Baby's First Marx

After six weeks moving halfway across the country and pretending to get my life in order, Seditious Conspiracy is back! Here it goes:

Despite my amenability to the Left’s project and introduction to it through various podcasts and friends, I (admittedly) find myself still remarkably unread in the realm of Marxist scholarship—who’s got the time? So Paul Le Blanc’s (by no means recent) reader, From Marx to Gramsci, proved a generally enjoyable and informative read. 

In an era of rambling academic tracts and judicial opinions, one cannot take for granted the Professor’s wisdom to distill the project’s tenets right up front. But the book contains more than mere introduction to the materialist view, tracing all aspects of society back to its fundamental economic form, or continued explanations of how managers squeeze ever more value from workers. Le Blanc introduces also some primary debates carrying Marxism to the present as its early adherents watched the Promised Land dissolve into the future, grappled with the eternal question of baby steps or decisive steps (yes), realized that the first major venture (the Soviet Union) had gone horribly wrong (blame Stalin?), and watched fascism animate the working classes in the complete opposite direction. 

Obviously, don’t count me an educated commenter yet. But two notes do leap out to me. 

First, these early Marxists desperately needed good editors. It’s no wonder they accomplished so little for so long: no one could understand them—which proves debilitating when the entire project revolves around organizing and animating normal people. The old line (was it Verdi?) about Wagner describes perfectly most of LeBlanc’s selections from Marx & Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci: minutes of brilliance; quarter hours of miserable boredom. 

Second, for a program aimed at attaining and wielding constitutive political power—that is, not merely governing but fundamentally restructuring a nation or society—I discerned precious little attention to the practical questions of constitutional law: sketching effective forms of government. To be sure, all echo Marx and Engel’s demand for democracy (p. 172). And I (mostly) believe they mean it. Marx’s oppressed wage laborers are the electoral majority after all. Democracy plainly offers a solution.

But we’re all materialists now! And democracy means many things. What does this idyllic call for democracy mean on the ground? What forms of government best enable the transition to socialism? Must we reject over two thousand years of political theory as bourgeois?

So far as I can tell, Marx and Engels themselves pointed to the Paris Commune as a model, but LeBlanc reports little more than vague and fantastical descriptions of “municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town” wielding “executive and legislative [power] at the same time” (p. 104). Surely Polybius and Montesquieu turn not on bourgeois sensibilities alone. Show me voting districts and I’ll show you a gerrymander. Proclaim universal suffrage and then please remind me of your voter registration requirements. Who gets to vote runs awfully close to the question of why people ought to vote in the first place. And perhaps I overread hints of localized popular sovereignty in the venture—but an American can never be too careful with the notion. An introductory reader this may be, but I consider these introductory questions. 

Lenin’s dismissal of democratic self-rule as “merely a form…which does not change the real state of affairs” and “Once capital exists…no franchise can change its nature”—to justify dissolving the Constituent Assembly—proves more distressing. Setting aside his laughable empirical proof of democratic-futility, describing the early 1900s United States as “[o]ne of the most democratic republics in the world,” one might more seriously ask how Lenin intended to divine the common workers’ will without regular election (p. 262) (at least Gramsci appears to grasp reality here (p. 361)).

The somber takeaway seems to be that, just like the Right, Leftists also forget why democracy matters—except that totalitarians can afford to.  We cannot.  If all men are created equal, then not only may one not rule over another without his consent, but all might partake in the communal self-government. Put differently, the recognition of equal human dignity that forbids both chattel slavery and wage exploitation also founds, even justifies, our submission to the votes of others—especially when we lose. Democracy doesn’t just pragmatically align with Marx’s appeal to the masses. The two go hand in hand.