Abstract
Lenin said, ‘We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life’. Marx himself believed in the principle of ‘ruthless criticism’ of everything existing. Critiquing and revising certain ideas to strengthen an approach to society is a constructive act. But the legitimate act of revision becomes revision-ism, when the fundamental tenets of Marxism are revised in order to attack – negate – its very explanatory or scientific foundation and to justify political reformism. Indeed, since Lenin’s time, scientific socialism has been under attack from not only the ruling class and its ideologues, but also those who associate themselves with Marxism itself, including in academia. The latter are revisionist Marxists. For them, Marxism has some usefulness. But they deny the superiority of Marxism as a way of critically and scientifically interpreting the world and transforming that world in the interest of the exploited and oppressed masses in a revolutionary socialist manner. This denial of Marxism’s superiority takes the form of the denial of Marxism’s central concepts: class and capitalism. The article discusses, and critiques, various forms of revisionist Marxism (e.g. Analytical Marxism, Polanyian Marxism, Post-Modernist Marxism, and Geographical Marxism). Revisionism does respond to some recent developments in the world (e.g. the defeat of class-based movements; the complexity of class structure), but it seeks to explain these not on the basis of Marxist foundations but on the basis of scientifically inadequate ideas and in a manner that is politically reformist.
Keywords
Marxism has been permanently under attack from at least two different sources. It has been attacked by ‘bourgeois science and philosophy’, which are ‘taught by official professors in order to befuddle the rising generation of the propertied classes (one might add, the property-less class) and to “coach” it against internal and foreign enemies’ (Lenin 1908). Marxism has also been under attack from revisionists – that is, Marxists as ideologues of the working-class movement, and Marxists in academia. Marx himself was attacked ‘by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism’ (Lenin 1908). Traditionally, revisionists have critiqued, among other things, Marxist political economy – including, especially, theories of value, tendencies towards workers’ impoverishment, proletarianization, and the crisis-proneness of capitalism. They have also targeted Marxist political theory. Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, and many other Marxists have countered revisionism that appeared in the last part of the 19th century in the form of ‘Bernstein-ism’.
This brings us to modern-day revisionism, the revisionism that has appeared since the 1980s or so. I refer to the work of those contemporary scholars who associate themselves with Marxism and who are nevertheless extremely critical of its fundamental tenets. This attack on Marxism has been happening at an important global conjuncture today. This conjuncture is characterized by the fact that capitalism, along with Western imperialism, continues to inflict on humanity, immense suffering, the elimination of which requires world-wide working-class struggles. Marxism seeks to guide such struggles. The specific aim of the article is to discuss the revisionist criticisms of Marxism and to counter these criticisms.
At the outset, it is essential to clarify some terminological issues. I use the term Marxism (‘Marxism proper’) to refer to the body of ideas of classical founders and their followers, which, armed with a materialist and dialectical philosophical perspective, explains the world on the basis of theories of such processes as value relation, class exploitation, capitalist accumulation, and the capitalist state, and advocates self-emancipatory class-struggle at multiple geographical scales aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to establish a global socialist-democratic society (Das 2020a). What I call revisionist Marxism (or simply, revisionism) is highly critical of the central intellectual and political agenda of Marxism. Much of revisionist Marxism is academic Marxism, and much of academic Marxism is revisionist Marxism. Specific examples of revisionist Marxism in the academic milieu that I will briefly deal with are: Analytical Marxism (‘Neo-classical Marxism’), Post-modernist Marxism, Geographical Marxism, and Polanyian Marxism.
Revisionism is different from the legitimate act of revising ideas in Marxism and renewing it. Lenin (1899) said, We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. (italics added)
Marx (1843) himself believed in the principle of ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’. Critiquing and revising certain ideas to strengthen an approach to society is constructive. But the legitimate act of revision turns into its (near-) opposite (i.e. revision-ism), when the fundamental tenets of Marxism, without which Marxism will not be Marxism, are attacked, and when political reformism (the opposite of revolutionary Marxist politics) is justified on that basis.
Central to Marxism is the theory of class relation, including in its capitalist form, and class struggle. So, in the first section, I discuss various aspects of the revisionist theory of class and capitalism. In the second section, I critique this. The final section summarizes the arguments.
Modern-day Marxist revisionism and class theory
Denial of primacy of Marxist theory of class
Let us begin with the work of Erik Wright, who was a professor of sociology at Wisconsin, Madison, and whose work is an exemplar of Analytical Marxism. Wright (1989, 2005, 2015) is also one of the most well-known experts on class. 1 Correctly rejecting the idea of class as mere difference in income or as subjective identities, Wright (2005: 21–22) usefully says that: what one has (in terms of one’s rights and powers over productive re-sources) determines what one gets (i.e. one’s standard of living), and what one has also determines what one has to be (or to do) to get what one gets. Reconstructing the ideas about exploitation advanced by another Analytical Marxist (i.e. John Roemer), Wright argues that inequalities in the distribution of productive resources in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies are sufficient to account for exploitation which is understood as the transfer of labour surplus from those who control these resources to those who do not.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Wright (2015: 2) had ‘argued for the general superiority of the Marxist concept of class over its main sociological rivals’. Two and three decades after, he concluded that: ‘It now seems to me more appropriate to see these different ways of talking about class as each identifying different clusters of causal processes’ and that there is nothing to suggest that the Marxist view has any primacy (Wright 2015). In a major journal of the new Left, Wright (1993: 27) advocated ‘a shift from an a priori belief in the primacy of class in social explanations to a more open stance in exploring the causal importance of class’.
In the Post-modernist Marxist class theory, there are two kinds of class processes: fundamental and subsumed (Wolf & Resnick 2012). The fundamental class process involves the production/appropriation of surplus labour in the sphere of productive labour, giving rise to two fundamental classes: producers (or performers) and appropriators (or extractors), of surplus labour. Subsumed class process is in the realm of unproductive labour and refers to the distribution of surplus labour from its appropriators to others. It defines two subsumed classes: some people (e.g. Walmart managers), who receive a part of the surplus that is produced in the sphere of productive labour, direct the subsumed class process, while others work for them for a wage (e.g. Walmart workers). An individual may occupy all, none, or any combination of these class positions. Contrary to Wright’s view, for Resnick and Wolff, property ownership or non-ownership does not signal class process. For them: class is not a noun, so it cannot refer to large groups of people. For them, class is an adjective: it refers to the appropriation and distribution of surplus in all forms of society. Class does not necessarily mean exploitation in the Marxist sense; communism does not mean classlessness because under communism direct producers will give up some of the surplus too.
