“MARCH ACTION” (Germany 1921)
An attempted revolutionary uprising in Germany in 1921, the second such attempt following World War I.
“On March 17, 1921, the German Communist Party began an armed rising against
the government, known in party history as the ‘March action’. The enterprise was certainly
supported, perhaps prompted, by Zinoviev and Comintern officials; the involvement of other
Soviet leaders, heavily preoccupied at the moment by the Kronstadt revolt and the party
congress, is doubtful. But the defeat of the German rising must have further diminished the
waning hopes in Moscow of revolutions in the west, and strengthened the hand of those who
saw a diplomatic accommodation with the capitalist countries as the immediate goal.”
—E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin, 1917-1929 (2004 [1979]),
p. 44.
MARIGHELLA, Carlos (1911-1969)
Brazilian revolutionary writer, leftist politician, and guerrilla fighter who promoted urban
guerrilla warfare and who was killed shortly after launching that form of struggle.
As a young man Marighella joined the Brazilian
Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro - PCB) and soon became one of its leaders. He
was arrested and tortured by the reactionary Brazilian regime on at least two occasions. In
1946, and representing the PCB, he was elected a Federal Deputy, and held that position until
the PCB was once again banned in 1948. He visited China in 1953-1954 at the invitation of the
Communist Party of China. But later on he was much more influenced by the Cuban Revolution and
the foco strategy of Che Guevara.
In May 1964, after a military coup seized power in Brazil, Marighella was shot and arrested
by the political police (DOPS), but was released the next year. His 1966 book, The Brazilian
Crisis, promoted armed struggle against the military dictatorship. Soon afterwards he
renounced his leadership position in the PCB, and in August 1967 he participated in the 1st
Conference of Latin American Solidarity in Havana. The next year, while still in Havana, he
wrote Some Questions About the Guerrillas in Brazil, which was dedicated to Che’s memory.
He was then expelled from the PCB, and founded the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) urban guerrilla
organization in February 1968. In September 1969 ALN members participated in the kidnapping of
the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick. This event, along with other ALN robberies
and kidnappings, led to a major effort on the part of the regime to destroy the ALN and capture
or kill Marighella. This they quickly accomplished. He was shot dead by police in an ambush led
by DOPS on November 4, 1969.
Marighella’s most famous book is the Minimanual
of the Urban Guerrilla, which is available online in English translation at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-guerrilla/index.htm
This work has been praised and adopted by many petty bourgeois proponents of urban guerrilla
warfare including the Weather Underground, factions of the
Irish Republican Army, the Basque ETA, the Red Army Faction, and Red Brigades in Europe. Of course
this revolutionary strategy has not proven to be correct or successful anywhere, mostly because it
necessitates isolation from the masses. Small bands of heroes cannot replace the revolutionary
struggle of the masses.
Carlos Marighella was a dedicated revolutionary,
and he can and should be honored for that. But his theory that urban guerrilla warfare in countries
like Brazil can promote and lead to a spontaneous peasant revolt in the countryside just makes
little sense. The working people of the world simply have to employ a much more rational way to
make social revolution.
“MARKET SOCIALISM”
An attempt to combine “socialism” with capitalism, and in particular with the capitalist
commodity market (including the market for labor-power).
From the revolutionary Marxist (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) perspective this makes no sense
whatsoever, because we define socialism as the transitional
stage between capitalism and
communism. But various types of
revisionist thinkers view “socialism” as merely a
modification of capitalism, and sometimes even such a slight modification that some of
them consider a lightly “regulated” capitalist welfare state (such as in Scandinavia)
to be “socialism”!
Clearly nothing like European
social democracy can be in any way viewed as genuine
socialism, either economically or politically. But couldn’t we imagine a society
where there are really no capitalists, but still separate, decentralized state-run
enterprises that use a market to sell commodities to each other, and sell mass-consumption
commodities to the people? Couldn’t there still be a labor market as well, with these
enterprises hiring workers, and even continuing to extract
surplus value from them—but then turning
all of this surplus value over to the state for the expansion of production and
for public purposes (education, health care, retirement benefits, and so forth), with no
“profits” going to any rich owners of the enterprises (because there are none)?
