Dave Renton, Classical Marxism: Socialist Theory and the Second International

This book was published by New Clarion Press, Cheltenham, 2002. ISBN 1873797354. £12.99. New Clarion Press can be contacted via their webpage.

The purpose of this book is to address a recent claim that socialist theory can be renewed on the basis of 'classical Marxism', the socialist politics of the Second International in the period between the death of Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution of 1917. This claim is approached, with both sympathy and some distance, through a series of biographical chapters that address the lives and arguments of important figures within the movement: Paul Lafargue, Tom Maguire, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin.

A key argument of the book is that classical Marxism was breaking down even before the outbreak of war in 1914. The alliance between socialist left and right could be kept together only by pushing the moment of socialist revolution ever further into the distance. With war and revolution imminent, this balancing act became impossible to sustain.

Dave Renton is a former trade union education officer and now works as a research fellow at Sunderland University. A life-long socialist, his main interests are in the comparative study of ideology and his books include Red Shirts and Black, Fascism: Theory and Practice and Marx on Globalization.

Classical Marxism: Socialist Theory and the Second International, by Dave Renton (New Clarion 2003). By Paul Hampton. Action fof Solidarity, spring 2004.

This book is worth reading, even though it is ultimately flawed by the politics of the SWP. It covers a vital period in the development of socialist ideas, from the death of Marx in 1883 to outbreak of World War One in 1914. Even though the book is not an adequate account of the Second International, it is clearly written, accessible and raises some useful questions. The best chapter is on Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law and a founder of French socialism. Lafargue's book The Right to be Lazy was widely circulated at the time, and one of the few books to set out what the socialist future might look like. The key idea, implicit in the title, was to reduce the hours spent on socially necessary labour, giving all humans the time needed to be free. The chapter on Tom Maguire is also interesting, bringing to life a lesser-known socialist activist in Leeds.

Renton believes that Marxists today can learn from the Second International. He also rightly says that the history of the Second International is best understood as a history of furious polemical arguments. But because the book is set out as a series of biographical sketches, some of these crucial discussions are left out or garbled. Notable omissions include Clara Zetkin's struggle to build a working class based women's movement and the debate between Lenin, Bauer and others on the national question. The argument between Kautsky and Luxemburg on the 1905 revolution in Russia and the mass strike is also missing, as is an account of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. And there is little on Plekhanov or Bebel or Guesde or others who led the Second International.

Worse - some key characters and ideas are mangled. Kautsky gets the worst treatment - accused of having a mechanical, evolutionist conception of Marxism, in which socialism was inevitable and socialists are reduced to patient "revolutionary waiting" and "political quietism". This seems to me to be very one-sided. For one thing, why would Kautsky spend the best years of his life in the socialist movement, if he thought socialism would come about automatically? To bend the stick a bit, it was Kautsky's virtue to root the Second International's politics in an analysis of the actual development of capitalism and the class struggle. His assessments should be critically appraised in hindsight, but the method still has validity. Kautsky was the first Marxist to outline the new stage of capitalism that emerged after 1900 - what became known as imperialism.

Much of Lenin's theory on imperialism was taken from Kautsky's works, including the importance of monopolies, cartels and finance capital, the export of capital and the drive for colonies. As early as 1899 Kautsky predicted that these developments would necessarily lead to world war. And Kautsky was the leading figure in the Second International in 1907 to oppose those right wing socialists and trade unionists who accommodated to imperialism. His Socialism and Colonial Policy, published in Workers' Liberty 2/3 still repays reading. After 1910 Kautsky changed his ideas, as he too began to adapt to the German state. His idea "ultra-imperialism" - of the peaceful development of capitalism - was wishful thinking in the context of world war. However Lenin did not dismiss entirely the idea that the advanced capitalist states might in future form a cartel to prevent war between themselves. Ultra-imperialism is not a bad description of the world after 1945, when the big capitalist powers did band together and avoid another war with each other. For sure there is a decline in Kautsky's Marxism after 1905 and for certain after 1914 he was a renegade. His role in the First World War, and later against the 1917 Russian revolution was a terrible one - but only because his later ideas contrast so sharply with his earlier politics. It was no accident that Lenin's ideas on the agrarian question, on the relationship between party and class, and much else besides drew much of their inspiration from Kautsky.

