The Director’s Lectures

Politics after Socialism

Lecture 3-4 November 1998

Where did we get to last time? The origins of socialism; Marx is the key figure in the
development of socialism. Karl Marx is one of these people who never had any
doubts, it seems. He wasn’t a tortured personality. Even though he lived in poverty,
Marx seems always to have believed in his mission. He wasn’t successful in his own
lifetime, as I mentioned last time; he didn’t really have a big body of followers until
afterwards. But he never seems to have had any doubt about his impact on history.
And that impact he certainly did have. I think it is absolutely essential, as we go
through these lectures, that we keep in mind that Marx set out to change the world.
What Marx was trying to do, and in a way, what the whole of the socialist tradition is
trying to do, is not just study the world, but use an interpretation of history to change
history. The lead theorem of Marx, which is really the theorem that ties him to the
enlightenment, because this was the particular position of the enlightenment, is that
we have to understand history to change history. Only if we understand our past, and
if we understand that in the past human beings have lived history without controlling
history, history has controlled us rather than us controlling it…we need to switch
around, Marx says. We need to become masters of our own history. We can only do
that through understanding it.

So, when you ask why Marxism has so much impact on the world, I suggested last
time as well, there are two aspects to this. One is a stress on the union of theory and
practice; the philosophers interpreted the world, the point is to change the world. It is
that kind quasi-religious aspect of Marx and Marxism that was certainly important in
the impact it has made on world history. The second thing is the sheer intellectual
power of Marx’s interpretation of history, and it was this intellectual scheme that I
was describing last time. Now, Marx argued that there are certain distinctive forms of
society in history, and you can’t understand, as it were, the potentialities open to us
today, living in an industrial civilisation, if you don’t understand how history has
changed and what possibilities it’s opened. So, let’s look fairly quickly at this
scheme, because this has also had a lot of impact on historians and others. Marx
argued that the earliest kind of society is what he calls tribal society, and he had
another term for this, but I’ll come onto it in a minute. Tribal society is the earliest
form of human society, what anthropologists call hunting and gathering societies, or
small agricultural communities. The whole of human social life originated in this form
of society. Now, Engels, who worked closely with Marx remember, had a particular
term for tribal society. He called it primitive communism. By that he meant, and Marx
meant, that in the smaller types of agricultural community and hunting and gathering
societies most things tended to be owned in common. Remember, the origin of
communism is communal; these were communal-based societies. So that, for
example, in hunting and gathering cultures there was virtually no private property;
nearly everything was owned in common by the members of the tribe. And you find
even among such surviving groups today…there aren’t many but there are a
few…say if you go on a hunt or something, and you kill a pig, let’s say, it isn’t yours.

The pig belongs to the community. You might get the best bit, the eyeballs or the
testicles or something, but you would have to give the rest of it to the community.
The fruits of hunting, like other activities are communal activities.

Primitive communism, as communism, or communal ownership or property, was
however based upon poverty. In Marx’s view, this was a non-class society. It is a
fundamental thing for Marxist ideas, and socialist ideas more generally, I suppose,
that class divisions are not natural; they are not given in history. They develop from
history, and they can be changed by history. These are societies with only a low
level of inequality. However, Marx argued, quite rightly I think, that this low level of
inequality is based upon poverty. The reason why there aren’t class divisions in
these societies is that they simply live close to the bread line and there isn’t enough
to go around. That is why they are sort of forced to share production communally.

