Armed Forces day some thoughts....S/he's a universal soldier and s/he really should wake up.......

S/he's a universal soldier and s/he really should wake up.......

While coming in today . I heard on the radio today about armed forces day on June 24. It talked about freedom a great deal and of thanking the services for their work. I have sat with soldiers destroyed by war, blown up on the Sir Galahad and who have been psychologically destroyed by the state and its wars. I have talked to their relatives and to many soldiers who have seen through the lies of our politicians. Many relatives and service personnel have woken up and have understood how the arms industry works, how the propping up of dictators and how wars about economics work. I have performed therapy with the victims of PTSD. I loathe war and its effects. Throughout history the military industrial comples recruits in areas of high unemployment. They recruit the victims of the economic system and they make them into its servants.
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

And yet there are those who having seen the realities of war and occupation of countries both near and far stick to a rigid right wing agenda and abuse the peacemakers and those who have changed from purveyors of violence. It's almost as if the conditioning has taken hold and that it takes shock and horror to awaken realiry. Some never awake and are loathsome to those of us who dare to be critical. Others stick to old ways of thinking and become unthinking right wingers.In a few cases they turn to Fascism and the Far Right. I know that I will have abuse about this post. I will have ex soldiers criticizing me . They will say I am a leftie..I will be called a commie and yet I have seen in my consulting room and in my practice more of the victims of war than anybody else other than the victims themselves.

We have had peace studies mocked. We have had those who are gentle and peaceful criticized by many who have themselves been brutalized. Working with over 50 ex service people in the last 25 years i keep coming back to Twain's comment "That it is easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled. There are more ex service people suffering from the effects of mental illness, more are homeless, more in prison than in a comparative sample of the general population and yet in many cases military psychology leads potentially to a host of other issues, to conditioning that lasts a life time. Throughout history the most appalling massacres, sexual violence and destruction originates in armies. I am not a pacifist, i would protect those I love with whatever means i could but that is not how an army is created or used. Repressive governments fall when the army wakes up and refuses to follow the orders of its rulers. Yes I honour heroes but a hero is someone who wakes up, rebels because they thought it through. These are the heroes U honor who have served the military and seen through the old lies.
Perhaps we should celebrate those who free themselves from the hypnosis of the state and the ego of the rulers who slaughter the working class of both sides. The generals know the uselessness of Trident and systems like that. Yet the propaganda that the state gives out is believed by those who it enslaves and kills. There was only one just war that was the Second World War. My Grandfather served in World War one and every other war has been aimed at supporting the ego of failing dictators or of western rulers seeking to distract away domestic concerns . From Trump to Trajan and back again ..the universal soldier really is to blame...until they wake up........
"Universal Soldier"

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.
He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.
And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.
And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.
But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned them at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

The Myth of Virtue signalling and political correctness......

Social media is full of the term. I have seen it used by many from Neil McEvoy to the narcissitic ex UKIP staffer Darren Bronham Niccols to the "Anders Brevik pony" tailed alt righter and so called 'Libertarain' Benjamin Mackenzie. its a meaningless term that lets them off their narcissism while dismissing your key values. Psychology reserach shows quite clearly that our key values and identity are never used to make you feel better,

If you’ve heard the phrase recently, it’s most likely being used according to his definition. Taking the example of someone who proclaims “I hate 4x4s!”, he says “It’s noticeable how often virtue-signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious.”

In other words, virtue-signalling is making a statement because you reckon it will garner approval, rather than because you actually believe it. It’s a form of vanity, all the worse because it’s dressed up as selfless conviction. When we’re defining ourselves and our core beliefs, vanity is generally not something we want contaminating the brand. Saying someone’s opinion is driven by self-regard is a powerful putdown.

“Virtue-signalling” is also a neat, pithy phrase, with – and this is the killer, really – a social-sciencey air, as though it’s a phenomenon recorded by behavioural economists and factored into nudge-unit projections of how many men pee standing up. (As of January 2016, however, a Google scholar search for the term yields only a handful of citations related to the work of a single religious studies academic.)

In informal political discussions – that is to say, down the pub, across the internet and on talk shows – the phrase serves two functions: to make your opponent look shallow, while at the same time (the irony) signalling your initiation into a more sophisticated level of discourse.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing in Bartholomew’s idea. Sometimes people do take positions to curry favour, or to burnish their reputations. But that’s hardly new. “You’re only saying that to make yourself look good” sums it up pretty well, it’s less pretentious, and still leaves 90 characters for the rest of your tweet.

There’s another danger in the the way the phrase is being deployed (and it’s being deployed a lot). Anyone who makes an argument that casts them in a good light can be accused of “virtue-signalling”. Anyone. That’s an awful lot of babies at risk of being thrown out with the bathwater.
In many cases, the thinking goes like this (with the left a frequent target):
Bill is saying something right-on
Virtue-signalling is when you say something right-on just to sound good
Therefore Bill is virtue-signalling

But 3. is not justified by 1. and 2. You can argue for something that happens to make you look virtuous because you genuinely think it is the best solution. That’s the case, for example, with most religious beliefs. Do we really think the pope is just virtue-signalling?
What started off as a clever way to win arguments has become a lazy put down. It’s too often used to cast aspersions on opponents as an alternative to rebutting their arguments. In fact, it’s becoming indistinguishable from the thing it was designed to call out: smug posturing from a position of self-appointed authority. I’m not saying we should eradicate “virtue-signalling”. But maybe it’s time to get vaccinated.

It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But People Who Say "It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But . . ." Are in most cases generally the type who say they are not political....
What, exactly, do people mean to signal when they preface a comment with "I know this isn't politically correct to say, but . . ."? in my experience the person who says they are non political really means that they are not prepared to challenge the status qua either in themselves or in others. They accept things the way they are and moan about those who do not.

What does it mean to make a group non political? Does it let the admin off the hook ? Does it mean not upsetting someone? Does it mean that there is a common sense that is agreed at all times and at all places.? Or does it mean that there are questions and issues that should not be raided? The personal is always political .I am so fed up with those who want an easy life and to be liked for everything they do. That's not what being political is..it is moral cowardice The personal is most political.........

The meaning of the phrase goes further to say that all the choices we make, even the ones that seem totally apolitical and personal, have political implications. The choice to wear particular clothes or not, to watch TV or not, to eat this or that to use a bank or not, and so on, is personal, but it is also political.

The "personal is political"- meaning that personal outcomes are largely a product of systemic relations and of structures beyond each individual that need to be addressed-came to mean, instead, that all political phenomena arise from the accumulated personal choices of individuals, so that what needed to be addressed to win better circumstances was primarily people's personal choices.
People who say they are not political raise certain questions. It is boasting? "Please acknowledge that I am brave, a rebel, a nonconformist, by being willing to say the following in defiance of social convention." Is it special pleading? "I recognise that the following may be considered rude, but please pretend that it is not because I have acknowledged it.""You can treat this as not-rude because I have pre-announced that it could be seen as rude. "Nobody would actually be offended by what I'm about to say, but I'm going to pretend that some people will in order to paint them as ridiculous." Is it self-serious cross-climbing? "Contemplate, for a moment, how I will suffer for being willing to share great truths with you."

There are plenty of interesting issues embedded here. Is there some sort of social or moral convention that requires us to keep unsolicited messages private?
But let's carve out just one issue: what does it mean by saying with "I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect"? I don't see anything to admire about it. It smacks of "I sense on some rudimentary level that this will likely annoy you but I'm going to say it anyway, so deal with it" Or perhaps it means modern norms of discourse annoy me and I shan't
abide by them and I find it necessary to announce my defiancem
Saying it strikes me as strengthening the argument that the communication is rude, or uncouth, or aggressive.