One important thing to seriously ponder in
a thought experiment of this kind is just how stable such a system would be. In
fact it would be extremely unstable, and would inevitably degenerate back into traditional
capitalism. There would still be foremen, supervisors, layers of management of plants and
enterprises, influential people running the government and the dominent political parties,
and so forth. And these people would soon develop (if they didn’t already have) special
interests of their own, both as individuals, and collectively as a new social class. In
other words class society would soon reassert itself, and we would soon be back in the
horrible capitalist world where we live today.
“But couldn’t we keep such tendencies
under control?” someone might ask. “Couldn’t we perhaps use the methods developed in Mao’s
China to have managers also engage in productive labor, to rotate streams of ordinary workers
into management and government positions for limited periods of time, etc. Couldn’t we even
engage in struggle against those who get too uppity and start to gather too many
private privileges and too much individual power, and so forth?” The answer is that this
sort of thing might work for a while, and will have to be made to work during the
relatively short socialist transition period to communism. But if society is organized in
such a way that these measures are permanently necessary, then an eventual breakdown
and return to capitalism is inevitable. The entire underlying material basis for capitalism
must be destroyed, and destroyed down to its lowest roots, if capitalism is itself to be
destroyed once and for all.
And here is where it is necessary to come
to understand the nature of bourgeois “right”,
and how it grows out of the commodity form itself. If you have commodities, if you have
commodity exchange, if you have the extraction of surplus value (even if for a time it
is somehow arranged that it is put to public uses), then eventually you will have
a complete system of capitalism again, because capitalism grows out of those
seeds.
What we revolutionary Marxists are trying
to do is to transform society so that classes no longer exist, so that class struggle no
longer needs to exist, and so that not even any “struggle” to prevent the development
of classes again is necessary any more! There is a way to do this, but it requires
uprooting capitalism completely, and on a world scale, down even to the existence of
commodity markets and the commodity form. And this is why we are also determined opponents
of any “market socialism” schemes.
The main motivation for favoring “market
socialism” comes from those who can only conceive of socialism in the form it took in the
Soviet Union, and view that failure as something that is inevitable in a “command economy”.
Thus they are straining their brains to think of another way to make socialism work. Well,
there is another way, a way that was outlined by Marx, Lenin and Mao. And that way is not
the state capitalism of the revisionist Soviet Union nor is it “market socialism”. Those
who champion that last scheme have just not investigated the problem deeply enough to
understand the inherent flaws in their proposals.
For those seeking to look into the question
of “market socialism” further, I suggest first seriously studying the great work by Marx,
“The Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875) which is available online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm. See also:
SYNDICALISM
MARKING [Linguistics: Semantics]
The utilization of the name of a broader category in a narrower (less abstract) sense. For
example, the word ‘animal’ in the broader sense includes all mammals and thus also us human
beings. But in the semantically marked sense—such as in a sign on the door of grocery
store saying “No animals allowed inside”—we human beings are contrasted with (other) animals.
The sign does not mean that no human beings are allowed in the store! It is the context
that “marks” this use of the word as being narrower.
Another example, where there is at present
social struggle involved (mostly among liberals and youth) which is now leading to changes in
how many people talk, is the use of the word ‘men’ to include both male and female human beings
(as in the sentence “All men are mortal”). No one imagines that this means the speaker thinks
that women may not be mortal! But, in contrast, in the marked sense, the word ‘men’
refers only to males (as with reference to the “Men’s Room” in a restaurant). The unmarked
senses of many English words (such as man, men, mankind, mailman, fisherman, etc.) are now
falling out of favor—because of the long history of male chauvinism in class society. While
this trend is understandable and reasonable, it is in fact also based on a failure of the
public to understand the difference between the marked and unmarked words in these cases, and
the whole concept of semantic marking in linguistics. And it does sometimes get quite silly
and carried away, as with a few feminists (including some men) who insist on spelling ‘women’
as ‘womyn’. I suppose there must be some people who also object to the word ‘humanity’ because
of the imagined chauvinist inclusion of the word ‘man’ within it! Moreover, things are getting
even more socially complicated and sometimes bizarre in this case, because even what it means
for a person to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ or perhaps some intermediate or other gender is now a
matter of confusion and/or struggle.
While semantic marking may be systematically
misconstrued in a few specific cases like this, it is in general a very important aspect of
language (all languages!), and an important means by which we humans think. The ability
to move in both directions in our thought, towards the more abstract and towards the more
specific, are critically important. And thus semantic marking (and unmarking)
are essential to thinking.
