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Marxism is distinct from pre-Marxist socialisms and communisms in a very simple way: it asserts that communism is not a simple act of moral will, but reflects the objective interests of the proletariat in the class conflict inherent in capitalism, so that the proletariat as a class can be expected at the end of the day to become communist. The proletariat’s grave-digging destiny demands that capitalism necessarily precedes communism.
Mass working class support for forms of reformism and gradualism, or - as in England before 1900 or in the West generally today - for capitalist parties, is generally taken to be the basis of the ‘crisis of Marxism’. This is because it calls into question the claim that the class struggle between capital and proletariat forms a material basis for communism. Communism then reverts to being an ethical imperative, to be approached through moral persuasion on a cross-class basis or through one or another form of voluntarist minority action - or rejected.*
There is a second crisis resulting from Marxism having lost sight of its individualistic project. The egoism of Max Stirner was an immense influence upon Marx, to the extent that he took the time to write (in partnership with Engels) the huge and unpublishable German Ideology, largely as a response the Stirner’s The Ego and its Own. Marx later wrote that the book was 'abandoned...to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we have achieved our main purpose: self-clarification.'
The distancing from Stirner in the German Ideology was disingenuous to say the least. Marx’s political aspiration was in many respects a continuation of Stirner’s; the release of the ego from all forms of social obligation. The difference in their approaches, repeated ad nauseam throughout Marx’s work, was that, whereas Stirner believed the ego’s freedom to be an act of individual will, Marx believed it had to be preceded necessarily by social revolution in order that the conditions for freedom and the all-round development of individuals might first be established.
The twin crises of Marxism are apparent in the way that moralistic socialists are fighting political battles on bourgeois ethical and collectivising agendas, reinforcing the ideologies of capitalism rather than destroying them.
Under this misconceived socialism, the red flag is being raised because it is ‘good’ and ‘right’, rather than historically necessary. The project of communism has social, rather than individualistic ends, with its adherents believing themselves to offer a countervailing force to the apparently individualistic liberalism of capitalism. However, this moralistic critique does not recognise the collectivist nature of capitalism – the greatest force for collectivisation the world has ever seen or will see. Under capitalism, the individual is enslaved and oppressed by the seemingly autonomous force that is society. It will take communism, a system of society consciously organised in the interests of people rather than monetary profit, before the individual’s potentialty for freedom is finally realised.
Yet socialists remain prisoners of a critique of capitalism that is grounded in bourgeois social mores, reinforcing the very ideologies they are supposedly setting out to destroy.
Until communism is understood as a necessary precursor to individual freedom, rather than a merely good and proper aspiration based on bourgeois principles of togetherness and co-operation, then its achievement will be delayed.
Coming back to the influence of Stirner’s egoism, Communism is a selfish rather than a selfless aspiration, and nothing disturbs bourgeois sensibilities more than selfish workers.
There is no individuality under capitalism; rather the self is prostituted to the capitalists. Individuals under capitalism are self-sacrificing; they are equally selfless as commodities.
Communism undermines all that workers are taught and led to believe by the capitalists and their ideological functionaries in education, art and religion.
* This summary of the crisis is adapted from paragraphs Mike Macnair’s article on the US Platypus Group in Weekly Worker, 19 May, 2011.
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