Marxism 2010: Does the Far Left have a future?

In short, yes. People will always be attracted to the ideas of revolutionary socialism and Marxism will always provide a useful framework to study history and economics. But beyond academic discourse and the revolutionary zeal of youth, it is difficult to say what influence Marxism will have on politics in the future.

The tyranny and failure of self-professed ‘Marxist’ regimes in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China has done much to damage the ideas of Karl Marx (although few academics would agree that either China or the USSR were Marxist). It matters little that none of the successful ‘Marxist’ revolutions were borne from circumstances prescribed by Marx (i.e. from developed capitalist countries) – the ideology is still dead amongst much of the developed world.

This seems to be reflected in the demographics attending Marxism 2010. From my estimates, 50% of attendees were students, 35% were the ‘generation of 68’ and the other 15% were somewhere in between. Clearly, large numbers of students are being lost when they graduate. This suggests an intrinsic fragility in the movement.

The Socialist Workers’ Party – the most significant party on the far left and organiser of Marxism 2010 – suffers from a number of internal contradictions and a dogmatic refusal to embrace a modernisation of Marxist analysis. In a lecture on Marxist economics, it is claimed that the falling rate of profit limits the capitalist’s ability to accumulate and this threatens capitalist production – but this is based on a completely “free” market and there is no mention of monopolies or protectionism. The SWP subscribe to an orthodox Marxist idea of profit – i.e. all work is based on the idea that the capitalist rate of profit is the value of what is produced minus the cost of labour. But what about the public sector? Nurses do not create profit – they are just a cost to the state. The only value they have is the services they provide. Karl Marx can be forgiven for not foreseeing the creation of the welfare state, but why don’t the SWP update their analysis? And why do they consistently champion the welfare state but never give Labour credit for creating it?

The SWP harp on about the need for proletarian revolution, but there is no indication of what a modern revolution would look like. There is no discussion of issues which affect workers – housing, jobs, education etc – it is all theoretical and hypothetical. In one seminar, a contributor had the audacity to propose a sports section in the Socialist Worker (official newspaper for the SWP) only to be hounded for proposing something that wasn’t ideologically pure. How can the SWP claim to represent workers when they refuse to relate on their level? I would’ve thought a sports section is a good way to attract a new readership that can then be converted to your arguments. Likewise, there is an inherent contradiction between the Marxist interpretation of class and the fact that most workers now consider themselves middle-class. Unless the SWP can resolve this conflict, there is a permanent impasse for their revolution.

The SWP’s lack of objective analysis is also a major hindrance. In a talk entitled ‘Will the working class ever be revolutionary?’ the SWP look back at historical examples to illustrate the revolutionary nature of British workers and cite the English civil war and the overthrow of the monarchy (there is no mention of the monarchy being re-instated a number of years later). Generally, the SWP seem to confuse protest for developed revolutionary consciousness. They finally concluded that British workers “are not enamoured with parliamentary democracy”. Maybe not, but they’re not exactly enamoured with revolution either. The SWP shouldn’t be trying to pretend there is a history of working class revolution – they should be looking at why there isn’t and how they’ve been bought off by capitalism.

Until parties like the SWP can update their ideological analysis and resolve fundamental contradictions, they will remain increasingly marginalised movements. The ideas of Karl Marx are still highly relevant as the advent of globalisation stratifies the world into two classes of countries – the bourgeois countries of the Northern hemisphere and the proletarian producers of the South hemisphere. As long as the SWP clings to its ideological purity, the far left will remain an anachronism. Not because Marxism isn’t relevant anymore, but because they remain trapped in a political time warp. The core constituency of a Marxist-Leninist party is the working class, but the SWP are not only unable to communicate with the working class, they are seemingly unwilling to do so.