For a Living Marxism!

Today Marxism is widely regarded as dead. But has anyone seen the body? And if they did would they recognise it? What is commonly held to be ‘Marxism’ is a revisionist and caricatured version that goes back to the split in the labour movement at the turn of the century. One branch became fatalists or super-determinist and read Marx and Engels as if history was inevitable, and the advent of socialism was only a matter of waiting for the inexorable forces working themselves out. The other branch became voluntarist, rejected grand historical forces completely and reduced everything to the will of the individual. The effects of the fatalist/voluntarist split in Marxism, meant that the working class, the only force capable of making a revolution, was left on the sidelines (or the trenches), with no active role to play in making history. This role was usurped by 'left' intellectuals, labour bureaucrats, and in the post-capitalist states, the Stalinist bureaucrats. In this chapter I argue that Marx’s method has been deformed in Australasia and coopted by reformism as the result of the 'backwardnesss' of Australasian capitalism. Thus today, the revival of a Living Marxism is a precondition of finishing the 'unfinished' revolution. 1
 
 

1883-1983.

1983 was the centenary of Marx’s death. While the labour movement passed over this occasion in silence, the left in Australia New Zealand indulged in acts of ceremonial remembrance. They celebrated Marx’s ‘influence’ in their country, an influence measured by the number of self-confessed adherents, Capital reading groups, and members of the respective ‘communist internationals’. What they also celebrated without knowing it, was the absence of any tradition of revolutionary Marxism, grounded in Marxist theory and practised in the ‘concrete conditions’ of one’s own country. What they celebrated was not revolutionary Marxism, but the deformations of Marxism that go by the names of Social Democracy and Stalinism.

The truth is that in Australia and New Zealand, revolutionary Marxism was stillborn, and has been as dead for almost as long as Karl Marx himself. For generations, the petty-bourgeois ‘leaders’ of the labour movement have struggled to rid themselves of the class struggle, whether it be the working-class spontaneity of revolutionary syndicalism and the wobblies, or the revolutionary example of the Bolshevik Revolution which degenerated into Stalinist bureaucratic centrism after 1924. These traditions, the vital history of the successes and revolutionary power of workers self-activity, always posed a threat to the petty bourgeois class interest in managing the class struggle– in the form of the labo(u)rist settlement. 2

For obviously, in countries without a developed working class, where economic opportunity allowed every man (definitely not woman) to be middle–class, socialism had also to be middle class. Upwardly mobile workers in the workers’ paradise of the Second International grabbed at the historic compromise of state socialism with both hands and have stuffed it into the open gobs of their young ever since - along with liberal doses of anti-workerism and anti-Bolshevism. 3

Against these petty bourgeois leaders, militant workers who turned their back on these Christian socialist delusions saw the answer in Bolshevism. But awe-stricken by these world-historic achievements, isolated, ideologically raw, yet morally committed, many of these local communists twisted and turned to every new step (including the goosestep) broadcast by the Comintern.4

Many also broke from Stalinism. The successive waves of rejection of Stalinism usually led to either the total rejection of Marxism ( Stalinism = socialism = Marxism) or, Stalinism was explained as a deviation from socialism. This took the forms of a totalitarian deviation with its roots in Bolshevism (anti-Leninism), a state capitalist deviation from socialism (state capitalism), a political deviation based on the rise of a bureaucracy (Trotskyism), or a personality cult (Euro-communism).

Of all those who took the view that the revolution could be brought back on course by removing the source of the 'deviation' Trotskyism was the main oppositional force. Trotkyism sought to overthrow the bureaucracy by means of a 'political revolution' allowing workers to move back onto the road to socialism.

In Europe and elsewhere from 1924 onwards a left opposition to Stalinism formed. Despite its repression by Stalinsim, until 1933 Trotsky thought that this internal opposition could correct the Stalinist devation. After 1933 and the betrayal of the German workers to Fascism, Trotsky broke with the Comintern and called for the formation of a new international –the Fourth International –formed in 1938. 5

Trotsky argued that in the crisis of world depression, the victory of fascism in Germany, and the drive to the Second World War, that the only factor preventing a world workers' revolution was the crisis of revolutionary leadership. There was no strong revolutionary party to oppose the betrayal of Social Democracy and Stalinism in the face of fascism. Yet a committed revolutionary leadership by applying the Transitional Programme, could displace the Stalinist mis-leadership and turn the imperialist war in civil wars and the socialist revolution.

The tiny Fourth International could not offer that leadership, and it failed to prevent the smashing of workers’ uprisings during and after the war. In the aftermath of these defeats and the restoration of capitalist stability, it too split into small dogmatic or opportunist fragments. What the remnants of the three degenerate communist internationals celebrate on the centenary of Marx's death is their own bankruptcy and failure to revive Marxism and to build a revolutionary movement. 6

The reasons for this historical failure need to be understood and explained before any real advance in the workers’ struggle can be made. This requires first an explanation of the material bases of these two deformations of Marxism and in order to do this an exposition and defence of classic Marxism as a Living Marxism!
 
 

Classical vs. deformed Marxism

Marxism is a particular theory of capitalist society that could only come into existence with capitalism. The ideas of a society are the product of that society, and in practice reproduce or change that society within historical limits. Marx broke with both mechanical materialism and Hegelian idealism. The former posits the social determination of ideas but no active role for ideas in history; the latter, inverts mechanical materialism but in such a way that the absolute idea unfolds to create a changing society. The ‘young Marx’, along with other students of Hegel, rejected this idealism, substituting the unfolding of another idea - humanity (or the species being). He became a Feuerbachian.

But Marx did not stop there. In The German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach, he replaced the trans-historical abstraction –species being –of the Young Hegelians with a theory of historically specific social forms. ‘Humanity’ is expressed only as specific relations of production corresponding to given levels of the development of the forces of production. His re-interpretation of human relations as social relations, and human nature as social nature, meant that the task was now not merely to interpret, or contemplate these relations, but to change social relations. 7
 
 

Marx's satellite view

At this stage in his intellectual development, Marx had descended from Hegel’s heaven but had yet to land on earth. We have the satellite’s view of a general theory of modes of production in history. Though that satellite is launched from a particular time and place in history, capitalism, it generalises about all modes and their common characteristics.

