Greatest Marxists poll

Crooked Timber? Wasn’t that a rumor about President Clinton?

Not Vladimir Lenin, by the way. Nor Volodya neither. My Russian history teacher (a lovely if corpulent Polish man) taught me long ago that that’s a solecism. Lenin is just Lenin, tout court. It’s a nom de guerre, it doesn’t take the legal names along with it. The guy is either V.I. Ulyanov, or Lenin, nothing in between. Same with Lev Davidovich and Iosif Vissarioniovich, too.

I would nominate Isaac Deutscher as a great Marxist…

I suspect that had Trotsky “beaten” Stalin, Stalin would have done better in the poll.

And there would be a lot of talk in certain quarters about how Marxism still has never been tried and, man, what if Stalin had won against Trotsky?

what about rudolf hilferding? his theory of the state may be pretty week, but his explanation of the role of finance in capitalism is, to me, still very impressive.

Ophelia,

I can’t speak about the good-old-days, but pleanty of people now in Russia who are Ochen kulturni are happy to call Lenin Vladimire Lenin. And children, for years, were told stories of “young Lenin”, where he was volodya, and not volodya ulyinov, for sure. At least this is what my ex-young pioner wife tells me.

-Matt

Agree re: Trotsky on fascism – some very intelligent, and sharply written stuff. I always wondered how the SWP crowd – never shy about describing their intellectual opponents as fascists – squared this with Trotsky’s devastating critique of the Third International’s simplistic take on Social Democracy as “Social Fascism” &c. As Trotsky pointed out, the Third International saw the change from Weimar democracy to Bruening and then to Hitler as just being one form of fascism succeeding another.

Why would anybody be interested in the “greatest” adherents to a political philosophy which demonstrably leads to genocide when put into practice?

Yawn.

You’d tear the right a new orifice if they started polling to decide who the greatest facists were.

I’d vote for Carl Schmitt.

Oh, okay, thanks Matt. I stand corrected. Beg pardon, Chris.

(Dang, I’ve been believing that for years and years, and now I have to remember to stop believing it, such a nuisance.)

Maybe this is too practical, but for bringing the whole thing to an unexpectedly non-nuclear end, I’d have to vote for Gorby.

msw

150,000,000 dead, give or take a bit. “Yawn” indeed…

150,000,000 dead, give or take a bit. “Yawn” indeed…

Marx put it better than me, in a recent interview.

what, not Marinetti? at least the Futurists generated some great art.

150,000,000 dead, give or take a bit.

If by “give or take” you mean “give”, and by “a bit”, you mean “25% of the highest estimate in the Black Book of Communism”, I suppose you could make this point, but you do run the risk of being accused of pulling numbers out your ass.

Oh, that’s a rousing defense of Marxism, that it only killed in the neighborhood of a hundred million. lol Whereas Kieran resorts to the, “Nobody who tried to put it into practice was REALLY a Marxist.”

For that matter, I doubt the people in power in Nazi Germany were such pure facists. But facism got the blame, rightfully, and marxism ought to take the hit for Pol Pot’s stacks of skulls, too.

I blame it on the fact that we were in a hot war with facism, which forced the right to purge it’s obvious brownshirts, while Stalin was our nominal ally in WWII, and the subsequent war was mostly cold. So the left didn’t have to purge itself of it’s totalitarian theorists. An accident of history, in other words. Still, you ought to be able to show SOME judgement, without being forced to!

‘All subsequent neo-Hegelians are variously charlatans, lightweights, obscurantists and dilettantes.’

All except Guy Debord, I’m sure you meant to say.

Forgot about Fanon. Also, there has been no mention of any of the great Marxist-feminists, although part of the problem is that it’s hard to choose one (many made good contributions, noone seems dominant).

Brett, do you frequent Christian theology discussions, droning on about how noone takes the inquisition seriously?

Wow, what a great discussion going on here! I encourage all the contributors to send their nominations for 5 top (NB: not necessarily the same as ‘greatest’, as I explain on my blog) Marxists to me via e-mail.
Also, just a response to Brett Bellmore: I’m sympathetic to the point, but I would like to point out that 1)The poll is for Marxists, not Communists or Leninists. This isn’t to absolve Marx from any responsibility for inspiring the ruthlessness and brutality of his followers; nor is it to insist on a line between Marxist/good and Communist/bad. I do think that at least some of the seeds of Communist inhumanity are found in Marx’s own ideas, and I do think that Marxism as a political movement has a pretty dubious track record (as a theoretical position it’s also flawed, of course, but I don’t see this as the same sort of moral problem). But that shouldn’t prevent us either from a)recognizing the way in which Marxism, for better and, I’d say more often, for worse has transformed the world (hence the value of a list of ‘greatest’ Marxists), or the internal diversity, and moral variability, of the Marxist intellectual tradition (as jam notes, there’s a whole tradition of Revisionist and Parliamentarian Marxism, against Communism, that’s well worth defending).
Also, since I take it Brett’s initial contribution was meant to suggest that anyone who even contemplates having, let alone initiates, a poll like this must be insufficiently aware of the horrors and evils of Communism, I should perhaps note that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Marxist, let alone a Communist; indeed, I’m politically staunchly, even somewhat rabidly, anti-Communist, and philosophically anti-Marxist, though not unsympathetic to some strains of Marxist theory.
As for greatest fascists, why not? Except that it’s not nearly as rich and varied an intellectual tradition. But, if we are taking nominations, how about Leo Strauss …
Kidding. I’m kidding.

Bernstein, Martov, Plekhanov, Djilas, Dubcek, Nagy.

Oh, that’s a rousing defense of Marxism, that it only killed in the neighborhood of a hundred million

If you look carefully at my post, you’ll see no defence of Marxism, rousing or otherwise. It was purely and simply an attack at you, Brett, for being a bullshitter. I note that you offered no defence against this charge (rousing or otherwise) and therefore tacitly admit that you are a bullshitter, you bullshitter.

How about Engels? Weird how nobody remembers Engels. I’d have to say I don’t see how Bourdieu and Bakhtine are different, improved models of … well, any previous Marxist. For me, the creative use of Marxism, instead of adherence to some ultra purified reading of Marx, is what makes a Marxist great. If you accept that premise, then the Sartre of Critique of Dialectical Reason — and the notebooks on violence — and the Deleuze of the anti-Oedipus period are my nominations.

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.

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.

i’m equally mystified by the notion of bourdieu as a marxist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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