Marx's last battle

Abstract

Marxism developed increasingly from a scientific to a Critical Marxism that was much more voluntaristic and stressed consciousness and conscious organization — rather than emphasizing a spontaneous economic evolution that first develops the forces of production. This long-term shift in Marxism is visible in Leninism: Leninism formulates a conception of a “vanguard” revolutionary organization more nearly akin to Bakuninism than to Marxism and adapts the old conspiratorial secret society to a Marxist rhetoric of theory and science by speaking of the vanguard cadres as “professional” revolutionaries. It also devoted increasing attention to the peasantry as an ally of the proletariat with a revolutionary potential. This increasing world drift of Marxism, toward a less economistic and more voluntaristic theory, has more usually been called a “critical” Marxism, when found in Western Europe. Critical Marxism has, therefore, seemed to some, such as Merleau-Ponty or Perry Anderson. a distinctively “Western Marxism.” This, how-ever, misses the point of the greater political success of Critical Marxism in the Third World. In less industrially advanced countries, Critical Marxism's reliance upon the peasantry has been even greater and its convergence with Bakuninism even more obvious. In Asia — including Tsarist Russia and other less developed regions, Scientific Marxism's insistence upon a prior industrialization made it seem irrelevant and generated apathy and passivity among revolutionaries who did not want to spend their lives making a bourgeois revolution. This shift suggests that there was a potential mutual transformability of Marxism into Bakuninism. Each might, under certain conditions, become the other.