Star Quality

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There's an idea under capitalist ideology that leaders are specially gifted. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be leaders, right?

There's also the corollary that when someone gets thrown out from their leadership position, their special giftedness always turns out to have been an illusion - and suddenly everyone knew it all along.

It's related to the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor - with the same corollary that when a poor person becomes rich, their poorness is rewritten as a temporary aberration - a brief failure of the universe to recognise that they deserved to be rich.

There's another idea that intellectual work is superior to manual work - and thus intellectual workers are superior to manual workers, and thus if a person is superior, it must be because they're a skilled intellectual worker. In other words, if someone is admirable, they must also be smart, because how did they get to be admirable if they weren't smart already, right?

When these two ideas collide, they produce an offspring: the idea that leaders are intellectuals. Thus Lenin was a great thinker, and although Plekanov was his mentor in theoretical matters, Plekanov was somehow less brilliant because, well, Lenin was the man in charge.

George Bush Jr was an idiot, and the left attacked him for it, saying a idiot like him should never be permitted political power. Which means, following the logic through, they were saying if he hadn't been an idiot, he would have deserved his power, and his policies been more justified. They were a lot kinder to the smart and educated Bill Clinton, whose policies weren't that different.

Now, it generally is better to have intelligent people than dumb ones in power, simply because they're more likely to understand the situation and be competent to deal with it. In fact that's almost a tautology, because that's largely what 'intelligent' means.

But to flip the correlation from "Intelligent people tend to make better leaders" to "Leaders are all intelligent" is a logical blunder a child could spot - and most do, before they grow up and lose their clarity.

Marxists ought to be able to see through this ideological trainwreck, but the reality is they can't. And that includes their leaders - who are always hailed as great intellectuals, and who always see themselves in that way.

Indeed, they tend to see themselves as great thinkers in all areas, whether they know anything about the subject or not.

Max Eastman was educated in science - Leon Trotsky was not. Karl Liebknecht and Nikolai Bukharin knew about science and philosophy - Rosa Luxomburg and Vladimir Lenin did not. Indeed, they both claimed to be uninterested in such matters - when they weren't writing about the errors of bourgeois scientists.

So of course it was Trotsky who spent hours shouting his "corrections" at Eastman, Lenin who remarked on Bukharin's ignorance of "real science", and Luxomburg who tells us Liebknecht didn't grasp Marx's philosophical insights.

While writing his aborted biography of Lenin, Trotsky found himself obliged to read Hegel. He managed thirty pages of Phenomenology of Spirit before giving up in exasperated incomprehension. This didn't stop him explaining the limitations of Hegel's genius in ABC of Dialectics - in terms lifted unattributed from Plekhanov.

It seems even the greatest marxists have trouble applying their insights to themselves, but it also goes for those who aspire to be leaders within marxist groups.

Those of us who've spent years sitting in rooms with a dozen revolutionaries know the type - the one whose ambition is to run their own branch (or party), who has a confident, decisive opinion on everything despite knowledge that's usually minimal and often just plain wrong.

I once had a comrade who liked to lecture on how higher mathematics and quantum mechanics proved marxism. Eventually I saw the one science book on his shelf - The Physics of Star Trek.

Sometimes I'm ashamed to call myself a marxist.

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The Masterplan

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Marx never got around to describing his method, though he planned to do so, but there are clues.

In the preface to the second edition of Capital, he refers to an article by an unnamed author in The European Messenger (May 1872, pp 427-436), on the subject of Marx's method, which calls his method "severely realistic" but his presentation "unfortunately, German-dialecical".

In other words, the author says Marx thinks like a hardnosed scientist, but writes like an idealist philosopher, indeed as "the most ideal of ideal philosophers".

Marx quotes the author at length:

"The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has."
(pp 23-24)

He then immediately comments:

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?"

So Marx says that an author describing his (Marx's) method, is describing the dialectical method - the one Marx extracted and demystified from Hegel, but never explained fully.

It's a long, wordy quote, but it boils down to two things:

1) Every economic epoch has it's own laws. There are no universal economic laws - that would be ahistorical.

