Where have all the Marxists gone?

Most of the time, you walk through life with your head down. Every so often, you stop, look around, and realise that the scenery has changed. Part of this scenery is the everyday chatter from the mass media, family and friends. The content of this chatter changes all the time, following personal experiences, news events, and the deeds of celebrities. But political and economic chatter can also be remarkably transient. Nobody now talks about monetarism, although this was one of the dominant political ideas of the 1980s. Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism also seem destined to wither. One set of ideas that has almost completely disappeared is Marxism.

This is strange because capitalism is now truly in crisis, and there was a time in the recent past when Marxism seemed a powerful set of intellectual ideas. At the time I was active in the British Labour Party (in the 1970s and early 1980s), political debate among activists in my constituency party was dominated by different versions of Marxism. Various Trotskyist factions existed within the Party, of which the strongest was the ‘Militant Tendency’. This was essentially a self-contained and disciplined political party which pretended to be an informal group of voluntary newspaper sellers. There was a minestrone of other Marxists groups outside the Party, most of whom had names with various combinations of the words ‘Revolutionary’, ‘Communist’, ‘Socialist’ or ‘Workers’. None of these factions had much mass support: they were stage armies of would-be leaders of a revolutionary struggle which they (and many others on the Left and Right at that time) believed was imminent.

The lack of mass support did not seem important because British politics is dominated by secretive committees and caucuses. This gives great political leverage to small and well-organised groups. Control of constituency labour parties can be won by getting a few activists nominated from poorly-attended or inactive local branches, who can then nominate candidates for Parliament who can be elected on a Party ticket even though their voters usually have little idea of their personal opinions (or personal morality). Many of the most ambitious local politicians in the Labour Party in the early 1980s rose either as members of one of the Marxists factions, or by doing deals with them. Either way, this required sharing a political language of class struggle against capitalism. In reality, ‘class struggle’ amounted to organising local and Parliamentary election campaigns, supporting strikes, and passing long and angry resolutions to be despatched to the Party’s National Executive Committee.

This all made Marxist ‘entryism’ a successful strategy up to a point. Members of various factions could become councillors and a few became Members of Parliament. But once Marxists had made it onto the national stage, they showed an extraordinary ability to lose votes, particularly when they tried to use local councils to introduce ‘socialism in one borough’. The Party leadership realised at that point that they needed to act against the factions. But a more important cause of the decline of Marxism was the rapid disappearance of communism in Eastern Europe, and, more locally, the continued success of the Conservative Party in British elections. In other words, the struggle against capitalism seemed to have been lost, and ambitious politicians decided they must find another route to power. This other route involved following Tony Blair in portraying Labour as competent and non-threatening, but also being relaxed about major and growing inequalities in wealth, subservience to the USA in foreign policy, and the parcelling out public services to the great profit of an inter-connected web of management consultancy, IT and PFI companies.

This is a world away politically from the Marxism of the early 1980s, but the ex-Marxists who now dominate the Labour Party have retained many of their old habits of mind. There is still the bitter factionalism, the preference for secretive committee-room conspiracies, and the contempt for public and for democratic politics. Gordon Brown became Prime Minister as a result of the first two of these, while his failure to hold a general election shortly afterwards illustrates the third. What we miss from Marxism, and what has been abandoned by these politicians, is the political energy, the internationalism, and the dream of a society organised on a different and fairer basis.