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For the next two segments of the polemic, Mr Grant adjusts his sights onto Mr Cliff’s “incorrect usage of quotations,” himself pulling from Marx and Trotsky to both outline his “materialist” conception of history and show the intellectual dishonesty of Mr Cliff’s thesis by means of reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, Mr Grant falls prey to the very charge he levies against his colleague, appealing to the authority of great thinkers while simultaneously distorting what they actually wrote beyond recognition.
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Following Mr Grant’s sorry attempt at philosophising, we get to see how he applies his method to historical analysis. The results are unsurprising.
|| Marx explained the historical justification for capitalism, [despite] the horrors of the industrial revolution, despite the slavery of the blacks in Africa, despite child labour in the factories, the wars of conquest throughout the globe - by the fact that it was a necessary stage in the development of the forces of production. Marx showed that without slavery, not only ancient slavery, but slavery in the epoch of the early development of capitalism, the modern development of production would have been impossible (!). Without that the material basis for communism could never have been prepared. ||
Mr Grant’s South African upbringing is unfortunately on full display here: apparently, the slave trade was indeed a necessary precondition for us to have communism. Mr Grant backs this sordid statement by pulling a passage from The Poverty of Philosophy, one of Marx’s own polemics against the French mutualist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
« Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
« Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy — the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. »[1]
Before further commenting:
|| Of course, the attitude of Marx towards the horrors of slavery and the industrial revolution is well known. It would be a gross distortion of Marx's position to argue that because he wrote the above, therefore he was in favour of slavery and child labour. No more can it be argued against the Marxists of today that because they support state ownership in the USSR that they therefore justify the slave camps and other crimes of the Stalin regime. ||
It appears as though Marx is in concurrence with this statement — the key word being appears. Mr Grant’s uncanny ability to search for quotes that seemingly affirm his position serves him quite well throughout this text (Kautsky would be proud!), and so long as you take him at his word he looks to be in the right. However, dig just beneath the surface and you’ll quickly find how hollow the support is. What point is Marx actually trying to make with this passage? Let us see the full context to find out. To quote Marx at length:
« Let us see now to what modifications M. Proudhon subjects Hegel’s dialectics when he applies it to political economy. For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides— one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petit bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm. The good side and the bad side, the advantages and the drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad.
« Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Suriname, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.
« Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
« Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.
« What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.
« Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. M. Proudhon has nothing of Hegel’s dialectics but the language. For him the dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad.
« ... Caught thus in a blind alley, from which it is difficult to escape by legal means, M. Proudhon takes a real flying leap which transports him at one bound into a new category. Then it is that to his astonished gaze is revealed the serial relation in the understanding. He takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to it arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, taxes remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the drawbacks of taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit.
« By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one, and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to make with this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradictions, two volumes of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: The System of Economic Contradictions.
« … Here all of a sudden, by a kind of switch-over of which we now know the secret, the metaphysics of political economy has become an illusion! Never has M. Proudhon spoken more truly. Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, of posing problems tending to eliminate the bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea “no longer functions” ; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.
« When M. Proudhon spoke of the serial relation in the understanding, of the logical sequence of categories, he declared positively that he did not want to give history according to the order in time, that is, in M. Proudhon’s view, the historical sequence in which the categories have manifested themselves. Thus for him everything happened in the pure ether of reason. Everything was to be derived from this ether by means of dialectics. Now that he has to put this dialectics into practice, his reason is in default. »[2]
Perhaps Mr Grant shouldn’t have mined this particular work for quotes, as now that we have the full formulation of Marx’s point, some discrepancies become obvious. Immediately it’s evident that this is not an assertion made by Marx, but rather from the perspective of Proudhon; ironically, the passage that Mr Grant cites is Marx attacking the exact position he is trying to defend. Mr Grant, like Proudhon, approaches history from a top-down schematic, starting at the form and using an abstract raisonnement dialectique to fit reality into rigid categories: these categories — each one with its own “good-bad” dialectic — are scaffolded onto one another in a linear progression, where the next category serves as the “antidote” to cancel out the “bad” side of the other. As history is nothing more than the Weltgeist unfolding itself in the form of these categories, real human beings are sucked dry of all life and agency, becoming little more than pawns in a grand game of chess.