2) There are "special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one".

So...there are universal, ahistorical economic laws, not governing economic systems, but governing the transitions between economic systems. And they have a teleology, because systems are replaced by "higher" ones.

It seems Marx really did think history was on his side, that the revolution was inevitable, that society really does have a master plan, and that he'd unlocked it.

Marx, the idealist.

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Class and Consciousness

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Marxism has an ambiguous attitude towards the working class, and its ideas.

On the one hand, marxism is supposed to be a theory of society and economics, history and the future, life as it is and as it should be, from the point of view of the working class. It could be characterised as codified and systematised working class consciousness.

On the other hand, we're told the working class doesn't actually have working class consciousness. Instead, workers have in their heads the muck of ages - the assorted contradictory ideologies and propagandas which served the ruling class at one point or another.

Class consciousness then is a matter of authenticity - only highly authentic people have much of it, and almost no one has much authenticity. And so long as there have been classes, people have been inauthentic. Which means, supposedly, we won't know what people are 'supposed' to be like until decades after the revolution. Obviously there's some residual essentialism in our materialism.

Class consciousness is what the working class would have if it could stand outside itself, seeing itself from an ahistorical gods-eye viewpoint.

The image of the marxist party as the 'memory' or 'soul' of the working class, or as the 'vanguard' or a container for the 'best' workers involves a blend of substitutionism (where the party is conscious on behalf of the unconscious workers) and a kind of messianism, where the chosen few keep the sacred flame which would disappear forever if they didn't tend it.

In "What is to be Done", Lenin wrote quite plainly that the workers are incapable of creating the insights of marxism from their own experience - even though the insights supposedly come from this experience. Rather, they need to be educated in what they should already know by people who haven't had such experience - forward looking bourgeois intellectuals.

This is at the least a condescending attitude - portraying the workers as children who lack the maturity to understand their own circumstance, and have been led astray by bigger children. Marxists then are the grownups who have to guide them back to the right path.

It also raises the question of how the marxists came to be the few grownups. Were they born qualitatively superior? Was their indoctrination into mainstream culture faulty at some crucial point in their lives? Are they just smarter and more principled by natural variation? All these answers are given - implicitly, of course, because they are very un-marxist notions - in hagiographies of marxist great figures.

The usual explicitly given answer is that they grew into marxists as a result of participating in struggles and resistance. Which doesn't explain where these struggles came from, or why the marxists were among to few to get involved. Presumably before they were marxists they were born proto-marxists.

There's another implication in Lenin's statement. If the workers can't create marxism, and people can only become marxists by reading Marx (plus maybe a handful of other towering figures) and engaging in struggles...then where did Marx come from? He seems to be at the start of one of Hegel's bad infinities, much as Freud supposedly was.

Just as Freud alone was special enough to psychoanalyse himself, so Marx alone was special enough to take Feuerbach, Ricardo, Hegel etc. and spin them around onto their feet.

Regarding the founder as unique, and justifying your beliefs by reading them into his words - these are traits of a cult, not the sole hope of humanity. But then, cults often do believe themselves to be the sole hope of humanity.

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What You Fail to Understand Comrade....

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A common idea among proselytisers is: "If you disagree, it's because you don't understand", with the corollary that "If we can make you understand, you will believe".

This is obviously rubbish. The church which persecuted Galileo understood heliocentrism perfectly well - they were just committed to not accepting it. Indeed, as the Marquis de Sade pointed out, the same church could easily believe its own doctrines without understanding them.

The opposite idea, however, can be true. If you believe in crystal healing, acupuncture, or transcendental meditation, it may be because you don't know enough about them to know why they're junk. If you study enough of them to see the vacuum at the center and still believe, it's because your faith means more to you than your reason.

But it's still a commonly asserted notion that statement of a truth necessarily entails persuasion, even among those who ought to know better. Marx himself in a letter to Engels wrote that Pierre Tremaux's sort-of-Darwinism only had to be explained to be persuasive. The irony is that Engels trashed Tremaux's incorrect thesis based on a misreading, and Marx supported it due to a different misreading.