 

 

Norms about courtesy and rudeness change. Do you disagree with the changes? Are you trying to resist and push back against the changes? Fine. Speak, and let the chips fall where they may. But ask yourself: what are you trying to accomplish by such a statement in any particular communication
It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But People Who Say "It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But . . ." Are in most cases generally the type who say they are not political....
What, exactly, do people mean to signal when they preface a comment with "I know this isn't politically correct to say, but . . ."? in my experience the person who says they are non political really means that they are not prepared to challenge the status qua either in themselves or in others. They accept things the way they are and moan about those who do not.
What does it mean to make a group non political? Does it let the admin off the hook ? Does it mean not upsetting someone? Does it mean that there is a common sense that is agreed at all times and at all places.? Or does it mean that there are questions and issues that should not be raided? The personal is always political .I am so fed up with those who want an easy life and to be liked for everything they do. That's not what being political is..it is moral cowardice The personal is most political..........

The meaning of the phrase goes further to say that all the choices we make, even the ones that seem totally apolitical and personal, have political implications. The choice to wear particular clothes or not, to watch TV or not, to eat this or that to use a bank or not, and so on, is personal, but it is also political.

The "personal is political"- meaning that personal outcomes are largely a product of systemic relations and of structures beyond each individual that need to be addressed-came to mean, instead, that all political phenomena arise from the accumulated personal choices of individuals, so that what needed to be addressed to win better circumstances was primarily people's personal choices.
People who say they are not political raise certain questions. It is boasting? "Please acknowledge that I am brave, a rebel, a nonconformist, by being willing to say the following in defiance of social convention." Is it special pleading? "I recognise that the following may be considered rude, but please pretend that it is not because I have acknowledged it.""You can treat this as not-rude because I have pre-announced that it could be seen as rude. "Nobody would actually be offended by what I'm about to say, but I'm going to pretend that some people will in order to paint them as ridiculous." Is it self-serious cross-climbing? "Contemplate, for a moment, how I will suffer for being willing to share great truths with you."

There are plenty of interesting issues embedded here. Is there some sort of social or moral convention that requires us to keep unsolicited messages private?
But let's carve out just one issue: what does it mean by saying with "I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect"? I don't see anything to admire about it. It smacks of "I sense on some rudimentary level that this will likely annoy you but I'm going to say it anyway, so deal with it" Or perhaps it means modern norms of discourse annoy me and I shan't
abide by them and I find it necessary to announce my defiancem
Saying it strikes me as strengthening the argument that the communication is rude, or uncouth, or aggressive.

Norms about courtesy and rudeness change. Do you disagree with the changes? Are you trying to resist and push back against the changes? Fine. Speak, and let the chips fall where they may. But ask yourself: what are you trying to accomplish by such a statement in any particular communication?

If they want me to believe in their god, they'll have to sing me better songs..existential spirituaility

REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY AND POLITICAL ACTIVITY

When I was five my father began to read mythology to me . I found a great tension between the religion I was taught at school and the tales of the Greeks, Romans and ancient Egyptians. I remembered asking at school why the Christian stories we heard at school were true and the mythologies of the ancient world were false. No teacher ever adequately convinced me . The best they did was to tell me I was foolish or indeed odd.

If they want me to believe in their god,
they'll have to sing me better songs.....
I could only believe in a god who dances.
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and
believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write
new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and
fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the
harvest.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche,
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra",

No polytheist ever imagined that all humankind would come to live in the same way; for polytheists took for granted that humans would worship other deities. Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could/should be lived by all.. If only one belief is true, then every other is wrong.
For polytheists, religion is a matter of practice,not belief, and there are many kinds of practice. For Christians , religion is a matter of true belief, and therefore every way of life which does not accept it must consequently be an error..
While many polytheists may vigorously defend their deities, they never perceive themselves as missionaries. It is certain that without monotheism humans would still be violent unstable beings ; yet history would have spared us from the wars of religion. If the world had been spared monotheism we would not have developed communism or indeed global democratic capitalism. It is possible to dream of a world free from militant faiths religious or political.
Yet it is also true that unbelief is a move in a game set by .believers. To deny the existence of a God is to accept the categories of monotheism. As these categories fall into disuse, unbelief becomes uninteresting, and soon is meaningless. Many humanists say they want a secular world, but a world defined by the absence of the Christian God is still a Christian world. Secularism like chastity is a condition defined by what it denies.. If atheism has a future, it can only be in a Christian revival and it is true that both Christianity and atheism are declining together.
Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for the truth. No Pagan is ready to sacrifice the pleasure of life for the sake of mere truth.. It is an artful illusion, not unadorned reality that they prize. Among the Greeks, the goal of philosophy
was happiness or salvation, not truth.The worship of Truth is effectively a Christian cult.
The old Pagans were right to shudder at the uncouth earnestness of the early Christians. None of the Mystery religions of the late Roman Empire would have claimed what the Christians claimed- that all other faiths were in error. For that reason none of their followers could ever become an atheist.. When Christianity alone claimed they possessed the truth they condemned the rich and lush profusion of the pagan world with damning finality.

In a world of many gods, unbelief can never be total It can only be a rejection of one practice and gods and acceptance of others or else as Epicurus and his followers claimedthe conviction that gods do not matter since they have long ceased to bother about human affairs.
Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of constructed interpretation. In claiming that there is only one truth faith, it gives truth a supreme value that it had not had before. It also made unbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism. If we live in a world without gods , we have Christianity to thank for it. Iamblichus of Chalcis commented

"You Christians have driven the Gods from the world and made it a lonely place".
Algernon Charles Swinburne writing in the late 19th century felt the same . In his poem Hymn to Proserpin he bold states
"You have conquered O Pale Galilean, the world has grown grey from thy breath".......
In D H Lawremce`s story “The man who died” Jesus comes back from the dead only to give up the idea of saving mankind. He views the world with wonder and asks himself; “ From what ? and to wha , could this infinite world be saved ?”

Humanity considers itself as perfectible beings superior to all other non human animals upon the planet and yet at the same time we never cease to escape from what we consider ourselves to be. Our religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom that we never perhaps have had.. In the last two hundred years the utopias/dystopias of right and left have served the same function. Today when politics is bland and unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of humanity's deliverer..
I believe that we need a teaching that stresses that there is nothing from which to seek deliverance, a teaching whose aim is to free humanity from the yoke of salvation.

Nikos Kazanantzakis states my belief clearly “Whoever says salvation exists is a slave , because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. Will I be saved or damned? He tremblingly asks.......salvation means deliverance from all saviours...now you understand who is the perfect saviour. ..it is the saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation.” or indeed Nietzsche once more claiming,

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and mg-back, a dangerous
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.”

Many people today think that they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith and not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be master of their destinies. Why then should we humans?

Science today has an authority that common experience cannot rival, yet let us remember that Darwin tells us that species are assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments. Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies to us as humans. Yet it is forgotten whenever people talk of the progress of mankind. . We have now put our faith in that which originated in Christian belief and in the last hundred years it has been been taken over by scientific rationalism.

