Karl Marx Oration Brochure 2006

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the 2006 Marx memorial address

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Marxism and imperialist war

by Andrew Murray chair of the Stop the War Coalition

I

t is an honour to be asked by the executive committee of the Communist Pa rty to address this annual commemoration of the life and work of Karl Marx. Many distinguished communists have made this address in the past. Rereading some of these speeches I was struck not only by the many p r o found points made, but also by their rather diplomatic character.

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This may be Marxist, but it is not a bit Marx-like.

The revolutionary bu ried here was endlessly disputatious, often truculent and utterly intolerant of any attempt to confound or compound the doctrines to which others gave his name. From Marx we can perhaps learn that diplomacy may be an over-rated virtue. Complacency and an avoidance of uncomfo rtable controversy proved problematic when our movement led one-third of the wo rld’s people in building socialism – it is disastrous when, as today, the Communist m ovement is weak and fragmented, still searching fo r a way forward in an era of counter-revolution and imperialist war. So I shall endeavour to be controve rsial. I cannot assert that anything I say necessarily represents what Marx would say if he were alive today – those are often questionable claims – but I will try to look at the question in his polemical spiri t .

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We can learn from Marx himself, and from the work of many Marxists over the 20th century, that the essence of this drive to domination and war can be found in the logic of c apitalist accumu l a t i o n , in the drive to exploit ever greater numbers of working people, in the demand for ever more surplus value and the maximum possible profit.

In being asked to address the question of Marx and imperialist war, we face a double difficulty. Marx himself ceased his lifelong labours before modern imperialism and its wars really secured their deathgrip on the world. He did, of course, address the plunder of India and Ireland by the British Empire, but here his wo rks need to be carefully weighed and scrupulously analy s e d .

For example, one of his most famous passages in relation to India acknowledged the brutality of British rule over the sub-continent, yet at the same time exalted its progressive work in uprooting Asiatic backwardness and implanting in its place the dynamism of European capitalism. I would like to think he would not have put the question in exactly the same way later on, when the economic and social destructiveness of imperialism was more fully revealed as a systemic block to the development of the peoples of Asia. He might also have reflected that human progress is not unilinear, with all countries required to advance to “civilisation”, emanating from Europe alone, by the same route.

Lenin and the Communist International, reflecting on later developments in wo rld capitalism, made the necessary corrections. But if Marx did not alw ays hit the mark with every detailed observation, from a perspective of 150 years on, the essence of his thinking is as much a guide as ever in the present imperialist war. We should not doubt the scope of the challenge the wo rld faces – the determined attempt of the wo rld’s only superpower to impose its own interests on the whole of humanity in what even the Pentagon has recently admitted will be a “long war".

Taking the internationalist view is not necessarily simple. Do we believe that the occupation of Iraq – the most central issue in the world struggle today – is entirely illegitimate and should be ended immediately? Or do we believe that it has been legitimised by the United Nations and should be ended at some point in the future, when the political situation in Iraq appears more favourable? In practice, behind purely verbal camouflage, Communist parties have different positions on this. They cannot be reconciled. One or other meets the intern a t i o n a l interests of the wo rking class.

It is no exaggeration to call this a wo rld war in more than embryo. At present, Iraq, Afghanistan and much of the former Yugoslavia are under direct occupation. Military bases are springing up across the face of the earth in readiness for new conflicts.

Countries presently threatened include Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria and North Korea.

This debate needs to be had without being bashful. Communists working in the spirit of Marx cannot accept the idea that the wo rking class does not have a single ideological standard. Of course, no one Party or guru can lay down that standard unilaterally. The struggle for it has to be the joint endeavour of all Communists. But to accept eclecticism ideologically is not only to go against the spirit of scientific socialism, it also we a kens the united front needed against the imperialist war.

We can learn from Marx himself, and from the work of many Marxists over the 20th century, that the essence of this drive to domination and war can be found in the logic of capitalist accumulation, in the drive to exploit ever greater numbers of working people, in the demand for ever more surplus value and the maximum possible profit. These features the present war has in common with the two great world wars.

