MARX ANDREVOLUTIONARY ORDER

The pH ‘universal indicator’ test to be conducted in this chapteris a little more complex than that carried out in Chapter 1, eventhough it proceeds along similar lines. Here, Marx’s Capital is thewhite paper, so to speak, and Russia turns it reddest, at least inthe end, that is by 1917. But Marx himself shifted his own positionon Russia considerably before his death in 1883, while both beforeand after the Russian Revolution his disciples argued about themessage to be extracted from his teachings. The basic questionswere: was the process described in Capital global or merelyWestern? How long would it take for that process to work itselfout, and for capitalism to be superseded by communism? Then,in particular, to what extent was Russia a full participant in thepassage from feudalism to capitalism and beyond? More certainly,during Marx’s lifetime, the USA was rapidly rising to beconsidered an integral participant in capitalist modernisation, butits ‘alkali’ resisted the overall impact of later Marxist doctrines.The major battles were fought in Soviet Russia, by Lenin, Stalinand Trotsky, whose struggle for the true succession will receiveat least a measure of the attention that it deserves. While non-Bolsheviks also joined in the debate throughout Europe andbeyond, even in Russia a more traditional Western view of worldorder was still in existence, as evidenced in an essay on ‘The NextTask’ by the historian E.V.Tarle. Just as Robespierre provided abridge from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, Tarle builds another fromChapter 2 to Chapter 3On 17 March 1883, Frederick Engels made his speech at thegraveside of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, London. Three daysbefore, ‘the greatest living thinker ceased to think’. And so: ‘Animmeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militantproletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, inthe death of this man. The gap that has been left by the death ofthis mighty spirit will soon make itself felt.’ For:Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organicnature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in humanhistory; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealedby an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first ofall eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it canpursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.; and thattherefore the production of the immediate material meansof subsist-ence and consequently the degree of economicdevelopment attained by a given people or during a givenepoch, form the foundation upon which the stateinstitutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even thereligious ideas of the people concerned have beenevolved, and in the light of which these things musttherefore be explained, instead of vice versa as hadhitherto been the case But that was not all: in particular, Marx had discovered the lawof surplus value, ‘the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society thatthis mode of production has created’. Moreover, the man of sciencewho made independent discoveries in every field that heinvestigated was not even half the man. ‘Science was for Marx ahistorically dynamic, revolutionary force’, and the man himselfwas ‘before all else a revolutionary’, whose real mission was tooverthrow capitalist society and its state institutions, and tocontribute to the liberation of the proletariat. Marx had been thefirst to bring about the proletariat’s consciousness of its ownposition and needs, and for this revolutionary cause, ‘he foughtwith a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival’.While he had encountered much slan-der and opposition, he hadbrushed them aside as though they were cobwebs. He had hardlyone personal enemy, and was ‘beloved, revered and mourned bymillions of revolutionary fellow-workers—from the mines ofSiberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America’. Engelsconcluded: ‘His name will endure through the ages, and so alsowill his work!’1Little more than a century after that ringing declaration, the issueis somewhat in doubt. While the Russian Revolution of October1917 and its aftermath appeared to give fresh emphasis to the wordsof Engels, the August Revolution of 1991 seemed to mark the endof an era in Russia, with the beginning of the end already apparentin Eastern Europe in 1989. This of course was 200 years after theFrench Revolution, whose authenticity was also more than a littlein question in bicentennial analysis. Towards the end of thetwentieth century, then, the cause of revolution looks to be in retreat.We will examine that subject in due course in Chapter 5. Here,in Chapter 2, we will attempt our own appraisal of aspects of thelife and works of Karl Marx, as well as making some observationsabout the revolutions, from 1789 in France to 1917 in Russia, andbeyond. In this exercise, we shall not forget Marx’s own words,especially