This satellite view re-appears periodically as ‘summaries’ in Marx’s later work. Take the nice quote from Volume 3 of Capital about the ‘inner secret’ of all modes of production being the "pumping of the surplus out of the direct producer." And best known of all, the famous 1859 Preface to a Critique of Political Economy:: "...The general result at which I arrived...can be briefly formulated as follows." Here Marx is re-stating, after his scientific analysis of capitalism as a specific mode of production, the validity of his general theory of modes of production in history. 8

But Marx lived during only one historic period, that of rising and maturing capitalism. It was this form of society that was the basis of his analysis of all other forms, pre-capitalist and post-capitalist. As he wrote in the Preface to the first volume of Capital, a scientific study must be of an actual existing society, used as model for a ‘type’. All ideas, including scientific laws, are the product of a specific society. So Marx made his first major discovery in his critique of Hegel, that the criticism of "heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth.9

Marx saw that Hegel’s ideas were not universal but the product of something much more mundane, the late development of capitalism in Germany. He saw that the emergence of British Political Economy had accompanied the emergence of capitalist production in agriculture. He also understood that utopian socialism was expressing the immature experience of a new class, the proletariat, before it had become a fully developed industrial proletariat.

All of these ideas were idealist, because they measured capitalism against some abstract idea –Hegel’s god of history that took the form of the ‘absolute idea’, Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ of the market, or the Young Hegelians ‘humanity’. None penetrated to the roots of the society that produced them - capitalism. Nor could they, until the working class had come on the historical scene. While they all grasped the reality that it was ‘labour’ that created value, this reamained an a-historical abstraction because there was no understanding of how labour specifically produced profits under capitalist social relations of production. The production process was naturalised or universalised rather than understood as specific to capitalism.

The result was that the political economists up to and including David Ricardo could not solve the secret of capitalist profits. They could not overcome a false separation of universal production and capitalist exchange. They were left with a contradiction in their theory - if labour produced all value as part of the natural process of production, and the wage was the value of labour, from whence did profits arise except by unequal exchange i.e. by interfering in nature and underpaying the value of labour?

Marx discovered in his critique of these ideas, that they did in fact reflect in a distorted fashion the contradictory reality that was present in capitalism. Marx showed that exploitation did not consist of capitalism deviating from nature by not paying the full or ‘fair’ wage that could be remedied by reforming capitalism as the utopian socialists like Proudhon believed.

He demonstrated that workers were not underpaid for their labour, but were in reality paid a wage for the full value of their labour-power which they used up in production. Labour-power, then, is that specific commodity which workers sell under capitalism, and its value equals the socially necessary labour time required for its reproduction. 10

Socially necessary labour time becomes the measure of value; so workers spend part of the working day working for themselves, earning a wage which allows them to replenish their labour-power, and part of the working-day working for the capitalist, producing value in the commodities for sale on the market. The time worked to replenish labour-power, is necessary labour time, that worked to produce surplus value is surplus-labour time. Hence the capitalist can, by ensuring that workers’ work for a longer period than that necessary to reproduce their labour-power, extract surplus-value as the source of profits. The proportion of necessary to surplus labour time worked is the rate of exploitation.
 
 

Marx's Method

Marx discovered the ‘secret of profit’ as the result of his scientific method of abstracting from the surface events of commodities in the marketplace, the hidden ‘essence’ of the form of value, the commodity. The commodity was a ‘queer thing’ because despite is everyday appearance it contained within itself the basic contradiction between use-value and exchange-value.

Use-value means the 'value' of any commodity that is in its use or consumption. Exchange-value is the value of a commodity when exchanged for money, in the market. To exchange, all commodities must be useful. But not all useful commodities are exchanged. Marx was able to understand the secret of profit because he understood the dual nature of the commodity labour-power.

Marx discovered the true source of the contradiction between production and exchange that had baffled Ricardo. It lay in the fact that labour-power was the only commodity whose use-value under capitalism was to produce more exchange-value than its own exchange-value. Because, under capitalism, the direct producer was separated from his or her own means of production, they could be worked for more labour time than was necessary to reproduce their labour power. Hence surplus-labour could be expropriated by the capitalist as surplus value during production without appearing to contradict equal exchange.

This contradiction, embodied in the commodity, was the contradiction that permeated the whole of capitalism. Use-value, expressed the forces of production, including the productivity of human labour-power harnessed to nature. On the basis of this production, human needs were satisfied, and further needs created. Exchange-value, on the other hand, separated production from consumption by expropriating the product and the profits for private consumption.

This actual really existing contradiction was the driving force behind class struggle and the motive force of capitalist development and its replacement by socialism. It is the struggle on the part of wage-labour to protect the exchange-value of labour-power and resist increases in the rate of exploitation, that requires capital to revolutionise the forces of production by increasing labour productivity. This struggle between ‘nature’ - the workers’ drive to consume what they produce, and capitalist ‘society’ - the capitalists’ drive to accumulate what is produced as private wealth, is the basis of capitalism’s inevitable crises of overproduction and falling profits. But as Marx clearly envisaged, it was the under-consumption of the impoverished masses unable to get access to the fantastic wealth of socialised production, that was the ultimate expression of this contradiction, and which would in the end lead to the destruction of capitalism. 11

The fruit of his scientific study was the discovery of the inversion of reality that in capitalist society objectifies and fetishises production relations as natural, idealised exchange relations. He was able to explain the essential hidden connection between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ as the product of a specific set of social relations and set of corresponding social forces, and the form that this underlying reality took on as the superficial reality of the market. Once these mysteries had been discovered by proletarian science, the analysis of the fundamental contradictions in this society could be used to explain the whole historical process in order to change it.

