Basics,
Part 4
Sources and Component Parts of Marxism
We have
said, while discussing Machiavelli, that communism does not discard the past,
but grows out of it. This week the main item is Lenin’s “Three Sources and
Three Component Parts of Marxism” (download linked below). This piece
of writing, though extremely short, manages to embrace the whole of philosophy,
politics and economics. For these reasons it is highly popular with teachers
and students.
Lenin’s
purpose is to show how comprehensive Marxism is, and that Marxism is on the
“highroad of development of world civilisation”.
He puts the
matter like this:
“…there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in
the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose
away from the highroad of development of world civilisation. On the contrary,
the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he furnished answers to
questions which had already engrossed the foremost minds of humanity. His
teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the
greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.”
One may
appreciate Lenin’s point, without necessarily accepting every simplicity in
this highly compressed account. It is a scheme of understanding, almost like a
diagram. It raises many questions, for example:
- Is there any such thing as “Marxism”, in
the sense described here by Lenin as “complete and harmonious” and “an
integral world conception”? Karl Marx did not think so. From his own point
of view, Marx had only completed a small part of what lay before him; and
he refused the label “Marxist”.
- In what sense was Marx’s philosophy
materialist? Did Marx see human beings first and foremost as arrangements
of molecules – i.e. as an “extension” of material? Or is the actual point
of Marx’s philosophy and politics to give the free human subject priority
over the material, objective world in which it must toil for its
development? Scholars still debate these questions.
- In what sense did Marx have an economic
doctrine, or an economic theory? It is true that the question of surplus
value is at the core of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. But is that work
therefore an economic text-book? Or is it really what Marx called it: A
Critique of Political Economy? In other words, is it not anti-economics,
rather than economics?
When it
comes to politics, there is no doubt about “the
struggle of classes as the basis and the motive force of the whole development”,
as Lenin puts it. So there is a lot that is good in the “Three Sources and
Three Component Parts of Marxism”. But it is only a start and it does not
absolve anyone from the necessity of further study.
It is
pleasing that in this short, packed piece Lenin still has time to mention South
Africa (in his last paragraph), and that news of proletarian organisation in
our country had already reached Lenin a full century ago, in 1913.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: 3 Sources
and 3 Component parts of Marxism, Lenin, 1913.