It is this logic which starts by intensifying exploitation eve rywhere – for example, in the fact that the average wo rker in the USA itself presently works forty per cent longer hours than twenty-five years ago, with little or no improvement in real wages over the same period – and ends with wars of conquest to control resources, open marke t s , privatise assets and remove those who will not comply.

And it is this situation, of course, which continues to bring millions of people around the world out onto the streets to demonstrate against imperialism and for peace.

The single ideological standard – the idea that in taking an international stand the vanguard of the working class had to be animated by the same principles eve rywhere - was the ideal that Marx fought for in his time against Lassalle, Proudhon and Bakunin and that Lenin fought for against Kautsky.

How Marx scorned the idea of unity for its own sake on an ideologically soggy basis.

Marx’s whole life was an insistence on socialism as a science, as a knowledge-based system of understanding the development of human society and the struggle for its emancipation. A struggle for a single ideological standard was perhaps his obsession – it did not make him easy company, but it did make him great.

How that fighting unity of Communists is restored is critical in the fight against imperialist war, with all the complications it presents.

Ta ke the novelty that George Bush has now What is the role of Communists then? It is proclaimed his open-ended war as a “campaign fo r outlined above all in the words of The Communist democracy". Let us pass over for a minute the Manifesto: “they point out and bring to the front the obvious hypocrisy of the US’s support for common interests of the entire wo rking class, dictatorships from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and its independent of all nationality” and “alw ays and contempt for the democratic choice of the Latin everywhere represent the interests of the movement American peoples in one country after another. as a whole". Further, Communists bring to the fore the class question – the question of production We must say that a “war for democra c y ” is an relations – at eve ry stage. oxymoron under imperialism. Imperialism is in its essence un-democra c y. It can provide the routine of This is more than ever necessary when the managed elections and the veneer of publ i c development of the imperialist dri ve for domination expression, but in its ve ry marr ow it is the rapacious in the post-Cold War world throws up a host of new seizure of the wealth of nations, the denial to peoples issues, where different classes are drawn into conflict of any control over their own destinies, it is national in new fo rms, when religious and national fo rms humiliation, racism and barely - veiled coercion often overl ay the essential issues, and where no class everywhere. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly worldwide presents a single face politically. This has than in Iraq, where the pictures of torture and bestial been true to some degree of all great wars, but it is abuse in abu Grahib and elsewhere are the authentic particularly acute when, as today, the wo rking class pornography of neo-colonialism, where a city like wields only a small influence at the level of state Fallujah, the size of Coventry, can be razed with power and where the ideological positions of barely a mu rmur and where the US Ambassador and imperialism often go unchallenged in mass political the British Foreign Secretary now dictate to the discourse.

Iraqis what manner of government they must form.

Yet there is a revisionist position which poses the demand for democracy – the legitimate aspiration of all peoples everywhere – against the struggle for freedom from imperi a l i s m . N e ver in our history have the two been so interdependent. We must restore to democracy its class essence – democracy for whom? – and say that those who expect imperialism to deliver democracy in Iraq or elsewhere will meet disappointment or wo rse.

The single ideological standard – the idea that in taking an international stand the vanguard of the working class had to be animated by the same principles everywhere was the ideal that Marx fought for in his time against Lassalle, Proudhon and Bakunin and that Lenin fought for against Kautsky.

How Marx scorned the idea of unity for its own sake on an ideologically soggy basis

heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” an analysis which serves well in considering the social circumstances imposed on many Muslims in Europe t o d ay.

It is equally wrong to allow the sometimes religious form of the struggle for national liberation in particular countries to distract from the core of the question. Let’s remember that the Mahdi – the “mad Mahdi” of contemporary chauvinist propaganda - who Another question that has come up sharply in the led the uprising in the Sudan against the hero of present imperialist war is a variation on the familiar Empire General Gordon was a theocra t . Yet William problem of imperialist economism, against which Morri s , one of Marx’s first followers in England and a Lenin fought so sharply in the first great imperialist man who alw ays insisted on describing himself as a war. In its contempora ry form, it poses social communist, observed that when the Mahdi took demands against the national and anti-imperialist Khartoum and killed Gordon the important thing was struggle. It reduces the campaign against imperialism that “Sudan is once again in Sudanese hands". That is to demanding trade union rights, urges the the point of significance – in Ira q , in Afghanistan satisfaction of economic problems without posing the (another disastrous British neo-colonial opera t i o n fundamental task of national democra t i c which must not be overlooked) and elsewhere. emancipation. Such arguments are familiar from the struggle against British imperialism in Ireland, where These are points of supreme importance in the they have been marginalised, and they are increasingly wo rk for the realisation of the perspective of Karl seen to be bankrupt in relation to Iraq as well.