See also:
HYPONYM
“To show that a good part of what we call ‘flexibility’ and ‘creativity’
is tied to the eminently human faculty of extending categories and making leaps between
them, we’ll take a close look at a particular phenomenon that gives insight into the
processes underlying the development of concepts—specifically, the linguistic phenomenon
called marking, which is extremely widespred in language, although people seldom
notice it at all; in fact, few even know it exists. The idea is that a single word of a
language can designate both a narrower and a broader category, where the narrower one is
wholly contained inside the broader one... Although marking can occasionally hinder
communication and lead to confusion, it is mostly a useful tool, imbuing language with
greater fluidity by allowing several categories to be labeled simultaneously by a single
term and by taking advantage of our mind’s natural sensitivity to context.” —Douglas
Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of
Thinking (2013), pp. 186-7.
“In language, one sees category membership shifting in a striking
fashion thanks to the phenomenon of marking, which allows an entity to shift its
category membership without changing its lexical label, but simply by changing the
level of abstraction that applies to that label. Marking is the phenomenon whereby a
word is used sometimes as the name of a general category and other times as the name of
a subcategory of the general one. When such a word is used in its broader sense, it is
said to have its unmarked meaning, while the narrower sense is the marked
meaning.” —Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, ibid., p. 193.
MARRIAGE — Trends in Contemporary Capitalist Society
In advanced capitalist countries in the contemporary era, marriage is being more and more
delayed, and there are indications that formal marriages may even be gradually dying out!
There are various reasons for this, including changing social mores, but the most fundamental
reason seems very likely to be the worsening economic situation for most people as the
long-developing capitalist economic crisis gets worse and worse. (Note that the start of the
increasing delay in marriage shown in the graph at the right corresponds almost exactly with
the beginning of the Long Slowdown in the U.S. economy in
the early 1970s.) When more and more people can no longer obtain reliable jobs with at least
wages capable of supporting both themselves and their families, then how can they reasonably
get married and start families? If they do live together they are still somewhat like
individuals more or less “on their own” economically than people in a true marriage. And if
they nevertheless do have a child or two, how certain is their long-term economic ability to
support them?
Marx explained how the wages for workers must
tend toward the level just barely able to live at the prevailing low current standard and to
allow for the bringing up of new generations of workers. But, because of ever increased
productivity and the long-term economic slowdown due to growing crisis, more and more of the
population becomes unnecessary as workers for the capitalists. This means more and more
competition for jobs, which in turn means that the wage level can and does tend to decline
below the level necessary to support marriages and families! That is exactly what
seems to be going on as the capitalist nightmare in human society continues.
See also:
“MIDDLE CLASS”—Bourgeois Ideology Of [WSJ
quote]
“According to a Census Bureau survey, the estimated median age of first
marriage in 2022 was 28.2 years old for women and 30.1 years old for men, up from 20.5
and 23.7 in 1947.” —New York Times, “Facts of Interest”, October 27, 2024.
MARTIN, Bill (1956- )
An eclectic radical American intellectual who is a professor of philosophy at DePaul
University in Chicago. His philosophical views have been influenced by many diverse and
conflicting sources, but especially by Kant and by modern
Continental philosophers such as
Sartre, Althusser,
Derrida and Badiou. Overall we
believe it is fair to call Martin a radical Kantian, especially in ethics.
For a number of years Martin was close to
the Revolutionary Communist Party and served to lend some limited
academic respectability to them through this association. With Bob
Avakian he co-authored a book of philosophical conversations entitled Marxism and the
Call of the Future (2005). A couple years later, however, Martin broke with the RCP and
became a participant in the Kasama Project whose core consisted
of others who also left the orbit of the RCP. Martin considers himself to be a “Maoist”,
though he is at pains to reject a number of what he views as “dogmatic principles” of
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In his book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of
Liberation (2008), as in his joint work with Avakian and elsewhere, Martin argues for
a Kantian re-envisioning of ethics within Marxism. Thus Martin has many similarities to the
philosophical idealists within Marxism in Lenin’s day, who also called for a “return to
Kant”.
Among Martin’s other works are several on
rock music and one entitled Into the Wild: Badiou, actually-existing Maoism, and the
“vital mix” of yesterday and tomorrow, which demonstrated how deeply enamored Martin is
with Badiou.
