by Gill Hands
Europe had been divided by peace treaty and many European countries came under communist control as part of the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union was now one of the major powers and it influenced governments in states around it using military and economic aid. Berlin became divided by the Berlin Wall. An ‘Iron Curtain’ of secrecy was said to have come down between Eastern and Western Europe.
There were fears that Communist China would come to dominate South East Asia. It was felt that ‘the loss of Indo-China will cause the fall of South East Asia like a set of dominoes’. This was the domino theory, as described by President Eisenhower, and it led to USA involvement in Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and ultimately to the Vietnam War.
There were revolutions in South America and Africa against colonial oppression. Many of the countries involved received aid from the Communist bloc in their struggle for independence. Communist governments in the developing world have included Cuba, Chile, Angola and Mozambique; all had differing colonial histories but received aid and arms from communist countries.
Marxists have argued that the USA escalated the Cold War by the use of atomic weapons during the Second World War and that the nuclear threat was used as a way of expanding capitalism. Whatever the reasons for its origin, the Cold War was largely an imaginary war based on fear and mistrust that came from deep ideological differences between the communist and capitalist blocs. It came to an end in the 1980s, largely due to the decline of the communist economies in the Soviet Union and The People’s Republic of China.
The decline of communism
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a rise in world communism, but by the end of the century it was in decline. At its peak, in the early 1980s, it was estimated that a third of the people of the world lived under some kind of communist government. Presently, there are only a few communist countries left; The People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam are the few remaining communist regimes under a single-party system. A large number of people still live under communist rule as the population of China is so vast, but the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and many people regard this as the beginning of the end for communism and as proof that the ideas of Marx do not work.
Historians are still debating the causes of the break-up of the Soviet Union and many blame the arms race that came as a result of the Cold War. This was financially crippling for a country that was already economically and technologically backward and politically isolated. Whatever the reasons, the decline began in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began to bring in the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). These were vital, as the country was virtually bankrupt and technologically very far behind the West. As it became more and more obvious that the Soviet Union was losing its power, many citizens of the satellite communist countries around its borders began relatively peaceful demonstrations against their governments. Eastern European Communist governments fell one after the other during the 1980s and in 1989 the Berlin Wall, once a great symbol of the Cold War, fell. Many of the republics within the Soviet Union began to agitate for independence and eventually there was an attempted coup against Gorbachev in the summer of 1991; following this, Boris Yeltsin became leader and the Soviet Union became a Commonwealth of Independent States. The Supreme Soviet, or the governing body, was dissolved in December 1991 and this is seen as the official ending of the Soviet Union.
Has Marxism failed?
Is the decline of the Soviet Union the beginning of the end for Marxism? Many people would argue that this is the case, but the response of many Marxists would be to say that the regime in the Soviet Union had very little to do with Marx except for the use of his name. They would describe it as a form of state capitalism, where bureaucrats acted as a form of bourgeoisie. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a great crisis of confidence in other communist countries that saw the Soviet government as a model for them to follow. They also lost trade markets and military support.
Critics would also point to the fact that China is now largely a free-market economy and not actually a communist state at all, and that the communist governments in Indo-China and in Cuba are reliant on Chinese economic support and so strictly speaking they cannot be described as communist either. Although officially North Korea (The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is a socialist republic, it has been described as a dictatorship by its critics. There is some debate about the future of communism in Cuba after Fidel Castro’s leadership ended. His age and ill health meant he passed the reins of government over to his younger brother in 2008. As personality cults are important in all communist states that developed out of peasant economies this change in leadership might affect the popularity of the communist government. There is much speculation as to how communism might develop in Cuba in the future.
Although it looks like the end for communism in many places, it has not stopped Marxists who are working towards power in the developing world, notably in India and Nepal. It is impossible to say what might happen in the future but this will be looked at in more detail in the final chapter.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Marx died in 1883 but Engels continued to work on his manuscripts.
His ideas were spread around the world through the labour movement and working men’s groups.
Marx wrote a vast body of work that has been interpreted in widely different ways.
Russia became the first communist country in the world after a revolution in 1917.
Communism developed in a way Marx would not have approved of in Russia and China.
The Cold War was based on the fear of the spread of communism in the West.
Communism failed in many countries because of economic problems.
