Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture

Jones Manoel

2020‑11‑08

There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the influence of religion on these political movements and the national adaptation of Marxism. When any Marxist researcher studies, for example, Chinese Marxism, they are obliged to address the influence of Confucius’ philosophy on Chinese culture in a general manner and on Chinese Marxism in particular. Likewise, the influence that Islam has on many African countries is always taken into account in analysis of socialist nations such as Algeria.

When the time comes to look at Marxism in Western politics, however, the influence of Christianity in the construction of the symbolic, subjective and theoretical universe of this Marxism is rarely taken into account. It is as if in Asia, Confucianism has an influence on politics, in Africa, Islam has an influence on politics, but in Brazil, in the US, in France, in Portugal, Christianity does not perform a similar role in forming historic subjectivity. This is a mistake for a very simple and objective reason, which Antonio Gramsci points out in several different passages of Prison Notebooks: the Catholic Church is the longest operating institution in the West. No other institution has managed to stay alive for so long with the capacity to disseminate and circulate ideas and concepts, through a body of intellectual priests, bishops and theologians, organized within a bureaucracy like the Catholic Church has. So it is impossible to speak seriously about Marxism, politics, subjectivity, culture, and the symbolic field in the West without incorporating the role of Christianity in each social formation, in each specific country as elements of analysis.

I believe it is impossible to understand the phenomenon that is poorly described as “populism” (a term which I do not use), of this relationship of the popular classes with people like Lula, Getúlio Vargas, Miguel Arraes, Brizola, Perón, Velasco Ibarra, and Hugo Chávez without understanding the basic configurations of the Catholic relationship between devotees and saints. Obviously this is not the only explanation, but there is a symbolic element in the political structure of this relationship. I have been thinking about this for a long time. It is not my idea — Domenico Losurdo and Roland Boer have written about how the fetish for defeat is one of the fundamental characteristics of Western Marxism and how this is a misunderstood derivative of Christian culture.

First, let us discuss a large tendency in western marxism. According to Perry Anderson there is a separation between Western and Eastern Marxism, and Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba and so forth. This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth — this is a very important point. Wherever a victorious socialist revolution has taken place in the West, like Cuba, it is much more closely associated with the so-called eastern Marxism than with this western Marxism produced in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and parts of South America. This Marxism is proud of its purity, and this is the first elemental characteristic that derives from Christianity.

Gramsci shows that one of the main historical concerns of the Catholic Church has been to control the reading and the diffusion of Christianity, blocking the rise and spread of popular, autonomous and base level interpretations and thereby saving the purity of the historic doctrine. Therefore, the Catholic Church can say that Christianity is love, equality, loving thy neighbor, compassion and non-violence, despite the fact that it has been a fundamental weapon in the legitimization of slavery, the crusades and colonialism, and despite the coziness of various elements of the Catholic Church with Nazi-fascism and the military dictatorships. There is a constant throughout the entire history of Christianity which is that these elements don’t corrupt the doctrine. They are either false expressions of Christianity, or they are facts, like potatoes in a sack, that have no theoretical, political or, most importantly, theological meaning. So, the fact that history denies the affirmation that Christianity is based on compassion and peace does not change or challenge the doctrine.

Many Marxists act the same way. Their biggest worry is the purity of the doctrine. Every time that historical facts challenge the doctrine or show the complexity of the practical operationality of elements of the theory, they deny that these elements are part of the story of Marxist theory and doctrine. This is, for example, what doctrines of betrayal are built on. Every movement that appears to stray a bit from these “pure” models that were created a priori is explained through the concept of betrayal, or is explained as “state capitalism.” Therefore, nothing is socialism and everything is state capitalism. Nothing is socialist transition and everything is state capitalism. The revolution is only a revolution during that glorious moment of taking political power. Revolution is always a political process which has two moments: a moment of destruction of the old capitalist order and taking power, and a moment of building a new order. Starting from the moment of building a new social order, it’s over. The contradictions, the problems, the failures, the mistakes, sometimes even the crimes, mainly happen during this moment of building the new order. So when the time comes to evaluate the building of a new social order — which is where, apparently, the practice always appears to stray from the purity of theory — the specific appears corrupted in the face of the universal. It is at this point that the idea of betrayal is evoked, that the idea of counter revolution is evoked, and that the idea of State Capitalism appears in order to preserve the purity of theory.

A great example of this was when the Soviet Union entered its process of terminal crisis. As the end of the Soviet Union approached many western Marxists announced that it was a great event in the history of Marxism because finally Marxism was liberated from that experiment that was born during the October Revolution, that distorted Marxism, that transformed Marxism into a mere State ideology. Now, without having to explain the ball and chain of the Soviet Union, Marxism could finally be liberated and reach its emancipatory potential.

READ ON

To Be Or Not To Be Marxist?

By Michael Albert

January 23, 2024

Z Article
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Velvet, Creative Commons 4.0

LONG READ



A recent Jacobin article about how Karl Marx first got radicalized included these two sentences: “Today, many young people are marching leftward in [Marx’s] footsteps from a passion for freedom to a critique of capitalism. But unlike Marx, they have the whole tradition of Marxism to guide them.”

Will taking the “whole tradition of Marxism” as their guide reveal to “young people marching leftward” the critical, essential elements of their circumstances they will need to navigate to best win a better society? Police violence. Abortion denial. Accelerating inequality. Climate collapse. War. Fascism. And more. To react effectively, should we immerse ourselves in Marxist texts?

Weeks, months, years, and decades come and go. Left “scholars” periodically proclaim “Marx said it. Marx knew it. Marx taught it. To win a better world, we should channel Marx’s Collected Works. We should be guided by the whole Marxist tradition.” But is it true that if we don’t seriously study Marx to learn his old answers to our current questions—and if we don’t seriously study Lenin and Trotsky too to learn their answers as well—then our knowledge, preparation, and thinking will not successfully advance our needs and desires?

The bearded big man, the optimistic oracle, the grandest grand teacher, the most famous flag bearer himself wrote “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Non-Marxologists might think Marx must have been referring to the effect of the tradition of dead generations on reactionaries who wish to return to the past. It turns out, however, that reading further we find that reactionaries weren’t Marx’s target: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time honored disguise and borrowed language.”

So it was revolutionaries, not reactionaries, that Marx was eloquently castigating for borrowing “names, battle slogans, and costumes” from the past in order to present the present in “honored disguise and borrowed language” until we find that over and over, today is costumed as if it was yesterday, and this is done, ironically, by those claiming to seek tomorrow.

Some will say I exaggerate the problem. Perhaps, but then did Marx exaggerate it too? Suppose you think you operate in the tradition of some dead thinker. Should you proclaim it? Should you footnote it? Should you urge your preferred old texts on others? What is a committed comrade to do?

When asked that question, my first observation is that there is no need to display your lineage, much less to trumpet it even if your claimed lineage is brilliant. What matters instead is to make clear what you yourself believe and to show why you believe it using your own words of today. Can’t we agree that here is rarely need to quote dead men’s words and most especially that there is never reason to treat dead men’s words like scripture, as if simply quoting such words provides an argument or evidence. Instead, to convey our own passion on behalf of our own aims while we also attend to the expectations, fears, and experiences of those we address, why not present relevant experiences and logical connections in our own contemporary words as evidenced in our own contemporary times?

Consider a person, probably a guy, who repeatedly quotes Marx and advises reading Marx (or some other long gone icon) to make some point about contemporary relations much less about contemporary means or aims. Imagine hearing or watching him. Doesn’t he too often seem more concerned to get his audience to genuflect to Marx or more concerned to demonstrate his own allegiance to Marx than he is concerned to help larger, undecided audiences consider for themselves current observations based on current evidence and reasoning? In short, doesn’t to quote from the past often mask contemporary communicative poverty? Doesn’t it sometimes appeal to some dead author’s authority, which in turn risks a slip-slide toward sectarian conformity?

Why not instead take Marx’s own advice and let “dead generations” rest in peace? Why not avoid “nightmarish” mimicry? Why not stop “borrowing” and instead create?

Please note, so far I haven’t offered a word of critique of Marxism itself. Not a word. Instead the above observations are about how to communicate substance, not about the merits of the substance to be communicated. But to now assess Marxism’s substance, consider the harsh claim that the goal of struggle in every Marxist text that offers a serious economic or societal vision is an economy that elevates about twenty percent of its population to ruling class status and that also retains patriarchy, racism, and political authoritarianism, not to mention continuing to excessively spew pollution. Is that claim true? Consider that when Marxist movements have actually guided revolutions, those revolutions have delivered societies with just those horribly flawed features. Does this aspect of Marxist tradition matter? Do these outcomes exist consistently with and not despite Marxism’s concepts?

Many Marxists reply that such implications are nonsense. They say every genuine Marxist’s goal is mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom. And I agree that that is what Marx and most Marxists desire. But then I add that despite those undeniable personal desires, in practice most Marxists don’t pursue institutions consistent with mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom or with ending patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism. Again, is that claim about institutional aims false, or is it true?

To decide, suppose we could put every Marxist text about economics and/or society in a pile. To the very limited extent that anything in that pile provides serious institutional vision, won’t it most often be only economic and include authoritative decision making, a corporate division of labor, remuneration for output or bargaining power, and markets or central planning, each of which institutions elevate the earlier-mentioned twenty percent. And then if we look at actual Marxist-inspired revolutions, putting them in a pile, so to speak, don’t we see just those institutional aims achieved?

Perhaps the cause of Marxism not delivering what most of its advocates have wanted hasn’t been bad leaders. Yes, of course Stalin was a bad leader, to put it mildly. But perhaps the real, deeper, and lasting problem has been Marxist movement dynamics that have elevated a thug like Stalin and, going still one step further, perhaps the problem has been the concepts that have elevated or at any rate that did not prevent those Stalin-elevating movement dynamics.

