John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

While radical soixante-huitards like Bookchin and Daniel Cohn-Bendit disinterred and re-invigorated libertarian socialism, Michael Albert developed a systematic alternative to both market and statist economics. Albert’s What Is To Be Undone (1974) emerged from the intellectual ferment of 1968 but, unlike leftists who took a detour into Structuralism and Critical Theory, it remained firmly anchored to concrete strategies to transform capitalism. It and his later Unorthodox Marxism (1978) attempted, in the words of Stanley Aronowitz, to fulfill “a long-needed critique of contemporary Marxist orthodoxy”, specifically that “socialism requires a theory that takes into account not only capitalism’s economic dynamics, but its social and cultural aspects as well”.

In Parecomic (2013), an engaging and accessible graphic novel about Albert’s life and thought, the writer Sean Michael Wilson presents the young Albert’s view that

Marxism had too much about hours of work and not enough about sex and celebration. Marxism didn’t explain the better things in life. Nor did it explain rape, lynching, denigration or sectarianism. People don’t solely sleep, eat, and work, as Marxism seemed to assume. On paper, Marxism was too pat, too confident, and too narrow. In practice, it was too centrist, statist and authoritarian. 12

Albert advanced a strong critique of the record of Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, reformulating the criticisms of Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman and Maurice Brinton about the denial of democratic rights to socialist and anarchist opponents of the Bolsheviks. He stated bluntly that “no matter what Lenin and Trotsky sometimes said about power in the Soviets, they no longer believed in it as a first principle and they had no intention of ever allowing it to come about”. He concluded that the Leninist model “is perhaps not so bad if one wants a transfer of power in an environment of chaos, or if one merely wants to run a bourgeois factory effectively. But for an all-sided revolution or any kind of broadly humanitarian endeavour it is terrible”. 13

While Bookchin, Albert and others such as Chomsky were attempting to lead the American left away from an authoritarian and schematic Marxism, Rudolf Bahro and André Gorz blazed a similar trail in Europe. As a dissident in East Germany Bahro published The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1977), which E.P. Thompson called “one of the few necessary, original and truly significant contributions to the political thought of Europe in the post-war years”. Although not overtly critical of Lenin, Bahro concluded that in 1917 Russia had not been economically advanced enough to manage the transition to socialism, which was why the attempt had ended in the mass industrialistion of the 1930s. His conclusion that the Soviet Union was still not a socialist society and needed a cultural revolution before it could become one led to an eight-year prison sentence (later commuted to two).

Bahro’s real influence lay in his work after he moved to the west, in books such as Socialism and Survival (1982) and From Red to Green (1984). In these he developed the first “Red-Green” theoretical programme, identifying–decades before Lowy and Klein–the threat the capitalist economic model posed to the eco-sphere, and questioning the role of the trade unions and working class in resisting it. He did not assign to the working class alone the task of transforming capitalism when there were many others, driven by concern for the environment and the wider “species-interest” of humanity, who were prepared to challenge the system and offer viable alternatives beyond simply wage struggle. With some justice he found that “If there is anything today that really does deserve the label of a single-issue movement, it is the institutionalised wage struggle which is ultimately subordinated completely to the overall process of capitalist reproduction”. 14

Bahro acknowledged a great debt to the Austrian (naturalised French) Marxist André Gorz. Gorz’s youthful Existentialism made him naturally sympathetic to the resurgence of interest in the 1960s in Marx’s early work and the re-discovered Grundisse , a neglected Marxist classic which stressed the humanist mission of socialism as the overcoming of alienation and abolition of wage labour. From the late 1960s Gorz explicitly identified himself as a “revolutionary-reformist” with a particular interest in political ecology. His focus on “post-industrial capitalism” and how to achieve it separated him from a French left still sunk in freeze-dried Marxist orthodoxy.

Gorz’s books Farewell to the Working Class (1982), Paths to Paradise (1985) and Critique of Economic Reason (1989) questioned, like Bookchin, if the working class was any longer an agent of revolutionary change. He suggested the necessary transformation of capitalism “can only come from areas of society which embody or prefigure the dissolution of all social classes, including the working class itself”. 15To that end he sought to build a radical ecological alternative to capitalist productivism, based on the liberatory use of technology and a Guaranteed Basic Income. Gorz was accused by stern ideological commissars of apostasy, yet his ecologism remained fundamentally anti-capitalist, rooted in the young Marx and the Grundisse .

The work began by Bookchin and Gorz has been extended by Marxist eco-socialists such as Michael Lowy, Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster. Four decades before Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014) explicitly situated climate change and environmental degradation as the primary arena in which the self-destructive contradictions of capitalism could be challenged and overcome by public ownership of natural resources, Bookchin’s Our Synthetic Environment (1962) had done the same, and proposed similar solutions. Bellamy Foster expresses Bookchin’s argument in a Marxist idiom. He highlights a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature, based on Marx’s observation in Capital, Volume III that the unregulated development of capitalism will inevitably produce an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism”. 16

This often-overlooked strand of Marx’s work was a continuation of his early thinking in the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 , which was concerned with the perversion of the “species-being” of mankind by the development of capitalist relations of production, as well as its ruinous effect on the environment in which the species lived. Marx himself said of the planetary eco-sphere that society must “hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition”. It was an insight that fused romantic anti-industrialism with a cold economic analysis of capital. It is the basis of Lowy and Kovel’s vision of a socialism which consciously distances itself from the productivist varieties of the 20th century that led, in one iteration, to the Soviet Union’s satellite states Czechoslovakia and East Germany holding the record for emission of greenhouse gasses per inhabitant. It was this vision that inspired the Belem Declaration, an Eco-Socialist Manifesto discussed and signed by thousands of anti-capitalist activists and writers at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in 2009.

As humanity races towards the second quarter of the 21st century it is now clear that to have any chance of not exceeding a 2°C increase in global temperature–an increase in itself now virtually inevitable, and which will produce severe environmental and social crises especially in sub-Saharan Africa and coastal areas–two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground. At the same time, we must move rapidly to a post-carbon energy infrastructure with radically new forms of transport. Fracking, supported by some trade unions because it creates jobs, is an enormous backward step. If unions are to play any role in shaping and saving the future, they must urgently promote re-skilling and publically-funded jobs in renewable energy rather than act as compliant footmen to capital’s exploitation of natural resources and human labour. As John McDonnell put it in Another World is Possible: A Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism (2007), “We cannot tackle climate change unless we address the system that has caused it”.