Main Currents of Marxism

Back in the early 1970s, Leszek Kolakowski tells English historian E.P. Thompson what he thinks of him:

http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1974_Kolakowski.pdf: Your letter contains some personal grievances and some arguments on general questions. I will start with a minor personal grievance. Oddly enough, you seem to feel offended by not having been invited to the Reading conference and you state that if you had been invited you would have refused to attend anyway, on serious moral grounds. I presume, consequently, that if you had been invited, you would have felt offended as well and so, no way out of hurting you was open to the organizers.

Now, the moral ground you cite is the fact that in the organizing Committee you found the name of Robert Cecil. And what is sinister about Robert Cecil is that he once worked in the British diplomatic service. And so, your integrity does not allow you to sit at the same table with someone who used to work in British diplomacv.

0, blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the 40s and 50s which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labour and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you not think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on this?

No, you are innocent, while I do not feel, as you put it, the "sense of the politics of those years" when so many Western intellectuals were converted to Stalinism.

Your "sense of politics of those years" is obviously subtler and more differentiated than mine, I gather this from your casual comments on Stalinism. First, you say, that a part (a part, I do not omit that) of responsibility for Stalinism lies upon the Western powers. You say, second, that "to a historian, fifty years is too short a time in which to judge a new social system, if such a system is arising". Third, we know, as you say, "times when communism has shown a most human face, between 1917 and the early 1920s and again from the battle of Stalingrad to 1946"....

Your second comment is revealing, indeed. What is fifty years "to a historian"? The same day as I am writing this, I happen to have read a book by Anatol Marchenko, relating his experiences in Soviet prisons and concentration camps in the early 1960s (not 1930s).... The author, a Russian worker, was caught when he tried to cross the Soviet border to Iran... in Khrushchev's time, when the regrettable errors of J. V. Stalin were over (yes, regrettable, let us face it, even if in part accounted for by the Western powers), and so, he got only six years of hard labour in a concentration camp.

One of his stories is about three Lithuanian prisoners who tried to escape from the convoy in a forest. Two of them were quickly caught, then shot many times in the legs, then ordered to get up which they could not do, then kicked and trampled by guards, then bitten and torn up by police dogs (such an amusement, survival of capitalism) and only then stabbed to death with bayonets. All this with witty remarks by the officer, of the kind "Now, free Lithuania, crawl, you'll get your independence straight off !"

The third prisoner was shot and, reputed to be dead, was thrown under corpses in the cart; discovered later to be alive he was not killed (de-stalinization!) but left for several days in a dark cell with his festering wound and he survived after his arm was cut off.

This is one of thousand stories you can read in many now available books. Such books are rather reluctantly read by the enlightened Leftist elite, both because they are largely irrelevant, they supply us only with small details (and, after all, we agree that some errors were committed) and because many of them have not been translated (did you notice that if you meet a Westerner who learnt Russian you have at least 90% chance of meeting a bloody reactionary? Progressive people do not enjoy this painful effort of learning Russian, they know better anyway).

And so, what is fifty years to a historian? Fifty years covering the life of an obscure Russian worker Marchenko or of a still more obscure Lithuanian student who has not even written a book? Let us not hurry with judging a "new social system". Certainly I could ask you how many years you needed to assess the merits of the new military regime in Chile or in Greece, but I know your answer: no analogy, Chile and Greece remain within capitalism (factories are privately owned) while Russia started a new "alternative society" (factories are state owned and so is land and so are all its inhabitants). As genuine historians we can wait for another century and keep our slightly melancholic but cautiously optimistic historical wisdom.

Not so, of course, with "that beast", "that old bitch, consumer capitalism" (your words). Wherever we look, our blood is boiling. Here we may afford to be ardent moralists again and we can prove--as you do--that the capitalist system has a "logic" of its own that all reforms are unable to cancel. The national health service, you say, is impoverished by the existence of private practice, equality in education is spoilt because people are trained for private industry etc.... And you propose "a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic". You think apparently that this makes perfectly clear what you mean; I think, on the contrary, that it is perfectly obscure unless, again, you imagine that once the total state ownership of factories is granted, there remain only minor technical problems on the road to your utopia.

But this is precisely what remains to be proved and the onus probandi lies on those who maintain that these (insignificant "to a historian") fifty years of experience may be discarded by the authors of the new blueprint for the socialist society (In Russia there were "exceptional circumstances", weren't there? But there is nothing exceptional about Western Europe).

Your way of interpreting these modest fifty years (fifty-seven now) of the new alternative society is revealed as well in your occasional remarks about the "most human face of communism" between 1917 and the early '20s and between Stalingrad and 1946. What do you mean by "human face" in the first case? The attempt to rule the entire economy by police and army, resulting in mass hunger... several hundred peasants' revolts, all drowned in blood (a total economic disaster, as Lenin would admit later, after having killed and imprisoned an indefinite number of Mensheviks and SRs for predicting precisely that)? Or do you mean the armed invasion of seven non-Russian countries which had formed their independent governments, some socialist, some not (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia; 0 God, where are all these curious tribes living?) ? Or do you mean the dispersion by soldiers of the only democratically elected Parliament in Russian history, before it could utter one single word? The suppression by violence of all political parties, including socialist ones, the abolition of the non-Bolshevik press and, above all, the replacement of law with the absolute power of the party and its police in killing, torturing and imprisoning anybody they wanted? The mass repression of the Church? The Kronstadt uprising?