[See also my “Report on a Discussion by Bill
Martin & Raymond Lotta of a book by Martin and Bob Avakian” (April 2007), at:
https://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/BillMartin-RayLotta.htm —S.H.]
MARTOV, L. (or Julius) (Real name: Yuli Osipovich Tsederbaum) (1873-1923)
A prominent Russian Menshevik leader. He was born in Istanbul into
a Russian Jewish “middle-class” family. Martov led the struggle against Lenin at the Second
Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 (which was really its founding
Congress). His “Mensheviks” (“minority”) were defeated on the issue of the composition of
the editorial board of the Party publication Iskra [“Spark”], but won the vote on the
issue of who should be allowed to be a member of the Party. (Lenin wanted a party of fully
committed and dedicated revolutionaries; Martov wanted a party with much looser and broader
membership rules.) This led to the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks (“majority”).
Martov, however, was generally on the “left”
wing of the Mensheviks, and opposed Russian participation in World War I, which he agreed
with Lenin was an imperialist war. He thus became the central leader of the
“Menshevik Internationalist” faction, which
opposed the main Menshevik party leadership. Martov also opposed the Mensheviks becoming part
of the Provisional Government after the overthrow of the tsar, but was unable to stop them from
doing so and from continuing their support for the war.
Martov was thus marginalized both within the
overall R.S.D.L.P., and even within the Mensheviks. After the October Revolution, he became
even more marginalized, and in 1920 legally emigrated to Germany where he died three years
later. In his last few years he established a newspaper called Socialist Messenger
which continued publication in Paris and then New York until the last of the Mensheviks
abroad petered out. It is rumored that Lenin himself provided the initial money for Martov
to set up this newspaper! If true, it would not be too surprising; Lenin thought that even
the enemies of the people should still be allowed a small voice, as long as they were unable
to corrupt the masses.
MARX, Karl (1818-1883)
The primary founder, along with Frederick Engels, of the science
of society and social revolution which is now customarily known as Marxism,
or—as it has further developed—as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
[Much more to be added...]
“As to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering either the
existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me
bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle
and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new
was to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of classes is merely linked to
particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that class
struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this
dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes
and to a classless society.” —Marx, Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852,
Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: 1975), p. 64; in a slightly different
translation in MECW 39:62.
“These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and
the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to
Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science. The next thing was to
work out all its details and relations.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878),
MECW 25:27.
MARX — and Philosophy
As a young man Marx saw the need to study philosophy in order to begin to understand the world.
Unlike most who do so, and once he felt he understood the basic points of philosophy (which are
by no means inherently undecidable as bourgeois ideologists contend!), Marx then shifted his
focus of interest into politics and political economy. Not such a bad personal trajectory!
“In 1837 [at the age of 19] Marx ceased his literary pursuits, having
come to the conclusion that he can make no progress in any branch of science, for example,
jurisprudence, without first studying philosophy. Indeed, as Engels was to write later,
if one wishes to develop and perfect the capacity for theoretical thought, ‘there is as
yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.’
“Marx attempted a critical
interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel, who then had a large following at Berlin
University. Marx was both attracted and repelled by Hegel. He was deeply impressed by
Hegel’s dialectic, by his attempt to grasp the world in its development, in motion, in
the struggle of opposites. He recognized in Hegel a gigantic philosopher who had dared
to draw into one philosophical system the entire development of the universe, the whole
of science and art. However, this system was idealistic in that, for Hegel, the creator
of the natural world was the ‘world spirit’, thus making the idea prime [primary] over
matter. Marx began to doubt whether Hegel was right, and in order to resolve these doubts
he turned to the source of philosophy, to the philosophers of Ancient Greece.
“From among the numerous
philosophical trends of antiquity, Marx chooses to examine the ideas of Democritus and
Epicurus. Both were materialists and moreover, developed the theory that matter is
composed of basic, indivisible particles—atoms. The fact that Marx selected the
philosophies of the major Greek atomists and materialists reveals the direction in
which he was moving in his search for a new world view. The Hegelian system could not
be superceded within the framework of idealism. No idealist philosophy could be of any
help in this regard. Only the age-old materialist tradition could offer a solution.
“Marx chose the philosophy of
Democritus and Epicurus as the theme of his doctor’s thesis, which he successfully
completed in 1841. This thesis reveals that, while Marx has not yet adopted a fully
materialist outlook, he is already dissatisfied with idealism. This work, together with
the preparatory manuscripts, contains a profound criticism of Hegel and his reactionary
followers, the so-called right-Hegelians. Marx also sharply criticizes the theoretical
basis of religion, in particular the principles used to prove the existence of God and
the immortality of the soul.
