Revolutionaries (22 page)

As for the discussion between different kinds of marxists, for a generation this hardly seemed to arise. Most marxists were communists: in or very close to the communist parties. Those who were not, were – or seemed – negligible, and indeed were often unknown, because they represented no important movements. And we vaguely assumed that those who were no longer communists, or who had at one time or another parted company with Lenin, had either ceased to be marxists then, or had somehow never been ‘real' marxists. We begged a lot of questions in this way, but they did not seem to be important questions. Plekhanov, for instance, was the father of marxism in Russia and we read some of him with admiration, as Lenin had done. We did not read those writings of his which did not agree with Lenin, because they were not available, and even had they been (like Kautsky's later writings), we would – I think understandably – have judged that they must be wrong, because he himself had been so obviously proven wrong by history. Conversely, we assumed that all those who wrote under the auspices of the Communist Party were marxists, which is by no means inevitable. We were wrong on both counts.

In Britain the impossibility of maintaining this attitude became obvious after 1956, when a high proportion of marxist intellectuals left the Communist Party. It was obviously impossible to argue seriously that, say, Christopher Hill stopped being a marxist historian at the moment when he stopped
holding a party card, implausible to argue that he had never been a marxist, and meaningless to argue that he had left the party because at some stage in the past he had stopped being a marxist without telling anyone about it including himself We had to learn to live with the fact that the marxist intellectuals who were in the Communist Party were only a part – and not as in the past the overwhelming majority – of the intellectuals who called themselves marxists.

The development of different trends within the communist movement made the old assumption even less tenable. It is quite true that a number of ex-communists also became ex-marxists and indeed anti-marxists in due course, as had always happened, and this seemed to justify the old attitude. But equally, and especially in the past ten years, we have found plenty of non-marxists becoming marxists (or calling themselves marxists) without ever joining, or wanting to join, the Communist Party. In fact today it is impossible to make the simple statement on which many of us were brought up: there is one and only one ‘correct' marxism and it is to be found in Communist Parties.

This does not mean that there is no ‘correct' marxism. Only, it cannot be any longer institutionally defined, and it is by no means as easy to know what in any instance it is, as we once thought. In saying that the discussion is open among marxists I am not saying that on any point it can never conclude, though I think I would say that discussion on some points (not always the same) must go on indefinitely, because marxism is a scientific method, and in the sciences discussion – and discussion between people holding different views on the basis of science – is the only and permanent method of progress. Each problem solved simply produces more problems for further discussion.

But what I am also saying is that, at present, opening questions is much more important than closing them, even if it were easier to close them than seems likely just now. I may suspect – and I do suspect – that a lot of the people now calling themselves
marxist aren't, and a lot of theories being put forward under marxist auspices are very far from Marx. But this applies to marxists in communist parties or in socialist countries just as much as to marxists outside both. And anyway, we must also ask ourselves which is at present more important, to define what marxism isn't – which will sooner or later sort itself out anyway – or to discover, or rediscover what it is. I think it is the latter, certainly that is the more difficult task.

For much of marxism must be rethought and rediscovered, and not only by communists. The post-Stalin period has not answered questions, it has asked them. If I may quote a French communist intellectual:

Those who impute to Stalin not only his crimes and faults, but also all our disappointments of all kinds, may well find themselves disconcerted by the discovery that the end of philosophic dogmatism has not given us back marxist philosophy . . . It has produced a genuine freedom for research, but also a sort of fever. Some people have rushed to call philosophy what is only the ideological commentary on their feeling of liberation and on their taste for freedom. But temperatures go down as surely as stones thrown into the air. What the end of dogmatism has done is to give us back the right to make an exact inventory of our intellectual possessions, to name both our wealth and our poverty, to think out and to formulate in public our problems, and to set about the rigorous task of real research.
²

Communists increasingly realize that what they learned to believe and to repeat was not just ‘marxism', but marxism as developed by Lenin, as frozen, simplified and sometimes distorted under Stalin in the Soviet Union. That ‘marxism' is not
a body of finished theories and discoveries, but a process of development; that Marx's own thought, for instance, went on developing throughout his life. That marxism doubtless has potential answers, but often no actual answers to the specific problems we face, partly because the situation has changed since Marx and Lenin, partly because neither of them may actually have said anything about certain problems which existed in their time, and are important to us.

Non-communist marxists must learn that the errors, oversimplifications and distortions of the Stalin period, or even of the entire period of the Communist International, do not mean that no valuable and important contributions were made to marxism, in this period and in the international communist movement. There are no shortcuts to marxism: neither the appeal to Lenin against Stalin, nor to Marx, nor to the young Marx against the older Marx. There is only hard, and long, and in the present circumstances perhaps inconclusive work.

Fortunately all this is widely recognized today and the work is going on. To mention only the very striking revitalization of theory within communist parties. This has been most impressive in recent years, both inside and outside socialist countries, though it has been held up by the reluctance of older cadres, whose career was identified with stalinism, to admit the mistakes they were associated with. (This is particularly marked in the field of the history of the communist movements themselves. With the exception of the Italian Communist Party, which has encouraged the frank and self-critical analysis of its own history and that of the Soviet Union, I can think of no communist party which has written a scientifically acceptable history of itself – certainly neither the French nor the Soviet party – and several, such as ours, which has shied away from the task of writing its history at all.)
³

There is still in many communist parties a great deal of what might be called darning holes in socks. For instance, Roger Garaudy's phrase ‘realism without limits' does not face the question whether the aesthetic theories we used to accept as marxist are valid or not; it merely allows us to admire Kafka, or Joyce, or other people who used to be taboo in the heyday of ‘socialist realism' by pretending that they are ‘realists' too in some indefinable sense. There is even in communist parties, particularly in eastern Europe, a tendency to go in for simple empiricism and to cover the results by saying ‘of course we are marxists'.