And what is the most human face in 1942-46? Do you mean the deportation of eight entire nationalities of the Soviet Union with hundreds of thousands of victims (let us say seven, not eight, one was deported shortly before Stalingrad) ? Do you mean sending to concentration camps hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war handed over by the Allies? Do you mean the so-called collectivization of the Baltic countries if you have an idea about the reality of this word?

I have three possible explanations of your statement. First, that you are simply ignorant... this I find incredible, considering your profession of historian. Second, that you use the word "human face" in a very Thompsonian sense which I do not grasp. Third, that you, not unlike most of both orthodox and critical communists, believe that everything is all right in the Communist system as long as the leaders of the party are not murdered.... Did you notice that the only victims Khrushchev mentioned by name in his speech of 1956 (whose importance I am far from underestimating) were the Stalinists pur sang like himself, most of them (like Postychev) hangmen of merit with uncountable crimes committed before they became victims themselves? Did you notice, in memoirs or critical analyses written by many ex-communists... that their horror only suddenly emerged when they saw communists being slaughtered?...

Well, Thompson, I really do not attribute to you this way of thinking. Still I cannot help noticing your use of double standards of evaluation.... We must not be fervent moralists in some cases and Real-politikers or philosophers of world history in others, depending on political circumstances.... [A] Latin-American revolutionary who told me about torture in Brazil. I asked: "What is wrong with torture?" and he said: "What do you mean? Do you suggest it is all right? Are you justifying torture?" And I said: "On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity." "Of course," he replied. "And so is torture in Cuba?", I asked. "Well, he answered, this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable"...

Comments

[BruceW07]

"On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity." "Of course," he replied. "And so is torture in Cuba?", I asked. "Well, he answered, this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable"...

George W. Bush thinks torture is something he has the authority to order, a means of self-defense for a very large country.

Just an observation.

[Kieran]

A pity to see the "50 years is not time enough for a Historian" thing coming from the historian who sought to rescue ordinary people ground up by the industrial revolution from "the enormous condescension of posterity."

[wcw]

Funny; this makes me think of your previous center-left-technocrat post. When I read it and its comments (I think I restrained myself from joining), all I could think were of the manifold indignities of fifty years of (D)-brand policies, and how despite them since FL2K I have become a party-line (D) voter. I have no idea what kind of people or historians Kolakowski or Thompson may have been, but I have sympathy for the one who with distaste pulls the lever for the better available choice.

Kolakowski here would seem to be Krugman, recognizing that essentially from the beginning, Soviet Communism was unreformable (I come at this argument from the left, but I sympathize with it as well). Thompson, it seems, is you: denying the reality of the malevolence of the well-meaning political movement to which he long cleaved.

I am grateful the US is unlikely to slip from its current perch as mere purveyor of violence and police-state manque into the true depths of Stalinism. A friend of my parents was in the latters prisons, and we can be proud we haven't sunk so low.

Depressing that that's the best we do these days, huh?

[andres]

wcw: Brad has never cleaved to the Republican party in any way other than admitting that there are reasonable, reality-based Republicans (just as there are reasonable, reality-based communists, right?). This may be true at the ground level, but some filtering phenomenon generally prevents such Republicans from wielding positions of real leadership.

I remember reading somewhere that Kolakowski became a committed anti-socialist after his experience with communist Poland. While I wouldn't go that far, history has proven that with regards to communism he was right and Thompson and all the other apologists for communist regimes are wrong.

What I violently object to is the implicit characterization communism = Marxism in Brad's title. Given what communism became, they are not the same even if Marx and Engels thought of themselves as communists.

[Roger Albin]

This powerful piece and several other of Kolakowski's essays can be found in his My Correct Views on Everything. The most recent New York Review of Books contains a perceptive review of the question of why Marxism was so attractive by the historian Tony Judt in the specific context of Kolakowski's writings.

[wcw]

andres, I am not sure that is so, though I agree Brad gets a solid (D) after his name in any history. I would prefer our host speak for himself, but I can note his public fondness for Ford of the Helsinki Accords as one datum. I do think the time to draw the line has passed, though, and in that antecedent post our host chooses not to.

On Communism <> Marxism, I disagree. Marx's personal and intellectual authoritarianism were clear from the beginning. It was not Lenin who injected the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" into discourse, nor Stalin who expelled the anarchists from the International. While I am generous enough to believe Marx would not have wanted Stalin, I doubt he would have balked at Lenin.

The nybooks article is nice; I am reading it now. Cf http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302

[Dustin]

I'm partial to "The Myth of Human Self-Identity" written while Kolakowski still considered himself a Marxist, where he tries to understand why "The Marxist project" has always ended bloodily wherever it has ascended to power, before ending with the question of whether the problem was that Marxism itself was inherently totalitarian.

[wcw]

Yeah, that Judt piece is just beatiful, at least through the present day. Thanks for pointing me to it. I am reminded of two poetic snippets, both inevitably critiques.

The first is that famous Debs quote (misdated) at http://www.bartleby.com/66/42/15942.html

The other is an obscure 1986 composition by McCarthy (which bequeathed Tim Gane to Stereolab), slightly incorrect lyrics to which you may find at http://people.umass.edu/mwsances/mccarthy/albums/allverywell.htm

Corrected:

While there's still a world to win
My red dream is everything
They won't wake me
They won't wake me

You really should hear the song. It's something else.

