An Alibi for Pigs

Sir Tony Brenton, the former British ambassador to Moscow, writing in the Times on Friday, said that most people under thirty will be ‘blissfully ignorant’ of the nonsense of Marxism, which is apparently undergoing something of a popular and intellectual revival in the fallout from the latest ‘crisis’ of capitalism.

Under thirty I may be but I am assuredly not ‘most people’, having made a particular study of utopian ideologies, of which Marxism is by far the most repellent. It was delivered to the world by a bearded prophet in tablets of stone, grave slabs, really, for the millions done to death in the name of these commandments of perfection.

Marxism really is the road to hell. I’ve never understood why fascism is held in such obloquy, why symbols like the swastika are perceived with revulsion while the communist star is not. I’ve seen the traces of communism, the shadows, and the bones, it left in Cambodia. I see the traces indirectly. Among other things I’m reading Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick’s account of life in North Korea, which really is nothing to envy. Imagine the life of a termite. No, imagine something worse.

Apparently Das Kapital shot up the best seller lists after the banking crash of 2008. Perhaps you have a copy in your book collection? Have you read it; have you even glanced through its pages? Yes, I know: it really is awful, the dullest book ever written, the prose so turgid and heavy that it won’t rise from the page. I imagine it stands proud in many a trendy household, occupying the commanding heights of the bookcase, accusatory, imperious and forever unread, the ultimate word in superfluous value.

Professor Terry Eagleton, a sort of intellectual lumpen proletarian, a useful idiot of the most idiotic kind, has just published a book called Why Marx was Right, providing further proof, if proof is needed, that he and his kind have learned nothing and understood less.

Yes, markets are not infallible; they will continue to move in cycles, and boom and bust are features of free economies. But Marx was not right; he was bloody well wrong in everything, most of all in the contention that capitalism eats up its own profits and pauperises the working-class. Crisis after crisis we have had since Moses was interred at Highgate in north London, resting under an awful slab of old Eastern European monumentalism, but people are still better off than in the old dog’s day. Even in China, where Marxism coupled with blind dogmatism was responsible for unbelievable levels of suffering, free market capitalism has rescued the people from abject poverty, showing that history does not move in one direction only.

Marxism poisons everything it touches. As Sir Tony says, the civic spirit of Russia has still not recovered after seventy years of communist tyranny, which makes it all the easier for authoritarianism and corruption to flourish almost unchallenged.

Then there is the argument, he continues, that we have never had ‘real’ communism, that the revolution happened in the wrong places, that it will all be better the ‘next time’ around. It’s all fodder for muddle-brains like Eagleton and those who fly under his wing, a fairytale for the unreflective. The Marxist Utopia is predicated on the assumption that the world is a kind of cornucopia, forever pouring out the good things of life, ready to be shared with equality once the parasitical ‘bourgeois’ have been eliminated from the picture of perfection.

Time and again we’ve seen it; time and again we have seen the Lenin-style elites take the good things, always a scarcity, for themselves. People who read Orwell’s Animal Farm and see it as a fable about Stalinism are wrong; it’s a fable about hypocrisy and greed. Remember those wind-fall apples? The corruption did not begin with the triumph of Napoleon over Snowball; it was there from the outset. The revolutionary vanguard are all pigs. Marxism is the alibi of pigs.

Sir Tony’s article concludes with a reference to Hegel’s observation that the only thing we ever learn from history is that no one learns anything from history. Eagleton is a living reminder of this truism. Still, so long as we live in a free society, a capitalist society, we are all better off; he earns royalties from the mugs who take this nonsense seriously; I am under no compulsion to read this meretricious rubbish or contribute to his profits. In Utopia I would have no choice and he would have no income.

What is Marxism?

Let's reduce this question to the most basic terms. What is Marxism? Oh, I know what the standard answer is: it's a synthesis of German idealism, French politics and English economics. But at an even more basic level Marxism is no more than the intellectual process behind this supposed synthesis. Marxism, in other words, is Pallas Athena emerging fully armed from the head of Karl Marx in the shape of a nineteenth century Zeus.

Marx conceived and encompased in one mortal life a doctrine which supposedly explains the whole procees of human history and evolution. In this shape it is as absolute as the most doctrinare of Medieval scholasticism, because it envisiges and embraces the end of history itself. This, in all of its appealing simplicity, is its strength; and this, in all of its ambition and arrogance, is its weakness. For the process of degeneration, or, better still, the process of ossification, begins with the death in 1883 of the prophet himself. You see, while Karl Marx stopped, history did not. Clearly, with the master no longer present, the doctrine required interpretation and adjustment. The canon was safe for a time with Friedrich Engels in the role of Aaron. But with Engels's departure in 1895 there is no sure path left, no way of adjusting Marx to the continuing evolutions of history.

