SOCIALIST UNITY

According to Xinhua –

When Karl Marx famously said “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” he might well have added “…or as a musical.”

One can only guess at what the great political and economic philosopher might have thought of his best-known work, Das Kapital, distilled into a song and dance production — but Shanghai audiences have been flocking to see it since it opened last week.

Broadway musical elements have been adopted in this black humor story, which involves the audience in a critique of modern capitalism and the social realities of 21st Century China.

“Confronting current social realities, how to reinterpret Marx’s masterpiece became the mainspring for producing the stage play,” says He Nian, who directs the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center production at the Shanghai Majestic Theater.

While it may have borrowed the most famous title penned by Marx (1818-1883), He says the performance taps into and reflects a renewed interest in the work.

“Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ has run out of copies in some Western countries since the financial crisis in 2008, and a Japanese cartoon version of ‘Das Kapital’ has also became a best-seller again,” says the 30-year-old director.

High housing prices, second generations of the rich, and the financial crisis are the modern phenomena interpreted according to the theories of Marxist economics.

The production tells a story of an actor who plans to raise 10 million yuan (1.47 million U.S. dollars) to invest in a stage play. However, it turns into a capital operation after China’s most successful real estate tycoon and most popular comedian join in.

The actor becomes the performance company’s boss and the company is soon listed on the Nasdaq exchange. Standard and Poor even creates an “applause index” for it — the more applause the higher the share price.

Danwei reported the conception of the play back in March 2009:

Yang Shaolin, general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, told the Wen Hui Bao how he prepared the dramatization of Das Kapital,  together with Fudan University economics professor Zhang Jun, and other experts, They chose the  director: He Nian, who directed the stage adaptation of the hit martial-arts spoof My Own Swordsman (武林外传). (clip here with English subtitles of the TV version)

He Nian combines elements from animation, Broadway musicals, and Las Vegas stage shows to bring Marx’s economic theories to life as a trendy, interesting, and educational play. As Danwei reported:

Laughing at the doubters, Yang Shaolin said that more than a decade ago, when [Chinese theatre] was dominated by [the classics] and the Stanislavsky system, it certainly would have been difficult to imagine Das Kapital adapted into a play with “main characters, major dramatic elements, and profound educational meaning.” However, as drama has flourished in many different forms that make use of a variety of different ideas, the stage has opened up to the point that turning a profound theoretic work like Das Kapital into a play is no longer an intractable problem.

To director He Nian, Das Kapital and the theory of surplus value are serious issues, yet he wants to make them fun to watch. He will set the play in a business. In the first half of the story, the employees discover that their boss is exploiting them and learn of the “surplus theory of value.”  However, they react differently to the knowledge of their exploitation: some are willing to be exploited by the company, and the tighter they are squeezed, the more they feel they are worth. Others rise in mutiny, but this ruins the company and leaves them out of work. Still others band together and use their collective wisdom to deal with the boss….He Nian said that due to the different points of view held by the boss and the workers, he would borrow the structure of Rashomon to show things repeatedly from different viewpoints.

He Nian has always dreamed of making a musical, and music can be found in his earlier works, The Deer and the Cauldron and My Own Swordsman. Das Kapital brings his dream one step closer to reality. This time, he will bring a live band on stage, and the actors will sing and dance in addition to speaking their lines. Scenes from Zhu Deyong’s comic strips will show up in Das Kapital, too. “The particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marx’s theories cannot be distorted. We’ll have professor Zhang Jun and experts from Beijing act as academic advisors for Das Kapital to ensure that this theoretic classic is performed correctly.

The Xinhua story reports how Yang Shaolin, general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and production designer, believes that profit-driven capital needs to be regulated, controlled and supervised. After each performance there is a debate about current  financial regulations and surplus value allocations in modern China. Yang says neither the government nor the public have challenged the production and he is confident that tickets will continue to sell well. 

As bizarre as this may sound, a theatrical Das Kapital is not an unprecedented undertaking. Japanese writer, translator, and civil servant Sakamoto Masaru (阪本勝) wrote a mammoth stage adaptation of Marx’s masterpiece (戯曲資本論, 1931) that was translated into Chinese by Fei Mingjun and published in 1949 as A Dramatic Capital (戏剧资本论). Sergei Eisenstein had also planned to make a film version of Capital on his return to the USSR in 1932, but this project never reached a conclusion.

by Steve Arnott

Democratic Green Socialist

In the first of a series of essays begun in the bi-centenary year of the birth of Charles Darwin, Steve Arnott argues for a new synthesis of Marxist and Darwinist ideas, and that in the field of biology and human nature, the left needs to abandon some cherished myths and shibboleths for a greater degree of genuinely scientific understanding.