For Marx then, this science was the ‘weapon of ideas’ which once adopted by the working class would bring class consciousness and the revolutionary transformation of capitalism. Revolutionary theory would guide revolutionary practice and in turn be corrected by that practice. Since his day, events have shown that the development of Marxism as a revolutionary science can occur only in the framework of a revolutionary, democratic centralist, party that dialectically unites theory and practice as the means of changing society. Such a party, is the only means whereby Marxism can retain its independence of bourgeois forces, respond to the ongoing experience of class struggle, and develop as a revolutionary weapon. 12

For want of as better term, I shall call this scientific theory and its practical application classical Marxism to distinguish it from the two main deformations of Marxism - naturalism and voluntarism. While Marx made the fundamental break with bourgeois ideology, ‘marxism’ was immediately subjected to the hostile influences of revisions at the hands of supposed ‘marxists’. The complex unity which Marx had discovered and explained in Capital was split into the false dualism of the bourgeois ideology of man (the free agent exercising free will against necessity) and nature (the objective, lawful, deterministic necessity against man). The consequences of this bourgeois deformation of classic Marxism were two currents, each a one-sided reflection of the other, absorbing the revolutionary thrust of Marxism in the petty-bourgeois ‘swamp’ of revisionism.
 
 

The material basis of revisionism

Marx proved that the basic contradiction between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ expressed as class struggle, was the real motive force of capitalist development. But knowledge of this reality cannot simply be learned from Capital and has to be also experienced as practical class struggle. Within the First and Second Internationals there existed petty-bourgeois, or privileged workers, whose understanding of Capital was brought into line with their own class position. In substituting themselves for workers as the agents of change, they revised Marx, essentially by re-interpreting the nature of the contradiction in capitalism by rejecting the objective/subjective split.

On the one side, Engels, was re-interpreted by some of his adherents such as Plekhanov, as arguing that the mechanism of change was given in nature as some objective a-historical abstraction. That is, instead of following Marx in finding the contradiction to be specific to capitalism, with both of its aspects expressed in capitalist reality, they universalised use-value as outside capitalism, against the other, exchange-value, inside capitalism.

The result is that capitalism was reduced to a one-sided exchange-value in contradiction with some supra-historical state of nature. This is the vulgar determinism, or naturalism, of fatalistic ‘Marxism’. Nature becomes separated from man (as society or social relations) and is reduced to an automatic evolutionary mechanism of the development of the productive forces, or technology.

This objectivist deformation of Marx, had its roots in an idealist ‘inversion’ of Hegel, in which ‘nature’ replaces ‘god’, and can be seen today in the Frankfurt School’s rejection of capitalist society as ‘alienated’ from nature. Since one side of the contradiction – use-value –is abstracted from capitalism, it cannot motivate the working class struggle to realise their needs against the capitalists demand for profits, and the working class ceases to be capable of overthrowing capitalism. This historic mission then falls to petty-bourgeois intellectuals, who alone are able to understand the ‘contradiction’ and rebel against it. So we find that a fatalist conception of history, having split the objective from the subjective aspects of the real contradiction, reunites them formally as its obverse expression, the subjective-voluntarist role of the petty bourgeois intellectual as political philosopher. 13

Banaji, commenting on the vulgar Marxist conception of history explains its origins and its consequences:

"The tradition of Vulgar Marxism which drew its earliest sources from the Marxism of the Second International, crystallised only under the domination of Stalin. Stalinism uprooted not only the proletarian orientation of Marxism, but its scientific foundations as well. For the dialectic as the principle of rigorous scientific investigation of historical processes – it was after all this rational dialectic that was "a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors". 14 Stalinism substituted the "dialectic" as a cosmological principle prior to, and independent of, science. For the materialist conception of history it substituted a theory of history "in general", "converting historical epochs into a logical succession of inflexible social categories". 15 Finally, this rubber–stamp conception of history it represented as a history deja constituee, open therefore only to the procedures of verification. This lifeless bureaucratic conception, steeped in the methods of formalism, produced a history emptied of any specifically historical content, reduced by the forced march of simple formal abstractions to the meagre ration of a few volatile categories. Within five decades of Marx's death, the history written by Stalinists became as opaque and dream–like, and hardly as exciting, as the fantasies of surrealism."16

This objective/subjective ‘split’ and ‘reunion’, is also present in the Baran- Sweezy, and Frank-Wallerstein, underdevelopment and world–systems neo-Marxism. They too, universalise use-value and fail to locate both sides as the essential unity of opposites that characterises capitalism. This means that rather than explaining capitalist dynamics as some supra-historical inevitability that only the petty bourgeois philosopher is privy to, they reduce everything to the historical contingency of relations of exchange and distribution. But just as surely as the objectivist current, the subjectivist/ voluntarist current suppresses the basic contradiction and reduces class struggle to the standpoint of the petty bourgeois which reflect their class interests in managing class compromise. 17
 
 

Voluntarist Marxism.

Thus we have the other-sided development of voluntarist ‘marxism’ in which the fundamental contradiction is abandoned altogether. The capitalist market becomes an aberration of the ‘natural economy’ which is the ‘state of nature’. In the natural economy economic activity produces ‘use-values’ to meet needs. But the capitalist market introduces ‘exploitation’ of surplus-labour because the capitalists own the means of production and are able to extract labour time from the workers without payment. Therefore, like the fatalist position, there is no contradiction internal to capitalism, just the a-historical abstract natural economy representing ‘use-value-in-the-abstract’, and the market, representing ‘exchange-value’ under capitalism. This means that there is no historical dynamic bringing about change in capitalism other than the subjective actions of the working class to reclaim the surplus-labour appropriated from them in the sphere exchange. This leads to a revolution of exchange relations in isolation of a revolution of productive relations.