I believe that at heart humans and other animals are kin. By contrast, arising from Christianity humans are set beyond all other living beings, and have triggered a bitter argument that rages to this day. In Victorian times this was a conflict between Christians ans unbelievers. Today it is fought between secular humanists and those who believe that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal. This is the hope of rational science today for although human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same; a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive.
Darwin showed us that humans are like other animals, humanists claim they are not. Humanism insists that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this they renew one of Christianities most dubious promises -that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of the Christian faith.
Perhaps is is therefore impossible to describe an adequate definition of real progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this ls intolerable. As a result, Darwin'steachings have been stood on their head. Christianity`s cardinal error-that humans are different from animals- has been given by science a new lease of life.

Many thinkers like myself realise that humans can never really be masters of the earth. Our spirituality And sense of self must recognise that we are mere stewards of the biosphere and therefore must except a neo -pagan or pantheist belief For much of our history and all of prehistory humans did not see themselves as being any different from the other animals among which they lived. Hunter gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not superior and animals were worshipped as divinities in many traditional culture.

The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. It is the animist feeling of belonging with the rest of nature that is normal. Feeble as it may be today the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things that is embedded in the human psyche.
Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the environment are moved by the love of living things, a "biophilia" a frail bond of feeling that ties humankind with the earth and that should form the basis of our spirituality./political activity.

"We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The World Cup, sport and the political Left and Right

The World Cup cultural and potical meanings and discourse... There is a cultural link and echo that is sounding around Europe. The World Cup a superficial level can be dismissed as a new opium of the people by the left and while others on the right could argue naively that it has nothing to do with any political discourse. Yet there is an interconnection and subconscious process that has political implications.

The chants of "God save the Queen" and "Rule Britannia" are not left wing songs..they imply rule; empire, and the threat of the foreigner.. and they are sung by the political right and are used as a subtext by the Far Right. The Union Jack is used in the same way by the same people. It us too late to be proud of it. We are twenty years into devolution and the UK is simply the English state creaking and breaking apart. The Nations of the UK the Welsh: the Scottish and others have their own identity now and their flags do not come with the legacy of Empire and of the political right. Yesterday I was lectures on social media about "our national team" .I replied it was not my team and was called xenophobic by xenophobes...and the sad thing was that they had no awareness that they were and knew not of the numerous nation's that are the people's of Brexit isle...

Sport was crucial in the 1950s allowing West Germany to recover after the horrors of 1939. In 1966 victory I the World Cup empowered Wilson and Labour to win a landslide election. But it was not the Football of the corporation's of the Premier League that is so powerful in promoting a right wing and nationalist agenda .

.
Sport is a socially transforming force in South America and footballers are progressive and socialist in outlook. Sport does not have to be the new opium of the people but here it often is and particular to the bluekippers. We heard the chants in 2016 after Brexit and before. However last night I loved the irony of an own goal leading to English defeat by Belgium as Theresa May negotiated Brexit.botb were of course own goals as both woke to reality.

The German defeat and ejection from the World Cup is an omen that says much about Mutti Merkel and the fall of her government. Sport offers social and political commentary as well as synchronicity. The rights denial of its political significance and the left's incomprehension of it as a possible force for progress must be challenged..


Over the last 35 years I have often heard the view that organised sport was the new "opium of the people" designed to keep the masses docile and to distract people away from the real issues. I thought of a very different tradition in South America, where the left organised on the terraces, where Che Guevera played Rugby and wrote a sports column in a newspaper, where the French Philoxpher Albert Camus was a keen footballer and a lover of the sun. While it is true that the corporation that is manchester United and other premier Lragie teams are essential corporations it is important for the left to contest the UKIPISATION of the working class.

I remember some ten years ago we in Swansea Green Party celebrated and congratulated Swansea on the erection of the statue of John Charles, the prominent sportsfigure of the area. I remember getting more positive comments about that one press story than any other story we had publushed that year. People congratulated the party on understanding the significance of John Charles. At the next Green Party meeting I was criticised by a former member of the party for daring to wade into such a minor issue. Some weeks ago I published a Green Dragon story on Welsh sporting success on a local party web site and got told off once more. I really think that sport is a blind spot for the Left and for Ecosocialists in general. Perhaps its because we were once the serious ones, who were useless at team games, or like me because my sight was lousy.....I dont know....perhaps we consider ourselves above it all. I do know those who celebrate great works of literature often forget that in Elizabethan England all classes and people attended the plays of Shajespeare and the like. Perhaps we experience a major disconnect between high culture and popular culture.?

Its no accident that Maradona has a tattoo of Che Guevera, its no accident that in the 1970's the far right recruited on the teraces of the football match.Organised sport would enable criticism by us to be made of the corporations that the premier league is, the facts that ma y ordinary people can no longer afford to watch Rugby or Football live, to expose the schemes of Rupert Murdoch and his ilk.I wonder if we could appreciate this.

Then there is the subtext that we could comment on. As an exile returning to Wales I had foregotten that Rugby was the sport of ordinary Welsh people, it England Rugby is the game of the Public Schools and the Old Grammar schools, of the English ruling class.Thats why its great to see England humiliated by a subject nation and a former colonial state.Its the return of the repressed, its a collapse of the corporate campaign of the English brand, tied to big business, the denial of the role of ordinary people in sport.

There is a major role for the left to be involved in sport it would enable us to ask questions on the role of sport in promoting notions of gender and sexuality and of power. Womens football and Rugby has far to go in acheiving parity with that of men. The obscene payments made to Premier League players illustrates inequality of income, the attitude to gay players is shocking paticularly in the Premier League.

We fail to understand Sport ion the left, yet fitness, health and self confidence is the key to empowerment and self realisation. Sport deserves to be an area the left can get its ideas across in. Change begins when popular culture is understood and sneered at. We need to grasp this point to began real engagement. Even the popular culture of the Big Brother house teaches us much about political power and group psychology. I make a plea for us to understand and act.
Some months ago we were in a taxi chatting about politics to the driver. His analysis was radical and left wing but he hated politicians. He wasclearly on the left but did not see it this way at all.Sport offers a way to reconnect, to learn the ĺanguage, to connect popular culture and high culture and to stop us all within the left appearing smug, condescending and to realise the smug condescending attitude we have comes from is our own individual psycholgy.....

Permanent Revolution

In the early twentieth century, most Marxists held the view that any future Russian Revolution could only take the form of a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution. Economically, it would sweep away the remnants of Russia’s feudal order, above all, the Tsarist state, and, by giving land to the peasants, allow capitalism in agriculture to switch from a slow, “Prussian” tempo of development to a fast-moving, “American” one.
Politically, the revolution would replace a feudal autocracy with a capitalist state, ideally, a republic. The workers’ movement would then take full advantage of newly won freedom of press, assembly, and speech to organize much as their Western European counterparts had. With these key bourgeois-democratic tasks solved, Russian social democracy would then press on and fight for socialism, just like their opposite numbers in Germany, France, and other advanced capitalist countries.
Against this widely accepted view, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution presented an alternative scenario.
First lined out in 1906, Trotsky brilliantly forecast the course and outcome of the Russian Revolution. Le Blanc summarizes the idea as follows:

The revolutionary struggle for democracy in Russia could only be won under the leadership of the working class, with the support of the peasant majority.
This democratic revolution would begin in Russia a transitional period in which all political, social, cultural, and economic relations would continue to be in a flux.
This transition would be part of, and would help to advance, and must also be furthered by, an international revolutionary process.

