Introduction to Ryazanov

150 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, Marxists are faced with redeveloping, virtually from the ground up, a mass working-class socialist movement of the sort which one hundred years ago our predecessors thought they could point to as the towering achievement of the previous 50 years.

Of course, there are powerful labour movements, and not only in the old countries of capitalism such as Britain, where the trade unions possess a great latent power. Wherever capitalism has prospered in newly developing countries, from Brazil to Korea, labour movements have grown up to confront it. Therein lies the rational basis for our belief in a socialist future and for the conviction that what the socialists of today do can shape and secure that future.

But even where there are in these movements strong drives toward independent working-class politics, or, as there normally are, socialist tendencies within them, they are not - or not yet - socialist. Some of them, the British trade unions for example, which spent many decades notionally committed to the socialist transformation of society, have moved away from their old and all too vague reform socialism.

Marxism has retreated deeper into academia - though there is a lot less even of that than there used to be - or, in a ridiculous parody of what Marxism was to the Stalinist organisations, into the cloistered seclusion of one or other "revolutionary party", where it exists to grind out rationalisation and apologia to justify the decisions of the "party" apparatus: "Marxism" with its eyes put out, chained to the millwheel. Much "Marxism" is now of this sort: "Apparatus Marxism".

Apparatus Marxism is a peculiarly rancid species of pseudo-academic "Marxism" from which everything "objective", disinterested, spontaneous and creative is banished. Creativity is incompatible with the prime function of "apparatus Marxism": rationalising. Creativity and, so to speak, spontaneity is the prerogative of the all-shaping, suck- it-and-see empirical citizens who man the "Party" apparatus. Everything is thereby turned on its head. The sad history of the "Orthodox Trotskyist", or Cannonite, organisations is a story shaped by this conception of the relationship of Marxism to "the revolutionary party" - as a handmaiden of the apparatus. So too is the story of the the British SWP, for which "party building" calculations determine the "line" and "Marxism" consists in "bending the stick" to justify it.

Lenin rightly argued that revolutionary theory without revolutionary practice is sterile and that revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory is blind. "Apparatus Marxism" is both blind and sterile because it is not and cannot be a guide to practice. It exists to rationalise a practice that is in fact guided by something else - usually, the perceived advantage of the organisation. For Marxists, the unity of theory and practice means that practice is guided by theory, a theory constantly replenished by experience. In "Apparatus Marxism", the proper relationship of theory to practice and of practice to theory is inverted.

To understate it, "Marxism" is not in it's best-ever condition. Yet, the truth is that the destruction and eclipse of what might be called "20th Century Marxism" was historically necessary and is progressive - demolition work on the corrupt Stalinist counterfeit of "socialism" and "Marxism". Most of the political ideas that for decades passed for "Marxism" and socialism were authoritarian, more akin to medieval scholasticism than to post-renaissance thinking, and downright reactionary: the destruction of that "socialism" and its servitor was necessary.

The objective conditions for the revival of authentic Marxism and of socialism conceived of a human liberation are, despite everything, more favourable now than at any time since the rise and consolidation of Stalinism in the USSR and in the Communist International 75 years ago.

But there can be nothing mechanical, and there is nothing necessarily inevitable, about the redevelopment of Marxism, or of mass socialist movements and organisations. That depends on what those socialists who stand in the tradition of working-class anti-Stalinism do now. We have to clarify our own ideas, we have to reclaim the genuine traditions of socialism even while we argue for socialism in the existing working class movement. A necessary part of this is work to rediscover what Marxism was, before the Stalinist ice-age.

Here, the study of Frederick Engels' Anti-Dühring is irreplaceable. Anti-Dühring is the only systematic exposition of Marxism by one of its founders. It was written in close consultation with the other, Karl Marx (who in fact contributed the section on dialectics). Anti-Dühring was the handbook of those who built the Second and Third, and founded the Fourth, Internationals. It remains a necessary part of the education of anybody who aspires to be a Marxist. This article by David Ryazanov, the leading Marxist scholar of the Bolshevik Party - murdered by Stalin in the mid-30s - will deepen that education.

Anti-Dühring is an enormous polemic, the sort of thing that the philistine culture of the present-day left damns as "sectarianism". It fact it is the antidote to both sectarianism and to our predominant philistine Marxism. That culture is largely made up of the self-satisfaction of various "Apparatus Marxisms", protected, as behind high tariff walls, by the "party" regimes they serve. Demurals or questionings of cloistered certainties are inimical to that culture. This segmented "Marxism" stands in the way of Marxist self-renewal: it makes the cornerstone of revolutionary Marxism - as distinct from Academic Marxism and its gelded first cousin, "Apparatus Marxism" - the unity of theory and practice, Marxism as a guide to action, an impossibility.

In what way other than by debate and argument can reasoning self-respecting people, who have broken with religion, decide between the different opinions that inevitably arise amongst socialists who start from the same premises and have the same goals? What else is there except to reason, to discuss, to compare and exchange ideas, to argue and attempt to validate and buttress what you think is the truth by demolishing what you see as mistaken? The only other way is to set up a Pope or a College of Cardinals to pronounce on what is true and useful. That "other way" facilitates not Marxism but "Apparatus Marxism".

An earlier variant of the philistine culture dominant on the contemporary left threatened the German Marxist movement in its infancy. As Ryazanov shows in this fascinating account of the impact on German socialism of Engels' attempt to hammer out clarity and intellectual coherence among socialists, most of whom would, given the chance, have settled as between Engels and Dühring for a cosy, vague and thoroughly poisonous "broad-socialist" consensus. If that culture had not been overcome, the great German socialist movement could not have come into existence.

Of course, the fact that Frederick Engels wrote an epoch-making polemic does not certify that all polemic is good or Marxist. But, apart from the test of practice, which can't in its fullest revolutionary development be arranged at will, only free and open debate - polemic - can establish that. We do not have Engels, or Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky. We have to use our own heads. Discussion about our differences - reason, argument and polemic about our differences - combined with unity in action - that is the way to collectively use our heads. There is no other way.