For Post-modernist Marxism, class is an indispensable concept for analyzing society. 2 Yet, class does not dominate, nor is it dominated by non-class processes. Class cannot be ‘the principal axis of antagonism in a unified capitalist space’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 20). In Post-modernist Marxism, class ‘is understood as neither foundational nor totalizing, necessitating fundamental systemic change to transform it. Rather, it is one little slice in life’ (Arvidson 1999: 140). One reason for this is that class is one of several social relations, which include the relations based on race, gender, and sex. Whatever political activity one may engage in (e.g. union organizing, species protection, rural boosterism, etc.), it is no more influenced by class relations than by race, gender, age, spirituality, and so on (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 20). Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 4–5) say: ‘It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism’. So, if class has no primacy, then the theory of class can have no primacy: it is just one among many ways of seeing the world that the theorist happens to choose.
Denial of the primacy of Marxist theory of capitalism (as a form of class relation)
In Marxism, capitalism is a transient form of class relation. Revisionists not only challenge the explanatory primacy of class relations but also of capitalism.
According to Wright, in capitalism, surplus labour is appropriated through market exchanges: workers are paid a wage that covers the costs of production of their labour power; capitalists receive an income from the sale of the commodities produced by workers, which is greater than the wage paid. Apart from the capital–labour contradiction, there are unequal and exploitative relations that are non-capitalists. These are the relations between those who own ‘organizational assets’ (managers) and those who do not, and between those who own ‘monopolizable skills’ (experts) and those who do not. Managers and experts are the middle-class people who work for a salary: they are organization- and/or skill-based exploiters. This means that capitalist relation of production is only one type of relation of production in modern society. So, the implication is that there is no justification for Marxism assigning unique causal importance to the relation between the class that owns/controls capital and the class that lacks control over capital and has to, therefore, perform manual and mental labour for a wage/salary.
For Analytical Marxism, control over property is crucial to the conceptualization of capitalism, although its view of property is problematic (Das, 2017b). The Polanyian Marxist perspective, however, such as that of Block (2019: 1173), a professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, is different. He criticizes ‘the traps of property-based essentialism’ of Marxism, which is the idea that ‘the key factor in understanding any given society is the nature of the property system’ (p. 1167). This property-based view of capitalism cannot explain ‘the huge differences in income inequality between, for example, Brazil and Sweden’ both of which are capitalist, or ‘the vast differences in economic performance across [capitalist] societies’, nor can it explain ‘the variability in the power exercised by owners [of capital] in such societies’ (p. 1170). The factors explaining all these differences ‘lie outside of the system of property and production’ (Block 2019). These factors include ‘the legal and political system’: the latter ‘determines which profit-making strategy’, whether it is productive/efficient or predatory, ‘will dominate in a particular society’ (Block 2019). Block even suggests that one must ‘avoid characterizing any particular society as being capitalist’ (p. 1173), that is, a society ‘defined as a regime of private property in which producers seek to profit in competitive markets’ (p. 1167).
In line with Block’s criticism of Marxism, the Marxist geographer, David Harvey (2000: 102), a professor at City University of New York, says that ‘Marx often fixed this relation’, that is, class relation of capitalism, ‘in terms of property rights over the means of production (including, in the laborer’s case, property rights to his or her own body)’ and that ‘this definition is too narrow’. There is a need to ‘broaden somewhat the conventional Marxian definition of “class” … under capitalism to mean positionality in relation to capital circulation and accumulation’. So, Harvey’s (2000: 102) labourer has multiple identities: ‘The labourer as person is a worker, consumer, saver, lover, and bearer of culture, and can even be an occasional employer and landed proprietor, whereas the laborer as an economic role – the category Marx analyses in Capital – is singular’.
Property relations are important to Harvey, but not in the realm of production. Relative to ‘expanded reproduction’, which involves exploitation of labour by capital in the productive sphere, Harvey stresses what he calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) whereby some (including capitalists) lose property to others. By ABD, Harvey (2007: 34–35) means such processes of the transfer of property rights as: the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of common/collective and state property into private property rights; extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights; and privatization of state pensions and state-funded education and health-care. ABD is ‘most importantly exercised through the credit system and financial power’; it is primarily economic, rather than extra-economic (which Marx’s primate accumulation was) (Harvey 2006: 159). It is not just that ABD is an on-going process. It has become the dominant form of accumulation (Harvey 2003: 153). So, Harvey argues, the main contradiction in today’s world is that between the dispossessor and the dispossessed, and not between the exploiting class and the exploited class, that is, capital and labour.
For Post-modernist Marxists, capitalism, like class relation itself, is one among several processes. It has no necessary primacy. This is for three reasons. First, capitalism coexists with non-capitalist non-class relations of gender, race and so on. Interestingly, this view is supported by Daniel Bensaid (2006) as well, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, and who was influenced by a variety of Trotskyism: ‘the capital/labour relationship’ is not the ‘main conflict’, because that relation is one of ‘a series of contradictions’ including ‘gender (or sex) relations’. Second, capitalism coexists with non-capitalist-class relations (e.g. household sector; peasant-based and communal production, etc.) (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: xi). In this sense, capitalism has a ‘constitutive outside’, so it is not as big as Marxists think it is (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 203).
Third, the logic of capital does not have the force of necessity that Marxism assigns it: ‘far from dictating the laws of movement in every area of social development’, the logic of capital ‘is itself contingent, since it depends on processes and transformations which escape its control’ (Laclau, in Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: xxiv). Post-modernist Marxists criticize ‘the dominant discourse of profit maximization with enviable economy and efficiency’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 187). They argue in support of ‘the suppressed or marginalized subjectivities that reside within the corporation’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 189), rejecting what they call Marxism’s ‘essentialist discourse of profitability that constitutes a singular and centered enterprise’. They even reject the idea of the capitalist firm. Just as Harvey’s labourer has many identities (see above), so does the Post-modernist Marxists’ capitalist: ‘We can argue that entrepreneurs, like anyone else, have a host of personal motives. Profit is one, perhaps, but they are also interested in sex, food, and saving souls’ (Cyert and March 1992, approvingly quoted in Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 187). For them, a bourgeois has other needs and desires than just investing money to make money (accumulation).
For Marxism, capital–labour relation is the dominant relation. It is an antagonistic one. In much of revisionism, capital–labour relation is not only not dominant. It is also not necessarily antagonistic in any objective sense: ‘insofar as the worker is considered not as flesh and blood but only as the economic category of “seller of labour power”’, say Laclau and Mouffe (1987: 10), ‘the capitalist–worker relation … is not an antagonistic one’. They explain: ‘Only if the worker resists the extraction of his or her surplus-value by the capitalist does the relation become antagonistic, but such resistance cannot be logically deduced from the category “seller of labour power”’. So, whether the rule of capital – capitalism – is antagonistic is a contingent matter: it depends on whether there is resistance. Politics – political action – decides the class character of the structure of capitalist relations, in other words.