Far from being original or innovative, Le Blanc holds that Trotsky’s perspectives flowed “naturally from the revolutionary conceptualizations inherent in the analyses and methodology of Marx himself.”  However, there are reasons to doubt this.
Trotsky’s perspectives on the Russian Revolution were unique.  No one else shared them — not Marx, not Lenin, not Luxemburg, not Kautsky, not Parvus, not Riazanov, not Mehring — even though all were intimately familiar with Marxist methodology.
Though Le Blanc argues otherwise, there was only one version of permanent revolution — Trotsky’s. No one else adhered to Trotsky’s analysis of the coming Russian Revolution: that only workers could overthrow Tsarism and that as a result the democratic revolution in Russia would have to be a proletarian-socialist one, not a “bourgeois-democratic” one.
Trotsky argued that the working class would take power and, with the support of the peasantry, carry out “bourgeois-democratic” tasks — essentially, peasant expropriation of the landed gentry — simultaneously with socialist tasks — worker expropriation of capitalists. There is no non-revolutionary “transitional period,” in this account, between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist phases of the revolution.
Trotsky thought that the victory of socialist revolution in Russia would inspire workers abroad to do the same. Without successful proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist West in the very near future, no transition to socialism in Russia is possible owing to peasant opposition to a planned economy or successful imperialist military intervention. He was alone in all these views and was only vindicated in 1917 when the Bolshevik Party moved independently of him to adopt the practice of permanent revolution, in Lenin’s famous April Theses.
Trotsky’s role in the October Revolution that followed is well-known and Le Blanc rightly dwells on it.  He was an outstanding orator and could sway those who heard him like no other tribune of the Russian Revolution.  The praise is fully merited.  Here, though, a sense of proportion must be maintained and all hero-worship avoided.  Lenin and Trotsky were ”co-leaders” of the Revolution, as Le Blanc says — but only because they were leading members of the Bolshevik Party.
Trotsky could only be in one place at one time in 1917; the Bolshevik Party was somewhere all the time, and was everywhere across Russia at the same time. Thousands of Bolshevik worker-leaders and educators fanned out among the workers, little Lenins and little Trotskys explaining what was happening and what needed to be done. The October Revolution could have won without Trotsky, but Trotsky (and Lenin) could not have won without the Bolshevik Party.
As commissar of defense, Trotsky led the Red Army in battle against the Whites. His gifted generalship, and his ability to rouse worker-soldiers to do their duty, stood the Bolsheviks in extraordinarily good stead — a legacy Le Blanc praises even if he takes exception to Trotsky’s “authoritarian” and  “ruthless” methods.

Socialism in One Country

Victory in the Civil War (1918-1921) thrust the Bolsheviks into new, hitherto uncharted waters.
During the Civil War, virtually no Bolshevik thought victory over the Whites would be durable without successful workers’ revolutions in the advanced capitalist West.  If such revolutions failed, the October Revolution would soon be reversed.  And without a workers’ state in Russia, a transition toward socialism in that country was unthinkable.
But the unthinkable became thinkable. Trotsky led the Red Army to victory without the help of victorious workers’ revolutions abroad. Something which the theorist of permanent revolution had thought highly improbable became an actuality: the unintended formation of an isolated workers’ state.
When peasant uprisings and working-class protests forced the Bolsheviks to abolish War Communism in 1921 and implement the New Economic Policy (NEP), a new task now faced Lenin’s party: how to begin a transition toward socialism in peasant-dominated Russia without the direct and immediate aid of workers abroad. Trotsky and every Bolshevik believed that building “socialism in one country” was still possible, at least for a while. As Le Blanc rightly says, despite the defeat of revolutions abroad, Trotsky

worked tirelessly, after the 1917 revolution (and particularly in the 1920s), to help build up and develop the economy of the Soviet Republic, that he explicitly, consistently, and energetically sought to do this in a manner that would contribute to the country’s development in a socialist direction.

