Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which had a profound impact upon the history of the modern world, inspiring great revolutions against feudal or colonial dictatorships in Russia, China and Latin America, and influencing European politics even to this day.
Although current convulsions in the Labour party have been ascribed to Marxist entryists, and some of them are undoubtedly involved, they are a small minority.
The origins of Corbynism are much more complex. They spring in part – and despite its immense achievements now shamefully airbrushed – from New Labour’s hollowing out of the party and draining members of their self-belief.
But the Corbynista mission to grab hold of the party at all costs, and regardless of the consequences for our voter base, comes from a strand of the left rooted in Marxist-Leninism. For them, winning the party rather than the country is the all-consuming mission, and anybody challenging that is a ‘traitor’ to socialism.
So an understanding of Marxism is useful in Labour’s current malaise. And there are few better placed than Gareth Stedman Jones, an iconic figure from my teens in the radicalism of the late 1960s when I attended leftwing activist conferences and voraciously read New Left tracts.
But disappointingly, his book is less an ideological critique, more a seminal, painstakingly-rich biography, which explains why Marxism gained such popularity as an analysis of nineteenth century capitalism, by exposing its brutal and uncaring exploitation of the emerging industrial working class and the manner in which profit for the owners of capital, rather than the emancipation of the workers who toiled for it, was endemic to the system.
There can be little dispute about the validity of Marx’s coruscating verdict on those iniquities. But Marx professed through his exhaustive analysis to have uncovered a truth equivalent to those in physical science. His solution (emphasised more by Lenin) was the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the vehicle for that, a revolutionary vanguard party whose leadership was the repository for the ‘scientific’ truth extolled by Marxism.
That verity enabled various party elites across the world to subordinate their rank and file – and through them all citizens – to whatever ‘line’ they deemed valid. This left no room for possible error or dissent. Marx thereby spawned Leninist disciples (including Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists) who all interpreted his creed to enforce their will, any opposition to be crushed or dismissed as ‘unscientific’ or a betrayal of the working class.
Many Corbyn fans will protest that all this nothing to do with them. Many, maybe most, have been enthused by what they feel is an authentic and principled radicalism absent from a mainstream, managerial politics which has infected Labour too. They rightly want an end to austerity and extreme inequality. But, knowingly or unknowingly, they have been recruited to a political movement that has echoes of Marxism. Some of its leaders and activists are indeed declared Marxists.
Consequently, Marxism is now playing a bigger role in British politics than it has for decades – despite that fact throughout history societies shaped by Marxists so abjectly failed to deliver prosperity, democracy, freedom or equality.
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Peter Hain is a former cabinet minister and author of Back to the Future of Socialism
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Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Gareth Stedman Jones
Allen Lane | 768pp | £35
Most Corbynistas just want Labour to stop being Tory-lite. The party simply became infested with Tories and grinning careerists during the 90s. It’s great to see the socialists back in charge.
Edouard Bernstein, the founder of social democracy, considered himself a Marxist. So Peter needs to be more precise when he condemns all Marxists for abjectly failing to deliver prosperity, democracy, freedom or equality.
Social democracy has on many an occasion delivered exactly those things.
That said, Peter is right to caution Labour Party members of the dangers of the marxisms that some party members are peddling.
Stedman-Jones is free to study the intellectual history of the nineteenth century.
But I would no more want to base my politics on what Marx wrote than what Bernstein wrote.
I want a serious analysis of why our party has slumped lower than ever in the polls, how we can reverse it quickly and win power, how we can stop our country’s decline into poverty, ignorance, squalor, insecurity and chronic disease.
In 1948 the Labour Party published a centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto – reflecting the importance of Marxism to the Labour Party. In 1999 Karl Marx was voted in a BBC poll as the most important thinker of the Millennium. His analysis of the logical and unstoppable development of Capitalism into a monopolistic form that squeezed the working class on a global scale is unsurpassed, and unchallenged. Peter Hain’s application of his Liberal prejudices to this will not undermine that position. Lenin identified that the Capitalists would happily use the bloody might of the State to prevent Socialists replacing Capitalism with a society operated in the interests of the vast majority. Two days after the anniversary of the 1973 Coup in Chile – which re-emphasised this reality in most contemporary circumstances – Lenin’s lessons should not be ignored or belittled. The right-wing of the Labour Party have become the Capitalist State’s first line of defence against those who would implement Socialism. But if the movement is not prepared those much darker State forces remain a threat to any future Left-wing Labour Government.