Comments on: Greatest Marxists poll

By: Doug Rivers

Doug Rivers — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 22:51:14 +0000

BTW everyone. Pretty damn interesting discussion. It is opening the door on a very basic moral dilemma: how culpable is the Theory if it has been consistently, persistently, horribly abused in Practice?.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 23:00:24 +0000

Thanks, David! That was the thinking behind having the poll in the first place …

By: David W.

David W. — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 21:16:55 +0000

I simply don’t have time to respond at length right now, but I would like to make one point. I’m not sure why this debate ought to have anything to do with “the left” or “the far left.” Is it because this is generally a left/liberal blog? It is, but in a profoundly un-Marxist kind of way. Anyway, that seems irrelevant. It strikes me as a topic of interest to political/social theory junkies, of any political persuasion. I told my lunch companions about the poll, and we had a spirited discussion about the proper composition of our lists. These people are, respectively, a Burkean conservative and a Rawlsian liberal. It never occurred to either of them that participation in this poll had anything to do with “the far left” and its alleged pathologies. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of those who comprise “the far left” would find this poll boring and pointless, whereas a goodish portion of those interested in political and social theory would find it worthwhile and entertaining. If this exercise is evidence of moral confusion (and I’m pretty sure it’s not) it would be moral confusion amongst political and social theorists, not some ambiguous and undefined entity known as “the far left.”

By: roger

roger — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 18:05:49 +0000

Douglas Muir makes a standard point that would be stronger if it didn’t displace—and disguise—what was happening in the 19th century by focusing on what happened in the twentieth century. I think Mike Davis, who was mentioned in these comments, has done us a service by focusing on what he called the Victorian Holocaust—the terror famines, to use Robert Conquests useful term, that chronically re-occured in India from 1870 to 1910, and that can be pretty easily linked to the British program of re-forming property law in India to reflect laissez faire norms—in fact, a classic case of a planned economy, with the maybe thousand member Indian Colonial bureaucracy revamping India according to an ideology derived from Bentham. Interestingly, Marx approved. This shows, I think, that Marx’s isolation from what was happening at the time can be exaggerated. In one way, Marx, like the classical economists, were at one in targeting peasant economies for destruction. What Stalin did in the Ukraine does reflect this ideology—what we fail to do is contextualize that in terms of the whole history of the capitalist assault on peasant economies. The difference was that the state accrued, ideally, the surplus labor value of the peasant landholder—instead of directing the liquidation of that peasant landholder’s property in the interest of finance (in India) or agribusiness (in the U.S.) The painful thing is, what was the alternative? An industrial, and a post-industrial order can evidently not co-exist with a large agricultural sector—the collapse of the agricultural population in the U.S. is one of those long events that have certainly defined the twentieth century. If you rephrase the accusation against Marx in this way, you can actually make an interesting, semi-Marxist point.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 15:48:46 +0000

Great list, manumission! I’m afraid what you say to begin with just won’t stand, though. To reverse Chris’s argument somewhat, Marxism is an ideology, a particular political/social-philosophical position, and a political movement (though not always a wholly unified one), in a way that democracy and capitalism (which are, as you note, general systems) and organized religion tout court (ok, I really have to stop using that phrase!) aren’t (if we spoke of Christianity more specifically, say, we’d have a somewhat different case). It’s quite true that many people have been killed under capitalism and democracy, and perhaps even because of these systems, though I tend more towards the view that these systems are flawed in allowing, rather than causing, the deaths (imperialism is a different case, which you seem to point to without naming; but again, it’s not a single ideology or movement). On the other hand, so far as I can tell, Marxism-Leninism or Communism really has been a motivation and judtification for mass-murder on a genuinely unparalleled scale. Which, as I’ve tried to say before, shouldn’t lead to the conclusion that Marx himself or Marxism as an intellectual position are responsible for these things. But I do think we need to recognize Communism as a unique and horrible historical force; and recognize that the evils of Communism were carried out in Marxism’s name, and, I think, under the inspiration of (one strain, and possibly a perverted one, of) Marxism. And pointing out the evils of other systems, while in itself perfectly valid, can’t really detract from or effectively deny that fact.