“Origin of man now proved - Metaphysic must flourish
- He who understands baboon would do more towards
  metaphysics than Locke.”

Charles Darwin

“The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”

Karl Marx

1. What has Darwin ever done for us?

Introduction

If the work of Charles Darwin, its implications, development and modern synthesis, have traditionally been neglected by the media, then, in 2009, the year of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, they more than made up for it.

Particularly in the television sphere (and most notably from public sector broadcasters) there has been a plethora of programming on Darwin. Almost everything has been covered, from the voyage of the Beagle and his observations in the Galapagos Islands to the vital and imaginative experiments he carried out at his country house to prove aspects of natural selection; from his family life and his gradual retreat from religion (he begun early adulthood with the ambition to be a country pastor), to analysis after analysis on the great debates and distortions his key work has engendered since publication. The comedian Harry Hill quipped on his Saturday night family show TV Burp ‘too many Darwin programmes on the telly at the moment’ – and got a good laugh from his live audience. It was back handed compliment – the old naturalist and his work had impinged on the realm of mass consciousness in a way rarely seen before.

From all these ‘too many’ Darwin programmes a consistent picture of Charles Darwin emerged, however. He was a thorough and industrious intellect, but no natural self promoter and certainly not an instinctive polemicist like his contemporary, Marx. He was diffident, and careful, in parsing his conclusions. As a middle class English country gentleman of means and an already established naturalist of note, he was almost painfully aware of what publication of his ideas on the origin of species would mean in terms of its challenge to the cultural paradigms of the day - the religious explanation of creation, human exceptionalism and, arguably, West European white exceptionalism (though, of course, Darwin would not have thought of it in precisely these modern terms.)

The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It concentrated on presenting Darwin’s accumulated evidence for evolution by natural selection (and sexual selection) in the animal and plant kingdom, but one animal was notably absent from the discussion – homo sapiens. Darwin referred to natural selection and humankind only once in hundreds of pages of text in the splendidly isolated sentence ‘Light will be thrown on man and his history.’

Could Darwin have had any idea just how all-encompassing his ‘dangerous idea’ – to use philosopher Daniel Dennett’s now celebrated phrase – would become in the sphere of human discourse and history, not just in science, but in psychology, politics, sociology and economics? Sitting in his garden at Down House on a drowsy summer’s day, halfway through the nineteenth century, perhaps jotting down notes from his latest experiments, could he possibly have had even a glimmer of either the predictive power or political potency of the simple, elegant idea he was shortly to unleash on the world?

We can never know, of course, but I open this series of articles on Darwinism, Marxism, their connections and possible synthesis, with the quote that heads up this chapter for a very good reason. I want to indicate that at least once - perhaps in the passing - Charles Darwin entertained the idea that the explanatory power of his new approach to the natural world was a thoroughly revolutionary one for human ideas and philosophy.

Similarly, I want to indicate from Marx’s own words in the second quote, that, if we are to take his own careful language ‘literally’, then Marx was well aware of humankind’s biological status and origins, and of the multiply thirled dialectic that is the human animal of the ego and the human animal within society: our ‘species-being’ and ‘social being’.

(more…)

Philosophy Football have produced a crowd pleasing Trotsky T-shirt in time for Xmas. So this is a good opportunity to appraise the historical legacy of Trotsky.

One of the most extraordinary achievements in advancing scholarly understanding of the USSR, and the experience of Stalin’s rule is the compendious work by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov “The Road to Terror” which assembles and discusses hundreds of previously top secret Soviet documents from the 1930s.

This describes the process of the growing use of state terror, and in particular how the causes were not solely the personal responsibility of Stalin: agency was dispersed and devolved throughout the Communist Party. The extensive use of violence came from a particular type of party organisation that had been forged in specific historical conditions and which then encountered difficult real-world challenges that triggered an exaggerated repressive response.