Primitive communism is therefore a classless society based upon lack of wealth. As
we will see in a minute, Marx argued that a classless society of the future will be the
opposite. It will be based upon abundance rather than poverty. Now, there is a very
important thing here; Marx was not an admirer of primitive communism. Marx was
not an admirer of the traditional, local, rural community. Famously, one of his sort of
more polemic phrases talks of rural idiocy. In other words, a kind of limited nature of
culture in these societies. This is very important because this is a division within
socialism. Marx had no time, really, for the small agrarian community. Many other
socialists built their ideas around it, and especially anarchists built around it. What
they wanted to see was an escape from industrialism. This is still quite common
today; it was very common in the student movements of the 1960s for example, thirty
or so years ago. The idea that industrialism is something which is basically
oppressive, and we need to escape from it back into the local, rural community;
many people have thought that, and whole branches of socialist, anarchist thought
was based on that. That means escaping from industrial society, going back to an
earlier form of production. Well, Marx never had any time for that. Marx was
extremely hostile to people who thought in that way. This is again very important.
Marx was not a critic of industrialism. Marx thought that industrialism, for reasons I’ll
mention very shortly, generates far more wealth than any other society or culture has
ever had before. The problem is to use industrial production rationally, so that you
produce a society where that wealth is reasonably, even distributed, and where it is
used for human purposes rather than any endless pursuit of profit. A question which
still makes sense at the end of the twentieth century, as it did, I think, at the end of
the nineteenth century.

So, the first type of society in history, for Marx, is something we have to escape from.
If you want to put it in sort of current terms, you could say that Marx was a
moderniser, because Marx thought that modernisation or transformation, getting
away from our rural past, was the key to living a decent life in the future. Now, Marx’s
scheme of history books looks rather like this. He argues that in Europe out of tribal
society you get the first class system. This is the ancient societies of Greece, Rome,
and the other civilisations I mentioned last time; the earlier agrarians civilisations.
These are class societies in the sense in which, since they accumulate more wealth,
since they are urban based civilisations, you get a class division…basically you get a
fairly complicated class division, but basically a class division between a patrician, or
aristocratic ruling class, and a majority class of slaves and other non-propertied

individuals. This is a class system, Marx thought, based upon slavery; the slaves of
Greece, the slaves of Rome, especially he had in mind. And this is the kind of
society in which the class division is structured around ownership of people. In a
slave-ownership society, some people literally own other people. They don’t in a
modern society. There is a big difference in being in a labour market, Marx thinks,
and being owned by anybody. Slavery, Marx thought, is not a very economically
efficient mode of production.

So, what happened in the ancient world, Marx argued, was that there were class
conflicts between the dominant class and the slaves and other groups. You have
numerous slave revolts. Most people here would have heard of Spartacus slaves
revolt, but there were many revolts of the slaves. So this was a society in which there
was a lot of conflict. But this conflict, Marx argues, did not lead to, as it were a higher
stage of civilisation. The reason for this is that slavery, Marx says, was an
insuperable barrier to further economic development. So, in Rome, for example, you
had quite a lot of commerce, you had quite a lot of trade, but it never led to a
capitalist society. What it led to was a society which destroyed itself through its own
contradictions. You can’t have a commercial society, Marx argues, based upon
slavery, because slavery is too static; it’s too fixed, it doesn’t fit with an industrial
society. You can argue that the same thing happened all over again in the American
Civil War, and that is just what Marx did argue in his writings on America, that the
Civil War was a war between two systems of production. To have an effective
industrial society you had to get rid of slavery. It was less motivated by noble values
than by the economic need to have a more flexible labour force.

To put the story in brief anyway, since I don’t have time to tell it in detail, the ancient
world collapsed under the impress of its own structural contradictions or difficulties.
So the barbarians marching into Rome were simply putting a seal upon an already
declining and decaying civilisation. Edward Gibbon, the famous historian of Rome,
reached much the same conclusion. Max Weber, the famous German sociologist,
drew very strongly on Marx’s analysis in his discussion of the ancient world. And
there are several very prominent ancient historians who still use this analysis as a
way of explaining why the ancient world, why Rome in particular, collapsed.

In Europe, this leads to, of course, the emergence of feudalism. The transformation
of feudalism into capitalism is something I discussed last time, so I won’t go over it
again. It involves the same kind of scheme, except in this case you get a historical
progression. Feudalism begins as a de-centred agrarian system, involving a system
of obligation and fealty between an aristocratic ruling class and an in-surfed
peasantry. As a result of its economic development, you get the emergence of urban
centres, these become manufacturing centres. You don’t have the barrier of slavery.
This develops a bourgeoisie, or a new manufacturing, capital-based class. This class
eventually challenges the old feudal class, overthrows it and so you get the French
Revolution and a sequence of so-called bourgeois revolutions. The bourgeois
revolutions are the manufacturing class in the towns putting political power on top of
their economic power. You get an economic transformation of feudalism, followed by
a political revolution, follower by ideological, or bound up with ideological,
transformation. We think, for example, so much in terms of individualism, Marx says,
because individualism was what the new emerging class wanted. They wanted to

hire and fire workers. Well, you couldn’t do that in a feudal system. Feudalism was
possible to get beyond, as it were, in a way in which slavery wasn’t, however.