Le Blanc says little about this unprecedented project, which Trotsky had never theorized before.  He is virtually silent about Trotsky’s “manner” of developing the Soviet Union’s economy in a socialist direction under the NEP.
Le Blanc pretty much skips this period in Trotsky’s life to focus instead on his time in exile between 1929 and 1940, after Stalin’s victory and the destruction of the NEP, when Trotsky “sought to defend and explain the relevance of heroic best that was in the early Communist tradition.”
This near-exclusive focus on the last phase of Trotsky’s life is most regrettable, because it essentially excludes any in-depth discussion of what Trotsky might have done differently under the NEP to stop Stalin.
Le Blanc basically assumes that Stalin’s victory was a foregone conclusion, inscribed in “objective conditions” as the sacramental phrase has it — without considering how Trotsky himself might have inadvertently contributed to the formation of those objective conditions in the first place. As this problematic speaks to the question all inquiring people want answered — was Stalinism inevitable? — it merits a very close look.
Trotsky’s sharp, inner-party polemics about “bureaucratization” and the lack of “inner-party democracy” in NEP Russia almost invariably came into play not just in relation to promoting an internationalist foreign policy, but also in relation to Trotsky’s special economic strategy for building socialism in Russia.
In contrast, Le Blanc tends to discuss both contentious issues in abstraction from concrete policy questions. This is an analytically disabling weakness shared by many historians, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, who have studied this period closely.
Trotsky did not call for inner-party democracy just to hear himself and others talk, of course. He wanted to use freedom of discussion for a definite purpose, not admire its existence for no definite end.
In a nutshell, Trotsky thought he could persuade the party to adopt his domestic and foreign policies by majority vote only on condition that the leadership allow freewheeling democratic debate among rank-and-file party militants, not top-heavy bureaucratic “debate” dominated by business-as-usual apparatchiks who, collectively, Trotsky believed, had little interest in proactively building socialism at home, or working intelligently and conscientiously for socialist revolution abroad.
Le Blanc, however, practically ignores Trotsky’s distinctive economic policy prescriptions, grounded in a unique analysis of the Soviet economy’s relationship to the world capitalist market. Instead, he quickly moves back to emphasize Trotsky’s “plain Marxist” proposition that building socialism to completion was possible only on a planetary scale.
There is a reason for Le Blanc’s shift in focus from the new back to the old in Trotsky’s thinking, from Trotsky’s special domestic economic strategy back to the ABCs of Marxism, from “Trotskyism” back to “plain Marxism,” from the uncommon to the commonplace.
Le Blanc and virtually all other Marxist historians make the final victory of “socialism in one country” the central issue opposing Stalin and Trotsky because doing so automatically grants victory, rightly, to Trotsky and to “plain Marxism,” which denied this victory was possible. Case closed.
Only people wholly ignorant of Marx and Lenin could contest this victory. But this triumph of Trotsky’s, rebroadcast by Trotsky’s followers ever since, was largely a paper one, achieved simply by marshalling an interpretation of Marx and Lenin that was faithful to — because based on — an honest reading of both men’s writings: it was a theoretical victory too easily won with little political purchase because it could not provide Trotsky (or anybody else for that matter) with much guidance about what to do in the here and now.
The central issue domestically for Trotsky in the 1920s was far more concrete and practical than Le Blanc and most Trotskyists allow: What was the best way to build socialism in Russia, under the NEP, until final salvation came from abroad?
To make a long and complicated story short, Trotsky proposed an industrialization program which, he thought, would more speedily develop the forces of production, converting peasants into workers, thereby strengthening the material foundations of socialism in the country. The features of this program, along with the (faulty) assumptions which founded it, need not detain us here.
As the 1920s progressed, however, Trotsky warned ever more insistently against Stalin’s vacillating, “centrist” policies, now tending to the left, toward building socialism, now tending to the right, toward restoring capitalism.
Trotsky notably attacked Stalin’s ally and theoretician of building an autarchic socialism, Nikolai Bukharin, for thinking that domestic, “free-market” mechanisms could trigger economic development because this approach dangerously underestimated the “capitalist” character of that development. This policy, if systematically pursued, would ultimately lay the basis for capitalist restoration in Russia, and the destruction of the workers’ state.
Trotsky thus summed up his multifaceted political struggles throughout much of the 1920s as the struggle against centrism, not against Stalinism. The two terms are not interchangeable because the difference between them is not terminological but substantive. Though “Stalinists” dominated the Party, roughly from 1925 on, there was still no “Stalinism.” Le Blanc downplays the significance of this distinction. He is not alone.
Stalinism only came into its own in 1929, when Stalin threw his centrism overboard by abolishing the NEP and launching the Five Year plans and collectivization. This so-called “revolution from above” created a new set of property and class relations, destroying those originally set up and consolidated by the October Revolution.
Only then can we properly speak of Stalinism as the eponymous term for a new mode of production, a new class society where the bureaucracy was able to link the factory floor and the agricultural kolkoz to the state sufficiently tightly to forcibly extract a surplus from the immediate producers on a regular basis.
This history leads us to the big question: did Trotsky help pave the way for the victory of Stalinism — or did he fight Stalin and all his plans? Le Blanc’s answer is unequivocal, as is that of all his followers, even the most critical ones: “The core of what would be identified as ‘Trotskyism’ decades later,” he writes, was its “insistence on working-class democracy” and against Stalin’s one-party dictatorship.
For Le Blanc, this insistence can be found as early as 1926, in the “Platform of the Thirteen,” the programmatic statement of the United Opposition of 1926-1927 led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. But this document does not “insist” on this. And therein lays a tale.
There is no demand for multi-party working-class democracy in the Platform of the 13 — saying otherwise is a gross misrepresentation on the part of Le Blanc and others. The United Opposition sought to achieve its programmatic goals at home — essentially, speedier economic development on the basis of the NEP — through the Communist Party, not outside it.
With the exception of the Democratic Centralists of 1928, all the “inner” party oppositions of the 1920s, beginning with the Workers’ Opposition (1920), the Democratic Centralists (1920), the Left Opposition (1923), the Zinoviev-Kamenev Opposition (1925-1926), the United Opposition (1926-1927), the Left and Right Oppositions (1928-1929) thought the interests of workers and peasants could only be realized through this party.
None considered organizing independently to present a party-political alternative to it. None ever called into question this party’s monopoly on politics. All rejected talk of a second workers’ party. Nevertheless, the very existence of these oppositional currents does at least speak to the non-monolithic character of the Bolshevik party in the 1920s.
Besides endorsing one-party rule and accepting the NEP, another feature common to these oppositions, including that of the Democratic Centralists of 1928, was their struggle against “bureaucracy.”
Indeed, the party leadership itself, beginning with Lenin, had protested the scourge of bureaucracy, of incompetent and corrupt administration. So had Stalin. And Bukharin. In fact, everyone had come out against this phenomenon — who could possibly be for it? Le Blanc is mistaken to think that this was Trotsky and the Left Opposition’s signature struggle, setting it apart from other oppositions.
If neither the struggle against bureaucracy, nor the struggle for inner-party democracy, nor acceptance of the NEP can capture the distinctive core of Trotsky’s thinking for building a socialist Russia in this period, what can?
The solution to this puzzle is to be found in the historically specific circumstances under which Trotsky and the Left Opposition operated in 1928-1929, circumstances that compelled it to distinguish itself from all other oppositions of the past not just theoretically, i.e., Trotsky’s analysis of the Left (proletarian), Center (Stalinist) and Right (pro-capitalist) party tendencies, but practically as well. Le Blanc does little to elucidate those circumstances because they show Trotsky and Trotskyism in a very bad light. What were those circumstances?
Up until 1927, all oppositions emerging under NEP had operated against a background of more or less steady economic recovery and improving living standards for workers and peasants — with the hope of still better times to come. The more these oppositions unanimously decried Stalin’s bureaucratic rule, the more easily the non-party masses could reconcile themselves to the rule of bureaucracy since such rule seemed to be in their material interests.
Certainly, these oppositions were not going to get support inside the party to battle bureaucracy given that the party apparatus itself was increasingly staffed and run by an unelected bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, with vanishingly small numbers of “Old Bolsheviks” — militants who had joined the party in 1917 and before — holding office.
In 1927, however, what was good for Stalin and the party bureaucracy and what was good for the immediate producers, most especially the peasantry, no longer appeared to dovetail — a telltale sign that Soviet society was cleaving into antagonistic classes.
In November 1927 widespread harvest failures triggered a reduction of grain deliveries to the cities, leading to dramatic hikes in the price of bread for workers. This crisis of underproduction was not the result of Stalin’s “mistaken” agrarian policies, as Le Blanc and many others hold, uncritically repeating Trotsky’s explanation.
Rather, it was the unintended result of millions of peasant households acting in their self-interest, actions ultimately determined by their non-capitalist relation to the land and to each other.
To get grain from the peasants Stalin resorted not to forced collectivization but to requisitioning without payment. This greatly alarmed his ally Bukharin, who feared that Stalin’s war communist methods jeopardized the lynchpin of the NEP, the worker-peasant alliance, the smychka.
Bukharin, joined by trade union council chairman M.P. Tomsky and A. I. Rykov, the nominal premier, began to form early in 1928 what Trotsky called the “Right” Opposition (a mislabel that stuck) to oppose Stalin’s smash-and-grab operations that threatened to alienate millions of peasants and turn them against the state.
Stalin’s search-and-seizure operations greatly exacerbated the crisis, as peasants responded by further cutting back on production to minimize their exposure to a marauding state. A self-reinforcing, downward spiral had begun, threatening to turn crisis into catastrophe.
In 1928, the leadership introduced food rationing. Workers’ real wages began to decline, reversing the more of less steady improvement in living standards of the previous years, the halcyon years of NEP, when the sun had shone on just about everybody.
Critically, only now could an opposition to Stalin’s leadership have had the potential to garner popular support outside the party bureaucracy, to defend the NEP and preserve the worker-peasant alliance, because only now were Stalin’s policies immediately threatening to inflict great damage to the masses’ well-being, that of the peasants above all.
Bukharin understood all too well that Stalin’s cure for the grain crisis was worse than the disease. Thus, a window of opportunity opened, ever so slightly to be sure and ever so briefly, to save the Russian Revolution from final destruction by mobilizing workers and peasants in its defense. Trotsky and the Left Opposition did everything in their power to slam this window shut.
Throughout 1928 Bukharin challenged Stalin’s predatory policies in the countryside, recognizing in them the risk of disaster. The Left Opposition did not.  Bukharin and his cohorts, Trotsky explained, in trying to placate the ostensibly kulak-led peasantry, were simply opening the way for capitalist restoration in agriculture and, eventually, in industry. This would be the greatest evil. Trotsky’s slogan of the day was: “With Stalin against Bukharin — yes; with Bukharin against Stalin — never!”
Refusing to join the Right Opposition in a “united front” against Stalin, the Left Opposition instead enthusiastically welcomed Stalin’s removal of Bukharin and his supporters in the trade unions from leadership positions in spring 1929.
By that summer, the Right Opposition had been decapitated, and the Left Opposition had rallied to Stalin, its members offering their services to help build socialism. Apart from Trotsky and a few stragglers, the opposition had ceased to exist. The window of opportunity to stop Stalin had irrevocably shut.
Continued peasant resistance right through 1929 to a second edition of War Communism (1918-1921) prompted Stalin to go beyond the periodic rip-off operations of the previous two years. In December 1929, he declared all-out war on the peasantry, ordering wholesale collectivization and exiling millions of recalcitrants to labor camps, where many would die from overwork and starvation. By 1933, Stalin had consolidated 25 million peasant homesteads into thousands of gigantic farms, the kolhozy, a transformation opposed tooth and nail by the peasantry.
Simultaneously, Stalin launched a crash program of industrialization in the cities, destroying the factory committees and trade unions that had hitherto effectively represented the interests of workers on the shop floor. An enserfed peasantry and a regimented working class marked the final annihilation of the October Revolution, which had freed both from class relations of exploitation.
The Left Opposition had not bargained for Stalin’s “Great Turn” at this juncture but by then it was too late. It had jumped on Stalin’s bandwagon the previous summer and was not prepared to jump off.
Besides, Trotsky had given his adherents no compelling reason to do so. The Left Opposition could not organize a struggle against the bureaucracy since it did not see the bureaucracy as a class in its own right. It had no opponent to target. And it could not organize on the issue of Stalin’s program since his program was to industrialize.
Indeed, there is no evidence that the Left Opposition actively backed workers’ resistance in 1929 and later, let alone that it sought to lead workers on the path of militant anti-Stalinist political struggle. On the contrary, by supporting Stalin, even “critically,” the leadership of the Left Opposition only sowed confusion and demoralization in its own ranks and among more politically alert workers.
And yet, in Trotsky’s view, despite the resistance of the proletariat, Stalin’s dictatorship was, somehow, preserving the dictatorship of the proletariat and building socialism, albeit by “bureaucratic” means.
The dramatic events of the late 1920s in the Soviet Union constitute a pivotal episode in the history of the international workers’ movement, when, to use Trotsky’s metaphor, the locomotive of history could have been switched from one track to another — toward Stalinism or away from it.
Lenin accomplished such a task with his April Theses in 1917, “rearming” the Bolshevik Party to face the challenges of the day.  But Trotsky never wrote his own April Theses to rethink matters so to confront the new dangers — and take advantage of the new opportunities — that began to present themselves in 1927.
Trotsky’s view of the Right Opposition as capitalist-roaders was fantasy. So was his view that Stalin was a centrist, perpetually tossed now to the right, now to left, and incapable of striking out on his own to become the head of a new ruling class. He never came to terms with his utterly mistaken appraisal of Stalin’s politics, itself founded on a profoundly erroneous analysis of the bureaucracy as a non-class phenomenon, a “caste.” This confounds Le Blanc’s assertion that Trotsky always admitted to errors of political judgment.
Trotsky’s politics in the late 1920s remained faulty through and through. Had he revised them and reoriented himself politically and joined Bukharin to give timely leadership to working-class opposition to Stalin, this might have changed the course of history. Certainly, it was the only way it could have been changed.
Moreover, the enabling condition for a revival of soviet democracy was created only at this moment because the political synergies generated by the Left and Right Oppositions making common cause against Stalin’s rule could well have led to the formation of a second party to represent the interests of workers and peasants, not those of the bureaucracy. That is why this period is critical.
Trotsky’s failure to overcome a “crisis of leadership” — his own — in conducting a class struggle against Stalin outweigh his other accomplishments. Trotsky’s adherents — Le Blanc included — cannot possibly accept this conclusion, along with the analysis founding it, without jeopardizing their political identity as Trotskyists.

