Manifesto: Place in Marxist Thought

To round up my three weeks of commentary on the Manifesto, I shall try and place it in Marxist thought. I was originally going to write a short critique of Marxist thought but it quickly grew to an unreadable length and so I have settled for this slightly less ambitious task. Thus this text is half criticism, half recommendations for further reading. Before I start on the meat of the discussion I should say that in 1848 Marx had begun but by no means finished his study of political economy and so we should not place too much emphasis on the relative lack of ‘economic essentialism’ in the Manifesto; the outline of history in the preface of the Contribution was substantially the same as in the Manifesto, but the economic claims were stronger. There is still, though, a rather crude and mechanical account of the development of ideas, in the Manifesto: ‘The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class.’ Taken literally, this means that Communism will only become a ruling idea when the proletarians have taken power, or worse, that it is already only a bourgeois idea. Marx does make room for immanent criticism, ‘when people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of the new one have been created.’ However there is no denying that what we might call the theory of ideology in the Manifesto remains in the domain ‘vulgar Marxism’. In their defence, it should be added that Marxists have a virtual monopoly on the sophisticated discussions of ideology.

A full discussion of ideology is quite impossible here, so I will leave it at the somewhat unsatisfactory comments above and move onto the main practical criticisms of the Manifesto. Put briefly, these criticisms are about the theory of politics, the ‘national question’, the role of women and the role of class. These four categories, I believe, can all be subsumed under three more general criticisms of Marxism in general, though I will not discuss these extensively here: the criticism of Marxist teleology, politics and once again ideology. It can be seen that there is some overlap; for instance, the theory of politics in the Manifesto relates to the overall Marxist discourse on politics, as well as the reality of socialist political praxis. Similarly, categories 2), 3) and 4) all relate in various degrees to both the Marxist theory of politics and ideology, though I believe it is important to distinguish the two. My final brief comment about these more general criticisms is that, though the central problem for Marxist thinkers today is the nature of a political subject, that is, a problematic of politics and ideology, the ultimate problem for Marxism has and always will be whether or not it is teleological.

1. The Theory of Politics. Ultimately, there is no theory of politics in Marx. Certainly, the vague practical recommendations in the Manifesto at best suggest that people should be pragmatic and analyze the concrete historical situation. While in the 1872 preface Marx and Engels have realized that simply seizing capitalist modes of production is not enough, and while in the Critique of the Gotha program Marx uses the rather enigmatic phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ there is still no real theory of politics. Lenin gets somewhat closer, in a practical sense with the creation of vanguard parties, and in a more profound sense with what might be called a theory of action, which Rosa Luxembourg spells out best in her criticism of the Mensheviks refusal to revolt on the grounds that Russia’s objective historical situation was not yet ready. Gramsci, however, has perhaps the best political sense of any Marxist thinker, with a theory of hegemony not unlike Foucault’s discussion of power. The precise mechanism for this struggle for hegemony, however, has I believe been best formulated by post-Marxist thinkers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their brilliant book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy looking at the way discursive fields become ‘overdetermined’ by certain hegemonic interpretations of words and phrases.
2. The National Question. In the Manifesto the role of nationalism in politics had a somewhat summary treatment. The Manifesto itself is staunchly internationalist, though it quite unconsciously accepts the nation as the basic unit of political organization. Similarly, in Marx’s day, there was probably little thought that there could be any hostility between national movements and socialist movements; though Garibaldi was a somewhat dubious socialist, the Fenians were considered kosher and had close links with Engels. It was really only with WWI that there was any conscious discussion of the antagonism between socialist and nationalist ends, though Benedict Anderson rightly points out that the Welsh miners did not feel unpatriotic when striking over working conditions. Much of the early Marxist discussion of the national question suffers from the then ubiquitous error in taking nations to be as old as time immemorial (nations in general not particular nations like Germany or Italy which were clearly recent inventions). Serious scholarship on nations did not come until the flurry of books in Britain in the 80s, the best being Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities and the collection edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger The Invention of Tradition. By then, of course, the writers had lived through the curious hybrid of nationalist pan-Africanism during the end of official Imperialism in the 60s. That this seeming paradox was possible was very suggestive for nationalist phenomenon.
3. The Role of Women. Here the issue is in many ways the other way round to the previous points. While the Manifesto, because of Engels, had a really rather feminist position for its day, Marxism has traditionally been somewhat hostile to feminist movements. Women, of course, were a large ‘standing army’ of workers to be exploited driving wages down and so typical intra-class rivalry no doubt played a part in this hostility of the working classes to women, though the transposition from ‘person to compete with’ to ‘women to compete with’ is both the locus of sexism and irreducible to class rivalry. Similarly, feminism was for a long time a middle-class phenomenon; certainly, the ‘women’ Mary Wollstonecraft speaks of are unmistakably bourgeois women, though this has been largely remedied by the theorists from de Beauvoir on. Things were largely the same elsewhere in Europe and in the US though Howard Zinn does tell a rather touching story of a meeting between Eugene Debs and Susan Anthony. The relationship between Marxism and feminism has always been complicated, and will probably continue to be so.
4. The Role of Class. Class is a surprisingly complex concept in Marx’s work as Lukàc’s History and Class Consciousness shows. The formula oft repeated by vulgar Marxists and their more vulgar critics that kicks of the analysis in the Manifesto, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle’, is I would suggest, by no means as determinist as many people say, though there is not space to argue this here. Much has been made, recently, about the disappearance of class, though if this is true it is a purely western phenomenon and there is much reason to doubt that this is true even in the west. There is a very sad truth to Warren Buffets words, ‘there is class warfare, and it is my class, the rich, that is winning.’ Certainly with international inequality decreasing and overall inequality increasing talks of the end of class society seem a little previous. On the other hand, some recent analyses have also led to a proliferation of new classes, the precariat, the consumertariat etc. These discussions are basically idiotic, or even cynically disposed along the lines of divide and conquer, but they contain a core of truth which all the successful Marxist revolutionaries (Mao, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Castro etc.,) picked up on. The truth is, in brief, the declining demographic role of the industrial proletariat and the persistent refusal of society to polarize itself into the two great camps as per the dictates of the Manifesto. On the whole recent left wing critiques have not abandoned class analysis, but they have stopped thinking in terms of proletariat/bourgeoisie and the new elect revolutionary class is the lumpenproletariat of old; Negri and Hardt’s ‘rhizomatic multitudes’; the billion new slum dwellers, the unemployed and those subsisting on the informal economy – essentially the demographic base of the progressives in Latin America. Goran Therborn has written a perspicacious summary for New Left Review. I direct those interested there.