Feudalism leads to our type of society, industrial capitalism, and I’ll be saying more
about that in a minute. Industrial capitalism, according to Marx, will eventually be
superseded by socialism, which puts, as it were, the cap on this historical evolution.
We need to look in some detail about what this transition actually is. However, here
is something that is really interesting, and again it has had a lot of influence. Marx
argues that this is a pattern of Europe, there is no inevitability about it, this is simply
a history of Europe. And in the east, and in the other big civilisations, something
different happens. So, when you think of China and India; Marx wrote quote
extensively about China and India…in China and India you get a different pattern of
development. And here you get what Marx sometimes called oriental despotism; he
didn’t invent this term, but he sometimes used it; or the Asiatic mode of production.
By this he meant traditional China, India and, although he wrote on it, Japan. What
happens in the East, Marx argues, is you get a kind of arrested class development.
These societies never become full class societies, in the way in which Rome and the
ancient world did in Europe. The reason for this, certainly in China and India, was
that they were big landmasses. As they kind of developed economically, so they
developed a sort of early state; a kind of administrative system, the Chinese Imperial
State, for example. The Chinese Imperial State kind of froze out further class
development, Marx argues, because it wasn’t too favourably inclined to commerce.
So these societies remained sort of suspended, as being half-class societies, yet not
fully class societies. And they were societies in which control of irrigation by an early
bureaucratic state came to introduce a kind of stability into history. Again, Marx says
a lot more about that than I can really say here. But, the essence of his argument is
that, in the East, you get a kind of accommodation or balance between a central
state apparatus and a relatively primitive, but quite well organised, system of
production centred around irrigation. He argues that therefore these societies
remained relatively static for some two thousand years. In these societies, you don’t
get the same dynamic of development as happened in the West. These are
societies, if you like, ruled by a bureaucratic elite more than a class.

Now, there are plenty of people again who have picked up on this theme. One
important writer here was a famous historian called Karl Wittfogel, who wrote an
equally famous book called “Oriental Despotism”, in which he uses Marx’s ideas to
discuss the Eastern civilisations. But this is one of the intriguing things about it, and it
is also relevant to Marx…Wittfogel tried to apply this then to Russia. What Wittfogel
argued was that Russia was itself a case of oriental despotism, a bureaucratic state
of an authoritarian kind, and when communism was established there, communism
kind of picked up on this kind of authoritarian system. So that, according to Wittfogel,
and according to a lot of interpreters of the Soviet Union, Soviet communism,
strangely enough using Marx, became a kind of transmuted authoritarian state. It
simply kept on the same kind of authoritarianism, despotism, as was true of previous
periods. It is a thesis worth looking at, and we will consider in a bit more detail in the
next lecture when I discuss why communism collapsed and what has happened to
socialism after Marx. But this book had a lot of influence.

It is very important in Marxist terms because you have to ask; did Marx regard
Russia as a case of oriental despotism, or not? The answer is, we don’t really know.

Marx did, however, say some very important things about Russia and the possibility
of revolution there, which we will come onto a bit later. Now Marx’s argument is that
these societies, in a sense, don’t have a history. In Europe you have a dynamic
history; in Asia you don’t. You have more stasis. So what happens is that these
societies only become transformed through the globalising impact of Western
capitalism. It is only when Western capitalism expands across the world, and the
adventurers and the merchants from the West go to China, to India, to Japan, start to
colonise India, that these civilisations start to crumble. They crumble because they
are not prepared for this contact. They are based on a completely different system.
So when they come into contact with Western colonialism, it is highly destructive,
and it essentially undermines the old system of production, or will do so completely.

