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Title: What is Orthodoxy? Author: Sidewinder Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Anton Pannekoek, economism, false consciousness, Lenin, Marxism, Rosa Luxemburg, scientism Source: Retrieved 11/10/2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/20170713122231/http://anarchism.pageabode.com/sidewinder/what-orthodox-marxism
A spectre is haunting the Left, the spectre of orthodox Marxism. In
order to fully exorcise this pernicious spirit it is necessary to first
understand it's true nature. The orthodox interpretation of Marxism
arose after Marx's death through the work of Engels and the founders of
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), most significantly, Karl
Kautsky
Kautsky eventually became the undisputed "Pope" of the orthodox
interpretation of Marxism within the SPD, after the excommunication of
the reformist heresy of Eduard Bernstein. Orthodoxy (literally: right
thinking) discovers its formulations through the process of opposing the
first heresy that threatens its continued existence. By this process,
orthodoxy to a degree preserves, like the negative image of a key
pressed into wax, the imprint of the heresy or heresies it originally
defined itself against, long after those heresies have passed out of
existence and been forgotten. Often then, the deconstruction of an
orthodoxy most fruitfully begins with the study of the heresy it
suppressed. However, for the purposes of brevity, we will skip the
examination of Bernstein's revisionism and move directly to outlining
the core framework of orthodoxy itself.
Reduced to its most basic framework, we can characterise orthodoxy as
having three core pillars and a fourth, compensatory element. The three
core pillars remain relatively constant in all the different branchings
off the orthodox tree, but the fourth compensatory element changes and,
as such, constitutes the main difference between the different branches.
If we use the metaphor of a restaurant table on an uneven dining
terrace, the fourth element is the folded beermat that is placed
underneath the shortest leg to bridge the gap and damp down the
instability of the rocking table. Of course, if a table has only three
legs, this problem does not arise, similarly, the three core theoretical
pillars of orthodoxy are made unstable by the fourth leg of the table -
the contingent reality of the situation of the day, resting on the
uneven rocky terrace of history.
The three core pillars are 1) Economism, 2) Scientism and 3) False
consciousness.
Economism or economic determinism is a hard version of the
base/superstructure interpretation of Marxism, that is, this (in)famous
passage from The Poverty of Philosophy -
"Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In
acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and
in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning
their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill
gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the
industrial capitalist."
Is read as meaning "social relations are determined by productive
forces"[1]. This notion that social relations in general and the
relations of production in particular, are determined by the forces of
production, can lead in the extreme case, to technological determinism.
That is, that technological advance revolutionises the forces of
production, which in turn revolutionises society. This kind of thinking
is more widespread than Marxism or the Left, and has persistent appeal
amongst the skilled scientific, technical and engineering strata of
capitalist society. Witness the number of plant biologists who still
seem to think that one more increase in crop yields will banish world
hunger and poverty, or the "net nerd" enthusiasts who believe that the
internet is going to magic humanity into a new age of digital freedom.
It is also the root of a peculiar blindness which leads the sufferer to
miss the fact that technology is neither politically or socially
neutral, but determined by the struggles and contradictions of our
society.
Scientism is the unshakeable conviction that Marxism is more than a
theory, it is a science of society and the "laws of motion" of
capitalist society, in an analogous fashion to engineering science being
the science of engines and the laws of motion that govern them. The most
obvious thing that must be pointed out about this deeply held conviction
that Marxism is a science, is that it is deeply unscientific. Popper's
criticism of orthodox Marxism that it's belief system had more in common
with a religion than a science, is not entirely without merit. The other
aspect of Marxism as the science of the laws of motion of capitalist
society including its inner contradictions, especially the so-called
"Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall", combined with
economism, leads to historicism. Historicism is the idea that there is a
direction to history, that society is progressing towards a particular
goal. It was a common idea in the 19th century, linked to ideas of big-P
Progress, going back to the Enlightenment. It was also part of the
teleological (tr: goal-directed) schema of Hegel, Marx's philosophical
mentor. However, Kropotkin is another example of how hard old
revolutionaries find it to resist the temptations of the "scientific
inevitability" of the triumph of the revolution, even without a
background in German Idealist philosophy. Historicism and a belief in
the "objective" economic laws of development, tend to lead to the
downplaying of class struggle as an active force in making history. At
first sight, this may seem a surprising feature of any kind of Marxism,
given that "all history is the history of class struggle" is one of
Marx's more well-known quotes[2], but it is a definite tendency of
orthodox Marxism.
