Philosophy
and Religion, Part 7
Marxism, or Marx?
Cyril Smith, late in life, and following the fall of the
Soviet Union, felt himself free enough to challenge the principle Shibboleths
of Marxism, including the word “Marxism” itself. Students may think that here
and there, Smith did not quite succeed in resolving all his issues. For
example, he approves Marx's aim of “development of communist consciousness on a
mass scale” but disapproves, in another place, of what he considers to be
Lenin’s determination to do the same thing “from outside” (This CU course will
continue to examine that particular question).
But
otherwise, Cyril Smith succeeds admirably to hit and to knock down his targets,
which are the dead wood and the rotten branches of 165 years and more of
“theory”, and he does us a great service thereby.
This makes
Smith’s work ideal as a means of introducing to this course a set of
propositions about the work of Marx, Engels and their successors, and asking
whether their ideas have stayed on track, or whether they have been reversed,
or overturned, by those who have claimed to be their carriers down the years.
We may
quickly get close to the heart of the matter by first looking at Smith’s talk
on “The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years” (attached, and linked below), and
in particular at the section headed “The Subject of History”. In this section,
the daily practice of communists (“to educate, organise and mobilise”) comes
together with the most profound depths of philosophy. It begins:
“Marx's problem was to discover the possibility
for humanity, individually and collectively, to take conscious charge of its
own life, and to find this possibility within bourgeois society. Communism
would mean that humans would cease to be prisoners of their social relations,
and begin purposively to make their own history. In other words, we should
cease to be mere objects and start to live as subjects.”
It is not
unreasonable, nor is it an exaggeration, to say that this is no less than the
whole matter of Marx, Lenin, communism and the entire work of all the
communists that have ever been. Therefore this text is offered as the main
reading and discussion text for this part, and the matter will be taken up
again in the next part. Use the section on “The Subject of History” for
discussion, because it is sufficient, but do also read the entire document, for
the light that it sheds upon the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Image: The
late Cyril Smith’s passport photograph.
The full
Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Communist Manifesto after 150 years, 1998, Smith.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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