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Why we are Marxists | In Defence of Marxism

Why we are Marxists

W ritte n by Alan W oods Monday, 13 De ce m be r 2010

T wo decades hav e passed since Francis Fukuy am a published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, proclaim ing the definitiv e trium ph of m arket econom ics and bourgeois dem ocracy . T his idea seem ed to be confirm ed by alm ost 20 y ears of soaring m arkets and v irtually uninterrupted econom ic growth. Politicians, central bankers and Wall Street m anagers were conv inced that they had finally tam ed the econom ic cy cle of boom s and slum ps. Now, two decades after the fall of the USSR, not one stone upon another remains of the illusions of the bourgeoisie. The world is ex periencing the deepest crisis since the 1 930s. Faced with a catastrophic situation on a world scale, the bourgeois of the USA, Europe and Japan are in a state of panic. In the 1 930s, Trotsky said that the bourgeoisie was tobogganing to disaster with its ey es closed. These words are precisely applicable to the present situation. They could hav e been written y esterday . For the last twenty y ears the bourgeois economists boasted that there would be no more boom and slump, that the cy cle had been abolished. It is an actual fact that for decades, the bourgeois economists nev er predicted a single boom and nev er predicted a single slump. They had worked out a wonderful new theory called the efficient market hy pothesis. Actually , there is nothing new about it at all. It amounts to the old idea that: Left to itself the market will solv e ev ery thing. It will automatically balance itself out. As long as the gov ernment doesnt interfere, in the long run ev ery thing will be fine. To which, John May nard Key nes issued the v ery celebrated reply , In the long run were all dead. In the first decade of the 21 st century , it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has ex hausted its progressiv e potential. Instead of dev eloping industry , science and technology , it is steadily undermining them. The productiv e forces stagnate, factories are closed as if they were matchbox es, and millions are thrown out of work. All these are sy mptoms that show that the dev elopment of the productiv e forces on a world scale has gone bey ond the narrow limits of priv ate property and the nation state. That is the most fundamental reason for the present crisis, which has ex posed the bankruptcy of capitalism in the most literal sense of the word. The plight of Ireland and Greece prov ides graphic confirmation of the diseased state of European capitalism. Tomorrow the contagion will spread to Portugal and Spain. But Britain and Italy are not far behind. And France, Germany and Austria will follow them inex orably on the downward path. The bourgeois economists and politicians, and abov e all, all the reformists, are desperately seeking some sort of rev iv al to get out of this crisis. They look to the recov ery of the business cy cle as salv ation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders believ e that this crisis is something temporary . They imagine it can be solv ed by making some adjustments to the ex isting sy stem, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the prev ious conditions. But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at w hich capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a w eak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards.

The crisis of bourgeois ideology

Marx ism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels
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Why we are Marxists | In Defence of Marxism

we do not find a closed philosophical sy stem, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were dev eloped, would prov ide a v aluable addition to the methodological armoury of science. Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy . In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay , the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any ideas at all. Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalisations it denies the v ery concept of ideology . That is why the post-modernists talk of the end of ideology . They deny the concept of progress simply because under capitalism no further progress is possible. Engels once wrote: Philosophy and the study of the actual world hav e the same relation to one another as onanism and sex ual lov e. Modern bourgeois philosophy prefers the former to the latter. In its obsession to combat Marx ism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past. Dialectical materialism is a dy namic v iew of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 1 9 t h century , it is a strikingly modern v iew of nature and society . Dialectics does away with the fix ed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical phy sics. It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite. The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap has receiv ed a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its deriv ativ es. Chaos theory has put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductiv e determinism that dominated science for ov er a hundred y ears. Marx ist dialectics is a 1 9th century ex pression of what chaos theory now ex presses mathematically : the inter-relatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between entities. The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary phy sics. There are an infinite number of ex amples of the same phenomenon. The transformation of quantity into quality is a univ ersal law. In his book Ubiquity Mark Buchanan shows this in phenomena as div erse as heart attacks, av alanches, forest fires, the rise and fall of animal populations, stock ex change crises, wars, and ev en changes in fashion and schools of art. Ev en more astonishing, these ev ents can be ex pressed as a mathematical formula known as a power law. These remarkable discov eries were anticipated long ago by Marx and Engels, who put the dialectical philosophy of Hegel on a rational (that is, materialist) basis. In his Logic (1 81 3) Hegel wrote: It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes. This was long before the butterfly effect was ev er heard of. Like v olcano eruptions and earthquakes, rev olutions are the result of a slow accumulation of contradictions ov er a long period. The process ev entually reaches a critical point at which a sudden leap occurs.

Historical materialism
Ev ery social sy stem believ es that it represents the only possible form of ex istence for human beings. That its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egy ptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all ferv ently believ ed. And that is what Francis Fukuy ama wished to demonstrate when he assured us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called sy stem of free enterprise is the only possible sy stemjust when it is beginning to sink.