[citizen k]

Kolakowski's attack on Thompson is not particularly honest.
But at that point in his life, Kolakowski believe that opposition to the Vietnam war was evidence of being a communist stooge.

[JR]

Presumably Brad, whose reading is eclectic, has for the first time come across Kolakowski's essay "My Correct Views About Everything" as reprinted in the collection that has been published under that title. The problem with reprinting the selection is that it is entirely out of context.

Thompson was a Marxist in the British tradition, which goes back to the founding of the Labor Party. He belonged to the Communist Party until 1956, when he resigned over the invasion of Hungary. He spent his life advocating what he called "socialist humanism," by which he meant a democratic socialism incorporating Western humanist traditions. He was a life-long enemy of Stalinism and of Stalinst tendencies among Western Marxists (his "Poverty of Theory" of 1978 is a slashing attack on the then-fashionable neo-Stalinist philosophy of Althusser and his followers). He was a leading opponent of Thacherism and devoted much effort to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was a voice against the Official Secrets Act and government abuses of power and secrecy.

He was also a ground-breaking historian. His Making of the English Working Class is one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth century social history. He wrote biography (William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary), legal history (Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act), and intellectual history (Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law). He was a towering scholar and a great public intellectual for half a century.

His debate with Kolakowski surfaced publicly, after a private exchange of letters, in Thompson's 100-page article of 1973, "An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski." In it, Thompson proposed that the failure of Soviet Communism did not mean the failure of the socialist project. Kolakowski, in a surprisingly vituperative response published in the same journal as "My Correct Views About Everything," argued that socialism was dead.

There are many things in Kolakowski's article that are hurtful and unfair. Kolakowski implicitly accuses Thompson of cowardice; Thompson spent World War II in a tank corps and saw fighting in Italy. Kolakowski (who was still a child) spent most of the war at his parent's country house.

As for what Kolakowski thought of Thompson, the end of his response is worth reading:

If I repeat these old truisms this is because they still seem to go unnoticed in utopian thinking; and this is why nothing in the world is easier than writing utopias. I wish we could agree on this point. If we do, we can agree on many others, even after exchanging a few caustic remarks which, I hope, we will be generous enough to forgive each other. Such an agreement will be much less likely if you keep believing that communism was in principle an excellent contrivance, somewhat spoilt in less than excellent application. I hope to have explained to you why, for many years, I have not expected anything from attempts to mend, to renovate, to clean or to correct the communist idea. Alas, poor idea. I knew it, Edward. This skull will never smile again. Yours in friendship, Leszek Kolakowski

[piotr]

I skimmed through the Kolakowski's letter. Overall, it is a bit more friendly than the quoted passages imply, and contrary to some post above, it suggest certain commitment to socialist values (equality, need of a state with powerful regulatory capabilities) and no barest hint that he supports Vietnam war (he dwells on the fact that torture in South Vietnam is no worse than in the North Vietnam, he does not claim that it is better).

At one point I commiserated with Thomson. Kulakowski complains that Thomson went balistic because K. uttered this sentence "Man has no fuller means of self-identification than through religious symbols ... religious conciousness is irreplacable part of human culture".

Duh. The guy abandoned Marxist mumbo jumbo for that. Does he accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour, or does he entrust the Polish nation to the care of The Most Saintly Maiden? It does sound much more weasely than that. Personally, I do not care if I am sufficiently self-identified or not, and it seems to me that culture would survive without religion just fine. By the way, the current government in Poland seems very religious and it is not a pretty sight.

[andres]

wcw, one does not have to agree with everything Marx wrote, or even to like the man, in order to call oneself a Marxist (I don't do so only because the word is now universally used to describe people who read Marx as if he were the word of God, which is an insult to both their intelligence and Marx's). And one can still have a great degree of sympathy for Marx's writings while at the same time reviling 20th century communism.

Let me make a countercase: Marx and Engels frequently attacked Russia and Russian culture (at the time of the Tsars) as the first and greatest source of tyranny in Europe, even after Marx eventually admitted that Russia had a decent chance of a social revolution that might preempt capitalism. If a socialist revolution had occurred in Russia within Marx's lifetime, he would still have cast a cautious eye on it because of Russia's inherent authoritarian tendencies. My guess is that Marx would have become disenchanted very quickly, and well before the rise of Stalin and the purges. I can't imagine Marx approving the following: (1) the expulsion of all non-Bolshevik parties from the government (2) the invasion of Poland, (3) the suppression of the Workers' Opposition, (4) the forcible annexation of Georgia, (5) the creation of a secret police force very similar to the Tsarist Okhrana, and often staffed by ex-Okhrana officers, (6) Lenin's decree prohibiting factions within the Bolshevik party itself.

Marx's authoritarian tendencies though present, have been exaggerated, especially in regards to Bakunin and anarchism--Bakunin was a terrorist in the true sense of the word, and his organization included common criminals/murderers like Nechayev among others. To say that Marx was authoritarian because he tossed out the anarchists from the International is to make Marx look good.

Does all of this absolve Marx (and Engels) from blame for the catastrophe of 20th century communism? Of course not. They made any number of political mistakes in their writings which I won't go into here. But to blame them exclusively for what communism became, and to actually say that Soviet or Chinese communism was exactly what they wanted, is to be dishonest or deluded in the extreme.