Getty and Naumov discuss the peculiar nature of Russian Marxism in the pre-revolutionary period. They reject the conceit of Michel Foucault that the language, patterns and interactions used in “discourse” create meaning – whereby language becomes the mediation through which historical reality is created as a social reality independent of physical reality. Nevertheless, while rejecting this specious and fashionably technical usage of the word “discourse”, Getty and Naumov nevertheless locate the historically specific experience of the Bolsheviks in creating a sub-culture of discourse, within the everyday meaning of that word: debate and discussion creating a particularly text-oriented belief system. As they put it:

“For the Bolsheviks before the revolution (and especially for the intellectual leaders in emigration), hairsplitting over precise points of revolutionary ideology was much of their political life. To a significant extent, Bolshevik politics had always been inextricably bound with creating and sharpening texts”

The nature of Bolshevism was to seek to create an ideologically relatively homogenous political party sufficiently socially insulated and self-referential to dare to overthrow not only the government but also to restructure or replace all of the civil society institutions that mediated daily life; and who were sufficiently self-assured to seek to form a new form of government untrammelled by the historical constraints of precedence or the rule of law.

Naturally, this political party was also immersed in day to day practical agitation, organising among working people, publishing and arguing with other political forces and therefore while in opposition was constantly having this self-contained intellectual world challenged. However, the messianic role that the party cast itself in made it very difficult for individuals to break discipline: they saw any behaviour that weakened the party as weakening the cause of socialism, indeed jeopardising the future of humanity, who without their success would be doomed to barbarism.

The experience of power was challenging. War and civil war, terrorism, famine and economic collapse created a brutalised siege mentality, and the language of the Bolsheviks in power became full of references to being “merciless” and “intransigent”, and of “smashing opposition”. As early as 1918 the Bolsheviks cut themselves free of any concept of constitutionality or legal process by reintroducing the death penalty by fiat, overruling the theoretically sovereign All Russian Congress of Soviets, (This incident was the cause of the Social Revolutionaries leaving government and taking up arms against the Bolsheviks – itself an irrational reaction that could only be understood from the heritage of Russian nineteenth century politics. As Randall Law describes in his very recent book “Terrorism, a History” there was a very wide acceptance of political violence in Czarist society at all levels.).

The ideological homogeneity and discipline that had informed the sub-culture of the Bolsheviks in opposition became an elite belief system and expectation of behaviour that bound together the party in power. What is more, party members were the only part of society immune to GPU (state security police) supervision until 1927, providing a demarcation in society between a political strata empowered to discuss alternative politics, and the broader population where any manifestations of opposition were anathematised as expressions of “white counter-revolution”.

Now of course, we do need to understand that the material circumstances that the CPSU leadership were operating in were desperate indeed; by 1926 and 1927 the economy was in protracted crisis, exacerbated by partial failures of the grain harvest, and the breakdown of trade with Britain and France; the fevered debates in the party in the 1926 to 1929 period, so vividly documented in Michal Reiman’s “The Birth of Stalinism” reveal a millenarian atmosphere; with factions of the leadership of the party locked in bitter conflict, while all around them society was falling apart.

After his exile, Leon Trotsky sought to present himself as a clean pair of hands. But it is important to remember that before his fall from grace he was the most ruthless of all the Bolshevik leaders; and that he had fully supported the extraordinary measures of “war communism”, had supported the violent suppression of the Krondstadt mutiny, had supported the ban of factions within the party. It was Trotsky who wrote “Terrorism and Communism” a coruscating and defiant defence of the use of state terror; and had advocated the conscription of labour, which made the Soviet trade unions determined opponents of Trotsky. He was removed from power after Lenin’s death because there was genuine apprehension among other party leaders that he might use his position as head of the Red Army to become Russia’s Napoleon.

Notwithstanding the sometimes brilliant work of party theoreticians like Nikolaii Bukharin in seeking to understand the complexity of the economic situation, and the attempts by leading party figures like Chicherin, Rykov and Tomsky to explore moderate and realistic options and to stabilise the USSR’s international trading position; the debate became polarised around caricatures and symbolic unreasonable positions divorced from reality.