Marxism emphasizes the tendencies towards crisis and towards imperialism (partly as a response to crises in the North) and their potential impact on radicalizing the masses. So Marxism insists on the relation between political economy and theory of class struggle. The revisionist view is different. Erik Wright (1993: 23) says that: ‘The thesis of the long-term nonreproducibility of capitalism – the inherent, endogenous tendency towards deepening, and eventually catastrophic, crises rooted in the falling rate of profit – is certainly problematic’. Besides, for Marxism, capitalism necessarily develops into imperialism (Lenin 1939), but revisionism does not talk about it (much), or it says that imperialism is not a big thing. For example, Harvey (2017: 169) says, ‘the old categories of imperialism do not work too well in these times’ and that the ‘historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries, for example, has largely been reversed over the last thirty years’ (italics added).
Wholesale embrace of reformism
The objective effect of the ideas of revisionists about the transformation of society, and often their subjective intention, is the pursuit of reforms, or distribution-based politics, within the framework of capitalist production and property relations. People can engage in such things as small-scale production, coops, and so on, as non-capitalist forms of production, and benefit from governmental assistance as a product of popular pressure. In other words: reformism or, (classic) social democracy is the underlying political motive of revisionism.
Post-modernist Marxism says: ‘The point of class struggle … is not mass systemic revolution against relations of capitalist property, production, exchange and exploitation’ (Arvidson 1999: 140). Much rather, class struggle means ‘a struggle within capitalism to change the mode of surplus extraction and distribution toward more democratic and collectively fair forms’ (Arvidson 1999). Marx advocated the abolition of wage slavery and expropriation of capital. But putting revisionist words into Marx’s mouth, a Post-modernist Marxist, Spivak, says: ‘Marx is not talking about the nongeneration’, that is, ‘non-production’, ‘of capital but the nonutilization of capital for capitalism’. Spivak recommends that people ‘agree to the production of capital, but restrict it (by common consent) so that it can’t be appropriated by one group of people but becomes a dynamic for social redistribution’ (Spivak & Plotke 1995: 7–8). So the idea of the Spivaks is as follows: keep capitalism intact but make it a little redistributive.
Wright rejects the binary between capitalism and socialism. He says that the regulation of enterprises by the state and unions can transfer ‘some dimensions of the property rights’ in the means of production (e.g. machines) ‘from the capitalist to a collective agency’, and thus reduce the classness of capitalist enterprises. So, a capitalist society can be more or less capitalistic.
The Polanyian Marxist perspective as well rejects the Marxist view that ‘Without transforming that core relationship by ending private ownership of the means of production, reforms that were won today would be reversed tomorrow’ (Block 2019: 1167). Block advocates for ‘the Polanyian view of socialism’ which ‘is not tied to property, but rather to the ability of the citizenry, through democratic means, to exercise sovereignty over the market’ (p. 1173; italics added). Similarly, Leo Panitch and Gindin (2015), formerly of York University, Toronto, stresses ‘the importance of making the public goods and services required to meet workers’ collective needs the central objective of class struggle’.
What makes (distribution-based) reforms possible, one might ask? Revisionism suggests several processes. First, and ontologically speaking, capitalism is not as big as Marxists think it is, so reforms are possible. ‘If capitalism does not function as a unity (or as a totality), it can be partially or locally replaced’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 203). Second, the Post-modernist Marxist theory of class as the distributional transfer of surplus labour from one group to another and its concomitant rejection of primacy given by Marxism to exploitation and property rights, justifies reformist-distributional politics. Marxism’s ‘privileging of exploitation over distribution as the truly legitimate focus of class politics reveals an essentialist vision of the economic totality as centered upon a core economic relation (between capital and labor)’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 174). Contrary to the Marxist claim that a significant amount of surplus must be reinvested because of capitalism’s accumulation imperative and incessant search for profits, Post-modernist Marxists say that capitalist accumulation does not have a privileged claim on the appropriated surplus. Because a bourgeois has other needs than just making money, some redistribution of the surplus can be effected: ‘a decentered and disunified vision of the economic entity could free distribution from its traditional position of subordination to exploitation and investment/accumulation’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 189). There are ‘unlimited and ever changing set of surplus distributions’ possible which can benefit ‘a range of claimants’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2001: 13). For example: environmentalists can make a claim on surplus distribution to clean up the environment’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2001).
Third, contrary to the Marxist argument that in spite of its variable degree of freedom from the capitalist class or its dominant fractions, the state fundamentally and ultimately serves the ruling class interests, at the expense of the basic interests of the masses (Clarke 1991: 29–31; Das 2022a; Lenin 1917a), there is unanimity among the revisionists of different hues that the capitalist state (the legal and political structure in general) is much more amenable to reforms in the interest of the masses than Marxists think. Like Block and Wright, Post-modernist Marxists are also critical of the Marxist claim about the state’s capitalist character. For example, Resnick and Wolff reject ‘the problematic character of [the] reductionist and centered idea of the state’ in Marxism. Advocating ‘epistemological openness’ (Bhattacharya & Seda-Irizarry 2015: 676), they say that ‘the state is pulled and pushed in different contradictory directions’ so ‘intervening in individual social processes cumulatively could have as much, if not more, of a transformative effect on the state as any political practice targeted at the state’ (Bhattacharya & Seda-Irizarry 2015).
Rejection of the Marxist theory of revolution against capitalism
Since reforms are possible in all the ways just discussed, there is no need for anti-capitalist revolution to eliminate capitalist private property rights as a necessary condition for socialism. Acceptance of reformism and rejection of revolution are two sides of the same coin. Panitch rejects the Marxist notion of overthrowing of the capitalist state. So does Harvey (2019): a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not anything that’s conceivable at the present time. … [We] have to make sure that it does not happen … [The] kind of fantasy that you might have had – socialists, or communists, and so on, might have had back in 1850, which is that … we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different – that is an impossibility right now.
Post-modernist-Marxists too reject revolution. Gibson-Graham (2006 [1996]: 174) say that: ‘the socialization of production’ as the classic goal of traditional Marxism, might ‘just reshape the ways in which surplus labor [is] produced, appropriated and distributed (by instating a different class process involving, for example, communal appropriation) rather than eliminate exploitation’. They further say that: ‘our vision of a noncapitalist future is not predicated on the general eradication of capitalism but simply involves the acknowledged coexistence of capitalist and noncapitalist economic forms’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 179). There is even a suggestion that the Marxist vision of the future is too Euro-centric to be useful, so Post-modernist Marxists endorse not only anti-economism but also ‘anti-Eurocentrism (both of which) work in tandem to displace monolithic images of the future and to bring into visibility cultural and social differences, resistances to hegemony, local power, dynamism and subjectivity’ (p. 42). Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 4–5) are more explicit: ‘It is no longer possible to maintain … the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared’.