Even during Marx’s lifetime (see his Critique of the Gotha Programme) and certainly within a decade of his death, classic Marxism had already undergone a major deformation. Marx’s scientific method was replaced by the objective idealism of nature (the god of ‘history’ or ‘nature’ that accomplished the historic mission without the working class) or the subjective idealism of the revolutionary will (in both its existentially authentic and parliamentary grubbing senses). Classic Marxism was purveyed to the working class both such as Plekhanov as the caricatures of vulgar determinism, in which their actions were accidents, or the blank cheque of parliamentary opportunism in which they, or their representatives, strutted the benches like the puppet Bernstein.

Instead of revolutionary theory informing revolutionary practice, armies of petty-bourgeois bureaucrats peddled watered-down versions of socialism to pacify working class demands to keep the workers in line, both the assembly line and the trenches.

The destruction of classic Marxism had tragic consequences in the collapse of revolutionary opposition to the First Imperialist war, and also of the post-war revolutions in Europe which would have given necessary support to the Bolshevik Revolution and made possible the building of socialism in the whole of Europe. But the vast majority of the Second International abandoned Marxism for petty-bourgeois chauvinism in turning their guns not only on the workers of other nations, but also on the revolutionary workers in their own countries. This current of deformed ‘Marxism’ is, as we shall see, the dominant tradition in the New Zealand labour movement.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to rescue revolutionary Marxism from the chauvinists. But despite the success of the October Revolution in vindicating Bolshevism and exposing the objective ‘marxists’ in Russia, the failure of the European revolution at the hands of the reformist betrayers led inexorably to the ultimate degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The emergence of this Stalinist deformation of ‘Marxism’, is represented in New Zealand, in the ‘Marxist–Leninist’ current.

A third current, that of classic Marxism itself, survived Stalinism as the international Left Opposition, and became in 1938 the Fourth International, or the 'World Party of Socialist Revolution'. This current, despite the heroic efforts during the fascist onslaught, and the war that followed, was too small and isolated from the working class by the reformist currents to offer an alternative leadership. Only today, in the present crisis conditions, are elements of this tradition in the position to revive revolutionary Marxism and a revolutionary leadership in the working class.
 
 

Deformed semi-colonial Marxism

The material conditions that led to the revision of Marxism in Europe in the late Nineteenth century were also present in Australia and New Zealand in an extreme form. The task of establishing capitalist semi-colonies at a time when British capitalism was already approaching maturity required that the semi-colony be protected from the Britain’s advanced industry. This forced the weak national bourgeoisie to form an alliance with the rising working class: the historic compromise of 'state socialism'. 18

The material base of this ideological compromise was the need for import protection against free trade. This was necessary to enable the national bourgeoisie to accumulate capital free from the competition of British or other more advanced capital. Such a compromise would last as long as, but no longer than, the ability of Australasian capital to accumulate within the bounds of the national market. The class alliance therefore ensured that protection would also be ‘protection’ of the working class to some extent. The workers got the prospect of jobs created by import-substitution and relative full employment, while the bosses got the profits generated by accumulation based on intermediate levels of technology.

Reflecting this political alliance, and the central role of the state in implementing it, there arose the ideological justification of ‘state socialism’, or 'labourism',  representing the national interest over that of class interests of either capital or labour. Yet this progressive solution to the labour problem was in reality no more than a radical version of the progressive liberal philosophy of the mid-nineteenth century, adapted to suit the conditions of the semi-colonial economy.

In Australasia, bourgeois ideology was present in both its objective and subjective idealist forms. The evolutionary doctrine of historical progress was present in the ‘civilising mission’ of the white master race. State socialism took over both the chauvinism and the racism of this current. At the same time the ethical idealism which frees human action from the capitalist laws of motion, became the basis of the liberal collectivism of Robert Stout, who preached that the state representing the collectivity or community, could reconcile the interests of individual and nation and create "beautiful citizens". 19

These two strands of bourgeois ideology were firmly welded together by the material conditions in the settler colonies that made the state the obvious and necessary means of building the nation, of advancing social progress, and reconciling the collective will with the individual good as the ‘class-neutral’ helping hand replacing the hidden hand of the market.

Why did this petty-bourgeois ideology emerge with such force in the settler states? The answer is that the task of establishing and managing capitalism, especially when its establishment was late and its development more rapid, then was the case in the advanced capitalist countries, required the active intervention of the state in the process of primitive accumulation. 20

We can document the connection between the progressive liberal ideology and the tasks of capitalist nation building. The production of political ideas and political action is always the result of specific class interests in land, employment and profits. To show how this happened in history we have to first, analyse the way in which the class structure of the semi-colonies, generated particular conflicts between particular classes or fractions of classes.

On the one hand, the local bourgeoisie was weak and divided over free trade. Exporters and importers (merchants, farmers etc) wanted free trade - it was in their class interests to sell abroad and earn foreign exchange to import the most cheaply produced commodities, both machinery and consumer goods, produced in the advanced industrial countries.

Opposing them were the rising industrial bourgeoisie who wanted to set up manufacturing for the local market, in order to employ and exploit wage-labour. But because the Australasian market was small and the scale and technological level of production was therefore small-scale and backward, they needed protection from cheaper imports.

This conflict within the colonial bourgeoisie was in fact one between merchant and finance capital (who also controlled farming) on the one side, and on the other, the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. The outcome was a political victory to the industrial bourgeoisie and a defeat for the merchant-finance fraction. The industrial bourgeoisie (who were also the product of land and financial dealing), joined forces with the growing working class and small farming class to form the liberal-labour alliance on a platform of 'state socialism' and labour reform to create opportunities for workers in industry and farmers on the land.

The result of this political victory was the establishment of capitalist social relations on the land and in industry, and the political framework of state protection and state arbitration to manage these social this compromise were that of a backward capitalism undergoing forced growth within the ‘hothouse’ of protective barriers. 21

Once capitalism outgrew the Australasian market, the national barrier to further accumulation would have to be broken and the material basis for the historic compromise would no longer be in existence. The class alliance of capital and labour expressed as a lumpen-imperialist chauvinism would be superseded when capital had matured and outgrown its national market.

