Marx and Engels on Imperialism by Spencer A. Leonard

Author:Spencer A. Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS
Published: 2023-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Whereas most were content to obfuscate and self-deceive, after the Stalinization of Marxism, the consolidation of fascism, the death of Trotsky, and the outbreak of World War II, the Frankfurt School pursued the question of imperialism under conditions of collapse. See, inter alia, Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” [1942] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 93–110; Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State” [1942]; Otto Kirchheimer, “Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9:2 (1941), 264–89; and Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations” [1941], in Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 71–94.

Perry Anderson’s remarks on the subject of Marx’s concept of bonapartism in his 1976 Considerations on Western Marxism typify the capitulation to Stalinism by leading thinkers of the New Left. Marx is, Anderson writes, more “politically and theoretically central to the later twentieth century” than he is to his own time, with which he is somehow “out of synchrony.” Marx is to be brought before Anderson’s conception of the twentieth century and assimilated to it. He never allows Marx to challenge his categories of “bourgeois democracy” and the “modern bourgeois state.” Indeed, Anderson demonstrates small familiarity with Marx’s writings on the imperialist state. His confusion arises from his search in Marx for his own preoccupation, “bourgeois class power.” Here’s what he wrote nearly half a century ago,

[Marx’s] early writings started to theorize, in effect, the structures of what was later to be bourgeois democracy, before it existed anywhere in Europe—but at a very abstract and philosophical level. Then in 1848–50 he wrote a concrete, historical study of the peculiar dictatorial state created by Napoleon III in France—his only such venture. Thereafter, he never directly analyzed the English parliamentary state under which he lived for the rest of his life. If anything, he tended to generalize “Bonapartism” abusively as the typical form of the modern bourgeois state, because of his political memories of its counterrevolutionary role in 1848. He was consequently unable to analyze the Third Republic in France, when it emerged after the defeat of 1870. Finally, because of his preoccupation with “militarist” Bonapartism, he seems by contrast to have tended to underestimate the repressive capacity of the “pacifist” English, Dutch and American states, at times appearing to think that socialism could be achieved in these countries by peaceful and electoral means alone. The result was that Marx never produced any coherent or comparative account of the political structures of bourgeois class power at all. . .

Allied to this failure seems to have been an incomprehension of much of the nature of the later epoch through which he lived. Although Marx was alone in his lifetime in understanding the economic dynamism of the capitalist mode of production after 1850, which was to transform the world, he seems never to have recognized the great shift in the international state system that accompanied it. The defeats of 1848 appear to have convinced Marx that bourgeois revolutions could no longer occur, because of the fear that capital now everywhere had of labour.

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