Even if anti-capitalist revolution happens, it will not lead to socialism, writes Wright (1989). Representing the Analytical Marxism camp, Wright is explicitly sceptical of anti-capitalist revolutions, which ‘attempt to eliminate the distinctively capitalist form of exploitation’ which is ‘based on private ownership of the means of production’ (p. 20). This is because the consequent ‘nationalization of the principal means of production … would not necessarily affect exploitation based on’ such things as ‘skills/credentials’ and organizational assets (Wright 1989). In other words, because capitalist-class relation coexists with relations between managers/bureaucrats and others, anti-capitalism can only lead to a society ruled by bureaucrats (‘bureaucratic socialism’), and therefore, socialism is not the only alternative to capitalism. These ideas echo those of another academic, James Burnham (1940), who was a Marxist philosopher at New York University, and a part of the Trotskyist movement, who wrote many decades ago: ‘I consider that … a new form of exploitive society (what I call “managerial society”) is not only possible as an alternative to capitalism but is a more probable outcome of the present period than socialism’.
Wright rejects the traditional Marxist idea of ruptural transformations and sharp break with existing institutions and social structures. Revolutionary rupture is neither necessary nor possible. Echoing Post-modernist Marxists’ criticism of the Marxist agenda of an all-out attack on capitalism, Wright (2014: 87) says: ‘The central image [in Marxism] is very much that of a war in which ultimately victory depends on the decisive defeat of the enemy in a direct confrontation’.
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Vivek Chibber (2017), who is a professor of sociology at NYU and who is associated with Democratic Socialists of America, echoes his former mentor, Erik Wright, in form and content: Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach. [The] left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to pressure the state, gain power within it, change the institutional structure of capitalism, and erode the structural power of capital – rather than vaulting over it.
The revisionist idea is that the popular pressure on the state will produce some kind of socialism through the so-called democratic road. There is an incredible parallel here with Kautsky (1892), who said: ‘Like every other class, the working class must strive to influence the state authorities, to bend them to its purposes’ and it ‘can do so only through parliamentary activity’.
Revisionist rejection of the Marxist theory of working class as the key anti-capitalist agent
Associated with the revisionists’ rejection of socialism/communism and revolutionary struggle is their rejection of the Marxist conception of the working class as the key revolutionary agent. For Post-modernists Marxists, everything in the world, including the economic, is fragmented, so there is no collective unified subject. Denied is ‘the ontological centrality of the working class’ (Laclau & Mouffe 1985: 2). If there is ‘no system or unified economy’ that ‘covers the social space and thus necessarily dominates other forms of economy’ (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: xiv), and therefore, if capitalism is not dominant, then the proletariat, as the key anti-capitalist revolutionary agency, is not necessary for social change (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]). In slaying the ‘capitalist monster’, Gibson-Graham has discursively destroyed the subject position of its opponent (i.e. the revolutionary working class). There is no ‘the emancipatory agency of a mass collective subject unified around a set of shared “interests”’: From our perspective, what has died or been demobilized is the fiction of the working class and its mission. … Now the militaristic image of a massive collectivity of workers … is part of a receding social conception and politics of change (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 69).
Wright, from the Analytical Marxist standpoint, also rejects the status of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent. He is critical of the Marxist claim that ‘capitalism produces a sufficiently homogeneous class of proletarians to constitute its gravediggers’ (Wright 1993: 23). Since it is an empirical fact that the proletariat has not quite acted in a revolutionary way, there is no theoretical reason why it will behave differently in future, that is, why the proletariat will not be satisfied with reforms. In making this claim, Wright joins other analytical Marxists such as Przeworski (Mayer 1994).Wright’s (1989: 27) ‘reconceptualization of the middle class’, the people from non-proletarian, non-capitalist strata, leads him to conclude that ‘it is no longer axiomatic that the proletariat is the unique, or perhaps even the central, rival to the capitalist class for class power in capitalist society’.
This idea is shared by many other revisionists. For example, Panitch says that ‘the working class as the agency of socialist transformation needs to be problematized’ (Panitch & Gindin 2015: 16; italics in original) and that the idea of the working class conquering state power is a worn-out concept (Panitch & Gindin 2015: 16–17, 19). Similarly, Harvey (2006: 65) says that there is no ‘simple conception of the proletariat to which we can appeal as the primary (let alone exclusive) agent of historical transformation’. For Harvey (2003: 169–171), the ‘single-minded concentration of much of the Marxist- and communist inspired left on proletarian struggles’ and on the workplace was relevant in the 1970s when capital–labour contradiction was the main contradiction, but such an approach is problematic today because that contradiction is not the main contradiction. He asserts that: the Marxist ‘notion of the factory worker as the vanguard proletarian figure that is going to make the revolution, I don’t think that works; I don’t think it ever really worked very well’ (Harvey 2010). Harvey (2010) argues for ‘a broader notion of an alliance of forces in which the conventional proletariat is an important element, but not necessarily an element that has a leadership role’. This would be a (popular front type) coalition against neoliberalism and against ABD, and not for the abolition of capitalism as such. What is needed is a new New Deal to save capitalism from itself. Gibson-Graham also imagine new sorts of cross-class alliances between managers and unions in capitalist firms, who might have common interests in reducing distributions of surplus value to financiers and instituting, for example, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (Gibson-Graham & Ruccio 2001: 178).
Denying the unique power of Marxist theory as a whole
The revisionist rejection of the central tenets of Marxism – the key ideas about class, capitalism, working class, and revolutionary change – amounts to their critique of the superiority, or distinctiveness, of Marxist theory as such. For revisionists, a Marxism that assigns primacy to class is no more useful than any other way of thinking.
‘The Marxist tradition is a valuable and interesting body of ideas’, Wright (2015: 2) acknowledges. In line with Analytical Marxism’s dismissal of dialectics, Wright, however, rejects arguments for ‘a distinctive Marxist epistemology and methodology that sharply [differentiate] Marxism from its rivals’ (p. 17; italics added). According to Wright (1993: 23), ‘One cannot go back to the confident assurances of Marxism’ anymore. Marxism ‘does not have a monopoly on the capacity to identify real mechanisms’, so one needs to theoretically ‘combine distinctive Marxism-identified mechanisms with whatever other causal processes seem pertinent to the tasks at hand’ that non-Marxists (e.g. neo-classical economists, Weberian sociologists) have identified (Wright, 2015: 2). The upshot of all this is that: ‘What might be called ‘pragmatic realism’ has replaced the Grand Battle of paradigms’. Wright (2015) even does not wish to use ‘Marxism’, and prefers ‘Marxist tradition’ instead, because ‘Marxism suggests something more like a comprehensive paradigm’. Wright (2015: 1) affirms: ‘While I continue to work within the Marxist tradition, I no longer feel that the most useful way of thinking about Marxism is as a comprehensive paradigm that is incommensurate with “bourgeois” sociology’. 4
Like Analytical Marxists, Post-modernist-Marxists are also committed to a thinner, a less ambitious, Marxism. Two admirers of Post-modernist-Marxism suggest: ‘The main contribution of Stephen Resnick (in his works with Richard Wolff) was to … produce a thinner but analytically more distinctive Marxian theory’ (Bhattacharya & Seda-Irizarry 2015: 670). Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 4–5) say: ‘in scaling down the pretensions and the area of validity of Marxist theory, we are breaking with something deeply inherent in that theory: namely, its monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History’ (italics added). As widely known, Laclau and Mouffe (1987: 106) declare: ‘it [is] necessary today to go beyond the theoretical and political horizon of Marxism’.