Bertoll Ollman writes: "A correct understanding of Marxism (as indeed of any body of scientific truths) leads automatically to its acceptance". He of course inserts the weasel get-out clause that one needs a "correct" understanding - an incorrect understanding doesn't guarantee belief, so if there's no belief, the understanding must be incorrect. Which means each individual student must adjust their understanding until they believe - and that's how we determine when they have the 'correct' understanding.

Lenin noted that Bukharin didn't understand the dialectic. Rosa Luxembourg said the same about Karl Liebknecht. The truth was that Liebknect and Bukharin understood the idea perfectly well, and wrote clearly about why they rejected it. Lenin and Luxembourg also wrote about the dialectic, but never clearly stated why they believed it.

Modern marxists have a habit of patiently explaining to doubters the very thesis the doubters doubt. It might be more helpful if they respected the doubter's intellect, and presented some evidence instead.

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The Secret

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One of the defining characteristics of cults is their insistence that they - and only they - have access to some Great Truth.

Sometimes they differentiate themselves from the outside world by making the Truth a secret - forbidding their members to tell outsiders about it. The cult of Pythagoras supposedly did this with the irrational value of Pi, though in their case it was a Truth they feared as well as revered. In this case the Truth was also true, though that isn't the important thing historically.

The Great Truth is of course usually a falsehood, and not actually the secret the cult tell themselves is it. The notions from scientology of Xenu and thetans are obviously not factual, and are common knowledge. Only members have to pay to be told.

There's another possibility: that the Great Truth is indeed true, but a commonplace triviality, dressed up in obscuring new words and the constantly repeated insistence that outsiders can't see it, or refuse to see it. Indeed, they claim the political structure of the world outside the cult is designed to obscure it.

Alfred Lawson dressed up the easier notions of relativity - the relation between motion and frame of reference - as "zig-zag and swirl". He also wrote impenetrable books on how "scientists" were too stupid to understand "his" insight into how things move.

Marxists have the same attitude.

In an article called On Teaching Marxism, Bertell Ollman writes:

"The dialectic is the only adequate means of thinking (and therefore, too, of examining and presenting) the changes and interactions that make up so large a part of the real world."

A few paragraphs later:

"Unlike bourgeois social scientists, who try to relate and put into motion what they conceive of as logically independent and essentially static factors, Marx assumes movement and interconnectedness and sets out to examine why some social forms appear to be fixed and independent."

The same tired old strawman - "we have the special knowledge, no one else does, and it consists in recognising something screamingly obvious, which no one else can see". Ollman paints mainstream academia as incapable of comprehending that different disciplines overlap because the distinctions between them are matters of convenience, not eternally fixed and inevitable.

Everyone knows that chemistry and biology blur into each other, with organic chemistry, molecular biology, enzymology and other subfields differentiating the overlap - and obviously overlapping with each other also. No one would deny that some philosophical works tend to be read as works of literature (eg. Hobbs' Leviathan, Rousseau's Confessions), and vice versa (eg. Alice in Wonderland, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence).

Leviathan is also part of political science, and Alice in Wonderland is used by linguists - who would be very surprised to be informed otherwise by a marxist colleague.

If marxist academics can't combat the mainstream without caricaturing it, then the problem is either in academia, or marxism.

Darwinism, for instance, is the only theory of its kind to have any credibility, not just because of the mountain of evidence, but because almost every single attack on Darwinism is a strawman - failing to get to grips with the real theory. If marxists can produce nothing but strawmen, then they should join the creationists and inventors of perpetual motion machines.

Note that I say "marxists", not "marxism". I'm sure marxists can produce rigorous, engaged critiques of every aspect of bourgeois society. Occasionally they do so, but too few, and too rarely.

When a cult has a secret Great Truth, the content of the secret is irrelevant. It doesn't affect the running of the cult - though it's probably used to justify the way the cult is run. It doesn't serve to enlighten members, though it does make them feel enlightened.

