Eurasia Press & News
Not long ago a Jacobin article (re-posted on ZNet) argued that we need more Marxism. To my eyes the tone was if we aren’t Marxist we aren’t materialist, if we aren’t materialist we don’t believe in reality, and if we pay inadequate attention to reality we will chase rainbows and succumb to mis-leadership. Conclusion, we need to be Marxist materialists. As steadily more people become deeply disenchanted, then horrendously horrified, then outstandingly outraged at today’s world, and in response want to do something about it, there will be offers of helpful guidance. Smart people, confident people who have scads of answers, will offer tools to utilize and concepts to employ to make sense of what is happening and of means to make things better. Follow our lead. Sign on with us. Their offer will be helpful if the offered tools and concepts are well suited to the world we face and the tasks we undertake.
A bit longer ago, an earlier Jacobin article included these two sentences: “Today, many young people are marching leftward in [Marx’s] footsteps from a passion for freedom to a critique of capitalism. But unlike Marx, they have the whole tradition of Marxism to guide them.” That last point is undeniably true. Marx couldn’t access the whole edifice. Today for Tommy and whoever else who comes along the whole edifice is there to consult, employ, and advocate. But will taking the “whole tradition of Marxism” as their guide reveal to young people who “March leftward” the critical, essential elements of their circumstances that they will need to navigate to win a better society? Abortion denied. Male malevolence. Racism resurgent. Immigrants deported. Medicine collapsed. Science lobotomized. Education disrobed. Inequality accelerated. Ecology raped. War spread. Fascism enthroned. To best react to all the policies and reconstructions that threaten us, should we immerse ourselves in Marxist texts? Learn the lingo? Brandish the banner?
Weeks, months, years, and decades come and go. Left “scholars” periodically proclaim that Marx said it. Marx knew it. Marx taught it. To win a better world, we should channel Marx’s Collected Works. We should be guided by the whole Marxist tradition which of course includes Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and so much more. The scholars are scholarly. They know so much. They are so confident. They have so many answers. Some of them even sound wise. But is it true that if we don’t seriously study Marx to learn his old answers to our current questions—and for that matter if we don’t seriously study Lenin and Trotsky or whoever else aligns with Marx to learn their answers as well, the more of them the better—then our knowledge, preparation, and thinking will be too shallow to advance our needs and desires? We will chase rainbows and be misled? This refrain is likely to echo from many directions in coming weeks as resistance to Trumpism grows and Marxists point to their heritage as a source of sustenance, guidance, wisdom, and even identity.
Align with Marx, they say. They believe they have valid tools and concepts and of course, feeling thus, they want to share them. They want to spread them. That’s what advocacy attempts. Fair enough. However, the bearded big man, the optimistic oracle, the grandest grand teacher, the most famous flag bearer himself wrote “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Is that a danger?
Non-Marxologists might think Marx must have been referring to the effect of the tradition of dead generations on reactionaries who wish to return to the past. It turns out, however, that reading further we find that reactionaries weren’t Marx’s target. In his next sentence he clarifies his focus to avoid confusion or outright obfuscation. He continued: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
So it was revolutionaries, not reactionaries, that Marx was eloquently castigating for borrowing “names, battle slogans, and costumes” from the past in order to present the present in “honored disguise and borrowed language” until we find that over and over today is costumed as if it was yesterday, and this is done, ironically, by those claiming to seek tomorrow.
Some will say I exaggerate the problem. Maybe that kind of result is possible, but we can do better. If so, did Marx exaggerate it too? Suppose you operate in the tradition of some dead thinker. Should you trumpet that? Should you effusively footnote it? Should you press your preferred old texts on others? What is a committed comrade to do? What are activists to do? Do we really need to imbibe and celebrate Marxism to find out?
Doing Better?
When asked these questions, my first observation is that there is no need to display your lineage, much less to trumpet it even if your claimed lineage is brilliant, much less if it isn’t. What matters instead is to make clear what you yourself believe and to show why you believe it using your own words of today. Can’t we agree that we only occasionally have good reason, and even then most often a stylistic rather than a revelatory reason, to quote dead men’s words? And can’t we agree there is never reason to treat dead men’s words like scripture, as if to quote such words provides unassailable argument or evidence? Instead, to convey our own passion on behalf of our own aims and address the expectations, fears, and experiences of those we address, why not present relevant experiences and logical connections in our own words as evidenced in our own times?
Consider a person who repeatedly quotes Marx and advises voraciously reading Marx (or some other long gone icon) to make some point about contemporary relations much less about contemporary means or aims. Imagine hearing or watching this person. Doesn’t he often (and even though women are now forefront all across activism, this person will only rarely be a she) seem more concerned to get his audience to genuflect to Marx or more concerned to demonstrate his own allegiance to Marx than he is concerned to help larger, undecided audiences consider current observations based on current evidence and reasoning? In short, doesn’t to quote from the past often mask contemporary communicative poverty? Still worse, doesn’t doing so sometimes appeal to some dead author’s authority, which in turn risks a slip-slide toward sectarian conformity? Why not instead take Marx’s own advice and let the “dead generations” rest in peace? Why not avoid “nightmarish” mimicry? Why not stop “borrowing”? Why not create?
Beyond Style, What About Substance?