“In the last three years as a
student, Marx moves from a struggle against religious hypocrisy and religious morality to
a decisive rejection of religion. At that time, criticism of religion was one of the
forms of protest against the feudal-monarchical system in Prussia, which had the
blessing of the official church. Marx’s friends from the left-wing, more progressive
followers of Hegel (the so-called Young Hegelians) became enthusiastic critics of
religion and theology.
“[However,] purely theoretical
speculation did not satisfy the young doctor of philosophy. He wished to combine
philosophy with reality, that is, to take an active part in politics.”
—The Basics of Marxist-Leninist
Theory, ed. by G. N. Volkov, (Moscow: Progress, 1979), pp. 14-15.
MARX — “Promethean Impulse” Attributed to Marx
“Critics of Marx have sometimes noted a so-called Promethean strain
in his work—a belief in Man’s sovereignty over Nature, along with a faith in limitless
human progress. There is indeed such a current in his writings, as one might expect
from a nineteenth-century European intellectual. There was little concern with plastic
bags and carbon emissions around 1860. Besides, Nature sometimes needs to be subjugated.
Unless we build a lot of seawalls pretty quickly, we are in danger of losing Bangladesh.
Typhoid jabs are an exercise of human sovereignty over Nature. So are bridges and brain
surgery. Milking cows and building cities mean harnessing Nature to our own ends. The
idea that we should never seek to get the better of Nature is sentimental nonsense. Yet
even if we do need to get the better of it from time to time, we can do so only by that
sensitive attunement to its inner workings known as science.
“Marx himself sees this sentimentalism
(‘a childish attitude to nature,’ as he calls it) as reflecting a superstitious stance
to the natural world, in which we bow down before it as a superior power; and this
mystified relation to our surroundings reappears in modern times as what he calls the
fetishism of commodities. Once again, our lives are determined by alien powers, dead
bits of matter which have been imbued with a tyrannical form of life....
“As early as The German
Ideology, Marx is to be found including geographical and climatic factors in social
analysis. All historical analysis, he declares, ‘must set out from these natural bases
and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.’ He writes
in Capital of ‘socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating
their material interchange with nature and bringing it under common control, instead
of allowing it to rule them as a blind force.’ [Vol. 3, Int’l Publishers ed., 1967,
p. 102.] ‘Interchange’ rather than lordship, rational control rather than bullying
dominion, is what is at stake. In any case, Marx’s Prometheus (he was his favorite
classical character) is less a bullish champion of technology than a political rebel.
For Marx, as for Dante, Milton, Goethe, Blake, Beethoven and Byron, Prometheus
represents revolution, creative energy and a revolt against the gods.
“The charge that Marx is just
another Enlightenment rationalist out to plunder Nature in the name of Man is quite
false. Few Victorian thinkers have so strikingly prefigured modern environmentalism.”
—Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was
Right (2011), pp. 226-8.
MARX — and Racism
There is a letter by Marx written to Engels in 1862 which criticizes
Ferdinand Lassalle in a way which certainly seems
to express a racist attitude, and apparently also an anti-Semitic attitude. Although it is
always painful to learn about any shortcomings of your heroes, our allegiance to the truth
must always take precedence over our allegiance to any individual. Here is the passage at
issue:
“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the
end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation.
The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even
though his interest and capital were guaranteed. [Marx was in a desperate financial
situation at the time. —Ed.] In this he bases himself on the view that he ought to
live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron (no doubt by the countess).
[Sophie von Hatzfeldt, who gave Lassalle a great deal of money for representing her
in a legal case against her ex-husband. —Ed.] ...
[Followed by a page of
criticisms by Marx of Lassalle’s self-importance and his absurd claims to have
controlled the ‘history of the past three years’ in Europe.]
“And on top of it all, the
sheer gluttony and wanton lechery of this ‘idealist’!
“It is now quite plain to me—as
the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended
from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or
paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and
Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably
give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.”
—Marx, excerpts from a letter
to Engels, July 30, 1862; MECW 41:389-390.
