Book Reviews
Contents:
Classical Marxism. By David Renton. New Clarion Press. 2002.
There is a tradition of ideas that can be termed Classical Leninism.
According to this tradition, classical Marxism was betrayed by a number
of key leaders until the collapse of the Second International in the
First World War, leaving the way clear for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to
carry the flag of socialist revolution. This is the “Great Man” theory
of history, and even though this book includes two women in its
collection of biographies, the leader fixation remains the same.
Marx played a prominent role in the formation of the International
Working Men's Association (1864-1876), which became better known as the
First International. This was an international federation of working
class organisations based on the principle that the emancipation of the
working class could only be achieved by the working class itself.
Renton argues that the Second International (1889-1914) was set up as
an explicitly Marxist organisation but went on to distort Marx's ideas
to suit their own purposes. This was the era of “classical Marxism” and
Karl Kautsky was its leading theoretician. Kautsky was the “Pope” of
Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Second
International. He is the main bogeyman in classical Leninism.
But there can be no doubt that Kautsky did distort Marx, in particular
his support for reformism. Kautsky, Lenin and Renton are agreed that
parliamentary action must be reformist. However, this is not
Marx's conclusion, as he wrote in 1881 of workers' struggles being
“pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal,
including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of
trickery which it has been up till now into an instrument of
emancipation” (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/overview/principles.pdf)
and other writings by Marx. There is no reason why parliamentary
institutions could not be used by a class-conscious socialist majority
to win power for the socialist revolution, and this is the position
adopted by the Socialist Party at its formation in June 1904. Delegates
were sent from the Socialist Party to the Amsterdam Congress of the
Second International in August 1904, but, after seeing the reformism
rampant within it, soon decided to have no more to do with it. When the
leaders of the SPD voted for war credits in 1914 it came as a shock to
Lenin and at first he refused to believe the news. The Socialist Party,
on the other hand, had long warned of SPD support for militarism .
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/translations/bebel(1907).pdf
The fact is the Second International, the Third (Leninist)
International (1919-1943) and the Fourth (Trotskyite) International
(1938 onwards) have all distorted Marx for their own purposes. The
main, but by no means only distortion by Lenin concerns the vanguard
party. Lenin argued that workers were incapable of self-emancipation
and instead must be freed from above by professional revolutionaries
who have the workers' best interests at heart. (Renton points out that
this is similar to Kautsky's position.) But Marx and Engels profoundly
disagreed, as they made clear in a circular to the SPD in 1879:
“At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the
battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by
the working class itself. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say
openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves,
and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of
the upper and lower middle classes” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/18.htm).
So what is left of Marxism? Renton prefaces his book with a quote from
an incredulous Trotsky: “None of those who propose to renounce
Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other
course.” The Socialist Party has argued that the answer is to be found
in the self-activity of the working class. For as Rosa Luxemburg wrote
in Leninism or Marxism?: “Historically, the errors committed by
a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the
infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee” and “The working
class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of
history”(www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ch02.htm).
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Neo-Darwinism
A Devil's Chaplain. By Richard Dawkins. Weidenfield &
Nicolson, 2003.
The ironic title of this collection of essays comes from a letter
Darwin wrote to a friend commenting on his own work, Origin of the
Species: “What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write . . .” Most of
the essays here concern Darwin's intellectual legacy. Dawkins is
probably the world's foremost advocate of Darwinism – or as he prefers
to call it, “Neo-Darwinism.” His uncompromising defence of scientific
method and scorn for irrationally held beliefs has earned Dawkins some
notoriety, and some reviewers of this book have been dismayed by what
they perceive as his arrogance. But what is offensive to some is
refreshingly outspoken to others.
The core of Darwinism, argues Dawkins, is the “theory that evolution is
guided in adaptively nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of
small random hereditary changes.” Several of the essays here defend and
expand on that theory. But at the same time as Dawkins supports
Darwinism as a science, he states “I am a passionate anti-Darwinian
when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.”
This corrects the impression which may have been given to some by his
earlier book The Selfish Gene that we are all somehow prisoners
of our genes. He denies ever holding a belief in genetic determinism in
the sense that genes determine social behaviour.
Dawkins's withering criticism is mainly directed at religion and
associated beliefs. Yet it is important to realise that Dawkins is not
being gratuitous; where irrational beliefs affect us all they should be
subject to the closest scrutiny. Dawkins tells the story of a TV debate
he had with a cleric (later elevated to the House of Lords). The cleric
refused to shake hands with any women in the studio for fear that they
might be menstruating and so be, in religious terms, “unclean.”
Dawkins's comment is typical Dawkinsism: “They took the insult more
graciously than I would have, and with the 'respect' always bestowed on
religious prejudice – but no other kind of prejudice”. Dawkins is an
honorary member of the Rationalist Press Association, and it's safe to
say he is no socialist, though he did come out publicly against the
recent Gulf War.
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Fetish worship
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. By Alissa
Quart. Arrow.
“Catch them young” has always been the slogan of those peddling
religious ideas, but it has now been taken on board by people in charge
of marketing in capitalist corporations. As Alissa Quart shows in this
interesting if sometimes superficial book, clothing and cosmetics
companies in particular are increasingly targeting teenagers and
'tweens' (nine-to-thirteen year-olds).
The idea is that youngsters who develop an attachment for a particular
brand (Gap, for instance) will continue to buy it as they get older.
Thus money spent on advertising to kids will pay big dividends over the
years ahead. Brands and logos become crucial in adolescent peer groups:
if you don't have the right bag or shoes, then you may have trouble
being accepted by your would-be friends.
But how to advertise? Teenagers spend less time watching TV these days
than a few years ago, preferring to surf the web or play video games.
So, while TV advertising remains important, it is being rivalled by
sneakier ideas such as product placement in films. In Legally Blonde,
for instance, it is clear which make of nail polish and shampoo the
main character uses. Another avenue for publicity involves planting
logos in video games: a skateboarding game may contain logos for a
company that makes boards and clothing, or the 'characters' in the game
may skate past one of the company's shops.
Teen peer-to-peer marketing is another ploy, with teenagers being
'employed' as unpaid salespeople, to spread the idea of a particular
brand to their friends and provide feedback on proposed new lines. At
the same time, parents work longer hours and so have less time with
their children, who they may buy off by spending more money on them. As
a result, the brand has become a kind of surrogate parent:
“Teenagers have come to feel that consumer goods are their friends –
and that the companies selling products to them are trusted allies.
After all, they inquire after the kids' opinions with all the
solicitude of an ideal parent. Tell us how best to sell you our
products, they ask. If you do, we will always love you.”
There may be a bit of exaggeration here, but it remains a pretty
dreadful condemnation of the pressures that commodity-based society
places on workers as both producers and consumers.
I must confess that I found parts of the book barely comprehensible –
I'd like to think that this is due to its American emphasis rather than
my being an old fogey. Quart supplies a preface for this edition, where
she discusses the extent to which US-derived marketing ideas have
spread to Britain. Schools, for instance, often house subsidised
vending machines from Coke and so on, while the Walkers' Crisps
campaign involving “free” textbooks has boosted their brand rating. On
the whole, though, things are not quite as commercialised here – not
yet, anyway, but there is little doubt about the way that capitalism is
going and about how it is driven by marketing considerations rather
than any satisfying of human needs.
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