Classical Marxism is the unifying theme of the book. Classical Marxism means the body of ideas beginning with Marx and Engels and carried on by the First International (1864-72), the Second International (1889-1914), the Third International (1919-1922), the Left Opposition and the Fourth International (1923-40). Renton discusses the dangers of establishing such a tradition - the argument from authority - where modern Marxists simply parrot the classics, rather than thinking things through using their method. But allowing for these caveats, and acknowledging the internal differences, contradictions and silences, I think the idea of a classical Marxist tradition is valid. What Renton fails to understand is that the first hundred years of Marxism is "classical" precisely because the continuity with these ideas, individuals and organisations was broken after 1940. Instead he subscribes to the burgeoning myth that Cliff picked up the threads of classical Marxism after Trotsky, and thereby connected the SWP directly to the classics. Factually this is preposterous, but as a method it's worse.

In fact the SWP has long committed precisely the error Renton fears, using "classical Marxism", simply as a source for scissors and paste rationalisation to justify current politics. The SWP have described the classical Marxist tradition as a place they had "taken refuge in" during the 1980s when times were hard. Renton seems to accept this was problematic, but constantly alludes to the changing times of the present, and the need for Marxists to adapt. The implication, though not clearly spelt out, is that the SWP shouldn't worry too much about "classical Marxism" any more. Renton therefore inadvertently rationalises the SWP's turn to populist, negative "anti" politics, putting them in an altogether different tradition - of the utopian socialists before the Second International.

Review: William Quayle, 'Classical Marxism by Dave Renton, New Clarion Press, 2002 12.99, ISBN 1873797354', North West Labour History 28, September 2003.

The historian E.A. Freeman once dryly noted that 'history is past politics and politics is present history'. This grandiose and overarching concept proves to be incredibly apposite when applied to any appraisal of the Second International. Now, in the formative years of the twenty-first century, socialists must still wrestle with the historical and ideological legacy bequeathed to us by the International and its own historical period at the end of the nineteenth century. It is to this legacy that we can trace not only the origins of ideologies of Stalinism and Social Democracy, but also familiar concepts such as the mass party and the general strike.

Paradoxically the ultimate failure of the International can be partly attributed to its success. The innovative model of mass participatory politics that it pioneered would help shape a world that is still recognisable today. Developments in the theoretical sphere proved equally dynamic. The great thinkers and activists of the International took a Marxist theoretical framework in its infancy and nurtured it to fully fledged maturity. Given these achievements it is hardly surprising that some socialists look to elements of this past for ideas on how to influence the future. Leszek Kolakowski is typical of these. He views the time of the Second International as a 'Golden Age', where socialist politics were as yet untainted by the yoke of Stalinism. In his book Classical Marxism, Dave Renton sets out to assess the credibility of this notion, weaving threads of history, political theory and biography into a seamless narrative that charts the rise, flowering and ultimate demise of the Second International.

The opening chapters devote themselves to portraying the historical framework in which the International functioned. Overall the major impression conveyed is of the combined and uneven nature of capitalist development that defined the era and how the different national constituents of the International reflected this. This enables a greater understanding of why certain ideas have taken root in certain countries during certain periods. Is it any coincidence that the draconian harshness of Tsarist Russia gave birth to some of the more exotic and individualistic approaches to achieving socialism? Or that the apparent economic stability and massed ranks of the SPD of Germany in the 1890's led many to believe that the overthrow of capitalism could be achieved through the ballot box?

Next is an exploration of how Marx's ideas were actually disseminated. In order for this to happen books and pamphlets had to be translated and printed. The often difficult process of doing this would play an important role in shaping the nascent socialist movement. In these days of almost instantaneous global communication its sobering to reflect that the first French translation of the Communist Manifesto didn't appear until 1872, almost a quarter of a century after it was first written and a year after the noble failure of the Paris Commune. Such limited access to primary texts would have a profound effect on how the ideas of Marx were sometimes ossified into a dogmatic reductive closed ideology after his death.

The rest of the tome is largely given over to exploring the life and ideas of key figures from the period. The subjects of these biographical sketches are refreshingly eclectic. Included are chapters devoted to the key architects of theoretical revisionism, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. In keeping with the balanced tone of the book, the latter is described as 'the single figure who incarnated the best and the worst of the politics of the Second International. Representing the revolutionary wing of the movement are biographical appraisals of Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin.

