We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the "early Marx" and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the "late Marx" in the Grundrisse, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the "Unpublished Sixth Chapter" of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the "early" and "late" Marx (though we did not yet know Marx's writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly "late Marx" and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the 'diamat" world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum's world. It was of course "Eurocentric" to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, "not Eurocentric" to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840's onward may have been "Eurocentric" but the brain-dead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the "three goods" and the "four bads" were, for these people, decidedly not.
Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings-no doubt Eurocentric-- on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on pre-capitalist societies everywhere in Einfuehrung in die Nationaloekonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter's lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukacs similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940's and 1950's CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China's four "revolutionary operas" and songs such as "The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers" while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter's limitations) and Guy Debord.
Then there was the influence of "Monthly Review" magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World "anti-imperialists" to China; they were infused with the "Bandung" climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist "anti-imperialist" bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mind-set, as did the later "Tri-Continental" (Latin America- Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arrighi Immanuel, and the South American "dependency school" (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin's theory of imperialism, with its idea of "imperialist super-profits" making possible the support of a "labor aristocracy" and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy's economics, Elbaum still uses "monopoly capital" as one of his many unexamined concepts.
Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of vol. I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel's Phenomenology only on the initial phase of "sense certainty" of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria's "On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucusus", reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: "the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars." He might have added that it wasn't worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers' councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum's own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the "socialism in one rural commune" of William Hinton's Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong "democracy" by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin's Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960's, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Duehringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx's time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890's as power-political "monopoly capital." This "anti-imperialism" was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the "progressive" regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960's, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the U.S., Europe and East Asia (so much for Lenin's theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to implicate the 'white" (e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from 1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the U.S. and Britain, May 1968 in France and the "creeping May" of 1969-1977 in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum's "Third World Marxists" that they were bought off by imperialism.
A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum's book from beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, ultra-leftism. Elbaum never explains that "revisionism" meant to this milieu above all the ideological demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called themselves "antirevisionists" were identifying, implicitly or explicitly (and usually explicitly) Stalin's Russia with some betrayed "Marxist orthodoxy." In his counterposition of "revisionism/antirevisionism" Elbaum does not devote one line to the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of "socialism in one country", a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin's Testament called for Stalin's removal as General Secretary, another "fact" that counted for nothing in the mental universe of "Third World Marxism.") For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and affirmed it. As for “Marxism-Leninismâ€, Elbaum does admit that it was a concoction of Stalin. In its subsequent career “Marxism-Leninism†could mean anything to anyone, anything of course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every failed proletarian revolution of the 20th century (Russia 1905 and 1917-21, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-67, Hungary 1956, France 1968) had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small totalitarians in Elbaum’s “Third World Marxist†pantheon put together.
"Ultra-leftism" for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum seems quite unaware of the true historic ultra-left. One can agree or disagree with Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin's State and Revolution), Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed onto western Europe) or Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale,. But such people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland and Italy) that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct) League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of the "proletariat" as the commodity form of human labor power.). As indicated above, figures such as Korsch, Mattick, Castordiadis, and the early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered part of an ultra-left, and unlike the productions of Elbaum's milieu, their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese
Michael Pugliese