The problem wasn’t that everybody in Marxist Leninist parties explicitly wanted to trample workers on the road to ruling them. That is overwhelmingly false. That is nonsense. The problem was that however well meaning their members may have been, some of the core concepts of Marxist parties have inexorably led those parties, when they succeeded, to trample workers. Behind and pushing the leaders, structures. Behind and elevating the structures, concepts.

Become a Marxist revolutionary. Even with the very best motives—the very very best motives—the odds are that you aren’t going to make a revolution in our modern world because you won’t have sufficiently broad focus and especially, ironically, because you will lack sufficient working class support. But if you do transcend those problems and you do help make a revolution, the odds are your achievement will elevate what I call the coordinator class to economic rule over the working class, and will leave patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism modified but intact or even intensified.

Some Marxists find this claim personally insulting. I don’t think it should be. It isn’t about particular people or motives. It isn’t about people’s personalities much less people’s genetics. It is instead about concepts, methods, and institutional allegiances which, even in the hands of wonderful people foster results that those people never wanted. The target of my comments is nightmarish tradition that weighs down good people. Or, as my bard, who is still living, sang, “I mean no harm nor put fault on anyone who lives in a vault, it’s alright ma, if I can’t please him.”

So let’s focus on two substantive issues. Consider first that Marxism’s core concepts and associated practices overemphasize economics and underemphasize gender/kinship, community/culture, polity, and ecology.

This claim doesn’t imply that all (or even any) Marxists ignore everything other than economics. Nor does it imply that all (or even any) Marxists don’t care greatly about other matters. It implies, instead, that when yesterday’s Marxists addressed the sex life of teenagers, marriage, the nuclear family, religion, racial identity, cultural commitments, sexual preferences, political organization, police behavior, war, and ecology, they tended to highlight dynamics arising from their understanding of class struggle or that demonstrated implications for class struggle and tended to miss concerns rooted in the specific features of race, gender, power, and nature. They most often even claimed that this limited accounting was a virtue.

This criticism doesn’t say yesterday’s Marxism has said nothing useful about race, gender, sex, and power or at least about the economics of each. But this criticism does say that yesterday’s Marxist concepts did not sufficiently counter tendencies imposed by then current society, or by then current struggle, or by then current tactical choices that generated racist, sexist, and authoritarian outcomes even against the best moral and social inclinations of most Marxists. Yesterday’s Marxism left out too much that matters greatly for it to guide us to tomorrow.

In other words, these claims about Marxism’s overemphasis on economy and insufficient emphasis on other sides of life do not predict mono-mania about economics or even a universal and inviolable pattern of over attention to economics and under attention to everything else. No, instead they predict a harmful pattern of narrowness in how attention is given to extra economic phenomena. Doesn’t Marxism instruct us to study such phenomena and to correct ills associated with such phenomena, but to do so with our eyes primarily on what Marxism says are the paramount change-relevant causes and effects, which Marxism says are the economic ones? Doesn’t Marxism provide valuable and even essential insights about the economic dimensions of other than economic sides of life, but not so much about their less economic dimensions? By analogy imagine a feminist, anti-racist, or anarchist who says we should pay attention to economic phenomena and seek to correct ills associated with them, but we should do so always with our eyes primarily on what feminism, anti-racism, or anarchism would call the paramount change-relevant causes and effects, which they would say are the intrinsically gender, racial, or political ones. Wouldn’t Marxists rightly reply that those other approaches need economic enhancement? But isn’t it just as valid for those other approaches to say that the Marxist approach needs gender, racial, and political enhancement?

If so, then doesn’t it follow that the fix for Marxism’s “economism” would be for Marxists to agree that feminism, anarchism, and anti racism have their own core insights and that just as advocates of each of those perspectives need to take account of class-focused understanding, so too people seeking classlessness should take account of those other source’s insights about those other focussed areas of needed change? Won’t prioritizing only a one-way causation, whether economics to the rest or some other favored focus to the rest, miss phenomena of crucial importance, especially given the racial, gender, authority, ecology, and class biases and habits that are imbued so prevalently in current societies? But doesn’t that make clear that we therefore need concepts that counter and certainly not concepts that accentuate such biases?

The good news is that I think the majority of today’s Marxists agree with the need to transcend economism. The bad news is that I think the majority of today’s Marxists haven’t yet adopted new concepts that equally prioritize those other areas of needed change. Instead the concepts and words of the dead generations that inhabit Marxism’s tradition tend to crowd out or sometimes even stamp out such broader insights as soon as momentum for fundamental change builds. So while the majority of today’s Marxists see the need to escape economism and while they sincerely seek to do so (often by embracing another perspective so we get socialist feminism, marxist anti racism, anarcho-marxism, and eco-marxism), nonetheless, isn’t a lingering obstacle to their success that in times of crisis their allegiance to their whole tradition’s core intellectual framework tends to overcome their good intentions? As movement urgency rises, that is, don’t desires for enlarged breadth of focus tend to get washed away? That is what we might call Marxism’s economism problem.

A second area of concern less noticed and less confronted than its economism, is ironically that regarding Marxism’s primarily focused side of life, the economy, Marxism’s concepts fall profoundly short. Most Marxist might say, “come on. Whatever limitations or even failings Marxism may have, surely its economics is powerful.” Well, yes, Marxism rightly argues the intense importance of class conflict and that is excellent. But then Marxism near universally fails to highlight a class that exists between labor and capital. Yesterday’s and also today’s Marxists tend to apriori deny the roots of a third class in how the economy defines and apportions work. Yesterday’s and also today’s Marxist’s teach, instead, that classes owe their existence only to ownership relations. But isn’t it blindingly evident that this is why Marxism fails to see that the economies that Marxists have either positively called “socialist” or critically called “state capitalist” have elevated neither capitalists nor workers to ruling economic status? Instead, in this system, aren’t capitalists gone but workers still subordinate? Indeed, hasn’t what the Marxist tradition has sought and won beyond capitalism in every case elevated to ruling economic status not workers but instead a coordinator class of planners, managers, and other empowered employees? Hasn’t it been out with the capitalist boss, in with the coordinator boss?

But why does that happen? Is it a revolution hijacked? Or is it that victorious Marxism has most often sought and won public or state ownership of assets, top down decision making, corporate divisions of labor, remuneration for output or power, and markets or central planning for allocation. And hasn’t this all happened, remarkably, even while Marxists simultaneously urged the need for workers control. Yet when Marxists have implemented the former institutions they have not attained the latter goals. Isn’t that because some key Marxist conceptual and institutional commitments have not only permitted but propelled coordinator rule even while they have denied that the coordinator class exists? Perhaps the reason why Marxism isn’t all that popular among working class audiences isn’t solely that those audiences have been misled.

But, please note, this doesn’t say that most (or arguably even any) individual Marxists self-consciously try to advance the interests of managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, planers, and other empowered actors over and above workers. It says, instead, that certain concepts within Marxism do little to prevent this elevation of a coordinator class and indeed even propel it. It says that in Marxist practice, coordinator economic dominance tends to emerge even despite and against the sentiments of Marxism’s rank and file.

This may seem peculiar. After all, how could a movement most of whose members want one thing repeatedly wind up implementing something damningly and even diametrically opposite? But actually, this is not uncommon. Social outcomes often diverge from rank and file desires.

For example, sincere and eloquent advocates of workers control who favor privately-owned corporations, whether they do so for personal gain or due to a sincere belief that private ownership is essential for a well functioning economy, do not usher in workers control. Their institutional choice to retain private ownership trumps their worthy ethical desire for workers control. All Marxists understand that outcome because Marxism’s concepts highlight how private ownership precludes workers control.

Similarly, sincere and eloquent advocates of workers self management who favor markets or central planning and who favor the corporate division of labor, whether they do so for personal gain or due to a sincere belief that those choices are essential for a well functioning economy, will not usher in self management. Their institutional choices will trump their worthy ethical desires for self management. Marxists often fail to understand that. Their concepts don’t highlight and even obscure the dynamics at work.

Is it nasty to point out that Marxists ought to easily understand this possibility not least because Marx himself smartly advised that when judging some intellectual framework one should discount what it says about itself (“workers above all”) and instead notice what its concepts obscure (“coordinatorism above workers”)? Is it nasty to urge, like Marx, that an intellectual framework that becomes a tool of an aspiring ruling class will obscure that class’s behavior, hide that class’s roots in social relations, and even deny that class’s existence, all while furthering that class’s rise to dominance?

Look at the theory and ideology of mainstream capitalist economics to see exactly that dynamic. But don’t we also discover something quite similar if we apply the same evaluative method to assessing Marxism’s relation to the class between labor and capital? That is, when we look to see what the Marxist tradition highlights, obscures, and seeks, don’t we see that Marxism’s focus on property relations as the only basis for class conflict obscures the importance of the distribution of empowering tasks among economic actors for class conflict? Don’t we see that that’s why Marxism misses that with owners gone, coordinators can rise to rule workers? Don’t we see that Marxism removes from view the rule exerted by about twenty percent of the population (the coordinator class that monopolizes empowering work), over the remaining eighty percent of the population (the working class that does mainly disempowering work) in so-called “twentieth century socialism,” which system we really ought to call coordinatorism?

Don’t we see, in other words, that despite the sincere and oft-stated aims of so many of its adherents, in practice Marxism’s concepts overwhelmingly and predictably elevate the coordinator class to rule over workers even as Marxism’s concepts have hidden coordinator’s role and even their very existence?

Would Marx call today’s Marxism and especially today’s Marxism Leninism the ideology of the coordinator class, not the working class? Whether Marx would do so or not, isn’t it clear that to argue that we should do so doesn’t imply that we think that somehow all Marxists are enemies of classlessness? Isn’t it clear that it instead urges that even when Marxists overwhelmingly desire classlessness, their conceptual and institutional allegiances trample those desires?

A question arises. How might today’s Marxists seek a better Marxism for tomorrow? How might new Marxists augment, alter, or otherwise transcend faulty current concepts to avoid the two problems we and so many feminists, anti racists, anarchists, councilists, and others have highlighted?