In addition to these (and arguably of more interest) are the chapters devoted to lesser-known figures of the movement. These historical figures are included for two reasons. Firstly, they throw into sharp focus the many facets that the Socialism of the International took. Moreover, they are included to illustrate how ideas were often the product of action and not vice versa. Thus self-educated working class radical Tom Maguire is biographically sketched because of the huge success he enjoyed in unionising the gas workers of his native Leeds. Contrastingly, the work of Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, is reassessed. Far from being the diatribe of a utopian schemer, his book The Right To Be Lazy (Le Droit a la Paresse) is held to be 'a masterpiece in studied contempt' that proved to be as portentous as it was influential.

For such a slender tome Classical Marxism sets itself some ambitious aims and, on the whole, it succeeds in achieving them. In his introduction the author states that he is simultaneously impressed and appalled by the Second International tradition. The works greatest success lies in its ability to remain largely non-judgmental in fusing these bipolar emotions into a functioning historical analysis.

Given the current fashion for 'pop history' it is a somewhat ironic fact that never has the dearth of well-written, intellectually accessible socialist historiography been more acute. Classical Marxism takes up the challenge and steps into the breech providing a valuable addition to the canon of labour and progressive history.

Review: Mike Macnair, 'Classical Marxism' and grasping the dialectic, Weekly Worker, 11 September 2003

John Rees The algebra of revolution: the dialectic and the classical Marxist tradition London, 1998, pp314, £16.99 Dave Renton Classical Marxism: socialist theory and the Second International Cheltenham, 2002, pp174, £14.99

These two books have to a limited extent a common theme in the idea of 'classical Marxism'. They have a common method in approaching the history of Marxism through the history of the ideas of leading individuals in the movement. And they have a common thesis - the bankruptcy of the 'Kautskyan' centre group in the Second International in the 1890s and 1900s due to its mechanical, or inadequately dialectical, approach to Marxism. It has to be said that Rees has a lot more to say than this. Both attempt to draw lessons about the question: what Marxism for our times?

Second International

Renton's book is shorter and more superficial. The first two chapters give brief introductions to the history of the Second International and to post-Marx Marxism. The bulk of the book is made up of equally brief biographies and introductions to the ideas of the French socialist, Paul Lafargue; the English socialist and trade union activist, Tom Maguire; the German 'revisionist' - ie, anti-Marxist - socialist, Eduard Bernstein; Karl Kautsky, leader of the centre in the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and 'pope of Marxism' in the 1890s and 1900s; the Polish revolutionary Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg; the American left syndicalist and later communist, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; and the Russian revolutionary leader, VI Lenin.

Renton admits in his preface that many other leaders of the period have been excluded. He points in particular to English socialist William Morris; Russian Marxists Leon Trotsky, Georg Plekhanov and Julius Martov; French syndicalists Pierre Monatte and Georges Sorel; Italian Hegelian Marxist and socialist- syndicalist Antonio Labriola; German Marxist Rudolf Hilferding; German Marxist and later communist Clara Zetkin; and Austrian socialist Otto Bauer. One could point to others - the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/ index.htm) is a wonderful resource of diverse Marxist writings, including a good deal from this period. In a book of this type selection is unavoidable, but it is far from clear that the selection Renton has made actually gives us a real picture of the "socialist theory" - his subtitle - of the Second International.

An even briefer conclusion (pp144-47) identifies the Second International as fundamentally divided between left and right. The centre was bankrupt: "If socialism is most fundamentally a doctrine of change," we are told, "then the very worst Marxists were those of the centre, who went into battle most determined to find that the terrain was what they expected. When the ground changed, t h e y w e r e lost" (p146).

Conversely, "The most impressive Marxists of all those discussed in this book were undoubtedly Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin. What both shared was a sense that the world was changing, and that in a new political period people would have to rethink their politics anew. In Lenin's case this process was bound up with his immersion in Hegelian dialectics" (pp146-47).

Rees's book is more narrowly focussed and much deeper. After an introduction addressing the "contradictions of contemporary capitalism" and giving an outline of Rees's understanding of the dialectic, successive chapters address the dialectic in Hegel, Marx and Engels; the "First crisis of Marxism" (covering Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov and Luxemburg); Lenin; the Hungarian communist Georg Lukacs (and the Italian Antonio Gramsci); and Trotsky. In relation to each author or group of authors the use of dialectical argument is explored, together with the context in which the author is using it. A final brief conclusion deploys the work done in the book to criticise very briefly French Stalinist theorist Louis Althusser, the 'post-modernist' theorists who took Althusser's critique of Engels as a starting point and the 'analytical Marxists' Gerry Cohen and Jon Elster.