It's there to be the thing which marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders - cult members and the enemies outside the group. Marxism has long become too much like a cult.

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Patchwork Retrotheorisation

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Karl Marx didn't have a theory of art. That didn't stop Mikhail Lifshitz writing a book on it.

It's not a difficult trick. If you want to find "the islamic theory of childhood", you trawl through the Q'uran and your favoured hadiths, picking out any passages that refer to children, put them in a list and treat them as notes for a book which the author(s) planned but never got around to writing.

If you want "the marxist theory of aesthetics", you assume as a matter of faith that
(1) there is such a theory,
(2) it's contained implicitly in available works on other subjects,
(3) it can be extracted from them, and
(4) it's well worked-out and coherent.

Four highly questionable assumptions. In effect, you assume the great marxists did unwittingly collaborate on a worthwhile theory of aesthetics...but they wrote it out of sequence, scattering it in fragments across works covering tangentially related topics.

If you're a scrupulous researcher, you'll remember the context the fragments came from and take that into account when interpreting them - and if you're not, well, that makes it easier to write the book.

None of this is to say such a work must be worthless, or that Marx, Lenin etc. had nothing interesting to say about art. But any project like "Buddha on family", "Hume on linguistics" or indeed "Lenin on music" should be regarded with great skepticism.

If I want to know something about geology, I ask a geologist. I don't ask a dozen haematologists, or read a dozen books by one astronomer.

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Engeldust

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Marx thought he had a theory of economics and politics - casting sidelights on history, society and psychology.

It's an impressively wide ranging theory - indeed, if only half of it turns out to be true, it would still be one of the great theories humanity has ever produced.

But that kind of reach wasn't enough for Engels - he thought he had a theory of everything. Atoms, societies, galaxies, emotions, reason and everything in between.

Lenin followed Engels instead of Marx. Trotsky and Mao followed Lenin. Luxembourg followed Trotsky, and now whenever we read Marx, we read him through the lens of Engels.

Seeing as Engels was wrong - both about the need for a totalising theory and about the theory itself - this is a problem.

So the questions are:

* Is this problem fatal to the marxist project of political change if it's unresolved? And,

* If there's a solution - a way to get marxism back on track - what is it?

I haven't found answers to these questions yet - these little essays are partly an ongoing attempt to find them - but here's an oblique stab at them.

Believing in a false (or meaningless) theory - if you act on it - is obviously not a recipe for success. If, like any major church, you kind of believe in it, and justify your actions in terms of it, but don't actually act on it, then adherence becomes an empty ritual.

A lot of people like their rituals empty, but are there any positive effects of the influence of engelsism (to coin a term) on marxism?

I'd say there is at least one positive effect, namely that marxism as a theory of everything is much more attractive to potential recruits than marxism as a theory of economics and politics - or even as a theory of world revolution.

The percentage of revolutionaries who want to make a revolution, as opposed to struggle for one, must be quite small.

But there's a flipside to this. Many are attracted to marxism because it provides a social support network for them - and depending on the stripe, this may extend to it being a closed cult, which of course is exactly what many disaffected people want.

Others are attracted to the liberal progressive campaigning that some groups do - as a way to hold the party together until a revolutionary situation presents itself.

Some like bloodcurdling rhetoric of violent overthrow, or the opportunity to walk in the road with a banner shouting abuse at the police.

These desires are obviously not mutually exclusive or fully conscious, but another one would be the desire to have a totalising theory of absolutely everything. They're attracted, not really to the theory itself, but to the fact that there is one.

Most marxists don't understand dialectics, and aren't sufficiently troubled by their lack of understanding to read the standard works about it - which is of course one reason why they don't realise how vacuous it is.

Indeed, most marxists haven't read Marx, or any of his followers. Some books are for reading, some are for quoting, and some are for owning. But it doesn't seem to impair (or improve) their effectiveness as marxists, so long as the cell, branch or party has a resident intellectual or two to set the line for others to follow.

So, the mysticism of Engels may - or may not - be a factor in the failure of marxism as a political project. But it's also probably a reason why there are so many marxists.

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