Regarding “economism,” isn’t the problem that we need to transcend a conceptual framework that starts from economics and then even while revealing important economic dynamics, primarily examines other realms with the intention of seeing their economic implications but not their intrinsic extra-economic dynamics?

And if we recognize the problem, shouldn’t we instead ground our overall perspective on concepts that highlight economics, but also equally highlight polity, kinship, culture, and ecology? Shouldn’t we prioritize understanding each of these life sphere’s own intrinsic logic and dynamics, and simultaneously prioritize seeing how in actual societies each of these life spheres influences and even limits and defines the others without presupposing that they line up according to some particular hierarchy of importance? For example, as a possible correction to today’s economism, tomorrow’s Marxist might say,

“I am Marxist but I am also feminist, inter communalist, anarchist, and green. I recognize that dynamics arising from spheres of life other than the economy are critically important and can even define economic possibilities, just as the reverse can occur. Of course, I still think class struggle is important, but I realize gender, race, religious, ethnic, sexual, and anti-authoritarian struggle are each also important. I realize that just as we need to understand non-class struggle in its relation to class struggle, we also have to understand class struggle in its relation to gender, race, political, and ecological struggle.”

So, okay, suppose tomorrow’s Marxist does renounce the idea of an economic base which affects an extra-economic superstructure which is in turn only affected. Suppose tomorrow’s Marxist denies that societies rise and transform only due to modes of production and instead sees how modes of kinship, culture, and polity are also crucial to how societies rise and transform? Suppose tomorrow’s Marxist still argues the importance of class struggle but no longer sees class struggle as the alone dominant conceptual touchstone for identifying strategic issues. Could the label “Marxist” come to connote what this new “Marxist” believes? I am not sure. Maybe it could, though the Marxist tradition would no doubt resist. Indeed, I think this battle is and has been under way for decades.

In contrast to the above possibility for overcoming Marxism’s economism problem, the class-definition problem of yesterday’s and also most often of today’s Marxism seems to more strongly resist correction. Capitalists are capitalist, Marxists rightly urge, and this is so by virtue of their private ownership of the means of production. To no longer have capitalists above workers requires, Marxists also rightly urge, that we therefore eliminate private ownership of means of production. So far, so good. So essential.

Marxists then say non-capitalists own only their ability to do work which they sell for a wage. Also good. But then Marxists say that all these wage earning employees, by virtue of having the same ownership situation as one another, also have the same class interests. They are all in one class, the working class. This is not good.

The point is, Marxists almost universally fail to recognize that the parts of wage earning employees can have crucially different class interests from other parts due to having different jobs in the corporate division of labor. Suppose in response to this criticism we hypothesize that perhaps there is a class between labor and capital. Is this hypothetical third class real? Is anyone actually in this hypothetical third class? Once we admit that it might exist and we thus admit that something other than ownership relations might generate class difference, if we then look can’t we easily see that some employees—managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and more are highly empowered by their economic position and in particular by corporate divisions of labor which allot to them a virtual monopoly on empowering tasks as well as on the levers and requisites of daily decision-making, while in contrast allotting to other employees disempowering tasks that leave them subordinate—so that the former coordinators decide and the latter workers obey?

Doesn’t it follow that to no longer have empowered coordinators above disempowered workers, and therefore to attain classlessness, we must replace the offending institutions—markets, central planning, and especially the corporate division of labor? But if so, then why do most Marxist and all Marxist Leninist visions explicitly advocate having a corporate division of labor?

More, doesn’t this advocacy explain why Marxists typically do not see that even when private ownership is eliminated, markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor will nonetheless elevate a ruling class of structurally empowered coordinators above a subordinate class of structurally disempowered workers?

Marxists often movingly and sincerely describe the justice, equity, and dignity that “socialism” should usher in. But, if we look at texts by Marxists for their proposed vision, don’t we find vague rhetoric that lacks institutional substance, or, when there is some institutional substance, don’t we find institutions that deny the justice, equity, and dignity that Marxists personally favor?

Similarly, when we look at Marxist practice, which is most often Marxist Leninist practice, don’t we find these same coordinatorist structures nearly universally implemented? Could a Marxist today transcend this problem by adopting a three class view that sees beyond only property relations as able to cause class rule, and yet reasonably continue to call him or herself a Marxist?

If a Marxist did follow that path, which indeed some Marxists have at times tried to do, (including myself when I co-authored a book with Robin Hahnel forty six years ago called Unorthodox Marxism) I think signs that it had occurred would be obvious. For example, wouldn’t such “new Marxists” critique what has been self-labeled “socialism” by its advocates in various countries around the world, and then not call it capitalism or state capitalism, or even deformed socialism, but instead call it a new mode of production that enshrines a coordinator class above workers?

And wouldn’t such new Marxists then offer a vision that would dispense with markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor, as well as dispense with modes of remuneration that reward property, power, or output, and of course dispense with private ownership of means of production?

And wouldn’t such new Marxists also propose new defining economic institutions to seek in place of those rejected options? The new institutions that I think might gain support from such new Marxists might be, for example, worker and consumer collectively self-managing councils, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, a new division of labor that has jobs balanced for empowerment effects, and participatory planning in place of markets and central planning?

Then, in accord with their altered economic vision, wouldn’t such new Marxists also advocate movement organization, methods, and programs that embody, propel, and actually arrive at their positive aims? Wouldn’t they understand that strategies for social change that embody organizational choices and methods such as employing centrist parties, top down decision-making, and corporate divisions of labor will not eliminate coordinator class rule but entrench it? Wouldn’t they understand that today’s Marxism’s flaws lead to coordinator class rule regardless of the sincere desires of many or even nearly all Marxists to end up someplace much nicer than coordinatorism?

What would be the relation of such “new Marxists” to the Marxist tradition that they previously celebrated? Well, I doubt such new Marxists would call themselves Leninist or Trotskyist, but even if they did, they would certainly disavow huge swaths of associated thought and action.

Instead of persistently quoting Lenin and Trotsky positively, for example, they would aggressively reject Lenin saying: “It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management.”

And they would reject Lenin saying: “Any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.”

And they would reject Lenin saying: “Large scale machine industry which is the central productive source and foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unity of will… How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.”

And they would reject Lenin saying: “A producer’s congress! What precisely does that mean? It is difficult to find words to describe this folly. I keep asking myself can they be joking? Can one really take these people seriously? While production is always necessary, democracy is not. Democracy of production engenders a series of radically false ideas.”

And then they would reject Trotsky saying (about left communists): “They turn democratic principles into a fetish. They put the right of the workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the Party’s right to affirm its own dictatorship, even when this dictatorship comes into conflict with the evanescent mood of the worker’s democracy.”

And they would reject Trotsky saying, “We must bear in mind the historical mission of our Party. The Party is forced to maintain its dictatorship, without stopping for these vacillations, nor even the momentary falterings of the working class. This realization is the mortar which cements our unity. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not always have to conform to formal principles of democracy.”

And they would reject Trotsky saying: “It is a general rule that man will try to get out of work. Man is a lazy animal.”

And they would reject Trotsky saying (with pride): “I consider that if the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management much sooner and much less painfully.”

More, wouldn’t such new Marxists not waste time blaming Lenin or Trotsky’s personal dispositions for the origins of such undeniably horrible utterances and outcomes, but instead look for underlying inadequate concepts they can now transcend?

But, honestly, isn’t all of the above in some sense the fare of “dead generations”? More important than arguing about the past, wouldn’t tomorrow’s “new Marxists” note that utilizing hierarchical structures in economic and/or political or social institutions risks ushering in coordinator rule as well as creating an environment uncongenial to widespread worker involvement, or kinship, racial, political, or ecological advances?

If tomorrow’s Marxists wanted to argue that in some difficult contexts such structures may have to be employed, wouldn’t they urge seeing the structures as temporarily imposed expedients and in all other respects try to pave the way for classless self-managing social relations, now and in the future?

Finally, despite some crucial flaws, is there also great wisdom in Marx and in many subsequent Marxist writers and activists that “tomorrow’s Marxists” would rightly retain? Of course there is. But wouldn’t new Marxists who rightly reject not only capitalist property relations but also markets, central planning, and a coordinatorist division of labor as well as patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism also want to avoid fulfilling Marx’s own commentary that: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

That seems like a good back-to-the-beginning place for us to sign off, no?

Well, at the risk of belaboring, I don’t think so. To reject things we have been taught, things we have quoted, things we have taken our identities and battle slogans from, things that we have believed in, and that we have advocated all so that we can get beyond traditions of dead generations is no simple path to navigate, especially when many highly learned, compelling committed, courageous, and accomplished folks repeatedly tell us that to do that would leave us ignorantly ill-suited to winning change. So at the risk of running on, I want to give the issue just a little more attention.

The point of activists becoming familiar and facile with such long-lived frameworks as Marxism or Marxism Leninism (or any other long-lived framework) as they move leftward should of course be to find in such frameworks’ insights and methods that can usefully aid current and future practice.

To decide if to immerse oneself in Marxist (or any other) long-lived tradition is a wise choice, shouldn’t we ask, will that tradition’s proposed concepts and practices not hinder but instead help us to comprehend all main conditions we will encounter when we combat injustice? Shouldn’t they help us try to conceive and attain a desirable new world? If so, we should of course learn from that collection of proposed concepts, albeit using our own words. But if not, shouldn’t we develop better concepts and embark on better practice?

To that end, here are some additional very summary judgements about Marxist tradition to discuss, debate, explore, and hopefully get beyond:

1. Marxist “dialectics” is a substantively empty drain on creativity and range of perception. If you doubt it, okay, ask even a well read Marxist what dialectics means. And especially ask what dialectics helps activists understand which, if they hadn’t learned dialectics, they wouldn’t understand. Ask what makes dialectics other than useless and pointless rhetoric that only elevates its owners above those who fail to successfully borrow those same habits and slogans from dead generations.

