Preface to the Third edition I have added substantially to the bibliographical material for each chapter and expanded both the final chapter and the conclusion Canterbury
Preface to the Fourth edition This edition is thoroughly revised and expanded. Books on various aspects of Marxism continue to appear as regularly as ever. I have therefore expanded all the bibliographies. I have also added at the end of the book, a list of dictionaries of Marxism and, in particular, relevant journals. Most chapters contain minor additions; there are substantial additions to the chapters on Latin America, theories of underdevelop- ment, the frankfurt School, Italian Marxism, and British Marxism The chapter on Marxism in the United States and the Conclusion have been considerably expanded. There is also a new chapter on Marxism and Postmodernism. My aim has been to provide as comprehensive a guide as possible to Marxist thought since the death of Marx DM Canterbury Easter 2006
Introduction: The legacy of marx At first sight, Marx would seem to have bequeathed a firm body of doctrine to his followers. In what he called the ' guiding thread of his studies, marx considered himself to have shown that the sum total of relations of production- the way men organised their social production as well as the instruments they used-constituted the real basis of society on which there arose a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponded definite forms of consciousness. Thus the way men pro- duced their means of subsistence conditioned their whole social, politi- cal, and intellectual life. But at a certain stage in their evolution the forces of production would develop beyond the relations of production and these would then act as a fetter. Such a stage inaugurated a period of social revolution. These productive forces had to develop to the fullest extent possible under the existing relations of production before the old social order would perish. It was possible to pick out the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. These bourgeois relations of pro- duction were the last ones to create a divided society and, with their end, the prehistory of human society would be brought to a close For bour- geois society would end with a period of revolution that would culmi- nate in the proletariat, through the agency of its own political party gaining power and, after a period of dictatorship, creating a classless, communist society But the passage of time revealed serious ambiguities in thought. One obvious reason for this was the chaotic state in Marx left his manuscripts at his death. Not only was his work unfin ished, but the rough drafts that went beyond what he had actually published implied-at least in the minds of many -a thorough reassess- ment of his message. At the time of his death, Marx's thought was
2 Marxism after marx known mainly through the rather simplistic Communist Manifesto and the difficult Capital. The publication of Marx's early writings around 1930 and the grundrisse in 1941 are the most striking examples of the influence of unpublished material. Indeed, the history of the develop ment of Marxist thought could almost be written in terms of the redis- covery of aspects of Marx's ideas that had either been neglected or unknown - or at least as far as western marxism is concerned a slightly less fortuitous reason for the ambivalence of Marx,'s legacy was that his way of thinking did not allow itself to be encapsulated in easy formulas. In his youth, Marx had detected an ambivalence in his master Hegel, and the same ambivalence was present-not surprisingly-in the disciple. For each was a dialectical thinker, and the Marxian dialectic in particular was open-ended being a unity of subjective and objective factors, both the theory and the practice were constantly interacting and evolving. Marx himself had changed and developed his views, both political and economic, during his lifetime Thirdly, Marx had urged his followers not to interpret the world, but to change it. But the more successful they were in this the more Marxism tended to become the doctrine of a mass movement. Mass political parties were born in the second half of the nineteenth century and socialism was the most radical of them, appealing to all who were excluded from, or not getting enough of, the benefits of the new industrial society. What distin guished Marxism in this context was its rare ability to link revolutionary fervour and desire for change with a historical perspective and a claim to be scientific. Almost inevitably, therefore, the inherited ideas were simpli fied, rigidified, ossified. Marxism became a matter of simple faith for its millions of adherents, to whom it gave the certainty of final victory. But this entailed an ever-growing distance from the original ideas of Marx and their transformation into a dogmatic ideology with the correlative concept of heresy (or revisionism, as it was often called) Lastly-and most evidently- the world has changed so much, and in so many places to which Marx paid little attention, that it would be idle to expect many specific points of his work to be still applicable. Marx certainly had views on the nature of socialist policy in Germany, and even, towards the end of his life, considered the possibility of revolution in Russia. But it remains paradoxical that Marx, a Victorian thinker who saw Europe and North America as the centre of the worlds stage and the arena for future revolutions, is apparently now more widely respected as a mentor by the populations of Third World countries. It is most impor tant to bear in mind in this connection that Marx envisaged a commu- nist revolution taking place in countries where a certain degree of
Introduction: The Legacy of marx 3 economic well-being would permit considerable post-revolutionary polit ical freedom. In the event, however, Marxist doctrines have proved most successful in those countries where scarcity of resources means that polit- ical freedom is a luxury that cannot be afforded. Thus, in many develop- ing countries a version of Marxism combined with nationalism has functioned as an ideology for mass participation in the modernisation process. The difficulties contained in Marx's legacy -at least in the minds of its recipients -can be shown by outlining briefly the ambivalences of his views in the key fields of economics, sociology, politics, and philosophy In economics, the very foundations were unclear at the time of Marx's death. Whether the labour theory of value could prove a useful tool in analysing real economic movements had to await the posthumous pub lication of Capital Volume Three and Marxs solution to the question of he transformation of values into prices. And his answer seemed unsat- isfactory to many of his followers. On more immediately practical mat- ters, Marx was clear that the collapse of the capitalist system was inevitable -but the exact mechanism was unclear. Was the key to be found in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? Or was it a question of overproduction and consequent underconsumption? Or a combina tion of both? Marx left the question sufficiently open for it to be a sub ject of considerable debate to this day. Moreover, Marx's economic studies dealt primarily with the competitive stage of capitalism Although he correctly predicted the growth of monopoly, he was not in a position to analyse its laws of motion and still less those of imperial- ism, which was peripheral to Marxs vision but is quite central to most modern Marxist accounts of the world economic system In sociology, the Communist Manifesto had talked of the simplification of class antagonisms and declared that 'society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeois and Proletariat,. Yet Marx's researches in the Theories of Surplus Value on the growth of the middle class and of the unproductive service sector seemed to supply a much more subtle view that even Bernstein would have found congenial. These problems were not clarified, as Marx's attempt to define class was notori- ously left unfinished at the end of Capital Volume Three. But the great lacuna in this respect in Marx was his treatment of the peasantry. Given the generally conservative attitude of the Western European peasantry, it is not surprising that Marx could talk discouragingly of the idiocy of rural life, and allot to the peasantry at the most a subordinate role in any revolutionary movement. With the centre of gravity in Marxism moving