Please note, so far I haven’t offered a word of critique of Marxism itself. Nothing about its substance. Not one word. Instead the above observations are about how to communicate substance, not about the merits of the substance to be communicated. I think such stylistic observations are far from unimportant but to now assess Marxism’s actual substance I’d like to consider the harsh claim that the goal of struggle in every Marxist text that offers a serious economic or societal vision is an economy that elevates about twenty percent of its population to ruling class status and that also retains patriarchy, racism, and political authoritarianism not to mention continuing to excessively spew pollution. Is that critical claim true? Or am I ignoring material reality and as a result mired in rainbows and misleadership?
Well, one way to assess the claim is to consider that when Marxist movements have actually guided revolutions, those revolutions have delivered societies with exactly the horribly flawed features the claim anticipates. Does this aspect of Marxist tradition matter? Do those outcomes exist consistent with and not despite Marxism’s concepts? Were they externally imposed or were they internally intrinsic? Vision warped, practice flawed, okay, we can almost all agree, but maybe the underlying concepts are fine. Maybe the problem has been that Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and all the post-Marx Marxist parties have misapplied Marxism. No need to transcend anything. We need only use it better.
Many Marxists will in that vein likely tell me to hold on. My worries about its aims being unworthy don’t damn Marxism. They will say every genuine Marxist’s goal is mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom. And I would agree that that is what Marx and most Marxists have said they desire. But then I would add that despite those undeniable personal desires, in practice most Marxists haven’t pursued institutions consistent with mass working-class participation, democracy, and freedom or with ending patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism. Are such claims about institutional aims false? Should we immerse ourselves in the whole tradition? Should we establish reading groups for long dead writers?
Marxists will say, come on Michael, it was outside pressure and civil wars plus inadequate understanding or sometimes bent motivations that led to the distortions we all find abhorrent. But, I reply, if that was so then shouldn’t the tradition, which is to say the plans, policies, text books and quotations from the early days to now, all not only blame external factors but also include concepts and institutional aims contrary to what emerged and pursuing what didn’t emerge. But that isn’t the case. And in our time shouldn’t we have better concepts and institutional aims that won’t be perverted by external opposition or internal misleadership?
Resolving the Dispute?
To resolve the dispute and decide about immersing ourselves in or even just advocating the whole tradition, suppose we could put every Marxist text about economics and/or society in a pile. To the very limited extent that anything in that pile provides not just analysis of some of what has been plus admirable descriptive adjectives of liberation, but also provides more encompassing actual proposals about what can and should be—isn’t the included institutional vision most often only economic and doesn’t it include top down decision making, a corporate division of labor, remuneration for output or bargaining power, and markets or central planning, each of which institutions intrinsically elevates a new ruling elite? That is a mighty big claim, l know, but if we look at actual Marxist-inspired revolutions, don’t we see just those horrid institutional aims implemented not occasionally but every time? Do we really want to blame that on everything but the guiding concepts and inclinations?
Could it be, put more assertively, that the reason Marxism in command hasn’t delivered what most of its advocates have wanted from it hasn’t been exclusively bad leaders or even violent external opposition? Of course there have been bad leaders, to put it mildly. And of course opposition has been intense and destructive. But perhaps the deeper persistent problem has been intended Marxist movement dynamics that have elevated bad leaders and, going still one step further, perhaps the problem has been the concepts that have elevated or at any rate that did not prevent those harm-elevating movement dynamics. And that stuff, that is the tradition isn’t it?
Of course the problem wasn’t that everybody in Marxist Leninist parties explicitly wanted to trample workers on the road to ruling them. That is overwhelmingly false. It is even nonsense. The problem, if you agree there has indeed been a problem, has been that however well meaning the vast bulk of the Marxist rank and file may have been, some of the core concepts of Marxist parties and movements have inexorably led those parties and movements, when they succeeded, to trample workers. Structures pushed the leaders. Concepts elevated the structures. Aren’t the structures and concepts the essence of the tradition? Shouldn’t we assess those and not just Lenin’s personality and reactionary violence?
The offered claim suggests that even with the very best motives, the odds are that Marxist movements aren’t going to make a revolution in our modern world because a) they won’t have sufficiently broad concepts and aims to appeal around extra-economic desires and even to not repulse those with extra-economic desires, and especially, ironically, because b) they will lack sufficient working class support. But if they do transcend those problems and they do help make a revolution, the claim is that the odds are overwhelming that their success will elevate a coordinator class of empowered employees to economic rule over the working class of disempowered employees, and will leave patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism modified and even reduced in some respects, but also intact and even intensified in other respects—like has occurred throughout the tradition.
Some Marxists will find these claims personally insulting. I don’t think they are. They aren’t about particular people or motives. They aren’t about people’s personalities much less people’s genetics. They are instead about concepts, methods, and institutional allegiances which, even in the hands of wonderful people, have repeatedly yielded results that those people never wanted. The target of the claim is not bad people but “nightmarish tradition” that weighs down good people. Not a word about Marx or Lenin, or whoever. Words only about Marxism, Leninism, and whatever. The claim means no harm nor puts fault on individuals who get caught up in and even become an advocate or scholar and implementer of the tradition. But the nightmarish tradition itself, that is what I offer many words about.
