I'm going to Brazenly steal from DominicGee here for an opening to my next post.

"I find Marxism is mostly theory, as in practice there's nothing there that anybody would willingly advocate".

http://needfully.blog.co.uk/2008/05/27/the-usa-is-not-a-fascist-regime-4229243#c6915535

I can see what he is getting at. There's a big stodgy pile of rancid rubbish that goes by the name Marxism. It's usually badly written ponderous tripe or hysterical, strident tripe. Like this little gem from the hilariously mad Sparticist league.

“All of our party’s activity is directed to organizing, training and steeling the proletarian vanguard party necessary for the seizure of state power. In contrast, the politics of the reformists and centrists consist of oppositional activity completely defined by the framework of bourgeois society. The latter was sharply characterized by Trotsky as ‘the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.’ Such accommodation to capitalist class rule by organizations nominally claiming adherence to Marxism is, if anything, more decisively pronounced today in a world defined by the final undoing of the Russian Revolution and the triumphal assertion by the imperialist rulers that ‘communism is dead’.”

—Spartacist pamphlet, For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism! (November 2000)

http://www.spartacist.org/english/esp/index.html

To quote from the learned Butthead, "this sucks!" Okay, so I am picking a particularly lurid example. To be fair, most of it isn't like that.

But most of it is predicated on a blueprint that they believe is based on the Bolshevik model. Why? Because the Bolsheviks seized power and that is what counts. So the theory is, you build a "party" - and there can only be one by the way - wait for the point of revolutionary crisis, seize power and implement the "programme".

What else? Er, well that's it, actually. Okay, no, I am being disingenuous. There are socialists out there who commit themselves to practical work. The SWP in my opinion do a lot of hard graft. However, as I pointed out before, the hard graft is tied to Leninism. The problem with that is that “Leninism” arose from specific historical circumstances. The Bolsheviks were shaped by the experience of conspiratorial, underground work in Russia. They did not have the experience of decades of work in democratic workers' organizations or a democracy. The absence of that type of work shaped their experience and eventual practise. That practise was not as many would argue, a failure. I do not see how seven plus decades of existence would be described as such. It was not a failure. But it wasn't socialism either. Yes Stalin said it was. So what? A cat won't become a dog because you call it rover. You can't pour sugar on shite and call it dessert.

So what was it? That is a question for another day. What I would like to briefly blog about is what I believe Marxism to be.

Firstly, it is not a theory. If you read Marx you find common themes, that's true. You find a definite method in his work, that is also true. What it is not is a rigid dogma. Or at least it shouldn't be. As Cyril Smith writes

Even in their lifetimes, Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) were dismayed to see their fundamental notions buried under the myth of infallibility. Marx would have been utterly hostile to the statement of Plekhanov (1856-1918) that ‘Marxism is an integral world outlook’. In fact, only a fraction of Marx’s original plan for his work was ever completed. By the time of his death, bourgeois society was already entering a new stage. A large and important part of his writings remained as unedited and undeciphered manuscripts, unknown even to Engels

(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm).

It is a dangerous, but almost ubiquitous notion of both friends and foes of Marxism that there's a body of work out there that tries to answer all problems. Of course no human mind can do that. Marx's detractors are right to argue that there is no recipe for a future Utopia in Marx's work. There was never intended to be one.

It suited the benighted bureaucrats of the Soviet Union to make “Marxism” into a state religion.

The name of Marx was now obscenely linked with the ‘theory’ of this Party. In that terrible time, the very terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ came to be identified with this monstrosity. But even for those who could see what a falsification this was, the ideas of Marx became inextricably fouled up in the network of bureaucratic assumptions, including terms like ‘workers’ state’, ‘revolutionary party’, and ‘orthodox theory’. The name of Marx, who stood for the liberation of mankind from exploitation and the disappearance of state oppression, became entangled with the defence of the privileges of a bureaucratic caste and the power of a brutal state apparatus

(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm).

But they were not the first. An orthodoxy was already starting to emerge long before the Stalinists took a stranglehold of the communist movement. Trotsky wrote

In the hands of the Party is concentrated the general control.... It has the final word in all fundamental questions.... The last word rests with the Central Committee.... We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party

(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm).

The notion of orthodoxy persisted even amongst its dissidents afterwards.

Even those who fought against the murder-machine which was ideologically lubricated by this stuff could not escape being affected by it. Trotsky (1879-1940) and his supporters struggled to maintain the outlook which inspired and guided the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Communist International. With whatever voice they had, they denounced the lies and corruption of Stalinism – especially the lie that Stalin’s Russia was ‘socialism’. But they never had the theoretical resources to penetrate to its philosophical core. The best they could do was to show that Stalinist policies and distortions were contrary to the decisions of Lenin’s party and the teachings of ‘Marxism’

(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm).

The weight of orthodoxy has managed to bury Marxism in so much sludge that people believe that Marxism is synonymous with that orthodoxy. I would argue that this has nothing to do with Marx himself who was long since dead and gone.

To be continued...