By: Manumission

Manumission — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 11:44:27 +0000

It’s a funny thing about the old “how-many-people-did-Marxism-kill” argument – we never hear the same people condemning capitalism, democracy, and organized religion for the many more people who died under these systems. Native Americans, Tasmanians, Africans… odd how no overarching political/ideological theories seem to be responsible for millions of deaths there. They “just happened”. Anyway, 5 great Marxists, a bit late: V.G. Childe, Gramsci, Ferruccio Ross-Landi, Luxemburg, Hobsbawm. Childe put archaeology on a totally new and productive path; Rossi-Landi was an Italian semotician/philosopher who wrote about language and signs in the context of social reproduction (archaeology and semiotics; how’s that for two obscure fields?). They are both good examples of the “creative” and applied use of marxism. I don’t know if any of them would make a “top-10 greatest list”, but they deserve mention.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 22:09:51 +0000

Thanks, Josh. You have to a large extent stated my case better than I could have myself. Just a couple of additional points. 1) Chris, you say that “The fact that a regime or a movement self-identifies as Marxist doesn’t make it Marxist.” Well then: What regimes, in your opinion, /have/ been Marxist? Any, ever? And if the USSR wasn’t Marxist, then how do you justify naming both Lenin and Trotsky as among your personal “greatest Marxists”? I’m not trying to fork you; I understand that the middle is not excluded, and that the USSR could have been Marxist in one sense but not in another, or Marxist now and not later, yadda yadda und so weiter. But if you’re going to evade the evils of Communism by claiming that not all those horrible regimes were Marxist, then I think it behooves you to tell us which were and which weren’t. In your opinion. 2) “You write as if Marx produced some kind of recipe, which people then tried to cook with disastrous consquences. He didn’t.” Yes, he did. (Man, that “recipes for future kitchens” quote has been getting a lot of mileage in the last decade or so, hasn’t it.) Marx /did/ write a number of specific recipes, and they pretty much all turned out to be wrong. I’ve mentioned the collective farms before. People tried to cook that one and, by God, there were disastrous consequences. 4) “There have always been Marxists (and self-defined Marxists) who have set themselves full square against all the tyrannies that describe themselves as Marxist. Those people have gone under many labels, and many of them have died for their beliefs. Indeed, they were among the first victims of the Gulag. You surely know this.” Um… I hate to interrupt a good righteous harumph, but did I or did I not just devote a post to Djilas? Remember him? Good Communist, practical revolutionary, theorist, writer? Spent nine years in Tito’s prisons for pointing out that the Emperor was going commando. And—I say again—his analysis of what went wrong with Communism as actually practiced is IMO far superior to Trotsky’s. Trotsky still had axes to grind and killings to justify; Djilas, alone in prison, was able to be a lot more objective. And Djilas seems to have been that rarity, an intellectually honest revolutionary. He suffered for it accordingly. But anyhow. No offense, but this does make me wonder whether you’re reading or just reacting. “You berate the “left” for failing to ask whether there is anything in Marx’s ideas that is conducive to tyranny.” I said that the far left was morally confused and politically impotent. That’s not berating; it’s a plain statement of fact. N.B., I am writing from the Balkans. Pause to contemplate the various positions taken by the European far left on this region in, say, the last ten years, and their practical political effect. Then tell me again that I am “completely misguided.” Doug M.

