Comments on: Come Back Karl

By: Jacob Richter

Jacob Richter — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:25:32 +0000

I forgot to mention Marx the labour economist (much more accurate in describing the exploitation of labour and too hyped as a “crisis economist”) and the concepts of class-struggle-as-political-struggle, classes-in-themselves, and classes-for-themselves.

By: Jacob Richter

Jacob Richter — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:23:46 +0000

For revolutionaries and other activists of Lenin’s time, the Marx that was important was not Marx the “crisis economist,” or Marx the philosopher, or Marx the historian, but rather Marx the political activist.

“Come back Karl; all is forgiven. You were right. (Up to ‘the revolution’, that is.)” is woefully ignorant of Marx’s very active role in the history of worker movements and of revolution as an economic and also political process.

“The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country” is the typical remark that is ignorant of key works by Marx from the 1870s to his death. It is also ignorant of Marxist developments of those remarks in connection with inter-imperialist rivalry.

By: Camus123

Camus123 — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:34:32 +0000

Karl often gets blamed for Lenin and Stalin – as if he ought to have foreseen where the Russian revolution in 1917 would lead to. It’s worth remembering that he hoped that the working class in Germany would be the first ones to throw off the yoke and put his theories into practice. We haven’t got to the point where the stresses of the current crisis begin to stretch the resources of the state, but we must be pretty close.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:27:37 +0000

My recollection of 1989 was that it felt as if everything was still to play for, Civic Forums and all – it was the end of Communism in Europe, but it didn’t feel like the end of Communism, let alone socialism. That came a couple of years later – the flare-out of the Yanayev coup was exhilarating, but what followed after made me feel that one too many brick had been knocked out. In something I wrote at the time – now lost on the far side of the Typewriter Event Horizon – I said that the collapse of the State Committee of the State of Emergency seemed to have retroactively discredited all the other Committees before it, right back to 1793, and made a whole way of thinking about politics unavailable to us.

It was a very disorientating period for the Left – surprisingly so, for those of us who’d never called ourselves Leninists – and one in which the Right (under any definition) made quick and massive gains. So I agree with you about the relationship between the end of the Communist bloc and the revival of capitalism red in tooth and claw – thus making Marx more relevant than ever. But I think the end of the USSR needs to be seen as a defeat for the Left – and not only the relatively insignificant parts of the Left which actually supported it. Dialectical innit.