Rees's book is, I think, quite clearly the best currently available introduction to the Marxist dialectic in English, as well as being a serious study of controversial issues. Here the biographical method enables Rees to make philosophical ideas clearer by putting them in the contexts of their authors' times and political engagements. There are problems, which I will address later, but I would still recommend the book as fundamental reading for Marxists.

Classical Marxism

It should be apparent from what is has been said so far that Renton and Rees are operating with different definitions of 'classical Marxism'. For Renton it means the Marxism of the Second International. For Rees, in contrast, it means 'classical' Marxism as opposed to the 'mechanical' Marxism of Kautsky, the 'official Marxism' of the USSR, and in modern times the 'Hegelian Marxism' of Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James and of recent authors like Tony Smith and Ian Fraser; and also as opposed to the 'western Marxism' or 'humanist Marxism' favoured by the 1960s new left, to Althusser's 'structuralist Marxism' and to 'analytical Marxism'.

Rees's version comes close to being a 'thin red thread', as the truth about the ideas of Marx and Engels is successively rediscovered and reapplied by the favoured authors (Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukacs, Gramsci, Labriola, Trotsky). The sense of a 'thin red thread' is reinforced by the extent to which Rees favours, where he can, citation from authors within the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party tradition, of which he is a leading member (there is some potential embarrassment here, as some prominent authors in this tradition in the 1960s and 1970s - for example, Alex Callinicos's Althusser's Marxism (1976) - opposed the use of dialectical analysis, which was then a speciality of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party). A danger in this approach - which is also present in Renton's argument - is that there is some risk of dialectical analysis appearing as a sort of philosopher's stone which turns dross into gold: this was certainly how Healy used it. Thus, though Renton's book is rather superficial, his starting point - the Marxism of the late 19th and early 20th century - may be more helpful.

The bankruptcy of Kautsky and the centre grouping in the Second International which he led has been a commonplace of communist politics since the publication of Lenin's The Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky (1918), where we can also find a very summary version of the claim that Kautsky's non-dialectical approach accounts for this bankruptcy: "As far as the philosophical roots of this phenomenon are concerned, it amounts to the substitution of eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics. Kautsky is a past master at this sort of substitution" (chapter 1). The result is a 'standard communist', or at least Trotskyist, narrative of the history of the Second International as failing due to "mechanical Marxism". Renton's book and Rees's chapters 3 and 4 provide slightly varying examples. In fact, this account severely oversimplifies the history of the Second International and the political tendencies in the European workers' movement before 1914.

The Second International was founded in 1889 as a federation primarily of socialist political parties, based on the growth of socialist parties generally, and in particular the strength of the German SPD, and the less striking but still real progress of the French Parti Ouvrier Français. The anarchists participated in it until 1893, when the Zurich congress passed a resolution excluding all non-trade union bodies which did not recognise the need for parliamentary action.

Trends in the workers' movement

By the middle 1890s it is possible to distinguish five different trends in the international workers' movement: (a) Right syndicalists or 'non-political' trade-unionists. The most important element was the right wing in the British trade union movement, but the trend was also found elsewhere in Europe, and within Germany under the banner of the SPD, as well as in the catholic and other trade union organisations. The Russian 'economists' were ideological representatives of this trend with a Marxist coloration. This tendency held that it was sufficient to defend the immediate economic interests of workers in the direct struggle with their employers - primarily through trade union action, but also through seeking pro-worker legislation.

(b) Non-Marxist socialists. The usual 'representative figure' is Bernstein, because he was an ex- Marxist, relatively 'sophisticated' in his writings and engaged in argument by the German centre and left. In fact Bernstein is not particularly representative: there were various other forms of non-Marxist socialism, like those of the English Fabians and Independent Labour Party or the semi-Radical trend in France led by Jean Jaurès. This tendency argued, on very various grounds, that the task of the movement simply was to fight within the existing state order for reforms which shifted society towards socialist 'values'. Its direct inheritors are the modern socialist parties.

(c) The 'Kautskyan Marxist' centre, mainly based in the SPD but also found in France (where the most prominent leader was Jules Guesde) and elsewhere; the Russian Iskra tendency around 1900, and hence both the Bolsheviks and part of the Mensheviks, were part of this tendency. This tendency had generally Marxist reference points. It foresaw a decline of capitalism and a revolution at some point in the future, but was ambiguous as to the role in this of the parliamentary-constitutional state. Its main focus in practice was on 'preparatory tasks': ie, building up the organised workers' movement, including trade unions and cooperatives, but particularly building an organised workers' political party which would take on all political questions posed for the society as a whole.