By: josh

josh — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 16:30:34 +0000

I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with Chris Bertram and David W on this one, at least in part. First of all, I think that Doug Muir makes a good, important point, which is that being rude and dismissive towards those who raise the question of the relation between Marxism and the evils of Communism—whatever one might think of the quality of their arguments or characters—is pretty unattractive. It’s also, let’s face it, an evasion. You can make the case that Marx shouldn’t be blamed for the evils of Communism, and (with greater difficulty, since Marxism is so hard to define) that Marxism shouldn’t be blamed for it. But you do I think have to make that as a case, and not just wave off the objection with a yawn. Because the fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed, and millions more enslaved, tortured, terrorized, starved, etc.—in the name of Marx’s ideas. There are very few thinkers of whom that’s true, it is something largely unique to Marx (Jesus is of course an exception, but, contra W, I don’t really consider him a philosopher in the modern sense), and it’s something we have to acknowledge and deal with. Even if we conclude that Marx’s own writings and thought weren’t responsible for any of this, we need to address the question and make a case, not assume the answer. So, Doug’s raising of the question is I think fair, valid, valuable. Now, as for Chris’s defense of Marx. Chris certainly knows more about this than I, and I should probably, were I wise, defer to his judgment; but I of course won’t. First, I do think that it’s notable that Marxism as a political ideology and movement—which is after all part, though as Chris says, not all of what it is (but I think the same can be said for other positions as well …), has generally either led to horror, or failure, on the political level. This of course needs to be qualified, and I’m sure were I to think about it more fully I’d be able to come up with a number of succesful, useful, positive political achievments by Marxist parties. But what does stand out most clearly is the moral and political failure that has been Communism. Now, one can deny that these governments were actually Marxist, as Chris suggests. This too seems to me dubious, though. It seems to me that these governments THOUGHT they were Marxist, and thought they were deriving their ideas and their goals from Marx. Perhaps they misread him; but then it seems to me that re-readings and mis-readings of Marx are central to the nature of Marxism. Anyway, Chris’s case is I think somewhat undermined by his nominating of Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the sometime apologist for Stalinism Lukacs, as among the greatest Marxists. I don’t mean to suggest that these figures are intellectually worthless by any means, or that their ideas have no value apart from their actions. But if we are to consider these figures genuinely Marxist, then I do think we have to conclude that the systems they founded or guided or praised were indeed Marxist, and conclude that Marxism, at least as expounded and developed by these figures, really did contribute directly to the horrors of the Soviet Union, its satellites and its immitators. I think that it’s important to make the point that there’s a genuinely democratic/parliamentary tradition in Marxism, which remains genuinely Marxist; but we also ought to admit that the opposite wing of the Marxist tradition, the totalitarian one, is also genuinely Marxist. As for Marx himself, I think that Chris’s attempts to present him as a theorist and analyst of society, while obviously correct, also just won’t cut it. The thing about Marx was that he was devoted both to theory and to practice; that he believed he was scientifically analysing society, but also regarded himself as a committed revolutionary whose works guided and served the cause of revolutionary action. And what I’ve read of Marx suggests that he was perfectly happy to allow that that action might be—even would have to be—bloody and involve considerable cruelty and tyranny at some stage. It seems to me that Chris’s attempt to defend Marx rests on driving a wedge between theory and practice, analysis and action, that Marx himself would reject. As for David’s Rousseau analogy: of course, many HAVE blamed Rousseau for the Jacobins, and attacked Rousseauians—and have left quite a mark doing so (think of Burke or Constant). But there is a crucial difference, of course. Rousseau never embraced an actual political program (unless one counts his drafted Constitutions for Poland and Corsica); Marx founded a political movement. Rousseau’s writings point to a frankly anti-political conclusion as often as they point to a political program, and Rousseau himself never joined a political movement nor, so far as I know, thought extensively about political tactics. Marx did found a movement, a movement which in other hands was involved in a good deal of evil, he did embrace a political program, he did devote considerable time to political agitation and debates about political practice. To regard Marx as a philosopher or social scientist is of course correct—he was both, and its as such that he’s made a lasting, and in some ways still suggestive, contribution. But he was also a political activist, and that side of his career and thought can’t be divorced from his theoretical or analytic works and tossed aside. So, while I think that Chris does make some good points, I think he’s unjust to say that Doug’s comments are ‘completely misguided’. I think Doug raises a perfectly valid, serious point; and while I agree that the evils of Communism shouldn’t be blamed on Marx or ‘Marxism’ (I ultimatley don’t think that ideological labels can bear responsibility for actions; only people can. This, incidentally, is one thing that makes me very un-Marxist), I do think that one can’t talk about Marxism as a whole without including Communism, and all its evils. And while we shouldn’t let revulsion against Communism prejudice us against Marx or dismiss him as a thinker, we also shouldn’t be too quick to absolve him of any responsibility for the development of Communist doctrine and what one might call the Bolshevik mindset. Even if we do conclude that Lenin’s ideas are a complete perversion and bastardization of Marx’s thought, we still need to acknowledge Marx’s own intolerance and fanaticism, and the lasting harm they’ve done to the reception and development of his genuine insights.