There are many ex-communists and ex-socialists like Kolakowski who have turned entirely against socialism/Marxism because of their experience with Soviet-style communism. I don't blame them, but neither can I agree with them. I prefer to side with Milovan Djilas, who after spending nearly a decade in Tito's prisons could still write:

"As I became increasingly estranged from the reality of contemporary Communism, I came closer to the idea of democratic socialism...the ideas of equality and brotherhood among men, which have existed in varying fomrs since human society began--and which contemporary Communism theoretically accepts--are principles which fighters for progress and freedom will always try to achieve. To criticize these ideals would not only be reactionary and ugly, but futile and foolish as well. The wish to attain them for mankind is inextinguishable." (_The New Class_, pg. vii).

Lastly, I should mention that there are quite a few socialist critics of Soviet communism, of which Djilas above and Roy Medvedev are the most far-reaching. Even though Solshenytsin may end up being the most famous critical chronicler of Soviet Communism, they should not be forgotten either.

[Maynard Handley]

Amazing how people get caught up in parochial matters.

The whole Marx was/was not responsible for communism is so played out. A more interesting discussion would consider the larger question of when, in general, are academics responsible for where their ideas lead. Are Friedman and Feldstein (pace Brad's earlier article) responsible for the current GOP?
If you thought Goldwater sounded reasonable in 64, should you have bailed out when the Southern Strategy was unveiled? Reagan did rationalize some of the tax code, and did liberalize some of the economy --- and did precious little to rein in spending, and started the whole kulturkampf thing in a big way. Was that the time to bail out? How about when GWB became the GOP candidate, or when he was elected, or when it became clear from his first days in office that his one single priority was to funnel money from the poor to the rich through the machinations of the federal government?

To be fair, I am trying to think of awful consequences of authors in the classical liberal tradition, but nothing much comes to mind. You can rant about how Keynes led to the excesses of the LBJ great society, but in the grand scheme of things this seems fairly minor.

[Jon Fernquest]

The British historian E.H. Carr was the most adept historian at "misreading dictators" including, most famously, Stalin (14 vols), but also Hitler before that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.H._Carr Then contemporary historian of Korea Bruce Cumings misread Kim Il Sung in his monumental "Origins of the Korean War" but there are still enough objective facts in the work to build up quite a weighty defense of Edmund Burke. Modern South Korea was built on the foundations of Japanese colonialism.

What was the correct response to Stalin's atrocities? Outrage followed by economic sanctions and isolation? Or increased trade and cultural exchange? THe later based on a confidence that the western free market-democracy would overwhelm in the end. (This the dilemma the Burma faces NOW)

What might be interesting for Burma is a Niall Ferguson-like counterfactual history of Glasnost applied now: "...the main goal of this policy [Glasnost] was to make the country's management **transparent** and open to debate, thus **circumventing the narrow circle of apparatchiks who previously exercised complete control of the economy**. Through reviewing the past or current mistakes being made, it was hoped that the Soviet people would back reforms such as perestroika." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasnost

[JK]

Leszek Kolakowski wrote:

'And I said: "On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity." "Of course," he replied. "And so is torture in Cuba?", I asked. "Well, he answered, this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable"'

But is it self-evident that Trotsky's defense of his actions is wrong not just in conclusion by in method? Leon Trotsky wrote:

'Thus or otherwise I carry full responsibility for the Decree of 1919. It was a necessary measure in the struggle against the oppressors. Only in the historical content of the struggle lies the justification of the decree as in general the justification of the whole [Russian] civil war which, too, can be called, not without foundation, “disgusting barbarism”. ... History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the [American] Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!'

I think Trotsky here is correct at least in so far as that while violence is certainly barbaric, the argument that all violence is to be condemned cannot stand. Rather we must argue in each case whether violence in Brazil, Cuba, the Russian or American Civil wars were justified.

So far as Kolakowski vs. Thompson goes, both produced some fine scholarship (although Main Currents was very, very far from Kolakowski's best) while holding awful politics.

[citizen k]

Brad: Is this supposed to justify your "non-ideological" technocratism? As if. Failure to question the ideological assumptions of the state is not the same as being "non-ideological".

[Jim S]

No, there's no such thing as a reality-based communist. There is also no such thing as a reality-based libertarian. There are reality-based Republicans but they are an endangered species, threatened primarily by other Republicans. And yes, there are Democrats who aren't particularly reality-based but they currently are outnumbered by their Republican counterparts, IMO. Forgive me, I'm still traumatized by a recent exposure to a bit of Sean Hannity while trying to find some simple sports talk about the Chiefs the other day.

[andres]

"Amazing how people get caught up in parochial matters. The whole Marx was/was not responsible for communism is so played out."

Maynard, the whole debate should have been played out and abandoned decades ago, but it hasn't, which is why I don't find it parochial or meaningless at all.

Brad on occasion posts items of history which are intended to rub the noses of leftist ideologues on the excrement of communist crimes in the previous century. I'm rather ambivalent on this tactic: if Brad does it as a way of keeping the memory alive so that communism will be remembered as a system that was as evil if not more so than Nazism or Inquisition Catholicism, I can't do anything but approve. But I also wonder if the tactic is Brad's (unconscious?) way of saying "this is what will happen to any party that adopts policies to the left of the center-reality-based Democratic party".

If that's the case, I don't buy it. The centrist wing of the Democratic party, as well as neoclassical economists such as Brad and Krugman who identify with the Democrats, should deeply ponder the question of why the extremist wing of Republicanism has become so powerful since the 1960's when the US seemed on the verge of becoming a true social democracy. It is, I believe, because a social-democratic political coalition and its policies are not sustainable as long as corporate capitalism remains intact. And that's by no means a parochial matter.

