28.03.2013
Learning and struggle: Stalinism, sectarianism and Marxist education
There exists a dialectical relationship between deepening Marxist understanding and the fight for a Marxist party, argues Paul B Smith
What is the future of Marxist education? In order to answer this question I shall discuss five topics: firstly, the nature of Marxism; secondly, the history of Marxist education in Britain; thirdly, the barriers that prevent a movement for Marxist education developing; fourthly, the role that such a movement could play in bringing into being a Marxist party or parties; and finally whether Marxist education will take place within or outside schools, colleges and universities.
Marxism as doctrine
Marxism is the knowledge workers need in order to overthrow capitalism worldwide and bring into being a socialist or a communist society. In other words, Marxists attempt to provide the theory for the working class to abolish itself as a class and - in the process of emancipating itself - of liberating the whole of humanity. Marxism is the most developed form of socialist theory and is therefore a necessary ingredient of class-consciousness.
Workers want to explain the present development of the capitalist economy in order to create a socialist alternative. They will continue to want to do this as they take and hold on to power. Marxism gives workers the intellectual and political confidence to stop a military or bureaucratic elite taking control of the surplus during a transition to socialism.
Marxists place political economy at the centre of socialist theory. They aspire to use a scientific method of inquiry. This is a method of acquiring knowledge - of using it to understand the process of change and of describing how change occurs. Marx asserted that political economy aimed to discover the laws of motion of modern society.1 These laws govern the origin, development, maturation, decline and replacement of capitalism. A law is the process of movement of the poles of a contradiction. Marxists aspire to identify these laws.
Contradictions are the source of movement and change, and - like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky - Marxists are interested in understanding the relationship between the class struggle and changes in the categories of political economy. This method of understanding and describing the process of change is what is known as dialectics.
Another aspect of dialectical method concerns that of acquiring knowledge. The categories within which change is conceived are themselves subject to birth, maturation, decline and replacement. Abstraction is the means by which Marxists identify the categories crucial to political economy.
This feature of Marx’s method requires that - as the world changes - Marxists retheorise it. They do this by engaging in a process of concept formation in the hope of arriving at categories adequate to the retheorisation of the new reality.2 This may mean devising new categories, bringing formerly marginal ones to the centre, and rejigging others.
For example, Hilferding and Lenin brought finance capital to the centre. Trotsky did the same with long waves, decline and Stalinism. These developments of Marxism suggest new areas of empirical investigation for workers and intellectuals to follow.
Stalinism tried to destroy Marxism and turn it into the nationalist ideology of a bureaucratic elite. As a result, the most crucial categories Marxists are now keen to foreground are the surplus product, its extraction from labour and the interaction of their changing forms.3 For example, the form of the surplus product has changed historically. In pre-capitalist societies, it was extracted through force and the personal dependency of slaves and serfs on their masters and lords. In a capitalist society it is extracted as capital through the commodification of labour-power and dependency of workers on wages and money.
Stalin attempted to write the surplus product out of history and replace it with the juridical category of ownership. He realised that the conception of a social group living off a surplus product extracted from the labour of Soviet workers was revolutionary.4
Within the former USSR the surplus product did not take the value form as money or capital. Labour-power was not a commodity. Abstract labour did not exist; therefore there was no value or surplus value. Instead, there was an attempt to extract a surplus through enforced political and bureaucratic atomisation. This reduced workers to semi-slaves dependent upon the system. Moreover, the Soviet form contributed to a declining capitalism and a malfunctioning of the law of value worldwide.
Trotsky was especially keen that workers grasp the Marxist method of dialectics and abstraction. He wrote: “Give the worker a method and with it he [sic] will find knowledge on a bookshelf.”5 In a letter he wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1909, he criticised the curriculum of the proposed three to four-month school for Russian Social Democratic Labour Party activists on the Isle of Capri. He stated it would be a mistake to try to cram the maximum amount of socialist knowledge into the heads of workers within the time available. Rather, the school should try to redress the advantages intellectuals have over workers by giving them a grasp of Marx’s method.
Political economy is the scientific application of this method. Trotsky therefore proposed putting Capital at the head of the school’s syllabus. He thought the study of Capital should take up at least a third of the time allocated for teaching and learning at the school - if not more - and that the focus should be on the chapters of volume 1 “most essential for the understanding of the whole”.6
Marxist education and British history
Up until the 1920s there was a small but lively movement for Marxist education in Britain. This was pioneered by members of the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party. It was taken forward by the Plebs League and the Labour College movement. Plebs League members prioritised the teaching of political economy, history and evolution. Their concept of education was political. They saw Marxist education as a means of developing class-consciousness with the overall aim of assisting the process of destroying wage-slavery and winning the struggle for workers’ power.