So these societies are brought into world history by the impact of world capitalism,
which, for reasons I’ll go on to discuss immediately, Marx says is a voraciously
expanding system. Industrial capitalism is different, he is quite right about this, from
traditional civilisations. For example, the Chinese, even as late as the seventeenth
century, were well ahead of Europe. But the imperial rulers decided not to expand
into the wider world. At a certain point, famously, they stopped exploration occurring;
they said, you must retreat within the walls of the Chinese empire. In the West this
did not happen. The reason this did not happen, Marx argues, is that the dynamics of
capitalism makes it impossible. There are certain reasons why capitalism cannot
stay still. It is not a society that can stay still. We all know this from our own lives. If
you think of the changing rate of technology today; as soon as you buy a computer it
is obsolete. Well, there has never been a society remotely like that in history. It is a
society of endless change, and it is a society of endless expansion. So, the whole
world history changes, Marx argues, once industrial capitalism becomes established.

So, let’s look at his analysis of industrial capitalism; what it is, and how it supposedly
becomes transformed into socialism. Because, in a way, this is the core of what
Marx’s writings were all about. What is a capitalism economy, and what is a capitalist
industrial society? Here, Marx is talking about the kind of society we live in today. I
think no-one disputes that capitalism is still the key term for designating the kind of
economy and society in which we live, especially with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. No-one any longer denies that capitalism is a globalising system. Anyone
who has followed the trajectory of East Asia, the Asian economies, can see the
globalisation of the capitalist economy, and the fact that it increasingly draws us all
within a single global market place. Well Marx anticipated most of that, although he
thought there would be a strong reaction against it. And, indeed, for quite a long
historical period there was a strong reaction against it, in the shape of the ideas that
Marx promoted. So what is this kind of society? Where does it get its dynamism
from? What is it doing to the world?

A capitalist society, of course, depends upon the accumulation of capital, and there
has never been a society before, Marx argues, of this type. In pre-modern societies
you had merchants, you had commerce, but you never had a whole society based
upon market principles. Capital means the accumulation of wealth which is re-
invested to produce more wealth. In a capitalist economy, money is not static.
Anything can be bought and sold. Capital, whether it is in the form of money,
whether it is in the form of ownership of factories, whether it is in the form of
ownership of machines, whether it is in the form of ownership of other fluid

assets…capitalism is a regularised investment system whereby you invest money in
other resources to try to generate further resources. A fundamental aspect of
capitalist economy, therefore, Marx says, is the existence of the commodity, again
something pretty unique in history. We are the first type of economy is society in
which almost everything can be bought and sold. A commodity is simply anything
bought and sold on the market. Marx argues that in a capitalistic society…for the first
time, for example, take one example, land can be bought or sold. We are so familiar
with this at the end of the twentieth century that no-one thinks it is at all surprising;
you can sell your house, you can sell the land your house is on, you can sell your
farm etc. You couldn’t, of course, do so in a feudal system. You couldn’t do so in
most pre-modern societies. You could not sell lots of land.

Basically, in a capitalist society you believe there is a price for everything, and price
is determined not by the intrinsic use of the asset, but by how much you can get for
that asset on a market. So the idea of a commodity in turn implies a market, and it
implies an indefinitely extensible market, as it were, because as more and more
things become turned into commodities, so markets occupy more and more of our
lives. So that now, we live in a society where you can assess easily and immediately
the cost of going on holiday against the cost of buying a new item of clothing. Well,
these things have nothing in common whatsoever. We are just used to doing it
because that is what a market does for us. A market creates abstract values in terms
of which you can compare and price everything. And Marx thought this also included
human beings. A fundamental aspect of modern capitalism is that labour power, that
is you and I, also becomes a commodity. In a capitalist society, again for the first
time in history, if you want to put it this way, you have labour markets…the labour
market is where all of us here sell our labour in order to get a return. No-one here, I
take it, lives from the produce from their own small plot of land. We all depend upon
a whole series of services which we purchase through the money we can get in the
labour market, whether as a student getting a grant, whether a person getting a job.
Human labour power therefore becomes a commodity to be bought and sold like any
other commodity, and if you consider a capitalist or industrialist, you know, making a
decision about an investment, that capitalist can simply assess whether or not the
labour costs are too high in relation to the costs of technology, or the costs of the
plant, or whatever. Labour power, therefore, Marx says, is a sort of de-humanising of
human beings, because it treats human beings as though they were equivalent to
material objects simply to be bought and sold at the whim of industrialists or other
employers, and he had a lot to say about that.