(d) A 'Hegelian Marxist' and semi-syndicalist left tendency within the International. Prominent leaders or writers included Antonio Labriola in Italy, Herman Gorter in the Netherlands and Rosa Luxemburg in Poland and Germany. This tendency argued that the International should not merely prepare for the revolution, but should fight for it by promoting strike action and the general strike, which was seen as the means by which the proletariat escaped from the dynamics of commodity fetishism and began to emancipate itself; it tended to deprioritise or reject electoral and parliamentary activity. Luxemburg's pamphlet The mass strike is part of the ongoing polemics of this tendency against the right and centre round the 'strategy' of the general strike. Trotsky seems to have been intermediate between this position and the centre.

(e) Outright left anarcho-syndicalists were outside the International, but, as can be seen from (d), their ideas had significant indirect influence within it; they were strongest in Italy, Spain and France (another Hegelian Marxist, Georges Sorel, was a theoretician of revolutionary syndicalism in France). They were also present in the USA and Britain (International Workers of the World and De Leonist Socialist Labour Parties).

We can thus see a 'right', 'centre' and 'left' of the workers' movement. The Bolsheviks, however, were part of the centre. With Kautsky, they emphasised the construction of workers' institutions under capitalism and especially of a workers' political party, which should attempt to take the lead in all the questions affecting society as a whole and hence should fight for political goals and make whatever use it could of parliamentary, etc, institutions. They did not adhere to the 'general strike' strategy, or to the Hegelian 'voluntarism' (insistence on the role of the subjective and the 'act of will') of the left, as can be seen in Lenin's Materialism and empirico-criticism (1909).

World war

The outbreak of war in 1914, of course, changed all of this. The majority of the leaders of the centre - notably Kautsky and Guesde - went along with the rightwing trends, particularly the right-syndicalists, to form pro-war majorities in most socialist parties. Socialist opposition to the war came mainly, on the one hand, on pacifist grounds from part of the non- Marxist socialists - notably Bernstein and the British ILP - and, on the other, to the left from the anarcho-syndicalists and the Hegelian Marxist semisyndicalist left socialists. Only a minority of the centre, of which the Bolsheviks were the strongest organised component, opposed the war.

It was in this context, and not merely because of the war, that Lenin turned to the study of Hegel. In Lenin's polemics against Kautsky and Plekhanov and accounts of the causes of the political collapse of the Second International in 1914-15 (CW Vol 21) we begin to find references to Kautsky's and Plehkanov's defective dialectics, and to the voluntarist turn of phrase, the "unity of the will" of the working class. There is here an implicit, partial, self-criticism of Lenin's political alignments in the International movement before the war. The Communist International, when it was founded, grouped a section of the old centre which had moved to the left ... but also an important part of the old left, including elements from the old left syndicalists who had never been part of the Second International.

The result was a tendency to downplay the historical differences between the Bolsheviks and this tendency. These, however, resurfaced in 1920-21 as 'new' differences between the majority and the 'left' communists on participation in parliament, attitudes to the trade unions, the party question, etc, discussed in Lenin's Leftwing communism, an infantile disorder (1920).

Fate of the left's strategy Once we see that the Hegelian Marxists before the war represented a distinct international political tendency linked to left syndicalism, we are forced to make a balance sheet of the strategy of this tendency. The conclusion is simple. It failed miserably in the face of revolutionary crises, both in Germany in 1918-19 and in Italy in 1919-21. Similar strategies have failed repeatedly in similar situations between 1921 and the present date. As to why the strategy failed, the answer is equally clear. The Hegelian Marxist left neglected the preparatory work, especially the construction of a workers' political party under the existing regime, which the Kautskyan centre insisted on. They did so due to their over-reliance on the spontaneity of the mass movement to solve political problems.

Their radical-left refusal of the struggle for political leadership in relation to pre-revolutionary political problems left them politically disarmed when revolutionary crisis actually broke out. This is not to say that they did not organise at all, though this is perhaps true of the German left before 1914. The problem is just as much that they tended to organise small sects - and their descendants, the 'libertarian left' and 'council communists', continue to do so to this day. There is more than a trace of these vices in the history of the Trotskyist movement, including that of the SWP.