The Problem Named Economism
Having gotten this far, let’s get more concrete. First, let’s consider the claim that Marxism’s core concepts and associated practices overemphasize economics and underemphasize gender/kinship, community/culture, polity, and ecology.
Note that this claim doesn’t imply that all (or even any) Marxists ignore everything other than economics. Of course not. No one remotely aware and fair could suggest that. Nor does this claim imply that all (or even any) Marxists don’t care greatly about other matters. Most do, of course. It does imply, however, that when yesterday’s Marxists addressed the sex life of teenagers, marriage, the nuclear family, religion, racial identity, cultural commitments, sexual preferences, political organization, police behavior, war, and ecology, if they abided Marxism’s instructions and didn’t escape them they tended to highlight dynamics arising from their understanding of class struggle or that demonstrated implications for their understanding of class struggle but downplayed or even totally missed concerns rooted in the specific features of race, gender, power, and nature. They most often also claimed that this type of limited accounting was a virtue. It was materialist. It was scientific. It shoved away the peripheral to focus on the essential.
Well, I have to agree that to focus on what is critical and even to bypass what is peripheral is often wise. Even more, I don’t say that yesterday’s Marxism said nothing useful about race, gender, sex, and power or at least about the economic aspects of each. But I do believe that yesterday’s Marxism did not sufficiently counter tendencies imposed by then current society, or by then current struggle, or by then current opposition, or most important by then current tactical and strategic choices that together generated racist, sexist, and authoritarian outcomes even against the best moral and social inclinations of most Marxists. On those axes, that is implications for overall outcomes, yesterday’s Marxism left out too much that is not peripheral but is instead actually critical for that tradition to guide us to tomorrow. Did some practitioners do better than others? Of course. But the norm and the outcomes are what matter most.
In other words, the claim called “economism” that many offer about Marxism’s overemphasis on economy and insufficient emphasis on other sides of life does not predict mono-mania about economics or even a universal and inviolable pattern of exclusive attention to economics and zero attention to everything else. No, instead the claim predicts a harmful pattern of narrowness in how attention is given to extra economic phenomena. So does the claim deny reality?
Well, doesn’t Marxism instruct us to study such phenomena and to correct ills associated with such phenomena, but to do so with our eyes primarily on what Marxism says are the paramount change-relevant causes and effects, which Marxism in turn says are the economic ones? Doesn’t Marxism provide valuable and even essential insights about the economic dimensions of other than economic sides of life, but not much about their non economic dimensions?
By analogy imagine a (flawed) feminist, anti-racist, or anarchist who says we should pay attention to economic phenomena to correct ills we endure but we should do so always with our eyes primarily on what feminism, anti-racism, or anarchism deems the paramount change-relevant causes and effects, which they would say are the intrinsically gender, racial, or political causes and effects. Wouldn’t Marxists rightly reply that those other approaches, in those hypothetical cases, would need economic enhancement—and rightly so? But isn’t it just as valid for those other approaches to say that the Marxist focus on class and economics needs core gender, racial, and political enhancement?
If all that is so, and I wonder who would seriously contest it when put as it is put here, then wouldn’t it follow that the fix for Marxism’s “economism” would be for Marxists to agree that feminism, anti racism and anarchism have their own core insights and that just as advocates of each of those perspectives need to take account of class-focused understanding, so too do people who seek classlessness need to take account of those other source’s core insights about their focussed areas of needed change? Indeed, won’t prioritizing only a one-way causation, whether it is from economics to the rest or from some other partial focus to the rest miss phenomena of crucial importance, especially given the racial, gender, authority, ecology, and class biases and habits that are imbued so prevalently in current societies? But if so, then doesn’t that imply that we need concepts that counter and certainly not concepts that accentuate such biases?
That is the “anti-economism” claim and the good news is that in recent years it has seemed that a great many of today’s Marxists largely agree with the need to transcend economism in order to enrich Marxism. The bad news is that I think the majority of today’s Marxists haven’t yet adopted new concepts that equally prioritize those other areas of needed change. Instead I think the concepts and words of the dead generations that inhabit Marxism’s tradition still tend to crowd out or sometimes even stamp out such broader insights as soon as momentum for fundamental change builds and causes them to seek new recruits to Marxism. So while perhaps even the majority of today’s Marxists accept the need to escape economism and while they sincerely seek to do so (often by embracing another perspective so that we get socialist feminism, Marxist anti racism, anarcho-Marxism, and eco-Marxism), nonetheless, isn’t a lingering obstacle to their success that in times of crisis and existential need their allegiance to their whole tradition’s core intellectual framework tends to overcome their good intentions? As movement urgency rises, don’t desires for enlarged breadth of focus tend to get washed away by entreaties to highlight economy? Get behind our banner, only our banner, and it’s awesome tradition? That is what we might call Marxism’s economism problem.
Marxism’s Class Problem
A second area of concern less noticed and less confronted than the tradition’s economism, is ironically that regarding Marxism’s primarily focused side of life, the economy, Marxism’s concepts fall profoundly short. Many Marxists might reply to that, come on. How could that be? You are being ridiculous. Whatever limitations of focus Marxism may have, surely its economics is powerful. Well, yes, I agree that it is, to an extent. For example, Marxism rightly argues that mode of production matters greatly and emphasizes the extreme importance of class conflict. Good. It explains the drive to accumulate. It sheds light on how economy affects other spheres of life. But none of that requires immersion in or advocating the whole Marxist tradition. But severely offsetting the good, Marxism near universally fails to highlight a class that exists between labor and capital. Yesterday’s and also most of today’s Marxists tend to apriori deny the roots of a third class in how the economy defines and apportions work. Yesterday’s and also today’s Marxist’s tend to teach, instead, that classes owe their existence only to ownership relations. That persists, and yet, isn’t it blindingly evident that it is why Marxism has nearly always failed to see that the economies that Marxists have either positively called “socialist” or negatively dismissed as “deformed socialist” or “state capitalist” have in fact neither elevated workers not retained capitalists in ruling status? Instead, in what has also been called twentieth century socialism, aren’t capitalists gone but workers still subordinate? Indeed, hasn’t what the Marxist tradition has sought and at times won beyond capitalism in every case elevated not workers but instead a class of planners, managers, and other empowered employees to ruling economic status? Hasn’t it been out with the old boss, in with the new boss? But a Marist might sensibly reply, is this dismal result intrinsic or isn’t it instead due to misleadership or external imposition that has perverted Marxism’s wisdom?
In response, we have to ask, why does a new economic boss emerge (and I won’t even get into why does dictatorship emerge)? Is it repeatedly a revolution hijacked? Or is it that victorious Marxism has in every case sought and won public or state ownership of assets, top down decision making, corporate divisions of labor, remuneration for output and power, and either markets or central planning for allocation and that those choices have not yielded desired classlessness but a new class boss? And hasn’t this all happened, remarkably, even while Marxists simultaneously urged the need for worker liberation via workers control? In other words, when Marxists have implemented their favored institutions, they have undeniably not attained their qualitative goal. But is that because, as I assert, some key Marxist conceptual and institutional commitments have not only permitted but have propelled what I call coordinator rule even while Marxists have denied that the coordinator class between labor and capital in capitalism even exists? Could it be that the reason why Marxism isn’t all that popular among working class audiences is not because those audiences have been misled, but because those audiences have sensibly seen Marxism’s aims as a nightmare and not a utopia? Is that because they have been tricked, or is it because in that regard their eyes are wide open?
Please note, these claims do not even remotely suggest that most or arguably even any individual Marxists self-consciously try to advance the interests of managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, planers, and other empowered actors over and above disempowered workers (though some do). It suggests instead that certain concepts within Marxism do little to prevent this elevation of a coordinator class as a new ruling class and indeed even propel it. The claim is that in the Marxist tradition, coordinator economic dominance emerges even despite and against the better sentiments of most of Marxism’s rank and file.
This may seem peculiar. After all, how could a movement most of whose members want one thing repeatedly wind up implementing something damningly worse and even diametrically opposite? But actually, it is not uncommon. Social outcomes often diverge from rank and file desires which are ignored and often harshly repressed.
For example, sincere and eloquent advocates of workers control who favor privately-owned corporations, whether they do so for personal gain as owners themselves or due to a sincere belief that private ownership is essential for a well functioning economy, do not usher in workers control. Their institutional choice to retain private ownership trumps their worthy desire for workers control. Workers who persistently seek the latter get some lip service but wind up ignored or repressed. All Marxists understand that dynamic because Marxism’s concepts highlight how a choice to retain private ownership will rule out workers control.
Similarly, the critical current claim rendered here is that sincere and eloquent advocates of workers self management who favor markets or central planning and who favor the corporate division of labor, whether they advocate these priorities for personal gain or due to a sincere belief that those choices are essential for a well functioning economy, will not usher in self management. Their institutional choices will trump their worthy desires for self management. Workers persistently seeking self management will get some lip service but will wind up ignored or repressed. I claim that those immersed in the Marxist tradition often fail to understand the logically quite similar dynamic to the one they do understand regarding capitalists because in the coordinator case Marxism’s central concepts don’t highlight and instead even obscure the class processes at work. So is it contrary to reality and even nasty to point out that Marxists ought to easily understand this possibility not least because Marx himself smartly advised that when judging some intellectual framework one should discount what it says about itself (we want “workers above all”) and instead notice what its concepts obscure (there is no “class of coordinators above workers”)? Is it nasty to urge, like Marx himself, ironically, that an intellectual framework that becomes a tool of an aspiring ruling class will obscure that class’s behavior, hide that class’s roots in social relations, and even deny that class’s existence, all while aggressively and even violently furthering that class’s rise to dominance?
Marxists look at the theory and ideology of mainstream economics and see the conceptual inadequacies that obscure and elevate domination by owners. But they don’t see something quite similar regarding Marxism’s own relation to the class between labor and capital? That is, when we look to see what the Marxist tradition highlights, obscures, and seeks, don’t we see that Marxism’s focus on property relations as the only basis for class conflict obscures the importance for class conflict of the distribution of empowering tasks among economic actors? Don’t we see that that’s why Marxism misses that with owners gone, coordinators can rise to rule workers? Don’t we see that Marxism removes from view the rule exerted by about twenty percent of the population (the coordinator class that monopolizes empowering work), over the remaining eighty percent of the population (the working class that does mainly disempowering work) in so-called “twentieth century socialism,” which system we really ought to call “coordinatorism”?