2. “Historical Materialism’s” claims have some validity, but when real existing people utilize the concepts of historical materialism they typically tend to arrive at an economistic and mechanical view of society that systematically under-values and mis-understands social relations of gender, political, cultural, and ecological origin and impact.

3. Marxist “class theory” has obscured the importance of a class between labor and capital, has under-appreciated that class’s antagonisms in capitalist economies with the working class below and with capital above, has long obstructed class analysis of Soviet, Eastern European, and Third World post capitalist economies, and has especially obstructed understanding the failings of tactics and strategies that have consistently attained other than what most activists have wanted to attain.

4. The “Marxist Labor Theory of Value” misunderstands its own subject the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies and more broadly turns activists’ thoughts away from a needed social-relations bargaining-power view of capitalist exchange. It also directs its advocates away from seeing that the dynamics of workplaces are largely functions of the differential empowerment effects of work, of bargaining power, and of forms of social control and not solely functions of ownership relations. It suggests all workers will wind up earning the minimum wage they need to reproduce themselves. But then one ought to wonder what the point of seeking higher wages is, and for that matter why wages for different wage earners differ so markedly.

5. Marxist “crisis theory,” in all its variants, often distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by seeing intrinsic cataclysmic collapse as inevitable and even imminent where no such prospect exists, and by in that way orienting activists away from the importance of their own sustained vision-guided organizing as a far more promising basis for desirable change.

6. Regarding visions of desirable societies, the Marxist tradition has been particularly obstructive. First there has been Marxism’s general taboo against “utopian” speculation which taboo literally rejects trying to conceive a vision we wish to attain. Second, Marxist causal economism has presumed that if economic relations are made desirable then other social relations will fall into place, making vision for other than economy redundant. Third, Marxism is permanently confused about what constitutes an equitable distribution of income. “From each according to ability and to each according to need” is not a viable economic guide since for each of us to provide society according to our ability would mean we should each work as much as our ability allows which is typically way more than it makes sense for us to work. Likewise, for each of us to receive according to our need would either let us all have anything we say we need or, if not, it would require that someone or something else decides our needs for us. In neither case would it respect or reveal information that indicates how much people want or need any particular thing and not just that they do want/need that particular thing, and that would in turn prevent determining costs and benefits of different possible choices by workplaces. More, the norm that Marxists sometimes propose instead, “from each according to personal choice and to each according to contribution to the social product” is not even a morally worthy maxim since it rewards productivity, including genetic endowment, and not just effort and sacrifice. And fourth, Marxism approves hierarchical relations of production, a corporate division of labor for workplace organization, and approves command planning or even markets as a means of allocation because while Marxism recognizes the need to eliminate the causes of capitalist economic rule it does not even recognize the existence of much less seek to eliminate the causes of coordinator economic rule.

7. Taken cumulatively Marxism’s injunctions regarding economic goals amount to advocating what we call a coordinator mode of production that elevates administrators, planners, and all structurally empowered workers, called coordinators, to ruling class status. This Marxist economic goal then uses the label “socialist” to appeal to all other employees, workers, but it does not structurally implement socialist ideals (just as the political goal of bourgeois movements uses the label “democratic” to rally support from diverse sectors, but does not structurally implement full democratic ideals).

8. Finally, Leninism and Trotskyism are natural outgrowths of Marxism as it is employed by people in capitalist societies, and Marxism Leninism, far from being “theory and strategy for the working class,” is, instead, by its focus, concepts, values, methods, and goals, and despite most of its advocates’ desires, “theory and strategy for the coordinator class.”

So, to get personal about all this, and to add a crucial caveat, since I believe the above claims, albeit my reasons are only summarized here, I hoped the demise of the patriarchal, nationalist, authoritarian, ecologically suicidal Soviet model, would end allegiance to Marxism and Marxism Leninism taken as whole traditions, since those whole traditions aimed in their principles, concepts, thought, and vision (though not in the deepest aspirations of many of their advocates), at that Soviet model.

So, what’s the problem? Out with that model, out with the concepts and strategies that led to it. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Yes, but—and here comes the caveat—only to a point. When theories fail to sufficiently explain reality or to successfully guide sought practice, they certainly do need to be refined and corrected or sometimes even jettisoned and replaced. And, in the case of Marxism and Marxism Leninism, the faults briefly discussed here and often also critiqued by feminists, anti-racists, anarchists, councilists and even many Marxists are demonstrably intrinsic to certain Marxist core concepts so that correcting those concepts is not just modestly tinkering with the still intact intellectual framework.

That is, supposing we seriously refine or even dispense with major elements of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the labor theory of value, Marxism’s constricted understanding of class, Leninist strategy, a coordinator elevating economic vision, and Marxism’s still insufficient attention to and aspirations for kin, gender, sex, race, ethnic, political, and ecological vision, won’t whatever emerges reject enough from the Marxist tradition to also have to find a new name? Maybe, maybe not. But I would suggest that it is time—actually that it is well past time—to get on with something new.

My caveat, however, is that it is also true that when theories fail to sufficiently explain reality or to guide practice, it does not follow that we must jettison every claim they made, every concept they offered, and every analysis they undertook. Quite the contrary, it is more likely that much will be still valid and should be retained (though perhaps recast) in any new and better intellectual framework.

So, in 2024, as crisis looms and momentum for change grows, learning from past traditions can certainly help us, but we should recognize that immersing ourselves in past traditions can also crowd out our need to explore and adopt essential new insights in place of flawed ones we have heretofore borrowed from traditions of dead generations.

This article is an edited and shortened transcript of the 265th episode of the podcast RevolutionZ titled, Marxism Revisited: Beacon Or Burden?

The author hopes to hear from those who agree and from those who disagree with the many controversial sentiments of this essay via the ZNet discord channel set up for the purpose.



Michael Albert s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.

How Marxists Brought Science to Politics and Politics to Science

JACOBIN INTERVIEW WITH

HELENA SHEEHAN

08.22.2022

From Marx and Engels to the present day, socialists have been deeply engaged with the world of science. With the provision of lifesaving vaccines held hostage by corporate profiteering, the story of this relationship is more important than ever.

The Marx and Engels monument in Berlin. (Getty Images)

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been a disaster for humanity, but it’s been a great boon for the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Our reliance on Big Pharma for lifesaving vaccines has reminded us how badly we need to understand the links between science, politics, and commercial interests.

For Marxists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these were some of the most important questions to be addressed in their work. The cross-fertilization between Marxism and science had major implications for the development of both.

Helena Sheehan is an emeritus professor at Dublin City University and the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, a book that traces the history of this encounter.

This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
DANIEL FINN

What connection did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels see between their own work and the developments in the natural sciences at the time?
HELENA SHEEHAN

Marx and Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their day. They saw it as a kind of rolling revelation of the world. They were constantly writing to each other about various discoveries — which were coming very fast in the nineteenth century — and what they meant. They were struck by three discoveries above all.

One was the discovery of cellular structure, which they thought demonstrated the unity of the organic world. Then there was the discovery of the law of conservation and transformation of energy, which they thought revealed nature as a continuous and dynamic process. But most of all, there was the discovery of the evolution of species, which they saw as demonstrating the natural origins of natural history. They were particularly enthusiastic about Darwinism and the implications of evolution in both the natural world and the historical sphere.Marx and Engels saw science as a kind of rolling revelation of the world.

This took place amid a massive shift in mood, as the nineteenth century witnessed a general transition from seeing the world as a static and timeless order of nature to viewing nature as more of a developmental and temporal process. As part of this, and within this whole atmosphere, Marx and Engels pushed the theory of evolution of species further into a theory of the evolution of everything. They explored the implications of this in formulating a philosophy that came to be called dialectical materialism.

DANIEL FINN

What were the most significant arguments that Engels made in his work Dialectics of Nature?
HELENA SHEEHAN

Dialectics of Nature was a posthumously published, unfinished manuscript by Engels, which he meant to be a major work elucidating the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. When he died, parts of it were fully written, while other parts were sketchy. Some of the science has been superseded. On the other hand, some of what Engels wrote anticipated scientific discoveries that only came later.

The core of Dialectics of Nature was its methodology, which was an epistemology and ontology of a new materialism — a materialism that was dynamic and fluid, one that saw the world as an interconnected totality, as opposed to an older materialism that was static, mechanistic, and reductionist. The epistemology and ontology were also in contrast to various idealist tendencies.

DANIEL FINN

There are two separate arguments that could be made — and have been made — about the attempt by Engels to extend the scope of Marxism beyond the limits of human history. One is to say that you simply can’t come up with any general principles that would apply to the history of the universe and also to human history. The second is to say that the particular set of principles that Engels did come up with were unhelpful and misconceived. What’s your opinion of those two arguments?

HELENA SHEEHAN

I disagree with both arguments. I think it’s impossible to think coherently, or even to live coherently, without working out a comprehensive worldview that encompasses everything. Marx and Engels believed this. They repudiated the idea that there was one basis for science and another for life.

Although some later Marxists tried to blend Marxism with various other philosophies, such as neo-Kantianism, with its sharp dividing line between nature and history, the mainstream of Marxism with which I identify has held on to a more holistic approach in thinking about both the natural world and human history. Those pulling in the other direction — I’m referring here to the Austro-Marxists, the Frankfurt School, the Yugoslav Praxis school, and much of the 1960s New Left — have tended to align natural science with positivism and to leave natural science to the positivists.

However, the best of Marxism, I think, from Marx and Engels on, developed a critique of positivism as well as a nonpositivist philosophy of science. I believe that politics needs to be grounded in a worldview that’s coherent and comprehensive and empirical, and I believe that science is crucial to this, as the cutting edge of empirically grounded knowledge.

Of course, people sometimes get involved in politics on the basis of particular issues, and we can work with people with whom we disagree on other questions. But I think that we need an intellectual tradition and a political movement that pulls it all together. As I discovered in my own journey, and as I hope I conveyed in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, there’s a brilliant intellectual tradition tied to a political movement that has been doing this, and that’s Marxism.

