abstract this social content from its ideological form”: ie, “a fundamental precondition for its materialisation into the Soviet Union”. “Conrad’s dualist beginnings stand exposed,” announces a triumphal comrade Watson, “as the foundation for a partial, one-sided and false approximation of the USSR and its 20th century dynamic.”

Jack Conrad has not been felled. He remains standing. The pebble was not even on target. I do not in the least deny the importance or the contradictory and evolving nature of ideology in the USSR. As indicated above, in human society the actors are all endowed with consciousness. Nothing happens without some intention, without some desired aim. People make history. Thus history is also a question of what individuals desire. There are, however, countless motives - naked ambition, survival, hatred, ideological enthusiasm, political mistrust, sex, caprice, etc. Individual wills are therefore a force active in history ... yet in terms of “total result” they constitute, argued Engels, something of “only secondary importance”, because they come into conflict with each other and thus tend to be subsumed (F Engels MECW Vol 26, London 1989, p388). Ends become contradictory and result in their unintended and undesired opposites. On the surface things appear totally chaotic, but events are actually governed by hidden laws that can be discovered. These determining laws find themselves variously reflected in the minds of the historical actors as motives.

The task is to investigate the underlying laws which - consciously or most often unconsciously - lie behind the motives of historic actors. The answer cannot be found in the head of a Stalin or a Gorbachev. Nor the party-state. Nor is the answer to be found in the ideologies which momentarily set in motion whole classes and nations. We must discover what fundamentally motivates leaders, parties, states and peoples. In the last analysis Marxism declares that what determines such active factors in history is the “development of the productive forces and relations of exchange” (F Engels MECW Vol 26, London 1989, p391). We must look beneath transient ideologies to lasting results. Everything which sets people in motion must pass through their minds. But what form it takes in the mind depends very much upon objective circumstances, the role of which must be derived from the facts, from history and society itself, not abstract interconnections sprung from the brain. Marxism put an end to the old speculative philosophy in the realm of history. Reviving it is as unnecessary as it is impossible.

If comrade Watson has evidence that I dismiss the cause and effect of ideology he would surely locate some suitably representative statement - as opposed to this or that phrase plucked out of context - and bring it forth as damning evidence. He cannot find any such thing. Neither in my short review of The fate of the Russian Revolution. Nor in my 30,000-word ‘Genesis of bureaucratic socialism’ supplements published in our press over the weeks December 19 1996, January 9 1997, February 12 1997 (itself constituting the seventh draft chapter of volume one in what is envisaged to be a six-volume study). So he is reduced to fabrication and unfounded assertion … a rather unrewarding and sad method of polemic.

Having complained about comrade Watson’s lack of hard evidence as prosecutor, let me present in my defence the three concluding paragraphs from the first part of the ‘Genesis of bureaucratic socialism’:

“Though still within the vestigial framework of a workers’ state the bureaucracy could now [in the 1920s - JC] govern for itself. Hence the state machine displayed a ‘relative independence’ unheard of under capitalism or any other classic western European mode of production, where the rulers rule, due to culture and wealth, despite maintaining a bureaucracy for the purposes of administration. With capitalist industry nationalised and the workers politically inert, the Soviet bureaucracy - ie, political power - could break free from its social base and Bonapart-istically balance between the workers and the NEP classes and strata. The Soviet labour bureaucracy thus came to be the ‘master of society’.

“To justify itself a mystifying ideology was needed. By definition that could not be genuine Marxism nor could it be pro-capitalist reformism. Soviet centrism was invented. It justified adaptation to Russia’s backwardness and legitimised the bureaucracy’s monopoly of power. Soviet centrism stood between reform and revolution in its own particular way; that made it centrism sui generis.

“Three features immediately distinguish it from Kautskyite ‘classic’ centrism. Firstly, it reflected extreme economic and social backwardness - hence lack of debate and a leadership cult, the crude and cavalier attitude towards truth. Secondly, it served a social stratum which gained its privileges to the detriment of socialism, yet at the same time owed those privileges to a socialist revolution - hence the contradictory ideology that denied the existence of an antagonistic bureaucracy and its privileges, and portrayed an imminent realisation of utopia. Thirdly, despite its ‘extreme poverty and even dishonesty’, it reflected and actively moulded, as Herbert Marcuse pointed out, ‘in various forms the realities of Soviet development’. This was because it was an ideology which both justified and served a caste, if not a class, that was running a world power - hence though sharing the unstable, transitory features of ‘classic’ centrism, it was in comparison far more durable and solid.”

Comrade Watson quotes and briefly discusses various propositions and insights advanced by Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams. Having done so, the gist of comrade Watson’s non-argument with me is that ideology can under certain circumstances become not only a material force through which people express their lived relations between themselves and their conditions of existence, but (in certain specific instances) a primary material force that must be situated within the complex of other forces, including those “abstracted” as ‘labour’ and ‘production’. Yes, in the Soviet Union official ideology “actively moulded” certain specific realities of development.

