People's Democracy

NOVEMBER REVOLUTION OF 1917 

Marx’s Theory Of Revolution Remains A Beacon

Sukomal Sen 

THE great November Revolution, ushering in socialism and a workers’ state, occurred in Russia in November 1917. Next year will be observed the 90th year of this world-historic revolution.

Analysing the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, its very short tenure, many mistakes, signs of immaturity and also the heroic acts of the Paris workers who laid down their lives in thousands, Marx hailed this great event as the “storming of heavens.” Had Marx been alive in the early-20th century and seen the Soviet Union’s birth, he would perhaps have given a more thrilling acclamation for this world-shaking event.

Subsequent to the most unfortunate collapse of the Soviet Union and the tragic setbacks to socialism, the bourgeoisie gleefully started the campaign that socialism is dead and Marx is obsolete. Many in the communist and Left movements also suffered mortal shocks and turned away from Marxism. But many still hold high the banner of socialism and Marxist revolutionary principles. 

Yet they are not complacent. Marxists all over the world are already making a critical appraisal of the November Revolution’s message --- whether Marxism is still relevant in today’s world ravaged by US hegemonism, military aggression, plunder of countries and merciless exploitation of the people by the unbridled profit motive of world capitalism. 

MARX ON CAPITALISM

Marx and Engels elaborately and systematically dealt with the development of capitalism. And at present, particularly since the Soviet Union’s collapse, there is raging a debate on globalisation. 

To be sure, Marx or Engels never used the word globalisation that is a recent invention. Yet, despite the argument of many globalisation theorists that the world has now entered a new economic era, most commentators agree that many of the processes being analysed today go back to the old international economy. Such processes as world capitalism, market trade between regions, the growth of finance and new patterns of work have been part of our life since at least the 1840s when Marx and Engels began to write.

There are several reasons therefore to return to Karl Marx’s works. One, Marx wrote in a clear and lucid language, for workers and other laypersons in economics. His books and pamphlets are remarkably free from the jargon that disfigures much academic work. What is more, Marx and Engels were among the first writers to recognise the novelty of global capitalism and to write about it in a systematic way. They were the first to understand that capitalism, which then existed only in England and parts of Northern Europe, would spread. Given the contemporary rural societies whose population lived on land in still feudal conditions, it was an extraordinary achievement to map out the contours of the capitalist world in which we have since come to live. Eric Hobsbawm writes, “Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it” (Introduction to Communist Manifesto, New York and London, 1998).

Marx and Engels were among the first writers to treat the international economy as a dynamic category, in which both states and regions were affected by international trends. In this way, they did pre-empt the globalisers pet theme of a unified world. In Communist Manifesto (1848), they recognised the radicalism of the new capitalist order:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

This passage is famous for the positive tone in which these revolutionaries celebrated the vigour of the capitalist system. Indeed it was one of the petty ironies of the 1990s that when the World Bank was looking to justify the introduction of the market into the countries of the formerly socialist countries, it chose the above passage to introduce its World Development Report 1996. 
One of the globalisation arguments is that recent developments constitute progress. So, if anyone protests, she/he simply stands in the way of scientific advance, like the King Canute of a British legend who attempted to turn the sea-waves back and failed. On this postulate, they want to make us believe that to complain against globalisation is pointless and reactionary. The invisible hand of the market will necessarily allocate resources across the globe fairly. In their own day, Marx and Engels were contemptuous of those free traders (!) and others who portrayed capitalism as operating in only a positive way. Writing in 1844, Engels scathingly attacked those who claimed that what would come would necessarily be for the best: “You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the one great monopoly, property, may function more freely and unrestrictedly. You have civilised the ends of the earth to win new terrains for the development of your vile avarice. You have brought about the fraternisation of the peoples, but your fraternity is the fraternity of thieves” (quoted in Marx, An Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy).

FIRST CAPITALISM & THEN SOCIALISM?