Don’t we see, in other words, that despite the sincere and oft-stated aims of so many of its adherents, in practice Marxism overwhelmingly and predictably aggressively and all too often even violently elevates the coordinator class to rule over workers even as Marxism’s concepts have hidden coordinators’ role and even their very existence? The tradition gets in the way of the aspirations and even the observations of its own advocates.
Does to urge that we need to transcend Marxism seek to rob activism of everything any Marxist has ever said? Or is it only a call to not succumb yet again to the now stultifying and even suicidal aspects of this particular tradition of dead generations?
Dare I suggest it, would Marx brought back to life now call today’s Marxism and especially today’s Marxism Leninism the ideology of the coordinator class, and not of the working class? We can only guess. And why bother to guess or even to care unless we are historians of ideas? Whether Marx would do so or not, isn’t it clear that to argue that we should ourselves do so doesn’t imply that we think that somehow all Marxists are themselves overt enemies of classlessness? Isn’t it clear that it instead urges that even when Marxists overwhelmingly desire classlessness, their conceptual and institutional allegiances tend to trample those desires?
Some Possible Improvements
Okay, let’s get positive. A pivotal question arises. How might today’s Marxists seek a better Marxism for tomorrow? How might new Marxists augment, alter, or otherwise transcend faulty current concepts to avoid the two problems we and so many feminists, anti racists, anarchists, councilists, and others have highlighted? And might we make the needed changes and also sensibly retain the Marxist banner, name, and tradition?
Regarding “economism,” such new Marxists might decide to transcend a conceptual framework that starts from economics and even while revealing important economic dynamics, primarily examines other realms with the intention of seeing their economic implications but not their intrinsic extra-economic dynamics?
And having recognized that economism problem, perhaps such neo-Marxists, let’s call them, might choose to ground their overall improved perspective on concepts that highlight economics, but that also equally highlight polity, kinship, culture, and ecology. Perhaps they might prioritize understanding each of these life sphere’s own intrinsic logic and dynamics and seeing how in actual societies each of these life spheres influences and even limits and defines the others without presupposing that they all line up according to some particular hierarchy of importance?
For example, as a possible correction to today’s economism, tomorrow’s Marxist wanting to do better might say, I am Marxist but I am also and equally feminist, intercommunalist, anarchist, and green which means I recognize that dynamics arising from spheres of life other than the economy can even define economic possibilities just as the reverse can occur. Of course, I still think a society’s mode of production and class struggle are critically important. But I also realize gender, race, religious, ethnic, sexual, and anti-authoritarian struggle are each also critically important. I realize that just as we need to understand non-class struggles in their relation to class struggle, we also have to understand class struggle in its relation to gender, race, political, and ecological struggles.
So, okay, suppose tomorrow’s Marxist does renounce the idea of an economic base which affects an extra-economic superstructure which superstructure is in turn overwhelmingly only affected. Suppose tomorrow’s Marxist denies that societies rise and transform only due to modes of production and instead sees how modes of kinship, culture, and polity are also crucial to how societies rise and transform. Suppose tomorrow’s Marxist still argues the importance of class struggle but no longer sees class struggle as the alone dominant conceptual touchstone for identifying strategic issues. After such changes, could the label “Marxist” come to connote what this neo-Marxist believes? I am not sure. Maybe it could, though much of the Marxist tradition “of dead generations” would likely strenuously resist the change. Indeed, I think this battle has been unfolding for decades.
In contrast to the above trend toward overcoming Marxism’s economism problem, Marxism’s class-definition problem seems to me to more strongly resist correction. Capitalists are capitalist, Marxists rightly urge, and this is so by virtue of their private ownership of the means of production. To no longer have capitalists above workers derivatively requires, Marxists rightly argue, that we must eliminate private ownership of means of production. So far, so good, and also essential.
Marxists then say non-capitalists own only their ability to do work which they sell for a wage. Also good. But then Marxists say that all these wage earning employees, by virtue of their having the same ownership situation as one another, have the same class interests. They are all in the working class. This is where the problem arises.
The point is, Marxists almost universally fail to recognize that some wage earning employees can have crucially different class interests than other wage earning employees due to occupying different positions in the corporate division of labor. Suppose some Marxists decide to consider this possibility and as a way to test it they hypothesize that there is a class between labor and capital. They ask, is such a hypothetical third class real? Is anyone actually in this hypothetical third class? Or is this hypothesis immaterial, unscientific nonsense?
To my eyes, once Marxists admit that such a third class might exist and thus entertain the possibility that something other than ownership relations might generate class difference, if they then look closely to see if it is so, they will easily see that managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and other employees who are highly empowered by their economic position in the corporate division of labor because it allots to them a virtual monopoly on empowering tasks and the levers and requisites of daily economic decision-making while it allots to other employees overwhelmingly disempowering tasks that leave them subordinate. Such neo-Marxists will then see that in a new economy without owners the former coordinators will decide and the latter workers will obey.