This is the nub, therefore, of the class system of capitalism. The class system of
capitalism looks roughly like this; you have a dominant class of industrialists, they
are the owners of large capital, they are people who own large enterprises, banks,
finance companies and so on. You have a large class of people who have only their
labour power to sell, in other words a working class, or Marx sometimes used the
more archaic terminology; the bourgeoisie and proletariat, but you can largely ignore
that. There is an industrial dominant class. There is a majority of the population
working and selling their labour to that class. In the middle you have many other
groups, for example you have small property owners, small capital, people who Marx
also called the petty-bourgeoisie, these are people who own small businesses, they
are often in conflict with the owners of large capital in a capitalistic society.

So, according to Marx’s analysis, a capitalist society has an economic base, which is
the expansion of markets, it has political institutions, which are parliamentary
democracy, and it has an ideology, of individualism; the ideology of capitalism is the
idea that we are all responsible for our own individual fate, we should all get on with
our own individual lives, we have to look to ourselves for our own economic reward
and our own salvation. Very, very different from a feudal system, Marx argues.

Now this society, according to Marx, should follow the same plan that I mentioned
last time, that is, you have an existing set of relations of production, you have a new
set of relations of production developing within that society, on an economic level,
which will eventually lead to a period of revolution and after that a new kind of
society taking over. And this is exactly what Marx tried to show. Marx argues that in
its early years, a capitalist society is based upon open market competition between
lots of producers and consumers. In an early period of a capitalist society, producers
and consumers know nothing about one another. You are producing for a market;
you only know whether you should go on producing in terms of whether people buy
your product. Marx thought this was very, very different from a feudal system. In a
feudal system, you knew who you were producing for. In a feudal system there is a
connection between production and consumption, because, if there is a market, it is
a very local market, the farmers go into the market, they know who they are
producing for, the local villages. In a capitalist society, for the first time, there is a
massive split between production and consumption, and only the market determines
the relationship between one and another. It is only in terms of price, investment and
profit that industrialists will go on producing only as long as people will buy what they
actually produce, so a schism or a division is introduced between production and
consumption.

In the early phases of capitalism then, you have no kind of conscious intervention in
the production process. It is simply a society dominated by market forces. It is a
heavily revolutionary society, it can’t stay still, Marx says, precisely because you’ve
always got to be looking for new markets. There is no way in which a capitalist
enterprise can simply stay stable. There are technical reasons for this, which Marx
gave, but he argues that in capitalist economy you must always try and get new
markets, you must always try and cheapen your labour power, you must always try
and cheapen your costs to try and compete with other producers. So capitalism
involves massive processes of technological change. It is a society in which
technological change is absolutely fundamental, because if you can produce a
specific technological change you can get a market for a while, until someone
catches up with you. It is also a society which ruthlessly expands into the rest of the
world, because the more you can get cheap raw materials, the more you can get
cheap labour power, the more you can compete more effectively with other people
competing with you in the market place.

Capitalism, therefore, is a system based upon what Marx calls the anarchy of the
market, in its early phases, you’ll still hear the beginning of this process. Now, as
capitalism expands, Marx argues, two changes occur on the economic level. First of
all, you get the increasing concentration of capital, and second, you get the
increasing centralisation of capital. The concentration of capital means that
capitalism, although it begins as an open market system, tends towards the
production of monopoly, or oligopoly, in the organisation of industrial enterprise.