An assertion often ascribed to Marx and Engels is that the entire world would follow one line of development. According to some critics, Marx believed in the inevitability of first capitalism and then socialism; this means that Marxism is a closed, teleological historical theory; but it cannot be proved by events in the outside world. But the fact is that the boot is on the other leg; the charge applies not to Marx’s work which was much more subtle but --- and much more sharply --- to globalisation theorists. That globalisation is inevitable is more often asserted rather than proved. 

As regards whether Marx and Engels did actually believe in the inevitability of one pattern of economic change, the fact is that they did not. In the preface to Capital, Vol 1, Marx’s line of argument was this: “It is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” Later, however, Marx was more cautious of the idea of inevitability. In a famous 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx suggested that Russia could bypass capitalism: The peasantry had not been driven from the countryside, and until they were, there was no need for Russia to follow the west European model based on a landless proletariat. He had written the same thing in an earlier letter to the Russian paper Otechestvenniye Zapiski in 1877: “By studying each of these evolutions on its own, and then comparing them, one will easily discover the key to the phenomenon, but it will never be arrived at by employing the all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.”

Perry Anderson, among others, has criticised the Zasulich letter for its implied vision “of a direct transition from the Russian village commune to socialism.” He says what Marx’s account lacks is an explanation of how society might advance from a primitive economic egalitarianism to an advanced industrial socialism. Or one might say there is a tension within Karl Marx’s theory of economic development. On the one hand, Marx believed that the world was moving in one direction, towards a more integrated global capitalism. On the other hand, he was also alive to the unevenness of this process, and to the possibility of contrary outcomes. After Marx’s death, several writers attempted or are attempting to combine these insights in the theory of “combined and uneven development.” According to this argument, capitalism was spreading even to the underdeveloped countries. Indeed the system that developed in such countries was often capitalism in a comparatively advanced form. Accordingly, they feel, whole stages of capitalist development, which took hundreds of years in Germany or Britain, could be skipped in Latin America, Russia and elsewhere. A similar process can be seen in the recent spread of computer technology to Africa. In such countries as Egypt or South Africa, there are some schools with computers and essential skills including network management and computer maintenance. They do remain rare but yet there are available the latest computer languages, animation, web-page design and other technologies to be found in the West. This debate is one that may be usefully visited. 

It is not only Marx’s account of the radical nature of capitalism, which is of relevance to the debate on globalisation. In Marx and Engels’ work, there is also a sustained account of the relationship between different regions under capitalism. Although several globalisation theorists have argued that world capitalism will bring the third world up to the same level of development as the richest western countries, Marx was less optimistic about such a change. Marx dealt with this subject in 1853, in his article on revolution in China and in Europe; it was published in the New York Daily Tribune. 
Two points stand out.

First, Marx argued that there was a connection between developments in the East and class struggle in the master countries. Both were aspects of a total system of social relationships, and there was no necessary reason for the West showing the way to the East, it could rather be vice versa. Writing on China in 1853, Marx maintained that “the next uprising of the peoples of Europe .… may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire than on any other cause that now exists.”

Second, Marx was alive to the brutality of the colonial system. He sympathised with the misery of ordinary Indians and openly sided with them during the Indian war of independence of 1857-59, which was a rare position in Britain at the time. Marx’s articles for the New York Daily Tribune, like “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” are vivid examples. Marx did argue that imperialism would bring to the non-industrial countries the advantages of capitalist technology, railways and new methods of production. Yet, rather than taking these developments as an example of progress, he portrayed these positive developments as part of the same process as the tortures and humiliation inflicted by colonialism. Indeed, he compared them to “that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” So, according to him, progress was only an indirect result of the British rule in India. 

SCIENCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

One theme of globalisation is that scientific development would necessarily introduce social change; the introduction of new technology including new media, computers and the Internet would inevitably change the way people live and work. Although Marx and Engels are often described as economic determinists, who would presumably not accept the logic of such an argument, both were in fact sceptical of this approach. As Marx pointed out in his philosophical writings, such crude materialism deprives people of their role as agents with a power over their own future. His belief was that economic changes did shape social life but they did not determine its condition. Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” throw light on it. He says the materialist doctrine concerning the change in circumstances forgets that it is men who change circumstances. Human beings do not act under conditions of their own choosing but they do make their own history. According to Marx, there is an interaction between base and superstructure, with the economic base shaping society and society then reshaping its economic base.

