# Marxism Yesterday and Today

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Colin Leys, Marxism Yesterday and Today, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> Marxism Yesterday and Today
> 
> Colin Leys
> published in The Bahá'í Faith and Marxism pp. 43-49
> 
> Ottawa, ON: Bahá'í Studies Publications, 1987
> 
> There are two main themes in Marx's conception of
> socialism: (1) democracy,i.e., political freedom, personal freedom,
> self-activity--people deciding their own fate, not being dominated
> by others; and (2) the emancipation of labour, i.e., relief from grinding
> drudgery in the struggle for existence; working to live, not living to
> work. Humankind now has the capacity to produce enough for all, the task
> is to ensure that this happens and that all enjoy it.
> 
> Marx's original (1847) vision of how this would happen was roughly as
> follows. The bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class that forced Western
> Europe out of its feudal framework, reorganized the entire society along
> market lines, and set in motion a self-sustaining and colossal expansion
> of productivity and of new products but at the cost of acute
> contradictions, expressed in the form of miserable poverty in the midst of
> plenty, acute inequalities, periodic slumps, social tensions, and wars.
> However, this process will also assure its own supersession since it
> simultaneously creates a proletariat whose exploitation and oppression
> forms it into an organized and revolutionary class in its turn. ''What the
> bourgeoisie produce above all, therefore, are its own gravediggers."1 In the meantime, capitalism has raised output
> to the point where there need no longer be any shortages of essential
> goods. The working class seizes power and embarks on the creation of a
> socialist society.
> 
> One of the distinctive features of Marxism, compared with other theories
> of social change, is its focus on the precise historical structures and
> tendencies at work in any given place at any given time. It seeks to grasp
> these structures and tendencies, to
> 
> understand the social forces at work, and to formulate practicable
> strategies for change based on this analysis. While Marx would have agreed
> with Bahá'u'lláh's image of a tempest sweeping through the
> modern world, he went further and identified it as the tempestuous
> productive and political forces released by capitalism, spreading on a
> global scale. The image he originally had of how capitalism would, in
> turn, be replaced by socialism (as outlined above) was based on a first
> attempt to grasp the dynamics of this process, as revealed in Western
> Europe.
> 
> But by the 1870s two things had already happened to alter this picture.
> First, the working class in Western Europe was increasingly becoming
> organized in parliamentary political parties and gradually became
> reformist, not transformist; and second, capitalism had become a worldwide
> phenomenon affecting many countries in which the working class was still a
> small minority. In Russia, in particular, still essentially feudal in
> spite of the recent ending of serfdom, a revolution was imminent. The
> question was,
> 
> would feudalism give way to capitalism and all its miseries and
> contradictions? Was the task of the Russian socialists simply to help
> usher in capitalism, as a necessary precondition for socialism?
> 
> __________
> 1. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The
> Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848] in R.C. Tucker, ed., The
> Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978),
> 483.
> 
> 44
> THE BAHA'I FAITH
> AND MARXISM
> 
> The Russian socialists wrote to ask Marx for his opinion. He replied that
> his vision of the process, as sketched in his earlier writings, was not a
> universal schema, and Russia might have a chance of going directly to
> socialism if the peasant communal system in the countryside could be
> prevented from decaying any further. So (to oversimplify drastically what
> was the result of a very complex and intense struggle within Russian
> social democracy) the Russian socialists under Lenin determined to make
> their attempt to drive straight for socialism doing capitalism's job of
> expanding the productive forces along the way.
> 
> The problems were too numerous--the exhaustion of the whole population by
> the war with Germany; the devastation of the economy, followed by the
> civil war (at one point the Red Army was fighting on sixteen different
> fronts against the first contras, backed
> 
> by the western allies); the death of so many of the best Bolsheviks in
> the war; the growing use of violence and even terror in the desperation of
> the war; the formation of the political police; and finally the rise of
> Stalin through the centralized and authoritarian structure of the party,
> ending in dictatorship. There was also the failure of the working class in
> Western Europe to make a parallel, supporting revolution, as Lenin and
> especially Trotsky had always seen to be necessary if a revolution in
> Russia was to have a chance of achieving its aims.
> 
> The ultimate results we know. Few, if any, sane Soviet citizens would like
> to go back to the Russia of the Czars, and contrary to what is often
> imagined, probably very few would like to change to a system like the
> United States today, however much they may appreciate aspects of North
> American popular culture or envy the consumer society as it is presented
> on American television. Soviet progress in the space of less than seventy
> years, in spite of yet another world war, has been spectacular. They have
> gained a great deal. At the same time, it may well be that the Soviet
> system is approaching some sort of crisis arising from its own
> contradictions--the contradiction between centralized political control
> and the need for a decentralized, more market-based economy now that the
> Soviet economy has become as complex as it has. But this is not
> guaranteed, and in the meantime it is very clear that the Soviet Union as
> it is today is very far indeed from what Marx wanted. It in no way
> represents either democracy or
> 
> the emancipation of the people from toil. It is as everyone says--a not
> very efficient, hierarchical, secretive, bureaucratic grey and oppressive
> system (even though the USSR has also supported progressive causes and is
> not the expansionist "evil empire"
> 
> that the American Right find it convenient to pretend).