For example, the left ridiculously called for compulsory grain seizures in the famine of 1927 ignoring evidence known to the party that the harvest was not being hoarded, and the crops had genuinely failed in parts of the country. The so-called “Kulak” threat was talked up to the point where people genuinely believed it, and sincerely thought that the poor and middle peasants supported the government in grain seizures. The myth of grain hoarding was to have truly horrific consequences in the 1932 famine. Stalin’s supporters caricatured all opposition as being the work of Trotskyists and saboteurs, developing a fantastical paranoia. The way in which all dissent was externalised as an alien and existential threat partially explains the fear and insecurity leading to state terror.

The Stalinised party in power developed three important attributes; i) a self-referential Weltanshauung or belief system rooted to the idea that the party itself was an historical actor with privileged access to truth; ii) a culture of demonising categories of opponent “Kulaks”, “Trotskyists”, “counter-revolutionaries”, that became symbolic concepts to pidgeonhole and depersonalise real life dissent; and iii) a leader cult, where the messianic historical role of the party became personified to an individual to whom loyalty was expected.

This is not the place to discuss the consequences of Stalin’s policies, but the USSR did achieve considerable economic growth and modest improvements in living standards over the course of the 1930s; and even the scale of repression was not experienced by many ordinary people as being any worse than the period following 1917.

It is important to understand that Trotskyism in exile developed in entirely symmetrical response, and of course grew out of the same soil. Trotsky, who while in power had brooked no dissent became a born-again advocate of party democracy as soon as he was in a minority. Each Trotskyist group has the same conceit that the ideological or theoretical delimiters which justify its special existence as a discrete organisation give it unique access to truth; the labelling of other activists as “stalinists”, or “reformists” acts to contextualise those disagreeing with the partys as being inherently flawed, and therefore their opinions are delegitimised and thus bureaucratic practices to overcome them can be justified (and a similar attitude is displayed to opponents of the leadership line within the party) ; and the Trotskyist left has especially perpetuated the leader cult, deflected onto the historical person of Lenin or Trotsky, but with an implied apostolic succession to the current leadership of their group. At its most obscene, Healy’s WRP paraded Trotsky’s death mask on stage; the Militant brought Trotsky’s living relatives to London, and the IS/SWP published the only theoretical defence of the leader cult that I am aware of “Lenin, Building the Party” by Tony Cliff. (Which as John Sullivan pointed out reads very much like a biography of John the Baptist written by Jesus)

The Trotskyist tradition has sought to unite around a shared belief system, and interpret the world through a largely self-referential and textually based discourse; so they are resilient at ignoring aspects of reality that contradict an arguably faith based political project. Concrete and specific situations in the modern world are often judged by reference to Trotsky’s writings about related but different circumstances more than half a century ago.There is a certain cognative dissonance among some “Marxists” who prefer the idealised working class of their imagination to the real, living and complicated mass of working class people; and prefer purity to the compromises and adjustments that are needed to make socialism a living political reality, relevant to the day to day experience of working people.

Indeed, while the official communist parties have, since Khruschev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU systematically sought to recognise and overcome this historical legacy; the Trotskyist left, certainly in the Anglophone world, have made no such reappraisal of the aspects of continuity in their own politics with the negative parts of the Russian experience. (It is worth making the aside that the Trotskyite tradition around Ernest Mandel were always more pluralistic, as Liam Mac Uaid has recently pointed out, but in other respects still bear the weaknesses of Trotskyism)

Trotskyism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Stalinism”. The identification has two further highly negative consequences: i) firstly to accept the Russian experience as normative – which is a very poor guide for political activity in developed liberal democracies in the twenty first century; and ii) an exaggerated emphasis on theoretical homogeneity and faith in the wisdom of the small group has had extremely bad consequences in terms of sectarian and divisive behaviour.

I have written before about how “Marxism” as practised by Trotskist groups takes an unscientific attitude towards verification; and that the material basis of sectarianism lies in the conservatism inherent in separating organisationally on the basis of differences in theoretical doctrine.

In science, theories become accepted not only on the basis of explaining the evidence, but also by a process of evaluating the impact they have on the already existing body of mature scientific theory. (Follow the link here if you want more philosphical justification)

In defence of scientific realism … we must say that theories that explain the empirical evidence must also conform to theoretical virtues, such as coherence with other established theories, completeness, unifying power and the capacity to generate novel predictions.