The heyday of Marxist education in Britain coincided with the last years of World War I and the immediate post-war period. The decline of Marxist education in Britain began with the rise of Stalinism in 1924 and the effect Stalinism had on Labourism in the late 1920s and 1930s. Both Stalinism and Labourism stressed the training of activists, as opposed to Marxist education.
Up until Lenin’s death in 1924, Lenin was regarded by British Marxists as having merely restored the Marxism of Marx from the impurities of the Second International. By 1925, however, CPGB members were instructed that Lenin was someone who had established a new body of revolutionary doctrine and a new type of party.7 Stalin introduced a new orthodoxy. This was that socialism could be built in one country.
‘Socialism in one country’ was an incoherent and anti-Marxist doctrine. In order to enforce it, Stalin had to deny the essence of Marxism. This was the dialectical method applied to political economy. Stalin redefined Marxism as the unity of theory and practice. Stalin based this unity on two separate doctrines: historical and dialectical materialism (Histmat and Diamat). This was a faith-like catechism. It meant that every aspect of policy and theory became subordinate to the needs and interests of the Soviet state. It meant the death of Marxism as a science.
This death was reflected in the CPGB’s training of revolutionaries. Training included learning standard passages from Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Stalin off by heart. Members were then subject to a compulsory test of their knowledge. They were not encouraged to reflect critically on material learnt by rote and were therefore unable to compare the interpretation they were trained to adopt with any other.8
Labourism also contributed to the decline of Marxist education in Britain. The dependence of labour colleges on trade union funding subjected them to pressure to provide courses tailored to training for shop stewards and officials on negotiation and trade union management. The Plebs League was absorbed by the National Council of Labour Colleges in 1927. This marked the end of Marxist influence on trade unionists in Britain.
What was the experience of Marxist education in Britain after the 1920s? It is a remarkable achievement that Marxism survived in any form at all.9 In order to ride the low ebb of world revolution during the last world war and the cold war, classical Marxism was frozen into a rigid doctrine.10 Survival came at a cost. Marxism as a science played second fiddle to the group line. In order to keep going in a hostile environment, Marxists accommodated their opposition to Stalinism to the Stalinist form of party organisation itself.
The Stalinist party imposed a line on its membership. This gave the bureaucratic elite the freedom to zigzag, manoeuvre and combine in the interests of the Soviet state.11 Other characteristics of the Stalinist form of party organisation included minimal control from below, the maximum possibility for pretence and falsification, minimal political literacy, a debased form of inner-party education and a minimum of scientific thought. Once it was decided upon, the elite used the line as a yardstick for disciplinary and policing purposes.
Marxists adopted a similar form of organisation to the Stalinists in order that their lines on the former Soviet Union survived. These lines included degenerate and deformed workers’ statism, state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism. In order that organised opposition to Stalinism endured, Marxists resorted to policing each other and disciplining individuals that deviated from or challenged the line.
Internal education was therefore debased. Education was identified with instruction on the profile of the group, learning the line, objections to it and a handful of other responses. Marxists promoted a retarded form of theory derived in an ossified form from Trotsky and Lenin. They used theory conservatively in order to resist a hostile external world and to keep the group intact.
Barriers to Marxist education
I maintain that the legacy of Stalinism remains the most important barrier to the emergence of class-consciousness in the present. One of the greatest achievements Stalinism made in relation to the survival of capitalism was the almost complete undermining of Marxism.12
Workers want to be able to distinguish between the market, bureaucratic controls and socialist planning. This is part of the process of taking and holding onto power. However, Stalinist traits still operate to prevent Marxists from educating themselves in the method of acquiring the knowledge they need. The Soviet Union has long gone, but the intellectual, political and moral damage it inflicted on Marxism remains.
Some of the effects that Stalinism has had in its attempt to destroy Marxism include sacrificing millions of people for the nationalist goal of socialism in one country. This killed hundreds of thousands of Marxists. Stalinism presented socialism as something different from communism. It associated socialism with dictatorship and economic failure. It made communism appear an unrealisable utopia.13
Stalinism has promoted national (and women’s, gay and black) liberation over class liberation. Stalinists tried to suppress any interpretation of Marxism that was not their own. They argued for workerism and idealised proletarian alienation. They divided workers by rejecting the idea that unproductive or white collar workers were part of the working class. They presented class as a juridical relation of ownership. They abandoned the dialectical method for a structural analysis of the interrelationship between base and superstructure and forces and relations of production.