The third pillar of orthodoxy is the notion of false consciousness.
Again for the sake of brevity, we will skirt around a full treatment of
Marx's notion of ideology and class consciousness, save in noting that
he made a distinction between class in itself (an sich) and class for
itself (für sich), the latter concept being that of a body of people
united by a conscious recognition of their common interests as a class
and their common interest in overcoming capitalist relations. It was
also clear that the class consciousness associated with class for itself
was a precursor for revolution. Combined with historicist notions that
the "objective laws" of capitalist development are headed inevitably
towards revolution and is building it's own grave diggers in the
proletariat, the lack of such a wide-spread, consistent revolutionary
class consciousness amongst actual workers of the day creates a problem.
This is a classic is/ought question. Why does the consciousness the
workers ought to have differ so much from the one they actually do have?
False consciousness is the solution to this problem. The workers
development of the scientifically-determined "proper" consciousness is
being blocked by an obstacle - a false consciousness that is taking up
the room that the correct consciousness should be developing within. Of
course this solution is itself a riddle - what are the origins of this
usurping false consciousness and how is the correct consciousness to be
restored to its rightful place?
Thus the three core pillars of orthodoxy, destabilised by an
inconvenient reality, require a fourth, bridging element - a fix to the
false consciousness riddle, to bridge the gap between what is and what
ought to be.
In the SPD of Kautsky, the solution to the riddle of false consciousness
was found in a reading of Marx on ideology and the famous fetishism of
commodities, that inferred that the social relations of market exchange
in capitalism separated the sphere of production from the sphere of
exchange, thus hiding the reality of social production beneath the
appearance of private economic intercourse, mystifying the overall
social reality from the ordinary worker, re-invented as consumer. In
Kautsky's view, only bourgeois specialists with the education and time
to study the new social science of Marxism could bring the proper
consciousness back to the workers, from the outside as it were. The mass
membership parliamentary party was the proper pedagogic vehicle for
"scientific" specialists, such as himself, to school the workers in the
correct way of viewing the world and developing their capabilities while
waiting patiently for "the objective conditions to be ripe" for the
glorious day. In the meantime the worker should dutifully pay party and
union subs, study hard, support the party's social clubs, vote for the
party at the elections and, above all, not do anything rash until their
leaders told them the time was right and what their new orders were.
Already within German socialdemocracy there were some dissenting voices
who, while rejecting the Bernsteinian revisionist heresies, were growing
less convinced that this strategy of "actionless waiting" was the
correct response to the requirements of the political struggles of the
day. Let's focus on the two most well-known - Rosa Luxemburg and Antonie
Pannekoek (who was the originator of the "actionless waiting" tag for
the Kautsky strategy). Both of their challenges were prompted by the
upsurge of syndicalist unrest that followed the Ruhr Miners strike and
Russian Revolution of 1905, the Charter of Amiens in France and so on.
Above all, how to react to the popular syndicalist slogan of the General
Strike (or Massenstreik as it was termed in German). The divisions that
emerged from the debate that raged over the Massenstreik within the SPD
in 1906 were later deepened by the European crisis that culminated in
WW1.
The spectre of a spontaneous working class uprising naturally fills the
bourgeoisie with existential terror. Good bourgeois that he was, Kautsky
had a visceral horror of working class spontaneity. Consequently he was
violently opposed to the idea of the General Strike, particularly as the
onset of a proletarian uprising and revolution.
