Is Marxism Bankrupt?

Marxism is bankrupt! From the most liberal democrats to the rabid fascist reactionaries, the declaration of the bankruptcy of Marxism has become a victory cry. The narrowness and short-sightedness of the bourgeois spirit, the crisis of their own sinking, disintegrating, destructive society, is cloaked by the self-soothing philosophy of the populist. After all, Marxism is bankrupt! The mighty, powerful party organisations which for a decade have been the ghosts of bourgeois order and lawfulness, which have awakened the horror of the realisation of socialism in the bourgeois skulls, have been dismantled and destroyed without a trace. No problem! Yes, a new era is dawning. The ‘nation’, the ‘family’, ‘religion’, the ‘sanctity of private property’ are once again on firm and unshakable foundations. The ideal of civil order has finally triumphed over the materialism of the 19th century. Yes, Marxism is finally defeated. The dying man convinces himself that he is healthy, that he has conquered the germ that caused the circle, that he is beginning a new life, fresher and better than ever. The ghost of socialism is gone.

The working class is now defeated. The new and inevitable political form of monopoly capital, fascism, has triumphed in some of the main areas of capitalism. The powerful party organisations, Social Democracy and the Third International have not been able to stem the tide of fascism and transform the immediate revolutionary situation brought about by the transformation of the political forms of bourgeois society into a victory for the working class. Their reformism and their orientation towards bourgeois democracy prevented them from doing so. In a daze, the working class fell into the arms of fascism. Their leaders abandoned them at crucial moments. They were unable to fight alone. The masses of the parties, trained to command and lead, lacked the slightest autonomy. On the one hand, the victory of the fascist counter-revolution (in Germany) and, on the other, the collapse of illusions about their own leaders and their party brought to life the lethargy of the workers' terrible indifference. A mood of defeat had settled in the workers' minds.

Is this why Marxism is bankrupt? Because the party-machinery of reformism, in which the majority of workers believed and trusted, has collapsed, because the rule of the monopoly pumpkin has demanded a new political form and the reformist lackeys have been built up or destroyed by the new one? Or has not everything been achieved in the course of capitalist development that Marxism showed half a century ago? The concentration and accumulation of capital from the hands of the many into the hands of the few?! Is there not the pauperization of the masses to the worst degree of mass oppression?! Are not the social antagonisms in the womb of society stretched to the limit?! And is not this terrible suffering of the masses ripening day by day the soil of social revolution and transformation? Capitalism, imperialism, fascism, the ghosts of the proletarian revolution, mass oppression, mass unemployment, defeats and temporary victories, accumulation of commodities by the capitalists, accumulation of poverty by the working class, accumulation of capital and accumulation of misery on one side and on the other, — all this is there. And it has justified Marxism!

The crisis of monopoly capital has become the graveyard of reformism, but the graveyard of reformism has not become the graveyard of Marxism!

Bankrupt capitalism, bankrupt reformism!

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“Socialism is the product, on the one hand, of the opposition between the propertied and the propertied, the oppressed and the oppressing class, and, on the other, of the recognition of the anarchy of production.” (Engels).

Capitalist production is the most mature, the most flexible, the most adaptable of all social forms. But however much capitalism may be able to change its political systems and its political superstructures, to change them, to adapt them to its economic needs, it cannot eliminate the capitalist character of production itself, commodity production, the money system, the wage system, income production, unemployment, recurrent crises, which are repeated on a constantly larger scale, in short, the moles of capitalist management. This is capitalism itself. All this belongs to capitalism, and all these things belong to capitalism. They are inseparable. And as long as it exists, there is the antithesis of the dispossessed and the dispossessed, the oppressor and the oppressed, and socialism, Marxism, is an ideological expression of the most necessary material interests of this dispossessed and oppressed class.

Marxism has never established methods applicable and feasible in the practice of every class struggle, or a schematic school of tactics and strategy which it has made it the duty of every Marxist organisation to implement and adhere to precisely. Marxism has never put forward a revolutionary recipe whose point-by-point observance must bring about the victory of the working class. The method of Marxism in class struggle is precisely the dialectical application of means and methods of struggle. Just as Engels pointed out nearly four decades later the obsolescence of the practical parts of the Communist Manifesto — which were, however, good at the time — so too Marxists today must not infer the fall of Marxism from the obsolescence of the methods previously employed by Marxism. The change in the economic base brings with it a change in the means of struggle. Since the birth of Marxism, competitive capitalism has been transformed into monopoly capitalism. The old forms of struggle were necessarily broken up and replaced by new ones.

Marxism is, above all, the science of the working class, the historical world-view which reveals the laws of movement of societies, which analyses the contradictions at work in capitalism, which portrays the material interests of the classes as the most powerful driving forces of social development and the progress of class struggles, and not a paragraph-by-paragraph prescription for the salvation of suffering humanity. It is not a ready-made plan to be implemented and then we are rid of what is bad, inefficient and useless for the working class.

Social Democracy and the Third International — two of the most powerful mass movements in the history of capitalism — have for years compromised Marxism before the working masses. The first completely divorced itself from Marxism in 1914-18. The second reached its 1914 peak on 5 March 1933. The first sacrificed the international struggle of the proletariat for bourgeois liberal ideas, the second for the interests of Russian state capital. Now the working masses are stunned into lethargy with a terrible sense of defeat and betrayal of their own fate and class. But at the same time, the search for a new instrument for the class-struggling workers has begun. Their defeat is also their lesson. And the working class will find new weapons of struggle that will be sharper, better, more capable, equipped with the lessons of past struggles.

The decline of capitalism promises to be much more violent than its rise. The most important thing for the working masses now is clarity of vision. It is only now that the real application of the methods of Marxism is really necessary, and only now that it can bring about clarity of vision in the working class. And Marxism cannot be buried. It is alive. The terrible suffering of the proletariat of the world, the starvation of millions of crippled and exploited people day by day, hour by hour, is re-maturing Marxism.