Stalinism pretended to be Marxism for so long that Marxists have internalised its incoherence, irrationality and exclusion of difference of opinion. Internalisation of Stalinist patterns of behaviour and thought dictate that the programme or line of one’s own group should dominate every new political formation to the exclusion of all others. This makes it difficult for Marxists to distinguish between an ally and an enemy. Marxists either find it hard to perceive where alliance is possible and where it is not, or make alliances with individuals and groups fearful of impassioned differences of opinion.
One of the ways Stalinism tried to kill off Marxism was through the training of revolutionaries. Stalinism reduced Marxist education to the acquisition of a faith-like dogma and the recitation of sacred texts. The emphasis was on training hyperactive automatons preoccupied with campaigns, paper-selling and branch activity. Training included becoming experts on the group’s line and this went hand in glove with untheoretical passivity and ignorance. Marxists adopted and adapted to this type of training in order to survive.
The Stalinised method of training revolutionaries can be contrasted with that offered at the RSDLP’s 1909 Capri school. As well as the recommendation that at least a third of the sessions be on the most theoretical chapters of Capital Trotsky called for another third to be focused on training in propaganda, agitation and writing.
Training in writing, public speaking, media and journalism are still skills required of class-conscious workers today. Nevertheless, such training presupposes the primary task of an education in Marxism. Marxists need to be thoroughly anti-Stalinist - not just in name but in substance. Newer generations of Marxists will hopefully eradicate the irrational influence Stalinism has had on Marxism.
Marxist education and Marxist parties
One of Trotsky’s criticisms of Capri was that “the school must be linked with the politics of the party: in other words, it must be one of the means for building the party”.14 The party had already split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and Trotsky asked whether the school’s organisers had a line on this.
An obvious difference between the state of Marxism now and then is that there is no Marxist party or parties in existence today with a mass working class membership. Presently there are numerous small, nominally Marxist groups - the majority of which are in the process of disintegrating. Few of these groups appear capable of putting their resources at the disposal of a new working class party.
A crucial question today is therefore whether a movement for Marxist education can be linked to a campaign for a Marxist party. Is a political priority building a consensus on the need for Marxist education or for a Marxist party? Or are both simultaneous priorities? In other words, will Marxist education be one of the means by which a Marxist party is brought into being?
Trotsky warned that pupils returning to Russia without having addressed the split could act to strengthen the “walls of blind mistrust” that existed between factions of the party. The school, he argued, would then turn out not to be an element in the formation of a new party, but an aspect of the disintegration of the old one.
The analogy here is that many Marxists today do not ask whether the absence of a Marxist party might be the result of an adaptation to Stalinism. Most Marxists currently explain the “walls of mistrust” between the various groups and individuals of the left today as the result of sectarian behaviour. Every group apart from one’s own is sectarian. There is a debate on sectarianism, but it is unconnected to the persistence of the influence of Stalinism. Moreover, education is not seen as a means of resolving the problem.
Those who think that Marxist education has an integrative potential are likely to argue that a Marxist culture can only come into being through an honest and comprehensive acknowledgement of the damaging effect of Stalinism. Without this, there is no way of bypassing “the walls of mistrust” between groups. The leading members of existing groups may continue to advocate top-down forms of organisational unity and make temporary alliances with their counterparts. However, when such alliances break down, mistrust and demoralisation is deepened.
Integration and a move towards a new Marxist party are therefore likely to come about through a molecular movement forcing change from below. This entails one-to-one as well as collective debate and discussion of Marxism. It will include the initiative of groups that have either begun the process of housecleaning or are beginning to see the need to start doing so.
A group’s commitment to education is one of the criteria individuals can use to assess whether it is in the process of abandoning quasi-Stalinist traits and becoming Marxist in nature, not just in name. Marxists have to radically transform the internal education of their groups. Training members exclusively in transmitting the profile and line of the group has to be replaced by a scientific orientation with political economy at its heart.
A Marxist party will need lines on many different issues, but the question remains on how lines are derived. Are they decisions of an elite which uses them to police members? Or are they theses that stand or fall on their merits within a genuine debate? If they are the latter, does the quality of the debate depend on members having a deep or a superficial knowledge of Marxism? Clearly, the deeper the understanding of the theoretical assumptions informing the theses, the higher the quality of the debate will be. The line will reflect the views of the membership more accurately as a result. A nominally democratic party would become democratic in nature.
This process of arriving at a line involves constantly questioning a thesis or proposal in a responsive and creative way. Without knowledge there can be no line.15 A group’s attitude to knowledge and the methods of acquiring it is therefore crucial to its abandonment of the quasi-Stalinist traits it has acquired historically.