By: David W.

David W. — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 15:36:29 +0000

Echoing Chris’s third point—there are tons of social scientists who are thoroughly Marxist in their approach, but have no interest in any kind of socialist revolution and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat—they just find his methodology and tools for social research useful. I’m thinking here of Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, etc. To my mind, blaming Marx for the moral and political failings of the USSR makes about as much sense as blaming Rousseau for the moral and political failings of the French Revolution, but I can’t imagine we’d be getting any complaints on a “greatest Rousseauians” discussion. In both cases, some of their key writings were seized upon by revolutionary elements in society, and some of these ideas were used to shape the rhetoric (mostly) and perhaps, a little, the institutions put in place after the revolution. In both cases, these were clear misapplications of theories in question (Marx said socialist revolution was for advanced capitalist states and Rousseau said the social contract was for Corsica—but this is just the start of how the revolutionaries got it wrong). In fairness, the theories of both Rousseau and Marx, while utterly brilliant, do not include the protections for individual rights that most (I’d wager all) of us would like to see. But I’d wager that if Marx and Rousseau had been more concerned with human rights, it wouldn’t have changed much in France and Russia. Hitting perhaps closer to home for those of us who are Americans, I think you could also make a compelling case that Locke, the defender of individual rights and inspirer of the founders in the US, could be understood as creating a theory that led to a great deal the conquest of indigenous peoples in the Americas—specifically his arguments about property and land ownership in chapter five of the Second Treatise. (Can we blame Hobbes and Plato for the misdeeds of authoritarian governments?) But the complainants here suffer from a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between theory—especially normative political theory—and practice. If every political theorist was always stopping and asking himself “Could this theory be used by misguided radicals to justify evil?”, we probably wouldn’t have any great visionary political theory, but we’d still have evil.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 15:32:22 +0000