[andres]

"Amazing how people get caught up in parochial matters. The whole Marx was/was not responsible for communism is so played out."

Maynard, the whole debate should have been played out and abandoned decades ago, but it hasn't, which is why I don't find it parochial or meaningless at all.

Brad on occasion posts items of history which are intended to rub the noses of leftist ideologues on the excrement of communist crimes in the previous century. I'm rather ambivalent on this tactic: if Brad does it as a way of keeping the memory alive so that communism will be remembered as a system that was as evil if not more so than Nazism or Inquisition Catholicism, I can't do anything but approve. But I also wonder if the tactic is Brad's (unconscious?) way of saying "this is what will happen to any party that adopts policies to the left of the center-reality-based Democratic party".

If that's the case, I don't buy it. The centrist wing of the Democratic party, as well as neoclassical economists such as Brad and Krugman who identify with the Democrats, should deeply ponder the question of why the extremist wing of Republicanism has become so powerful since the 1960's when the US seemed on the verge of becoming a true social democracy. It is, I believe, because a social-democratic political coalition and its policies are not sustainable as long as corporate capitalism remains intact. And that's by no means a parochial matter.

[andres]

Oops. Sorry for the double post/click slip.

[Gray]

Speaking about the past, I just stumbled upon a story about the 1936/7 strike at Gm at Steve Gilliard's site:
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/09/flint-sit-down-strike.html

This interesting info is in it:
"Other than "the Battle of the Running Bulls," only one other violent incident was reported during the sit-down strikes, on Feb. 1, when some 28 persons were injured. Striker Earl DeLong, 22, shot in the stomach, was the most seriously hurt."

Hmm. A relative of you, Prof DeLong?

[Almost surely a distant one.]

[Jim Dandy]

“The whole Marx was/was not responsible for communism is so played out."

Yes, indeed. For those of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s, it does seem rather old hat.

But the question remains: why does it keep on “playing out” till today?

My years in academia proved to me that there is a recurring generation of scholars who learn quickly that they must prove their chops by continuing to hammer on the theme of the "evils of Marxism” for fear of losing out in the race for tenure and professional recognition by being branded as “leftist” or “Marxist”.

This tendency is particularly pronounced in the social sciences where academic debates very often turn on whether your theory or argument or critique of the dominant orthodoxy borders on being “Marxist”, an epithet that is usually sufficient to confine it to the garbage bin.

As to Kolakowski vs Thompson, I think Thompson stood head and shoulders above him, not only in breadth and depth of intellect, but also in the persistence of his radical commitment to humanism while confronting the realities of actually existing “communisms”.

[piotr]

andres: seems that there exist countries with "social-democratic coalitions" and "corporate capitalism", and for the last 50 years they seem to be rather stable. Sometimes welfare state gets out of hand and is trimmed, but even if there is a "right wing" government in those countries what you get is that the state's share of GNP dropped from 67% to 55%.

Why, Canada is social democratic when compared to USA, and it seems sustainable. If anything, American policies seem unsustainable, and THIS could motivate the flight away from "reality".

Corporate power in USA needs trimming like welfare state needed in Scandinavia. Perhaps some corporations should be broken into pieces using anti-trust laws (Walmart, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil? Google is not evil yet...), fairness doctrine should return in some form etc.

Saying that we need to get rid of corporate capitalism does not advance the necessary (or at least useful) reforms. I guess this is what Brad aludes to, however obliquely.

[piotr]

Totally off tangent. Would it be nice to give a project to students in Artificial Intelligence class (or Computer Vision) to program a "robot" capable of posting in Brad's comments?

[Roger Albin]

"As to Kolakowski vs Thompson, I think Thompson stood head and shoulders above him, not only in breadth and depth of intellect..."

Thompson was a fine historian and his work on 19th century social history has enduring value but he never produced anything like Main Currents of Marxism.

[Blissex]

"On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity." "Of course," he replied. "And so is torture in Cuba?", I asked. "Well, he answered, this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable"...
«George W. Bush thinks torture is something he has the authority to order, a means of self-defense for a very large country.
Just an observation.»

I spotted that irony too. But first let me point that that it is not «George W. Bush» in himself but the majority of USA voters (and most of their representatives of both parties), who have enthusiastically endorsed or not opposed such policies.

The President is just democratically carrying out the wish of the voters (with Rove looking at opinion polls very intently), and so is Congress who would stop the President in a moment, if their mailbags were full of letters against torture, rendition, indefinite detention etc.; but they are not.

I'll paraphrase the statement above:

''Well, the average USA voter answered, this is another thing. The USA are a small country relative to the constant threat of the global islamofascist caliphate. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable.''

If you believe, as many USA voters seem to do, that your safety from many hundreds of millions of religious fanatics armed with Iraqi weapons of mass destructions depends on using all means of self-defence, the outcome is not that surprising.

A lot of non-Administration oriented commentators have written with ridiculous hyperbole that the war on terrorism is a war on those who have the ability to destroy the USA's civilization and way of life. The average voter seems to think ''better safe than sorry'', and the gloves come off.

Shameful, but I think that unfortunately that is the real situation one has to confront.

[Barkley Rosser]

Hmm, well it may be played out, but as I have yet to see any commenters, much less the quotations from Kolakowski or the cited remarks of Thompson do so, maybe it is worthwhile reminding of Marx's views on the subject of democracy.

