29.10.1998
Social democratic platitudes
Who could have foretold it? Less than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of ‘official communism’, Marx is ‘back in fashion’ - at least if you believe what you read in The Guardian. Provocatively asking the question, “Was Marx right after all?”, the paper’s G2 section superimposes on a picture of Marx the announcement that “He’s back” (October 20).
In the minds of those of us who never thought that Marx had ‘gone away’ in the first place and who have never doubted the truth (and hence the power) of his ideas, this apparent ‘rehabilitation’ is of great interest. Serious discussion of Marxism is to be welcomed, but when The Guardian, the bastion of bourgeois liberalism, sounds so enthusiastic about the idea, deep suspicions are aroused. Sadly, they are fully justified. What we are dealing with here is not a serious engagement with Marx’s thought, but a characteristic piece of shallow 1990s marketing hype masquerading as the intellectual heights. Marx, or rather his iconic form, is being used as a trendy designer label to promote and lend credibility to a very inferior product - in this case, the warmed-up leftovers from the last supper of old Labour social democracy.
The guilty party responsible for this farrago of nonsense is the late and unlamented journal Marxism Today, which last week came back from the grave with a special issue devoted to a sententious critique of “the Blair project”. Thanks to a meticulously orchestrated PR campaign, the publication of this one-off issue became something of a media event and, judging by the difficulties experienced by this writer in laying his hands on a copy, the venture must, commercially at least, have been a conspicuous success.
Before we examine this special issue in more detail, let us recall a few facts about the history of Marxism Today. Having been for many years a theoretical journal of the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain, in the 1980s it was effectively taken over by what was then the increasingly powerful and dominant Eurocommunist wing. Throughout this period and until its demise in December 1991, Marxism Today was edited by Martin Jacques, who was also the prime mover behind this month’s special issue. Along with the likes of the ‘official’ Party’s last and decidedly least general secretary, the long since forgotten Nina Temple, Jacques was a renegade from ‘official communism’ and a brazen liquidator. He took all the ‘official’ opportunist crap to its logical conclusions.
Significantly, the ‘final’ issue of Marxism Today was emblazoned with the words “The end” on its cover. However much Jacques may now protest that this merely denoted the fact that “we had done what we could” and that it “was time to move on”, the fact is that then his editorship of the journal concluded with the formal repudiation of Marxism and a wholesale capitulation to bourgeois ideology. In short, Jacques openly and unashamedly went over to the class enemy, and it is no coincidence that he has since made a good living out of mediocre political punditry by marketing himself adroitly as a ‘leftwing’ intellectual.
By the end of its life the title Marxism Today was a glaring misnomer - there was nothing remotely Marxist in its philistine and opportunistic promotion of Labourite politics. The same is true for last week’s pitiably tame ‘critique’ of Blair’s “Thatcherism in trousers”. The whole issue rests on two fundamental propositions: one of them self-evidently true, the other plainly false. The true proposition is that capitalism is currently in the throes of a global financial crisis; the false, that “the age of neo-liberalism is over”.
As regards the first, we cannot but agree:
“After hubris comes Nemesis. What price now the facile triumphalism of 1991 - the empty boasting about the victory of capitalism in economics and of bourgeois democracy in politics; the ignorant crowing of bourgeois intellectuals about the end of history? The period of reaction through which we are living has entered a new phase, in which all the comforting ‘certainties’ that bourgeois ideology derived from the collapse of the USSR are now exposed as mere will-o’-the-wisps” (Weekly Worker October 15).
There is common ground here between ourselves and Marxism Today. Indeed, we would go further and suggest that the capitalist system is currently pregnant not only with acute contradictions, but with potential devastation. In a characteristically bilious and disingenuous attack, The Economist accuses Marxism Today, and by implication ourselves, of indulging in“Schadenfreude”(October 24). But as we and the comfortable Economist writers know perfectly well, it will not be the capitalists but, as always, the working class who will end up paying the price for the present crisis.
However devastating the crisis may turn out to be, on the basis of present evidence it is theoretically unjustifiable - in fact perversely wrong-headed - to suggest, as does Marxism Today, that it marks the end of the road for “neo-liberal, free market fundamentalism”. Throughout the developed world and beyond, leaving aside local nuances, “neo-liberal” capitalism remains the dominant ideology, and this situation seems unlikely to change in the immediate future. In the subtext of the whole Marxism Today comeback issue one detects an excitement and anticipation curiously reminiscent in some ways of the Trotskyite left - except that, whereas these comrades exhibit an infantile conviction that the collapse of capitalism is imminent and that it will ‘inevitably’ usher in a proletarian revolution, the contributors to Marxism Today naively believe that the Blair government simply must ‘see reason’ and put things to rights by embracing the social democratic nostrums of yesteryear. Both are equally wrong. Even if confidence in free market economics were not merely shaken but totally destroyed, capital would seek to renew itself at our expense, as it has done before. Workers too do not spontaneously look to socialist revolution in such circumstances. In the short term we must face the fact that the most likely prospect is neither revolution nor liberal reform, but a retreat to the stringent authoritarianism that is already implicit in Blair’s social policy.
Perhaps the best way of coming to grips with the Marxism Today special issue is to look at its centrepiece - an article by the venerable historian Eric Hobsbawm, grotesquely described by one of The Guardian’s benighted sub-editors as “Britain’s foremost Marxist thinker”.