However, the industrial capital of the colonies took many decades to outgrow the national market. It was able to accumulate under protection and become more and more monopolistic. The period from 1890 to 1970 represents the span of the youth, adolescence and maturity of industrial bourgeoisie and the parallel growth of the proletariat.

Between 1890 and 1915 the liberal-labo(u)r alliances broke-up and the labour movement founded social democratic Labo(u)r Parties. The founding programmes of these parties adopted an extreme form of ‘state socialism’ in protection and state intervention in production, distribution and exchange extended to nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. 22

From 1950 to 1970, the post–war boom created a bipartisan ‘welfare consensus’ which was actually no more than growth based on relatively full employment. Although the centre of each successive government mandate was shifted marginally to the left or to the right, the common element remained that of the class compromise based on the development of the national economies.
 
 

Stalinism and Maoism.

It is the material circumstances of Australia and New Zealand’s ‘protected’ settler development that underpins the class compromise and explains the ideological hegemony of ‘state socialism’ in its various guises. So too the incorporation of the organised labour movement into Labourism and state arbitration.

To the left of the Labo(u)r parties the small ‘Marxist-Leninist’ currents originated with the of the Third International and then followed the zigs and zags of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union, the Maoist split with the Soviet Union, war between degenerate workers states in Indo-China, and most recently the collapse of the so-called ‘socialist’ regimes in Eastern Europe.

But while the Stalinist foreign policy played a major part in the defeat of the European working class struggles after 1923 its influence on the Communist Parties of Australia and New Zealand was moderated by local conditions. In Europe the mass Stalinist parties played a major counter-revolutionary role. But in Australia and New Zealand labourite reformism never lost its grip of the workers’ movement. 23

Since its birth, the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ deformation of Marxism has worked against world revolution, making deals with the capitalists of the West to defend ‘socialism in the USSR’. In Australia and New Zealand the chauvinism of this policy of peaceful coexistence of capitalism and communism, reinforced rather than competed with, the social patriotism of labourite socialism. 24

The ‘backwardness’ of the settler colonies and the hegemony of ‘state socialism’ put considerable strain on the Australasian left and made it reluctant to adopt the 'ultra-left' line of the Comintern after 1928. The 'third period' between 1928 and 1935 was Stalin's response to the world crisis and the internal crisis of the NEP on the Soviet Union. Stalinism's fatalist conception of world revolution as an objective process led it into the trap of believing that socialism was inevitable. The rise of fascism was capitalism in its death agony and would soon be followed by socialism. This led to the conception of the reformist Labo(u)r parties as 'social fascist' and an enemy rather than an ally of communism against fascism.

In Australia the CP's found the anti-Labor stand put them outside the labour movement and in danger of losing any influence they had. The CPA and CPNZ were therefore slow in adopting the ultra-left line and lukewarm and inconsistent in applying it in practice. Dissident communists rebelled against those who were regarded as Moscow's men, and the movement splintered and floundered until the advent of the popular front in 1935. 25

The zig-zag from ultra-left line to popular front line followed the victory of Nazism in Germany in 1933. Instead of the collapse of fascism, it was communism that was smashed in Germany. Stalin now looked to alliances with the capitalist 'democracies' against Germany to defend his 'socialism in one country'.

Now Labo(u)r parties were no longer the enemy, but allies in this defence. The CPA and CPNZ became bedfellows with the Labo(u)r parties and drew in thousands of workers and intellectuals into the party. They also attracted a wider periphery of 'fellow travellers' who were broadly sympathetic to defending Soviet socialism as a member of the same family as Australasian state socialism.

The Popular Front period saw such 'fellow travelling' envelope large sections of the European petty bourgeois intelligentsia also. However, in Australasia political and cultural backwardness reinforced that deformed version of Marxism. Stalinism became merged with a broad Menshevik view of history, in which intellectuals and bureaucrats played a leading role, and the working-class, almost none. 26

I don't want to leave the impression that no proletarian resistance to the hegemony of ‘state socialism’ at home and abroad existed during this period. In Australia the historic record is rich with the documented struggles of manual workers and Aboriginals against state incorporation and Labourist reformism. 27

Yet despite these glorious episodes, the failure of proletarian resistance to break through the barrier of the conservative labour bureaucracy, is proof of the counter-revolutionary nature of the historic settlement.

Similarly, the periodic upsurge of militancy In New Zealand succumbed to the state and its labour officials empowered by legislation. Such is the short history of the Red Federation which broke with the Arbitration Court in 1908 only to meet with defeat in the 'tragic story of the Waihi strike. 28 Notable also is the struggle of the Waikato tribes who rejected conscription to fight a war that they saw as being between the white oppressors of the Maori people. 29 Most important, the TUC that broke from the bureaucratic FOL in 1950 played a key role in the working class resistance to the 1951 lockout before it was smashed by the state. 30

Yet in the final analysis, all of these movements were variations on reformist politics. From the spontaneous rebellions, and wildcats strikes of the 19^th century which led the struggle into parliament, to the massive lockouts and confrontations of the 20^th century, most workers never saw beyond the need to influence their party and their politicians. They may have excoriated these for selling-out, but when pressed, the vast majority of workers never subscribed to the revolutionary platform of scrapping the wage-system. This was not because they were incapable of it, but because those institutions which they looked to as representing their interests, Labo(u)rism and Stalinism, had interests elsewhere.

I conclude this analysis of the history of deformed Marxism in Australasia by restating my view that the re-birth of classic Marxism would have to wait upon the development of a maturing working class and the end to semi-colonial ‘backwardness’. This would only happen when both countries had broken out of their dominion capitalist cocoons.

This time came with the end of the post-war boom and protection as the basis for capital accumulation. The forces of production had reached the point where any further development had to 'burst' the barrier of the national market, the 'globalising' of capitalism in Australia and New Zealand, and the internationalising of the class struggle.

The breaking of the cocoon of insulation in the 1970’s and 1980’s forced by the world crisis of capitalism, brought with it the material conditions for the re-birth of Marxism and with it also, the crisis of Stalinism and Labourism as the historic institutions of class compromise.
 
