Alec Ramsdell wrote:
>
> I'm here at Chicago's Harold Washington Library, about
> to check out the Ollman book. The intro starts by
> targeting "four major onslaughts" against Marxism.
>
> One of these is "officialism,": "or its adoption,
> beginning in 1917, by a variety of underdeveloped
> countries as the official doctrine of the regime, with
> a subsequent shift in Marxism's meaning from an
> analysis and criticism of capitalism to a
> rationalization and organizing ideology for a
> 'socialist' state." My question is, since the left
> today, and those more profoundly influenced by Marx,
> lack organization (or, as Carrol prefers to put it,
> the left simply does not exist), does Marx's value lie
> only or mostly in his analysis and critique of
> capitalism, rather than any ideological agenda he
> proposed as a means of actively reaching "socialism"?
>
I too was impressed by that passage from Ollman. One or two preliminary comments. His point about "officialism" is essentially the same point as Sweezy and Magdoff made in a Review of the Month sometime in the last couple of decades. (I remember the point, but not when or exactly where I read it.) They claimed that there could be no "science" of the socialist economy, because there was nothing in a socialist economy (even a transitional one) to correspond to the law of value under capitalism. And if there are no "laws" (even tendential ones -- and Marx claims all historical laws are only tendential) there can be no science. (One qualification: Ellen Wood has argued, quite effectively I believe, that markets cannot be controlled politically and thus socialism depends on the abolition of the market. That is only a negative however; I don't think there is very much in Marx & Engels -- or even Lenin or Mao or Castro -- that is of much systematic help in building socialism.)
But that concerns the building of socialism, not the building of a movement _within_ capitalism to destroy it. And here the picture is, I admit, pretty muddy, and there is no escaping endless argument, some of it pretty nasty. I'm assuming that Marx & the major marxist thinkers, despite many differences, have given us a pretty good picture of capitalism and its potentials; and I'm prepared to deny that in its essentials capitalism has changed or is ever going to change. That is why the _German IDeology_ or the _Grundrisse_ give us a rather better picture of even contingent contemporary reality than do most "social scientists" in the universities. (Charles: Ollman persuaded me to your view that the early writings of Marx are part and parcel of his thought.)
There have been two classical misuses of Marxist theory for movement building (or at least two general categories under which specific misuses can be grouped). Both assume that there must be a direct connection between the theory of capitalism (marxism proper as it were) and the theory of revolution, and draw opposite conclusions. The first route is to conclude that one can draw a theory of revolution directly from _Capital_ as it were, but the only political direction that _Capital_ can (directly) give is the injunction printed at the beginning of socialist works: Workers of all countries, Unite!
That is the sum total of political advice that what I call "marxism proper" can offer. It does not say, working men and women unite; it does not say workers and national bourgeoisie of imperialized countries unite; it says nothing of educated and uneducated workers uniting: it merely says workers unite. This generates all sorts of bastard political programs, well illustrated, for example, by the non-marxists Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman. This is the marxism that Judith Butler apparently has in mind in her infamous NLR article, infamous because she blindly takes the same basic premise of all dogmatisms, the direct and unmediated of theory to practice, and therefore believes, quite stupidly I think, that the only way to change the practice is to go back to the drawing board and begin with another theoretical premise than class. As a result she is able to understand nothing, for capitalism and capitalist culture are totally opaque unless you _begin_ with class, and class alone.
Here the Chinese slogan, One divides into two, not two combine into one, is of crucial importance. You will _never_ get a unified politicalf force by _adding_ up elements. But neither will you get a unified force by fiat, one equals one, as it were. You proceed towards unity by dividing. The initial unity is capital, which divides into capital and labor (which from certain perspectives are the same). (This is one of the reasons one must simply not even in one's private doodlings talk about such chimeras as "lower" and "middle" and "upper" classes. Those are categories for the academic playpen, not for serious political thinking.
Here it gets messy and I'll quit.
Carrol