This essay is a follow-up to Marxism is not a Layer Cake — which discusses the linear view that communist theory consists of layers of theory, laid down building on each other, without much outside influence or internal negation.
By Mike Ely
The creation of existing communist theory has often been described as a kind of relay race — where the leaders of various parties hand off theoretical batons to each other in a linear ascent. It is not how Marxism will develop — and it is not (in fact) how it did develop.
The linear view (exemplified by the “5 heads” pantheon) underestimates the degree of discontinuity, difference, innovation and cross fertilization. And it greatly disguises the degree to which revolutionary theory was influenced (and needs to be influenced) by the larger thinking of its times. Communist theory does not present itself (if it is vibrant and organic) as “one to many” but as a part of a “many to many” dynamic with the creative and scientific thinking around it.
Why should we not consciously develop our revolutionary understandings today knowing that it will emerge as a contentious communist bush woven into a larger revolutionary and social ecosystem of ideas and struggles?
In some corners of communist activism there has been a great deal of debate about “who is in the line-up?” — where quite major questions of line and politics got concentrated in the historical (and iconographic) questions of whether you keep Stalin on a par with Mao and whether you elevate Mao to an “ism.”
These have generally been rather important matters of line — though they have been discussed in highly peculiar ideological ways — so that even many communists found them obscure and did not understand the life and death matters being worked out. It has been important to acknowledge that there was an element of the new (the quite radically NEW and discontinuous) in Mao — that is not an affirmation or extension of previous orthodoxy. There has been both affirmation and negation in communist theory — and that is a good thing.
And (frankly) most people (and most revolutionaries) in the world are not that hung up on Stalin. It is a very very old question. And any attraction now to those politics of the “classical” Comintern is (at best) a yearning for a communist doctrine that is quite simplified, finished, coherent and rigidly authoritative. There is no such doctrine, and the Comintern’s claim to have one was deceptive.
Any search for a tidy previous cure-all doctrine (in the form of Back to Marx! or Back to Lenin! or Back to Stalin!) is naive at best. And it is certainly an idea that leads away from what we need to do. The theoretical knife has to cut deeper than that.
Really, what we need to do is get to the work of looking at how to make revolution in our world today (and in our particular social formations with their very particular histories and politics).
We need a verdict that says inherited communist theory is insufficient for what we now need to do. And we have to be far far more innovative than that to have the slightest chance of success.
Development of Complex Analysis is Bushy not Linear
In service to that goal — my discussion of the “5 heads” view of Marxism is not mainly a discussion of “who is in that line up” (however important that has been in the past). My immediate complaint is the very idea of this lineup of busts.
A Hoxhaist “history of shaving” — one version of 5 heads
This “history of shaving” is as mistaken as that classic picture of “evolution” showing the linear “march” from fish to reptile to mammal to man (or the equally iconic and mistaken linear march from ape to man). No. Things don’t emerge in such linear way
The assertion of MLM as the label for communist theory was the preparation for new cloistered “isms” with mistaken claims of universality (no matter what they chose to call them). It led to the narrowing of the discussion internationally, its ghettoization into jealously competing “isms” — at a time when the whole thing needs to be opened up a great deal, with some open-minded cross fertilization.
The assertion of MLM as a a linear sequence (even if a linear sequence of leaps) is, like the even more mechanical insistence on “continuity of program” in some Trotskyism, a declaration that privileges continuity over discontinuity, tradition over innovation.
The 1960s Maoists learned from Black nationalists, and feminists, and Althusser, and Marcuse, and Abby Hoffman, and Stephen Gould’s post-modern questions about linear directionality – whether anyone publicly acknowledged it or not. And why should such influences not be acknowledged — the way Marx and Engels celebrated the thinkers around them?
Why should we not consciously develop our revolutionary understandings today knowing that it will emerge as a contentious communist bush woven into a larger revolutionary and social ecosystem of ideas and struggles?
Communism’s emergence and development is more of a cross fertilizing bush of pathways (and always has been) — than a relay race of singular theorists. Marxism emerged as a bush that included some outstanding theorists. But we also need to recognize the cross fertilization of ideas (including from non-Marxists to Marxists) if we are to develop a communism for our time that is able to embrace and connect with some real clarity.
Originally published by the Kasama Project in 2010
https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/marxism-is-more-like-a-bush/