 

The Left Opposition.

The Trotskyist Left Opposition made its appearance in Australia in 1933 with the formation of the Workers Party. An Australian section of the Fourth International, the Communist League was formed in 1938. This was the closest that Marxism got to a genuine birth in Australia. It was no accident that this conception resulted from the union of Trotsky's revolutionary dialectics and the proletarian experience of a few determined Australian ex-Stalinists. For a brief period, the Australian working class had the embryo of a revolutionary vanguard party in its womb.

Important questions of imperialist war and Australia's role in that war were debated. Nick Origlass' article on the character of Australia was the first coherent statement of Australia's hybrid character as a privileged semi-colony. Trotsky wrote a letter to the group in 1937 clarifying the role of the working class in defending Australia, but with revolutionary internationalist methods. 31

However like the whole post-war Trotskyist movement the Australian Trotskyists collapsed into centrism during the war, and became liquidationist after the war. For its anti-war activity the Communist League was banned in 1940. In a desperate attempt to escape isolation from the working class Origlass adopted the 'french turn' of entering the Labor Party.

This was to be the beginning of the fatal attraction to the mirage of the 'inevitable left split' in the Labor Party which never happened. After the war this tactic was turned into a strategy of permanent 'entrism sui generis' advocated by Origlass' favourite leader Michael Pablo. Like the whole of the post-war Trotskyist movement the first Australian Trotskyists overreacted to their subjective impotence and were overcome by the objectivist deformation of marxism worshipping the blind 'fatalism' of history. Thet tragedy of the healthy Fourth International was that it failed to apply the lessons of Trotsky’s dialectics so clearly expressed in his letter on Australia and the war. 32

In New Zealand there was no formal Trotskyist organisation during this period. At most there were tiny echoes of the International Left Opposition which surfaced sporadically in the journal Tomorrow. 33

Thus after 1940 there was no surviving classic Marxist tradition capable of a thorough critique of Stalinism. The Sino-Soviet split was reproduced in the Communist Parties. Those who went with Mao did nothing to correct past errors going back to the disastrous outcome of the Communist - Kuomintang alliance - the massacre of tens of thousands of workers between 1926 and 1927 in China. At most, Stalin was regarded as a Russian Chauvinist who denied national self-determination inside as well as outside Russia.

That all ‘national roads to socialism’ would follow the same road and cause future wars between ‘socialist’ states was ignored during the 1960’s and 1970’s when, for the student intellectuals of the West, Maoism became the new ‘shining path’. Despair of working-class revolutions in the imperialist countries, now turned to hope that the national revolutions in colonial or semi-colonial countries would, even in the absence of a strong working-class leadership, become socialist revolutions. 34

The rebirth of the Left Opposition in Australia and New Zealand came with the Vietnam war mobilisation as part of a world-wide resurgence of solidarity with ‘third world’ revolutions and support for ‘peaceful coexistence’ or detente. The movement was dominated by Stalinists and Social Democrats who uncritically supported the Vietnamese Revolution against the imperialist USA, on the basis that freed from such military intervention, Vietnam could, like Russia, China, Cuba (and even the Eastern European states) achieve socialism.

Against this ‘third–worldism’, Trotskyists challenged the theory of ‘socialism in one country’, and revived the classic debates on the national question and permanent revolution among the Bolsheviks before 1924 and the Left Opposition up to Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. The result of that debate was a revolutionary position on the national revolution against the Stalinist-Menshivik two-stage theory.

In the epoch of imperialism, the national bourgeoisie of the backward countries could not be strong enough to break the hold of imperialism over their countries and achieve national independence. They would have to enlist the support of the peasantry and most important the working class to achieve this. In mobilising the workers and peasants they would run the risk of being overthrown themselves. The bourgeoisie would do a deal with their imperialist bosses, sharing the surplus value extracted from the working class.

In the light of this, the working class must be prepared, and in any alliance with the national bourgeoisie to overthrow imperialism, maintain its armed independence, and having made the bourgeois-democratic revolution possible, move immediately to the next step of overthrowing the bourgeoisie to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yet a successful workers' revolution would not be sufficient to build socialism. As in the case of the Russian Revolution, unless the revolution in backward countries was joined by successful proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist states, imperialism would intervene, and either smash the revolution, or force it to compromise, and stagnate as some form of bureaucratic transitional state.

This was, of course the fate of all attempts to apply ‘national Marxism’, to be stuck on the plateau of ‘actually existing socialism’, isolated from the support of the proletariat in the imperialist countries and the developed forces of production at their command, which would make socialism a reality.

The Vietnam revolution therefore sparked-off a return to the classic Marxism of the Bolsheviks and the Trotskyists. However, despite this renewed political vigour, the petty-bourgeois ‘third world’ romanticism was as yet unable to embark on a fundamental self-criticism and a revolutionary critique of state socialism in any of the ‘socialist fatherlands’. Conditions had not yet matured sufficiently within Australia and New Zealand to bring the national question home, and to expose finally, the total bankruptcy of the legacy of deformed Marxism. 35

These conditions could not exist until national capital had outgrown its national market and was forced to ‘internationalise’. This point was reached at the same time as the Vietnam mobilisation, but took another 5 years or so, to have an impact on the left'. In New Zealand it took the return of the Muldoon Government in 1976 and the crisis policies of restructuring to drive home to workers that the age of protectionism was over for good. In Australia the shift to the right of the Hawke/Keating governments taught Australian workers the same 'rationalist' lesson.

The working class could no longer be protected from unemployment or low wages, or provided with social security from the cradle to the grave. Workers could no longer be guaranteed ‘fair shares’ through the mechanism of state arbitration and the divisions within the working-class, papered over during the boom times, re-appeared. These divisions were between the predominantly white, male skilled labour aristocracy and the so-called middle class on the one hand, and on the other, the largely migrant, female, and youthful, reserve army of labour.

