Why Marxism Failed

 

Communism has failed, brothers, to capture the modern world from the clutches of capitalism, and it is counter-productive to go on denying it.  The chains binding the proletariat to the capitalist system are stronger and tighter now than they were in the time of Marx and Engels, those godfathers of the modern ideology, who would be turning in their graves if they could see how their ideas had been maligned, misunderstood and most importantly misapplied in the twentieth century and beyond.  There are a number of reasons for this, but central to it was an assumption which was false, which Marx perceived was false, but which tragically was made again and again by those who sought power in his name.  The assumption of power through the existing levers of the nation-state.

 

In the 1872 preface to “The Communist Manifesto”, quoting from Marx’s own work “The Civil War in France”, he states that one of the learnings from the experience of the Paris Commune of the previous year was that the working-class can’t “simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”[1]  Yet this is precisely what the Bolsheviks would attempt to do less than half a century later in Russia, and what many others would similarly attempt after them.  Marx’s conclusion was based on his understanding of the modern nation-state as predicated on a machinery set up for a hierarchical division of labour and ultimately the maintenance of state power, originally belonging to the landed aristocracy but having transferred courtesy of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830, to a capitalist bourgeoisie no less ruthless in wielding that power for the benefit of their own class.

 

That the Bolshevik regime, and others that came after them, turned rapidly into unequal societies of haves and have nots, with only the former having any real power or ownership of the system, can be explained in this context, that they inherited a state machinery set up, not for the emancipation of the working-class into a society of equals, but instead the creation of a new kind of hierarchy whose maintenance became too convenient to those who now ran the state.

 

The nation-state of the post-World War Two order is based explicitly on a clearly delineated territory, with the implied respect for the territoriality of other nation-states a fundamental principle of international law, but Marx and Engels breathed a different air, a world of competing, hustling absolutist European nations, scrapping for lands inhabited by peoples whose perceived barbarism rendered their possession incidental to the plans of Christian supremacists, and where even the borders of Europe itself, a continent still mostly monarchical, were far from definite.  They could not be expected to foresee, therefore, that the philosophy of communism would come to be a tool in the hands of nationalists to overthrow capitalist imperialism, or to paraphrase Engels, its own undertaker when those same nationalists would subsequently betray the revolution when faced with the realities of national rule in a world still dominated by the same capitalist imperialism.

 

The nationalist aspirations of the Bolsheviks may have remained latent until Stalin adopted the policy of socialism in one country, but Mao Tse-Tung was always more explicit than the Russian Bolsheviks, in tying his revolution to the nation.  This was because industrial capitalism was even less developed in the mostly agricultural and feudal China than it was in Russia, and because where it had been developed it was at the hands of the European imperialist who had systematically raped and humiliated his country.  For the latter reason the Chinese Revolution was as much a forerunner of the later nationalist left-wing revolutions of the post-war order as it was a sister revolution of the Russian.  For the former it had more in common with the wave of rebellions of medieval and early modern times in both China and Europe driven mainly by a peasantry not beholden to a capitalist paymaster, but instead to an exigent landlord class.  Mao lumped the landlord class and what existed of the bourgeoisie together as national traitors, while acknowledging that some had been anti-foreign and hence could be allies of the peasantry and proletariat.  In so doing he made the struggle from the outset more nationalist than exclusively class-based socialist.  A regime born in such soil was always destined to tread a path leading back to ingratiation with the capitalist world, and once the economic isolation from the Soviet Union kicked in the later betrayal of communism became a near-certainty.

 

Yet if Marx and Engels couldn’t be expected to foresee the evolution of the nation-state a hundred years after writing the Manifesto, there are other reasons for this betrayal that they not only should have foreseen, but foreshadowed. 

 

“The Communists … are … the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”[2]

 

They failed to perceive that this advantage would keep them in power over the proletariat after the revolution, and that in attempting to form the proletariat into a class, an entity whose class parameters were already innate, they were actually forming a separate sub-class with its own discrete interests, which far from leading to the elimination of class would instead form a new kind of parasitic aristocracy.

 

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia they did so in the name of the proletariat, but not in the body.  Lenin believed that without a cadre of professional revolutionaries to educate them, the working class would never develop beyond trade union reformism, writing that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.  The history of western social democracy in action would seem to confirm this view, but classes form in the political sphere around a shared commonalty of interest which distinguishes individuals from those of other classes, and the tragedy that Lenin apparently failed to foresee, was that in Russia the “professional revolutionaries” would be of necessity a separate class from the workers with their own discrete interests, who once in power would be driven by those interests to form a dictatorship not of, but over, the proletariat, a new kind of aristocracy which replaced the old to rule over a new kind of down-trodden worker.

 

Stalin argued, in echo of Lenin, that “the bourgeoisie that is overthrown … remains for a long time stronger than the proletariat which has overthrown it”, [3] and with help from abroad would attempt to destroy the revolution.  This, he argued, justified continuation of the dictatorship until all counter-revolutionary forces had been destroyed.  The events of the Russian Civil War might have seemed to justify his argument, but what he (and others) failed to perceive was that counter-revolution was unnecessary since the concept of perpetual revolution was succeeding only in maintaining a perpetual class system, of haves who formed for the purpose of preaching to, rather than obeying the will of, the have nots.