I think, and I have the authority of the late Oscar Lange for thinking so, that some of the recent innovations in Soviet economic theory are not – or not yet – marxist, but simply the insertions of bits of liberal economic theory such as marginal utility analysis into the great holes left open for so many years by the failure of Soviet economists to do their job. This is the sort of thing which is rightly criticized by the Chinese, though I confess that their own solution, which seems to me to be that of going back to the simple primary-school marxism of the old days, is in its way just as much an evasion of the real problems of analysis.

Nevertheless, there is real and lively theoretical activity. For instance, one of the most promising signs is the revival of discussion of Marx's so-called Asiatic mode of production which has been going on since about 1960 in France, Hungary and the
GDR
, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Egypt and several other countries, and since 1964 also in the Soviet Union and even – though critically – in China. For we must remember that this concept of Marx was abandoned by the international communist movement between 1928 (when the Chinese criticized it) and the early 1930s (when it was banned in the Soviet Union) and has since been beyond the theoretical pale.
⁴

What is the nature of this discussion today? It is, obviously, about the applicability of the marxist analysis to the world today; or rather, since it plainly cannot be applied literally in the old form, about the modifications in the analysis which must be made to fit the world today.
⁵
And the ‘world today' must include the socialist as well as the non-socialist world. There has been very little marxist analysis of that. In political terms this means it is about the perspectives for the victory of socialism in non-socialist countries and of its further development in socialist ones. This implies, but does not exhaust, the discussion of a number of more theoretical problems. It is evident that some of these have no very direct or discernible relevance to immediate or any other politics, though this was not always recognized. For instance, whether we finally decide that the history of China at some time in the past can be analyzed in terms of Marx's ‘asiatic mode' or not will make no difference to the politics of the Chinese Communist Party now or in the future. But though a distinction between the theoretical and practical aspects of these debates can be made, in reality they cannot be sharply separated.

Politically, it seems to me that the major problem in non-socialist countries is that of how many and what different roads there are to socialism. Since the October revolution there has been a tendency to assume that there was basically at any time only one, though with local variations. The centralized organization of the world communist movement as well as its later domination by the
CPSU
only emphasized this rigidity. It still haunts the Soviet-Chinese discussions. Now two observations must be made, of which one poses fewer problems for the marxists than the other. The first is that, quite obviously, the road to socialism cannot be the same in, say, Britain and Brazil,
or its perspectives equally bright or gloomy in Switzerland as in Colombia. The task of marxists is to divide the countries of the world into realistic groupings and to analyze properly the very different conditions of progress in each group, without trying to impose any uniformity (such as ‘peaceful transition' or ‘insurrection') on all of them. This is not so difficult in principle, but as it involves jettisoning a lot of past analyses and policies, it is not so easy in practice.

Much more difficult is to recognize that ways of progress to liberation and even socialism may have developed, in which the traditional communist parties or labour movements play only a subordinate part. I am thinking here of cases such as Cuba, Algeria, Ghana and perhaps others. Or in more general terms to ask ourselves whether our ideas of the role of communist parties in the advance to socialism may not have to be rethought in certain cases. For instance, as a current discussion in the Italian
CP
suggests, whether the split between social democratic and communist parties which arose after 1914 is any longer justifiable in certain countries today. In posing such questions, or rather in stating that they are being posed, I am not giving or even suggesting any answers. I am merely saying that such problems are no longer avoidable by closing our eyes to their existence.

Within the socialist world (and in so far as we think about future socialism in non-socialist countries), several problems are also posed, whether we like it or not, by reality. They are economic problems such as the best agrarian policy in such countries (given the rather striking failures of most of them in this field), or the best ways of economic planning, allocation of resources and goods, etc. They are political problems such as the best forms of organizing the institutions of such countries (given the very striking drawbacks of such institutions in many of them). They are problems of bureaucracy, or freedom of expression, etc. They are also, alas, international problems, as
the difficult relations between different socialist states show only too clearly; including above all (as Togliatti pointed out in his Memorandum) the role of nationalism in socialist countries. Here again in stating that the problems exist, I am not implying any answers must not be begged by phrases such as that such things are due to hangovers from the pre-socialist past, that they are due to revisionism or dogmatism, or that they would all disappear if things were ‘liberalized'.

All these problems imply theoretical discussion, and in some cases the willingness to break with long-established attitudes (as Lenin for one always was), or to enter entirely new territory. We are not used to this, so much so that we forget that marxists have done so in the past. For instance after the October revolution in Russia they had to enter a territory virtually unsurveyed by Marx, except in a few very general sentences, namely the problem of economic development in backward countries. And because they did so, marxism is today a genuine world movement, for after all, what gives it its most obvious appeal in the world today is, the analysis of the imperialist phase of capitalism, which is very much post-Marx, and the discovery of ways of turning backward countries into modern ones, which is the major theoretical discovery of the Soviet marxists in the 1920s. Moreover, some of these things also bring us back to the dialogue between marxists and non-marxists, for they involve learning from the achievements of non-marxist scientists. It is irrelevant that, if marxism had not ossified, it would itself have kept abreast and no doubt ahead of the best achievements of science. In many ways it did not, and we must now learn as well as teach.