István Mészáros is called upon as the next - unlikely - witness against Jack Conrad and his “mechanical epistemology” (Mészáros maintains that the Soviet system was post-capitalist but not post-capital - it was, we both agree, exploitative). One of the reasons the bureaucracy could not fragment and atomise the labour-capital relation along the lines of the “capitalist labour process”, suggests Mészáros, was the negative power of Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the state in the Soviet Union. With its legitimising rhetoric of ‘building socialism’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the ‘leading role of the party’, “it had to exclude quite explicitly the possibility of capitalist restoration and the subjection of labour to the alienating fetishism of commodity” (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p668).

Again Jack Conrad can only but agree ... but with the qualification that what was previously a material force inevitably became unreal in the course of development, because it steadily lost connection with necessity and thus rationality. Engels, in discussing the close of Hegel’s philosophy, makes this generally applicable point:

“[A]ll that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality - peacefully, if the old has enough common sense to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly, if it resists this necessity. Thus the Hegelian proposition [that what is real is rational - JC] turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself” (F Engels MECW Vol 26, London 1990, p359).

The CPSU “proved”, states comrade Watson, to be “ultimately an unwieldy instrument for the realisation of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the totality of material social processes”. In fact “under the rule of the bureaucracy its ideology suffered an endless blocked mediation becoming ever more atrophied as the USSR neared extinction”. So although “Marxist theory bore its practical fruit with the leadership of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 revolution” as the Soviet Union and the CPSU “became subject to distinct bureaucratic distortions, this point of mediation became blocked”. Marxism-Leninism lived on, in the phrase of Georg Lukács, as an “abstract and utopian strain”. In other words, one could say, official Marxism-Leninism was unreal in the sense that in the course of its development reality proved it to be unnecessary (a material fact of some significance). In 1991 the Soviet state and its ideology was so unreal - that is to say, so drained of all necessity, so irrational - that it was effortlessly destroyed by the Yeltsinite counter-coup. Official Marxism-Leninism was the unreal and the peaceful, and democratic counterrevolution was the real. Here was the counterrevolution in the counterrevolution.

Yet for all that, insists comrade Watson, the CPSU “still represented a revolutionary movement and the USSR remained the world’s revolutionary centre until the bitter end of August 1991”. For Leninists, it should be stressed, the designation of a country as the “world revolutionary centre” has only the a tangential relationship to the ideology of this or that party. The world revolutionary centre is an “objective question based on uneven development” (J Conrad, ‘Genesis of bureaucratic socialism’, part one Weekly Worker December 19 1996). It is a category that refers to the country where the proletarian struggle has reached its highest stage. First located in Chartist Britain, the world revolutionary centre shifted to France and, after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, to Germany. In 1882 Marx and Engels rightly believed that Russia was destined to become the “vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe” (K Marx, F Engels MECW Vol 24, London 1989, p426).

What of the CPSU “still” representing “a revolutionary movement” to the “bitter end”? This strange, not to say metaphysical, claim is based not on any concrete theory of necessity or empirical evidence of what is and what is not revolutionary. It is crudely, and ham-fistedly, lifted from a reading of Lukács’s critique of the pre-1914 Second International under the centrist leadership of Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Kautsky. Though they theorised eloquently and penetratingly about the revolutionary nature of the epoch, they declined to organise the “concrete mediation of that theoretical insight: the revolutionary party”. On the basis of this correct observation Lukács is then cited: “The upshot was that for the proletariat these differences of opinion” - ie, the struggle against the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein et al - “simply remained differences of opinion within the workers’ movements that were nevertheless revolutionary movements” (G Lukács History and class consciousness Cambridge Mass 1975, p302). Comrade Watson has his ‘proof’.

There is no doubt that militant German workers in the Social Democratic Party were convinced that their movement was the very model of a revolutionary party ... but comrade Watson is wrong to equate or conflate what is subjective with what is objective. That would make the Labour Party of Michael Foot a vehicle for socialism and World War II a crusade against fascism. Millions believed these ideological claims. It is foolish in the extreme to dismiss what people think as irrelevant - not least if they proceed to act on that basis. However, the task of a science of society is to lay bare what is real in terms of underlying laws and categories that exist outside the consciousness of people, and yet shapes, determines and drives that consciousness.

From the time of Stalin onwards the CPSU should be designated as a counterrevolutionary party, albeit of a special type. What was irrational predicates its opposite. In 1924 the bureaucracy enshrined as official doctrine the self-defeating notion of ‘socialism in one country’: ie, national socialism. Was this not a utopian attempt reminiscent of the 19th century communist experiments in America but on the grand scale? Was it not a fundamental break with genuine Marxism-Leninism? Is not scientific socialism necessarily internationalist to its core?