> 
> What matters, however, in this as in other spheres, is to understand the
> reasons. It was a Salvadorean who said, "...ideal revolutions exist only
> in the minds of those who have never had to make one." That is, the ideal
> conditions are never present.
> 
> There are several reasons for what happened in Russia, reasons that are
> not unique to Russia and that are extremely important to recognize. The
> most important is perhaps that the enemies of socialism are often ready to
> commit huge resources to defeating r
> 
> evolutions whether by direct intervention, as in Russia, or by
> destabilization and the use of mercenaries, as in present-day Nicaragua,
> Angola, and Mozambique. Also, those attempting the revolution are only
> human beings with their usual frailties, who have often had too little
> education, too little time to think everything through. They are the
> leaders of the
> 
> Marxism
> Yesterday and Today
> 45
> 
> oppressed and deprived majority, not of the well-educated few, but this
> can never be reason for not making the attempt. The same reasons that
> handicap the leaders are also reasons that oblige them to try--the
> impossibility of securing freedom, democracy,
> 
> education, and economic liberation for the majority in any other way. It
> was Engels who said, after urging the necessity of doing everything
> possible to seek power democratically, that the right of revolution was in
> the end the only really historical right. That is, if we have the right to
> make our own fate, we have the right to make a revolution when reform is
> denied to us.
> 
> Secondly, Marxist socialists today, like the Russian Marxists at the turn
> of the century, have to face complex situations, usually in developing
> countries, often with relatively small working classes. This means that
> the workers must form alliances with m
> 
> any other social groups, especially peasants, the lower-middle class, and
> students. In Russia, the Bolsheviks understood this but did not make
> organic, long-term links with these other elements, and eventually paid
> the price of having to suppress them by
> 
> force. To avoid this, a genuine unity, based on a genuinely pluralist
> approach, is essential.
> 
> Thirdly, after the experience of Stalinism, it is clear that the kind of
> organization you form to fight for socialism must try to prefigure the
> kind of socialist society you wish to build. The Leninist party--a
> vanguard organization under the centralized
> 
> control of a cadre of dedicated, trained professional revolutionaries--was
> designed as a fighting organization capable of surviving and eventually
> winning power in the special conditions of Czarist Russia. It succeeded,
> but at a terrible price--Stalinism.
> 
> Today, it is doubtful if such a party can succeed again, and in any case
> the price is too high to pay. Its tendency to lead to a new form of
> repressive society is too obvious. Something more open, more democratic,
> is essential, even in the conditions of
> 
> guerrilla war. It must be a democratic, caring, open organization if a
> democratic, caring, open socialist society is the goal.
> 
> This is once again a great oversimplification, but let it serve for the
> moment: these are some of the lessons of the first revolutionary socialist
> experience, and these lessons have been learned. To see this, let us turn
> from Russia in 1917 to Nicaragua today.
> 
> Nicaragua
> 
> Nicaragua today is in many ways a leading example of the way these
> principles have been adopted by contemporary Marxists--although note that
> only a minority of the Sandinista leaders and their party members are
> Marxists; also, there is no need to idealize
> 
> the Sandinista leaders, to claim that no mistakes have been made, or
> anything like that. However, their achievement is already such that for
> many Marxists today, the line followed in Nicaragua by the Nicaraguan
> Marxists, in collaboration with their non-Marxist allies, is a powerful
> example of the best kind of modern Marxist thinking. For example:
> 
> Pluralism and Elections
> 
> The Sandinistas have maintained the right of all parties to exist and have
> held elections in 1984 that were judged exemplary for fairness by all
> unbiased observers, in spite of the attempt by the United States of
> America and its Nicaraguan allies to make
> 
> it seem otherwise.
> 
> 46
> THE BAHA'I FAITH
> AND MARXISM
> 
> Collaboration with Christians
> 
> Without the socialist current in the Roman Catholic church, the Frente
> Sandinista de Liberacion National would not have acquired the mass base it
> now has. The socialists have welcomed the exponents of liberation
> theology. The foreign minister is a Catholic priest, Father Miguel
> D'Escoto, as is the minister of education, Father Fernando Cardenal.
> 
> Democracy
> 
> There is constant emphasis on democracy at all levels, from local
> community block councils, to the highest levels of the party and
> legislature. In this connection the right-wing media have tried to obscure
> the facts by gross efforts of misrepresentation,
> 
> especially in connection with the 1984 elections and the current project
> to give autonomy to the Atlantic Coast region.