DANIEL FINN

What were the main trends in Soviet philosophy and science during the first decade of the revolution, and how did they interact?

HELENA SHEEHAN

I found this period very exciting when I discovered it and began researching it. In the first decade of the revolution, there were debates about absolutely everything: about industrialization strategy and its relation to the collectivization of agriculture; about nationalities policy; about the nature of the state and the status of law under socialism; about the liberation of women, the future of the family, and free love; about avant-garde art and architecture; about various educational theories; about the idea of proletarian culture.

There were debates within every academic discipline, which also obviously involved debates about philosophy, science, and the philosophy of science. The most interesting debates of all were those among the Bolsheviks themselves. The debate about philosophy of science was a complex philosophical and political struggle, with much higher stakes than most intellectual debates.J. D. Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history.

At one level, there was a debate about the relative emphasis on Hegel and more generally about the history of philosophy versus the stress on the natural sciences. There were accusations, on the one side, of reversion to idealism or, on the other side, of reversion to mechanistic materialism, both of which had been superseded by Marxism.

There’s always been a tension in Marxist philosophy throughout the history of Marxism, but this debate was supercharged by its implications in complex historical currents and a complex struggle for power within the USSR. In 1931, there was a closing down of these debates and a push to accept one position in all of these different debates as the Marxist position. It was not only a matter of who was making the most convincing arguments in these debates, or who would get university positions or be on editorial boards. It was also a matter of who might be purged.

In philosophy, a group of young philosophers went to Joseph Stalin. Their position was a kind of synthesis between the two positions, which I believe made sense philosophically. But it was also complicated by ambition and opportunism, as is often the case. When I was in Moscow doing research on this, I interviewed Mark Mitin, who was the most prominent of these young philosophers. He argued that the philosophical debates didn’t have political consequences, although my research told me otherwise.

But what’s important about these debates is to see them in a wider context. In my book, I dealt with the whole cluster of debates, particularly this one in the area of philosophy, as well as the other debates in the natural sciences, which involved many factors swirling around each other. Of course, the one in biology was particularly fierce and consequential.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the Soviet delegation that came to London in 1931 for a scientific conference have on the development of British science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

The appearance of a Soviet delegation at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London in 1931 was the first appearance by any Soviet delegation at a major international academic congress. For this reason alone, it created quite a stir, not only at the congress itself but also in the mass media at the time. A book called Science at the Crossroads also came out of this, where the Soviet papers were published. It was translated into many languages and many editions and circulated all over the world. In fact, it can still be read today.

The delegation was led by Nikolai Bukharin, who was once a contender to succeed Vladimir Lenin. His appearance at the 1931 congress was midway down his trajectory, in terms of his position in the Soviet power structure. Bukharin and the others came forward at this congress with a fresh and vigorous proclamation of Marxism as an integrating philosophy that made more sense of science than anything else on the horizon.

It had a lasting impact, particularly on the Left. Some of the scientists who were present, such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, and others, were major figures, not only in British science but also in international science at the time.
DANIEL FINN

What did J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane in particular take from Marxism for their scientific work? How did they understand the relationship between politics, philosophy, and science?

HELENA SHEEHAN

What they took from Marxism was philosophical integrality and social purpose, based on Marxism as the key to integrating the various results of the natural sciences to form a coherent picture of the natural world, and then beyond that, for connecting nature to history and science to political economy. Both Bernal and Haldane wrote massive philosophical and historical works about science, as well as continuing their leading role in basic scientific research and organizing a movement for social responsibility in science.

Bernal saw Marxism as extending the scientific method to the whole range of phenomena, from the smallest particle to the whole shape of human history. He saw science as a social activity that was integrally tied to the whole spectrum of other social activities: economic, political, cultural, philosophical. He contrasted science under capitalism with science under socialism. Bernal believed that the frustration of science was an inescapable feature of the capitalist mode of production, and that science could only achieve its full potential under socialism.

Haldane also had a synthesizing approach extending beyond science, reaching for a theory of everything, from the beginning of time to the end of the world. He found this in Marxism. He saw Marxism as a scientific method applied to society, extending the unity to all knowledge, analyzing the same basic processes in nature and society. For Haldane, as for Bernal, there was no hermetic boundary between science and politics. He believed that those who thought otherwise were deluded. On one occasion, he said that even if the professors left politics alone, politics wouldn’t leave the professors alone.

DANIEL FINN

You’ve argued that Christopher Caldwell, who wasn’t a professional scientist, made a strikingly original contribution to the philosophy of science in his book The Crisis in Physics. What were some of the key points that Caldwell put across?

HELENA SHEEHAN

Caldwell was an autodidact. Not only was he not a professional scientist; he also wasn’t an academic, and he didn’t even attend university. He was a loner for most of his short life, but he read voluminously, and was relentlessly searching for a coherent and comprehensive worldview, which he, too, ultimately found in Marxism. He didn’t simply take it off the shelf: he made it his own in a fresh and original way across many areas, encompassing not only science but also philosophy and culture.Christopher Caldwell addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture.

He also joined the Communist Party and threw himself into party work. He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died. It was a terrible loss to Marxism that this brilliant figure died so young. I feel very mournful every time I think about him, which is quite often.

Caldwell wrote with great clarity, passion, and profundity, and with the same sort of integrality as Bernal and Haldane. He addressed the theoretical fragmentation that he found in all disciplines and argued that it was rooted in a crisis in bourgeois culture. He said that at the root of that culture’s most basic thought patterns was the subject-object dichotomy, which had its basis in the social division of labor — in the separation of the class that generated the dominant ideology from the class that actively engaged with nature.

Caldwell thought that this distorted art, science, psychology, philosophy, economics, and indeed all social relations. He argued that while there had been great empirical advances in genetics, evolution, quantum mechanics, and other fields, at the same time, however, there was an inability to synthesize the meaning of these discoveries.

He analyzed the crisis in physics in terms of the metaphysics of physics. Caldwell displayed an acute grasp of theoretical physics — in particular the tensions between relativity and quantum theory. He argued that physics was advancing along the empirical front and generating a growing body of knowledge that could not be fitted into the existing theoretical frameworks and was rent by the same dualisms as all other intellectual disciplines.

He also analyzed the crisis in biology and the tensions between genetics and evolution, between heredity and development, equally brilliantly. He really was an extraordinary figure.

DANIEL FINN

What impact did the purges under Stalin have on the Soviet scientific community, including some of those who had gone to London in 1931?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was tragic for Soviet science and for Soviet society. Soviet society became engulfed in a terrible spiral where truth-seeking seriousness was caught up with compulsion, paranoia, ignorance, slander, revenge, deceit, and indeed a brutal struggle for political power. Several of those who so fervently stood up for Marxism at the 1931 congress — Bukharin, Boris Hessen, Nikolai Vavilov — were portrayed as conspiring against the revolution, and perished in the purges.

The purges are often put down to Stalin becoming a megalomaniac, which I don’t deny. But I don’t think that this is a sufficient explanation. I think it is necessary to understand the complex forces in motion, the monumental nature of what the Soviet Union was trying to achieve, particularly in the period of the first five-year plan, the massive obstacles in their path, and the frenzy that resulted from this cauldron.

DANIEL FINN

What was the nature of what became the infamous Lysenko controversy in Soviet biology?

HELENA SHEEHAN

It was part of that monumental struggle and the resulting frenzy. The Lysenko controversy is often portrayed as a cautionary tale against ideological interference in science, but I don’t see it that way. The relation of ideology to science is complex: eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable, in my opinion.

The controversy has to be understood in terms of what forces were in motion at the time. First of all, there were the tensions in mainstream international science between genetics and evolution. The contemporary synthesis between genetics and evolution, which we take for granted now, was not in place then. As well as the particular tensions and problems in the international science of 1920s and ’30s, there was a wider, more long-term tension between heredity and environment. This was the question of how much of what we are is due to heredity and how much of it is determined by our environment — nature versus nurture — which is still an ongoing debate.Eliminating ideology to get pure science is not possible or even desirable.

There was also a whole history, which played into this particular set of debates, of ideological positioning, associating the Right with one pole and the Left with the other. This played out in a very forceful way in the Soviet Union. On top of these international intellectual tensions, there were specific tensions in Soviet intellectual life. There was a need to create a new Soviet intelligentsia, the problem of how to deal with bourgeois expertise, the challenges of meeting the very ambitious targets of the first five-year plan — especially the question of how to raise the productivity of Soviet agriculture.

Trofim Lysenko walked into these swirling tensions. He was a Ukrainian agronomist who came to prominence with an agricultural technique called “vernalization” that allowed winter crops to be generated from summer planting. He pushed forward from this to articulate a whole theory of biology, which was basically a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and a denunciation of genetics. In terms of international science, it was essentially a Lamarckist position versus a Mendelian one.

This coincided with the frenzy of the purges, and the Soviet authorities proclaimed the Lysenkoist position to be the correct Marxist position in biology, with tragic consequences for science and scientists, and particularly for genetics and geneticists. Vavilov, who I previously mentioned, was an internationally renowned geneticist and one of those who came to the 1931 congress in London. He perished in the purges.

DANIEL FINN

What do you think are the most important legacies from this historical period for the way that we think about science and about politics today?
HELENA SHEEHAN

I think what has weathered every storm are the core concepts of Marxism in its approach to science. There have been many debates about Marxism vis-à-vis other approaches, but as I see it, having studied all these debates, both the ones before I came onto the scene and those that have unfolded during my own lifetime, I believe that nothing makes so much sense of science as Marxism. Indeed, nothing makes so much sense of everything as Marxism.

I want to say clearly just what is distinctive about Marxism as a philosophy of science. It is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, and developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in seeing everything that exists within an interacting web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.In its basic concepts, Marxism is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon.

It is an integral philosophy. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of intersecting processes, where others see it only as disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how all forces in motion are products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production. It sees science as socially constructed, but at the same time as an empirically grounded revelation of the natural world.