This bastardisation of immanent critique is at its most egregious when Mr Grant makes the grotesque defence of the “good side” of slavery — it was “historically necessary” so that the next piece of scaffolding could be built on top of it and eventually substitute its “bad side.” This categorisation of “historically necessary” is even extended to U.S. chattel slavery, with Mr Grant painting Marx as praising it for building the foundations of American industry, “the most progressive of countries.” Of course, in order to distance himself from backlash, he quickly adds that he is not in favour of slavery per se, but simply views it as necessary until the moment it exhausts its societal usefulness. As the saying goes: qui s’excuse, s’accuse.[3]
Marx’s actual assessment of slavery in this text was not that it was necessary as a universal principle which all societies must undergo in order to grow, but that it was the load-bearing pillar on which the colonies of the American continent grew their economies and fuelled the industrial development upon which world trade was established. It’s viewed as a specific historical phenomenon, a fact that occurred and not an abstract stage of development: Marx makes clear that the approach of parsing the “good” from the “bad” is nonsense moralising which robs history of all agency and spontaneity. Chattel slavery did not need to be the form of production put into practice in order for the United States to industrialise, but it was how it played out historically.
The darker implication of this schematic scaffolding is that because slavery was a historically necessary economic category for advancing the development of production, the struggle against slavery at this stage would have been “premature,” thus serving reaction. Mr Grant seems to carry this view over to Russia in his affirmation that Marxists should be supportive of the economic structure of state ownership in the USSR, in spite of this owner employing what Mr Grant himself concedes to be slave camps. To hell with species-being! What does human subjugation matter anyway? As he puts it, “in the last analysis, the development of production is decisive.” It’s no accident that this was the same line touted by Soviet state ideology in order to justify its dominion over worker and peasant.[4]
In an even more ironic twist for our Trotskyite friend, this logic of abstracting history into a linear progression between rigid, formal categories — with the development of each stage necessary to jump to the next one — is one in the same with that of Menshevik stagism.[5] The notion that the exploited classes must accept, for a certain period of time, the economic and political rule of its “historically progressive” masters so that they may develop the productive forces flies in the face of the real class struggle, and is at large antithetical to the Marxist formulation of the permanent revolution.
Writing in a time where countries marked by tributary production were in the thralls of revolution waged by a historically progressive bourgeoisie, Marx holds that the proletariat should not set its interests to the side, accept its oppression and let the capitalists have their heyday. Rather, it must organise itself on an independent basis, beholden only to itself as a class, and continue to wage war against its subjugation by both aristocrat and capitalist, never stopping until it has achieved its ultimate aim: the victory of the social revolution against all vestiges of exploitation. Quote:
« As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable… But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far — not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world — that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.
« … They themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution. »[6]
Mr Grant would tack onto that last sentence: unless their rulers are draped in the red flag!
One of the most consistent positions Marx held throughout his life was that all exploited classes — throughout all of history — are right to struggle against their exploitation, unconditionally and without restraint. Quote: “man is the highest essence for man — hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.”[7] There is no Marxist defence of slavery as a historically necessary category, and the fact that Mr Grant is even making this argument as a prelude to analysing the economic and political nature of the USSR is telling.
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This distortion of historical materialism doesn’t stop at slavery, however. Mr Grant continues onward:
||Marx's support of Bismarck (??) in the Franco-Prussian war was dictated by similar considerations. In spite of Bismarck's 'blood and iron' policy and the reactionary nature of his regime, because the development of the productive forces would be facilitated by the national unification of Germany, Marx gave critical support for the war of Prussia against France. The basic criterion was the development of the productive forces. In the long run, all else flows from this. ||
“Marx supported Bismarck” is a creative statement on its own, but specifying that he supported the revolutionary defence of the Prussian state in its goal of European conquest is awe inspiring. In the text, Mr Grant leaves a footnote — suggesting a citation — but what we find is this cursory description:
||Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the Prussian government from 1862, introduced the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878. He carried through the unification of Germany, under Prussia, by successful wars against Denmark, Austria-Hungary and then France. ||
Unglaubliches Werk! We are once again expected to take this at face value and assume that Mr Grant is simply relaying what Marx wrote down, this time not even providing a source for this tall claim; and just as the last time, we shall refer to what Marx thought and said for himself. Quoting from Marx’s address to the First International on July 26th, 1870, a week after the outbreak of the war:
« On the German side, the war is a war of defense; but who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? Prussia! It was Bismarck who conspired with that very same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of crushing popular opposition at home and annexing Germany to the Hohenzollern dynasty… After her victory, did Prussia dream one moment of opposing a free Germany to an enslaved France? Just the contrary. While carefully preserving all the native beauties of her old system, she super-added all the tricks of the Second Empire, its real despotism and its mock democratism, its political shams and its financial jobs, its high-flown talk and its low legerdemains. The Bonapartist regime, which till then only flourished on one side of the Rhine, had now got its counterfeit on the other.
