What is Marxism?  Germinal Libertario · Organ of Expression of the Anarchist Youth of León (FIJA)
Channel: Anarquistas
Date: 2021-01-02

Germinal Libertario · Organ of Expression of the Anarchist Youth of León (FIJA) What is Marxism?  Before beginning the critique of the principles and results of #Marxism, we consider it necessary to ask a question that apparently has the character of a riddle, but which is amply justified if we take into account that the defenders of this doctrine claim that only it offers the necessary  homogeneity leading to a coherent activity in the struggle for human emancipation.  This question is the following: what is Marxism?


   We will see later that, based on the texts of Karl Marx himself, it can be answered in very different, even contradictory ways.  For now, let's limit ourselves to certain immediate practicalities, which really influence the story.  In 1936, before Franco's triumph, there were three known currents in Spain: the #Socialist Social-Democratic Party, which was the most important;  the official #Communist Party, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).  Each of these currents claimed to be the only valid one, the only authentic representative of Marx's thought.  But the Communist Party called the members of the Spanish Social Democratic Party traitors, and claimed that it violated the sacred principles set forth in the Communist Manifesto and Capital.  To which the leaders and theorists of socialism who continued Pablo Iglesias, Jaime Vera or Pablo Lafargue responded by denouncing the deviation that consisted of trying to carry out socialism in an insufficiently industrialized nation, and implanting the "dictatorship of the proletariat" when the conditions did not exist.  socio-economic character (concentration of capitalism, important development of industry and the industrial proletariat, technical progress in agriculture with the elimination of archaic forms of land ownership), indicated by Marxism as sine qua non conditions of socialization in accordance  to the supposed scientific concept of socialism.

   The #POUM responded to these two currents, and with it the Trotskyists, half-hearted Poumists, who violated the principles of Marxism, on the one hand, those who did not want to carry out the social revolution as soon as possible, on the other those who wanted to carry it out according to the norms.  applied by the official Communist Party, which, following Stalin, violated the principles of Marxism-Leninism.  Only the Poumist or Trotskyist interpretation of Marxism was the good one, the authentic one, the indisputable one.


   Today we have the Stalinist Communist Marxists, the #Trotskyist #Communist Marxists, the #Poumist #Communist Marxists, the #Mao-Tsé-Tung Communist Marxists, the Togliatti Italian Revisionist #Communist Marxists, the Communist Marxists who are in favor of the trend created by Krutchev.  , and the different Trotzist currents.  We forgot the titists.


   But, historically, and on the world level;  currents and undercurrents have been multiple for many decades.  divided and opposing schools, and interpretations, each of which claimed to be, in its own way, the only indisputable interpreter of #Marxism.  Until the Russian revolution, reformist and semi-reformist #Marxists, revolutionaries and semi-revolutionaries clashed everywhere.  In Russia itself, the Bolsheviks with #Lenin, Chicherin and #Stalin, the Mensheviks.  with Plejanof, founder of the Russian Social Democracy, and Martov, in the middle of whom was Trosky, who dealt blows left and right, they fought savagely and accused each other of right and left deviations.  In Germany, the homeland of Marxism, the revolutionary tendency led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht fought hard against the reformist social-democratic majority whose main theorist was Bernstein.  In between the two was the semi-revolutionary and semi-reformist trend led by Karl Kautsky.  the most notorious Marxist of the time, whom Lenin had to beat a good deal by calling him “the traitor Kautsky” when he saw that his German opponent refused to approve of the Russian Bolshevik seizure of power.  As will be supposed, Kautsky demonstrated, on the basis of an orthodoxy no less indisputable than that of Rosa #Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, that the other two tendencies betrayed the thought of #Marx and #Engels.