Readings for revolutionaries: Marxism in Our Time

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“Marxism in Our Time”, by Isaac Deutscher (Ramparts Press, San Fran­ cisco, 1973, 312 pages) is an anthology of speeches, articles, and interviews that document one remarkable person’s struggle to keep revolutionary theory alive and potent in a period of working-class political retreat. The book trans­ ports us to the post-World War II capi­ talist boom.

Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967) was a Jewish-Polish political activist expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1932 for “exaggerating the danger of Nazism”. In 1938 the Stalinist Comin­ tern dissolved the Polish party under the pretext that it was corroded by “Trotskyist and Pilsudskist influences” and had become an agency of fascism and the police. Members of its Central Committee sought refuge in Moscow, but were imprisoned and executed as traitors, on Stalin’s orders.

A life-long opponent of capitalism and Stalinism, Deutscher’s chief difference with the Trotskyist movement was his view (in 1938 and subsequently) that it was premature to launch the Fourth International. His voluminous writings are steeped in the classical Marxist tra­ dition. Best known is Deutscher’s mas­ terwork, his three-volume biography of Trotsky, “The Prophet Armed”, “The Prophet Disarmed”, and “The Prophet Outcast”. Among his other acclaimed works are “Stalin: a Political Biography” (1949) and his anti-Zionist “Non-Jewish Jew and other essays” (edited by Ta­ mara Deutscher, 1968).

The present outstanding collection mer­ its serious study. It includes: “Trotsky in Our Time”, “The Tragedy of the Pol­ ish Communist Party” (which exposes the destructiveness of the Comintern’s policy zig-zags from opportunism to ul­ tra-leftism, and back again), “The Roots of Bureaucracy”, “On Socialist Man”, and “Discovering Das Kapital”.

Two chapters of the book seem par­ 10 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2010 Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher ticularly relevant at this end of the first decade of the 21st century. In “Marxism in Our Time”, notwithstanding the postwar boom, Deutscher returns to the very essentials in the Marxist critique of capitalism: “There is a striking contra­ diction between the increasingly social character of the process of production and the anti-social character of capi­ talist property”. To those who say such a critique is obsolete, that “since (John Maynard) Keynes, capitalism knows how to plan the economy”, Deutscher asks: has capitalism “ever planned ex­ cept for war purposes?” “Is planning congenial to capitalism?”

Looking back at the decades since the 1960s, about his insistence on the an­ archic character of the capitalist mode of production, its proclivity to war as an extension of its cancerous growth and clash of monopolies, and the over­ all steady proletarianization of human­ kind, Deutscher and Marxism seem to stand up rather well.

“Marxism and the New Left” presents a cogent argument against those who, responding to the apparent decline in militarism, the big banks and powerful conspirators, without grasping the need to organize working people to take con­ trol of the economy.

Speaking to students at Binghampton, N.Y., in 1967, Deutscher said: “Some of you, on the so-called New Left, want to leave behind all ideology in favor of pragmatism. ... But pragmatism is also an idea, ... you are only exchanging one ideology for another.”

Concerning political differences on the left, which are often blamed for lost op­ portunities for revolutionary change, he counters: “All human thinking and all human organization is subject to dif­ ferentiation. Whether you like it or not, ‘squabbling’ is the stuff of life; do not be contemptuous of it.

“The (U.S.) Communist Party did not want to ‘squabble’ with Roosevelt, and it supported fully and uncritically the New Deal. ... The members of the CP from Marxists became Rooseveltians. Then the Communists did not want to ‘squabble’ with Stalin, to criticize his policy, and therefore they allowed them­ selves to be turned into mere stooges of Stalin’s policy. In this way they commit­ ted moral and political suicide. They did not want to ‘squabble’ with Stalin, nor with Roosevelt—and you will not be much wiser if you too shun ideological debate.”

He noted that “the New Left is con­ Pamphlets on Marxism and Socialism • The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engles) $3 • Fascism: What it is and how to fight it. (by Leon Trotsky) $3 • Deconstructing Karl (by Cliff Conner) $2 • Marx was Right! The Capitalist Crisis Today (by Jeff Mackler) $3 als.” “The role of students is transient. They are not a stable element in soci­ ety.” They can be a vanguard of fascism or communism. Likewise, “Lumpenpro­ letarians [marginalized, often demor­ alized or desperate sectors, including beggars and thieves] don’t change soci­ ety. If the basic classes change society, then the lumpenproletarians may fol­ low them.”

“Crumbs from the table of the affluent society do not satisfy you and they do not satisfy the young workers. Have you tried to talk to them?” Thus Deutscher formulated an appeal to New Leftists to involve themselves in the working class and its struggles, and at the same time, to keep in mind clarity of purpose, programmatic clarity in the process of struggle.

“Do not delude yourselves that your aim—‘participatory democracy’— … is anything more than a vague and mean­ ingless slogan. It implies that you want to participate in the management of society as it is; but the society as it is excludes you from participation by defi­ nition. For this, a new form of society is needed. And when you proclaim the end of ideology you also implicitly ac­ cept the dominant ideology of the very society which excludes you from partic­ ipation, the very society against which you are in revolt.”

Well said, Old Mole. The Deutscher anthology “Marxism in Our Time” is an important tool in the kit of all who are determined not to re-discover the wheel, but rather to stoke the engine of revolutionary change. n

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