| Book Review | Labour History, 88 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: a Revolutionary Interpretation, Prometheus Books, New York, 2002. pp. 539. US $32.00 cloth.

Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, Berghahn Books, New York, 2004. pp. 256. US $70.00 cloth, US $24.95 paper.

Marxist theory claims to be a scientific explanation of human history and economics. It asserts a series of propositions, for example, class struggle as the leitmotiv of history, the labour theory of value and the inevitability of the revolutionary overthrow capitalism, which are said to be objectively true and allow the prediction of social developments after 1848, when the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels was published. As Professor Hook says in his 1933 exposition of Marx's methods and results, 'ultimately the validity of scientific method depends upon its power to predict, and wherever possible, to control the succession of natural phenomena'.

During the course of the last century, one dominated by scientific and technological achievement, the validity of the Marxist world-view was tested and revealed as defective in some respects by harsh empirical reality. If science is fundamentally concerned with hypotheses which can be verified by inductive reasoning or, as Karl Popper thought, falsified by disproof, then even the staunchest adherents of classical Marxism must be driven to concede the need for substantial revision and pro tanto abandonment.

This is not to say that the Marxist texts offer no contemporary or valuable insights. Isaac Deutscher points to Marx's 'profound, detailed and meticulous analysis of capitalism' and argues that the historical thinker cannot 'foresee the complications of history or map out its exact route' (I. Deutscher, Marxism In Our Time, Cape, London, 1972, pp. 25, 26). This reviewer's distinctly non-Communist lecturers on Marx, Henry Mayer in Government and Eugene Kamenka in Jurisprudence, certainly thought the dense prose of Das Kapital worthy of study. But is it really science or is it a sweeping, normative and idiosyncratic survey of past and future life on this planet?

The civilising of capitalism, effected in large part by reformist social democrats and the labour movement has avoided the progressive and absolute impoverishment of the working class in the developed world, which Marx postulated as a precursor to the revolution.

Private ownership of the means of production has proved a much more resilient structure than Marx contemplated. For Deutscher, this was a misjudgement of the 'tempo' of development (ibid; p 59, referring to Trotsky's predictions of the 1930s that the western world was entering an era of proletarian revolution). But it is legitimate to ask whether this was not a more fundamental error in the theory.

Of course, polemic within socialism is much more complex than Stalinism versus Trotskyism versus Fabianism. For example, there is a dichotomy, familiar to observers of leftist politics in England, Australia and elsewhere, between the 'hard' and 'soft' Left. As Trotsky explained in his essay on Stalin (L. Trotsky, Portraits: Political and Personal, Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p. 213) as early as 1903 some in the revolutionary vanguard were called 'hard' and others 'soft'. Lenin regarded the label 'diehard' as praise, and a Georgian adopted the pseudonym Stalin ('steely'). Some have attributed the origins of Soviet totalitarianism to the Leninist gloss on Marx: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party and democratic centralism.

The socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, prosecuted in Marx's name, did not take place in mature capitalist societies but rather in the underdeveloped world. Trotsky tried to reconcile this hiatus between theory and practice by posing the idea of a single 'permanent' revolution whereby the democratic bourgeois revolution could be skipped and merged into socialist transformation. It is difficult to see this as other than a departure of substance from orthodox Marxism.

The two books under review — Sidney Hook's youthful Trotskyist distillation of Marxist philosophy and Ian Birchell's argument that Jean-Paul Sartre was an independent minded non-Stalinist — facilitate reflection on these and related topics, including the descent of much critical analysis into the verbal relativist sludge of post-modernism.

Hook was an American academic philosopher. In later life, he repudiated early socialist convictions ('events ... have refuted the theory of historical materialism as well as Marx's economic predictions') and, although he rejected the tag of 'neoconservative', Hook characterised his position as a social democrat, a 'cold (war) warrior' who strongly defended President Reagan's attack on the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire'.

He followed the well worn trajectory of many on the anti-Stalinist Left who retained a life-long critique of bureaucratic totalitarianism, but lost faith in the potential for a democratic socialist revolution and, hence, adjusted to support for liberalism and, in some cases, embraced conservatism.

Hook began by lamenting the absence of a 'canonic formulation' of Marx's position, the lack of a definitive and finished exposition of the doctrine. It was that vacuum which the author abhorred and sought to fill. For Hook, to characterise Marxism as an 'objective science' was simplistic because a class bias and goal were presupposed. This scholarship was not mere description, but an 'instrument' in waging the class struggle, which would also 'approximate' objective truths.

Hook expressly conceded the possibility of 'revision' of the theory, as he in fact undertook in light of the establishment of the welfare state in the western world. And, as with many other intellectuals, the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s and Stalin's acquiescence in Hitler's rise to power led to a fundamental re-consideration of the character of the Soviet state.

This is a lucid, razor sharp and polemical exposition of Marxism, a classic out of print for 70 years. It is gratifying to read his exposition of the view, contrary to fashionable subjectivism, of the importance of scientific method. In its time, some viewed Hooks' exposition as 'soft' on social democracy, although the Fabian critics found little comfort in it. Its re-publication is welcome.

Was Sartre a Stalinist hack? Birchell's book is a forensic case for the defence. Although not an uncritical apologia, the writer argues that the French intellectual was, apart from a finite period of rapprochement with the Communist Party (1952–56), a free thinking, independent leftist, despite an unwillingness to throw in his lot with the critics of the Soviet Union.

The central thesis is that Sartre was no 'abject and sycophantic admirer of Stalinism'. But hagiography it is not. Whilst an attempt to 'rescue Sartre from those who would like to bury him', the writer does not shrink from accepting that his subject from time to time allied himself with Communist orthodoxy, was guilty of 'colossal misjudgements', made rash claims and contradicted himself. And yet he was frequently denounced violently by the powerful French Communist Party, publicly condemned the Soviet camps, and his thinking contained an echo of Trotskyist thoughts. For Sartre, politics was the extension of morality; Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours deserved serious examination; the end did not justify the means, hardly notions to be expected of a Comintern apparatchik.

In short, this is a worthy analysis of the dangerous and ambiguous political liaisons of an important twentieth century thinker. The argument is persuasive in showing that the subject of this book was separate and apart from what E.P. Thompson stigmatised as the 'shambles' of the 'tenacious posthumous Stalinism of the French Communist intelligentsia' (E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin, London, 1978, p. 406).


Sydney	J.W. SHAW

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