So is Marxism a science? To which I would answer it could be, but usually isn’t. If we mean by Marxism a social theory that seeks to establish its own approximate truth through examination of the evidence, and through self-critical evaluation of its own theoretical virtues, including coherence, then Marxism is a science. However, there must be a number of caveats. Firstly, that the development of evidence involves the art of seeking to change the world though political activity, and it is extremely hard to evaluate the impact of such activity, and what evidence is gathered is subjective . Secondly, the research resources of the Marxist left, including academics, are puny compared to the complexity of the society we are seeking to understand, so any theories we develop are likely to be only highly flawed approximations to the truth; thirdly the problem of organisational conservatism on defending false aspects of theories. When we take these caveats into account we can see the inadequacy of all those arguments that start: “As Marxists we should, or as Marxists we must … “

The last factor I mention, organisational conservatism is perhaps the most important. Precisely because the empirical evidence is sparse, or subject to other interpretations that are equally consistent with the evidence, then the question of “theoretical virtues” are of elevated importance. Alex Callinicos includes a useful discussion of this in his short book on Trotskyism, discussing the question of progressive and regressive problem shifts derived from Lakatos. If the consequence of a theory entails evidence consistent with an unrelated theory then this is a progressive problem shift, that supports a presumption towards truth-likeness. If however, defence of a theory involves rejection of parts of other mature ands established theories, then we are involved in a regressive problem shift (That doesn’t necessarily mean it is wrong as all theories are only truth approximations and can be refined – but a regressive problem shift should raise a presumption of truth-unlikeness requiring further research.)

Yet the various Leninist groups, the SWP, CWI, USFI etc, all derive their justification for separateness by defining themselves as having a coherent world vision based upon a unique or semi unique interpretation of Marxism, often deriving from very partial and incomplete evidence. How could it be different? How could a few amateur researchers, with scarcely any access to evidence, really develop theories that were sufficiently supported empirically; and sufficiently theoretically virtuous in the technical sense; to explain social phenomenon as complex as the degeneration of the Soviet Union? Yet on the basis of these differing interpretations, each of these groups has developed a distinct Weltanshauung that is largely hermetically sealed. For example, if we look at the theoretical writings of the IS tendency, they only refer to works within their own “tradition”, or to the old grey beards. The same can be said of the Mandelite tradition, or the Taafeites. In other words, the left groups deliberately eschew an attempt to develop a scientific exposure of their theories to a discussion of their theoretical virtues – again in the technical sense of what degree they are consistent, consilient, lacking ad hoc features, etc.

The heritage of Trotskism in the British labour movement has therefore been a largely negative one – that is not to say that individual initiatives or campaigns undertaken by Trotskist groups were negative, or that individuals are not useful activists. The Poll Tax and Stop the War were both important campaigns that owed their success partly to the Trotskyist left. Nor should we deny the role that the Trotskist left have played in inspiring and maintaining a cadre of good socialist activists.

However, they have also tried to graft an almost entirely alien Russian tradition of organising onto very unsympathetic British conditions; and have perpetuated traditions of intellectual arrogance, and hairsplitting. They have valued division over doctrinal questions as more important than unity, and have been prepared to wreck collaborative organisations or campaigns that do not bow to their superior wisdom, and recognise their right to lead.

To order Philosophy Football’s shirt, follow this link:

Every team needs a fourth international, though expect plenty of red cards for dissent. The quote is genuine, taken from Trotsky’s 1925 Where is Britain Going? the original can be found here though his prediction of an impending British revolution hasn’t proved exactly prescient! Available in sizes small (36inch chest/90cms), medium (40inch/100cms), large (44inch/110cms), x-large (48inch/120cms) and xx-large (52inch/130cms). CHRISTMAS GIFT-WRAPPING. With exclusive Philosophy Football paper and gift tag. To add message to tag type into ’special instructions’ box on the payment page.

  Small socialist organisations operating in relative isolation in the working class movements, or sometimes substantially outside these movements because they are composed almost totally of small groups of “socialist intellectuals” are chronically plagued with what might be called “Marxist” identity politics.  That is they are more concerned about “proving” to themselves that they are “real Marxists” than actually applying what Marx, Engels and Lenin taught which is to build real socialist leadership in the working class.  In fact, the further away such groups are from that objective, the more loudly they assert their “Marxist” identity.What passes as politics in “the left” as we have it in this country can degenerate to little more than a ridiculous I’m-more-Marxist-than-you pissing competition.  We’ve all seen this time and again with various little sects. More here from comrades in Australia.