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9
Marxism after Marx – the development of Marxist thought
In this chapter you will learn:
how Marxist theory was developed in the twentieth century
about postmodernism and post-Marxist thought
about the debate on Marx’s relevance in the twenty-first century.
There is no doubt that the ideas of Marx changed the world. Revolutions happened in his name and communist societies came into being. His ideas also led to a great deal of debate about the nature of society and of humankind, for he changed the way that we look at each other and at the world. In academic circles there has been continuing debate and discussion of his ideas for over a century. This has led to the splitting off of different schools of thought based on Marxist ideas, who develop them further. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been less interest in his work academically; it has become ‘unfashionable’, especially as the academic world moves towards postmodern theory. However, with the rise of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization campaigns, including the eco-socialist movement, there are signs that there may be future developments in the aspects of Marx’s work that look at the ‘destructive’ spread of capitalism and its relation to ecology.
This chapter aims to give some background understanding and structure to the many complex and conflicting theories that have been developed from the works of Marx. Some of these have been in favour academically and then gone out of favour again and some have always been controversial. However, it is important to have at least a basic understanding of them as many books on Marx assume knowledge of them.
There have also been numerous criticisms of his theories, especially as time has gone on. Many of his predictions do not seem to have come about and these will be discussed later in the chapter. In addition, there is also an examination of how relevant Marx is now that we live in a postmodern age.
Types of Marxism
Marx wrote a great deal and a great deal has been written about him, so that if someone claims to be a Marxist, the next question asked is often ‘What kind?’ As there have been numerous debates over who is the most accurate interpreter of what Marx wrote and many academic schools of Marxism exist, this is not an
easy question to answer. There is also some confusion with the word Marxian. Marxian is often used by those academics who agree with a lot of Marx’s methodology but not in the conclusions he reached, or in his predictions about the future of society. It is often used in relation to the study of political and economic systems. For example, Marxian economics embraces Marx’s use of the terms ‘means of production’, ‘surplus value’, etc. However, those who use it do not necessarily believe the conclusions that Marx came to about alienation, exploitation and the need for revolution.
The main types of Marxism and schools of thought developed in response to his work are as follows:
CLASSICAL MARXISM
Classical Marxism is the theory of Marxism that Marx and Engels developed. It is based on what Marx said or wrote. Most of what has been written in this book so far would come under the heading of classical Marxism, including Marx’s description of the capitalist society and historical materialism and the issues of class struggle, alienation, exploitation, revolution and communism. However, as Marx wrote a great body of work, there is still plenty of scope for people to disagree about what Marx meant by something or whether or not he might have changed his mind about it later. Added to this, is the fact that many Marxists have taken pieces of Marx out of context in order to prove political points.
Another problem in classical Marxism is that Marx changed his mind about some of the issues; sometimes he developed what he had already written and sometimes he refuted it, especially as his thought processes matured. Some Marxists would divide Marx’s work into two broad categories of ‘young Marx’ and ‘mature Marx’.
There is some disagreement about which works should be taken into account at each stage and where the dividing line is between his youthful and mature thought. It is observed that many of his earlier works are philosophical in nature as he was studying philosophy and still under the influence of Feuerbach. His later works deal more with economic theory and the materialist concept of history. This split is important to many Marxists because it seems to indicate a change towards a progressive kind of scientific socialism in his writing and this means that many of his earlier works could be said to be influenced by bourgeois philosophy and disregarded. In his book State and Revolution, published in 1917, Lenin claimed that The Poverty of Philosophy was the first work of the mature Marx. When The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were first published in 1932, they were seized on by those who wanted a humanistic explanation of Marx but they were suppressed in the Soviet Union.
Much of the more recent discussion of this division goes back to the works of Louis Althusser (1918–90), a structural Marxist who wrote a great deal on ideology and makes particular reference to the split between the young and mature Marx in his work For Marx, written in 1965. Althusser claimed that The German Ideology of 1845 marked the point where Marx broke away from his more humanist philosophical ideas and began a more scientific and materialist viewpoint. However, there have been others who disagree with him, such as Etienne Balibar, who wrote The Philosophy of Marx in 1991. These divisions between young and mature Marx do appear to be largely subjective and depend on what is trying to be proved at the time. Are the works of Marx a progression that develops through time and can we read the early works in isolation, knowing that the later works may contradict them? There are no conclusive answers in academic circles.