What this means, put simply, is that capitalism is an erratic kind of system. It goes
through crises of underproduction or overproduction of the kind we are now seeing
perhaps in the global economy. In these crisis situations, big firms can prosper while
small firms tend to go out of business. So, capitalism tends to produce a system in
which a limited number of very big firms tend to dominate the economy. These are
big firms like in our day, General Motor, ICI, or the many other really big firms that
dominate the world economy. That is the concentration of capital. The centralisation
of capital means the emergence of banks, especially central banks, which seek to
regulate the system. The centralisation of capital means that you don’t just accept
the market place. Banks, for example, today, as we will be seeing in the course of
today, use interest rates as a way of trying to stabilise the capitalist economy, and
we will know today what the Bank of England decided to do about that.

Now, the importance of these processes is that, as they continue, as you get more
concentration and centralisation of capital, you are producing a contradiction at the
heart of capitalism. Because, these are forms of production based upon conscious
control. They are no longer just based upon open, anarchic competition. Big firms
can control the markets that they are in, and banks and other organisation, including
the state, can increasingly control the economy. As this happens, capitalism is
subverting itself, Marx argues, because what this is showing is the emergence of
socialism within capitalism. What is socialism? Well, socialism is organising
production consciously according to human need. Capitalist markets do not do that.
But increasingly, as big firms dominate, so you get a kind of introduction of
conscious control back into the economy. It certainly is not socialism. In some
respects, Marx argues, it is the most aggressive form of capitalism. But it is no longer
the old system. Even on a world scale, you can get big corporations that can
command large sections of the economy, and of course in our day they can do so
through advertising and many other characteristics. This is socialism struggling to
emerge from capitalism; it is the system transforming itself from within on an
economic level. It gives us the chance of using the fruits of industrial production
much more effectively than they can be in an anarchic, open, competitive market
system. It is still, however, capitalism.

Now, when you get economic change you will expect to get political change and you
would expect to get ideological change; that is what the model involves. And this is
exactly what Marx says happens. As the system becomes socialised, as the fact
emerges that we are actually all inter-dependent in a modern economy, the system
can’t just depend on individualism because we are much more inter-dependent than
we ever were before, as this happens economically, on the political level you get the
rise of a political reaction to this, which is the rise of organised labour movements
and political parties. The emergence of labour parties, or socialist parties, is the
political expression of the understanding of the inherently social nature of the world
which industrial society is creating. So you get, first of all, a kind of defensive
formation of organised labour, and then you get the politicisation of organised labour;
you get labour, or socialist, parties emerging in all countries, setting out to challenge
the existing parties that were there hitherto. And this is indeed what happened. With
the arguable exception of the United States, in every Western country a socialist or
labour party or parties did develop. Marx thought they could be the agents of
significant transformation of the system. On an ideological level, socialism and
Marxism itself is the ideological expression of these changes. There are a lot of

questions to be asked about whether Marxism itself simply became an ideology of
class domination in the Soviet Union, but certainly Marx argued that the emergence
of socialism, and indeed communism, as a set of ideas is the ideological arm of
these things. So this eventually he expected to lead to revolution – you get a process
of revolution which will transform capitalism and produce a very different type of
society.

How, and why would this happen? Well, Marx thought in some societies, like, for
example, the UK he mentioned, remember he was labouring in the library here, in
Holland, and one or two other countries with established parliamentary traditions,
you could just get a reformist process of socialism. Socialist parties would come to
power. They would be able to reform the system. They would nationalise industry.
They would introduce conscious control of economic life. The smart saw socialism as
introducing the possibility of production again for need. It is true in a primitive
context; it can be true in an advanced context. Rather than price and profit, why don’t
we use the fruits of industrial production to produce what we know we need? As
Marx thought, remember, that capitalism is irrational. Capitalism is not the best way
to make use of the fruits of industrial production. Because in a capitalist system, you
can have millions of people without shoes, you can have factories producing shoes
which lie idle. Marx thought it was absurd to have a society with large numbers of
unemployed, where there are plenty of needs for whom, if people were employed,
they could cater. A socialist society would therefore reintroduce a connection
between production and human need; it would humanise capitalism, if you like.

