With the establishment of Soviet power and its orthodoxy, revisionism remained a constant shadow. The watch around the ideological line decreed was sometimes stricter, sometimes more generous. But it was always there, and was a concern for the innermost circles of power.
Helga Grebing wrote a book on the history of revisionism from Bernstein up to the Prague Spring. It was published back in 1977, when the Soviet Union still appeared to be the most stable of powers, unthreatened by anything except the Third World War. The Austro-Marxists who tried to unite Marx with Kant were given their own section; their role within Austrian social democracy was important during the interwar period.
The first big individual name in Grebing’s book is the Hungarian philosopher and literary historian Georg Lukács. His 1923 book History and Class Consciousness attracted sharp criticism in the Soviet Union. Lukács questioned the orthodoxy that had taken form on many points. Marxism did not entail a belief in one or another of the theses in Marx; it is thoroughly a method of studying reality, he asserted, and he repudiated the copy theory of knowledge that Lenin had established with inspiration from Engels. In addition, he criticized Engels’s method of extending the dialectic to nature as well. Lukács would himself repudiate his theses, and thereafter remained somewhat loyal to Soviet orthodoxy up until 1956, when he sided with the uprising in his home country and once again fell into disfavour.29
One unique and fascinating Marxist was Ernst Bloch, who developed a number of themes in his own headstrong way: materialism that opened broad horizons towards the diversity of life and culture; atheism that did not exclude the emotional intensity of religion; utopias that drove people constantly forward on the way to the ‘home everyone longs for, but where no one has yet been’ – the final words in his colossal 1959 work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope). When Bloch returned to Germany after exile in the United States, he chose the GDR and was allowed to start a new philosophical journal – Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (German Journal for Philosophy) – but soon turned out to be entirely too obstinate for the regime and sought refuge in West Germany, where he lived out his final years, a celebrated teacher of radical students.30
Both Lukács and Bloch were part of the group of intellectuals who, according to French philosopher Michael Löwy, gave expression to the hope for a happy ending to history that is typical of Jewish messianism. Löwy argues that such utopian thinking was common in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. One question that then presents itself is whether Marx’s ideas can be seen as a forerunner of this tradition. This seems doubtful; Marx was rather unaffected by the Judaism of his ancestors, and his statements on the subject do not even indicate any closer familiarity.31
From the 1920s onwards, the publication of Marx’s unfinished works, which had been interrupted after Kautsky, was taken up again. The driving force in this project was David Riazanov, who was active in the Soviet Union under increasingly difficult conditions. He was eventually murdered in the great wave of terror in 1938. The corresponding work in Germany could be carried out under freer conditions before Hitler’s seizure of power. In the years around 1930, the publication of a large critical edition of Marx and Engels’s work was underway; even though it had to be discontinued in 1933, it had far-reaching consequences. A new Marx could be glimpsed in part, above all in and through the previously unknown Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.32
One of the leading interpreters of this text was Herbert Marcuse. At that time, Marcuse was also a contributor at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) that had been established in Frankfurt am Main, where researchers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were working. Characteristic of this ‘Frankfurt School’ was that Marx was treated as a classical scholar and inspiration alongside several others, above all Hegel, Freud, and gradually Max Weber as well. This tradition has been maintained in new forms. Jürgen Habermas has attempted to reconstruct historical materialism; even a number of somewhat younger talents, with Axel Honneth at their head, have developed interesting ideas on Marx’s topicality.33
The thinkers usually counted among the Frankfurt School were without exception sharp critics of the Soviet Union and its Marxism–Leninism. French Marxists had a more ambiguous relationship to the rule of Stalin and his successors. After the Second World War, the French Communist Party grew stronger, attracting many young intellectuals. Michel Foucault was one of them; he said that at the time he disliked Jean-Paul Sartre, who polemicized against the communists. Gradually, their roles changed. Sartre took up a conciliatory attitude towards most of what the Soviet Union was doing. But in his great work from 1960, Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), he was at least a biting critic of the ‘lazy Marxism’ that in his opinion characterized official Soviet ideology.34
Sartre’s own Marxism bore the stamp of humanism: the Marx of the Manuscripts, who spoke about humanity’s essence and its alienation, became normative. A few years into the 1960s, this interpretation was subjected to merciless criticism by French philosopher Louis Althusser, who as we have already seen maintained that the early Marx, the author of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, differed crucially from the mature Marx.
Italy also had a strong Communist Party, but it developed in another, freer direction. One of its founders was Antonio Gramsci. Together with Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci was the most innovative Marxist of the first half of the twentieth century. But the conditions for his work were extremely unique: it was in Mussolini’s prisons between 1926 and 1937 that he composed his famous Quaderni di carcere (Prison Notebooks). That is why posterity has above all taken notice of his theories on cultural hegemony. He took one of his starting points from the third of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: that the educator himself also has an educator. A person’s convictions are not determined only by the social position they have. In capitalist society, the bourgeoisie also has the role of pedagogue, thereby possessing power over thinking. It would remain so even if the working class conquered political power, Gramsci argued. The workers therefore had to create their own convictions, values, and norms, getting help from those intellectuals who stood on their side.