A Marxist critique of Marxist revisionism
The major form of the revisionists’ denial of Marxism’s superiority is their critique of Marxism’s central explanans: that is, the Marxist claim that class relations, and their capitalist form (i.e. capitalism) are, the dominant cause of society’s major problems. By denying the explanatory primacy of class and the rule of capital as a form of class-rule, they deny the superiority of the intellectual and political agenda of Marxism as such. In the present section, I will elaborate on this point.
Philosophical problems with revisionism
Revisionist claims about society presuppose certain philosophical views which are problematic. For a start, Post-modernist Marxists believe that there is no space for primacy for anything. With its stratified ontology, Marxist dialectical philosophy is sensitive to difference but it takes the concept of primacy seriously. So: certain things are seen as having primacy over other things (e.g. social being over social consciousness; the act of eating/drinking over doing politics or praying; economic relations over political-legal relations; society-wide processes over individual-based processes; class relations over non-class relations). A Marxist can agree with revisionists that capitalists and workers do have other interests than having to make an average rate of profit and having to earn a daily wage, respectively. But does that mean that these two imperatives do not tend to subordinate the other things they do? A Marxist can agree that state regulation impacts accumulation and distribution of surplus. But does this mean that the state is not fundamentally subordinated to the capitalists’ class rule? Non-class relations (e.g. gender discrimination) or non-capitalist relations (e.g. remnants of feudal relations) do exist along with capitalism. But does that fact automatically mean that they cannot exist in any subordinate status in relation to capitalism?
Similarly, in revisionism, in part because class and non-class relations all interact, it is not possible to say that class is more important as a causal force in people’s lives than race and gender. This is an un-dialectical view of the world which says that the world is ontologically fragmented (and not stratified). Marxism absolutely recognizes that: class, gender, and race relations are inter-connected at a concrete level, and gender and race relations do enormously affect the everyday lives of the working people adversely. But it asks: what is the theory – the logic – of that inter-connection? In part because of a lack of such a theory, the importance that class has, in the view of Post-modernist-Marxists with their sympathy for identity politics, is merely up to the personal whim of the scholar. With its materialist and dialectical philosophy, Marxism assigns primacy to class as a causal structure of antagonistic relations rooted in material conditions. Yet, in explaining the concrete world, Marxism pays serious attention to racial and gender and forms of non-class oppression (Anderson 2016; Brown 2012), and in the world of practice, Marxism – as an intellectual tribune of the people – places the struggle against special oppression at the heart of its socialist politics (Das 2020a, 2022b; Pateman 2021).
The idea that Marxism has serious deficiencies and that it is no more useful than other ways of thinking about society (e.g. identity politics; social democracy; mainstream economics; liberalism, Post-modernism, etc.) allows one to be eclectic, that is, to combine a little bit of Marxism with non-Marxist method of knowing at a fundamental theoretical level: the level at which Marxism unpacks the structural tendencies of capitalism and class society. Such an eclectic approach is acceptable to revisionism because for it Marxism is not incommensurate with bourgeois theory. Criticizing what they call ‘traditional Marxism’, revisionists insist that ‘its reconstruction is essential’ (Wright 1993), so they resort to eclecticism. The eclectic reconstruction of Marxism in their hands means destroying a beautiful and tall mansion and boarding it up. It does not strengthen the foundation of Marxism.
There are intellectual reasons why eclecticism is not acceptable to Marxism. Marxism is dialectical. The revisionist tendency is to conflate dialectics with eclecticism: ‘eclecticism seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all’ (Lenin 1917a). According to Marxism, there is a hierarchy of ideas reflecting the fact that certain processes are more concrete (they are products of multiple determinations) and that other processes are more one-sided (i.e. abstract). Some ideas therefore are more abstract than other ideas. Marxist and non-Marxist ideas cannot be combined at a given level of theoretical abstraction. At more concrete levels, however, it is possible that there are mechanisms that non-Marxist discourses have shed light on better than Marxism has (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, micro-sociology of power, environmental mechanisms, etc.), which can be incorporated within the currently existing framework of Marxism, with some care. So, Marxism is much more epistemologically flexible than assumed: it does allow for incorporating new empirical facts and new relatively concrete-level concepts to update the Marxist analysis of society. Marxists can reshape a particular concept from a non-Marxist in a way that is in line with the overall intellectual character of Marxism (its philosophy, and its political economy and class theory). Lenin (1939) did this: he learnt from Hobson, for example, about imperialism. Before him, Marx did this: he learnt from Smith and Ricardo. Marxism masters the entire intellectual heritage of humanity on the basis of its own fundamental philosophical and scientific principles.
Besides, ideas are different in terms of which class interests they represent; after all, ideas, ultimately, reflect class (and class-fractional) interests. Marxist ideas reflect the interests of the exploited masses, and are opposed to the populist representation of interests of opposed classes that defines the revisionist project. The revisionist-eclectic approach licenses collaboration with forces other than (those which represent) the exploited. Such an approach is different from the Marxist view advanced by Lenin and others in the 20th century, which is not only ‘Infinitely more exacting, rigorous and well-balanced’ but also ‘a guide to action’ (Trotsky 1936) on the part of the working class in pursuit of a socialist-democratic world, a world that would be much more democratic than the bourgeois-democracies.
Revisionism emphasizes openness in the world. This idea is not at all new to Marxism. Central to Marxism is the idea that the openness in the world is expressed in temporal and spatial variability in social phenomena: the average rate of profit can rise, a rise in wages can at times cut into profit rates, class struggle can cause barbarism and not socialism, state actors can undermine conditions for accumulation, workers can turn to fascism rather than be revolutionary, and so on. All these can happen at certain times in the world and/or in certain regions of the world at a given point in time. Yet, Marxism says, the degree of openness is within definite material/objective constraints, so it rejects revisionist advocacy for extreme uncertainty. As Eagleton (2021) eloquently puts it, The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery.
Extreme scepticism towards certainty is associated with another problem. Revisionists, consciously or not, tend to emphasize an empirical or quasi-empirical mode of thinking. This involves, for example, figuring out the various taxonomic ways in which the quantity of originally produced surplus is shared by n number of groups. Or, the revisionist strategy involves counting how a society is divided into n number of classes/class-fractions, and examining how individual members of a class/fraction think/act differently, which can be measured quantitatively. The emphasis on micro-foundations (explanations based on what empirically identifiable individuals think and do), when applied to theory of class and class-consciousness, is particularly problematic: ‘classes are distinct, even though individuals may move freely from one class to another’ and ‘trends in political life are distinct in spite of the fact that individuals may change freely from one trend to another’ (Lenin 1917b). Empiricism, and what is often its twin, eclecticism, is conducive to pragmatism of revisionists. Yet, revisionists justify their eclectic position by falsely faulting Marxism for being dogmatic (Trotsky 1939).