In that case, if that is what we see once we allow something other than the tradition’s instructions to constrain our observations, doesn’t it follow that to no longer have empowered coordinators above disempowered workers we must replace the offending institutions—markets, central planning, and especially the corporate division of labor? But if that is in turn the case, then why do most Marxist and all Marxist Leninist visions explicitly advocate having a corporate division of labor, markets, or central planning? More, doesn’t that advocacy explain why Marxists typically fail to see that even when private ownership is eliminated, markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor will nonetheless elevate a ruling class of structurally empowered coordinators above a subordinate class of structurally disempowered workers? Isn’t this blatantly and utterly obvious unless one accepts concepts that rule it out a priori?
Marxists often movingly and sincerely qualitatively describe the justice, equity, and dignity that they wish to achieve. They want workers liberated at last. But, if we look at texts by Marxists for their proposed economic vision, don’t we find vague rhetoric that lacks institutional substance, or, when there is institutional substance, don’t we find institutions that deny the justice, equity, and dignity that Marxists personally favor?
Similarly, when we look at Marxist practice, which is most often Marxist Leninist practice, don’t we find these same coordinatorist structures nearly universally implemented? Could a Marxist today transcend this problem by adopting a three class view that sees beyond only property relations as able to cause class rule, and that understands the possibility of the third class becoming the ruling class and yet reasonably continue to call him or herself a Marxist?
Suppose a Marxist did follow that path, which indeed some Marxists have at times tried to do, (including myself when Robin Hahnel and I co-authored a book nearly fifty years ago called Unorthodox Marxism). I think signs that it had occurred would be obvious. For example, such “neo-Marxists” would critique what has been self-labeled “socialism” by its advocates in various countries around the world, but then they would not call it capitalism or state capitalism, or even deformed socialism, but instead would call it a new mode of production that enshrines an economic coordinator class (and not just a political bureaucracy) above workers. And I think such new Marxists would then offer an opposed vision that would dispense with private ownership of means of production but also dispense with markets, central planning, and corporate divisions of labor, as well as with modes of remuneration that reward property, power, or output.
And I also think such neo-Marxists (or if you like, unorthodox Marxists) would propose new defining economic institutions to seek in place of those they reject. The new institutions that would gain support from such neo-Marxists might be, for example, a commons of productive assets, collectively self-managed worker and consumer councils, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, a new division of labor that has jobs balanced for empowerment, and a new kind of participatory planning in place of markets and central planning.
Then, in accord with their altered economic vision, whatever new defining features it might advocate, I think such new Marxists would also advocate movement organizations, methods, and programs that would embody, propel, and actually arrive at their positive aims. They would also realize that strategies for social change that elevate centrist parties, top down decision-making and corporate divisions of labor will not eliminate coordinator class rule but instead entrench it. They would acknowledge that the Marxist tradition taken as a whole has flaws that lead to coordinator class rule regardless of the sincere desires of many or even of nearly all Marxists to end up someplace much nicer than coordinatorism.
So what would be the relation of such “neo-Marxists” to the Marxist tradition that they previously celebrated? Well, I very much doubt such neo-Marxists would call themselves Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, or even Castroist, but even if they did, they would certainly disavow huge swaths of associated thought and action.
I would also anticipate that instead of persistently and exclusively quoting some valid insights from Lenin and Trotsky positively, of which there are of course many, they would aggressively reject Lenin saying: “It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management.” Could that be more explicit? And they would reject Lenin saying: “Any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.” Could that be more draconian? And they would reject Lenin saying: “Large scale machine industry which is the central productive source and foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unity of will… How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.” That is called dictatorship. No way around it. And they would reject Lenin saying: “A producer’s congress! What precisely does that mean? It is difficult to find words to describe this folly. I keep asking myself can they be joking? Can one really take these people seriously? While production is always necessary, democracy is not. Democracy of production engenders a series of radically false ideas.” There are indeed false ideas afoot, but not those advocating a producers’ congress.
And then I think such neo-Marxists would also reject Trotsky saying (about left communists): “They turn democratic principles into a fetish. They put the right of the workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the Party’s right to affirm its own dictatorship, even when this dictatorship comes into conflict with the evanescent mood of the worker’s democracy.” And I thought the above Lenin paragraph could be topped. And they would reject Trotsky saying, “We must bear in mind the historical mission of our Party. The Party is forced to maintain its dictatorship, without stopping for these vacillations, nor even the momentary falterings of the working class. This realization is the mortar which cements our unity. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not always have to conform to formal principles of democracy.” No rationalizes or denying here, just straight up authoritarian sentiment. And they would reject Trotsky saying: “It is a general rule that man will try to get out of work. Man is a lazy animal.” And typical reactionary sentiment. And they would reject Trotsky proudly saying: “I consider that if the Civil War had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management much sooner and much less painfully.” This is perhaps the most revealing quotation. It does not say violent opposition led to all the bad that followed, it says that opposition delayed the revolution from arriving at what it sought (that is, the bad that followed. Do we want to say Lenin and Trotsky weren’t Marxists. That their views violated rather than flowed from their Marxism. That would seem a bit like special pleading to me.
So I think our new neo-Marxists would not waste time blaming Lenin or Trotsky’s personal dispositions or ignorance for the origins of such undeniably horrible utterances and ensuing consistent outcomes, but would instead look for underlying inadequate concepts that they would need to transcend.