He was for it generally and wrote frequently and extensively in favor of it. Arguably this was based on his forecast that the industrial proletariat would become the majority of the population in the advanced capitalist world, where he saw socialism and communism first coming, and therefore a democratic system would be controlled by them and cater to their interests.

In his lengthy oeuvre Marx did talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and also made snide remarks about "bourgeois democracy." The major place where he did this was in his writings on the Paris Commune, a failed uprising in which his daughter and son-in-law died. This was an embittering experience, and he felt that the Commune government should have taken a harder line, stronger position, and so forth. Needless to say, Lenin drew heavily on these arguments to justify his democratic centralism, the beginning of his road to serfdom if you will and the Stalinism that grew out of it, not to mention Maoism and all the rest of it.

A major problem with Marx has always been that he wrote little about what should be done after the Revolution. The overwhelming mass of his writings was critiquing capitalism. He considered going on about the post-revolutionary future to be "utopian." If one wishes to criticize him for that, especially given what was done in his name, so be it.

I do remind that Rosa Luxemburg and others opposed Lenin's democratic centralism and other dictatorial policies in the name of Marx, even as they agreed with his more radical opposition to the nationalist catastrophe of WW I overwhelming the presumed international solidarity of the proletariat, with the revisionist elements of the German and French social democrats supporting their national governments in the origiastic and frenzied slaughter, out of which would come the Bolshevik Revolution and the even bigger slaughters of WW II.

[Dustin]

"Brad on occasion posts items of history which are intended to rub the noses of leftist ideologues on the excrement of communist crimes in the previous century."

Per Andres, the question should also be asked why Leftists or those who see themselves as such, feel so uncomfortable & defensive discussing such matters. Surely the modern "decent" left, has long such abandoned any misconceptions about Communism, "Marx wuz Framed!!1" type intellectuals such as Jim Dandy are increasingly rare even at insitutions with predominantly liberal/leftist faculty, and the modern left, which goes as far as the Social Democratic parties of Scandinavia are quite a ways away from the more orthodoxical marxist parties that existed with some influence in Europe up to 50 years ago.

Yet when the matter is brought up, Leftists act not unlike Whites do when the matter of slavery & racism is brought up; agitated, incredibly defensive, eager to stomp out any supposed link between them & their past brethren, & incredibly indignant at the fact someone even dared to bring the matter up.

[Barkley Rosser]

Dustin,

Would you characterize my remarks as fitting into your hyperbolic and insulting description?

It is simply a fact. Marx wrote a huge amount, and one can find defenses for all kinds of views and policies in his writings if one looks hard enough. Maybe Marx would have been just as bad as Lenin and Stalin et al, if he had been in power in the 20th century, but we have no way of knowing. I would submit that there is much of interest and value in Marx's writings, even if one can find things that were later used for terrible effect.

BTW, I note that we have the same problem with Nietszche. Do we throw him in a trash can because Hitler was inspired by some of his writings? Or do we read selectively and carefully?

[meno]

" The USA are a small country relative to the constant threat of the global islamofascist caliphate. "

Piffle! Utter nonsense!

Your "oh poor us" rhetoric is simply absurd coming from the biggest power the world's ever seen. The USA now is as safe as it has been at almost any time in its history.

Your citizens outnumber the muslim extremists at least five to one. Unless you class every muslim in the world as being against you - in which case you've 5 million muslim US citizens to round up and shoot, comrade, and in which case you should stop calling all those muslim states your "allies" and shipping them weapons.

Your USA's military spending exceeds that of all even vaguely hostile muslim states by over 100 times.

The USA is vastly bigger, stronger, more powerful, richer, better able, better educated than its islamic-extremist enemies. Al Qaeda has a few hundreds of operatives. Your USA govt has literally millions.

The USA has faced many real threats to it's existence: in 1812, in your civil war, in 1942, even as recently as the 80s the USSR had vast numbers of strategic nukes aimed at you capable of destroying your entire nation. Al Qaeda just doesn't rate against those: it is not a real threat to the USA's existence.

[William Davis]

In the U.S. at least, there was a long, sustained purge of those with leftist tendencies in academia, business and government that lasted from the '30s to the '60s. The left was driven out of the major institutions and to the fringes of society.

The early 20th century Progressives and socialists were effectively written out of the nation's history in the '50s, despite the fact that many avowed leftists served the nation honorably in government and the military during FDR's administration. As a result, the bad times of the Depression gave way to "What's good for GE is good for America" in the mainstream.

The radicalism of the '60s leftists were, in part, a backlash against this. The fact that, outside of a few English departments, there is still a reflexive tendency to deny being a leftist shows that the purges of the last century remain effective today.

American cannot embrace some of the political ideas that have shaped modern Europe because the very vocabularly needed to wrestle with the questions of what limits should be put on capital versus labor have been effectively written out of mainstream acceptable discourse.

[Jim Dandy]

“Thompson … never produced anything like Main Currents of Marxism.”

True. But that’s to say he never set himself up as a scholar of philosophy. He rather took to creatively employing the method of empirical-historical research to produce a brilliant original work of history that remains outstanding till today. Among his many other endeavors, literary works on William Blake, on William Morris, and a book of poetry, are on a different plane of achievement, but nevertheless considered significant and “influential”.

It’s a matter of taste, I suppose. I lean towards originality in empirical-historical research.