Groups attempting to develop workers’ capacities to gain an extensive knowledge of political economy will have a commitment to a high level of education. As a consequence, they are more likely to attract left-leaning intellectuals with a deeper knowledge of their fields. Within a group culture that encourages teaching and learning, intellectuals can share their knowledge through debate, discussion and writing. In turn, they can help contribute to the formation of a Marxist party with a mass, working class membership.
Marxist education and intellectuals
If intellectuals are individuals who pursue the study and furtherance of the truth irrespective of the obstacles in their paths, and Marxism has any truth at all, then one would expect that individuals who inquire freely into the nature of the commodity form and the rule of capital will become Marxists.16 Indeed during the cold war, it might have appeared to some that the capitalist education system was populated with a significant minority of Marxist intellectuals or intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism. Surely intellectuals organised collectively within the education system could have provided workers with the theoretical confidence to challenge capital and develop the consciousness required for the abolition of the wages system and its replacement with a rationally planned, classless alternative?
The reality was somewhat different. Intellectuals were forced to engage with anti-communist ideology. This used the former Soviet Union as a warning that socialism cannot work. It promoted the idea that Marxism was the ideology of the Soviet elite. It was therefore hostile to scientific inquiry and to the freedom intellectuals need to develop knowledge of nature and society. Moreover, the USSR’s power-hungry bureaucracy was armed with nuclear weapons and posed a threat to species survival.
Teachers and students who were members of Stalinist parties (or close to them) developed a limited form of social critique. This had little to do with Marxism, but enabled them to support the Soviet Union or regimes similar to it and survive periods of repression and suppression. Whereas serious intellectuals agreed that Stalinism was not socialism, Stalinised members of the intelligentsia argued that Soviet-type regimes were lesser evils than capitalist countries on the grounds they were anti-imperialist, had nationalised property relations, welfare systems and full employment. In return for a critical support for Soviet-type regimes, they promoted the interests of megalomaniacs and careerists at home and abroad. Abroad they supported supreme leaders for life, police states and nationalist elites. At home they supported social democratic and Labourite politicians.
The cold war prevented intellectuals from a free inquiry into nature of the commodity form and the rule of capital. It served instead to promote forms of distortion, confusion and irrationalism. Today these propagate an opaque understanding of Marx’s contribution to world culture, the history of the 20th century and the declining and crisis-ridden nature of contemporary capitalism. The development of the categories Marx used and their application to an understanding of a world that includes the influence of Stalinist-type regimes on capitalism is still in its youth.
The notion that a significant number of Marxists were subverting universities, colleges and schools was an invention of cold war anti-communist ideologists - a fantasy flattering to Stalinists. As a result of the popular front strategy, Stalinist academics kept the utopian idea that the future lay in the rule of an educated elite alive. This was a planned society for the planners. As such they zigzagged between the idea that a scientifically educated intelligentsia should rule and a workerism that celebrated or tail-ended the alienated consciousness of the atomised worker. This strategy appealed both to those academics who demanded more autonomy from market forces and the state and also to those who used the control they had over their labour-time to prioritise work in trade unions, campaigns and parties.
Did the end of the cold war open up opportunities for Marxist education? On the one hand, it vindicated Marxists who started the task of intellectual housecleaning the mess the Stalinist intelligentsia had made. Nonetheless, where Marxists are in work, controls over them continue within universities, colleges and schools.
This is partly to do with the complexity of social relations in the present. It is also to do with the nature of education within capitalism. This controls freely creative labour itself. Education is based on training for industry, business and the state. It thrives on rote-learning of large numbers of facts, covered under a blanket of religious, state and business propaganda. It creates a supportive social layer - an educated intelligentsia out of which management can be recruited - disinterested or fearful of an honest pursuit of the truth.
Capitalism is not interested in encouraging a critical understanding of the arts or social sciences except for a privileged few. These are the privileged minority of a privileged minority - the children of the rich. Rich parents send their children to the best schools, make sure they are trained to pass the necessary entrance qualifications, use entrance examiners as coaches, have contacts on the inside and use bribery. Within a declining capitalism, it is in the interests of the ruling class to hide or mask its existence. It is no surprise therefore that sociologists and economists ignore or obscure the concept of a ruling class itself.