But, honestly, isn’t all of the above in some sense just the fare of “dead generations”? More important than arguing endlessly about dead men’s words or even acts, wouldn’t tomorrow’s “neo-Marxists” emphasize that utilizing hierarchical structures in economic and/or political or social institutions risks ushering in coordinator rule as well as creating an environment uncongenial to widespread worker involvement, or kinship, racial, political, or ecological advances?
If tomorrow’s Marxists wanted to argue that in some difficult contexts such Leninist and Trotskyist dictates may have to be honored, wouldn’t they then be at extreme pains to also urge the need to see the structures as only temporarily imposed expedients and in all other respects try to pave the way for classless self-managed social relations, now and in the future?
Finally, despite some crucial flaws, do I agree there is also quite useful wisdom and moving eloquence in Marx and also in many subsequent Marxist writers and activists that “tomorrow’s Marxists” should rightly retain? Of course I do. But I reply that despite those insights, neo-Marxists should reject not only capitalist property relations but also markets, central planning, and a coordinatorist division of labor as well as elevate attention to patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism as much as they elevate attention to economy to avoid fulfilling Marx’s own commentary that: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Last Word?
That seems like a good back-to-the-beginning spot to end this argument. Yet at risk of belaboring, I don’t think so. To reject a framework we have been taught, a framework we have quoted, a framework we have taken our identities and battle slogans from, a framework we have believed in, a framework we have advocated and have previously deemed critical to achieving a better world all so that we can get beyond traditions of dead generations is no simple path to navigate, especially when many highly learned, compelling, committed, courageous, and accomplished allies and friends (and not just or even mainly sectarian numbskulls) repeatedly tell us that for us to do that would leave us ignorantly ill-suited to winning change. So at the risk of going still further, and of some redundancy as well, I want to give the issue a little more very explicit and even aggressive attention.
The point of activists becoming familiar and facile with such long-lived frameworks as Marxism or Marxism Leninism (or any other long-lived framework) as they move leftward should of course be to find in such frameworks insights and methods that can usefully aid and certainly not subvert current and future practice.
To decide whether it would be a wise choice to immerse oneself in Marxist (or any other) long-lived tradition, shouldn’t we then ask, will that tradition’s proposed concepts and practices not hinder but instead help us to comprehend all the main conditions we will encounter when we combat injustice? Will its proposed concepts and practices help us to conceive and to attain a desirable new world? If our answer is yes, then we should certainly seek to learn from that collection of proposed concepts, albeit using our own words. But if our answer is no, shouldn’t we be roused to try to arrive at better concepts and embark on better practice?
To that end, and at the risk of horrifying some, here are some additional very summary judgements offered quite provocatively but meant quite seriously about Marxist tradition.
Marxist talk about “dialectics” is a substantively empty obstructionist drain on peoples’ confidence, creativity and range of perception. It too often mostly makes people feel ignorant or even dumb. If you doubt that, okay, ask even a well read Marxist what dialectics means. And especially ask what dialectics helps that Marxist understand which, if he or she hadn’t learned dialectics (supposing there is even something there to learn), they wouldn’t understand. To put it bluntly, ask what makes dialectics other than useless and pointless rhetoric that only elevates its “owners” above those who fail to successfully borrow that same vocabulary from dead generations.
”Historical Materialism’s” claims have some validity, to be sure, but when real existing people utilize the concepts of historical materialism—base is fundamental, boundary is peripheral, and so on—they typically tend to arrive at an economistic and mechanical view of society that systematically under-values and mis-understands social relations of gender, political, cultural, and ecological origin and impact. Not to mention the breadth of human emotions and motives. Historical materialism says there is reality, which is of course true. There is material reality, which is also true. We can’t ignore material relations or do without economics. They impact us and everything. Also true. But then it says we must apriori prioritize economics above all else. And that doesn’t follow. And then it tacks on, if you don’t accept economic prioritization, then you don’t believe in and attend to reality. And that is utter nonsense.
Marxist “class theory” has obscured the importance of a class between labor and capital, has under-appreciated that class’s antagonisms in capitalist economies with the working class below and with capital above, has long obstructed class analysis of Soviet, Eastern European, and other post capitalist economies, and has especially obstructed understanding the failings of tactics, strategies and organizations that have consistently attained other coordinatorism rather than what most activists have sought. Does what it sheds revealing light on outway all that so there is no need to correct the problems?
The “Marxist Labor Theory of Value” (taking a brief foray into even more obscurity) ironically misunderstands its own subject, the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies. More broadly and however unintentionally it also turns activists’ thoughts away from a needed social-relations bargaining-power view of capitalist exchange. It also directs its advocates away from seeing that the dynamics of workplaces are largely functions of the differential empowerment effects of work, of bargaining power, and of forms of social control rather than being solely functions of ownership relations. It suggests that all workers will wind up earning the minimum wage they need to reproduce themselves which is honestly ridiculous and reduces attention to why wages for different wage earners differ so markedly. (So perhaps point 4 was not so obscure.)
Marxist “crisis theory,” in virtually all its variants, distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by seeing intrinsic cataclysmic collapse as inevitable and even imminent where no such prospect exists, and by in that way orienting activists away from seeing the importance of their own sustained vision-guided and oriented and ethically-attuned organizing as a far more promising basis for desirable change.