Mesmerised by the dialectical logic of Capital'

What is interesting for present purposes is why there should be a correlation before 1914 between Hegelian Marxism and semi-spontaneist or semi-syndicalist politics. The answer is that Hegelian Marxism involves a way of reading Marx's Capital as a closed dialectical system fully explanatory of capitalism. This involves tearing abstract capitalist political economy out of the context of the larger claims of ('Engelsian', 'Kautskyan') historical materialism and hence of the larger socialhistorical totality, which involves interpenetration of pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist forms.

In this closed dialectical system capitalism produces commodity fetishism - things at the immediate level have values, when at a deeper level these values express social relations between people. Rees gives a good explanation, discussing Lukacs's sophisticated version (pp210-225). As a result of commodity fetishism, the proletariat as a class is apt to have bourgeois consciousness. It represents a contradiction only insofar as it is compelled by the wage-relation to struggle with the bourgeoisie and actually enters into struggle (strikes). Socialist political parties are thus doomed to evolve into another element of capitalist management of the society, except insofar as they attempt to generalise the workers' immediate strike struggles. Hence the strategy of the general strike.

The converse of these views - since the working class out of immediate struggles is apt to have bourgeois consciousness - is that the revolutionary Marxists are naturally a small minority. But they are a small minority which can expect that when the workers enter large-scale strike struggles their ideas will, through a dialectical reversal, suddenly seize the minds of millions. Efforts to create a mass workers' party outside crisis conditions are therefore futile. The most that can be done is to organise the small minority which sees clearly, and wait for the mountain (the masses) to come to Mohammed (the revolutionaries); or, alternatively, by the acts of will of the minority to attempt to trigger the mass strike which will enable the masses to move (the 'general strike strategy'). Equally, since the dialectical logic of capital is over-determining, contradictions in the society which are not simply reducible to the logic of the contradictions of capital - like the struggles of peasants against landlords, and national struggles - disappear from the analysis or become marginalised. This is transparent in Luxemburg's work.

Lenin and the united will

Lenin's turn to Hegel helped him link up with the anti-war left in the international socialist movement. It also may have assisted his grasp of the fluidity of the political situation in Russia between February and October and his ability to formulate concrete political lines to deal with it. There was, however, a price. When the Bolsheviks took power, they inherited a collapsing economy and society and war conditions, and they were forced to emergency measures operated from the top down. Any other government would have had to do the same or preside over a continuing collapse into local warlordism. The problem was that they over-theorised these emergency measures as general features of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

An element in this over-theorisation was a shift in the concept of the party towards the idea that the general interests of the class are represented by the party, which forges a united will of the class through constructing its leadership. This sub-Hegelian idea is already present in Lenin's 1914-1915 critiques of Kautsky.

It resurfaces in March 1918 in Lenin's critique of workers' control and argument for one-man management: "Large-scale machine industry - which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism - calls for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. The technical, economic and historical necessity of this is obvious, and all those who have thought about socialism have always regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism … this is the only way in which strict unity of will can be ensured …" (VI Lenin CW Vol 27, pp267-69).

Through this route we arrive by 1920 at the theory that the dictatorship of the proletariat is by necessity the dictatorship of the vanguard party (VI Lenin, 'The trade unions, the present situation and Trotsky's mistakes' CW Vol 32, pp20-21), and, in turn, that the struggle for iron unity of will requires the banning of factions within the party. The dialectical trap here is in the last analysis the same as that which the Hegelian Marxist lefts fell into. If we treat Hegel's Logic as a guide to the Marxist dialectic and argue, as Lenin did, that "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic" (CW Vol 38, p180; cited by Rees, pp13, 185), we will imagine that the Marxist dialectic is, like the Hegelian, a theory of knowledge. We will then believe that the world can only be known by grasping the totality. The result is that we will grasp at prematurely closed totalities, and neglect concrete mediations - which can only be known from empirical evidence. In the Hegelian Marxist left this premature closure is on the inner dialectical movement of capital. In Lenin in 1918- 1920 it is on the will and on the party as a totality, with the result that the concrete mediations in the construction of the party and the relation of party and class - especially factional struggles, but also the decisionmaking capacity of local organisations and trade union fractions and the resulting feedback to the centre - are sacrificed in a false abstract unity.

