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.

Marxism 2010: Reminiscences of the SWP bore?

In recent years I’ve often felt as if I’m in a bit of a political limbo – too left-wing to join the modern Labour Party, too logical to make any kind of enthusiastic call for a working class uprising. I think this is a common feeling among progressive people of my age. We were born and raised under Thatcher and then became politically switched-on just as a ‘Third Way’ version of Labour came to power. That is to say, we were born during the destruction of the old left and became self-aware under a confusing, blurred, neo-liberal version of what I will begrudgingly call ‘social democracy’. When I was 18 – and a self-avowed Marxist, no less! – Marxism 2003 seemed to offer an exciting opportunity to mix with people who shared my hard left politics and ‘revolutionary’ zeal. In the event I was actually put off by the unquestioning nature of the SWP’s lectures and so-called debates. The latter tended to consist of a load of people calling for a workers’ revolution led by a vanguard party (the SWP, of course) who would ignore or jeer anyone who suggested a reformist route. Even by my naive analysis they seemed to be, well, naive. Still unable to bring myself to join or vote Labour, I saw Marxism 2010 as an opportunity to see how the far left in Britain (at least the part of it that was represented here) had developed over the last seven years, while also comparing it to the progress of my own political thinking.

The first lecture we attended was on the Marxist analysis of economics – a nice easy start, then. I actually found this lecture to be a good refresher for basic Marxist theory and it gave a fairly clear analysis of Marx’s argument regarding the crisis-prone nature of capitalism. The speaker made a good fist of applying it to the current economic situation but his argument didn’t quite come off as he failed to even mention the fact that the ‘means of production’ has largely been moved to the third world, therefore negating any possibility of the workers in this country seizing them from their capitalist owners. This lack of progressive – or even logical – thinking was to become a regular fixture. Following this we attended talks throughout the weekend on seemingly diverse topics including Venezuela’s and Bolivia’s socialist ‘revolutions’ – apparently they’re not socialist enough; the British working class and whether they are ‘revolutionary’ or not – according to the SWP they are, we’ve just got to keep telling them that until they rise up like one massive BA cabin crew; and the history of the world through a Marxist perspective – I found this to fit with my own beliefs in a very general way, but their debates about history and the way it is taught today were woefully out of date.

This is not to say that it was all bad. One talk on Keynesian economics and another entitled ‘Does the media control out minds?’ were enjoyable and were followed by interesting contributions from audience members. However, the latter talk made very little reference to online media and its scope for organising networks of disparate people and putting pressure on politicians (see the 38 Degrees and Take Back Parliament campaigns for evidence). All the speaker seemed to suggest was taking the Socialist Worker newspaper into your place of work with you or attempting to flog it to disinterested passersby who would probably rather be reading the Sun. By far the most positive aspects of the whole event were Slavoj Zizek’s contribution to the panel discussion on ‘The Idea of Communism’ and Tony Benn’s lecture. Unfortunately, other than these examples the unifying theme was a slavish deference to Marxist-Leninism, with seemingly no effort made to develop this theory past the 1920s. Combined with their rejection of trade unions and Parliamentary reform as a means of achieving better conditions for workers, and their constant references to some unidentified form of ‘struggle’ to achieve a revolution, this all added up to a very frustrating and, at times, irritating experience. The overall result? I’m still in limbo.

Marxism 2010: A Virgin’s Tale

Am I a Marxist? This is a question I have asked a number of times when trying to place myself within the political spectrum. I have just spent the weekend attending the SWP’s Marxism festival trying to answer this question. The answer I arrived at is resolutely no, well not the Marxism defined under the narrow constraints of the SWP anyway.

Unlike Dan and Tom I was a virgin to the event. I have a general distaste for far leftist meetings due to many past experiences which involved a large amount of hippy idealism and limited dogmatic thought. I was certain that I would hear phrases like “can’t we just all get along” and “when will everyone learn that we don’t need governments anymore”.

The first meeting I attended did nothing to allay these preconceptions. I was late due to a delayed train but helpfully Dan and Tom had sat at the front of the room in the middle of a row which meant I disrupted the speaker by pushing past people and apologising loudly. This entertained Dan and Tom greatly and for them was the highlight of the talk. The speaker mumbled at the floor and then a precession of people crowed about how clever they were.

This was a trend which ran through the whole event. Each meeting consisted of 30 minutes of a lecture and then 45 minutes of people speaking from the audience. This resulted in far too many occasions of people standing up and ranting with the sole aim of impressing everyone about how committed and intelligent they were. If your point was the inevitability of a workers revolution led by a vanguard, you would be well supported by the speaker, if not you were either ignored or told the above was true. Sometimes you would get the bizarre situation when the lecture topic or debate seemed to disagree or be unconcerned with the idea of a Leninist workers style revolution but would end with the speaker stating that it was the natural result of what had been discussed. This confused me as I wondered why you would devote a considerable amount of time to a discussion and then ignore it.

It became clear to me that much of the organisers and attendees were living in the past. The majority of topics on display were based on historical overviews and analyses of theories over a hundred years old rather than on anything progressive or new. Only one of the lectures I attended employed any technology above a microphone. Whilst I would be the first to admit that an analysis of history helps understand the future, this subject has been debated in this way for the past 100 years.

At one point I overheard a conversation between a man and woman that completely summed up all those present. At first the middle aged man complained that he had just missed a meeting with a friend due to being delayed. When asked why he didn’t call his friend to notify him he stated “I don’t believe in mobile phones”. I resisted the urge to show him my own phone as evidence that they existed. His female friend then produced a letter from BT which she said had a code on it that could be used in a phone box to get 90p’s worth of call time. This letter was a response to a complaint the woman had made after losing that value in a phone box once. He then tried to give her 90p which she refused. After hearing this exchange I worried for a while that I had somehow been transported back to the 1950s.

However, not everyone was caught in the past. We soon realised that picking meetings needed skill. If you weren’t careful you would end up with an SWP activist giving you the usual spiel. Occasionally though you would find either a multi-speaker debate or an outside expert. One such expert was Dr John Parrington (a Molecular Pharmacologist) whose lecture on evolution and genetics inspired a really interesting debate over the ethics of gene screening. His contention that a Marxist model of society was the best method of dealing with these ethical issues was compelling. Similarly a fair overview of psychoanalysis and its arguably necessary relationship with Marxist theory given by Sabby Sagall gave rise to one of the most intelligent debates I have ever witnessed in person. I was astonished with the breadth of knowledge, ideas and articulate discussion that followed (although I suspect half of those who spoke of being academics).

I would characterise the whole event as a well organised wasted opportunity to engage with new ideas and a wider audience. When those new areas of thought were explored an unparalleled opportunity for leftist debate arose.