Marxism, which continues to be a critical tradition
looking at capitalism critically, is now becoming also alongside of that (kind of two tracks)
a movement of new social construction, a new way of organizing society, a new way
of being you might call it. An alternative to capitalism, not just a critique of it. In 1917,
the Russian revolution, capitalism is overthrown by a group of Marxists who announce 'We're going
to set up an alternative. There it is' Marxists, by the way, many of whom were outstanding
critics of capitalism had been writing for years some of the seminal works in that field,
but suddenly they're in charge of a government. In Germany, which almost had such a revolution,
they didn't, but they did something similar. They built a powerful new political party,
the S-P-D. In German, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands: the Socialist Party of Germany.
And it became the second biggest party by the end of the 19th century.
It had achieved real power, and it was contesting to become the state apparatus.
Very close to the time the Russians made their revolution and seized power in 1917,
about a year, year and a half later the collapse of the German army at the end of World War One
when they lost the war meant that somebody had to take power in Germany to sign the surrender,
to sign the documents of the end of the war. And the two gentlemen who did that,
Ebert and Scheidemann by name, were officials of the Socialist Party of Germany. It had taken
over in the aftermath of a defeat. The government, and what we now call the Weimar Republic:
that enormously democratic experiment in governance in the 1920s in Germany,
was in part organized led, inspired by socialists. And so, the debate became 'Okay,
now we as Marxists' Because, the Socialist Party of Germany had been founded in part by Marx, by
Marx's family members and was committed to Marxism as the theory of how to reorganize society.
The Germans did it through the ballot box. The Russians did it through violent revolution.
The debates in Marxism became 'Which is the right way to go?
Which is the better way to go? Is one preferred to the other?' and so on. And the government became
a kind of focus for marxists. The very idea of the state as having an enormous political
and economic power became central to the Marxist tradition. Why? Because they were in charge of
the government. They had seized the government, and they had thought, this is what they said to
each other: that winning the government by revolution or by election would then give us
the means (the government) with which to carry through a more far-reaching transformation.
This idea just got stronger and stronger in the subsequent decades. Partly, because
capitalism crashed, the worst crash of global capitalism so far in its history 1929 to 1940.
During this crash, private capitalism looked for all the world like it was over,
like it was falling apart. And everywhere, government was called in to rescue
what was left of capitalism. That was what John Maynard Keynes in England thought he was doing:
figuring out how to save capitalism basically from itself. And after World War II, the third world,
the former colonies of capitalism broke away: India, Africa, all over set up new governments.
And they thought right away, 'We need the government to achieve our number one goal,
and that's called economic development.' So, wherever you looked inside Marxism,
outside Marxism the state was the vehicle the agent that was going to solve the problem.
Wow. This focus on the state was a phase of socialism and of Marxism,
but it suffered two results that we're now living through this focus on the state. The first one was
that a strong state could and did save capitalism from the ultimate collapse it came so close to
in the 1930s. In other words, a strong state, even one captured by people who wanted to use it to do
more, could frustrate that goal. The state, instead of being a mechanism to go beyond
capitalism, could reverse and become a mechanism to reinforce and stabilize
capitalism. That is what Keynes wanted, and that is what Keynesian economics
in the decades after World War II mostly achieved. It did that in the advanced part of the world,
and it did it in the third world. Where, strong governments turned out not to be the vehicle
to go beyond capitalism, but to actually be the mechanism whereby capitalists in Western Europe,
North America and Japan could solidify their hold on the colonial countries
but without operating a colonial government. Cut a deal with the new strong government in every
African, Latin American, Asian [country], and you can get the deals done that you need done
without appearing for it all to be happening in London, or Paris, or Rome, or New York.
And then, looking at the Soviet Union, it became clear that there was another problem
with this focus on the government: that even if the government did help you get beyond capitalism,
it might get you to a place that was the socialism or the communism you had hoped for.
It could get you to a horrible dictatorship government, a Stalinism if you like.
And so, socialists had to bite the bullet if you like. They had to face the fact that the
focus on the government had been overdone: not just overdone by those who were critical
of capitalism, but overdone by everybody third world people looking for development,
Soviet people looking for transition to socialism and everybody else.
And so a period starting around the 1980's- 1990's accelerated by the implosion of the USSR:
a process of self-criticism within Marxism took place, and that's where we are today.
But I want to be clear about what that means. It means that Marxism has in a way
gone through a difficult detour: the detour of the over-development of this state, the
over-focus on the state, the inadequate attention to what has to be in place if the state is even
going to do what you had hoped and expected it to do. But the state by itself isn't the solution.
So, then what is? The return to Marx is the effort to answer that question, and by returning to Marx,
I mean to return to what I spoke to you about a few moments ago:
he focus by Marx in volume one particularly of Capital on the specifics of the organization
of the workplace: the factory, the office, the store. To begin to say, 'Look.
That's what Marx saw as the core, and yet that wasn't the focus of that period of time
when both Marxists and non-Marxists overstated what the state could do, would do, should do.
Those moments starting at the end of the 19th century and running through most of the 20th,
those moments in diverse parts of the world did not pay attention to the organization
of the workplace. Mostly they took that as given somehow by modern technology, or simply
natural: that there somehow had to be a small number of people who made all the decisions.
An employer on the one hand, employees (the majority) on the other. That this was somehow
an unavoidable necessary, unsurpassable way of organizing work. This was a terrible mistake
because it meant that you got rid of the private employer if you were a socialist and substituted a
state official, but you left the employer-employee relationship there. You just changed who.
You know who else made the similar mistake? Those third world countries in Asia, Africa
and Latin-America. They got rid of the colonial master who ran their enterprises, and they instead
got people from their own community: people with their same religion, with their same skin color,
with their same colonial background. They changed who was the employer. They didn't understand any
better than the socialists in Russia understood that changing who the employer is is not enough.
It gives the state the power, but that power is shaped by the core institution of employer
and employee and that continues whether the employer is private or state official. So, the new
Marxism, the one that I am quite confident now will become the Marxism of the 21st century,
will be different from the one inherited from the 19th and 20th. It will, in a step forward,
include going back to Marx's focus at the micro level: his focus on a transformation
of the workplace, what we call the democratization of the workplace.
So that the workplace is a place where democracy is installed.