Bankrupt centre

To make these criticisms of the Hegelian Marxist left is not to legitimate the Kautskyan centre. In truth, if we put the question of Kautsky's 'failure to grasp the dialectic' on one side, the errors of the centre become much more transparent. They are, in essence, the legacies of the 1875 Gotha Congress, which founded the SPD by fusing the Marxists and the Lassalleans on an unprincipled basis. In the first place the centre was ambiguous on the question of the existing state and whether the working class could conquer power simply by winning a parliamentary majority and passing legislation. This ambiguity was a direct inheritance of the 1875 compromise with Lassallean state socialism, and supported passive 'legalism'.

Secondly, the centre was committed to preserving organisational unity with the right at the expense of political compromise. The effect was to give the right - which was willing if it came to it to cause a split - a veto over the party's political positions. Before the outbreak of war this arrangement was consistent with a good deal of formal Marxism, provided the left and centre did not organise a fight to exclude the right from party and union office. Once war came, the subordination of the centre to the right became transparent. This picture is, of course, familiar. It is the traditional practice of the Labour lefts. Kautsky's 'undialectical' claims that the victory of socialism was inevitable did not cause this practice, but merely provided an ideological cover for it. It is not at all clear that Hegelian Marxist dialectics would actually inoculate leftwingers against it: after all, we might suppose that the mass of the class, when it begins to move, will spontaneously marginalise the right (as Luxemburg seems to have imagined).

Conversely, the Bolsheviks between 1903 and 1914 were not Hegelian Marxists. But they were clear on the need to overthrow the existing state and fight for the democratic republic; and they were not prepared to allow the splitters on the right of the party to dictate policy. These concrete, political differences were enough to allow them to project a revolutionary policy in 1905 and down to February 1917.

Rees's dialectic

Rees's account can be said roughly to straddle Hegelian and non-Hegelian positions (an example is that, in spite of Rees's explicit critique of the modern Hegelian Marxists, Callinicos in the blurb characterises the book as "written from the standpoint of Lukacs's 'Hegelian Marxism'").

On the one hand, Rees takes seriously Marx's and Engels's critique of Hegel. He draws heavily on this aspect of their The German ideology and The holy family in chapter 2. He makes an explicit critique of the modern Hegelian Marxists (pp108- 114). He uses the concept of mediation as a road to the concrete, and thus stresses throughout the book the need for dialectical analysis to grow out of detailed study, making effective use of empirical evidence, as opposed to Hegel's speculative method. He takes from Marx and Engels a strong sense of dialectical analysis as being concerned with the analysis of change, and thus necessarily with time and concrete history. On the other hand, the book shows a series of slippages in the direction of Hegelian Marxist conceptions.

Lukacs

The core of the problem is that Rees wants (see chapter 5) to adopt Lukacs's account in History and class consciousness (1922) of the non-revolutionary consciousness of the working class masses (outside of revolutionary crisis) and of the party. This is understandable, because Lukacs's argument can provide support for the SWP's peculiar conception of the party grounded on organisational independence from the labour bureaucracy, rather than on a clear programme. This point surfaces twice, both in Rees's criticism of Luxemburg (pp163-4) and in the exposition of Lukacs on the party (pp225-228).

But Lukacs's account manages to combine both (a) aspects of the ideas of the Hegelian Marxist left, especially totality-determinations by the self-movement of capital, and (b) aspects of the most Hegelian version of Lenin on the party as representative of the class as a totality. There is therefore slippage back to Hegelianism Marxism elsewhere in Rees's account of the dialectic. The clearest symptom of this is the recurring proposition that contradictions produce movement - found, accurately, in the account of Hegel (p50), but unhelpfully in the context of Marx and Engels (p85) and Lukacs (p248). In Hegel's system it is true that contradiction produces change. In the arguments of Marx and Engels, however, it is an inappropriate formulation. For them the world 'just is' processes of change - matter in motion: change is presupposed. Dialectical analysis is a way in which we attempt to grasp and influence these processes.

Capitalism abstracted from its prehistory

Another interlinked aspect is that Rees retains, albeit in a dilute form, the tendency of the Hegelian Marxists to make a radical separation between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolutions and so separate the experience of the proletariat under capitalism from the overall historical experience of the species. Explicit examples can be found on p84 (where the need of the bourgeoisie for clarity in its revolution is understated) and p89, where we are told that "for the first time in human history, the mass of the labouring classes have completely lost control over the means of production and the products of their labour" - a proposition which would lead us to suppose that (a) chattel slavery had never existed and (b) the petty producers (artisans, etc) have wholly disappeared under capitalism.

