Notes on Ball & Dagger text, Chapter 6:  Socialism and Communism After Marx

INTRODUCTION TO / OVERVIEW OF SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM AFTER MARX

Marx's analysis consisted of three main points:  a clearer view of value showed that there was a fundamental conflict between the owning class and the proletariat;  the state was not a neutral arbiter of the conflict but rather a servant of the owning class;  and classical liberalism is only an ideology (part of the "superstructure") designed to obscure the basic conflict.  Thus Marx skewered each of the three domains whose interconnection classical liberalism took / had taken pride in:  the economy, the government, and the moral justification for them.  He also claimed a revolution was inevitable and desirable (and said how it would come about).

There were a number of responses to this comprehensive and philosophically sophisticated criticism.  I will sketch a few of them.

• Concealment:  (As Marxism gained strength) separate what used to be the single field of "moral economy" into the separate fields of philosophy, political science, and economics.  Creation of AEA in 1888, APhilA in 1900, and APSA in 1903.
• Reform:  With T. H. Green, admit that capitalism needed to be cleaned up so as not to weigh so heavily on the losers in the competition, but deny that there is any fundamental conflict between the owning class and the proletariat.  In other words, modern reform liberalism was an attempt to save classical liberalism from socialism (and, in an opposite way, from the excesses of individualistic conservatism).
• Various socialisms: 
  • Anarchism:  A Focus on the State:   Anarchists focused on one aspect of Marx's analysis — namely, that the State was part of the oppression — "a disease masquerading as a cure".  They held that destruction of the State would reveal humans' natural cooperativeness.  Some anarchists — the text mentions Bakunin and Kropotkin — sought this destruction by direct, violent means.  Other anarchists did not believe in violence;  some were explicitly nonviolent.
  • Scientistic, economistic (mis-)interpretation of Marx:  A Focus on "Exploitation":  Engels;  Lenin;  Stalin.  After Marx's death, Engels shifted what the text claims (and I agree) was Marx's more dialectical understanding into a scientific "determinism" and "materialism".
  • "Humanistic" (a.k.a. European, a.k.a. critical theory) Marxism:  A Focus on "Alienation":  many names here, but few mentioned in the text. Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, ...);  Bernstein, Lukacs, Gramsci.
  • Eventually postmodern:  A Focus on "False Consciousness":  Foucault, Derrida.  More abstract and general statement of the Marxian critique.

Eduard Bernstein:

• failure of Marx's prediction of the immiseration of the proletariat
• "revisionist Marxism", claiming that socialism will occur naturally through the increasing power of labor unions, so that revolution is neither moral nor necessary.

Vladimir I. Lenin:

• imperialism explains the failure of Marx's immiseration prediction.
• vanguard party, secret party, democratic centralism.  Bolsheviks vs. Mensheviks.
• breakup of the Socialist International at the outset of WWI
• backward & corrupt Tsarist regime overthrown, and the Communist Party is able to take control of the revolutionary soviets and throw out Alexander Kerensky.
• Civil war of Reds vs. Whites results in a consolidation of centralized power, suspicion, and totalitarian control of life.

Joseph Stalin

• "socialism in one country" (vs. Trotsky's — and Lenin's — internationalism);  the decline of the Comintern
• the vanguard leader of the vanguard party
• a dead end as far as socialist theory is concerned

Mao Zedong

• peasant revolution;  the "fish in the sea";  the "barrel of a gun"
• the importance of revolutionary will

Anarcho-communism:

• Emma Goldman
• Mikhail Bakunin

Fabian socialists

• George Bernard Shaw

Market socialism:

• Carol C. Gould
• Michael Walzer

Humanistic Marxism:  Georg Lukacs & Antonio Gramsci (responding to the rise of fascism in Europe before WWII), the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and others, responding ditto), Jürgen Habermas (and others of the "linguistic turn".

Postmodernism:  Foucault, Derrida.

Potential quiz questions:

• Name any one of the types of Marxism (mentioned in the text) that came along after Marx's death.  If you don't know the specific name, give enough detail to show me you read the chapter.  As always, "I don't know" or "I didn't read the chapter" receives 50% credit.

Thought questions:

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