Marx today and will determine in large measure our own pers p e c t i ves for advance in Britain.

What is the essence of the situation in Iraq? It was well put by the Iraqi Communist Pa rty, which Marx wrote in 1861 that “in no part of Europe said: “The Anglo-American imperialists who occupied are the mass of the people more utterly ignorant of our country and robbed us of our independence the foreign policy of their country than in England.” with the collaboration of a handful of national He could not write that today. Issues of foreign traitors, today works more frenziedly than ever to policy excite people of all classes, old and young, as turn our country into a war base.”That statement seldom before. The great anti-war movement has was, alas, issued in 1954 rather than more recently, put Bush and Blair’s world policies at the heart of but it retains its full force today. almost every issue of public debate.

Finally, there is the ever-dangerous embryo of chauvinism, never more than dormant in the British working-class movement, against which both Marx and Engels wrote so copiously. This finds its expression most recently in confusion in the face of the imperi a l i s t race-baiting of Muslims in Europe. It is a simple tri c k – keep poking devout Muslims with a stick until a small minority respond in an extreme and absurd way, and then turn on the whole community like a pack of hounds saying “look, these people are alien to our civilisation.” It is chauvinism when we neglect to observe that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims come from countries in a great arc from Morocco to Indonesia, countries which have without exception been colonies or semi-colonies well within living memory, whose peoples have been oppressed and their countries ra p e d , not because they were Muslim but because they stood in the way of imperialist superprofit. Their presence in large numbers in European countries, including our own, is likewise a consequence of the imperialist world system.

Secularism is an important principle. So, needless to say, is free trade unionism. So is equality fo r wo m e n , and for gays and lesbians. But we can still have a secular chauvinism, or a trade union chauvinism, if these principles are not fought for in the context of an understanding of the dialectics of imperialism, and in particular of the pervasiveness of racism against Muslim people in Britain today.

We all know that Marx described religion as “the opium of the people". Let us also recall that he preceded that famous phrase by writing that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a

This is not philanthropy. Foreign and domestic politics march as one. Imperialist war is breeding terrorism as never before, and terrorism in turn is the pretext for authori t a rianism, and for a sustained assault on liberty. If successful, that assault will have as its main consequence making it easier for those bent on hegemonising the world to launch further wars if they feel the need.

And these are the circumstances in which we must fight for the victory of the working-class socialism which Marx outlined as the inevitabl e realisation of humanity’s destiny. Actually, these circumstances are not so bad. It was Lenin who, in a prescient passage in Left-Wing Communism observed that “it is possible that [in Britain] the breach will be forced, the ‘ice broken’, by a parliamentary cri s i s , or by a crisis arising out of the colonial and imperialist contradictions.” That colonial and imperialist crisis is all around us today, despite the superficial calm and triviality of contempora ry British bourgeois politics, with all parties contriving to dance on the head of the same pin in the so-called “centre ground.” As the imperialist war unfolds, so we can be sure will the mass movement against it, which will be manifest on a global scale once more next we e kend. It is a struggle for peace, a struggle for national independence, a struggle for the pri o rities of social justice rather than capital accumulation and ultimately a struggle for the core ideal of Karl Marx – the restoration of humanity to its essence, a restoration which today can only lie through the defeat of a world system which mutilates humanity – spiritually and often physically. The defeat of imperialist war is the supreme task of Marxists and Communists, united as one across the world, today.

It was Lenin who, in a prescient passage in LeftWing Communism observed that "it is possible that [in Britain] the breach will be forced, the 'ice broken', by a parliamentary crisis, or by a crisis arising out of the colonial and imperialist contradictions”

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