Recognizing the dialectic

 

Here´s a radical idea: Marxism didn´t lead to Stalinism. It didn´t even lead to Leninism. Nor did it directly lead to “the administrative state” or the “professional-managerial class”. But the code word there is “directly”.

Marx and Engels did support the workers´ movement, the Paris Commune and the notion of cheap government. They also supported reform struggles and bourgeois revolutions, arguing that this would pave the way for capitalism…and hence lay down the foundations for socialism. And when the “revolutionary wave” was over, they decided to wait out the next one from within the Second International. Note also that Marx and Engels had geopolitics strikingly similar to those of Germany (which just happened to be their native land).

Thus, Marxism “objectively” led to Social Democracy. German Social Democracy, to be exact. But Social Democracy was in its turn taken over by middle class strata, which used the apparatus of the labor movement to further their own interests. In *this* way, Marxism led to the dominance of “the professional-managerial class”. So the objective fate of Marxism was to be transmogrified into reformist Social Democracy. An alternative fate (more in keeping with the original revolutionary impulse) can be seen in Rosa Luxemburg and the early Trotsky (before Bronstein became a Bolshevik). In other words, the historical fate of Marxism is to become either reformist Social Democracy or non-Bolshevik/anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism with a family resemblance to anarcho-syndicalism. But the latter ideology is utopian. It simply can´t be implemented. So the heirs of Rosa and early Trotsky either become a ginger group on reformist Social Democracy, or a ginger group on Stalinism. Or both?

But what about Communism? Lenin was accused by the Mensheviks of being a Jacobin and a Blanquist. To an orthodox Marxist, these are insults. The Jacobins and the Blanquist are “bourgeois radicals”, they are “the far left of the bourgeois revolution”, a kind of middle class radicals who completely lost their material anchor point, freely floating around in classless social space. And the Mensheviks were right. Lenin really was a kind of Jacobin. So was Mao. Yes, they took up Marxism and may even have identified with it on some un-ironic level. But their real historical role was different. Marx *opposed* Blanqui and the Blanquists. Indeed, the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” was originally a polemical retort to Blanqui, who had called for an educational dictatorship *over* the proletariat by the (Blanquist) revolutionary minority.

Lenin and Mao simply reproduced the usual cycles of Russian and Chinese history. Russian history oscillates between autocracy and a “time of troubles”. The Russian revolution and its immediate aftermath were the time of troubles. Later, Stalin restored autocracy. In China, history alternates between Empire and millenarian cults rebelling against Empire…only to become the new Empire. The Communist Party of China encapsulates this to a tee. Of course, in the modern world, all societies will converge on the rule of the Professional Managerial Class. Thus, the Confucian mandarins are replaced by Communist bureaucrats. The Marxian idea of a centralized planned economy (which Marx and Engels wanted to introduce only gradually and under a workers´ government) becomes a bureaucratic behemoth, a kind of weird mix of the Scandinavian welfare state (or was it the Prussian ditto) and Asiatic despotism.

In an ironic way, the fate of really existing Marxism proves the materialist conception of history. Marxism recognizes the dialectic. The dialectic also recognizes Marxism…but not under circumstances of Marxism´s own choosing.