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Why we are Marxists | In Defence of Marxism

Just as Charles Darwin ex plains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and ev olv ing, so Marx and Engels ex plain that a giv en social sy stem is not something eternally fix ed. The analogy between society and nature is, of course, only approx imate. But ev en the most superficial ex amination of history shows that the gradualist interpretation is baseless. Society , like nature, knows long periods of slow and gradual change, but also here the line is interrupted by ex plosiv e dev elopments wars and rev olutions, in which the process of change is enormously accelerated. In fact, it is these ev ents that act as the main motor force of historical dev elopment. The root cause of rev olutionary changes is the fact that a particular socio-economic sy stem has reached its limits and is unable to dev elop the productiv e forces as before. Marx ism analy ses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the dev elopment of human society from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern day . The materialist conception of history enables us to understand history , not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cov er politics, economics and the whole spectrum of social dev elopment The relationship between all these phenomena is a complex dialectical relationship. V ery often attempts are made to discredit Marx ism by resorting to a caricature of its method of historical analy sis. The usual distortion is that Marx and Engels reduced ev ery thing to economics. This patent absurdity was answered many times by Marx and Engels, as in the following ex tract to Engels letter to Bloch: According to the materialist conception of history , the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of life. More than this neither Marx nor my self hav e asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into say ing that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase.

The Communist Manifesto

The most modern book that one can read today is the Communist Manifesto , written in 1 848. True, this or that detail will hav e to be changed, but in all the fundamentals, the ideas of the Communist Manifesto are as relev ant and true today as when they were first written. By contrast, the immense majority of the books written one and a half centuries ago are today merely of historical interest. What is most striking about the Manifesto is the way in which it anticipates the most fundamental phenomena which occupy our attention on a world scale at the present time. Let us consider one ex ample. At the time when Marx and Engels were writing, the world of the big multinational companies was still the music of a v ery distant future. Despite this, they ex plained how free enterprise and competition would inev itably lead to the concentration of capital and the monopolisation of the productiv e forces. It is frankly comical to read the statements made by the defenders of the market concerning Marx s alleged mistake on this question, when in reality it was precisely one of his most brilliant and accurate predictions. Today it is an absolutely indisputable fact that the process of concentration of capital foreseen by Marx has occurred, is occurring, and indeed has reached unprecedented levels in the course of the last ten years . For decades the bourgeois sociologists attempted to disprov e these assertions and prov e that society was becoming more equal and that, consequently , the class struggle was as antiquated as the handloom and the wooden plough. The working class had disappeared, they said, and we were all middle class. As for the concentration of capital, the future was with small businesses, and small is beautiful.
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Why we are Marxists | In Defence of Marxism

How ironic these claims sound today ! The entire world economy is now dominated by no more than 200 giant companies, the great majority of which are based in the USA. The process of monopolisation has reached unprecedented proportions. In the first quarter of 2006 mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to $1 0 billion dollars a day . This fev erish activ ity does not signify a real dev elopment of the productiv e forces, but the opposite. And the pace of monopolisation does not diminish but increases. On Nov ember 1 9-20, 2006 the v alue of mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to a record of $7 5 billion - in just 24 hours! Takeov ers are a kind of corporate cannibalism that is inev itably followed by asset-stripping, factory closures and sackings that is, by the wholesale and wanton destruction of means of production and the sacrifice of thousands of jobs on the altar of Profit. At the same time there is a constant increase in inequality . In all countries the share of profits in the national income is at a record high lev el, while the share of wages is at a record low. The real secret of the current boom is that the capitalists are ex tracting record amounts of surplus v alue from the working class. In the USA the workers are producing on av erage a third more than ten y ears ago, y et real wages stagnate or fall in real terms. Profits hav e been booming and the wealthy are becoming ev er wealthier at the ex pense of the working class. Let us take another, ev en more striking ex ample: globalisation. The crushing domination of the world market is the most important manifestation of our epoch, and this is supposed to be a recent discov ery . In fact, globalisation was predicted and ex plained by Marx and Engels ov er 1 50 y ears ago. Y et when the Manifesto was written, there was practically no empirical data to support such a hy pothesis. The only really dev eloped capitalist economy was England. The infant industries of France and Germany (which did not ev en ex ist as a united entity ) still sheltered behind high tariff walls a fact which is conv eniently forgotten today , as Western gov ernments and economists deliv er stern lectures to the rest of the world on the need to open up their economies. On a world scale the results of globalised market economics are horrify ing. In 2000 the richest 200 people had as much wealth as the 2 billion poorest. According to the figures of the UN, 1 .2 billion people are liv ing on less than two dollars a day . Of these eight million men, women and children die ev ery y ear because they do not hav e enough money to surv iv e. Ev ery body agrees that the murder of six million people in the Nazi Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity , but here we hav e a silent Holocaust that kills eight million innocent people ev ery y ear and nobody has any thing to say on the subject. Alongside the most appalling misery and human suffering there is an orgy of obscene money -making and ostentatious wealth. Worldwide there are at present 945 billionaires with a total wealth of $3.5 trillion. Many are citizens of the USA. Bill Gates has a personal fortune estimated at around $56 billion. Warren Buffet is not far behind with $52 billion. Now they boast that this unseemly wealth is spreading to poorer nations. Among the super-rich there are 1 3 Chinese, 1 4 Indians and 1 9 Russians. And this is supposed to be a reason to celebrate!