Luxemburg had a more instinctive impulse to move part-way towards
granting the working class some spontaneous agency, albeit one that
would still be ultimately reliant on the leadership of the Marxist party
in order to finish the job worker's spontaneous action had started. But,
in face of the rising inter-imperialist European crisis, Luxemburg was
led to re-examine Marx's work on accumulation and reproduction of
capital and actually revise it in order to come up with a theory of
Imperialism. To this degree, Luxemburg not only questioned the
parliamentarism and anti-spontaneism of Kautskyite orthodoxy, but
actually had the temerity to begin undermining the core orthodox
principal of Marxism as an infallible and complete "science". Despite
the undoubted nerve it took to take this step (particularly as a woman
in a thoroughly unreconstructed male-dominated movement), Luxemburg did
not stretch to breaking with the SPD until she was forced out, the
attempts to take the initiative in the chaos of defeat, revolution and
counter-revolution, were too little and too late. Despite her initial
critical noises about the direction Lenin and the Bolsheviks were
taking, she did not have enough time to establish a branching of
orthodoxy distinct from Leninism or Kautskyism. Her legacy is also
compromised by the opinion of many non-orthodox theorists that her
unique theoretical contribution to Marxism - The Accumulation of
Capital, is based on an underconsumptionist argument that is basically
wrong.
Antonie Pannekoek, however, went further than Luxemburg in breaking from
Kautskyism. Not only did he support spontaneous workers actions such as
wildcat strikes and the general strike, but he grew increasingly
critical of the role of the SPD in opposing and putting down worker's
strikes. Eventually this lead him to see the SPD and their tame unions,
as being a barrier to class self-activity and hence their development of
revolutionary class consciousness. In Pannekoek and his fellow Council
Communists, the Kautskyist answer to the riddle of false consciousness
is inverted. Here it is the outside bourgeois "revolutionary
specialists" who are the source, not of the correct consciousness, but
the false consciousness. The solution to the problem of false
consciousness then, the fourth element, is the politically independant,
rank and file controlled worker's organisations aiming to build worker's
councils - the bodies that will be the new agency of class power and the
transformation of society. Of course this is in radical opposition to
both Kautskyite orthodox socialdemocracy and it' Leninist offshoot both,
but it still retains the three basic pillars of orthodoxy - economism,
scientism and false consciousness - only the fourth, bridging element
has changed. The mass parliamentary party has been replaced by the rank
and file workers networks and the workers councils.
The case of Lenin is probably more familiar to readers than the others,
and has been dealt with extensively elsewhere. Suffice it to say that
Lenin was the last person to break with Kautskyist orthodoxy and was at
a loss to explain the "betrayal" of his hero at the outbreak of WW1.
Lenin's full acceptance of the Kautskyist notion that worker's could not
transcend "trade union consciousness" without the intervention of
bourgeois intellectuals bringing them the proper consciousness from
outside, as stated in "What is to be done?" has been remarked upon many
times before. In this context we should see that Lenin's modification of
the fourth element from mass parliamentary party to a covert, compact
vanguard party of professional revolutionaries was simply a tactical
adaptation to the changed conditions of Russia - i.e. relative
backwardness and absolutist repression - as was explicitly stated as
such. Hence why Lenin is incapable of explaining Kautsky's "betrayal" on
any factor other than the subjective one - a "failure of leadership".
Here, ultimately, lies the progression of Leninism and it's remaining
descendants, principally Trotskyism, from the mass party tactic. Now the
fourth, bridging or substitutive element is a voluntarist subjectivism.
For the Leninist or Trotskyist, all problems of revolution can be
reduced to "the leadership question". In the face of actual situations
which force orthodox Marxists to remember that they are supposed to be
revolutionaries, the subjective element, completely eradicated from the
orthodox universe by its "objective laws", must, like Freud's return of
the repressed, return even stronger and yet not related to any
materialist analysis of consciousness itself, as an autonomous agent.