> 
> Equality of the Sexes
> 
> There is a continuing attempt to secure more equality for women.
> Nicaragua, like most Latin American societies, has inherited a strongly
> sexist culture. The Sandinistas have worked to change this by giving women
> education, promoting them in the party and
> 
> in government, and changing the laws to facilitate women's advancement.
> 
> Progress on all these and other fronts has been imperfect, not least
> because so much of the country's slender resources have had to be
> committed to fighting the counterrevolutionaries (organized and financed
> by the United States government), who have behaved with a savagery that is
> seldom adequately reported (i.e., terror of the ugliest kind--cutting off
> women's breasts, cutting men's throats and pulling their tongues through
> the hole). It is the same in Angola and Mozambique. Economic life also has
> indeed become hard in Nicaragua--this is what the United States has spent
> millions of dollars to try to achieve. The question is whether the right
> of revolution--the only really historical right-- must be abandoned,
> simply because the United States of America
> 
> has the power and is willing to try to deny it. The answer given by
> Marxists is no.
> 
> In the First World
> 
> What distinguishes Marxist practice from that of other socialists in
> advanced capitalist countries? First, there are always problems of theory
> and practice to be resolved. Among thoughtful Marxists it is a truism that
> Marxism has been "in crisis'' for nearly a century. It has had to deal
> both with the changes that occur in capitalism and with real weaknesses in
> Marx's own thought. These issues were first raised in the famous Bernstein
> debate in the 1890s, and they are still being intensely debated today.
> 
> The German social democratic publicist Eduard Bernstein argued that Marx
> had been wrong to imagine that socialism must come through a crisis in
> capitalism and a sudden, radical break with constitutional forms, a
> seizure of power, or dictatorship of the proletariat. He thought that
> capitalism had proved its staying power; however, it had also shown itself
> capable of being reformed into socialism. He proposed to abandon the idea
> of revolution in favour of evolution--gradual change towards socialism by
> parliamentary means. This was later the basis of the split between the
> majority of the members of the old Marxist
> 
> Marxism
> Yesterday and Today
> 47
> 
> parties, who became social democrats; and the more radical minority, who
> formed the new Communist parties all over the world after 1919.
> 
> Today, the major western Communist parties have--with the exception of the
> Communist parties of Italy and Spain, in particular--often been
> discredited by their Stalinism, although Communists play an important role
> in several other countries, especially in
> 
> some trade unions. There remain two other main kinds of Marxist: those
> who take a broadly Trotskyist interpretation of Marxism and adhere to one
> or another of the numerous groups that are descended from Trotsky's Fourth
> International; and independent Marxists. By this latter category, I mean
> people who identify themselves with the cause of exploited and oppressed
> people wherever they are and who try to work within a party or some other
> organization (e.g., a trade union, a single-issue group like a peace
> 
> movement organization or a women ' s organization) from a consistent
> Marxian perspective.
> 
> This means different things to different people, but it usually includes
> the following:Aiming for Long-Run Transformation Policies should be
> judged according to their long-run effect on strengthening the ability of
> the working majority to take control over their own lives. This means, for
> example, that a reform is more valuable if it involves more democratic
> participation, if it strengthens people's awareness of the nature of
> capitalist alienation, class divisions, exploitation, oppression and make
> s them more likely to press for further fundamental changes.Seeing the
> Totality of the Struggle Marxists do not see the problem of
> unemployment in Quebec and repression in the Philippines as unconnected,
> or the issue of Star Wars and the United States war against Nicaragua as
> unconnected. They see the international links between all popular
> struggles and understand how struggle on one front is important for
> struggle on all the others. Thus, for instance, it is obvious in
> retrospect that the struggle in Vietnam was crucial for permitting the
> struggle in Cuba to succeed, and today the struggles in Nicaragua and in
> South Africa are similarly linked. The link is the worldwide strengths and
> weaknesses of imperialism.Women's Liberation
> 
> Marxists have understood--belatedly perhaps--that there can be no
> socialism, no democracy, economic freedom, or justice without the
> emancipation of half of the human race from domination by the other half.
> Therefore, Marxists press for affirmative action
> 
> for women in all situations and for policies that will advance women, both
> for their own sake and in order to add their energy to the struggle for
> socialism. This means that Marxists take a stand, in principle, on issues
> like pensions for women, maternity
> 
> leave, day care, and abortion rights.
> 
> The Marxian Concept of Revolution
> 
> I want to add something on the Marxian concept of revolution. The hallmark
> of Marxism is its insistence on the unity of theory and practice. At the
> age of twenty-seven, Marx wrote a famous note to himself: "Hitherto the
> philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
> point, however, is to change
> 
> 48
> THE BAHA'I FAITH
> AND MARXISM
> 
> it."2 The key concept in his theory of
> change became the concept of revolution. This is very widely
> misrepresented, and so it seems useful at this stage in our discussion to
> say something about the concept.By revolution, Marx meant transformation.