The empirical mode of revisionism is demonstrated when many revisionists (especially, those influenced by Post-modernism, and here I include Post-colonial Marxists) say that Marx was a European, and Marxism is necessarily Euro-centric, and has therefore limited validity beyond Europe or advanced western countries. This is a queer Euro-centric charge against Marx’s Euro-centrism. Interestingly, that charge is not directed at Michel Foucault, a fine Frenchman, whose ideas inform many Post-colonialists, nor at the numerous revisionists who are all Europeans or North Americans. In any case, even if many Marxist claims have been produced by Europeans, that fact itself does not invalidate these claims. 5 There is absolutely no a priori reason at all why more abstract ideas developed in specific historical-geographical contexts cannot have wider validity across geographical areas. 6 Revisionism fails to appreciate the fact that Marxism is a multi-scalar project: its ideas, and the actions it aspires to inspire, are relevant sub-nationally, nationally, and especially, globally.
Countering revisionists’ approach to Marxist theory of class and capitalism
In the revisionist work that I have discussed, class and capitalism are talked about, but not in a way that Marxism – the work of Marx or Lenin or their modern-day followers (Wood, Callinicos, Carchedi, etc.) – would talk about these.
Marxism says that class relation is much more than about property relations and that socialism needs much more than replacing capitalist property with state/collectivized property. Yet, the Marxist claim is that class relationship is based on the differential control over property, which allows the transfer of surplus from direct producers to the ruling classes, and that this is why exploitative private property must be abolished. As Marx says, ‘the economical subjection of the man [or woman] of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence’ (Marx and Engels 1871). This view is rejected by Polanyian Marxists according to whom the property question is not relevant at all. This view is also rejected by Post-modernist Marxists such as Resnick and Wolff (2006: 119) who say: ‘the ownership of property (whether in means of production or more generally) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the wielding of power and vice versa’.
Within some revisionist work, the very basis of class in the Marxist sense is removed with the claim that class relations merely mean the appropriation and distribution of surplus labour, without these relations having to be based on property relations. An a-historical view of surplus is held: according to Post-modernist Marxists, even communism is a class society because surplus will be produced and appropriated in that society. If one agrees with this view, then who needs Marxism’s unique contribution to the study of class, revolution, and communism? 7
The revisionists also deny the basic tendencies that make a capitalist, capitalist and a worker, worker. Harvey says that the labourer has many identities (including that of an occasional employer, a consumer, etc.). This idea not only suggests that the main identity of the worker is not as the key revolutionary agent against capital, but also justifies the dilution of the socialist struggle aimed at capital–labour contradiction. Harvey here conveniently forgets that under capitalism, ‘The worker is … nothing more than personified labour-time’ and that other aspects of labour are subordinated to this capitalist logic of labour’s existence (Marx 1887: 168). And Marx’s standpoint is that because of the conditions under which the proletarians live, they, as a class, will be compelled to act as an anti-capitalist revolutionary agent, given proper ideological-political circumstances.
The revisionists’ denial of superiority of Marxism is partly based on their denial of the importance of certain key tenets of Marxist political economy, which underlie Marxist theory of class relations (in capitalism). For example, value theory is an important tool to understand the capitalist system, including the class relation between capital and labour, while analytical Marxists such as Wright, in their so-called pursuit of rigor, reject value theory. If value theory is rejected, how does one explain how and why a given wage is paid and received, if there is nothing in common between what the worker gives to capital and what they get? How is that common something to be conceptualized except in terms of socially necessary abstract labour time? When the value of the concept of value is recognized, its full implications are not.
While Harvey claims to take seriously the concept of value, there is only limited use of value theory and class relation in his political economy, including in his theory of uneven development (Das 2017a). Harvey is increasingly critical of Marx’s emphasis on capitalist production relations: for him, capitalist production and exchange guided by the law of value are less important than dispossession that does not (quite) obey the law of value. Harvey’s theory is indeed a part of a large amount of political-economic research that under-stresses production and exploitation. To the extent that the term exploitation is used, the emphasis is on exploitation as ‘expropriation of the common’ (Negri & Hardt 2000: 137–138). In fact, Harvey (2010) himself sees exploitation as a form of dispossession.
On the whole, according to revisionism, Marxist theory of class and capitalism explains less than what ‘traditional Marxism’ thinks it can. It is possible for revisionism to hold this wrong view, along with the view that state regulation can reduce capitalism’s classness, in part because revisionism breaks the necessary link posited in Marxism between class relations and the state, that is, the idea that the state must protect the fundamental interests of the dominant class at the expense of those of the masses.
It is possible for revisionists to clip the wings of Marxist class theory, and of Marxism as such, because it does not pay adequate attention to the implications of capitalism, especially, for crisis and imperialism. Revisionists, including Harvey, also reject the Marxist theory of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). The revisionist rejection of TRPF is in line with revisionist reformism: if the rate and ultimately the mass of surplus value is falling, this itself restricts the scope for reforms (Carchedi & Roberts 2018; Smith 2019). Revisionists are sceptical of the Marxist claim that capitalism is constantly crisis-prone and tendentially vulnerable to collapse. Two points need to be made here. One is that contrary to this sceptical claim of revisionism, capitalism has indeed been having near-death experiences many times over. Another is that if the state – which, for revisionists, exists outside of the capitalist system or not inherently capitalist – did not artificially prop capitalism up on the basis of various policies, the cost of which the working class ultimately bears (e.g. the policies that include the nationalization of bankrupt companies in the 2008 crisis, and quantitative easing), and if the trade union and political leaders of the working class allied with bourgeois and reformist parties, did not betray the working class, then capitalism would have collapsed given its crisis-proneness. If the continuation of capitalism is a demonstration of invalidity and inferiority of Marxist theory of capitalism, then the fact that aeroplanes fly must invalidate Newton’s law of gravity.
Marxism sees imperialism as the capitalist-class relation (along with capitalist competition governed by the law of value) at the global scale as having a mighty independent influence on every single national economy/state and on world events, and as causing the suffering of the peoples of the Global South. So being an anti-imperialist is fundamental to the identity of a Marxist. This is not the case with revisionist thinking, even within geographical Marxism. For well-known scholars like Harvey, as we have seen, because of the spatial temporal dynamics of capitalism including on-going Chinese foreign investments, the concept of imperialism is no longer useful. John Smith (2016) rightly counters such a view by saying, if China’s prosperity is abstracted from, it is clear that the less developed world continues to be drained by the imperialist West including by capital export and outsourcing. In fact, denying the role of western imperialism and advocating for reforms are not un-related: limited concessions from one’s own nation-state are possible only on the basis of support for that state and for the capitalists operating under its national-territorial jurisdiction.