The Russian Question

In 1933, Trotsky called for a “political” revolution, not reform, to overthrow Stalin, and for the formation of new, revolutionary parties, in Russia and abroad, to carry through the struggle for socialism. Trotsky did not explain fully how he could call for this while maintaining that Russia remained, as before, a “degenerated workers’ state” that had only needed reform.
What had changed about the structure of this state by 1933 that made revolution, not reform, the only way forward? Trotsky never convincingly answered this question, creating unending debate among his followers. Le Blanc leaves this perplexing issue alone.
Le Blanc writes that Trotsky’s reputation as an anti-Stalinist rests in good measure on a merciless criticism of Stalin’s tyranny in The Revolution Betrayed. This is undoubtedly so. But he could have done more to save the revolution from such a fate. Had he been successful, this work need not have been written.
Trotsky, of course, continued resisting Stalinism once in exile — a daunting task since Stalin’s triumph in Russia in 1929-1933 established his uncontested domination not only over the Russian Communist Party, but over all major foreign Communist parties as well. This power meant that Trotsky’s attempts to launch revolutionary alternatives in the 1930s were all but doomed to fail.
He continued to make major contributions, however. Le Blanc is correct to say that every Marxist can learn much from Trotsky’s writings on the rise of Nazism in Germany. Unlike the rise of Stalinism, Trotsky understood this phenomenon immediately and completely. He protested Stalin’s ultra-left line that fascism and social democracy were “twins” and that it made no difference to the working class whether one or the other won.
The German Communist Party accepted Moscow’s position all the more readily since an irrepressible and powerful ultra-leftism had dogged German communism from its very inception in 1919, nourished by an unquenchable hatred for German social democracy, which had abetted the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by counter-revolutionaries.
Against Stalin’s criminally irresponsible political line, Trotsky instead called for a united front between communists and social democrats to fight Hitler. Had this call been accepted by the interested parties the course of world history may well have changed for the better as this was the only way the Nazis could have been defeated — just as a similar call in Russia for Left and Right Oppositions to unite might have forestalled Stalin’s victory.
In these writings, directly addressed to the communist and social-democratic rank-and-file, and only indirectly to their leaderships, Trotsky was applying the not so “old principle” of the united front strategy to new realities. Lenin and Luxemburg, surely, would have done so as well. Le Blanc rightly recognizes there is nothing specifically Trotskyist about this strategy, originally theorized at the Third International’s Third Congress. Still, the complex of arguments Trotsky deployed in defense of this political line have no equivalent in Marxist political literature.
After Hitler’s victory, the Comintern, at Stalin’s behest, executed a U-turn in 1935, moving past the United Front to arrive at the Popular Front. Trotsky denounced this policy as well, implemented in France and Spain, which harnessed the workers’ movement to defend bourgeois democracy against fascism at the price of renouncing any struggles for socialist revolution.
The Communist parties of both countries worked overtime to suppress all working-class activity independent of or unacceptable to bourgeois parties. Trotsky advocated the United Front policy once again.
However, the position of the Communist parties was even stronger now than in the past, exercising a stranglehold on revolutionary segments of the workers’ movement. In Spain, Stalin even ordered NKVD death squads to eliminate all left-wing opponents. But, no matter how hard Trotsky tried, Stalinism could not be dislodged.
These are all exceptional writings. They have no equal in the annals of Marxism. In these extraordinary interventions Trotsky was trying desperately to avert the defeat of the workers’ movement in the West. At the same time, he was also dealing with the supremely baleful international ramifications of Stalin’s victory in Russia.
How much better it would have been had Trotsky destroyed Stalin and written about successful workers’ revolutions in the West, on a par with that of his magnificent History of the Russian Revolution — instead of brilliant dissections of their stomach-churning, heart-breaking defeats! For who can deny Stalin’s enormous role in contribution to their defeat in the first place, as Trotsky indefatigably showed time and again.
If there was a fighting chance anywhere for a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism in the advanced capitalist world to take root, the United States was it, owing precisely to Stalinism’s weakness there. Alas, this was not to be.
Trotsky made a litmus test of the “Russian Question” in his dispute with Max Shachtman, leading to a split in the American Socialist Workers Party in 1939-40 and, later, abroad as well. Trotsky’s actions — which Shachtman thought were sectarian — made even more difficult the SWP’s already fiendishly difficult struggle to gain a foothold, however modest, in the American labor movement.
The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 supplied the occasion for Shachtman to take a long view of matters and to begin to question Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state that preserved the core conquest of the October Revolution, state ownership of the means of production.
Trotsky rebuked Shachtman and declared that any Marxist worth his salt had unconditionally to defend that conquest, in war or peace. Shachtman disagreed and developed an array of historically sensitive arguments explaining the difference in the relationship between state and society in pre-capitalist, capitalist, and socialist modes of production. He held that state ownership of the means of production meant socialism only if the working class “owned” the state itself and ran it democratically. If it did not, there could be no talk of socialism nor about any kind of “workers’ state.”
Le Blanc prejudges this debate, without entering it, siding with Trotsky: he says Trotsky took the field against “once leftward-moving intellectuals” who began to express “skepticism toward revolutionary Marxism” and a “growing rejection of the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition.” That is not the whole truth.
It is certainly true that some prominent intellectuals, notably Sidney Hook and James Burnham, became ex-Communists. But Shachtman and nearly half the SWP rejected Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism, not revolutionary Marxism and Bolshevism. Le Blanc says nothing about Shachtman’s critique of Trotsky.