Throughout the whole period of its history, Marxism rises and falls in its status and in its influence. The period now is not a particularly high point. However, I think that there is a revival of Marxist philosophy of science in response to the exigencies of ecological crisis and also in response to the current pandemic, which is still playing out. By the way, although there’s an atmosphere of the pandemic being over, this particular one isn’t. One point that is being reinforced by anyone who has dealt seriously with this pandemic, most of whom were Marxists, is that the conditions are still there for future pandemics.

I think that Marxism is as relevant and as important today as it ever was — perhaps even more so. I think that Marxism needs to be constantly updated and developed to move forward. I always thought that there were areas where it was weak, such as psychology, although the foundations were there to make it superior to any other contending positions in psychology. But even in areas where it was most developed, such as political economy, the world is constantly changing — indeed it is doing so at an ever-accelerating rate.

There’s always much to do. I think that Marxism has showed itself to have that kind of dynamic capacity, and it is still developing further. I think that in its basic concepts, it is still the most coherent, comprehensive, and well-grounded philosophy on the horizon. Whether or not it is popular, it is right, and I still see it as the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

CONTRIBUTORS

Helena Sheehan is emeritus professor at Dublin City University. She is the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and Navigating the Zeitgeist.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

The Theory and Practice of Marxism in Japan

AN INTERVIEW WITH GAVIN WALKER

Gavin Walker is associate professor of history at McGill University.

JACOBIN  07.03.2021

From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan.

Japanese Communist Party Headquarters in 1950. (Wikimedia Commons)

INTERVIEW BY Daniel Finn

For many years, Japan has been one of the leading players in global capitalism. With the world’s third-largest economy and some of its most renowned manufacturing firms, Japan is one of the few countries to have bridged the infamous gap between “the West and the rest.”

However, alongside the development of capitalism in Japan, a powerful socialist tradition has also taken shape in Japanese political and intellectual life. Marxism has exercised an extraordinary influence in Japanese academic culture, while the Japanese Communist Party remains a mass-membership party with unapologetic roots in the communist tradition.

Gavin Walker teaches history at McGill University in Canada. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan and the editor of The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68.

This is an edited transcript from an episode of Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
DF

You’ve written about the importance of Marxism in Japan, both as a political movement — with more than one organizational form — and as an intellectual tradition. You’ve also noted that it hasn’t received the same attention as Marxist political organizations and theoretical work in countries where European languages are spoken — for obvious reasons, perhaps. Before going into the story of Japanese Marxism and socialism in detail, could you us give a bird’s-eye view of its most striking features, for someone who may not be familiar with Japanese politics or intellectual life?
GW


I would say a couple of things to begin with. One is that one of the most remarkable things about the history of Marxism in Japan is, I would say, its distinction from the history of Marxism, particularly in Europe, where the Marxist tradition really emanated most heavily from the side of political movements. It came from the First International — the International Workingmen’s Association. It came from the dominance of the Second International in Central Europe, and then from the dominance of the Third International after the victory of the October Revolution.

In Japan, on the other hand, the history of Marxism came principally from the side of the university. I think that conditioned very heavily the nature of Marxist theoretical work in Japan, but also gave it its particularly high-level theoretical character. Marxism was received first in Japan not principally as the ideological backbone of political organization but as the front curve of development at the cutting edge of the social sciences. In this sense, Marxism was really something that from the very beginning was given an almost principally theoretical character in Japan.Marxism was received first in Japan not principally as the ideological backbone of political organization but as the front curve of development at the cutting edge of the social sciences.

Some of the other effects that have been important for the development of Japanese Marxism include its dominance in the university — a situation that we can’t really point to anywhere in Europe or North America, in the sense of being the main trend of social-scientific and certainly historical research. In Japan, through to the end of the 1980s and the events of 1989–1991, Marxism remained the dominant methodological orientation in the university and intellectual life as a whole. Even those who were anti-Marxist or oriented more toward traditions of liberalism and so forth had a grounding in Marxist theory that would be surprising, though perhaps not everywhere — in France, there was a dominance of Marxism in the postwar period as well — but certainly in much of Europe and North America.

This widespread influence of Marxism in an advanced capitalist society was unusual and has roots in this highly intellectual background to Marxism in Japan that in turn led to the very methodological character of Marxism in Japan. A lot of work, for instance, on the MEGA project, the Marx-Engels collected works, took place in Japan. The striking feature of Japanese Marxism is its extremely high level of theoretical work and not only political analysis.

DF


Japan itself appears to be highly significant for Marxist theory as a case study because it was the first and arguably still the only country from outside the Euro-American cultural matrix to have become a highly developed, industrial capitalist state by any benchmark you might care to mention, whether it’s social and industrial structure, GDP per capita, median wage rates, etc. That might be explained by reference to the external geopolitical context, where Japan was one of the few countries in Africa or Asia to escape European colonial rule, so that its leaders could imitate the leading capitalist states of their day without being subordinated to their control. It could also be explained, on the other hand, by reference to Japan’s own precapitalist social and political structures, perhaps lending themselves to capitalist development in a particular way. What explanations have Japanese Marxists themselves tended to favor?
GW


Probably the most significant question for the early history of Marxist theory in Japan was to clarify how Japanese capitalism had developed — how it had sprung up on the basis of what existed before — and also to explain the peculiar trajectory of Japanese capitalism. It was similar to Germany, for instance, or Russia, as a late-developing capitalist state, in the sense that the feudal structure lasted for a long time in comparison to France or the United Kingdom.

One thing that distinguished Japan in particular was that it compressed its development into a small space of roughly fifty years from 1868 and the Meiji Restoration, which broke the feudal power of the old Shogunal government and established the route toward a modern state in Japan, to the 1930s. Over the space of fifty or sixty years, Japan passed through the stages of being a dominated or peripheral country with a late transition from feudalism to becoming a very rapidly industrializing country, particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, when enormous investment by the state in munitions manufacturing and heavy industry prompted a significant turn in the formation of modern Japan, which was the turn to imperialism.

The Japanese state remained in the early twentieth century the only major non-Western imperialist power. It held an extraordinarily large empire at its height in the 1940s, stretching from the South Pacific all the way through Manchuria into Northeast Asia. This Japanese empire existed a mere thirty to forty years after Japan had formed any kind of national state at all.Over the space of fifty or sixty years, Japan passed through the stages of being a dominated or peripheral country with a late transition from feudalism to becoming a very rapidly industrializing country.

This trajectory was extremely important for Marxists to explain. It bore very little similarity, on the face of it, to the story of the development of English capitalism told in Marx’s Capital. Of course, Marx’s Capital famously reminded its German readers that they should not think it was a book solely about England. It was the story of the development of an ideal average of a capitalist society. Marxists in Japan took this as a kind of spur for their work to think about how Japanese capitalism had developed from out of the existing situation.

This resulted in a wide-ranging debate on the origins of capitalism. One side argued that the Meiji Restoration had been a bourgeois-democratic revolution that broke the feudal power and set Japan on the trajectory toward becoming a “normal” capitalist state. Others took the position that, in fact, Japanese capitalism was overwhelmed from the very beginning with feudal remnants.

They referred to its extreme inequality, for example: in the 1890s and 1900s, Japan had an average wage rate lower than that of India at the time. India was, of course, a dominated, colonized state. This perspective identified these feudal remnants at the level of mentality, but also at the levels of social structures and ideology, most of all in the existence of the emperor system itself at the center of Japanese capitalism.

The emperor, we have to remember, was marginalized under late feudalism in Japan. Significantly, in 1868, when the modern Japanese state was formed, it was referred to as a restoration, not a revolution — the restoration of the emperor to the center of society. How could you explain this anachronism, this sense of bringing into life a modern state founded on the sanctity of private property and a modern, Prussian-style constitution, yet one that also brought back into its core this imperial institution? This was a key contradiction for Japanese Marxists to explain, and I would say it remains a key contradiction about which they profoundly disagree.
DF


In the field of politics and political movements, how did the socialist movement first become implanted in Japanese political life? And what particular challenges did that movement face?
GW


Socialism in Japan has in some sense an independent history from the history of Marxism. Of course, that’s not necessarily unique, because socialism predates the existence of Marxism as a political doctrine, and predates the actual life of Marx. In Japan, there were a number of sources for this divergence.

Marx was not widely read in Japan until the late nineteenth century. Marx started to be read in the 1890s, and really came to prominence in the 1910s, which is when the intellectual hegemony of Marxism was established. But prior to that, there was a separate trajectory of socialism, some of which came from Christian socialism. There was a certain prominence of Christian socialism in the last days of the Tokugawa feudal system, and there was an articulation of that agrarian, millenarian Christian socialism with many of the peasant movements of late feudalism.

One of the motors for the development of the modern Japanese state was the intense agrarian struggle that existed at the end of the Tokugawa system of provincial city-states. That usually came in the form of peasant revolts, which increased radically in number between 1850 and the early 1860s, leading up to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. After the Restoration, a number of social movements that channeled that popular energy began to emerge, particularly in the early 1870s.In the early Meiji period, after the establishment of the modern state, there was significantly greater hardship visited upon the peasantry than there was even at the end of the feudal system.

In 1873, you had the so-called Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, which was a kind of millenarian movement for the establishment of greater rights and freedoms for the popular classes. The Meiji state, having broken the feudal power, was by no means a progressive state at the level of social policy. Quite to the contrary, we might even say that in the early Meiji period, after the establishment of the modern state, there was significantly greater hardship visited upon the peasantry than there was even at the end of the feudal system.

The Freedom and Popular Rights Movement of the 1870s spurred on the development in the 1880s and ’90s of this articulation among Christian socialism, the peasant movements, and a nativist agrarian radicalism — almost anarcho-syndicalist — that would be embodied by figures like the famous anarchist Kotoku Shusui. The challenges that these movements faced were very significant. They were largely banned and outlawed quickly, but they successfully planted the seed throughout the intellectual world and workers’ organizations of what would slowly become a renewed militancy on the part of organized labor.
DF


How did Japanese Marxism begin to take shape as a school of thought with original perspectives of its own? What adaptations did Japanese Marxists find necessary for theories that had originally been developed in a European or perhaps in an American context?

