September 2024
What do you think of this I wrote?
Submitted by Jack Hannon on Sat, 2011-02-05 19:54
God worship-An Infantile Disorder (I originaly wrote this on facebook)
In this note i will be analysing a very strange disorder which has occured in Marxism , and this disorder is god worship.
In Marxism lately there has been alot of idolisation to people such as Lenin,Stalin,Trotsky etc.
And there's alot of idolisation of Stalin and how he was a great leader and how he made the soviet union great. Things like this are very counter-productive and very anti-marxist. Marxism is not an ideology of Idolisation of leaders if it was then it wouldn't be called marxism but fascism or capitalism.
Marxism is about equality and by implementing that with a proletarian revolution. But this god worship is a type of elitism and with this god worship it's creating inequality which is a product of Capitalism.
And this god worship is also another type of Revisionism which will not lead to a proletarian revolution but to delusional theories about revolution, just like all revisionism does.
But I ask these god worshippers what will this praising and "butt kissing" of leaders such a Stalin actually do will it actually achieve anything? will it achieve socialism? will it achieve equality? and the answer is no it will not achieve socialism and it will not achieve equality but it will achieve something and that is more inequality and more exploition.
I've noticed how these god worshippers reject anything that is put forward which is against the theory/theories of their god. This can be shown when we study people such as Rosa Luxemburg.
She is called a Revisionist by some organizations because she had different theories to Vladimir Lenin and she opposed some of his theories. So in the god worshipping logic your a revisionist if you oppose a theory of their god.
Here's a link to a piece of work by Paul Mattick which is on this subject of god worship which is quite interesting
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Agreed that it is a strange
Agreed that it is a strange thing for Marxists to identify with the "great man" theory of history. It is something the bourgeosie go in for. It has to be fought against. We have to view all previous communists however much they have positively given to the revolutionary movement critically. We call ourselves Marxist not because we worship Marx but we follow the critical method he laid down for the working class to understand its own position as a class and how to fight exploitation. Marx changed his mind over his lifetime because of this method. He saw for example that the programme he laid out at the end of the Communist Manifesto had become "outdated" by 1871 as the experience of the Paris Commune and other struggles helped to redefine how the working class will get to communism. We have no gods in that we have a critical appreciation of all revolutionaries. For example we are opposed to the method of Trotskyism (which is reformist in our time) but we recognise that Trotsky did make great contributions to the working class (in 1905 and in the early part of the 1917 revolution). The Mattick essay you point to is a bit funny though. He talks of Lenin's embalmed body and the cult around him. What he does not say (as I recall) is that this was a DELIBERATE act by Stalin. Stalin turned Lenin's funeral into a quasi-religious ceremony (over his tomb he kept saying "we vow to thee comrade Lenin" repeatedly). Stalin wanted a cult (which came to be called Marxism-Leninism) so he could be its high priest (and become the next in line as an object of worship himself). Lenin's dying wish was that he wanted to buried next to his family in a quiet grave but in Mattick's version it is as if the dead Lenin had created the cult. And Mattick's anti-Bolshevism gets the better of his class instinct when he criticises the Bolsheviks as opportunist by excusing the bourgeois government of Kerensky for failing to carry out land reform in 1917 . He does not mention that Kerensky could not carry out land reform, despite his government being dominated by the SRs, the peasant party, because the Provisional Goverment was beholden to landowners. In fact Mattick falls into the opposite trap here of simply criticising everything the Bolsheviks did (and they did make many appalling errors later). The result is that he throws the baby out with the bathwater and we end up thinking that it would have been better if the Russian workers had never risen up in the first place. Mattick is better in other essays (especially one on Lenin and Luxemburg where he points to the strengths and weaknesses of both). You might not agree with his judgement on these but he is at least using the right method. I hope we do the same.
Personally I make note to
Personally I make note to call myself a Marxist simply because it annoys Anarchists (And other assorted 'anti-nameists' who tend to be of a 'libertarian' stripe).
Just edited my usual
Just edited my usual appalling typing in the previous post but in reply to Zanthorus I have to say that we have suffered a lot from nameism. After all, the entire internationalist communist left today pays some nodding acknowledgement to the original Communist Party of Italy (founded 90 years ago last month) but as this was so dominated by Bordiga the left in the 20s and 30s who fought against the degeneration of the Comintern get called "Bordigist" but today's Bordigists are what our comrades call "late Bordigism" who base themselves less on the revolutionary Bordiga of the 1920s and more on the Bordiga who returned to revolutionary politics after an absence of almost 20 years and demonstrated that he was not only out of touch but even had regressed on his own previous clarity. However this is not much of a problem in the UK. Whenever we say we are descended from the Italian left we invariably get the reply "oh we like Gramsci too!"!
We need simple effective
We need simple effective communication.
The whole problem is that of doing away with separate power, a passive audience.
Certainly the history of the movement is of importance, and there is no need for everthing to be dumbed down, but equally, if we cannot make concise evaluations and easily understood explanations, then we are just adding to the vast literature the vadt majority will never even look at.
Re simple effective
Re simple effective communication no-one could disagree. We need communication on all levels. Longer explanations of what we mean in things like Prometeo and Revolutionary Perspectives or pamphlets and short political summaries in things like Aurora. The "vast majority" will not read what we say until revolutionary activity is a practical issue and then they will judge us by how much we are in tune with what they are thinking and doing.