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Home , Orthodox Marxism

Introduction

And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind. And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere. John Steinbeck, The Pearl

Orthodox posits a uniformity of collec- tive consciousness, inbred radicalism, and ironclad solidarity emanating automatically from the mate- rial conditions and dynamics of capitalist commod- ity production. Marx, himself, held complex and evolving views on the nature and logic of revolu- tion.1 There simply was no unitary model: the work- ers of France and Germany, for example, would not follow the same trajectory as those in England and America.2 Violent coup d’état, appropriate under particular circumstances, was futile and costly under

1 See the 1844 critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx and Engels 1978: 28–34). 2 I use ‘workers’, ‘’, and ‘’ interchangeably, here, but have Draper’s defi nition specifi cally in mind: the proletariat is the segment of the working class that sells its labor power for a wage and, in producing commodities, also produces surplus for the employer (1978: 34). Marx’s own thinking on proletarians (and revolutionary potential) underwent dramatic transformations throughout the 1840s arriving, by 1848, at more or less the classic meaning (Seigel 1978: 111–12). One of Marxism’s greatest selling features was the promise of radical change without fi rst transforming the possibly defective natures of real workers – leading Max Eastman to exclaim “‘Here was a method of attaining the ideal based upon the very facts that made it seem unattainable. I need no longer extinguish my dreams with my knowl- edge. I need never again cry out: “I wish I believed in the Son of God and his second coming” (in Diggins 1974: 42). But, of course, as Smith points out, as far as orthodoxy 2 • Introduction other conditions (Avineri 1976).3 Complexity aside, it is not inaccurate to view Marx as a metaphysician of sorts when it came to the historical status of the proletariat: revolution was inevitable and there were just no two ways about it. Hitched to , “ceased to be the affair of the workers themselves and forced its way into world history” (Avineri 1968: 250). Both Marx and Engels thought that will, motive, and accidental char- acteristics of workers were irrelevant; produced its own gravedig- gers.4 In his “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” Engels insisted that, despite the need for proletariat enlightenment and unity, revolution was “the necessary consequence of circumstances which are not in any way whatever dependent either on the will or on the leadership of individual parties or of whole classes” (Marx and Engels 1976: 101–102). Why exactly were the sub- jective aspects of the supposedly revolutionary class an extraneous matter, trumped by circumstances? The idiosyncratic qualities of individual workers were distinct from the collective existence of the working class. Certainly, if revolution were left up to workers themselves they would stagnate in their own ignorance and passivity:

To call the proletariat a revolutionary class is a condensation: it means a class with the historical potential of making a revolution; it is a label for a social drive; it is not a description of current events. This revolutionary class begins, like everybody else, by being fi lled with ‘reactionary cravings’ and prejudices: otherwise the proletarian revolution would always be around the corner. Marx’s theory looks on the proletariat as an objective agency of in the process of becoming. In this respect his conception of the proletariat as the historically revolutionary class is similar to his reiterated

was concerned “workers were born rebels, naturally and irrevocably hostile to all the previously authoritative powers of Church, State, and country” (1998: 36). 3 Avineri provides a sharp and concise retort to those who would reduce Marx’s views to a mere caricature, and, importantly, he reminds us not to confl ate the views of Marx and Engels as if they “were Siamese twins intellectually responsible for each other’s statements . . .” (1976: 42). 4 “What the , therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. . . . Of all the classes which confront the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and disappear in the face of large-scale industry, the proletariat is its most characteristic product” (Marx [1867] 1976: 930).