By the late 1970’s the historic compromise of ‘settler state socialism’ was facing crisis as it came to be seen as the ideology of the bureaucracy both in so-called ‘socialist’ states and in the labour movement in Australasia. Stalinists and Labo(u)rites continued to push their chauvinist and racist politics in the working class, but found them increasingly challenged by sections of the most oppressed workers. They found themselves unemployed in their thousands, while the labo(u)r officials merely talked of the need for a Labo(u)r Government's committed to ACCORDs and the Alternative Economic Strategy. Any criticism that the labour bureaucrats were ‘selling-out’ workers was met by accusations of ‘splitters’ and calls for ‘unity’. Workers who persisted in challenging the leadership of the Stalinists and Labo(u)rites were purged or sacked on the instigation of union officials.

The result of the experience of a history of deformed ‘Marxism’, and Stalinist national socialism, which has dragged the revolutionary flag through the mud, is that many of the most politically conscious workers reject the idea of Marxism as abhorrent. In particular, radical feminists and Aboriginal and Maori activists identify ‘Marxism’ with the bastion of the white-male-petty-bourgeois establishment, and get sucked into other ideological currents that are no better.

The result is that classic Marxism is almost unknown, and the revolutionary leadership of the working class goes begging by default. Without that revolutionary leadership, the militant forces in the labour movement, the women’s movement and the Aboriginal and Maori movements remain split into factions along race and gender lines. This prevents rank-and-file unity of the most oppressed workers from getting rid of the labour bureaucrats and forming a revolutionary mass movement.
 
 

Conclusion.

To sum up: the prehistory of Antipodian Marxism is explained by its deformation under the materials conditions of backwardness and protected development as semi-colonyies in the imperialist world economy. The sway of Labourite reformism together with the Stalinist national socialism, over the minds of the working class in this country comes down to one historic fact: the class collaboration of capital and labour in an exclusivist, privileged semi-colonial settlement, made possible by the conditions of backward, uneven development.

As Marx pointed out, capitalism sets itself only those tasks it can complete, and up to the present, it has set the Australasian working class a limited agenda - of an alliance with the national bourgeoisie to develop national capitalism. Today, even late in the imperialist decay, when the objective conditions for socialism exist worldwide, and when the collapse of capitalism threatens annihilation, the working class has yet to take up the challenge of socialist revolution; of becoming a class conscious mass movement.

The first step towards a class-conscious majority, is for the most conscious sections (vanguard) to revive classic Marxist theory and practice. This means breaking decisively with the class collaboration of state socialism in whatever form, Labourist or ex-Stalinist. It means going back to the points in the history of the communist movement when basic errors were made, confronting them, and learning the lessons. Marxist theory exists as a guide to revolutionary action today - it needs to be learnt, and applied in practice, as the ‘weapon of ideas’ in the struggle for socialism.

Such change is under way in Australasia; over 100 years after Marx's death, his previously stillborn ideas are able to come alive at last. A revolution in the structure of white-settler semi-colonial capitalism is occurring marking the end of the era of protected national capital and opening the door to the international market. The historic compromise of labour and capital is now a dead duck around the neck of profits.

National capital has become notional – like the working class, it has no country. Yet the labour movement is still trapped in the ideological swamp of labourite reformism and waits upon the national state to hand out the goodies. The pseudo-marxists who run the unions still imagine that we can return to the protective cocoon of collaboration, begging Labo(u)r governments to honour their side of a bankrupt bargain. They do not know that the only alternative to the CER of international capital is the CER of a workers’ international, owned, run, and operated by the workers, domestic labourers and working farmers of Australasia. 36
 
 

Notes.                                                                            (go to bibliography)

1 The original version of this chapter was a paper delliverted at a Conference at Auckland University in 1983 to commemorate the Centenary of Marx's death.

2 There is a large 'left' literature on the ALP. eg Macintyre Labour Experiment; Kuhn, 'Lenin...'; Irving, 'Labourism...'; Frankel, 'Beyond...'; Watts,'Laborism...'. There is less on the NZLP eg. Bedggood, 'The Long Detour..'; Jesson, Fragments...; 'The Disintegration...'

3 The liberal orthodoxy is that Australia and NZ did not have a ‘class structure’ like Europe, and so had left the 'class struggle' behind. See Bedggood 'Class Consciousness...' and the Chapter in this book on 'Class in NZ'. As we shall see however, this is the appearance of classnessness in priviledged white settler colonies where a class compromise beased on protection suppressed the law of value, and imposed an economic, political and cultural backwardness on settler society.

4 The 'Red Referendum' when the Communists voted wtih the Nazi's in Bavaria in 1930 against the 'social fascists', is only one of many Stalinist betrayals of workers to the class enemy - in this case Fascism (see note on Trotskyism below). The zig-zags of the Stalinist Comintern and the responses of the CPA are documented in Macintyre, Reds, O'Lincoln, Into...and Symons, Communism. On the NZCP see Taylor, 'NZ Section...' in Symonds, Communism.

5 Trotsky located the source of the Stalinist 'deviation' in the caste interests of the bureaucracy inserting itself between the working class and the captialist class see Trotsky, (The Revolution...). On the decisive Stalinist betrayal to fascism in 1933 see Trotsky (The Struggle...p 380) On the history and programme of the Fourth International see Documents of the Fourth International.Trotskyism in Australia and NZ began in the 1930's in opposition to Stalinism's zig-zag from "third period' to popular front, and to the internal party regime. An Australian Section of the Fourth International, the Communist League of Ausralia, was formed in June 1938. (Greenland, RedHot...p 83)

6 Revolutionary movements during and after the war were either suppressed or deformed as bureaucratic revolutions by Stalinism.  The failure of the Fourth International to displace the Stalinists resulted not only from its persecution by Stalinists and its small size, but also from the collapse of its leadership during the war and its capitulation to events after the war (Revolutionary History, Vol 1, nos 3 and 4 and  Vol 3 no 4). On Britain see Borstein and Richardson, War... Trotsky had identified this potential collapse in the failure of the new International to embed itself in the working class and apply the dialectical method (In defence...).