GW


This refers back, in a way, to your previous question about the development of Japan’s social and political structures. In this sense, the key debate on this question took place in the 1920s. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was founded in 1922, and very quickly became a central nodal point of intellectual activity. Around this time, what became the key debate in Japanese social thought was called the debate on Japanese capitalism. This debate was essentially between two positions.

One side, the so-called Koza faction, supported the thesis that Japanese capitalism was immature and incomplete, having only made a partial transition from feudal social forms. Defenders of this thesis would point to the fact that the labor wage rate was significantly below that of other capitalist societies and would argue that it could be explained by reference to other ideological factors, namely despotic power in the countryside, the transformation of former feudal lords into property-owning landlords, despotic tenant farm practices, the extraction of ground rent — more or less an agrarian despotism.

On the other hand of this debate was the so-called Rono faction, which would later go on to form the Socialist Party in the postwar period. They argued that Japanese capitalism was in fact a normally developing capitalism. They had a very normative understanding of what capitalism ought to be and argued that Japanese capitalism had been comprehensively established, with a full break from feudalism, with the advent of the Meiji Restoration. This break constituted a fundamental historical transition from feudal social and political forms. In other words, if such forms still existed in the political conjuncture, they were to be understood as inevitably dying and soon to fall away.The Comintern held that Japanese capitalism was not ripe for socialist revolution but would first require a two-stage revolutionary process involving a completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, principally directed against the emperor system.

What’s significant about this debate is that it placed into the center of the development of Japanese Marxism the question of what use Marx’s theoretical work could be in the concrete political analysis of Japanese capitalism. But it also involved a kind of allegorical retelling of political questions, in the sense that, unsurprisingly, supporters of the feudal thesis — the thesis that Japan was still overwhelmed with feudal remnants — took a specific political line. It would later become the line of the Comintern: the idea that Japanese capitalism was not ripe for socialist revolution but would first require a two-stage revolutionary process involving a completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which would be principally directed against the emperor system.

The other side — the Rono faction, which asserted that Japanese capitalism already constituted a mature capitalist social formation — had a one-stage theory of revolution, with the immediate passage to socialist demands. This mirrored very closely the development of similar debates, particularly in Africa and Latin America, but really everywhere outside Europe and North America — North America never having had feudalism properly speaking, except perhaps in New France, and Europe having had a transition from feudalism at an earlier stage, at least in England and France. This debate and its allegorical representation in two political lines was highly significant, and essentially created the main trends of Japanese Marxist theory.
DF


What was the experience of the Japanese Communist Party after its foundation in the 1920s? And what relationship did it have to the intellectual development of Marxism in Japan?
GW


The experience of the JCP was a very significant one. The party was formed in 1922 and immediately went through a very intense period of political and intellectual splits, exemplified by figures like Fukumoto Kazuo, whose thought was quite close to that of Georg Lukács. History and Class Consciousness was published in 1923 and was almost immediately taken up in Japan. This highly intellectualized vision of the party had major consequences in the 1920s. That line didn’t win out in the end, but it made the party a very important site for intellectuals.

However, the authorities cracked down on the JCP at an early stage. Having been formed in 1922, it was banned in 1925 under the Peace Preservation Law. Thereafter, the party was essentially a semiunderground organization, but many figures in Japanese political and intellectual life belonged to it or were at least adjacent to it.

The party took an early stance on this previous debate about Japanese capitalism. It was deeply influenced by the Comintern. At this stage, there were several figures in the Comintern as a whole who were occupied with Japan, including Nikolai Bukharin and the Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen. Kuusinen was the head of the Comintern’s Eastern Bureau during the late 1920s and early 1930s and wrote many of the position papers on Japan.

One of the things that the Japanese Communist Party did that was very significant was that it attacked the emperor system. It was for this that the communists were banned — not for being communists, not for proposing an end to capitalist society, and not for proposing a transition to socialism.

In fact, there was a relatively free intellectual culture throughout the 1920s, despite the fact that there was a government that was prosecuting imperialism all over East Asia, and that was increasingly open to a process of fascist transformation. It was absolutely possible to write about Marx, to read Marx, or to propose communist solutions to economic questions.After the defeat of Japan in August 1945, the JCP emerged essentially not just unscathed but with a remarkable degree of popularity, despite the years of repression.

What provoked the extreme force with which the Japanese Communist Party was attacked in the prewar period was its insistence that the emperor system was the theoretical and political lodestone of the social order, and that without a frontal attack on and destruction of the emperor system, there wasn’t any possibility for a communist development. This element of the JCP would become very, very important, and would also become an element of its postwar legitimacy.
DF


How did the Japanese communists respond to the new situation that arose after the defeat of Japan in 1945 and the inauguration of a new political system that was under US hegemony?
GW


The JCP changed significantly, for two reasons. First of all, from the mid-1930s and the genuine transition to fascism in Japan — without entering deeply into the debates around the historiography of global fascism, whether Japan qualifies as fascist, and so forth — the JCP was not just outlawed: it was hunted down and destroyed. The JCP faced an extraordinary level of political repression by the state in the 1930s: extrajudicial killings, long prison sentences for trumped-up offenses, etc.

The main leaders of the JCP through the 1930s and ’40s — that is, through the high point of Japanese fascism and into the Pacific War and the defeat in World War II — were in prison. When they emerged after the defeat of Japan and the surrender of the emperor in August 1945, the JCP emerged essentially not just unscathed but with a remarkable degree of popularity, despite the years of repression.

The JCP could legitimately say, “We are the sole political force who did not collaborate with the previous system.” Also, even among people who were not sympathetic to the JCP’s particular political ideology — to communism, socialism, Marxism — there was a significant section of the population, especially the working population, who saw them as a new possibility in political terms, at a moment when warfare had devastated the Japanese state.

It wasn’t only a perspective that said, “These people were persecuted by the previous order,” but also a perspective that said, “The previous order led us to destruction, therefore we should have listened to those voices which saw early on the destructive force of the fascist order.” The Japanese Communist Party thus had a remarkable opportunity in 1945.

The US occupation of Japan itself is a very interesting and rather strange phenomenon. Policy was essentially made in many cases by very young people — people who were graduate students at Columbia and Harvard. Policy under the US occupation emphasized the “de-fascization” of Japan — the elimination of the remnants of the fascist order from institutions and the repurposing of previous elements of government for a new democratic order.

In 1947 and 1948, there was the possibility that the Japanese Communist Party and the Japanese Socialist Party would run on a joint left-wing ticket for the elections. Polling showed that not only would this be successful, it might even be a complete success — perhaps enough to form a government. This, of course, was totally unacceptable to Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the allied powers at the time. MacArthur and his fellow commanders saw this through the lens of the early, developing Cold War — the possibility that Japan would go red.The choice of the US occupiers was to privilege anti-communism over de-fascization. That really set the stage for what would happen in postwar Japan.

This inaugurated what came to be known as the “reverse course” among historians. Until this point, there had been a sense that the American occupation was going to participate in the de-fascization of Japanese society. Now the new modus operandi of the occupation was to maintain Japan as a bulwark against communism instead. By 1947–48, it was clear on the Asian continent that the Chinese Communists, who had been struggling for ten or fifteen years in conditions of civil war, were on the verge of victory, which would come to pass in 1949. The moment was a very volatile one in geopolitical terms.

At that stage, the choice of the US occupiers was to privilege anti-communism over de-fascization. That really set the stage for what would happen in postwar Japan, not only in terms of the state but also in terms of the JCP and what would happen thereafter. To cut a long story short, the JCP had a brief turn to a more or less illegal mode of struggle in the early 1950s. It went, in part, underground.

That underground experience of the JCP in the early 1950s produced some remarkable political, cultural, and even literary and artistic effects. It was a very influential period, but it was repudiated by the JCP’s turn in 1955, when the party declared an end to any attempt at armed struggle and an acceptance of the parliamentary road.
DF


In the 1960s, despite or perhaps because of the extraordinary economic boom at the time, Japan developed one of the most significant New Left movements. It was easily on a par, in terms of social and political weight, with the movements in Western Europe at the same time. What common ground did it share with those European movements, and how did it differ from them?
GW


The Japanese New Left shared in some senses a common pathway of development with the New Left in Europe and North America. First of all, the effects of the 1950s on the global communist movement were significant. I’m thinking here of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and its crushing by the Soviet Union, and the so-called secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, when the crimes of Joseph Stalin and the existence of the gulag were revealed. This had a very intense effect on British communism, for example. It was the moment of the creation of the New Left and a certain exodus from the British Communist Party. The same can be said about many other places, like France.

The revelations about the nature of the Soviet Union and the pitfalls of the Soviet model of communism had a significant effect in creating a left that was independent of the JCP, with its Comintern-driven and deeply Stalinist orientation. But as I just mentioned, there was also an impact from just before 1956 and that apocalyptic moment for global communism. That stemmed from the repudiation by the JCP of the underground experience of direct action in the early 1950s.Many young people took as a genuine betrayal the JCP’s repudiation of the experience of armed struggle, which was formative for a whole generation, as having been simply ultraleft adventurism.

The JCP repudiated the line of armed struggle at the party’s Sixth Congress in 1955 and condemned those who went into the villages in a peculiar movement called the “mountain and village operations corps.” These were student groups that went into the poor and desolate rural villages in an attempt to spark revolution. Many young people took as a genuine betrayal the JCP’s repudiation of this experience, which was formative for a whole generation, as having been simply ultraleft adventurism, and as a sign that the Japanese Communist Party was no longer the vanguard of revolutionary politics that genuinely sought to overturn the existing order.