This separation of the bourgeois world from the concrete struggles which brought it into existence is reflected in chapter 1 in the banal and undialectical account of "the enlightenment" (pp14-20). This flattens into one theoretical tendency Thomas Hobbes, the defender of royal absolutism; John Locke, the democratic-revolutionary theorist and organiser; and David Hume, whose criticism of Locke is a criticism of political democracy.

Relativism and the proletariat as universal subject

Failure to get to grips with these pre-Hegelian philosophers leads, when Rees is discussing Lukacs's critics (pp234-36) to slippage between two different meanings of 'relativism'. The first is what is also called 'probabilism', which is the (Lockean) belief that we cannot have absolute knowledge, but only better or worse knowledge. The second is the belief that all knowledge is relative to a 'point of view'. This view is Humean in origin, but was adopted by the Stalinists. It was rigorously argued by Althusser, and is linked to the 'Marxist rejection of human nature' which Michael Malkin has criticised (Weekly Worker August 21, 28). Lukacs's Hegelian version sees the working class (and through it the vanguard party) as the Hegelian 'subject' of history, the bearer of consciousness and hence the class which can in principle attain true knowledge.

The point made by Lukacs's critics is that, once we assert this relativism, we have no ground to identify the 'point of view of the working class' and thereby avoid complete relativism (which surfaces as post-modernism). Rees slips between the two views to make a defence of Lukacs, and comes up with the conclusion that the "historical experience of the working class" is summed up in theory (pp236, 237; the formula is repeated elsewhere in the book). This, in turn, brings us back to the SWP concept of the party as one which "centralises experience", as opposed to fighting for a definite programme.

For all the strengths of The algebra of revolution, therefore, it is still a book which needs to be read with care and with an awareness that Rees's theoretical arguments are intimately linked to his SWP politics.

'Classical Leninism', Socialist Standard, September 2003

There is a tradition of ideas that can be termed Classical Leninism. According to this tradition, classical Marxism was betrayed by a number of key leaders until the collapse of the Second International in the First World War, leaving the way clear for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to carry the flag of socialist revolution. This is the "Great Man" theory of history, and even though this book includes two women in its collection of biographies, the leader fixation remains the same.

Marx played a prominent role in the formation of the International Working Men's Association (1864-1876), which became better known as the First International. This was an international federation of working class organisations based on the principle that the emancipation of the working class could only be achieved by the working class itself. Renton argues that the Second International (1889-1914) was set up as an explicitly Marxist organisation but went on to distort Marx's ideas to suit their own purposes. This was the era of "classical Marxism" and Karl Kautsky was its leading theoretician. Kautsky was the "Pope" of Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Second International. He is the main bogeyman in classical Leninism.

But there can be no doubt that Kautsky did distort Marx, in particular his support for reformism. Kautsky, Lenin and Renton are agreed that parliamentary action must be reformist. However, this is not Marx's conclusion, as he wrote in 1881 of workers' struggles being "pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation" (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/Overview/principles.pdf) and other writings by Marx. There is no reason why parliamentary institutions could not be used by a class-conscious socialist majority to win power for the socialist revolution, and this is the position adopted by the Socialist Party at its formation in June 1904. Delegates were sent from the Socialist Party to the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International in August 1904, but, after seeing the reformism rampant within it, soon decided to have no more to do with it. When the leaders of the SPD voted for war credits in 1914 it came as a shock to Lenin and at first he refused to believe the news. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, had long warned of SPD support for militarism (see www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/Centenary/Bebel(1907).pdf).

The fact is the Second International, the Third (Leninist) International (1919-1943) and the Fourth (Trotskyite) International (1938 onwards) have all distorted Marx for their own purposes. The main, but by no means only distortion by Lenin concerns the vanguard party. Lenin argued that workers were incapable of self-emancipation and instead must be freed from above by professional revolutionaries who have the workers' best interests at heart. (Renton points out that this is similar to Kautsky's position.) But Marx and Engels profoundly disagreed, as they made clear in a circular to the SPD in 1879:

"At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes" (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/18.htm).

So what is left of Marxism? Renton prefaces his book with a quote from an incredulous Trotsky: "None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other course." The Socialist Party has argued that the answer is to be found in the self-activity of the working class. For as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Leninism or Marxism?: "Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee" and "The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history"(www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/works/1904/org-rsd/ch02.htm).