During his time as an active politician, Gramsci was a more mainstream communist. In prison – where he could follow the ravages of fascism, the victory of Nazism in Germany, and the degeneration of the Soviet Union – he arrived at his new convictions. It was the late 1950s before his ideas gained real influence; over the following decades, he was among the most important providers of impulse for the left then taking form in Europe and other parts of the world.35
Gramsci became one of the fathers of Eurocommunism, a short-lived movement that was important in its time. Its chief proponent was Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party who struck a ‘historic compromise’ with the ruling Christian Democrats in Italy. Nothing came of it, however, and Eurocommunism quickly lost its power of attraction over the course of the 1980s.36
The leading ideologues in the Soviet Union of course condemned Eurocommunism as yet another form of revisionism. In the same way, they had managed to dismiss and persecute numerous deviationists on the home front. Tellingly enough, these persecuted heretics often sought their inspiration in Marx’s own writings.
A showdown that attracted a great deal of attention in its time played out in Poland between the young philosopher Leszek Kołakowski and the then ‘chief ideologist’ of the Communist Party, Adam Schaff. We have already become acquainted with their debate (see above, p. 134). Tellingly enough, Schaff soon lost his central position and was ultimately driven to leave Poland in connection with the wave of government-supported anti-Semitism that gushed forth in 1968. Kołakowski had been forced to emigrate earlier.
In almost all Soviet-dominated countries, similar oppositional interpretations of Marx and Marxism developed. The Praxis group in Yugoslavia has already been mentioned. In Hungary, students of Lukács – with Agnes Heller as the mo
st famous representative – formed their own pocket of resistance. But she and her fellow thinkers were gradually forced into exile. Among other things, Heller wrote a book that attracted a great deal of attention, titled The Theory of Need in Marx in its English translation. She made frequent use of Marx’s writings from his youth, as well as the Grundrisse and Capital – briefly put, all of his writings far outside the narrow and doctored selection of orthodoxy.37
Free thought also played a role in the Prague Spring of 1968 when a new regime in Czechoslovakia sought to create ‘socialism with a human face’. The attempt was brutally put down, and those who wanted to go their own way were forced into silence. Their chief representative was Karel Kosík, author of the remarkable and magnificent work Dialectics of the Concrete. Kosík sought to escape the soulless orthodoxy of Marxism–Leninism through drawing inspiration from Marx himself – both the young Marx and the author of Capital – and also from Hegel and even Heidegger. A central concept in Kosík was praxis, which he distinguished from labour with its character of a load or a burden. There is freedom and innovation in praxis, something that every person is capable of. But existing society, which Kosík by way of precaution only called capitalist, smothers freedom with its abstractions.38
The left-wing wave that rolled over Western Europe and the United States from the late 1960s through the following decades had much to learn from the intellectual opposition in the Soviet Union. But this only happened by way of exception. Everything associated with the Soviet Union, even its opposition, appeared tainted with melancholy.
People sought inspiration further afield. China, with Mao Zedong, aroused enthusiasm among many. Like the Russian Revolution and the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 came after a devastating war. The difference was that Mao appeared as the victor of the war. In the beginning, he followed the Soviet Union’s path, and China was flooded by Soviet experts. After Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the friendship turned into hostility; the Chinese Communist Party was not ready to rid itself of its inheritance from Stalin. But the cause of the schism also lay on another, deeper level. Mao and his party may have embraced Marxist orthodoxy, but they also carried another intellectual inheritance rooted in China’s long history. The old imperial dynasties had had the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. Mao may not have spoken about heaven, but his regime was the one that would carry China further through the new centuries.
Their long-term perspective was united with a short-term one. Chinese politics after the revolution was characterized by extreme irregularity. The ‘Great Leap Forward’, which would industrialize the country in a single stroke, ended in catastrophe with famine and mass death. The Cultural Revolution would put an end to class society and the rule of the political elite, and create an equal China. The results were years of unhappiness for millions of people, while enthusiasm for the great goal also gradually died down among the young people that had supported the revolution.
But it was precisely the Cultural Revolution that captivated many who wanted to get away from capitalism, consumerism, and vacillating social democracy in Europe and the United States. The hardness of heart of the Western world and the Soviet Bloc contrasted with Mao’s vital innovative thinking and the fighting spirit of the Red Guards. Many became Maoists, and schooled themselves in what was called Marxist–Leninist–Maoist thought.39
Others were swayed by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It meant liberation from a regime of oppression supported by the United States. The country only gradually became communist when the Soviet Union offered the only bulwark against the powerful enemy to the north, which considered itself as having the right to choose regimes in Latin America to its liking. Cuba gradually became more and more like other Soviet-supported regimes, with food shortages and political dissidents in prison.
