Socialist Party Australia - Have we reached “the end of history?” Is Marxism obsolete?

By Greg Bradshaw
‘Only the most ideological enemy of Marxism, or uninformed pseudointellectual, could seriously maintain that Marxist theory is obsolete.’ - Douglas Kellner
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire have led many to proclaim the end of ‘communism’ as an alternative to the market system. Historian David MacGregor wrote, ‘The former Soviet republics have been baptised by blood, and drowned in Pepsi Cola’.

Neoliberal authorities, postmodernist theorists, and even the popular press heralded this collapse tout court, taking swift advantage of a fresh opportunity to discredit the ideas of Karl Marx. Leading this charge has been Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History?, which claims that capitalism has established itself as the dominant and final social structure after its victorious struggle with communism, fascism, and all other contenders.

But to equate true Marxism - his 150-year old critiques of capitalism - with the bureaucratic collectivism of the Soviet Union – Stalinism - is ‘intellectually dishonest and historically false’. Despite the collapse and continued failings of Stalinist regimes around the world, the writings of Marx and his contemporaries have never been more valid.

‘Crises of Marxism’
Just as Marxists have at times been too quick to pronounce the death of capitalism, neoliberal theorists have vice versa been too quick to announce the death of Marxism. During World War I the inability of the Second International and individual Marxist parties to stop the war put into question the political efficacy of Marxism as an organised movement. The failure to carry through European revolutions after the war produced new ‘crises of Marxism’, and the triumph of fascism threatened to eliminate so-called ‘Marxist’ governments, parties, and militants.

After World War II the mild stabilisation of capitalism in the liberal democratic countries also led many to announce the irrelevance of Marx’s ideas. Intellectuals in France in the 1950’s pre-empted Fukuyama’s claims to the ‘end of history’ and ideology, many of whom were disillusioned or disgruntled ex-Marxists declaring it, ‘The God that failed’, turning instead to the postindustrial social theories that began to emerge in the US in a futile attempt to fill their perceived ideological void.

Marxism, like capitalism, has been in ‘crisis’ throughout the century, and indeed, throughout its whole existence. And just as capitalism has survived its crises by adapting to its challenges (through imperialism, fascism, military dictatorships, state capitalism, the welfare state, the ‘consumer society’, and so on), Marxism has evolved and improved.

The value of Marxism resides in the fact that it recognises all phenomena, including ideas, are necessarily in a process of constant flux, change and adaptation. As the Marxist Lukács elucidated, ‘Orthodox Marxism… does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations… On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.’ Abdul JanMohamed described that, ‘Revision is the very life of the Marxian dialectic’.

Collapse of the Soviet Union
Fukuyama wrote in his post mortem of Marxism, ‘Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices’. However Stalinism is not Marxism. Stalinism is completely at odds with the most basic tenets of Marx’s beliefs, and to argue that the ideas of Marx can be blamed for the crimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other self proclaimed ‘Marxists’ would be mere guilt by association.

Marx’s ideal society was one of participatory (direct) democracy presiding over a planned economy; and to this end he looked to the unfortunately short lived and ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871. While the Soviet Union had nationalised industries under Stalin, they were not ‘socialised’ into the hands of their immediate producers. There was a planned economy, but no democracy. Expressively, the Stalinist USSR never ended Marx’s greatest objection to class societies: the alienation of labour, i.e. the oppression of its workers. One can safely assume that Marx himself would have been horrified by the oppressive one-party state dictatorship of the Soviet Union (especially one under the theoretical banner of ‘Marxism’!).

Its collapse does not prove that socialism cannot work, but rather implies that only a truly democratic workers’ socialism could possibly succeed. As the Marxist Leon Trotsky explained in The Revolution Betrayed: democracy for a planned economy is like oxygen for the body - it will flourish and be healthy with it, but will deform and fail without.

Douglas Kellner wrote that: ‘Both communism and Marxism are historically sited, situated, infected, and mediated by particular traditions and histories.’ In this sense the disintegration of the so-called ‘Red Bloc’ has not ended the relevance of Marxism, but merely debunked the bastardisation of Marx’s ideas. The death of Stalinism – systematised as ‘Marxism’ in the Soviet Union - may well give birth, or rebirth, to the real ideas of socialism.

Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama
Ironically Fukuyama, a right-wing follower of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, is more theoretically linked to autocracy than Marx ever was. Hegel believed that there existed an absolute knowledge attainable by humanity, and that various stages of knowledge could be charted in reference to the ultimate knowledge: the Divine Idea (Geist). It is a notion that ideas, and not material changes, spur society forward. Only the objective apparatus of the state allowed humans, not yet at the highest level of the Divine Idea, full liberty. He called this theory the Philosophy of Right.

The state that Hegel had in mind was that of Prussia under Kaiser Wilhelm Frederick II, which was an absolute monarchy. In his day Marx fought vehemently against the Right Hegelians who supported the regime, championing democracy as the highest from of government. He considered that the state encouraged and facilitated the political divisions that were preconditions for its own existence; pursuing its own ends to the detriment of the community at large. He wrote:

‘…all forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy. …the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.’

Fukuyama noted that earlier forms of government had been characterised by fundamental defects and irrationalities, which had led to their eventual demise. He did not mean to suggest that liberal democracies had no problems; there were, he maintained, grave problems of injustice and social inequality. However these did not arise from inherent flaws in the principles upon which these societies were founded, but from the incomplete implementation of those principles; liberal democracy was ‘arguably free from such internal contradictions’. Likewise history had not ended in the sense that events, in particular large and grave ones, no longer took place, but in the sense that it could no longer be understood as a whole process in which human society was developing towards higher forms.

Marx outlined in great depth that a market economy is merely a historically specific system of production, and that it is no more society’s final form then the feudalism and slave-society that came before it. In spite of the repressiveness of capitalism, he recognised that it is not ‘evil’, but that it has an inevitable historical role to play. In The Communist Manifesto he admits, ‘It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.’ Marx believed that capitalism, for the first time in history, had created the material forces to enable the elimination of global poverty - albeit prevented by inherent contradictions in the system.

Yet Fukuyama maintains that both Hegel and Marx share his same view of the ‘end of history’:
‘Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an ‘end of history’: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.’

Marx in fact placed what he called ‘the end of prehistory’ (emphasis added) in a materialist context. He explicated that it is changes in actual social relations to the economic base structure – the means of production – that change the ideological superstructure of a society. The elimination of ideological antagonism would not come about by the mere defeat of an opposing ideology. In his Grundrisse notebooks (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy), he explains his ‘materialist conception of history’:
‘The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.’

Marxism unequivocally rejects the notion that an ‘end of history’ has come about; the inherent contradictive causes/forces of ‘progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions’ have not changed - let alone ceased. Ideologies for Marx are representative of class interests, and thus only with the elimination of classes and class struggle is the elimination of ideology and ideological struggle possible. Theoretical conclusions, he wrote, ‘merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very eyes.’

He espoused that the programme of socialism was grounded on the historical process itself. In contradistinction, Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis rests on an idealist theoretical base in true Hegelian fashion. Marx elucidates in one of his most famous passages that:
‘In the Social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’

Conclusions
So have we reached ‘the end of history’, where parliamentary democracies and unrestrained capitalist economies reign supreme? Is Marxism obsolete? Trotsky wrote, ‘The criterion for replying to that question is simple: if the theory correctly estimates the course of development and foresees the future better than other theories, it remains the most advanced theory of our time, be it even scores of years old.’

In The End of History? Fukuyama declared that Marxism could be relegated to ‘the dustbin of history’. However in more recent writings he seems to have qualified his position considerably; he today concedes there is a possibility for modern day socialism, simply not the Stalinist model of a state-owned command economy:
‘It is clear that socialism cannot be rebuilt in a single country. Workers pushing too hard for higher wages in Michigan will simply see their jobs disappear to Guadalajara or Penang. Only if all workers around the world were unionized, pushing simultaneously for a global rise in wages, would companies be unable to play off one group of workers against another. Karl Marx's exhortation ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ has never seemed more apt.’

Unbelievably (if not historically ignorant), he even goes so far as to affirm:
‘In theory, then, what the left needs today is a Fourth International uniting the poor and dispossessed around the world in an organization that would be as global as the multinational corporations and financial institutions they face. This Fourth International could push for powerful new institutions to constrain global capitalism.’

Marx’s basic critiques of capitalism have not lost any of their accuracy or potency. The Soviet Union, which collapsed ultimately due to internal conflict, is still better analysed by a Marxist analysis than any other form of historiography. It only adds justification to the theories of Karl Marx – a far cry from rendering them obsolete.