If that statement were true, then our plight would indeed be serious. Hobsbawm is undoubtedly learned in Marx’s thought and knows a great deal about him, but if that is the criterion, then Pope John Paul II must also be regarded as a Marxist.
To be a Marxist in any meaningful sense of the term means not only to be familiar with the theory of Marxism, but to embrace Marx’s vision - to be, like Marx himself, a partisan of the working class and of proletarian revolution. In this, Hobsbawm abysmally fails the test.
For example, to justify his glib assertion that “in 1998 Karl Marx came back”, he cites the fact that the 150th anniversary of the Communist manifesto “produced ... to everyone’s surprise ... an enormous echo in the press”. Perhaps it did, but so what?
Neither “the press” nor Hobsbawm himself care to reiterate the central message of the Communist manifesto, that only a proletarian revolution can emancipate the working class, and with it humanity as a whole, from the slavery and oppression inherent in capitalism. Instead of stating this fact, as any real Marxist must, Hobsbawm treats us to the trite observation that “what this man wrote 150 years ago about the nature and tendencies of global capitalism rings amazingly true today!” Quite so. Mr Hobsbawm’s Marx is the ‘prophet of globalisation’ and nothing more. He is a mere peg on which to hang a few social democratic platitudes dressed up as theory.
Both in terms of his economics and his social policy, Hobsbawm seems to have remembered everything, but learned nothing at all. Having acknowledged the somewhat obvious fact that “the global economy is indeed here to stay”, he proceeds to indulge in what has become a favourite daydream of our present-day bourgeois liberal reformists: namely the notion that the operations of globalised finance capital can be regulated by “non-market institutions”, and that
“at the very least they require the equivalent of a system of law with sanctions to guarantee the performance of contracts and, more to the point, outside regulation - very notably of financial markets”.
Mr Hobsbawm may be 81 - but he really ought to try and get out more. Let him go down to the City and talk to dealers in the equity and currency markets. They will soon convince him that globalised finance capital has produced conditions that are inherently unstable and beyond any effective control, least of all by the “political power and policies” in which, like all rational liberal intellectuals, he appears to place so much faith.
As Hobsbawm sees it, therefore, on the economic level “the problem” is “how we control and regulate the operations of a capitalist market” - scarcely the way in which a real socialist, let alone a Marxist, would envisage “the problem” raised by the crisis of capitalism. With touching naivety, he believes that “coordinated action by several governments” can do the trick, especially since “most countries of what has become the European Union are under governments of the centre-left, elected by voters sceptical of free market fundamentalism”. So there you have it: all we need to solve the crisis of capitalism is for Blair, Jospin, Schröder et al to get their heads together and come up with some “policies” with which to “regulate” the markets. Even by the standards of social democratic reformism this really is the most utter banality.
Hobsbawm’s approach to social policy is no better. Here the “problem” is “how to distribute the enormous wealth generated and accumulated by our society to its inhabitants”. The Blair government should remember that “its major objective is not national wealth, but welfare and social fairness”. Here speaks a real liberal - where would they be without the concept of “fairness”? But amazingly, where welfare is concerned, Hobsbawm even lets his liberal mask slip a little and mentions his agreement with the former Labour social security minister, Frank Field, that “we must break with a system that generates welfare dependency among people of working age and ... that it [the welfare system] can no longer be ... purely a system of state transfers”. Here Mr Hobsbawm seems to be giving the nod to Blair’s oft-stated desire to crack down on benefits claimants and institute a radical “reform” (ie, dismantling) of public sector welfare provision - a strange position for a liberal, let alone a “Marxist” to take - but it is symptomatic of the more deep-rooted confusion that underlies the whole essay.
At best, Hobsbawm’s views can be seen as similar to those which Marx attributed to the democratic petty bourgeoisie: they
“strive for a change in social conditions by means of which existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them ... they hope to bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms and to break their revolutionary potency by making their position tolerable for the moment ... For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property, but only its annihilation; not the smoothing over of class antagonisms, but the abolition of classes; not the improvement of existing society, but the foundation of a new one” (K Marx, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, March 1850).
Nowhere in Mr Hobsbawm’s essay will you find a single reference to the class nature of capitalist society or to the class struggle, let alone a call for the “annihilation” of private property. Heaven forbid. What Mr Hobsbawm, like all Labourite reformists, would like to see is a capitalist market that is better “regulated” and a capitalist society that distributes wealth more “fairly” - and these are the views which The Guardian attributes to “Britain’s foremost Marxist thinker”.
It should be obvious that this Marxism Today special was not a serious intellectual enterprise, but little more than a complacent, inward-looking piece of reformist gimmickry dressed up as radicalism: an attempt to create something of a stir in the small world of the liberal intelligentsia and perhaps a trial run at reconstituting a ‘leftwing’, supposedly “Marxist” alternative to Blairism that could serve as a rallying point for the forces around the old Labour left.
Whatever its purpose, this venture has at least reminded us of one important fact - that the ideologists of reformism in the labour movement are quite capable of exploiting a ‘safe’, emasculated Marx to give credence and a frisson of excitement to their tired old social democratic platitudes.
Nevertheless, reviving Marx as a safe liberal may not turn out to be so clever after all. The renewed interest provoked by this marketing exercise will no doubt lead some to seek out his real ideas. Communists must make full use of any opportunities the situation provides.
Michael Malkin