Originally spotted on Louis Proyect’s excellent blog. 

Marcel van der Linden’s encyclopaedic investigation into Marxist theories concerning the USSR is both valuable and flawed.

Van der Linden surveys a staggering variety of sources, from across Europe and North America, and provides a dispassionate and scholarly account, triangulating between the theories to reveal their strengths and weaknesses, and also showing the breadth of debate that has occurred within the left.

Although superficially of only historical interest, Marxist approaches to the USSR have a continued relevance to how socialists relate Cuba and Venezuela today; and indeed to how they relate to the whole project of participation in state and municipal government.

The author surveys a bewilderingly wide number of competing theories, but maintains intellectual and structural order by subordinating the material to three questions: what was the place of the Soviet Union in the successive modes of production? Were there any essential class antagonisms in Soviet society as they describe it,? And what was the driving force of Soviet society? To some considerable extent this approach does work to provide a consistent framework for evaluating the theories.

It considerably strengthens the ability to assess and debate particular political theories to understand their genesis, and the competing variants. For example, supporters of Cliff’s theory that the USSR was State Capitalist often use this definitional statement about the USSR as if it settles the question once and for all; but locating Cliff’s theory as only one of several competing State Capitalist interpretations from the 1940s contextualises the political questions that the theory arose to address. The 1940s also saw State Capitalist theories from Natalia Sedova, CLR James and Raya Dunayeskaya, and Amadeo Bordiga among others. Perceived weaknesses of Cliff’s theory also have an intellectual legacy and there have been several rival theories that locate the USSR as some form of capitalism, for example the works of Jorgen Sandermose, Neil Fernandez or Paresh Chattopadhyay. I take the example of Cliff only because of my own theoretical background, but the same is equally true, for example, for the varied theories of bureaucratic collectivism, or those who hold that the USSR was some form of sui generis transitional society.

However, what is startling about Van der Linden’s work is the absence of any attempt to evaluate the ability of the various theories to account for the known facts about how the society and economy of the USSR actually worked. Instead the criticism of the theories is presented only in terms of arguments made by other strands of the Marxist left. Of course these arguments could be valid in terms of teasing out logical inconsistency, on non-consilience with established Marxist categories, but the test of the truth-approximity of any theory must ultimately rest upon its ability to explain the evidence.

Van der Linden also makes a rather illogical distinction of including in his definition of “Western Marxism” only those theorists who do not “regard the social structure of the Soviet Union either as socialist or developing towards socialism”. This is highly problematic, because it excludes the broader labour movement context in which the oppositional Marxist views arose – often in debate or competition with the explicit supporters of the USSR from the official communist movement, or the implicit assumptions about the Soviet Union present in much of left social democracy.

Van der Linden is rather inconsistent here, in excluding pro-Moscow thinkers, but including, for example, Charles Bettleheim, a Maoist who believed that the USSR was socialist under Stalin, but ceased to be so under Khruschev! Most significantly, the exclusion of informed academic writers like Alex Nove, or critical Marxists from the USSR like Roy Medvedev means that those writers whose theories were most rooted in the empirical reality are excluded.

Seeking to exclude those socialist who “regard[ed] the social structure of the Soviet Union either as socialist or developing towards socialism” should also logically have excluded those Trotskyites like Isaac Deutscher who considered that the economic and social base of the USSR was progressive, and reformable in a more democratic direction. Yet while Deutscher in included, Euro-Communist critics of the USSR, who in terms of a legacy in mass political movements were the most important opponents of pro-Moscow orthodox communism are completely absent from Van der Linden’s taxonomy.

I am labouring this point only to show that there can in fact be no clean division between those Marxists who supported and those who opposed the Soviet Union in theoretical terms. All variants of Marxism were competing within the same labour movement, and influenced one another even if only indirectly; even though they may have adopted politically opposed positions at various historical conjunctures, they also shared an overlapping outlook and theoretical tools – often more than they themselves were prepared to acknowledge.

Of course it is unfair to be too critical of Van der Linden here, he set himself a herculean task, and some selectivity was both necessary and desirable. But the inherent bias of the author’s criteria for inclusion was not value neutral, and to a certain degree skews the results towards more marginal political forces.

