Chris Cutrone

Letter in Weekly Worker 1045 (February 12, 2015). [PDF]

I would not call Mike Macnair’s historiography “garbage”, as he labels mine (Letters, January 29), because it is as good as far as it goes. I would only raise what Macnair leaves out, which I would not oppose to Macnair’s perspective, but seek only to add to it. Perhaps it complicates it, but it does not necessarily “contradict” it. I have tried to find what is useful in Macnair’s observations. He only dismisses mine. Fine, then: opposition it is. Non-dialectically and polemically.

If I were to be honest, I would have to admit that I derive my approach from Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet Reform or revolution? and related writings, and that I accept Luxemburg’s claim to be following Marx contra Bernsteinian revisionism and, later, contra Kautsky. As Michael Harrington quoted Luxemburg in his essay on ‘Marxism and democracy’ (1981):

“Marx proved that each political movement of a social class has a specific, economic basis. And he showed that all previous classes in history had achieved economic power before they succeeded in winning political power. This is the model which David, Woltmann and Bernstein apply slavishly to contemporary social relations. And it demonstrates that they have not understood either the earlier struggles or those taking place today. What does it mean that the earlier classes, particularly the third estate, conquered economic power before political power? Nothing more than the historical fact that all previous class struggles must be derived from the economic fact that the rising class has at the same time created a new form of property, upon which it will base its class domination. . . .
“Now I ask, can this model be applied to our relationships? No. Precisely because to chatter about the economic might of the proletariat is to ignore the great difference between our class struggle and all those which went before. The assertion that the proletariat, in contrast to all previous class struggles, pursues its battles not in order to establish class domination, but to abolish all class domination. It is not a mere phrase. . . . It is an illusion, then, to think that the proletariat can create economic power within capitalist society. It can only create political power and then transform (aufheben) capitalist property.”

If Macnair were to be honest, he would have to admit that he not merely disagrees with Luxemburg, but indeed agrees with Bernstein – and not Marx. Macnair has no use for Marx’s writings on the 1848 revolution, such as The class struggles in France 1848-50, the ‘Address to the central committee of the Communist League’, and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, nor for much of Marx’s and Engels’ Communist manifesto or Marx’s later political writings, such as The civil war in France and Critique of the Gotha programme, on which Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky based their perspectives. But the 1848-50 writings were dismissed by Kautsky as those of Marx and Engels “before they turned 30”, on the basis of which Kautsky said sneeringly that the “communist theoreticians” like Lukács produced a “series of absurdities” in a “childish game” (‘A destroyer of vulgar Marxism’, 1924). This is what Macnair accuses me of doing. It is consistent with Macnair’s approach, which Luxemburg called the revisionist “opportunist method.”

Macnair adopts the Bernsteinian revisionist method of the supposed linear-progressive development of “evolutionary socialism”, in which the “movement is everything and the goal nothing” because the movement absorbs the goal, and thus Macnair like Bernstein identifies the goal with the movement rather than recognising, as Marxists did, the real contradictions that emerge between means and ends, practice and theory, and social being and consciousness in capitalism. This demands a dialectical approach to the struggle for socialism that Macnair dismisses, as Bernstein and Kautsky did, substituting apologetics for Marxian critical theory. For Macnair, the struggle for democracy in the workers’ collective movement is a direct political line to socialism, understood as democratic republicanism in society. Anything else – anything contradictory – is understood merely as an error based on the purported competing principle of bourgeois individualism. Macnair thus identifies socialism with democracy.

For Luxemburg, such an affirmative and not critical approach to bourgeois social and political relations in capitalism was understandable, if not forgivable, for Bernstein et al in a period of rising proletarian socialist organisation and consciousness. But that can hardly be said of Macnair’s perspective today. What Macnair leaves out and seeks to repress about the history of Marxism is more important than what he says about it. He thus conceals more than he reveals.

Macnair is not a Marxist, but, like Bernstein and Kautsky before him, an ideologist for democracy. Such ideology showed its limits in 1848: hence the need for Marxism, which was not opposed to democracy, but recognised the need in socialism to go beyond it. | §