In some countries this could happen as a reformist process, but elsewhere, Marx
said, it would have to happen throughout revolution. This is where, in a way, we get
back full-circle, because at the end of his life, where did Marx start writing about,
where did Marx think the revolution might occur? Well, Russia. In the last few years
of his life, Marx was in active correspondence with Russian socialists, and Marx
spent some time studying Russian society. Marx argued that Russia would be the
sparking point for revolution. Indeed, that is what happened, of course, in the
October 1917 revolution in Russia, about thirty or so years after Marx died. However,
Marx argued, in this correspondence of letters with Russian socialists, this can only
be an effective revolution if it becomes generalised. The reason why revolution might
happen in Russia, Marx thought, is that you get a clash of advancement and
backwardness. As technology, as ideas become imported from Western Europe into
Russia, it is an explosive mix.

Russia, therefore, could be a sparking point for revolution, but revolution could only
be successful, Marx argued…and here, he must have had in mind the Asian mode of
production, or oriental despotism…could only become successful if it was
transported back to Western Europe. Only if Russia became a sparking point for a
European revolution, Marx thought, could a socialist revolution become successful;
you couldn’t jump from a peasant society to a socialist one. This is not, as you will
know, what history produced. What happened was the revolution in Russia did
occur. It did occur along much the same lines as Marx had anticipated. It did produce
the first Marxist society in history. But for some fifty or forty or so years, that society
was the only Marxist or socialist society in the world. And so what happened was
that Stalin, the first inheritor of this society, invented the doctrine of socialism in one
country. By socialism in one country, he meant that Marx seemingly had prohibited;

you could have a successful transition from a largely agrarian society to an
advanced socialist industrial one. Many other people, including socialists, doubted
this, and this became the main division between orthodox Marxism, or Marx-
Leninism as Lenin, of course, was the originator of the 1917 revolution…between
this orthodoxy, on the one hand, and that followed by Leon Trotsky, on the other.
Trotsky argued, as many liberals argued, that the revolution in Russia was not the
socialist revolution. Trotsky argued that you could not go from a peasant society, just
as Marx had said, to an advanced, affluent, collectively organised system. Trotsky
argued that the Russian revolution was what he called a revolution betrayed. It was
betrayed because it did not become an international revolution. Even afterwards,
there was a division between Trotskyism, on the one hand, which looked for
international revolution, and Marxist-Leninism, or the form of Marxism that emerged
in the Soviet Union, on the other.

These are massively recognised historical questions when you consider the
subsequent fate of the Soviet Union, because, by any token, the Soviet Union
became an authoritarian society. By any token, it became a bureaucratic state. I
think, by any token, Marxism itself became an ideology of domination within the
Soviet Union. It was not…I don’t think it would be possible for an outsider to pretend
it was anything like the kind of socialist society that Marx anticipated. But what
happened in Russia was to happen across the world, because what Marx thought
would be the sparking point of revolution actually proved to be the main motive
power of revolution through the world. Revolutions did not occur, and will now never
occur, in Western Europe or the United States. The revolutions occurred in peasant
societies. The revolutions occurred in China, in Cuba, in some African countries, in
other far-Asian countries; all peasant societies, not industrial societies. In all those
contexts, they produced authoritarian, and one has to say barbaric, systems built in
Marx’s name.

A rather more important question, therefore, one has to ask of socialism and of
Marxism, is what all this means? Were these authoritarian tendencies built into
socialism? Was socialism, especially revolutionary socialism, always a doomed
enterprise? Is authoritarianism sort of an intrinsic part of what it means to have a
command economy? Therefore, is the only alternative an open market society?
Because, if the only alternative is an open market society, a market society produces
many of the things that Marx quite accurately predicted. Big inequalities between rich
and poor, now operating on a global level. Big fluctuations – an enormous sort of
yawning from prosperity to depression. A world in which many people are doing
unappetising jobs. A world in which, certainly within the economic system, there is a
good deal of obvious oppression. A world which simply does not listen to the sigh of
the oppressed creature because it is a world dominated by economic considerations.
These are questions that I will go on to consider, two weeks from now and next term.
Thanks very much for coming today.