7 For a good introduction to the Young Marx is Easton and Guddat Writings…and McClellan Karl Mar...

8 Capital, Vol.3 p927-928; Marx and Engels. Selected Works, Vol2, p.503.

9 McLellan, Karl Marx... p 64.

10 Marx Capital, Vol 1 Chapter 1 on the "Commodity".

11 Find Quote. Not to confused with an ‘underconsumptionist’ view which argues that lack of consumption is the fundamental cause of capitalist crisis.

12 Marx’s view that capitalist social relations were not transparent and required a scientific method to penetrate, was developed by Lenin who argued that the proletariat could not become ‘spontaneously’ class conscious and that Marxists had to introduce Marxism into the working class through the agency of a revolutionary party. (Lenin, What is to be Done)

13 For a fuller critique of the Frankfurt School see the Chapter in this book on Class Analysis for Bureaucrats.

14 Marx, Capital Vol 1 Afterword to Second German Edition.

15 Trotsky, History.....Appendix 1.

16 Banaji, Jairus. 'Modes of Production...' p3.

17 These and other ‘neo–marxist’ currents will be examined in more detail in the Chapter on Class Analysis for Bureaucrats.

18 See Kuhn, 'Lenin...' and Lenin, 'In Australia'.

19 Quoted in Bedggood, Rich and Poor...p 57.

20 Marx, Capital Vol 1 Chapter 33, on the "New Theory of Colonisation".

21 See Wells, Constructing Capitalism.

22 On Australia see Burgmann, In our Time.; Macintyre, Labour Experiment...On NZ see Fry, Common Cause.

23 For a comprehensive if academic history of the CPA which is equates Stalinism with Bolshevism see Macintyre (Reds) . See also Symons reference text (Communism). O'Lincoln 's book on the CPA (Into the Mainstream) takes a 'state capitalist' position. The decline of the CPA began only after the reversion of the USSR from socialism to state capitalism during or after the Second World War. Its decline is attributed to capitalism rather than Bolshevism. For the early history of the CPNZ see Taylor, 'NZ Section'.

24 This accounts for the fact that in NZ in the 1930’s a number of ‘progressive’ academics – Anschutz, Sewell, Winstone Rhodes, Bertram, Milner and Sutch, advocates of ‘state socialism’ in New Zealand, appeared to be sympathetic to that form of ‘socialism’ being built in the USSR. With the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, many of these intellectuals saw this as the second attempt to build ‘socialism in one country’. Bertram for example, went straight from Oxford University to China where he reported the civil war.

25 Macintyre, Reds

26 My argument traces the degeneration of Stalinism to the nationalist petty bourgeois and labour aristocracy whose immediate interests are served by the histroric settlement. So settler colonial backwardness inhibits the development of a strong working class, and allows the persistence of a bloated petty bourgeoisie living off the privileges of economic nationalism.

27 e.g Bergmann, In Our Time.; Hearn and Knowles; For the recent MUA struggle see Bramble, MUA

28 Olssen, Red Federation; Holland, The Tragic...

29 Source King. Te Puea

30 See Scott, 151 days; Barnes, Never...; Roth, 'The NZ TUC...'

31 See Origlass, 'Australia Cognita', Greenland, RedHot p. 96 quotesTrotsky in reference to a Japanese attack on Australia "Not one Australian worker or farmer wishes naturally to be conquered and subjected to Japan. For a revolutionary party it would be suicidal to say simply we are "indifferent" to this question. But we cannot give to a bourgeois and essentially imperialist government the task of defending the independence of Australia."

32 Specifically, the Fourth International failed to apply a programme which was capable of maintaining Trotsky's method of always subordinating tactics during the war to the defeat of the imperialist ruling classes. That is, of always trying to turn imperialist war into civil war. This was in part due to the pressures of extreme isolation and Stalinist suppression during the war, but more important a lack of proletarian cadre steeped in dialectical method. The European and US sections split into two tendencies, orbjective and subjective. There were those who exaggerated Trotsky's distinction between the enemies and allies of the USSR and uncritically joined the war against fascism, thus postponing civil war. And there were those who rejected the tactical struggle inside the army or industry and in the name of civil war retreated to a sectarian isolation of the working class. In the colonial and semi-colonial sections the program of permanent revolution was blurred along the same lines, allowing the Stalinists to suppress Trotskyists in Indo China and elsewhere and maintain the popular front in the interests of defending the Soviet Union (Revolutionary History,  Vol 3 no 2).

33 Tomorrow was a broad left popular front fortnightly that appeared between 1934 and 1939. Prominent 'left' contributers were Freda Cook, Winston Rhodes, Ian Milner, W.B. Sutch and ARD Fairburn. A regular correspondent W.N. Pharazyn commented critically on the Moscow Trials.

34 Australian 'fatalist' Trotskyism went in this direction also after 1940. Origlass followed Pablo in his turn towards third world liberation struggles. Despite the split in the 4 International 1953 ostensibly against Pablo's liquidation into such popular fronts, the reunification in 1963 follwed Pablo down the same 'Maoist" road of painting national liberation struggles and stalinist style revolutions in Cuba and Eastern Europe as deformed but essentially 'socialist'. (Greenland, RedHot, 234 passim)

35 Vietnam was a good opportunity for Trotskyism to break out of its centrism and return to the classic position of 'turn imperialist war into civil war'. Yet again most of the Trotskyist movement in Australia and NZ (and worldwide) took the short cut into the anti-war popular front 'against' imperialism, without fighting to turn this anti-imperialist war into a civil war of class against class.

36 I argue in this book that the objective process of concentration and centralisation of capital globally forces Australia and NZ back into an Australasian common market oriented towards the Asia-Pacific region. The post-modern bourgeois republicanism which accompanies this shift is reconstituting the dominion white racism as a form of politically correct multiculturalism in the working class on both sides of the Tasman. Yet this ideological shift is incapable of containing and legitimating the internal contradictions of a post-dominion settlement. See the Chapter on Towards a Socialist Australasia.