Negating revisionists’ problematic approach to class struggle, revolution, and socialism
There is a remarkable amount of continuity/similarity between modern-day revisionism and revisionism during Lenin’s time, which ‘did really try to revise the foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class struggle’. It argued that Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the ground for the class struggle … [Since] the ‘will of the majority’ prevails in a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class rule, nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie against the reactionaries (Lenin 1908).
This characterization of revisionism of the past, more or less, applies to modern-day revisionism.
Some of those who accept the idea that there are classes and class struggle deny the revolutionary aspect of class struggle or that masses must conquer state power. For the revisionists: class relation is not the main cause of humanity’s problems, so there is no need to overthrow it. This claim invalidates Marxism’s advocacy for revolutionary struggle. Those who deny the existence of objective class relations based on the differential control over private property and appropriation of surplus labour (and on value relations in capitalism) and those who deny the idea that class struggle must lead to the conquest of state power, are those who ‘regard the social conditions under which the bourgeoisie rules as the final product, … and that they are only the servants of the bourgeoisie’ (Marx 1852). The revisionists are like those who: ‘want to retain the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them. They think they are seriously fighting bourgeois practice, and they are more bourgeois than the others’ (Marx 1987: 108).
Revisionists’ views of socialism and revolution are mistakenly influenced by the fact that the 1917 revolution did not result in a socialist society. Effectively equating socialism to a slightly better form of capitalism, revisionists are sceptical of the Marxist socialist project itself. 8 The revisionist idea of Wright, for example, is that capitalism has multiple futures, and not socialism/communism. For him, struggle against capital will necessarily lead not to socialism but to a society based on the exploitation of workers by managers and skill experts: ‘The nationalization of the principal means of production … would not necessarily’ lead to socialism (Wright 1989: 20). Against this view is the claim of Lenin (1917c) in his Tasks of the proletariat in our revolution: ‘From capitalism mankind can pass directly only to socialism, i.e., to the social ownership of the means of production and the distribution of products according to the amount of work performed by each individual …’.
When revisionism says that capitalist private property does not need to be eliminated and that revolution will not necessarily lead to socialism, it fails to understand the Marxist claim that nationalization of property is the first necessary step towards socialism, but it is not sufficient: In order to become social, private property must … inevitably pass through the state stage … State property becomes the property of ‘the whole people’ only to the degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith the necessity of the state (Trotsky 1991: 201–202).
Revisionism does not appreciate the Marxist view that the process of transition to socialism is a historical and geographical (scalar) process. Besides, given the globally operating law of value (and the aggressive response of capitalist countries to the world’s first proletarian revolution), socialism cannot be built in one country, although a country can begin the process. ‘Marx never said that socialism could be achieved in a single country, and moreover, a backward country’ (Trotsky 2006 [1939]: 32; italics added). An internationalist view – which is opposed to a nationalist view that is generally characteristic of revisionism – would show that it was not possible to build socialist-democracy primarily because of the global isolation of the revolutionary process that was heroically begun in 1917 in the place (Russia) representing the weakest link in world-imperialism, and not necessarily because of any major inherent problems with the Marxist model of socialism and revolution as such, the model of Marx and Lenin. Those who associate Lenin (1917a) with authoritarianism should read his State and revolution for his conception of socialist democracy (see Shandro 2014).
Revisionists like Harvey (2019) advance an openly reformist view when they conceptualize the ‘socialist program, or an anti-capitalist program’ as one where ‘we organize the capitalist system so that it becomes less and less dependent upon profitability and becomes more and more organized so that it delivers the use values to the whole of the world’s population’ (italics added). It is clear that such claims ignore the basics of Marx’s political economy. Marx (1887: 163) says: ‘capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value’. Marx also says, ‘competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws, so much so that the capitalist “own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation”’ (p. 417). Marx adds that: ‘it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist’ and that ‘Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist’ (p. 107).
Revisionists such as Harvey forget Marx’s (1894: 84) claim that an ‘all-embracing and far-sighted control over the production … is on the whole irreconcilable with the laws of capitalist production, and remains forever a pious wish, or is limited to exceptional co-operation in times of great stress and confusion’. In advocating reformism, revisionism is also oblivious of Marx’s point about the limits to reforms. Marx says that: even if at times wages rise significantly, this does not affect the fundamental relation between capital and labour: when wages rise ‘as a consequence of accumulation of capital’ this ‘only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it’ (Marx 1887: 436). Indeed, ‘Production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production’ (Marx 1887). An increase in wages, and I would add, whether due to increase in investment or governmental pressure, ‘only means at best a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labour that the worker has to supply’ but such ‘diminution can never reach the point at which it would threaten the system itself’ (p. 437).
Revisionist’s political emphasis on distribution-based ‘class’ politics abstracts from the conditions of production, forgetting the point Marx (1875) makes in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves’. Marx (1875) continues: ‘Vulgar socialism … has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution’.
Revisionist Marxists (and their bourgeois fellow-travellers) also fail to recognize that to the extent that reforms are granted: ‘The liberal bourgeoisie grant [them] with one hand, and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought’ (Lenin 1913). As well, they ignore the fact that capitalists use the reforms ‘to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery’ which is why ‘reformism … becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers’ (Lenin 1913). Revisionists are also unaware of, or unwilling to accept, Lenin’s point that significant and durable reforms are often by-products of revolutionary struggle, the struggle that they reject. Marxism does advocate the fight for reforms, but this fight for reforms must be a part of the fight to abolish capitalism and to establish world socialist-democracy.
Critical of the Marxist principle of unity between scientific theory and revolutionary practice, revisionism is an expression of the absence of revolutionary will, and it is a justification for that absence, which may reflect the defeat of the workers’ movement in the last several decades. But he or she is no Marxist who takes a theory that soberly states the objective situation and distorts it into a justification of the existing order and … [tries] to adapt himself (herself) … to every temporary decline in the revolution and to discard ‘revolutionary illusions’. (Lenin 1907)
Indeed, without revolutionary will ‘Marxism is pseudo-Marxism, a wooden knife which neither stabs nor cuts’ (Trotsky 1973: 114–115). No wonder, revisionism particularly thrives in spaces of academia where the main aim of knowledge is to help reproduce the system in slightly modified forms. ‘Marxism cannot be academicism without ceasing to be Marxism, i.e., the theoretical tool of revolutionary action’ (Trotsky 1973). Without the revolutionary will, Marxists are ‘transformed into liberals’.