Lest these outrageous words by Marx be viewed as a matter of mistranslation from the
German original, it should be noted that the word ‘nigger’ is in English in the
original letter. And although that word had developed from the innocuous meaning of
“black” in Latin much earlier, by Marx’s day it had already long-since acquired something
close to its modern highly derogatory meaning.
Yes, this is only one letter, a private
letter not intended for publication, and Marx was perhaps justly peeved at Lasalle for a
variety of good reasons. And as far as we know this is the only time that Marx wrote in
this racist sort of way, even privately. In his newspaper articles Marx lambasted the
English military officers in India for their racist colonial actions, and similarly
prominently opposed racism and colonialism everywhere. Moreover, Marx was a staunch
opponent of slavery and a very strong supporter of the North in the Civil War in the U.S.
(However, it was quite possible to be a total opponent of slavery and to still have
racist attitudes, as was the case with Abraham
Lincoln.)
But it seems that this letter alone is
in fact sufficient evidence to conclude that Marx did have at least some actual racist
views, and probably also some anti-Semitic views. It is distressing to realize this, but
facts are facts.
Marx may well have had other views and
shortcomings which we today would justifiably criticize as well. What were his views of
homosexuality for example? (We have not yet investigated this. —Ed.) Some other general
criticisms of Marx in recent years seem to be less justified, such as his supposed
“Eurocentrism” and his supposed neglect of environmental issues (see however the entry
above on Marx’s “Promethean Impulse” on that
topic).
It seems that we have to conclude that
Marx—despite being a great revolutionary and a very far-seeing thinker in many respects—was,
like everyone else, also to some degree a person “of their own times”, that is, someone who
shared at least some of the unfounded and unscientific biases of their own age. Lenin once
remarked that you can’t live in society and be totally free of society, and that goes for
the great creators of our revolutionary science Marxism-Leninism-Maoism themselves.
In reference to Sun Yat-sen, Mao once said
that “Like many great figures in history who stood in the forefront guiding the march of
events, Dr. Sun, too, had his shortcomings. These shortcomings should be explained in the
light of the historical conditions so that people can understand; we should not be too
critical of our predecessors.” [“In Commemoration of Dr. Sun Yat-sen”
(Nov. 12, 1956), SW 5:331.] We should apply this same standard to Marx. We can and
should criticize him where we believe he is wrong—as with regard to apparent racist and
anti-Semitic views—but at the same time we should continue to uphold him as the great
revolutionary thinker and leader of the international working class that he still
undoubtedly was.
Marx himself explained early on how it is
that social revolution can actually be carried out by people who are themselves by no
means perfect. As we make revolution we also transform ourselves in the process; and the
fact that we revolutionaries ourselves need to be further transformed should by no
means frighten us:
“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances
and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances
and changed upringing, forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the
educator himself must be educated....
“The coincidence of the changing
of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only
as revolutionizing practice.” —Marx, Thesis III, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845),
first published as an appendix to Engels’s book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy in 1888. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p.
62.
“From the long-range view future generations ought to be more
knowledgeable than we are, just as men of the bourgeois-democratic era were more
knowledgeable than those of the feudal ages. Their judgment would prevail, not ours.
The youth of today and those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution
in accordance with values of their own.
“Mao’s voice dropped away and he
half closed his eyes. Man’s condition on this earth was changing with ever increasing
rapidity. A thousand years from now all of us, he said, even Marx, Engels, and Lenin
would probably appear rather ridiculous.” —Mao’s comments, as reported by Edgar Snow
from an interview on Jan. 9, 1965. SW 9:473. Online at:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/appendix.htm
MARXISM — As a Religion
There are several important things to discuss in this connection: 1) The claim by anti-Marxists
(or the just plain ignorant) that Marxism is really just another religion in the same way that
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or any other religion is; and why this claim is simply not
true. 2) The fact that some people who call themselves Marxists do in actuality
treat Marxism as a religion. And, 3) The fact that sometimes actual scientific Marxists
have spoken in rather poetic terms of Marxism as a religion, which in part acknowledges that at
least sections of the masses look at Marxism in this way. We will discuss each of these three
issues in turn:
1) Marxism is the science of social
revolution and, as a science, it can in no way be considered a religion:
Many people in contemporary bourgeois society do not at all understand the difference between
science and non-scientific systems of belief, such as religions. For them, all “belief systems”
are more or less the same sort of thing. This shows their ignorance of science and the
scientific method. Belief can be founded on what others
just tell you (such as priests), on what you were raised to believe, or on the most fanciful
ideas that you came across somewhere. That sort of belief is religious, or
at least genuinely akin to religious belief. But belief can also be founded on careful thought
and investigation, on the summation of wide experience of not only your own but of many other
people as well, and on tests of ideas through social practice and scientific experiment. A body
of scientific theory can be developed in that way, and this has been done in the case of Marxism.
