Marxism 2010: Callinicos Again

The past year or so has taken from us some of the most outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the 1968 generation .....In the supposedly ideology-free world of the Con-Lib coalition, it would be tempting to conclude that these individual disappearances are representative of a much broader decline of Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition.

Opines Alex Callinicos in the Guardian yesterday. Not one of these ideologues has made a scintilla of difference to public policy in Britain nor did they offer an alternative to neoliberal capitalism for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those like Chris Harman were Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists who continued to harp on about the Bolshevik Revolution as if it were a moment of great proletarian self emancipation and liberty. Yet Harman supported the crushing of the Kronstadt Revolt of 1921 by replicating Trotsky's self serving lies that the sailors of 1921 were not the same as those in 1917.

Few are now going to accept the romanticised mythology of the Bolshevik seizure of power without know knowing that this first successful attempt to create a workers paradise by abandoning liberal democracy-a free press, political pluralism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary-was a catastrophe that inevitably led to Stalin's totalitarian state.

Secondly, Marxism festivals off Gower Street in London held by the SWP should be termed Marxism-Leninism 2010 and not hitch the name to Marxism or even Marx if everybody wonders around these seminars and workshops bandying bits of Lenin about as if it were Pure Gospel. The SWP acts and produces devotees more like religious sectaries than free thinkers.

Marx one retorted that if a certain person he did not like was a Marxist then he was not one. It is true, Marx is a classical thinker and philosopher of capitalism who remains unmatched in some regards for his penetrating insights. But it is highly unlikely would have approved of the Bolshevik Revolution. He would have turned in his grave in Highgate to see what was done in his name in Russia.

If there is going to be an alternative to neoliberal capitalism it will have to be a debate about the pragmatic uses of the state intervention and not in the kind of apocalyptic nihilism espoused by supposed inheritors of Marx's political economy. Nor an argument for the total control of the state by ideologues forcing mankind to be happy by mass murdering all enemies of Utopia.

This is the problem with Marxism Festivals. Young people or ageing adolescents stuck in the fantasy world of ideological rationalisations for a lack of ego security in a complicated world or else a hard core devotion to overthrowing the state are simply not serious. It is dubious whether they are actually Marxists as Callinicos asserts.

When I attended Marxism 97 I did so as I wanted to hear the historian Chrisopher Hill speak. It has drawn some interesting names but most of it was broken down into post-1968 "identity politics" seminars. This cancels out the classical Marxism which was very much ro0ted in the now largely disappeared working class or "proletariat".

Callinicos is an ideologue yearning like Lenin for the catastrophe that will allow his fringe sect the SWP to emerge into the spotlight again but it will simply not happen.

SWP supporters are seen a attention seeking fanatics latching on to any dispute to display their plaards and punch their clenched fists. It's a 'pyschodelirium' as Raymond Aron said of the street theatre of the 1968 rebellions.

It would never be voted for. As he espouses a Party Line that deifies Lenin, the British electorate would have none of it. Leninist version of Marx places the idea that economics determines politics with the idea that politics could determine the economy.

This was under command economies a travesty of what Callinicos himself writes here,

Marx described his own intellectual project as the critique of political economy: Marxism therefore lives or dies by its ability to make sense of the dynamics of capitalism and to offer a way out of it.

The Financial Crash of 2008 and proceeding Economic Slump or Depression many parts of the West are facing now will not lead to a Revolution, though new thinking about the role where the state can do things best is on the agenda.

But there will be no reversion to Communism of the command type nor a fetish for violent overthrow of the capitalist system if that's what the potty prof means by 'Marxism offering a way out of the dynamics of capitalism'.

Yet Marxism Festivals seem to be jamborees of trendy New Leninists who seem to provide youth with ways of interpreting the world. With Harman and others gone, Callinicos advertises the festival by citing Zizek as a star attraction. Certainly, he's eccentric and offers some interesting insights.

Yet John Gray did a devastating and witty demolition job of Zizek in the Independent ( Friday, 20 November 2009 ) when reviewing First as Tragedy, Then as Farce when he wrote,

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century’s biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas…
A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Having said that Zizek does have some nuggets of wisdom tucked away amidst often what is elevated psychobabble.

He was particularly interesting in looking at what had gone wrong with the former dissidents of Central Europe like Vaclav Havel in the LRB, though that's probably motivated by the vanity to be seen as a 'real' European dissident more than Havel and Michnik who are now "useful idiots" as Judt put it.

As Gray put it witheringly,

Zizek ( writes ) "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."
In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved.
In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police and gulags. This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realised the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people."

Zizek seems to be one of these characters that could step out of a J G Ballard novel, that in the face of a boring a nihilistic neoliberal consumer economy just anything that smacks of real change and revolution is a really a bit bit sexy and exciting.

If only, of course, the history of terror, misery and privation of Leninism are increasingly not also known as well amongst desperate youth looking for "solutions" to a grave civilisational crisis in the West. Young people  live in a world besieged by admass dreck and wasteful consumerism and the myth of an infinite growth Utopia.

Gray continues,

'Thus Zizek steps forth as a pop star of the radical New invigorated New Left, Zizek identifies any social force that actually wants communism. For all his insistent tough-mindedness - "If you can get power, grab it", he declared in an interview the other day - he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.
The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time. The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives - and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.
A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism.
When Zizek and others like him defend communism - "the communist hypothesis", as they call it - they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past. Hence the appeal of Zizek's works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond.

To understand the failures of neoliberal finance capitalism, one would be better off with the maverick conservative John Gray's False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Tony Judt's defence of liberal social democracy in Ill Fares the Land or Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson's The Gods that Failed: How the Financial; Elite Have Gambled Our Futures Away.