voloshinov/bakhtin was a great thinker, but as a marxist simply doesn’t hold up. “marxism and the philosophy of language” has perhaps one throwaway reference to marx (i think in the first few pages). the book is about saussure, flaubert, style indirect libre etc. Actually this is not really true. Firstly Marxism and the Philosophy of Lnaguage is a rejection of Saussure’s linguistic determinism; as Voloshinov saw language primarily as a form of social interaction that couldn’t be separated from their spatio-temporal and material context and not as a Saussurean independent system of self-referential signs. Also unlike Saussure’s structuralist approach Voloshinov argued that language could not be separated from its context to have proper meaning; his ideas of muilt-accentuality and utterance located the meaning of language within the social relations from which they originated and was an attempt to tie it into the class-struggle narrative. In contrast to Sassure, language here was seens as incredibly sensitive to social relaity which it was held to “reflect and refract”; the Sausserian distinctions between langue and parole were erased and language was analysed both as a system and as a process. Secondly Voloshinov himself like other fellow linguists, Medvedev was unqeustionably a Marxist – not of the orthodox variety to be sure, but one nonetheless – I have not heard anybody seriously assert the opposite. Bakhtin on the other hand has a more ambigious relationship with Marxism, early on in life he was a member of the secret sect Voskresenie led by Alexander Meier, which supported the Bolshevik economic policy but opposed their atheistic cultural policy; along with other important members like Pumpianskii and Iudina; the members sought to combine their quasi-Messianic interpretation of Christianity with social revolution. Certainly Bakhtin’s attitude towards Communism soured after Stalin and his exile; and there can said to be a real tension within his work between his desire to reconcile historical materialism with neo-Kantian idealist philosophy, but mcuh of the central tenets of his later work are based on Marxist thought and could not be possible without them. I think the term Marxian is accurate for Bakhtin. i’m equally mystified by the notion of bourdieu as a marxist. You may want to look at the context of the discussion here. Bourdieu wasn’t a member of the fashionable leftist crowd from the ENS that joined the PCF in the 1950s but his criticisms of leftist French intellectuals of the period all come from their failure to hold a really leftist position on issues of the time like the Algerian war. The infleunce of Althusserian structuralism on his early work like “Sociologie de l’Algérie”, “Travail et Travailleurs en Algérie” (, “Le Déracinement” is very clear and as he himself noted in Pascalian Meditations all effective social analysis must begin with Marx. In his later work, the concepts of symbolic and cultural capital and their circulation within their respective economies as well as the great discussion of class relations and the impact they have on cultural taste amongst different fractions of the bourgeosie and the working class in his magnus opus “Distinction” is heavily Marixst – indeed would be difficult to understand outside a Marxist framework. Bourdieu provides powerful contributions to debates at the heart of Marxist theory, in particular with regard to cultural production (The Rules of Art) and consumption (Distinction) and in his analysis of the state and the role played by bureaucracy and education in the reproduction of its domination (Reproduction, Homo Academicus, The State Nobility). The argument which runs through these works is that the ruling class ensures its hold over the means of ideological production, not simply because of the fact of its control, but because it is able to legitimise its privileged status by disguising it as the result of meritocratic triumph through sheer talent. Thus several times, and in quite conventional Marxist terms, Bourdieu asserts the general primacy of the economic, in the Althusserian turn of phrase that economic capital is “always at the root in the last analysis” (“The Sociologist in Question”). It is true that elsewhere he is more circumspect, as where he admits that “in advanced capitalist societies, it would be difficult to maintain that the economic field does not exercise especially powerful determinations” while simultaneously asking “should we then for that reason admit the postulate of its (universal) ‘determination in the last instance’?” . This, however, may still be in accord with a developed theory of cultural capital once it is realised that the economic field is but a part of the general economy of practices (and hence “economic theory . . . [but] a particular instance, historically dated and situated, of the theory of fields” . If there is a parallelism between the cultural and the economic marked by the presence of specific forms of capital in both fields, rather than a dependency of the former on the latter, then what is at issue is the determination of the economic within the cultural, in other words the nature of cultural capital itself. Thus the economic could be seen as determinant in particular situations even if this were an economic logic proper to the field of culture. Again, however, this argument could only be sustained so long as cultural capital were clearly also fully capital On the other hand while when Bourdieu theorises the general nature of capital, he seems remarkably close to Marxist orthodoxy as he provides what is essentially the labour theory of value: “Capital is accumulated labour (in its materialised form or its “incorporated,” embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labour.” (“The Forms of Capital”) But the proximity to orthodoxy is misleading. Indeed, it is startling that Bourdieu here provides what in the labosr theory of value is, precisely, a definition of value rather than a definition of capital. For the essence of the labor theory of value is that it defines value as accumulated labour. But value is quite distinct from capital (even if capital depends upon value) in that capital, for Marx, is the result of a process in which “value . . . becomes value in process . . . and as such capital” . Bourdieu does mention such a process of valorisation or exploitation in his adding a description of appropriation to his definition. But this is an addition: he here defines capital as contingently rather than necessarily related to appropriation. Appropriation, in other words, is exterior (and as such other) to capital: “Capital is accumulated labour . . . which, when appropriated . . .” (my emphasis) rather than that is appropriated. As such, this definition of capital, cultural or otherwise, forestalls any understanding of surplus value or valorisation, which is what “converts [value] into capital. For Marx, this process whereby capital is produced is the production process itself; in contrast, what Bourdieu outlines here is rather a theory of (unequal) distribution of capital effected through appropriation. As some observers like John Guillory have pointed out, Bourdieu’s definition herereproduces certain features of a Marxist account of capital without grounding the concept in the cycle of production or ‘productive capital. By subsuming capital into a definition of value, Bourdieu passes over the passage between value and capital, and between capital and value, and hence production and valorisation disappear from his framework. So in a sense much of his work are based on framework that could be said to be marxisant, rather than Marxist as such. Still I think he can be subsumed under the Marxian label.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 11:40:33 +0000

Doug, I’m sorry to say that I find your remarks completely misguided. The ground are multiple, but for starters: 1. The fact that a regime or a movement self-identifies as Marxist doesn’t make it Marxist. If, on examination, it turns out not to be Marxist then none of its misdeeds can reasonably be laid at the door of KM. 2. You write as if Marx produced some kind of recipe, which people then tried to cook with disastrous consquences. He didn’t. 3. The great bulk of Marx’s writings (and those of his followers) don’t consist of prescriptive formulas but of claims about how the world is. Some of those claims are false, but even those that are false are often so in interesting ways. Marx often asks the right questions about society even if we disagree with his answers. Intelligent social scientists and philosophers (I’ll mention Max Weber as a case in point) have always acknowledged the virtues and merits of Marx’s work, and of the work of his followers. The comparison with fascism (which isn’t even in the same class of object! – it sits alongside socialism, communism, liberalism, conservativism etc as a political doctrine) is just puerile in the light of Marx’s deserved social scientific standing. 4. There have always been Marxists (and self-defined Marxists) who have set themselves full square against all the tyrannies that describe themselves as Marxist. Those people have gone under many labels, and many of them have died for their beliefs. Indeed, they were among the first victims of the Gulag. You surely know this. You berate the “left” for failing to ask whether there is anything in Marx’s ideas that is conducive to tyranny. But if you had looked, you would find that socialists and Marxists of various kinds have been asking that question for the past 80-odd years (or longer). They have tried to address it seriously in the light of this or that specific claim in Marx’s writings, the “Marxism-leads-to-tyranny” brigade are usually saying no more that “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. 5. Suppose that, on examination, we decide that some error or omission in Marx’s political writings made tyrannical action by later Marxists more likely (and I doubt that a stronger claim than than can plausibly be made), that would not establish the falsity or worthlessness (or whatever) of, say, the materialist conception of history.

By: schnauze

schnauze — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:15:26 +0000

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:08:39 +0000

Whoops, missed Josh’s post. My bad. Good, thoughtful response; thanks, Josh. However, I think it says a lot that it took a non-Marxist to make it. The repeated and horrific failures of Marxist ideas in practice remain the elephant in the kitchen for most modern-day Marxists AFAICT. Doug m.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 09:39:06 +0000

I was wondering who would cite the Prospect article; not too surprised that it was Kieran. If I had more spare time, and didn’t think that someone else was already doing it, it would be fun to take that thing apart. It’s a remarkably feeble apologia, and just plain wrong in a number of spots—frex, there’s no way that Marx, or even his ghost, would descripe Sephardic Jews as ‘clever people of good stock, who know the value of money’. In all seriousness, Brett raises a legitimate point, whether his numbers are good or not. Marxism in practice has proven to be a remarkably destructive doctrine. By any measure, institutions self-identifying as Marxist have killed far more people than those self-identifying as fascist. The fact that only one person is pointing this out—and that he’s getting responses like “yawn” and “your numbers are off, bullshitter”—is a little disturbing. I realize this is a lefty blog, but, well, refusal to acknowledge and deal squarely with these sorts of issues is a lot of what’s wrong with the left today. “La la la, not relevant” is just not a meaningful response to the many and vast horrors perpetrated in Marx’s name… though I suppose it goes a fair way towards explaining the moral confusion and political impotence of today’s far left. Doug M.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 09:18:25 +0000

Nice to see that someone remembered Djilas: theorist, practitioner, writer, thinker, active revolutionary. And subsequent long-term political prisoner, of course. IMO his critique of Communism-as-actually practiced beats Trotsky all hollow. Doug M.