Four years later the bureaucracy had become its opposite. The Stalinite bureaucracy substituted for the bourgeoisie and objectively constituted itself a collective entity of exploiters whose aim was to maximise the surplus product pumped out of the direct producers. It thereby forfeited any historical right to exist. With the first five-year plan the bureaucracy terroristically crushed the workers and peasantry - “the revolutionary proletariat of Europe’s first self-proclaimed workers’ and peasants’ state were turned into Europe’s most quiescent working class” (S Kotkin Magnetic mountain Berkeley 1995, p198). The CPSU “tried to impose in a most authoritarian form - including imprisonment and mass labour camps - the most severe labour discipline, holding workers criminally responsible as individuals for their failure to conform to the norm laid down for them” (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p668). The workers who exercised individual negative control over the productive process were the actual ‘enemy within’, mythologised by the bureaucracy’s ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ideology as the Trotskyite ‘enemy without’.

Gorbachev did earnestly proclaim perestroika on countless party platforms as the salvation of “socialist assemblage” in the USSR. Needless to say, there existed a profound bifurcation between his rationalisation and the actual goal which was to save the USSR as a great power. This was to be done by switching from political to economic methods of surplus extraction through the introduction of the market mechanism - crucially through disciplining the workers by establishing “a fully effective labour market” (ibid p669). Evidently, as proven by the post-1991 ideological spectrum, there were very few people in the USSR that actually believed official ideology. It had become a non-ideology (even in 1941 Stalin turned to the pre-revolutionary ideology of ‘mother Russia’ in order to mobilise the masses against the invading Germans, not proletarian internationalism or socialism).

The Yeltsin counter-coup exposed what was real by ushering in a form of democracy where people at least feel relatively safe in expressing outwardly what they think inwardly. No significant ‘communist’ grouping or faction in today’s Russia adheres to a Krushchevite, Brezhnevite or Andropovite ideology. True, showing what existed residually under the seamless surface of unanimity, there are Stalinites. But even those who nostalgically carry portraits of Stalin in Red Square advocate an eclectic red-brown mix of anti-western nationalism, anti-semitism and populism. Not even Nina Andreyeva’s All-Union Bolsheviks propound a pristine Stalin Stalinism. Was the bifurcation that existed in the late 1980s a novel feature? Surely as a social phenomenon it owes its origins to the terror system under Stalin where workers, not least those in the CPSU, learnt to speak ‘Bolshevik’ in public, “only to express their anger and frustration” over the “privacy of the kitchen table” (S Kotkin Magnetic mountain Berkeley 1995, p236). Terror and conformity with the general secretary’s latest encyclical also negatively moulded the bureaucracy - as a ruling stratum it too was unable to outwardly express counterposed self-interests or freely organise around them. Under Stalin’s monocracy the bureaucracy existed merely as a shadow class.

As with all ideologies - christianity, islam, nationalism, democracy, anarchism - official Soviet ‘Marxism-Leninism’ could be laid hold of by all manner of different class and social strata. Workers in the Soviet Union under certain particularly favourable circumstances turned it against their managers - during the great purges it was an excellent way for slaves to exact vengeance. Abroad ‘third world’ intellectuals adapted Soviet ‘Marxism-Leninism’ for their own purposes and wielded it splendidly to make peasant-based national revolutions - China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Western communist parties used it prosaically to justify and map out reformist, parliamentary roads to national socialism. In Africa and the Middle East army putschists proclaimed themselves Marxist-Leninist in the future hope of emulating Stalin’s imagined path to industrialisation and more immediately in order to secure Soviet economic and military aid. The point is, of course, that whatever the formal rationalisations and inner beliefs of these historical actors, they did not propagate nor practise Marxism-Leninism in any genuine sense. Theirs was a bastard or pidgin Marxism that might have embalmed or robbed phrases appearing in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin - eg, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Nevertheless in terms of content what we had before us was a reversion to the pre-Marxist utopianism and elitism preached by the likes of Proudhon, Blanqui, Lassalle and Bakunin and thus different ways of dominating the working class.

Marxism is real not because of the formal adherence of this or that big party or state (German social democracy abandoned its ‘Marxism’ in the 1950s; China still formally holds to it). Marxism is, and will become real, because it is scientific: ie, rational, true, dynamic and revolutionary. Marxism recognises and proclaims in theory and practice the international self-liberation of the proletariat as a historical necessity. “Marx was before all else a revolutionist,” said a mourning Engels in his celebrated graveside speech.

“His real mission in life was to contribute ... to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success that few could rival” (F Engels MECW Vol 26 London 1989, p468).