Another argument associated with globalisation is the notion that production is most effective where it is most flexible. A range of goods can be achieved through flexible production, while the way to achieve flexible production is by reducing the stocks of products and raw materials. According to the theorists of just-in-time production, even materials and machinery should be purchased according to the latest trends of demand. One way to meet the consumer’s demand is by keeping the supply of new means of production to a minimum. By contrast, in Capital, Vol 2 (published posthumously, in 1885), Marx argued that the only way to achieve continuous production was through establishing a steady supply of raw materials: “To the extent that there is no rapidity, regularity and security of supply [of raw materials], the latent part of the productive capital in the hands of the producer, that is to say the supply of raw materials waiting to be used, must increase in size.” Although it may be possible to reduce the stocks of finished products, it is much harder for firms to treat raw materials in the same way. 

Yet another claim associated with globalisation is that industrial capital is becoming less important while financial capital is now dominant. As finance has become more globalised, it is possible to buy stocks and shares all round the world. So where finance has blazed the trail, production must follow and move in the same way. Marx argued the reverse: under the conditions of advanced capitalism, finance is subordinate to industry, and this could be observed at times of boom and slump. The varied fortunes of international finance tended to follow the highs and lows of industrial production. “In the preliminary stages of bourgeois society, trade dominates industry; in modern society, the opposite.” Marx argued that capitalism had a tendency to age and would go into a crisis --- a long way from the optimistic visions of enthusiastic globalisers.

In the end, Marx and Engels hoped that international capitalist production would meet its nemesis in an international revolt of labour. While supporting the workers’ demands, they also called for an extension of national rights. In the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx and Engels campaigned against American slavery and for the right of the oppressed Poles to form their own state. These bourgeois democratic demands were perfectly in line with Marx’s vision of a workers’ revolution. He hoped that revolution would spread, becoming more socialist as it advanced from one country to another. What began with localised campaigns against national oppression would become a popular movement with socialist goals.

Marx and Engels believed that workers in the advanced nations could secure their liberation only if they fought together with workers in the colonial poorest countries. Working class politics had to be international, or it was nothing. This belief informed Marx’s famous letter to Kugelmann, in which he argued that English workers must fight the oppression on the Irish: “They will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes.… And that must be done not out of a sympathy for Ireland, but as a demand based on the interests of the English proletariat.” In this argument, as elsewhere, Marx’s relevance continues as earlier. 

MARX’S GUIDE TO ACTION

After the Soviet Union’s demise, motivated theorisations about the November Revolution’s message and Marx’s theory of revolution are bewildering many of the leftists. But the demise of the November Revolution after 74 years was not due to any fallacy ingrained in the revolution but due to direct violation of Marx and Lenin’s ideology and guidance for revolution at the later stages of the Soviet Union’s existence. 

One motivated propaganda is that socialist revolution cannot be successful in a backward country and that was why the November Revolution failed. This is a rotten propaganda that does not go into the real reason of the failure. The fact is that all the existing socialist regimes are in backward countries. Nay, revolutionary movements are today raging more vigorously in backward countries, in Latin American countries for example. Marx had come to such a conclusion in the later part of his life.

Moreover, the straightjacket theory that a country can think of socialist construction only after full bloom of capitalism is another erroneous theorisation. In that case, facts would have proved as wrong the innovations like New Democracy as in China or People’s Democracy as by the CPI(M) in India.

Thus the possibility of a revolution in a backward country still holds good and Marx’s theory of revolution is again being confirmed by the present world events. Despite all the ill-conceived propaganda, Marx has returned and the message of the November Revolution would continue to inspire the world so long as capitalism exists.