Marxist principles (beliefs) are always subject to rejection or revision if further investigation
and social experience requires us to do this. And indeed, Marxism has on many occasions been
modified or extended based on new experience in the world revolutionary struggle. [See however:
“RUPTURES” IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM] Thus viewing the theory of revolutionary Marxism
(Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) as a “religion” is either a mark of complete ignorance, or else an
outright bourgeois slander.
2) Unfortunately, however, some
people who call themselves Marxists do in fact tend to partially approach Marxist
scientific theory in sort of a religious way: This sorry fact reflects a situation in
present society where people are not trained to be scientific in general. It is dangerous for the
capitalist ruling class to promote skepticism in the educational system they control, or to
encourage thoughtful scientific investigation in any sphere, and especially so with regard
to human society. Even in the high schools where students are supposely learning something about
the sciences of chemistry, physics and biology, what the students are mostly actually taught are
a few of the established facts and principles that these sciences have discovered in the past. It
is extremely rare for any attention whatsoever to be paid to learning the scientific method, let
alone to inculcating the basic scientific approach to the investigation of the world into those
students. Even at the college level, education in the scientific method is woefully weak. Thus it
is no surprise that many young people, when they first turn to revolution, tend to view Marxist
theory in the same way they view the principles of chemistry and biology that they have hopefully
been exposed to; i.e., as a body of doctrine simply to be memorized.
Engels once pointed out that since socialism
had become a science it must be pursued as a science—that is, it must be studied. [See Engels
quote in: REVOLUTIONARY THEORY.]
And that is definitely true. But the full education of revolutionary Marxists also requires the
internalization of the scientific method, and the transformation of any lingering religious
approach to the body of Marxist theory into a genuinely scientific approach toward it.
3) On a very few occasions genuine
Marxists have spoken, in sort of a loose or poetic fashion, of Marxism as a “religion”:
How do we account for this?
Mao once remarked that “Not to have a correct
political orientation is like not having a soul.” [SW 5:405] But did that mean that Mao actually
believed in “souls” in the religious sense? Of course not! Similarly,
in his conversation with the French intellectual, André Malraux in 1965, Mao said:
“There is what one sees, and what one doesn’t see. Men do not like to bear
the burden of the Revolution throughout their lives. When I said ‘Chinese Marxism is the
religion of the people,’ I meant—but do you know how many communists there are in the
countryside? One per cent!—I meant that the communists express the Chinese people in a real
way if they remain faithful to the work upon which the whole of China has embarked as if on
another Long March. When we say, ‘We are the Sons of the People,’ China understands it as
she understood the phrase ‘Son of Heaven.’ The People has taken the place of the ancestors.
The People, not the victorious Communist party.
“The revolution freed the wife from
her husband, the son from his father, the farmer from his overlord. But for the benefit of
collectivity. The individualism of the West has no roots among the Chinese masses. The hope
of transformation, on the other hand, is a very powerful sentiment. A husband must stop
beating his wife in order to become a different man, who will be a member of the
party, or simply of his people’s commune, or of those which the army will set free: ‘Gods
are all right for the rich; the poor have the Eighth Route Army.’” —Mao, quoted in
Donald MacInnis, Religious Policy and Practice in Communist China (1972), pp. 17-18.
MARXIST THEORY
See also:
MARXISM, REVOLUTIONARY
THEORY
“The world’s greatest movement for liberation of the oppressed class,
the most revolutionary class in history, is impossible without a revolutionary theory.
That theory cannot be thought up. It grows out of the sum total of the
revolutionary experience and the revolutionary thinking of all countries in the world.
Such a theory has developed since the second half of the nineteenth century. It
is known as Marxism. One cannot be a socialist, a revolutionary Social-Democrat, without
participating, in the measure of one’s powers, in developing and applying that theory,
and without waging a ruthless struggle today against the mutilation of this theory by
Plekhanov, Kautsky, and Co.” —Lenin, “The Voice of an Honest French Socialist” (1915),
LCW 21:354.