Regarding visions of desirable societies, the Marxist tradition has been particularly obstructive of activist needs. First, there has been Marxism’s general taboo against “utopian” speculation which taboo manages to literally reject trying to conceive an institutional vision we could hope to and desire to attain. Second, Marxist economism has presumed that if economic relations are made desirable then other social relations will fall into place, making institutional vision for other than economy redundant and therefore unsurprisingly overwhelmingly absent from Marxist texts. Third, Marxism even at its best has been confused about what constitutes an equitable distribution of income. “From each according to ability and to each according to need” however nice sounding is not a viable economic guide since for each of us to provide society according to our ability would mean we should each work as much as our ability allows which is typically a whole lot more than it makes sense for us to work. And likewise, for each of us to receive according to our need would either let us all have anything we say we need (a ridiculous impossibility) or, if not, it would require that someone or something else decides our needs for us. In neither case would it reveal or respect information that indicates how much people want or need any particular thing and not just that they do want/need that particular thing, and that would in turn prevent determining relative costs and benefits of different possible workplace choices. More, the norm that Marxists sometimes propose instead, “from each according to personal choice and to each according to contribution to the social product” is not even a morally worthy maxim since it rewards productivity, which includes genetic endowment, luck, access to better equipment, etc., and not just effort and sacrifice. And fourth, Marxism approves hierarchical relations of production, that is, it approves a corporate division of labor for workplace organization, and it approves central planning or even markets as a means of allocation because while Marxism recognizes the need to eliminate the causes of capitalist economic rule it does not even recognize the existence of much less the need to eliminate the causes of coordinator economic rule.
Taken cumulatively Marxism’s injunctions regarding economic goals amount to advocating what we call a mode of production that elevates administrators, planners and all structurally empowered workers, collectively called coordinators, to ruling class status. This Marxist economic goal then uses the label “socialist” for its aim to appeal to all other employees, that is workers, that the Marxist proposed economy is the best they can hope for—but at the same time it structurally demolishes socialist ideals (just as the political goal of bourgeois movements uses the label “democratic” to rally support from diverse sectors, but structurally demolishes full democratic ideals).
Finally, if all that isn’t enough, and I would argue that each point is alone more than enough, Leninism and Trotskyism are not gross deviations but natural outgrowths of Marxism as it is employed by actual people in actual capitalist societies, and Marxism Leninism, far from being a “theory and strategy for the working class,” is, instead, by its focus, concepts, values, methods, and goals, and despite most of its advocates’ desires, a ”theory and strategy for the coordinator class.”Is the above awfully long for an article? It sure is. My fingers and eyes hurt from typing and working over it. But please don’t blame me for that. Blame the whole libraries of Marxist texts and the century plus of Marxist practice that have together included not only insights but so many faults we need to address. And now a last, last word.
To get a little personal about all this, and to add a crucial caveat, since I at the time and way earlier believed the above claims, albeit my reasons are presented only summarily here, I had hoped that the demise of the patriarchal, nationalist, authoritarian, ecologically suicidal Soviet system would have ended allegiance to Marxism and Marxism Leninism taken as whole traditions, since those whole traditions aimed in their principles, concepts, thought, and vision (though not in the deepest aspirations of many of their advocates) at that Soviet model that they implemented.
So, what’s the problem? Out with that model, out with the concepts and strategies that led to it. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Well, yes, but—and here comes the caveat—only to a point. When theories fail to sufficiently explain reality or to successfully guide sought practice, they certainly do need to be refined and corrected or sometimes even jettisoned and replaced. And, in the case of Marxism and Marxism Leninism, the faults discussed above and also often critiqued by feminists, anti-racists, anarchists, councilists and even a great many Marxists are demonstrably intrinsic to certain Marxist core concepts so that correcting those concepts is not just modestly tinkering with the still intact intellectual framework but literally overturning core elements of it.
So supposing that we seriously refine or even dispense with major elements of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the labor theory of value, Marxism’s constricted understanding of class, most of the heart of Leninist strategy, all the defining features of a coordinator-elevating economic vision, and finally Marxism’s still insufficient attention to and too often lack of institutional aspirations for kin, gender, sex, race, ethnic, political, and ecological vision—won’t whatever emerges reject enough from the Marxist tradition to require us to also find a new name for a new tradition? Maybe, but maybe not. But I would suggest that either way, it is time—and actually that it is well past time—to get on with something new.
My caveat, however, that I don’t want to have get lost in the critical shuffle, is that it is also true that when theories fail to sufficiently explain reality or to guide needed practice, it does not follow that we must jettison every claim they ever made, reject every concept they ever offered, and dismiss every analysis they ever undertook. Quite the contrary, it is more likely that much will still be valid and can be retained (though perhaps recast and reformulated more accessibly) in any new and better intellectual framework that does jettison the harmful stuff.
So, in 2025, as crises abound and momentum for change grows, for activists to learn some things from past traditions can certainly help us but we should recognize that to immerse ourselves in past traditions can also crowd out our need to explore and adopt essential new insights in place of flawed ones that we have heretofore way too often and inflexibly borrowed from dead generations.