Class struggle
Historical materialism teaches us that conditions determine consciousness. The problem is that consciousness is lagging behind the objectiv e situation, the mass organisations are lagging behind that, and abov e all, the leadership of the working class is lagging ev en further behind. This is the main contradiction of the present period. It must be resolv ed, and it will be resolv ed. Idealists hav e alway s presented consciousness as the motor force of all human progress. But ev en the most superficial study of history shows that human consciousness alway s tends to lag behind ev ents. Far from being
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rev olutionary , it is innately and profoundly conserv ativ e. Most people do not like the idea of change and still less of a v iolent upheav al that transforms ex isting conditions. They tend to cling to the familiar ideas, the wellknown institutions, the traditional morality , religion and v alues of the ex isting social order. But dialectically , things change into their opposite. Sooner or later, consciousness will be brought into line with reality in an ex plosiv e manner. That is precisely what a rev olution is. Marx ism ex plains that in the final analysis , the key to all social dev elopment is the dev elopment of the productiv e forces. As long as society is going forward, that is to say , as long as it is capable of dev eloping industry , agriculture, science and technology , it is seen to be v iable by the great majority of people. Under such conditions, men and women do not generally question the ex isting society , its morality and laws. On the contrary , they are seen as something natural and inev itable: as natural and inev itable as the rising and setting of the sun. Great ev ents are necessary to permit the masses to throw off the heav y burden of tradition, habit and routine and to embrace new ideas. Such is the position taken by the materialist conception of history , which was brilliantly ex pressed by Karl Marx in the celebrated phrase social being determines consciousness. It takes great ev ents to ex pose the unsoundness of the old order and conv ince the masses of the need for its complete ov erthrow. This process is not automatic and takes time. In the last period it appeared that the class struggle in Europe was a thing of the past. But now all the accumulated contradictions are coming to the surface, preparing the way for an ex plosion of the class struggle ev ery where. Ev en in countries like Austria, where for decades the ruling class bought social peace by reforms, stormy ev ents are being prepared. Sharp and sudden changes are implicit in the situation. When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto , they were two y oung men, 29 and 27 y ears old respectiv ely . They were writing in a period of black reaction. The working class was apparently immobile. The Manifesto itself was written in Brussels, where its authors had been forced to flee as political refugees. And y et at the v ery moment when the Communist Manifesto first saw the light of day in February 1 848, rev olution had already erupted onto the streets of Paris, and ov er the following months had spread like wildfire through v irtually the whole of Europe. We are entering into a most conv ulsiv e period which will last for some y ears, similar to the period in Spain from 1 930 to 1 937 . There will be defeats and setbacks, but under these conditions the masses will learn v ery fast. Of course, we must not ex aggerate: we are still in the early beginnings of a process of radicalisation. But it is v ery clear here that we are witnessing the beginning of a change of consciousness of the masses. A growing number of people are questioning capitalism. They are open to the ideas of Marx ism in a way that was not the case before. In the coming period ideas that were confined to small groups of rev olutionaries will be eagerly followed by millions. We can therefore answer Mr. Fukuy ama as follows: history has not ended. In fact, it has hardly begun. When future generations look back at our present civ ilisation, they will hav e approx imately the same attitude that we adopt towards cannibalism. The prior condition for attaining a higher lev el of human dev elopment is the ending of capitalist anarchy and the establishment of a rational and democratic plan of production in which men and women can take their liv es and destinies into their own hands. This is an impossible Utopia! we will be told by self-sty led realists. But what is utterly unrealistic is to imagine that the problems facing humanity can be solv ed on the basis of the present sy stem that has brought the
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world to its present sorry state. To say that humanity is incapable of finding a better alternativ e to the laws of the jungle is a monstrous libel on the human race. By harnessing the colossal potential of science and technology , freeing them from the monstrous shackles of priv ate ownership and the nation state, it will be possible to solv e all the problems that oppress our world and threaten it with destruction. Real human history will only commence when men and women hav e put an end to capitalist slav ery and taken the first steps towards the realm of freedom. London, Nov ember 1 9, 201 0

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