The Marxist method
There is prejudice about intellectual thought in our society, boosted by academia, which assumes that the greatest heights of theoretical achievement are the furthest from practical politics. Whether these are philosophical questions about the nature of human experience and the fundamentals of ethical choice or natural-scientific questions about the origin of the universe and the structure of the atom, they all seem a long way from our everyday issue of what to do next.
But for Marxists, the very opposite is true. The question ‘what is to be done?’ is very closely linked with issues about the Marxist method of analysis – in other words, with questions of Marxist philosophy.
Why is this? Can we not simply get by with the kind of ideas about strategy and tactics that have already been discussed in this pamphlet – the united front, sectarianism, ultra-leftism, and so on? Obviously, these concepts are essential, but how do we know when it is the right time to deploy a particular tactic? The Bolsheviks, as we have seen, almost missed the right time for the revolution in October 1917. But, as we have also seen, the German Communist Party’s call for revolution in March 1921 was a catastrophe.
The bad news is that there is no guarantee. The good news is that there are two kinds of experience that can give an organisation the best chance of making these judgements correctly.
The first kind of experience is the struggle itself. A network that has many members rooted in the battles of the working class will have had to make these kinds of judgements, or less dramatic versions of the same kinds of judgements, over and over again. Its members will have learnt how to evaluate the moods of its own class, the character of the labour movement leaders, the nature of the police and media, and so on.
Roots in the class should inform the party about the most pressing questions for workers and what action is already being taken, and this can form the basis of judgements about how to respond. But this kind of experience is never enough on its own.
No situation is ever an exact repeat of the past; it always contains something new. And no situation ever interprets itself; it always requires an act of intellectual labour to explain it. Despite the old aphorism, the facts never speak for themselves. They always require interpretation. As Marx said, ‘if appearance and reality coincided, there would be no need for science’.
So a second kind of experience is necessary: theoretical experience. This kind of experience gives us a method by which we can interpret the struggle. The starting point of any such analysis is to grasp the contradictory nature of our society. We have seen at the start of the pamphlet how the need for a vanguard organisation arises from the existence of contradictory consciousness among workers. And we have also seen that this contradictory consciousness arises from the interaction of oppression and revolt that is in the nature of wage-labour under capitalism. This in turn rests on the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society – that it requires the collective labour of workers to produce wealth, but that capitalists privately appropriate that wealth when it is produced.
We see here, in simplified sketch form, a series of interlinked contradictions, each resting on the other, which run from the fundamental economic structure of capitalism, through the consciousness of workers, to the forms of organisation most effective in acting on these contradictions. But this series of contradictions only describes the most general, and therefore relatively timeless, aspects of the system.
To analyse a new strategic and tactical situation would need much closer and more careful analysis. But the approach would be the same: first analyse the most general objective economic, social, and political contradictions. Then examine the contradictory forms of consciousness and organisations that arise from these. Then carefully specify what forms of organisation, slogans, demands, and so on might be expected to act on these contradictions in such ways as to advance the struggle. Finally, develop the organisational tools capable of realising these tactics.
Lenin was insistent that only a ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’ could be a guide to action. In criticism of an analysis of the possibilities of revolution in China by one of his fellow Bolshevik leaders, Nicholas Bukharin, Lenin wrote:
I know next to nothing about the insurgents and revolutionaries of South China [but]…since there are uprisings, it is not too far-fetched to assume a controversy between Chinese No 1, who says that insurrection is a product of a most acute nation-wide class struggle, and Chinese No 2, who says that insurrection is an art. That is all I need to know to write a thesis à la Bukharin: “On the one hand…on the other hand.” The one has failed to reckon with the art “factor”, and the other with the “acuteness factor”, etc. Because no concrete study has been made of this particular controversy, question, approach, etc., the result is dead, empty eclecticism.
Lenin insisted that ‘the truth is always concrete’. In each case, generalities may or may not apply and will certainly occur and combine in unique ways. This is why a concrete analysis is always necessary.
At the point where revolutionaries took the step of initiating the Stop the War Coalition in 2001, we undertook an analysis something like this. We had already understood the nature of the new imperialism from theoretical work at the end of the Cold War, during the First Gulf War, and during the war in the Balkans. We understood the contradiction between expansive US military power and its relative economic decline. We judged, from preceding experience in the anti-globalisation movement, that there would be a mood to resist and that the left might not be divided in the way it had been in the Cold War.
The judgement, the analysis of the contradictions and the assessment of the consciousness of the class, might have been wrong, but the immediate reports of activists in the workplaces in the days after the attack on the World Trade Centre suggested they were not. The success of the first Stop the War rally in London, only 10 days after 9/11, proved it. Had it not, practice would have dictated a rethink of theory!
Crucial to this method, and what makes it essentially different from the normal method of science, is that it includes within it the subjective element. And this is not simply in the exterior sense that it requires a judgement about workers’ consciousness, but in the additional sense that it must calculate the effect of our actions as organised revolutionaries on the objective situation. It must try to tell us not simply what is, but also what might be if we act on the objective situation in certain ways.
As Lenin argued:
The objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process, the materialist gives an exact picture of a given socio-economic formation and the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the necessity of a given series of facts, the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for the facts; the materialist discloses the class contradictions and so defines his standpoint…the materialist would not content himself with stating insurmountable “historical tendencies”, but would point to the existence of certain classes which determine the content of a given system and preclude the possibility of any solution except by the action of the producers themselves…materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in the assessment of events.
In summarising Lenin’s application of the Marxist method in this field, Georg Lukacs wrote:
He studied in order to learn how to apply the dialectic; to learn how to discover, by concrete analyses of concrete situations, the specific in the general and the general in the specific; to see in the novelty of a situation what connects it with former developments; to observe the perpetually new phenomena constantly produced under the laws of historical development; to detect the part in the whole and the whole in the part; to find in historical necessity the moment of activity and in activity the connection with historical necessity.
And Lukacs concluded:
Leninism represents a hitherto unprecedented degree of concrete, unschematic, unmechanistic, purely praxis-oriented thought. To preserve this is the task of the Leninist.
About the author
John Rees is a co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition and the author of The Algebra of Revolution and Imperialism and Resistance. He is on the Editorial Board of Counterfire, and he writes and presents the Timeline political history series. He is currently researching the Levellers and the English Revolution.
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