Letter: Distorting Marxism
Dear Sirs,
While not in any way wanting to associate the beliefs of our group with those of the SPGB, we are deeply amused at your efforts to emasculate Marxism. Your hatred of Lenin and Bolshevism rather stands in contradistinction to your espousal of Marxism. Most of all, quoting from the works of Kautsky and Bukharin in your literature, as if to prove your Marxism by the choice of books you quote from, is also most humorous. Take any Marxist conception and there the SPGB will be found revising and distorting it. It is perhaps paradoxical that the two works of Marx you base your policies on, Value, Price and Profit and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, are the very works in which Marx exposes and smashes present SPGB policy, in his attack on Lassalleanism. Nevertheless, we are not as sectarian as your Party, and are prepared to listen to any quasi-Marxist group.
M. E. THERRIEN,
Secretary, Exeter China Policy Study Group.
Reply
The theory and practice of the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain is based on Marxism; that is, we accept as valid the main theories put forward by Marx about history, political economy and politics. We accept that the materialist conception of history is a very useful method for examining and understanding social and historical events and changes. We accept that Capital is a brilliant analysis of the workings and historical tendency of capitalism and exposition of how the working class are exploited. We accept too that the working class can be freed from wage-slavery only by its own efforts, by taking class-conscious democratic political action to get Socialism. We were unaware that in so doing we were “emasculating” Marxism and we are not prepared to consider the allegation that we have distorted Marx’s views until and unless Mr. Therrien, or anyone else, produces some evidence.
As a matter of fact it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who twisted Marx’s theories. For Marx the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself. Lenin rejected this. In What Is To be Done? he says, contemptuously, of the working class that “exclusively by its own effort” it can only reach a trade union consciousness. Socialist understanding, Lenin argued, must be brought to them from outside—in Russia by a band of professional revolutionaries organised as a vanguard party. In other words, Lenin and the Bolsheviks held that a vanguard party could free the working class rather than the working class, through it own class-conscious democratic political action, free itself.
Before trying to pin labels on us Mr. Therrien really must make up his mind which one he is going to use. Kautsky (foremost thinker of European Social Democracy) and Bukharin (Bolshevik thinker and leader, later murdered by Stalin) were both opposed to Lassalle (a nineteenth century playboy who did some pioneer work in organising workers, of Iron Law of Wages fame). And of course Kautsky and Bukharin were opposed to each other. We, in the Socialist Party, have serious criticisms to make of all three. In fact, we would say that Lassalle had nothing to contribute to Socialist theory and Bukharin next to nothing.
The policy of the Socialist Party is not based on two works of Marx. It is based on the interests of the working class in the modern world. Value, Price and Profit is a basic work of Marxian economics always worth reading. The Critique of the Gotha Programme, some marginal notes written by Marx on the programme adopted by German Social Democrats at a unity congress held in Gotha in 1875, has certain defects precisely because it was not written for publication. It is odd that we should be accused of basing our policy on these since the Stalinists use them to try to justify their theory that Socialism and Communism are two separate societies. The notes don’t bear this interpretation anyway and Marx used the two terms interchangeably to refer to the classless society of the future, based on the social or common ownership of the means of life.
Finally, may we express the hope that Mr. Therrien’s group’s study of the policies of state capitalist China is conducted on somewhat more scientific lines than their study of Socialist Party policy appears to have been.
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE