Steve Paxton - Unlearning Marx: Why the Soviet Failure Was a Triumph for Marx

Why the Soviet failure was a triumph for Marx

Why the Soviet failure was a triumph for Marx

Steve Paxton

Winchester, UK
Washington, USA

First published by Zero Books, 2021
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Steve Paxton 2019

ISBN: 978 1 78904 541 3
978 1 78904 542 0 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956262

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Its probably not uncommon for specialists in any field to feel that their subject is misunderstood by the public at large. Few people or ideas, though, can have been as consistently and grotesquely misrepresented as Karl Marx and historical materialism. There is nothing new in this the right has always had a vested interest in misrepresenting Marx and his ideas but the current propaganda campaign even outstrips the hysteria at the height of the cold war, if not in volume, then certainly in the level of absurdity. (One facet of this debate, the tendency to ascribe a random number of millions of deaths to the work of Marx, is so absurd that it ought not to have a place in any serious work, and yet such is its currency in contemporary dialogue that it cant be ignored. Ive added an appendix to the end of this book to deal with this issue.) So the first sense in which we need to unlearn Marx is that as a society we need the idea of Marx to not induce a knee-jerk reaction based on misinformation. People dont need to agree with Marx, but it would help us all and it would help the collective, society-wide conversation about where were going if more people had a reasonable notion of his ideas.

But this book is not just aimed at the right, or the casual observer who has heard fantastical tales. I think we on the left have some unlearning to do too. Many people, when discovering the world and finding their place in the political arena, observe the injustices of capitalism and are drawn to discover what alternatives might be out there. When they come across Marx its almost always through the prism of the Soviet Union, and the work of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin, everyone can agree, is not someone you want to set up as your mentor, but Lenin died before Stalin began his atrocities, and Trotsky was exiled and eventually murdered by Stalins agents so they can safely be cleared of involvement in Stalins excesses. Because of these historical circumstances, many peoples introduction to Marx comes through what Lenin and Trotsky had to say about his work. This isnt necessarily the wrong way to read Marx, but neither is it the only way. Lenin and Trotsky were both caught up in a great social upheaval, and they were central characters in it. Of course, they read Marx from a different perspective to that which is available to us now. So one part of unlearning Marx is learning to forget what Lenin and Trotsky had to say and to try to read Marx without their help.

One of the consequences of the influence of Lenin and Trotsky is that many people come to Marx from a political perspective. They were primarily political actors, leading a great revolution and creating a new regime across a vast empire. This political angle is further enhanced because the first Marx that most people read is The Communist Manifesto . Its famous, its short and its less dense than a lot of Marxs other work. But its not really what Marx was about. He and Engels were commissioned to write it. Engels wrote most of it and although it was heavily edited and rewritten by Marx the whole thing was a rush and it was produced as a reaction to the revolutions happening around them in Europe in 1848. It was a call to arms, a political pamphlet the work of Marx the journalist rather than Marx the thinker. Marxs other widely known work is his three volume Capital . This analysis of the economic mechanisms of capitalism has provided the other central plank of Marxist thought, though its too dense and too technical (and too repetitive) for the casual reader. While most approaches to Marx focus on the political polemics as interpreted, developed and adapted by Lenin and Trotsky or on the economics as laid out in Capital , here I want to focus on Marxs theory of history. For it is there, I will argue, that we find the most valuable lessons in terms of what Marx can teach us about where we are now, how we got here and where were going next.

The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. The suggestion that the failure of the Soviet project provides favourable evidence in support of Marxs work is at least confusing for most, and beyond belief for others. And yet its true. Not through some convoluted, revisionist, cherry-picking of odd fragments taken out of context, but just through reading what Marx actually wrote. When it comes to Marx and the Soviet Union, theres no shortage of well-worn, hand-me-down propaganda. But widespread belief doesnt make something true. The truth is this: Had the Soviets succeeded in building a socialist utopia, that news would have been welcomed by socialists, and no doubt by Marxists too, but it would have required conscientious Marxists to revise that allegiance, since such an outcome would have delivered a fatal blow to important Marxian

This book covers a lot of ground, and most of that ground has been the subject of extensive campaigns of misinformation, so the aim here is to establish a factual basis upon which to conduct an informed discussion of the subject matter, rather than the kangaroo court in which Marx is so often tried in his absence. The charge is relatively straightforward. The argument runs that the failure of the Soviet Union and various other attempts to create socialism illustrate that socialism can never work. That there is something inherent in socialist ideals that will inevitably come into conflict with human nature and lead to collapse at best, mass murder at worst.

There are convincing arguments which the socialist can bring to bear against this charge, and these too are fairly straightforward and indeed are compelling not just for socialists, but for many others who appreciate well-reasoned arguments and historical evidence. But there is also a set of specifically Marxian responses to the charge, based on Marxs approach to historical change. These responses go further than the socialist response because they set the argument in the context of a theory of history and allow us to develop an understanding of what the Soviet experience actually means in a world-historical context. Attempts to understand the Soviet experience from a Marxian perspective have largely focused on the concept of the USSR as an example of state capitalism. The discussion of Marxs conception of capitalism in Part 2 will illustrate the fatal flaws with such an explanation. Other studies have focused on the economic structure in the Soviet period and centred around questions such as the relationship of the bureaucracy to the workers. This is a valuable approach, but one which I wont pursue here. Rather than addressing the exact nature of the Soviet economic structure, Ill examine the role of the Soviet Union in Marxs concept of historical change. The argument I present places some conceptual limitations on what the economic structure could be, but is not prescriptive on this matter in any but the broadest sense. It may be more accurate to say that in this context Im inflexible only in terms of what the Soviet Union was not.