The question arises therefore of how we evaluate the worth of these competing theories. The philosophical question is how we decide which theories are more truth-approximate. In defence of scientific realism we must say that theories that explain the empirical evidence must also conform to theoretical virtues, such as coherence with other established theories, completeness, unifying power and the capacity to generate novel predictions; but they must also account as far as possible for the available evidence.

In truth, the theories of the various strands of Marxism had from necessity very limited ability to measure their theories against reality. How could it have been different? How could a few amateur researchers, with scarcely any access to verifiable evidence, really develop theories that were sufficiently supported empirically; and sufficiently theoretically virtuous in the technical sense; to explain social phenomenon as complex as the social and economic development of the Soviet Union?

All political theorising is necessarily partial and conditional, and what Van der Linden successfully shows in his conclusion is the process whereby political considerations, including the perceived value of maintaining a regulative narrative to justify organisational continuance and separation of small Marxist propaganda groups, were important considerations.

For example, the valiant and long term trench warfare defence of theories of a degenerated workers state by Ernest Mandel was based upon a protracted criticism of alternative theories – the result being that the core political position was maintained, but only at the expense of abandoning the original theses and argumentation that had justified the position in the first place, and resulting in a “theory” with no predictive power to explain events, nor to generate explanation.

In contrast, Tony Cliff’s theory of State Capitalism started from a point of principle that the USSR could not be a workers state because the working class were not in control, and because the social model was extended to other countries without a workers revolution. Cliff therefore decided a priori that the USSR was capitalist, and used every example of similarity between the USSR and capitalist economies to “prove” that it was capitalist. This is clearly not a scientifically valid approach to theory, but it did give Cliff’s theory considerable but selective resilience to embrace empirical evidence about the actual operation of the USSR, its economy and society, but only at the cost that Cliff’s theory was not consilient with established Marxist economics – leading to extreme confusion over questions such as the operation of the law of value.

It also opened a vulnerability for the Cliffite’s that they often uncritically accepted liberal and cold-war propaganda against the USSR as good coin; and were blind to the achievements in social equality, full employment and central planning that went hand in hand with the more negative aspects of actually existing socialist societies.

The attempt to understand the world, especially when that attempt is motivated by a sincere wish to transform the world into a fairer and better place is a noble one. The thousands of socialists who grappled with trying to reconcile Marxist theory with the actually existing complexity of far from perfect socialist societies was not an ignoble one.

The tragedy is that this attempt at understanding was often undertaken in the Mickey Mouse Bolshevik tradition of seeking to build hermetically sealed organisations around their own version of the revealed truth. For the most part each of the far left groups regard their own tradition as being virtuous, and all others as being tainted by political original sin. What is more, organisational pressures to maintain the prestige of the leadership, and defend the theoretical legacy of the group leads to reluctance to either measure the theories against reality, or to allow the theories to be compared with one another to test their theoretical virtue.

In this sense Marcel van der Linden’s book is very good in dispassionately dissecting the whole swathe of theories within oppositional Marxism, and comparing them with one another, and to be quite frank it reveals that none of the competing theories was particularly good at explain the reality.

Marcel van der Linden’s “Western Marxism and the Soviet Union” is published by Haymarket Books, US$20.00.

I am delighted to point out to readers an excellent new resource.

David Harvey, the Marxist urban theorist and geographer, has been teaching a course on Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1) to postgraduate students at CUNY and John Hopkins University for more than thirty years. This is a (slightly) famous course and several noteable Marxist academics have  taken it at one point or another.

This year, Harvey is making the whole course available online for free.

Each of the lectures, including questions and discussion from his postgraduate students, is being filmed and put on his website soon afterwards. The course consists of 13 two hour lectures. The first two are already up, an introductory lecture and a lecture dealing with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. The idea is that people will read two chapters of Capital and then listen to the lecture before moving on to the next two, as if you were taking his class in CUNY. If anyone is thinking about reading or re-reading Capital this will probably be of great assistance. Harvey is a very interesting thinker and also an engaging lecturer and he knows Capital inside out. 26 hours of lectures look like they will be a fantastic resource. The third lecture is due to go online in three days.

Here it is: http://www.davidharvey.org

Thanks to Mark P (The Irish one)