- by A Carruthers
- The Guardian
- Issue #2122
Karl Marx invites job reps and community activists to share insights from Capital into how we are exploited, how nature is plundered and how to put an end to both by Humphrey McQueen
The written works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, have extraordinary breadth. Not only are they the makers of the great theoretical treatises, the epic works of scientific analysis, they were also great journalists, able to sweep up the immediate news as it came through and integrate it into their class view of history. Moreover they were also great proposers and critics of programs, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, but also their discussions and criticisms of other programs, notably the Erfurt and Gotha Programs, the Social Democrat programs. Lenin thought through the revolutionary practice of socialist governance both before and after 1921 and the transformation away from War Communism; Lenin took what Marx and Engels first saw and applied it to his age. The Leninist Communist Party is the bedrock of socialist countries today, who more and more show the success of this mode of governance, how it opens the path to communism. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were theoretical scientists, lively journalists, and programmatic, industrial communists. They were at one with all these roles.
Recent writing from Humphrey McQueen bears no similarity to the above. There’s a lot of confusing cultural speculation, and aimless bewilderment. This is what happens when somebody loses the dynamism of Marxism-Leninism and falls into the nihilism of the age; with no socialist mode of production ahead, no horizon of workers’ power, and no instruments of analysis to see it with.
McQueen’s latest blunders also show what happens when you repudiate the living idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the embodiment of class struggle. When you turn your back on the idea and the reality of the internationalist mass Party, the peoples’ democratic dictatorship, you head for the woods and don’t come back.
Let us put aside the “analytic” sections on Capital itself, in which McQueen quotes mainly from Volume 1 of Capital, only once from 3, and typically of Western Marxists not at all from Volume 2. Let’s focus on McQueen’s “program” for the future, the “Seven Pillars of wellbeing.” We have no disagreement with the pressing issues in these, for instance housing and education. One of these is work, and linking workplaces to communities, which he claims requires “learning through doing.” McQueen doesn’t link this “doing” to unions, to guilds, to workers’ industrial power. “Community activists” as he calls them have to “join in activities which show how changes in our everyday doings can lead to ways of living which enrich our individuality as part of our shared humanity.”
It’s a typical New Left fantasy: to imagine you can change the world entirely on the side of social relations, without changing production. How anyone can make this error if they claim to be a reader of Marx and Engels is anyone’s guess. Section III of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the section that critiques the socialists of their day, deals precisely with these errors. Like the “reactionary socialists,” McQueen shows a “total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.” Like the petty-bourgeois socialists, he points to the “misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production,” but has no ideas as to how to replace the old property relations, the old society, the old means of production. Like the “Critical-Utopian communists,” he resorts to individualistic notions of wellbeing, communitarianism and self-emancipation, but is unable to analyse the material conditions for the organisational and political advance of the proletariat, the conditions under which it becomes a revolutionary class. He remains a reformist.
Workers cannot stand in the midst of the productive forces of the day without a dictatorship of the proletariat, a workers’ power. Without unions, without workers’ state power in real, material, industrial terms, without a horizon of proletarian socialist governance, the establishment of workers’ power in the state as of the Manifesto, and the bending of the state towards the society, in preparation for the withering of its old bourgeois function, these kinds of participatory changes, the creation of the new social relations of socialist society, are impossible.
Reading Marx is one thing, applying it in practice, in reality, requires action: participation in unions, a Workers or Communist Party, and Proletarian internationalism. It also takes applying the quest for workers power to our current material conditions.
McQueen’s pamphlet is a mish-mash of New Left revisionism and poor readings of original texts. McQueen’s work has mainly been on Australian cultural history, but his contribution to Marxist theory is slight. It is better that he confines his intellectual focus to cultural history, goes back to all the original texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (not just some, but all of them), while concentrating his political efforts to building industrial workers’ power in Australia.