GRAMSCI AND HEGEMONY
One of the major thinkers who developed classical Marxism was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian communist. He was imprisoned by the Fascist regime in Italy in 1926 and began to write about what he saw as the failure of Marxist communism. Marx had predicted that a workers’ revolution was inevitable, so why had the promised revolution not occurred? Gramsci agreed with Marx that there was a need for class struggle but he saw that many European workers turned towards fascism rather than communism and he wondered why this had occurred. Why was capitalism still deeply entrenched in the society around him? Gramsci’s imprisonment lasted for eight years and during this time he thought and wrote intensively about these questions; over 30 notebooks and also thousands of pages on history and nationalism were later published as the Prison Notebooks.
Marx had written that the economic base was always the driving force of change; the superstructure of laws, culture and religion was subordinate to the economy. This is known as the theory of economic determinism. Marx had shown that the superstructure relied on ideology in order to instil a false consciousness about the economy.
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Insight
As we have seen in earlier chapters Marx believed that each mode of production brings into existence its own unique ideology.
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Gramsci agreed with this up to a point but thought that this view of society was too simplistic. He believed that the driving force in society was not the economy but lay in the dissemination of ideas that came out of the superstructure. Ideology was in fact an important and autonomous part of the class system, part of the total culture of society. Gramsci developed the idea of ideology much further, into the concept of hegemony. He believed that one class was still the ‘dominant’ class and in order to remain dominant it needed to have agreement in society that what it was doing was right and just and as it should be. The class needed to establish what he called ‘spontaneous consent’, so that there was no need for the ruling class to use force, or political or economic coercion to rule. All this class had to do was to make the workers believe in their perspective, through the means of religion, education and the media. In this way, a shared belief system becomes the basis for a form of class domination.
Gramsci did not believe that hegemony was a unified system of oppression forced on the workers from above, he saw it as a complex layered system that ran through society as a whole. People in society live their own life but are part of a small structure that is built up around them; they do not see how their life fits into the structure around them and how this slots into the structure of society as a whole. People assume that they have free will and autonomy, but according to Gramsci, a consensus culture had developed, where the values of the bourgeoisie had become the values of the majority of people in society. In some sense, there is a kind of mental or moral bargain made between the rulers and those who are ruled, which everyone accepts without thinking. It appears to be a natural and common sense view of the world but it is really the view of the dominant class. Although a minority of people may object to this view, they can be overcome by force if necessary, as long as the majority of the population are in agreement. Gramsci believed that all cultural institutions were suspect and all cultural practices and beliefs should be looked at critically and investigated for the part they might play in dominating society. Gramsci believed that the rise of fascism had come about because people were more concerned about buying into middle-class status and a consumer society than they were with working towards a revolution that would truly benefit them. The rhetoric of the fascist leaders, combined with the teachings of a bourgeois religious system, had blinded them to their true needs and made them believe that a culture of individuals in competition with each other was natural.
So, in Gramsci’s view, the culture of a society is not a morally neutral system but is an expression of ideology, which is used to promote the views of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie were able to dominate the proletariat by manipulating social consciousness through religion, education and other cultural systems. Today we would include the mass media, such as television, radio, newspapers and web pages as part of the hegemony, for these are a more important part of the superstructure than they were in Gramsci’s time.
Gramsci saw that the hegemony changed through time as circumstances changed, and that it was always possible for the proletariat to use the hegemony to their own advantage if they could get enough support from others in their society. It is possible to use hegemony to put forward an alternative view of the world; for example, communists could disseminate the idea tha
t a revolution is desirable and possible. He saw that this would be easier to do in an unpopular dictatorship than in a social democracy where culture was very complex and relations between people and institutions are complicated. This is why he believed education was extremely important, for he also believed that anyone from any class could be an intellectual if they were given the chance to study and that it was important to establish a working class ‘culture’ to articulate the needs of the masses.
Gramsci was important because he saw that everyday culture was a place where political action could begin and he was one of the first Marxists to realize the power of the mass media. He was an influence on the thinkers of the Frankfurt School who developed Marxist thought at around the same time.