The Deutscher Memorial Prize http://www.deutscherprize.org.uk/wp 'Marxism in Our Time' This is an edited transcript of a lecture given in February 1965 at the London School of Economics. It was published in the first posthumous collection of Isaac Deutscher’s writings, Marxism in Our Time, edited by Tamara Deutscher, Jonathan Cape, London 1971, and later republished in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades, Verso, London 1984. A recording of the actual lecture can be accessed via the Related Links page on this site. What is our time, for a Marxist and for Marxism? Is it a time of the ascendancy of Marxism? Or is it an epoch of the decline of Marxism? In those countries where Marxism is supposed to be the ruling doctrine, the official answer is, of course, that this is a time of an unseen, unheard of, unprecedented flourishing of Marxism in theory and practice. Here in the West, especially in our Anglo-Saxon countries, we are told day in and day out, goodness knows from how many academic and other platforms, that Marxism has not only declined, but that it is irrelevant - that it bears no relation to the problems of our epoch. From my native country, Poland, comes the voice of a brilliant young philosopher, but a very poor political analyst, who tells us that it is no use discussing Marxism any longer because Marxism has already gained and won and conquered the human mind to such an extent that it has become an organic part of contemporary thinking, and this marks the end of every great doctrine - when it becomes the organic part of human thought. This young philosopher lived in Warsaw after an epoch of Stalinism during which he and people of his generation identified Stalinism and Marxism. They knew Marxism only in the Stalinist form; they were served, and they accepted, the official Marxism as Stalinism and Stalinism as Marxism. Now they want to get away from Stalinism, and this - as they equated Stalinism and Marxism - means for them getting away from Marxism. It seems to me - such is the bitter dialectic of our epoch - that Marxism is in ascendancy and decline simultaneously. Since the beginning of my adult life (that is, over forty years ago), I have been a Marxist, and I have never for a moment hesitated in my - I wouldn't say allegiance because it is not a matter of "allegiance” - I have never hesitated in my Marxist Weltanschauung. I cannot think otherwise than in Marxist terms. Kill me, I cannot do it. I may try; I just cannot. Marxism has become part of my existence. As someone who owes this kind of "allegiance" to Marxism, I would not like to give any of you, who perhaps only recently made an acquaintance with Marxism, the idea that this is one of the golden ages of the Marxist doctrine. Far from it. This is a time of triumph for Marxism only insofar as this is an age of revolution which develops an anticapitalist, a postcapitalist kind of society. But it is also an age of degeneration of Marxist thought and of intellectual decline for the labor movement at large. Precisely because the modern labor movement cannot find another creative and fertile doctrine except Marxism, all its intellectual standards decline catastrophically whenever and wherever Marxism becomes ossified. We have an expansion in Marxist practice and a shrinkage and degeneration in Marxist thinking. There is a deep divorce between the practical experience of revolution and the whole Marxist theoretical framework within which that revolution has been anticipated, within which that revolution has been justified on philosophical, historical, economic, political, cultural, and, if you like, even moral grounds. For a student of philosophical or historical schools of thought and doctrines this is not an extraordinary statement. Almost every really great school of thought that dominated the thinking of generations has known its periods of great expansion, awakening and development, and its periods of decadence and decline. In this respect the only other school of thought that comes to mind is the Aristotelian school, 1 / 8 The Deutscher Memorial Prize http://www.deutscherprize.org.uk/wp which dominated human intellect for nearly two thousand years. In the course of this series of epochs it went through various phases of great creative interpretation and creative influence, and also epochs in which it found its triumph in a parody of itself, in the medieval Catholic scholasticism which, although based on Aristotelian philosophy, yet bore to it the same relationship which caricature bears to the real picture of an original object. This did not deprive the Aristotelian philosophy even in the Middle Ages of its raison d'être, of its creative phases, of its stimuli which still existed and later helped medieval Europe to overcome the scholastical degeneration. In this respect Marxism stands comparison with the Aristotelian philosophy as a way of thinking that epitomizes and generalizes the entire social, economic, and, to some extent, the political experience of the world under capitalism and exposes the inner dynamism of the historical development which is bound to lead from capitalism to some other postcapitalist order, which we have agreed to describe as a socialist order. Marxism is not an intellectual, aesthetic, or philosophical fashion, no matter what the fashion-mongers imagine. After having been infatuated with it for a season or two they may come and declare it to be obsolete. Marxism is a way of thinking, a generalization growing out of an immense historical development; and as long as this historic phase in which we live has not been left far behind us, the doctrine may prove to be mistaken on points of detail or secondary points, but in its essence nothing has deprived it, and nothing looks like depriving it, of its relevance, validity, and importance for the future. But at the same time we face the problem of degeneration in Marxist thinking. We have the divorce between theory and practice, and we have a striking, and to a Marxist often humiliating, contrast between what I call classical Marxism - that is, the body of thought developed by Marx, Engels, their contemporaries, and after them by Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg - and the vulgar Marxism, the pseudo-Marxism of the different varieties of European social-democrats, reformists, Stalinists, Khrushchevites, and their like. I am speaking here of a contrast between classical and vulgar Marxism by analogy with the way in which Marx spoke of classical and vulgar economy. You know that for Marx the term "classical economy" has a different meaning from the one it has in your textbooks at the London School of Economics. According to your textbooks, if I am not mistaken, classical economy lasts till the very end of the nineteenth and even the beginning of the twentieth century, and Marshall still forms part of it. To Karl Marx classical economy ends practically with Ricardo. All that follows is for him the vulgar economy of the bourgeoisie, and for a very good reason. In the classical economy, in Ricardo and Smith, Marx saw the main elements out of which he developed his own theory, especially the labor theory of value - of value based on human labor. This was the revolutionary element in the classical bourgeois political economy. For this revolutionary element the bourgeoisie had no use later on and, moreover, was afraid of it. Post-Ricardian economy wants to deduce value from anything but human labor. Later schools of vulgar economy deduce value from circulation; still later they "dismiss" value altogether and build a political economy without it because in this concept of value created by human labor was the seed of revolution. And bourgeois thinking instinctively shied away from it and, frightened, turned in other directions. Classical economy, the economic thinking of Smith and Ricardo, Marx argued, had given an insight into the working of capitalism that far exceeded the practical needs of the bourgeois class. Ricardo, who understood capitalism so well, knew that the bourgeoisie neither wished nor could afford to understand the workings of its own system, and therefore it had to get away from the labor theory of value in the first instance. This phenomenon of a doctrine and a theory that offers insights into the working of a social system far greater than are the practical requirements of the social class for which it is meant - this phenomenon occurs sometimes in history. And it has occurred with Marxism. The body of 2 / 8 The Deutscher Memorial Prize http://www.deutscherprize.org.uk/wp classical Marxist thought gave such profound, immense, and till this day unexhausted and unexplored riches of insight that the working class for its practical purposes seemed not to need it. This idea was once expressed by Rosa Luxemburg on the occasion of the publication of the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. She said that the social-democratic movement in Europe had conducted its propaganda and agitation in the course of thirty or forty years on the basis of the first volume of Das Kapital - that is, on the basis of a fragment of Marx's economic theory; then came the second and the third volume and the huge structure was rising before our eyes - yet the labor movement did not at all feel that it conducted its practical and theoretical activities on an inadequate foundation: the intellectual content even of the fragment of Das Kapital was quite sufficient to keep, so to speak, the labor movement intellectually alive for decades. Marx created a body of thought far in excess of the narrow practical needs of the movement for which he intended his work to serve.