A critical understanding of the arts and social sciences leads to a critique of the commodity form and the rule of capital. However, the opportunity to develop such a critique is impaired for the majority of teachers and students. Capitalism needs a workforce trained to accept the dumb routines of modern industry. Capital requires abstract labour, homogenous, flexible, interchangeable labour-time. It requires immediate results and needs profits. The result is an increasing degree of proletarianisation of academia and science.17
A growing bureaucracy administers capital’s controls over teachers and students’ labour-time. One-time academics are coopted into management and direct money into research for capital and away from the arts and social sciences. This encourages conformism - teachers and researchers conforming to managers, and managers conforming to the demands of their political masters. The latter are a section of the ruling class in government at a particular time. Combined with the short-term influence of finance capital, a form of bureaucratised privatisation now dominates universities, colleges and schools.
Even from the perspectives of the ruling class, marketised education leads to inefficiencies and waste. Capital requires an increasing amount of feedback from its abstract labourers. This means consulting skilled workers to an increasing degree. However, marketised education routinises the learning process. It encourages conformity in behaviour and thought. It produces graduates lacking in confidence in their intellectual ability. Many successful graduates emerge from the education system incapable of instigating innovative changes. They cannot cope with the rapid technological or social changes affecting them at work. A marketised education system is a barrier to creativity. It disables students and teachers.18
Universities, colleges and schools are now hostile environments for anyone who openly criticises the effect of market forces on education. In the post-cold war period, funds are withdrawn from research into the arts and social sciences unless they generate short-term increases in levels of productivity. As a result it is arguable that the opportunity to study Marxism at postgraduate level has diminished rather than increased.
How do the bureaucratisation of knowledge, the privatisation of education and the proletarianisation of the intelligentsia affect the classical argument that a Marxist education needs to take place within Marxist parties? This argument is associated with Kautsky and Lenin. The major premise is that class-consciousness cannot emerge solely out of economic struggles between capital and labour. A crucial function of a Marxist party is to organise intellectuals and workers around an education based on political economy, philosophy and the revolutionary Marxist heritage as whole.
The first point is that as a result of Stalinism many intellectuals have found what has been promoted as Marxism repulsive, pretentious or vacuous. Some refuse to distinguish between Marxism and Stalinism because they believe it is their self-interest not to do so. The majority, however, have yet to begin the housecleaning necessary to make this a clear distinction. The second point is that there are only a handful of intellectuals who have moved beyond recognition of the exploitative nature of capitalism and the state. Like other workers, lecturers and teachers are being drawn into trade union-led struggles with their employers. If Kautsky and Lenin are correct, these struggles will not lead automatically to a social critique of the commodity, the rule of capital and the need for a planned, socialist alternative. On the contrary, if they are purely defensive struggles over salaries, control over labour-time and freedom of expression, they can just as well reinforce utopian illusions that a professional independence from the influence of capital and the state can be preserved and extended.
Moreover, the small number of intellectuals with a knowledge of Marxism who inhabit positions of influence within universities have achieved this through adapting Marxism to a specialised division of labour. This militates against an understanding of the whole process of the production, consumption, exchange and distribution of commodities. The sub-division of Marxist scholarship into a multiplicity of different experts within different disciplines encourages both a narrow scholasticism and an adaptation to methods alien to Marxism. These can be empiricist, structuralist or other related to other methods, depending on the discipline.
Conclusion
To summarise: honest intellectuals will be driven to a social critique of the commodity form and the rule of capital. They will be drawn to Marxism, but forced to struggle to survive within a marketised environment. Within the education system, they will be faced with various choices:
- accommodate their critique to the dominant forms of irrationalism and be absorbed by management;
- retreat into scholarly solitude and hope social reality changes for the better;
- or resist individually and collectively as best they can.
Resistance includes a commitment to the teaching and learning of Marxism, to the advancement of Marxism as a science and the creation of a Marxist culture within which a party or parties can grow and flourish. This will mean challenging managerial controls, organising study groups and intervening in the life of activist groups.
This risks exclusion or expulsion and a descent into poverty. However, it also entails reaching out for support from like-minded allies and organising them into collective vehicles of struggle.
Notes
1. H Ticktin, ‘A critical assessment of the major Marxist theories of the political economy of modern capitalism’ Critique Vol 34, No3, December 2006, p271.
2. S Meikle, ‘Has Marxism a future?’ Critique No13, p116.
5. L Trotsky, ‘Trotsky on party education’ Critique No13, p124.
7. S MacIntyre A proletarian science Cambridge 1980, p226.
12. H Ticktin, ‘Stalinism - its nature and role” Critique Vol 39, No4, p493.
13. See H Ticktin, ‘What is Marxism?’ Marxist Voice October 2008, pp14-20.
16. H Ticktin ‘A Marxist theory of freedom of expression’ Critique No50, pp520, p527.
18. See M Newman, ‘Market values dominate sector’ Times Higher Education July 2 2009, p13.