Philosophical phrases are no substitute for scientific knowledge. To describe the conservative, flabby and oppressive CPSU as “revolutionary” to the “bitter end” is to shamefully kowtow before failure, KGB terror, censorship and a systematic history of lies. Revolution did not lurk behind its empty promises of communism and living dead leaders. Presumably then comrade Watson would also call for the defence of the August 1991 State Emergency Committee coup. Our trend did no such thing at the “bitter end”. Instead we argued for a “real political revolution” from below against the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy as a whole, and therefore opposed Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the State Emergency Committee. The CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee accurately warned that “the State Emergency Committee takeover could mean that the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, while delayed, will at the end of the day be facilitated” ... the mass are thrown into the arms of counterrevolution (J Conrad From October to August London 1992, p250).

So Jack Conrad does not consider the paradox of official protestations of fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and the alienation of workers under the Soviet Union system as something which is “at best, of secondary importance, or, at worst, a reactionary diversion”. We are - yes - “duty-bound to consider the manner in which ... developments were rationalised in the Soviet Union”. The verifiable and tragic fact that millions of workers throughout the world, including in Russia, still consider the Soviet Union post-1928 an example of ‘living socialism’, and therefore reject socialism in horror and disgust, is of cardinal importance. Not though our comrade Watson. His is not a fully Marxist criticism of the Soviet Union and Stalin, but a defence ... his logic is indeed circular and alienated. What begins as criticism from the left returns from the right as apologia.

The “methodological outline” drawn by comrade Watson is in his own words specifically designed to correct “one-sided and at times hysterical denunciations of the USSR and JV Stalin”. Such unattributed and unspecified “worrying formulations” - presumably statements to the effect that Soviet workers were exploited and politically subject to terrorism - are, he informs readers of the Weekly Worker, the “unambiguous product of tawdry theoretical beginnings, whereby dialectical reticence appears as the only unifying feature”. The positions defended by the majority of CPGB members are for our comrade “tortured narratives” and a “hideous symphony of one-sided truisms”, where “radical phraseology becomes the substitute for serious revolutionary theory”.

In his final peroration comrade Watson issues a battle cry: “It is only through the conscious application of the dialectic that the Communist Party of Great Britain can counter this revisionist ulcer.” It ought to be said that such shrill language could be mistaken for a declaration of civil war. But, as it comes from a comrade who has been a CPGB member for barely a few months, we surely have nothing more than an eagerness to enter debate and arrive at clarity. Anyway, let me reiterate, not least for the benefit of new readers - the agreed position of those organised under the banner of the Provisional Central Committee is that our project of reforging the CPGB is designed to rally all partisans of the working class. Necessarily that will involve continuous political struggle. But it equally involves a toleration of different shades and trends among communists, not least theoretical differences over the USSR. We positively want to win Trotskyites, Cliffites and advocates of the Soviet Union as a form of bureaucratic collectivism to CPGB membership.

What of Jack Conrad’s method? Everything must be studied - history, ideas, theories. But in terms of presentation and investigation it is true that Jack Conrad does start with the alienated Soviet product and its interconnected and contradictory movement through society and into new, higher and ever more impossible forms. These are not “dualist beginnings”. On the contrary I consciously, openly and unashamedly follow the logic and method of presentation employed by Marx in Capital - which has a universal applicability.

Marx began with the commodity and a thorough analysis of value. He concentrated on this single relation and to begin with intentionally ignored other higher forms of the capital relationship, such as wages, profits, exploitation, extended reproduction, banking, interest, international trade, the state, ideology, etc. The analysis yields the whole, as a result of testing and developing the elementary category through its actual manifested historical emergence and movement to more complex categories and forms ... these results are then summed up by means of dialectical thinking. Hence the “dialectic of concepts is merely the conscious reflection of the dialectical motion of the real world” (F Engels MECW Vol 26 London 1989, p383).

“Here, as everywhere else, the concrete universal concept registers a real elementary form of the existence of the entire system rather than an empty abstraction” (EV Ilyenkov The dialectics of the abstract and concrete in Marx’s Capital Moscow 1982, p225). More, this method of analysing the mode of existence of the “elementary protean body” is, states Ilyenkov, the “only way of obtaining a real definition and of revealing the essence of the matter” (ibid p224). It is not therefore an arbitrary decision to start with the product, but a logical necessity. Those who proclaim the need for a general theory but refuse to adopt such a Marxist approach are the ones doomed to one-sidedness. Instead of moving from social reality to theory, the likes of comrade Watson attempt to idealistically derive social reality from theory. The world constitutes a whole. But in the last analysis ideas are not and cannot be primary.

The real point of departure is not the idea, not the ideology of what should be: rather the actual state of things as they are.