« … If the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous. All the miseries that befell Germany after her war of independence will revive with accumulated intensity.
« … The English working class stretch the hand of fellowship to the French and German working people. They feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. »[8]
Marx again, in another address to the International on September 9th, 1870, just after the Second French Empire had collapsed and while the Prussian war machine advanced on the newly formed Third Republic:
« Thus, this pious king [Wilhelm I] stood pledged before France and the world to a strictly defensive war. How to release him from his solemn pledge? The stage-managers had to exhibit him as giving, reluctantly, way to the irresistible behest of the German nation. They at once gave the cue to the liberal German middle class, with its professors, its capitalists, its aldermen, and its penmen. That middle class… felt, of course, highly delighted to bestride the European scene as the roaring lion of German patriotism. It re-vindicated its civic independence by affecting to force upon the Prussian government the secret designs of that same government. It does penance for its long-continued and almost religious faith in Louis Bonaparte’s infallibility, by shouting for the dismemberment of the French Republic. Let us for a moment listen to the special pleadings of those stout-hearted patriots!
« They dare not pretend that the people of Alsace and Lorraine pant for the German embrace; quite the contrary. To punish their French patriotism, Strasbourg, a town with an independent citadel commanding it, has for six days been wantonly and fiendishly bombarded by “German” explosive shells, setting it on fire, and killing great numbers of its defenseless inhabitants. Yet, the soil of those provinces once upon a time belonged to the whilom German empire. Hence, it seems, the soil and the human beings grown on it must be confiscated as imprescriptible German property. If the map of Europe is to be remade in the antiquary’s vein, let us by no means forget that the Elector of Brandenburg, for his Prussian dominions, was the vassal of the Polish Republic.
« … What are the “material guarantees” Prussia, in her wildest dreams, can or dare impose upon France, compared to the “material guarantees” the first Napoleon had wrenched from herself? The result will not prove the less disastrous. History will measure its retribution, not by the extent of the square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest! »[9]
Curiously enough, there isn’t a trace of support for either Bismarck or the Prussian state in Marx’s works on the subjects. Not only is there no evidence of it in anything Marx wrote, but the very position of “critical support” for Bismarck’s ventures in Prussian expansionism — as a pragmatic move in the grand scheme of history — is precisely the same Lassallean Realpolitik which he railed against from the very beginning![10][11][12] Once again, in his sad attempt at passing off his own position as Marx’s, Mr Grant unwittingly points us to the coup de grâce against it.
First, Mr Grant uses chattel slavery as a historical comparison to justify his defence of the economic basis of the USSR, now he ties the Stalinist dictatorship to the despotic rule of Otto “Iron Chancellor” von Bismarck — who Mr Grant acknowledges to have crushed socialism in Germany — in order to “critically” defend them both. With these two analogies, Mr Grant has already given us a little insight into the conditions workers faced in the USSR. But hey, at least we can say that Stalin expanded industry, right?
Citations
1: Karl Marx, The poverty of philosophy (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 103, https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C30-The-Poverty-of-Philosophy-1st-Printing.pdf
2: Ibid., 102-105
3: Karl Marx, “The North American civil war,” in The civil war in the United States, ed. Richard Enmale (Colorado Springs: Portage Publishers, 2003), 63, https://files.libcom.org/files/marx_engels_us_civil_war.pdf
4: Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and historical materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 27-35, https://archive.org/details/stalindialecticalhistoricalmaterialism/mode/2up
5: Leon Trotsky, The permanent revolution and results and prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 125-144, https://www.sahistory.org.za/file/426917/download?token=vVlm5Gb7
6: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the central committee to the Communist League (March 1850),” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 317-318, 324.
7: Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, ed. Andy Blunden, trans. Joseph O’Malley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 7, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Right.pdf
8: Karl Marx, “First address of the general council on the Franco-Prussian war,” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 858-860.
9: Karl Marx, “Second address of the general council on the Franco-Prussian war,” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 864-866.
10: Karl Marx, “Marx to Schweitzer, 13 February 1865,” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 830-832.
11: Karl Marx, “Marx to Kugelmann, 23 February 1865,” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 832-837.
12: Karl Marx, “Marx to Schweitzer, 13 October 1867,” in Karl Marx: The political writings (London: Verso Books, 2019), 837-841.
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