> The moment of taking power was only a particular step in the process, the
> important thing is the radical reorganization of society, the
> transformation of the social relations, for example, the abolition of
> private ownership of the
> 
> means of production, the land, the oil wells, the plants as well as the
> class relations, the income inequality, the educational discrimination,
> the power relations, the alienated political life that are based on
> private ownership of the means of production. This takes a long time and
> also involves a reconstruction of the system of ideas that is dominant in
> society. For example, instead of the host of the Canadian Broadcasting
> Corporation's nightly news magazine, The Journal, treating someone
> like
> 
> Yasser Arafat with aggression, while treating right-wing political leaders
> with deference, one would try to achieve television treatment of the world
> from the standpoint of those who suffer, are deprived, and are struggling
> for their freedom. All this takes time and is a long drawn out struggle,
> full of difficulties, mistakes, and defeats as well as successes.
> 
> This is Marx's conception. Nonetheless, the issue of taking power is
> critical; Marxists believe that the majority are entitled to use
> their political majority to bring about the reorganization of society.
> This poses the question of how they can obtain the power to do this. Marx
> did not think that the achievement of power had to be violent. In 1872 at
> The Hague, he made a famous speech in which he said that in countries with
> democratic systems such as the Netherlands
> 
> Britain, and the United States of America, it should be possible to make
> the transition to socialism peacefully, through elections. However, he
> also pointed out in other writings that this depended on the ruling class
> accepting the verdict of democracy. It does not rest with the socialist
> revolutionaries alone, and the historical evidence was already
> discouraging. The year before Marx's speech at The Hague, 30,000 workers
> had been massacred in Paris by the French government. This followed the
> famous Paris
> 
> Commune of 1871, when the workers and lower-middle class leaders
> remaining in Paris took over the city (after the government had abandoned
> it to the advancing German army) and ran it as a sort of socialist
> mini-state for four months. A similar number have been put to death by the
> right wing in El Salvador since 1979. In the last sixteen months to the
> end of 1985, at least 1,000 people were killed by the police and the army
> in South Africa for merely demonstrating for reforms. The record
> is not encouraging, and those who want to end the power of the propertied
> classes have to face the possibility that force may be ultimately
> unavoidable.In this respect, it is important not to be mesmerized by the
> ideology of the right wing, which invariably highlights any violence
> against itself and ignores its own violence against the majority. Not only
> does it ignore overt violence-- in fact, it sometimes even glorifies it,
> as in the case of Reagan's description of the Nicaraguan contras, led by
> the professional
> torturers and murderers of Somoza's National Guard, as "freedom
> fighters"--it also ignores the day by
> 
> __________
> 2. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach [1844]
> in Tucker,145.
> 
> Marxism
> Yesterday and Today
> 49
> 
> day violence of repressive regimes, the violence of starvation and stunted
> lives. Recall what Mark Twain said about the way people reacted to the
> Terror during the French Revolution:There were two "reigns of
> terror" if we would but remember it
> 
> and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in
> heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a
> thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other
> upon a hundred millions; but our shudders
> 
> are all for the "horrors" of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so
> to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared
> with lifelong death from hunger, cold insult, cruelty, and heartbreak?
> What is swift death by lightning compared with slow death by fire at the
> stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief
> terror we have all been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over; but
> all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real
> Terror--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been
> taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.3In reality today, not only the
> silent violence but also the open violence is initiated by the Right, not
> by the Left. The militarization of politics in so much of the world is the
> institutionalization of violence against the Left. It was not Marxists or
> any other kind of socialists who initiated violence in Argentina or
> Guatemala but rather the officers of the army and the police; Marxists
> have been chief among their many victims.
> 
> If force is contemplated by Marxists, it is because people are too often
> left with no alternative. In too much of the world today, the options have
> been cruelly narrowed by the possessing classes, supported directly or
> indirectly by the United States of America. In this respect, Marxists are
> no different from others who seek legitimate change and are faced with
> bleak force. The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa is a good
> example. Ever since its formation in 1912, it has followed a policy of
> 
> peaceful protest, under the influence of Gandhi. It was the ruthless
> violence of the South African government that finally forced the ANC
> reluctantly to take up armed struggle. Christians in Latin America have
> found themselves forced to the same painful conclusion. It was a Brazilian
> bishop who answered a question about his willingness to collaborate with
> Communists in the following way: "...the choice we have to make in my
> country is whether one is for life and against death. I am for life and
> against death, and I therefore fight alongside all those who are also on
> the side of life."
> 
> __________
> 3. Cited in William Hinton, Fanshen
> (New York: Vintage, 1968), 101.
> 
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> — *Marxism Yesterday and Today (Used by permission of the curator)*