Limitations in Both Directions

Le Blanc acknowledges that “there are serious limitations in some of what [Trotsky] had to say. This is something historians can debate and explore,” adding, hopefully, that “Trotsky’s influence — rather than simply evaporating — has been diffused within what remains of the radical left.”
It is a pity Le Blanc himself did not explicitly explore and debate these limitations, stating his position openly. Instead, he sidesteps consequent discussion of critical episodes in Trotsky’s life and fails to call many things by their right name.
Keen to make Trotsky and Trotskyism relevant to socialist activists today, Le Blanc highlights only those facets of Trotsky’s thought and activity that show his undoubted strengths as a revolutionary thinker and politician, and from which all Marxists may learn, indeed, draw inspiration from — but tip-toes around controversial positions and policies that generated wide-ranging debate among Trotsky’s followers, in Trotsky’s lifetime as well as posthumously. These omissions are very difficult to justify, especially in an introductory work.

Marxism for beginners...

Everything that is solid melts into air......

Marxism is an economic and social system derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1829 - 1895). It is a theoretical-practical framework based on the analysis of "the conflicts between the powerful and the subjugated" with working class self-emancipation as its goal.
It asserts that the Capitalist mode of production enables the bourgeoisie (or owners of capital) to exploit the proletariat (or workers) and that class struggle by the proletariat must be the central element in social and historical change. According to Marx, a socialist revolution must occur, in order to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the ulimate goal of public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.
Classical Marxism is a variety of Socialism and provides the intellectual base for various forms of Communism. It was conceived (as to some extent was Anarchism) as a reaction against the rampant Capitalism and Liberalism of 19th Century Europe. It is grounded in Materialism and it is committed to political practice as the end goal of all thought.
As a philosopher, Marx was influenced by a number of different thinkers, including: German philosophers (e.g. Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach); British political economists (e.g. Adam Smith and David Ricardo); and French social theorists (e.g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Flora Tristan and Louis Blanc).
The defining document of Marxism and Communism is "The Communist Manifesto", published jointly by Marx and Engels in 1848. The first volume of "Das Kapital" (Marx's ambitious treatise on political economy and critical analysis of Capitalism and its practical economic application) was published in 1867, with two more volumes edited and published after his death by Engels. For the most part, these works were collaborations and, while Marx is the more famous of the two, he was strongly influenced by Engels' earlier works, and Engels was also responsible for much of the interpretation and editing of Marx's work.
Some of the basic ideas behind Marxism include:

• Exploitation and Alienation: Capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers by the owners of capital, due to the fact that the workers' labour power generates a surplus value greater than the workers' wages. This expropriation of surpluses leads to increasing alienation and resentment of workers, because they have no control over the labour or product which they produce (a systematic result of the Capitalist system, it is argued).
• Labour Theory of Value: The value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average amount of labour hours that are required to produce that commodity. This is similar to the value theory established by classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772 - 1823), although for Marx it is socially necessary labour which is important (i.e. the amount needed to produce, and reproduce, a commodity under average working conditions).
• Base and Superstructure: Relations are established among people as they produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and these relations form the economic basis of society. On this "base" arises a "superstructure" of political and legal institutions, and a social consciousness of religious, philosophical, ideological and other ideas. Any social revolution (caused by conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production) will result in a change in the economic basis and thence to the transformation of the superstructure.
• Class Consciousness: Any social class possesses an awareness (of itself, of the conditions of life, and of the social world around it), and its capacity to act in its own rational interests is based on this awareness. Thus, class consciousness must be attained before any class may mount a successful revolution.
• Ideology: The ruling class foists the dominant ideology on all members of that society in order to make its own interests appear to be the interests of all. Therefore, the ideology of a society can be used to confuse alienated groups and create a false consciousness (such as commodity fetishism, where social relationships are transformed into apparently objective relationships between commodities or money).
• Historical and Dialectical Materialism: This refers to the adaptation by Marx and Engels of Georg Hegel's theory of Dialectics, the concept that any idea or event (the thesis) generates its opposite (the antithesis), eventually leading to a reconciliation of opposites (a new, more advanced synthesis). Marx realized that this could also be applied to material matters like economics, hence the label Dialectical Materialism. The application of the principle of Dialectical Materialism to history and sociology, the main context in which Marx used it, is known as Historical Materialism (see the section below for details). The resulting theory posits that history is the product of class struggle and obeys the general Hegelian principle of the development of thesis and antithesis.

Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism (or the Materialist Conception of History) is Marx's theory of history, his attempt to make history scientific, and it undelies much of the rest of his work. It is based on the principle of Dialectical Materialism (a synthesis of Hegel's theory of Dialectics and the idea that social and other phenomena are essentially material in nature, rather than ideal or spiritual) as it applies to history and societies.
The main thrust of the theory is that history is ultimately about economics. It holds that class struggle (the evolving conflict between classes with opposing interests) is the means of bringing about changes in a society's mode of production, and that it structures each historical period and drives historical change. Material conditions and social relations are therefore historically malleable because developments and changes in human societies are dependent on the way in which humans collectively produce the means to life.
Marx's argument is essentially that, for human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and that this production is carried out through a division of labour based on very definite production relations between people. These relations form the economic base of society, and are themselves determined by the mode of production which is in force (e.g. tribal society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism). Societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally move from stage to stage as the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class in a social and political upheaval.
Marx and Engels identified six successive stages (including one transitional stage) in a society's development:

• Primitive Communism, as seen in co-operative tribal societies.
• Slave Society, which develops when the tribe becomes a city-state, and aristocracy is born.
• Feudalism, where aristocracy is the ruling class, and merchants develop into capitalists.
• Capitalism, where capitalists are the ruling class, and create and employ the true working class.
• Socialism (or "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"), where the workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.
• Communism, where a classless and stateless society has evolved.