The final actor in our brief survey of post-Kautskyist orthodoxy is
Amadeo Bordiga. His case is a little different from Luxemburg, Pannekoek
or Lenin, as he was less directly influenced by German socialdemocracy,
Italian socialism having it's own separate tradition going back to the
Italian wing of the First International. Bordiga is often called "more
Leninist than Lenin", however, the anti-democratic extremism of
Bordigism conceals a subtle but important difference. For Bordiga it is
not the party, whether mass or vanguard, that is the bridging element,
but the programme itself. The programme is the solution to the problem
of false consciousness. The development of the correct revolutionary
consciousness of the proletariat is carried out by its most conscious
minority who formulate the revolutionary programme. Once formed, the
programme then represents the answer to everything. It is the correct
revolutionary consciousness, written down in a proper scientific manner.
Hence calls for democracy within the party or in the relationship
between the party and the rest of the class can only be confusionist,
and thus, objectively counter-revolutionary. Bordiga himself was from
working class origins but had educated himself and worked his way into a
career as an agricultural engineer. To him notions such as the
Kautsky/Lenin thesis that the working class were reliant on outside
forces to intermediate scientific knowledge were self-evident nonsense.
Still and all, he held to the core notions of economism (if anything he
was the most deterministic of all), scientism (hence the disdain for
democracy) and false consciousness (any deviation from the programme).
In many ways, although an outsider compared to the SPD mainstream that
formed Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Lenin, Bordiga was the most orthodox of
them all.
In the post-war period, all of the dissendents from the "official"
communist movement of the Comintern linked parties, whether from
Trotskyist, Council Communist or Bordigist origins remained trapped
within the orthodox framework, despite their different bridging
solutions and attempts to locate the origins of the failure of the
Russian Revolution. Attempts to escape from rigid orthodoxy by going
back to early dissidents like Lukács and the re-discovery of the
writings of the early Marx on alienation, tended to lose themselves
ineffectively in abstruse philosophy or simply end up falling back unto
one or other of the micro-tendencies of the orthodox ultra-left. The
Situationists, in the heady environment of the wave of struggles of the
late 60s, were the first to raise the flag for a post-orthodox Marxism
with their manifesto in which they rejected both economism and
scientism. However, their escape was incomplete, entranced as they were
by the false consciousness problem. Unable to fully recognise the
objectivist origins of this concept or overcome it on anything other
than with a superficial, idealist critique that was not itself able to
overcome the apparent separation of circulation and production, they
ended up falling back into the orthodox councillist politics of
Socialisme ou Barbarie, albeit that they had formally broken their
organisational ties some time before. Similarly a lot of the so-called
"New Left" of the late 60s was clouded with variants of Maoism or
Guevaraism, which, as an alternative to orthodoxy, was as much an
advance as giving up Poker for Snap.
However, in Italy things were stirring. With the rise of the operaisti,
Marxists at last encountered a new formulation that went beyond the
cage-like framework of orthodoxy. The concept of class composition
finally transcended the is/ought problem of false consciousness,
economism was overturned with a renewed emphasis on class struggle as
the motor of capitalist development, not some transcendent "objective
laws of motion". Technology was no longer a neutral power, but a weapon
deployed in the class war by bosses against workers, but one which could
harm the wielder as well as the target and was not immune from being
taken off the bosses and turned back against them. Naturally these
developments were met with howls or protest from the orthodox faithful,
Stalinist, Trotskyist and ultra-left alike, and indeed they still are.
But the requirements of brevity have already been sorely tested, even
stretched beyond all recognition, so we must leave it there for now.
[1] At this stage it should be pointed out that the tradition is when
critiquing a certain reading of Marx, to counter perceived misreadings
by other, contrasting quotes from Marx. We are not going to do this
here, for the sake of brevity let's just take it as read that the
orthodox reading of Marx is not the only one available.
[2] Like most popular quotes, this isn't entirely accurate. The actual
phrase (at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto) is "The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Die
Geschichte aller bisherigen Gesellschaft ist die Geschichte von
Klassenkämpfen). But, whatever, see previous note.