From that moment of 1955, there was already a kind of nascent New Left forming. What really concretized that New Left before 1968 was the experience in 1959–60 of the renewal of the US-Japan joint security treaty. This was the governmental pact that kept the US military in Japan and kept Japan subordinate to the US. There was a mass uprising against it.

The student movement of 1959–60 — the so-called Anpo movement, named after this treaty — brought extraordinary numbers of people into the streets, often in simultaneous demonstrations around Japan. We’re talking about as many as seven million people in some of the daily demonstrations. That’s not in one place — that’s across the whole nation — but nevertheless, seven million is still a remarkable number to have mobilized in the 1950s under the social conditions that Japan was in at the time.

That period of 1959–60 created the first student movement that gave student power a genuine popular and national edge. In the late 1960s, when the second student movement reached its peak in Japan, there was a popular undercurrent that had already been formed. Obviously, there was a global simultaneity of political questions, particularly the opposition to US imperialism and the antiwar movement. But the Japanese New Left was not in any way an imitation of the New Left in France, Germany, or the United States. It was something that had its own local trajectory of development, albeit one that was, of course, articulated to this broader moment of upheaval.
DF


Coming into the 1970s, the JCP had a reputation for being rather close to the Eurocommunist current that was developing in countries like Italy and Spain. Would you say that reputation was well deserved, or do you think the Japanese party had a particular orientation of its own?
GW


This is a very interesting question, because the Japanese Communist Party, for people on the Left around the world, continues to be seen as a kind of remarkable oddity. It remains today a party with a genuinely mass membership for an organization which is unapologetically in the tradition of the large communist parties. The actual dues-paying membership of the party is still something in the order of 300,000 or 350,000 members. In Europe or North America, it’s certainly unthinkable that you would have this. If the US Communist Party has even thirty dues-paying members, that would be remarkable enough at this stage.The Japanese New Left was not in any way an imitation of the New Left in France, Germany, or the United States. It was something that had its own local trajectory of development.

What distinguished the Japanese Communist Party in the 1970s was the long-standing leadership of Miyamoto Kenji. He was in charge of the party for a pivotal period, from 1958 through into the early 1980s. That period was coextensive with the high point of Eurocommunism in the Spanish and Italian parties, and to some extent the French party as well.

One thing that’s different about this period, which makes it a bit more complex, is that Miyamoto quite heavily criticized the Italian party’s “Eurocommunist” term by suggesting that it was a betrayal of the social, democratic, and organizational foundations of communism. This argument was in one sense an attempt to preserve the traditional structure of the party, but in another sense, it also had to do with the political economy of Japan at the time.

Eurocommunism in Italy and Spain was focused on realistic communism, as it were — demands for the expansion of workers’ rights and the emphasis on pockets of communist control within state institutions, for example. Yet this was undercut in Japan, in a peculiar way, by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the main conservative party that has ruled the country in almost unbroken fashion since 1945. The LDP in the 1970s pursued an interesting double strategy. On the one hand, we can trace to that period the beginnings of what we would now think of as neoliberalism in Japan. But we can also trace a deepening of welfare-state institutions by the LDP itself.

The wing that was sympathetic to Eurocommunism in the JCP lost, not just because they didn’t have ideological hegemony within the party but also because, at the time, the Japanese state itself was taking a turn toward policies of popular equality. This was a very complex thing for the JCP and the Left in general to deal with, because there was a turn by the conservative forces in Japan toward a system of greater social equality at the governmental level.

In a way, the structural reform that the system itself was doing outflanked Eurocommunism within the JCP. The JCP throughout the 1970s was very successful in maintaining its organizational culture — a deeply Stalinist, “democratic-centralist” culture. It maintained this very difficult position in conditions of mass enrichment, and it even maintained insurrectionary elements inside the party. We can’t underestimate that.

There is a tendency to look at the history of the JCP and similar parties in terms of the critique brought forward by the New Left that said these parties were irretrievably Stalinist, but also bureaucratic and so on. But what made the JCP have this organizational culture that persisted was precisely the fact that internally, it did still uphold genuinely insurrectionary and emancipatory positions. The idea of the seizure of state power by military means also had this utopian quality.The JCP remains today a party with a genuinely mass membership for an organization which is unapologetically in the tradition of the large communist parties.

We can look at the JCP and compare it with the Italian, Spanish, or French parties. Of course, in the case of the Italian party, it was practically an alternate state in parts of Italy. The JCP never had that degree of popular control or cultural hegemony. But because the JCP’s internal culture had this strange persistence of emancipatory elements and rigidity, it managed to persist through the Eurocommunist period without falling apart at the other end. That is possibly due to Japanese conservatives making these welfare-state reforms that kept the Japanese state in a space of relative equality when compared to the advanced capitalist countries.
DF


How did the general retreat of the international left in the 1980s and ’90s affect Japanese Marxism? Did Marxism begin to lose its currency among intellectuals in a similar fashion?
GW


It did very much. Today, the events of 1989–91 are as much of an historical break as we often previously thought 1968 to be. We often speak in this vocabulary of “pre-’68” and “post-’68,” but we probably ought also to speak in a “pre-’89” and “post-’89” vocabulary. I think the retreat of Japanese Marxism began earlier, at the end of the long 1968.

It started with this complex moment of 1972 or 1973, when many of the post-’68 armed-struggle organizations devolved into what was really a remarkable level of internal violence and self-destruction. Naturally, this was something that turned off the general public in a very comprehensive way, particularly because of how it was mediatized. But the same period also constituted a defeat for the labor movement. This is a global story, of course, that relates to the early ’70s oil shock and the beginnings of neoliberal social policy, in the sense of breaking the power of the existing trade-union movement in Japan.

Marxism certainly had a high point in the ’60s in Japan, and after the ’70s became much more academic again. That didn’t mean a significant retreat of Marxism from the intellectual landscape. I would say that throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Marxism was still the dominant theoretical mode, according to which a great deal of intellectual work in the universities was done, in history and literary studies and political economy.

But after 1989 or 1990, something very significant took place in Japan — the bursting of what had been the speculative real estate bubble. This was coupled with the loss of the Soviet bulwark and the notion still upheld by the JCP that what happened in Japan was part of a global trajectory toward socialism, which had its bulwark in the world, even if it was imperfect. The implosion of official socialism, alongside the implosion of the Japanese postwar economic miracle, created a genuine sense, I think, that Marx had come to be a figure of the old, postwar world, and now a new “post-postwar” had begun.

However, I think there were really significant things that took place within Marxism in Japan after the 1990s. One of them was the work of figures like Kojin Karatani, who is now well known in English. He began an intense round of publication. Japanese Marxism took on, in some ways, a more academic character at this point, much as was the case in English or other European languages. One of the things that was true in Japan, I think, was that Marxism largely lost a clear connection to political movements.Japanese Marxism survives not only in small pockets of society but in concrete institutions.

Of course, the JCP persisted, and various political sects from the ’60s and ’70s persisted, but the overall direction of Marxist analysis in the university ceased to have a direct political connection through the 1990s and early 2000s. I would say that certainly is something that is very different from the way things were in the 1960s, when, if you look through the major figures of Marxist theory in Japan, the majority had some connection to concrete socialist politics.
DF


To what extent does Marxism still survive in Japan today, whether as an intellectual tradition or as a political force?

GW


I think Marxism survives in Japan today, as it survives everywhere, because Marxism remains in some sense, as Jean-Paul Sartre once said, the unsurpassable philosophy of our time. In the Japanese case, I would say that Marxism survives not only in small pockets of society but in concrete institutions. The JCP persists in having a mass social basis — a genuinely mass party basis. That is a significant political trajectory in Japan.

In intellectual life, Marxism certainly survives, but it is nowhere near being the kind of hegemonic force that it was, especially through the mid-twentieth century. It can’t be underestimated the degree to which Marxism was such a dominant force in the universities and in intellectual life in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Today, nothing like that persists, and the figures of Marxism in Japan who do persist are no longer the sort of dominant intellectual figures that you had in the 1950s and ’60s, such as Uno Kozo or Hiromatsu Wataru.

Those kinds of figures are not really there anymore, but there is also a renewed interest in Marxism in Japan. That’s a global phenomenon that we’ve seen — and of course Jacobin is a part of that — over the last fifteen years, really the mid- to late 2000s. I think that is a significant experience in Japan that mirrors those in Europe and North America. I can’t help but think that it’s something very closely connected to your previous question about the moment of 1989–91.Today, Japanese young people no longer believe in capitalism as the guaranteed system which will bring them prosperity or even the means of subsistence.

When you have a generation of young socialists who don’t remember the Soviet Union, on the one hand there’s a loss of genealogy, a loss of intellectual tradition, a loss of connection to a great trajectory of victory, but at the same time there’s also a remarkable freeing that comes from that. It’s a sort of freedom from a need to see Marxism in one’s own time as an inheritance of the Soviet system or as a response to it. In fact, it’s simply untethered from it now. I think that element in Japan has a significant potential.

Japan shares with the other OECD countries the phenomenon of an emptying out of the working class — a destruction of the postwar Japanese miracle that was founded on a triangulation of corporation, state, and family that ensured a certain type of welfare. Today, Japanese young people no longer believe in capitalism as the guaranteed system which will bring them prosperity or even the means of subsistence. I think that has a great potential to produce a significant new generation of Marxists in Japan.

Having said that, Marxism intellectually is in genuine retreat, and the pockets of Marxist theory that persist in Japan, while important, are no longer hegemonic. That means that it’s all the more important for this generation in Japan, but also for us internationally, to really learn from the Marxist theoretical work that was done. I would say that Japan’s was probably the most significant repository on Earth of Marxist theoretical writing after English, French, and German, and possibly Russian. I think it’s for us to try to learn from that, in connection with the new young socialists in Japan — of whom there are many.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gavin Walker is associate professor of history at McGill University. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), editor of The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), Marx, Asia, and the History of the Present (a special issue of positions: politics), and editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new edited collection, The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 is now out from Verso.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.