Class Analysis

Marx believed that the identity of a social class is derived from its relationship to the means of production, rather than being determined by wealth alone. He described several social classes in capitalist societies, including the following:

• Proletariat: workers who sell their labour power for wages, but do not own the means of production.
• Bourgeoisie: those who own the means of production (or capital) and buy labour power from the proletariat.
• Petit Bourgeoisie: a less wealthy sub-class of the bourgeoisie, those who employ labour, but may also work themselves (e.g. small proprietors, land-holding peasants, trade workers).
• Lumpenproletariat: those who have no stake in the economic system, are disconnected from the means of production, and will sell themselves to the highest bidder (e.g. criminals, vagabonds, beggars, etc).
• Landlords: a class of people that were historically important, of which some still retain some of their wealth and power.
• Peasants and farmers: a disorganized class that Marx saw as incapable of carrying out change.

History of Marxism

B

The early history of Marxist thought is essentially the history of Socialism, which has been detailed elsewhere.
Some Marxists see the French Revolution of 1789 - 1799 as a proletarian revolution in accordance with Marxist principles, but the reality is much more complex and there is much contention over the claim. Likewise, the American Revolution of 1775 - 1783 was essentially a war of independence and not a grass-roots rebellion in the Marxist sense.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1829 - 1895) first met in person in 1844, and they soon discovered that they had similar views on philosophy in general and on Capitalism in particular, and decided to work together, culminating in the groundbreaking "The Communist Manifesto" (published jointly by Marx and Engels in 1848), which became the defining document of Marxism and Communism. They further collaborated on "Das Kapital", (Marx's ambitious treatise on political economy and critical analysis of Capitalism), the first volume of which was published in 1867, with two more volumes edited and published after his death by Engels.
The first large-scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice came with the Russian Revolution (or October Revolution) of 1917, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924) and the Bolshevik Party (even though Russia was not an ideal candidate with a fully developed Capitalist system, as Marxist theory prescribed). Despite Lenin's exhortations, however, other countries did not follow suit, and attempted Socialist revolutions in Germany and other western countries failed, leaving the newly-formed Soviet Union on its own.
Even in the early days of the Soviet Union, there were those, notably Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) and Rosa Luxemburg (1870 - 1919), who claimed that the form of Communism adopted there (especially after Joseph Stalin took control after Lenin's death in 1924) did not conform to Marxist theory, and much of the rest of the history of Socialism and Communism is replete with different factions claiming their legitimacy from Marxism.
Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary Communist parties all over the world, some of which were eventually able to gain power (e.g. the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Cuba), and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states with stagnating economies, which caused much debate about whether Marxism was doomed in practice, or whether these nations were in fact not led by "true Marxists".
By 1990, the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe had all abandoned Communist rule, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved, leaving China, Cuba and some isolated states in Asia and Africa as the remaining bastions of Communism, although in most cases any identification with classical Marxism had long since disappeared.

Recent Developments in Marxism

In terms of the philosophical (as opposed to political) development of Marxism in the 20th Century, the first major figure was perhaps the Hungarian György (George) Lukács (1885 - 1971). His philosophy, which came to be known as Western Marxism, stressed the earlier Hegelian and humanist elements of Marx's work. Lukács' 1923 "History and Class Consciousness" is often considered a milestone in Marxist thought, with its themes of class consciousness (self-awareness of social class and of the role assigned to it by Marxism), reification (the attribution of human or living qualities to objects and social relations) and totality (seeing the whole picture of society at once, in all its complexity).
The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1931) spent much of his adult life in Mussolini's fascist prisons, but he has come to be seen as a highly original thinker within the Marxist tradition. His important philosophical legacy includes the introduction into Marxist thought of the idea of hegemony (the way in which the ruling class directs and organizes society though its cultural power). He saw cultural hegemony as an important means of maintaining the status quo in a capitalist society, pointing out that the bourgeoisie did not rule by force alone, but also by consent, forming political alliances with other groups and working ideologically to dominate society. Like Lukács, he strongly believed in the organic unity of social life.
The Frankfurt School, based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1930s, consisted of a nucleus of neo-Marxist philosophers, including Theodor Adorno (1903 - 1969), Max Horkheimer (1895 - 1973), Leo Löwenthal (1900 - 1993), Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980), Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) and Jürgen Habermas (1929- ), who met to discuss the perceived failure of Marxism and Communism in the West and to try to understand the success of Capitalism and Fascism and the emerging "mass society" of America. The Frankfurt School developed what they called a Critical Theory of Marxism, a social theory orientated toward critiquing and changing (rather than just describing or explaining) the totality of society, by means of integrating all the major social sciences, including economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
Jürgen Habermas, one of the younger members of the Frankfurt School, in particular, went on to extend Critical Theory and effectively attempted no less than a complete reconstruction of the foundations of Western Marxism, attempting to marry the determinist strands of the Frankfurt School with the action-based ideas of its American opponents (although his writing is considered difficult and demanding).
The French-Algerian Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990) developed another influential strand of Marxist philosophy which intersected with linguistics and Structuralism, and which is sometimes referred to as Structural Marxism. He presented a hightly scientific re-working and re-analysis of Marxist thought, which he claimed provided not only a model of the economy but also a description of the structure and development of a whole society.

Types of Marxism

Many different types of Socialism and Communism developed from Marxist thought, but several forms of Marxism itself can also be identified:

• Classical Marxism: The initial theory as conceived by Marx and Engels, as described above.
• Marxism-Leninism: The Communist ideological stream, loosely modelled on Marxist theory, that emerged as the mainstream tendency during the post-Lenin era of Joseph Stalin (1878 - 1953) in the Soviet Union. It is mainly associated with Stalin, although it is debatable to what extent he actually followed the principles of either Marx or Lenin.
• Western Marxism: A term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theories based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with the philosophy of the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China. It brought Marxism into the mainstream of European culture. Its proponents have been mainly professional academics, who view Marx as primarily a philosopher rather than a revolutionary, and who stress the Hegelian and humanist elements of his thought. The most prominent were perhaps the Hungarian György Lukács (1885 - 1971) and the German Karl Korsch (1886 - 1961).
• Libertarian Marxism: A school of Marxism that describes itself as taking a less authoritarian view of Marxist theory than conventional currents such as Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism and other well-known forms of Marxism-Leninism. It emphasizes the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.
• Structural Marxism: An approach to Marxism based on the Structuralism of the French theorist Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990) and his students. His detailed re-analysis of the Marx's entire oeuvre led him to realize that it provides not only a model of the economy but also a description of the structure and development of a whole society. It was influential, particularly in France, during the late 1960s and 1970s.
• Neo-Marxism: A 20th Century New Left school of Marxism that hearkens back to the early writings of Marx (before the influence of Engels), as well as attempting to incorporate elements of modern psychology and sociology into orthodox Marxist thought. It rejects the perceived economic determinism of later Marx, focusing instead on a non-physical, psychological revolution, and is more Libertarian in nature, and related to strains of Anarchism. The Frankfurt School, based at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany from the 1930's to 1950's, was instrumental in its development.
• Cultural Marxism: Another 20th Century form of Marxism which adds an analysis of the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society, often with an added emphasis on race and gender in addition to class.
• Analytical Marxism: A style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s. It claimed "clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog".
• Post-Marxism: The theoretical work of philosophers and social theorists who have built their theories upon Classical Marxism to some extent, but who have exceeded the limits of those theories in ways that puts them outside of Marxism.
• Marxist Humanism: A branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, (especially the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" of 1844 in which he develops his theory of alienation), as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural conception of capitalist society.
• Marxist Feminism: A branch of Feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of Capitalism as a way to liberate women. Marxist Feminism asserts that private property, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of the oppression of women.