Kolakowski’s standing as a student of philosophy cannot be slighted. But his reading of Marxism suffers from a fatal methodological flaw, IMO, of holding Marx responsible for all of the divergent and contradictory views and practices of those who claim to be his followers, a claim to which Marx once responded “I am not a Marxist.” That’s a form of Marxology that errs in following a scriptural reading of texts, so voluminous, contradictory, evolving over a lifetime, and unfinished, as to defy any rigid and monolithic interpretation.

[Nick Kaufman]

Being a southern European, I thoroughly enjoy Brad's postings and I find the debate on whether Marx was responsible for what happened afterward, as totally relevant.

It's hard to realize this, if one lives in the country of Republican populism and jingoism, but in large parts of Europe, the Marxist left has plenty of strongholds usually of the reformed variety.

To argue whether the then-existing socialism was a direct byproduct of Marxism is to argue whether Marxism and socialism are worth another look. For the Marxist leftovers, not recognizing the link between Marxism and applied communism is to get a cop out, so that they can argue on the same tune of vague generalities. It's also an allibi which allows them to sustain a consistent narrative that rehashes the same marxist thought into antiamericanism and anti-globalization trope.

[Jim Dandy]

For instance, how is one to defend Kolakowski's interpretation of Marx as providing “a good blueprint for converting human society into a giant concentration camp.”

[Jim Dandy]

Please regard my 4:21 pm comment as an addendum to my 4:03 pm comment and not in any way a response to 4:12 pm.

[Barkley Rosser]

Last time I checked, Marx was the most mentioned economist on the internet, ahead of Adam Smith and Keynes. Maybe all those people are unfortunately deluded, leftover, authoritarians and whatnot, but I would repeat that there is much that is profound and of deep interest in Marx, even if one rejects totalitarianism and thinks that he was fundamentally wrong about most of his economic doctrines and theories.

[Roger Albin]

Jim Dandy,

Its not just a matter of taste. First, check out Main Currents again. By one of those strange coincidences I happen to have volume 1 on my desk (OUP paperback version). Read pages 419-420, the concluding paragraphs of Vol 1. Here is the clear rebuttal of your claim about Kolakowski's attribution of Marx's responsibility for all the work of his disciples.
As for empiric work and Thompson's accomplishments, it turns out that The Making of the English Working Class, definitely Thompson's major work, is less important than it originally seemed. A number of his claims about the development of working class features in Britain turn out to be incorrect, at least in a general sense. This doesn't appear to be because Thompson was sloppy or deceitful. The historian Linda Colley made the interesting point that much of Thompson's primary research involved Yorkshire and the experience of industrialization there appears to have been somewhat anomalous with respect to the rest of Britain.

[Jim Dandy]

Roger Albin,
I don’t have Kolakowski’s text ready to hand to check how this particular reference you cite stacks up against what I recall as the main thrust of the argument in the three volumes. And the main thrust of the argument is summarized in his memorable words (as I recall from the Preface of the Norton edition) quoted above, describing Marx as offering “a good blueprint for converting human society into a giant concentration camp.” By what standard of scholarship is one to judge that as a meaningful interpretation of Marx’s work?

I am aware of the subsequent work of Linda Colley, Nicholas Crafts, and others, dealing with the period and subject-matter of Thompson’s research. It’s in the nature of historical research that subsequent work will modify earlier findings.

[ralph]

Hi all. These threads, along with Brad's technocracy post/thread, are really stimulating for me. I agree, with Andres and some others, that Brad does like to stick it to the non-purely-capitalist left, but he does so out what seems to me an entirely legitimate postion: He thinks that more individual economic freedom raises all boats higher and that this has real historical moral value that people miss.

I complain about Brad's position here and there, at whiles; but to be frank, I'm working hard to understand **in detail** why Brad isn't right. In this pondering, the "was Marx responsible" argument is suggestive. Marx was NOT responsible in any direct way, to be sure. The people who did those things were.

But many of Marx's most well publicized ideas are inherently suggestive that limits don't matter. The suggested historical inevitability of communism mated with a theory of conflict that gave one side all the moral value wrapped in truly brilliant but aggressive language had tremendous impact in a dark and corrupt world. There were and are people who resisted that -- admittedly suggested or implied -- temptation to place no boundaries on power or righteous violence. They were and are important people, well worth listening to. Yet as a former historian I can hear the potential urge to limitless violence that remains -- to me -- latent in his major political statements.

I think Marx would be a great historical figure if he'd just stuck to economics and stayed out of suggesting the future of history. I think we'd all be sitting here, thinking of him as a great man who wrote about injustice. But he didn't; what are you going to do?

In any case, right now I'm pondering exactly what the right approach is to Brad's major thrust: Basically-Free Market Captilism has provided so much more material goods that we are in danger of swamping our world with too many of us -- among other injustices. How, then, does one construct a legitimate opposition to this, if one thinks it true? It IS morally better that we can feed so many more than we have been able to in the past, and so on. But does that mean that people who disagree with that tradeoff ("more" in the aggregate through time yet with less independence, punctuated immiseration, and the destruction of worldwide communal resources) are "immoral"? That cannot be true. Yet this is the argument that I perceive being made....

[Randolph Fritz]

"Marx's personal and intellectual authoritarianism were clear from the beginning."

What nonsense. Marx was, if anything, too trusting of the popular will. For the rest, you will perhaps hear Orwell on this?

"Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality, and internationalism." "Second Thoughts on James Burnham", 1946.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.--"Why I Write"

[andres]

"But many of Marx's most well publicized ideas are inherently suggestive that limits don't matter. The suggested historical inevitability of communism mated with a theory of conflict that gave one side all the moral value wrapped in truly brilliant but aggressive language had tremendous impact in a dark and corrupt world. There were and are people who resisted that -- admittedly suggested or implied -- temptation to place no boundaries on power or righteous violence. They were and are important people, well worth listening to. Yet as a former historian I can hear the potential urge to limitless violence that remains -- to me -- latent in his major political statements."

ralph: If you look at Marx and Engels' writings on politics, you'll find that the two regimes that they excoriated as even worse than Bismarck's Prussia and Napoleon III's so-called Empire, were Tsarist Russia in the old world and the would-be Confederate States of America in the new. Guess what. Both regimes subscribed to limitless violence; no legal constraints on the Tsar's decrees or interrogation methods, no legal constraints on the right of the States to kill resisting slaves and anyone who aids them. Similarly, France's new Third Republic crushed the Paris Commune with a brutality that exceeded anything seen before or afterwards in French history. It's rather poor form to condemn Marx for not explicitly describing the necessary limits to violence when none of the regimes then opposed to his ideas recognized any such limits. And also to fail to recognize that Marx and Engels' denunciations of the most brutal regimes in their day constitutes an implicit rejection of limitless violence.

What Marx did not foresee was that capitalist totalitarianism would be mostly swept away in the aftermath of the two world wars, which is why he should have written on revolutionary methods that placed limits on the revolutionary's use of violence. Nonetheless, this failure is not the same as "Marx is to blame for Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism", which seems to be Kolakowski's world view.

[anne]

Cogently and interestingly argued, Andres.

[thebizofknowledge]

Hi Brad, I stumbled on your blog while doing some online research. As someone who came of age in the 60's and 70's I recognized certain trains of thought and argument that were around then. However, I appreciated reading all the give and take you generated.

[ralph]

andres and anne, sorry for the delay, but work and parenthood called. :-)

andres, take my points at face value, rather than suspect I'm arguing something that you fear I am arguing. I argue that Marx's work has a current in it that does not encourage limits to power for his victorious class, and that this lack made his work easier to adopt by people who also wanted to have no limits. No more, no less. Did he oppose Bismarck and Napolean III? Good; he should have.

From out of the haze I recall a Marx who said little to nothing about the limits on the power of the coming class victory, and instead viewed that victory as a kind of historical enlightenment, where violent power was less exercised as the conflict of class finally faded from view. Reconciled to one another as humans became in this world, the idea of "limits" just didn't occur to him. At least, this is a rough version (off the top of my head) as to how he saw things. I welcome your scholarship on such issues, warmly; it has been years since I've read him deeply and age has only recently begun to bend my mind back to these issues. :-)

But to respond to the points you make, I find it not at all surprising that Marx would have learned about injustice and fighting it at the hands of the time's most unjust and violent. That the suppression of the Commune was horrific is not a very persuasive point to me, mainly because I'm not surprised that Marx opposed the limitless violence of those who were the ideological enemies. That's the "easy" part. My question is, when he was laying out the future, did he oppose the limitless violence of those who would be his victors? If he did, I'd like to know because it would alter my view of his work and its influence.

You have two other comments to add to this. First, "It's rather poor form to condemn Marx for not explicitly describing the necessary limits to violence when none of the regimes then opposed to his ideas recognized any such limits." Second, you argue that , "... to fail to recognize that [M&E] denunciations of the most brutal regimes of their day constitutes an implicit rejection of limitless violence."

My response to the first assertion is that I believe you misread my intention. Poor form aside, I do not "condemn" him for what he wrote about the people at the time, about which he was right as rain. Rather, I am assessing his philosophy of politics and history -- something we inevitably weigh in retrospect. As I wrote, but perhaps not clearly enough, "Marx was NOT responsible in any direct way, to be sure. The people who did those things were." Now, if you respond that I was leaving the possibility of "indirect blame", I'm sorry for leaving that impression -- I was writing off the cuff. Let me say it again: Marx is not responsible for Lenin or Trotsky or Pol or Stalin. His ideas, however, do not lay the groundwork for restraint of the class victors. It is this lack which was important, it seems to me, in his use by future unscrupulous victors.

My response to the second assertion is that implicitness is in the eye of the beholder. You think it implicit that he condemns limitless violence in the suppression of the Commune or Prussia or the CSoA. I felt that his condemnation of limitless violence made sense, because those practicing it were his enemies.

I can make my point another way. Bakunin acknowledged Marx's genius as an analyst of sociopolitical life, yet opposed in the strongest terms Marx's view of how things should be for the revolutionary working class, right? I don't intend to do Bakunin justice in this short space, but his critique was contemporary to him and brutal: Among other things, he felt that Marx's victors would end up every bit the dictators anyone else was if they used Marx's theory as a model.

If you've even read this far, I can't thank you and anne (and Brad) enough because you've given me the chance to think out loud. You needn't worry that Marx needs defending from me, though; he has far worse enemies. I just think that the groundwork that he laid wasn't as good as it could have been, and that had important historical consequences. I've made several assertions herein that rely on my fuzzy memory of what I read years ago. I may well be sadly mistaken, but if so I'd be pleased to be directed to material from which I can learn. It's always a good thing.

Cheers all, Ralph

[ralph]

I'm not too cogent about this, huh? :-)