 

While the communist revolution in China in its nationalist overtones may have been an antecedent of the later struggles of the Third World against European imperialism, in other ways it was very much a sister of the Russian, and however superficial they may have seemed at the time, they would be as significant for the future history of China as they were for Russia.  Mao followed the Bolsheviks in predicting capitalism as a necessary stage in the development towards communism, and also, more significantly, in claiming that an organized party of revolutionaries would be necessary to galvanize and organize the peasantry and proletariat into action, thus laying the foundations for the later dictatorship in the same way Lenin had in Russia.

 

 

Marx and Engels also foresaw the dominance of social democracy in countries with more developed capitalist economies, regarding such movements as attempts at once to fend off the threats of revolution on the one hand and of capitalism on the other, and hence essentially conservative in nature.  The Bolsheviks would also subsequently retreat from their earlier belief in the need for revolution to start in such countries, or indeed that it would happen there at all, Stalin arguing in “Foundations of Leninism” that capitalism was a globalized phenomenon, and hence that revolution would more likely occur in the weak link countries with less development, ie in places such as Russia.

 

Yet there is another reason why Marxist revolution occurred in countries such as Russia and China, and never in western capitalist nations except for brief escapades such as the Paris Commune.  While decrying the historical efforts of the Chinese peasantry in myriad revolts of the past, which he claimed had achieved little beyond acting as levers in aristocratic civil wars, Mao claimed in “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” that the revolutionary potential of the modern peasants was strong because their exploitation was tripled, being imperialist and feudal as well as bourgeois in nature.  But this belies the fact that China at the time was overwhelmingly feudal in nature, and what little capitalist development had occurred had done so in spite, not because, of the western imperialists whom Mao admitted had no desire to transform China into a capitalist country, but instead into a colonial outpost.[4]  As discussed before, the Chinese Revolution stands, for this reason, as the last in the long series of peasant uprisings of that vast country.  As in the West the relationship of peasant to feudal lord was essentially that of tenant, receiving land and grazing rights in exchange for payment, and it was the latter which would tend to rise along with prices, and then rise some more even when prices fell, especially at times of war.  This relationship left the feudal peasant feeling they had little to lose in rebellion, and explains the myriad peasant uprisings which occurred not just in China, but across the Europe of the Middle Ages.

 

The relationship of proletariat to bourgeoisie is very different.  It is based on working for the latter in exchange for payment, and though fundamentally exploitative in nature, it creates a form of wage slavery which binds the worker to the bourgeoisie and hence the capitalist system upon which he comes to rely for his living.  While forming two distinct classes within it they are not, therefore, as Marx and Engels believed, naturally antagonistic in nature since they come to have a shared interest in the survival of the capitalist system upon which both of them, though for different reasons, depend.  Asking the proletariat to rise up against the bourgeoisie is therefore as unreasonable as asking the beggar to rise up and kill the toff who has just tossed him a 50p piece.  Much as he might want to he cannot, partly because he lacks the strength and partly because he needs all the coins he can get.

 

This relationship, founded as it is on the exploitation of a class left with nothing to sell but their labour, undoubtedly is one of tension, which explains the long history of working class militancy in countries such as the United Kingdom and United States, the Luddites, the Chartists and the Trade Union movements.  But it also explains why such proletarian movements always stopped well short of revolution and instead tended to act as catalysts for social and economic reformism, improving working conditions and perhaps most significantly expanding the vote franchise to the whole adult population (though even this took almost a century of activism in that innately conservative country). The Trade Unions of the UK have never been truly revolutionary in their nature and, with the exception of the mining unions, not even particularly militant.  Instead their interest historically has been to reform and indeed to expand the industrial capitalist system upon which they depend for their survival.

 

Brilliant, inspired and revolutionary, the communism of Marx and Engels was nonetheless of its time, borne of the struggles of early industrial capitalism and European imperialism.  It could not foresee its application to the conditions of centuries in which they didn’t live, the dying embers of colonialism and nationalist struggle.  Perhaps most importantly they misunderstood the relationship between the two great capitalist classes and why the proletariat were never destined to become a truly revolutionary class without the encouragement of a separate class with separate interests who would become not their liberators but their new exploiters.  Marxism is, of course, only one brand of communism, an idea which has antecedents dating back to ancient times.  It was the brand of the 19^th century revolutions and the Paris Commune, already outdated by the time Chairman Mao stood in Tiananmen Square and declared the People’s Republic of China.  The more immediate cause of the Commune’s downfall was the defeat of the National Guard by the armies of the Third Republic.  If there is a lesson in that it is that communists need to arm themselves for the struggles of the 21^st century by realizing that theirs is a global, not a national, brotherhood, that they must reject and destroy, not adopt the machinery and trappings of the nations, and that this is not a struggle that will be won through means of diplomacy.

 

[1] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France” (1871), C5, q. in “The Communist Manifesto” (1872 Preface), Marx and Engels

[2] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), C2

[3] Stalin, “Foundations of Leninism” (1924), C4

[4] Mao Tse-Tung, “The Communist Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” (1939) C3