In fact, all the elaborate revisionist (academic) treatises on essentialism in Marxist economic thought, multiple positionalities, and on cultural and geographical difference, and so on are really about creating a discursive ground for the argument that the logic of capitalist accumulation and exploitation process does not subordinate distributional, reformist practice and that the ‘tiger’ of capitalism can be significantly and durably tamed. The discursive/intellectual focus of revisionists of all colours on distribution-based politics (this includes distribution of things among privileged layers belonging to the socially oppressed groups such as women and racial/ethnic minorities), downplays the firm Marxist view that the fundamental interests of the exploited men and women directly contradict those of the capitalist class and its state, and cannot be met significantly and durably within capitalism.
On the whole, revisionism has little to do with Marxist political program which is described beautifully by Murray Smith (2019: 327) of Brock University in Canada, one of the leading Marxists of the world: The essential programmatic conclusion emerging from Marx’s analysis is that capitalism is constitutionally incapable of a ‘progressive’, ‘crisis-free’ evolution that would render the socialist project ‘unnecessary’, and furthermore, that a socialist transformation cannot be brought about through a process of gradual, incremental reform. Capitalism must be destroyed root and branch before there can be any hope of social reconstruction on fundamentally different foundations.
Revisionism’s reformism has a twin: opportunism. Revisionists wish to make use of all opportunities to create so-called non-capitalist spaces inside the capitalist society and to make some (progressive or compassionate) owners of capital or capitalist managers serve people’s needs, if need be by striking compromises with these non-working-class elements.
Revisionists deny the need for revolution and yet claim some association with Marxism. Lenin (1917a), who, more than Marx, is an enemy of revisionism, asserts, in line with Marx himself, that Only he [or she] is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship [political hegemony] of the proletariat. … That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois.
In what sense can revisionists be called Marxists if they say that the aim of class struggle is merely to get some concessions or that as long as capitalism exists, masses can enjoy durable and significant improvements?
Conclusion
As we have seen, one or another revisionist has made one of these mistaken claims: class has no primacy over non-class processes; class is not necessarily exploitative; communism is not class-less; class does not refer to large groups of people; capitalism has no primacy over non-class processes such as race or gender, nor over non-capitalist class processes; understanding capitalist class relation does not require the labour theory of value; capitalist class relations are not necessarily based on property relations; capital–labour relation is not an objective contradiction; capital–labour contradiction is not the fundamental contradiction in today’s world; the working class is not the key revolutionary agent; anti-capitalist revolution will not result in socialism because skills-based and managerial exploitation will necessarily continue; significant reforms are possible within capitalism; revolution against capitalism is neither possible or necessary; socialism is a fantasy, and so on.
Revisionists are not a homogeneous group, however. Some are realists (Wright). Others are anti-realists (Post-modernist-Marxists). Some emphasize property relations in characterizing the class society (Analytical Marxism). Others do not (e.g. Polanyian Marxists like of Block). Some accept the importance of value theory, albeit only partially (e.g. Harvey). Others do not (e.g. Wright). But they all deny the primacy or superiority of Marxism in the study of society and in envisioning a better future for humanity, by denying the primacy of class and by denying the necessity/possibility of anti-capitalist and socialist revolution. They often hide their soft corner for identity politics and/or social-democratic (left-liberal type) politics, which emanates from the causal claim, implicit or not, that non-class relations (e.g. race- and gender-based discrimination) and inadequate government policy are major reasons for people’s problems. All the different revisionists subscribe to reformism even if they justify it in slightly different ways. While Post-modernist-Marxists think capitalism is not as big a thing as Marxism says it is and that therefore there are plenty of spaces for reforms, Harvey’s geographical Marxism says that global capitalism is simply too big for us to allow it to fail, that it is in our interest that such a big thing does not fail, and therefore, we must reject Marx’s and Marxism’s (‘rhetorical’) call for its overthrow. In other words, both types believe that significant reforms are possible inside capitalism, whether capital is too big or not-too-big.
What might be some of the reasons for these mistaken claims, the claims that have been made by people who are intelligent and who do wish humanity to live a better life? Ideas, ultimately, reflect material conditions and class interests. What are these to which revisionism might be a ‘reaction’?
Empirically, a capitalist society is more than capitalists and workers. The power of capitalists, as an embodiment of a social (class) relation, is shared by owners as well as managers and CEOs who are paid a salary and who may not be juridical owners of capital. Revisionist Marxism has been a reaction to what it perceives as the Marxist two-class model (capitalists and workers). Also, revisionist class theory has been a reaction to a perceived reduction within Marxism of all social relations to class relations: certainly, one could say, Marx or Lenin did not write as much about race and gender as about class. There are other conditions to which revisionists react. The first socialist revolution in 1917 did not engender a socialist society, and the transitional society was repressive where state actors came to acquire much power and behaved like new capitalists. Stalinist degeneration was for all to see. The world working class has also not behaved in a revolutionary and socialist manner. The socialist working-class movements have been defeated. Instead of class movements, there has been a rise of new social movements based on identities. To the extent that revisionism is a reaction to the conditions outlined above, it is, however, a distorted reaction, a process in which Marxism’s fundamental tenets have been unnecessarily undermined. There is no reason why the empirical/conjunctural issues at hand (e.g. defeat of workers’ movement; failure of 1917 to establish socialism) cannot be, more or less, explained within the framework developed by the founders of Marxism (Das 2020a).
If revisionists have not done so, could there be a political reason? To the extent that theoretical ideas ultimately reflect different class/class-fractional interests, and that class struggle happens ‘in the domain of ideology’ (theory) and involves ‘disputes over theoretical amendments to Marx [and Marxism]’ (Lenin 1908; also Althusser 1976: 37), could it be that revisionism, irrespective of the subjective intention of revisionists, objectively reflects the interests of some compassionate/conscientious capitalists and non-capitalist affluent layers? The latter include petty-bourgeois strata which exist in the sphere of production, and which also include government officers, intellectuals, and leaders of reformist parties and trade unions. ‘It is quite natural that the petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up [within Marxism]’ (Lenin 1908)
In any case, the revisionist attacks on Marxism must be countered. This has been the explicit task of the article on a modest scale. As Lenin (1908) said: ‘to belittle the socialist ideology [i.e. Marxist theory] in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology’. Callinicos et al. (2021) and Ollman (2003) rightly lament the fact that academic Marxism (since at least the 1970s) has divorced Marxist thought from socialist struggle. In addition to negating the criticisms of Marxism, there is a positive task. This is to theoretically demonstrate Marxism’s superiority in the world today in a more explicit and elaborate manner than conducted in this article. ‘[C]apitalism and Marxism are bound together as eternal antagonists’, as economic crisis, and so on suggest (Callinicos et al. 2021: 17), and therefore Marxism as developed by its classical founders and their followers is as relevant today as it was when they wrote. This is because the spectre of the fundamental features of capitalism that the founders analyzed continues to haunt us. There is indeed a need ‘for defence of the theoretical basis of Marxism and its fundamental propositions, that are being distorted … by the spread of bourgeois influence to the various “fellow-travellers” of Marxism’ (Brass 2021; Lenin 1910).
