Philosophy and Religion, Part 7
Marxism, or Marx?
Cyril Smith, late in life, and following
the fall of the Soviet Union, felt himself free enough to challenge the
principle Shibboleths of Marxism, including the word “Marxism” itself. Students
may think that here and there, Smith did not quite succeed in resolving all his
issues. For example, he approves Marx's aim of “development of communist
consciousness on a mass scale” but disapproves, in another place, of what he
considers to be Lenin’s determination to do the same thing “from outside” (This
CU course will continue to examine that particular question).
But otherwise, Cyril Smith succeeds admirably to hit and to knock down
his targets, which are the dead wood and the rotten branches of 165 years and more
of “theory”, and he does us a great service thereby.
This makes Smith’s work ideal as a means of introducing to this course a
set of propositions about the work of Marx, Engels and their successors, and
asking whether their ideas have stayed on track, or whether they have been
reversed, or overturned, by those who have claimed to be their carriers down
the years.
We may quickly get close to the heart of the matter by first looking at
Smith’s talk on “The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years” (attached, and linked
below), and in particular at the section headed “The Subject of History”. In
this section, the daily practice of communists (“to educate, organise and
mobilise”) coincides with the most profound depths of philosophy. It begins:
“Marx's problem was to discover the possibility for
humanity, individually and collectively, to take conscious charge of its own
life, and to find this possibility within bourgeois society. Communism would
mean that humans would cease to be prisoners of their social relations, and
begin purposively to make their own history. In other words, we should cease to
be mere objects and start to live as subjects.”
It is not unreasonable to say that this is the whole matter of Marx,
Lenin, communism and the work of all the communists that have ever been. This
text is offered as the main reading and discussion text for this part. You may
use the section on “The Subject of History” for discussion, because it is
concise and sufficient, but do also, if possible, read the entire document, for
the light that it sheds upon the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Image: The late Cyril Smith’s passport photograph.
The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Communist Manifesto
after 150 years, 1998, Smith.