By the turn of the nineteeth century the German Social Democrats, by far the strongest Marxist party in the world, had turned the doctrine into sacred text rather than living practice, something to be visited on high days and holy days, and largely disregarded thereafter. It was Eduard Bernstein who recognised that Marxism, as it stood, was becoming historically obsolete, and was bold enough to suggest that there was a better, more modern way of dealing with the problems the party faced. He was attacked for his challenge to accepted orthodoxy by Karl Kautsky, the guardian of the sacred flame, though, for all his efforts, the theory became steadily more instrumental and less relevant. There was no one left to say, with authority, what Marxism was, and what it was not-at least not until Lenin took it in an entirely different direction from the Social Democrats-and from Karl Marx.

With Lenin Marxism moves in steadily decreasing circles; no longer the doctrine based historical inevitability and the mass party, but a doctrine of political action embraced by a self-selecting and conspiratorial elite. Lenin wins in Russia by a process that in no way corresponds to Marx's historical model; but political victory brings intellectual authority.

Alternative views, like that of Rosa Luxembourg or Julius Martov are disregarded, because Marxism has now become predicated on political success; it becomes, in turns, what Lenin, or Trotsky, or Bukharin or Stalin say it is, with authority always and everywhere derived from power, and power alone. In the end it becomes no more than an intellectual excuse, cynically exploited to justify the power and practice of the Soviet state. And so it continues, fragmenting and dividing, finding homes further and further from its origins, degenerating to ever more oppressive and ever more murderous forms. It is one of history's greatest frauds, a supreme exercise in bad thinking and bad faith; bad as theory, worse as practice.

Just Dictatorship

The notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' is possibly one of the least well-defined concepts in the whole of the Marxist canon. In terms of concrete political practice this was to have a particularly serious impact, because it is also one of the most central.

The root cause of the problem is that Karl Marx himself wrote far more about Capitalism than he ever did about Communism. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is mentioned for the first time in rather vague terms in a letter of 1852, where he suggests that it will 'emerge' as the outcome of the ongoing class struggle. It was to take another twenty years before it had a second outing, this time in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx made essentially the same vague pronouncement: "...between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation...Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

The problem this presented for those who followed was simply this: in what fashion or manner would this coercive use of political power lead to the second great element of Marxist eschatology-the 'withering away' of the state?

This core problem was to lead to some incredible intellectual contortions, with Karl Kautsky, the leading German Marxist thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century, suggesting that it simply meant 'majority rule', since the proletariat were the 'majority' of the people in advanced industrial societies. But the man who came closest to the truth was another German socialist, Edouard Bernstein, who argued that Marx had derived the concept from Auguste Blanqui, who in turn was looking back to the forms of dictatorship established during the First French Republic by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which, in turn, harked back to the forms of emergency dictatorship established during the time of the ancient Roman Republic.

So, the concept, regardless of the setting, always had authoritarian roots. The best that can be said of it is that, in the manner of Kautsky, in advanced capitalist societies the dictatorship of the proletariat would replace the 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie', achieving a higher form, in other words, of popular democracy. But what about less advanced societies like Russia, with an active Marxist intelligentsia and a relatively small urban working-class? We are now in the world of Leninism, of 'substitutionism', if you like, where the revolutionary vanguard stands in the place of the revolutionary worker.

For Lenin and his Bolshevik Party the working-class, left to its own devices, was only capable of lower forms of consciousness, usually centring on trade union struggles. The Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1917 might, indeed, be said to have established in the Soviets nascent forms of direct democracy, in contrast with 'bourgeois' parliamentary institutions, like the Duma and the later Constituent Assembly. But the Bolsheviks, in pursuit of their own revolutionary doctrines, were quick to seize complete control of the Soviets, removing all rival voices in the working-class movement, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks alike. In the end the Soviets were no more than auxiliary agencies of the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat no more than the outright dictatorship of the Communist Party; and the dictatorship of the Communist Party the dictatorship of one man. Bakunin and Bernstein were both absolutely correct

Karl and the Boar's Head

Well, here is a little tale that may serve to amuse: Karl Marx was related through marriage to the earls and dukes of Argyll, chiefs of Clan Campbell, whose crest was the Boar's Head, with the motto in Latin Ne Obliviscaris (never forget). His wife, Jenny von Westphalen, was the grandaughter of one Anne Wishart, a descendant of the Campbells.

When Karl and Jenny were married in June 1843 the wedding presents included a collection of jewellery and silver plate with the Argyll crest, a gift from the bride's mother, and part of a legacy from the von Westphalen's Scottish ancestors. Later, when the couple were living a penurious existence as political exiles in London, Karl tried to pawn the family silver. The police were alerted, and he was duly arrested, because they refused to believe that the scruffy German refugee could have acquired these ducal heirlooms legitimately. The great prophet of world revolution spent the night in the cells, before Jenny came to the rescue in the morning.

The Campbell connection also gave the down-at-heel Karl a very distant link with none other than Queen Victoria herself: for her daughter, Princess Louise was married in 1871 to John Campbell, Marquis of Lorne, the future 9th Duke of Argyll.