It was not primarily Fidel Castro, revolutionary leader and later on president, who inspired enthusiasm among radicals in Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe; it was his closest comrade, the Argentinian Ernesto Guevara, known as Che. Che Guevara saw his task as liberating all of Latin America from poverty, right-wing dictatorships, and dominance by the United States; he imagined the next opportunity for revolution was in Bolivia. He thought he would encounter a dilapidated Bolivian army, but on the contrary found himself face to face with an enemy trained and equipped by the CIA. He was executed in 1967, and immediately became an icon who still holds a certain charm many decades later.
At the beginning, it was Guevara’s theory of revolution – the ‘foco’ theory – that aroused interest and, at least in Latin America, a following. This meant that the uprising against the regime of oppression would be concentrated on a single crucial point, like sunbeams in a magnifying glass. That was how Guevara interpreted what had happened in Cuba – a limited group of men had overthrown the old regime by concentrating their attack on their opponent’s weakest point. It was an idea that inspired many across the entire continent. Latin America was regarded as a unity – in fact, a single country from Mexico to Patagonia. Now this enormous territory was to be liberated from oppression.40
But the United States started large-scale training for combating guerrillas in Panama, and attempts at uprising failed everywhere. Even a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in 1973 in a military coup for which US Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger was primarily responsible. Chile instead became one of a number of brutal right-wing dictatorships that left their mark on the continent at the time.
Only around the turn of the twenty-first century could a number of more or less socialist-minded regimes come to power in Latin America. But by then the Soviet Union had fallen, and the grip of the United States on the continent had weakened. The foco theory no longer had any drawing power.
It would not be possible to obtain a correct image of the singular history of Marxism without also saying something about its equally lively counter-history. Statues of Marx have been raised, but the malicious portraits, abuse, and more or less conscious distortions are equally numerous. The Soviet propaganda apparatus was met with an American one. The free world was never so free as it was during the time of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, when the mildest liberal could be accused of being a communist. It remained free despite bloody regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and the Apartheid system in South Africa could only fall once the Soviet Union was gone.
The oddest propaganda efforts could also find a place among seemingly serious researchers. The 1947 biography of Marx by the German sociologist Leopold Schwarzschild, translated into English in 1986 as The Red Prussian, was a work of hatred that suited the atmosphere of the Cold War. (Even the title of the work is strange; as we know, Marx was not from Prussia, but from the Palatinate.) But in its time, the book met with great approval in circles where perhaps not Marx, but the Soviet Union was seen as a major threat.41
The list of writing in the same tradition is a long one, and it has not stopped yet. It is more common now that Marx is dismissed with some brief, conventional summary of the idea behind his work. A few terms such as base and superstructure, and socialism and communism, are brought together, and if necessary, the dish is spiced with a few well-known quotes taken from writings and letters that came out at various stages of his life. Above all, according to these caricatures, there is a straight line from Marx through Lenin to Stalin and Mao. Everything that had been realized in the Soviet Union and China is found in Marx.
The actual history of Marxism began with Marx’s death, gaining its fixed form when Kautsky and Lenin each created their own closed system. Everyone who did not feel at home within these narrow frameworks but nonetheless sought inspiration and Marx’s writings thus became deviationists and were dismissed as revisionists or renegades. Within the Soviet sphere of power, many who went their own way paid with their lives or were exiled to the ‘gulag archipelago’ of work camps. At best, they were pushed out into obscur
ity like Deborin. Only in periods of ideological thaw could those who thought independently make themselves heard without repression. Even those who lived outside direct Soviet influence were forced to constantly declare whether they accepted or deviated from accepted Marxism.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the Communist Parties – recently so powerful – became mere fragments of what they had been, with no possibility of maintaining more than a trickle of the enormous torrent of propaganda material. Trotsky’s Fourth International still remains, but with no power other than words can provide.
The changes in China were equally radical. They had begun much earlier, as a result of Deng Xiaoping’s return to the centre of power in the late 1970s after more than a decade out in the cold. Deng and his closest collaborators pushed through a radical change of China’s economic policy, with increasingly larger features of a capitalistic market economy. In 1989, when large parts of Eastern and central Europe were already melting down, a growing movement of primarily young Chinese demanding freedom of expression, the press, and assembly reached its culmination. The movement was crushed on 3 June in Beijing, in a bloody massacre in Tiananmen Square. Deng wanted a free market, with politics entirely dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The party would decide what could be said and written in the country.
More than a quarter-century later, long after Deng’s death, raw capitalism and raw communism are still united in a China that has now become an economic world power. The party pays lip service to Marxism–Leninism; literature in the names of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong is still being produced; and there are still mildly oppositional politicians demanding more ideology, more Marxism, and above all more Mao Zedong in politics. Their criticism is now benevolently taken up by those in authority, who in their own way unite Marx with what can be termed a neoliberal economic policy. The Chinese regime is stable so long as it is economically successful. The day it is not, it will be threatened by collapse.42
A World to Win Page 72