What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Valmy]

It's always been an ideology that appeals to the more well off middle class types.  I don't think it is a coincidence that Marxists leaders rarely come from an impoverished factory worker background.

How many leaders of anything come from impoverished factory worker backgrounds? Anyway all you need to be a Marxist is have the time to read Marxist writings and agree with them. They are free and available to anybody who is interested in a ridiculous number of languages.

In the US, at least, Marxism has always been fairly minor.  Prior the Russian Revolution the main current of radicalism was more anarchist, than Marxist.  Marxism was the revolution of the educated, of the University.

Marxism is just a branch of anarchism anyway, they both want a stateless society where everybody is equal.

And that is because historically that was mostly the only way you even got exposed to Marx was through education, through university. But that is no longer the case.

[Neil]

The relationship between trade unionism and Marxism is an interesting one, and I think it's something that is sometimes overstated.  Marxism added a veneer of intellectual rigour to the age-old guild practice of 'we stick together to push up our take', but Marx also made some claims about social development and the labour theory of value that are pretty dubious.  Marx's writings were influential, but more in terms of how they were used as opposed to their content.

[crazy canuck]

Why do you think the content of his writings have not been influential?  People continue to discuss his work to this day.

[Sheilbh]

In the US, at least, Marxism has always been fairly minor.  Prior the Russian Revolution the main current of radicalism was more anarchist, than Marxist.  Marxism was the revolution of the educated, of the University.

Sure and the US is far from unique in that. However before the Russian revolutions the divides mattered less. Marx could be incredibly vituperative in his inter-left fights.

But the radical politics of the left was mixed everywhere with slightly different weightings I suppose. The Marxist tradition was absolutely a part of that, with anarchists, utopian socialists etc. So I don't think you can sort of pick out the Marxist bit of those movements with broad working class bases and say it doesn't belong/doesn't really appeal.

Similarly I think the academia angle is absolutely projecting backwards. Marx and Engels were journalists. The leading early theorists were similarly journalists and sometimes full-time activists living on very little cash. It emerges not in the university but in the world of pamphlets and fly-by-night newspapers with one issue and the workers' lending library (and it's not alone in this - that era had huge print production and relatively narrow and constrained university curricula). It would also often function the other way - Gramsci was a student in Turin which was the centre of Italian industrialisation and was radicalised not by the classical curriculum of a literature student but by what was happening in the city he was studying. I think Walter Benjamin is the greatest Marxist intellectual of the 20th century and his life is desperately trying to and failing to find a university position (various options are temporary or possible but never quite materialise) - which is why he ends up doing more journalistic writings.

I could be wrong but I don't think there's really any formal study of Marxism in a university or academic context until the 20s - again because, as you say, the Russian Revolution happen. Of all the various strands of the radical left (all present in Russia) of anarchists, Marxists, utopian socialists each with their different theorists the one that seizes power in a state is the Marxists and then you have the Spartacists, Bela Kun, the Bavarian Soviet etc. So Marxism "wins" in the sense of attracting lots of new interest from other bits of the left but as the historically (and not just intellectually) significant theory it becomes relevant in academic circles and regularised.

So I think you start to get the early days of the Frankfurt School in the 20s. Lukacs becomes Marxist from just generally on the radical left, I think there's something similar with Bloch (though the German left comes from a fairly conventional Marxist tradition so less of a leap there). The Soviet Union establishes institutions to properly document and study all of Marx and Engels (voluminous) writings - so there's a huge amount of "new Marx" in the 20th century, because he was a journalist so a lot of his writing was ephemeral until the USSR needs it for academic/intellectual reasons. The overwhelming majority of students in universities though were conforming with the class politics you'd expect at that point - in the US they were Republicans, in Europe they were entering the politics of their professions.

But by the 20s and 30s (again because of the USSR's success) there is definitely a student body of Marxists - City College in New York is so important precisely because it was a radical college, unlike almost all other colleges (and, again, there's a particular Jewish New York story here). I think that generation of students in the 1930s (who were any way split between Stalinists and Trotskyists) then become the academics who start applying Marx more broadly in academia in the 50s. It starts being more common in historical analysis, or literary criticism etc.

I think the idea there was Marxism in universities and that's where it recruited, the milieu it was made up of is inaccurate - and, as I say, I think casting back from a point in time when it is true (because it won) to a point when it didn't (and it was one of many popular radical currents). I also think that it was a gag online recently but that a lot of what is described as "Marx" influenced in the US is actually more to do with Weber - and Weber was definitely in the universities.

[Gups]

Sorry but that's nonsense and projecting current tendencies into the past.

There are challenges with what we mean by "Marxism" because historically there have been a lot of splits over various points (parliamentarianism v revolution etc). However Marxism was the basis of the German Social Democratic Party which was absolutely a party of the working class (and August Babel the iconic worker to political leader of early socialism/mass working class politics), not well-off middle class types and also other parties inspire by the SPD particularly in Northern and Central Europe. There are also lots of sometimes contentious attitudes between different strands of the left which affects the shape of the left in different countries, for example the relationship with anarchists (who were stronger in Spain and Italy) or utopian socialists (big in England and France).

However many parties and unions of the left were alliances of those different factions of the left - there is a Marxist story in the history of almost all trade unionism, perhaps especially in the US where the history of labour activism and radicalism is really important in "the left". So I think there was absolutely mass class appeal that was primarily in the working class - though there were middle class supporters, obviously. Similarly there have always been working class conservatives - identifying that strand and tapping into it through a bit of jingoism and a charismatic, if slightly shaky, leader was the genius of the Tories under Disraeli who was very big on an aristocratic working class alliance against the well-meaning but deadly serious meddling, puritanical, po-faced Liberal middle class (plus ca change). But in both cases the broad stream was workers absolutely backing Marxist or fluidly influenced by Marxist organisations. In most of Europe and the US, I think there only start to be very strong clear dividing lines across those strands of the left in the 1930s.

It had broken down well before then. The German SPD (by far the most important socialist party in Europe) had adopted the Erfurt programme which regarded as a synthesis between Marxist historical inevitability of socialism with a programme of gradualist improvements while the forces of history played themselves out. This was falling apart even before the formal split in the 1914 between pro-war gradualists and anti-war internationalists/revolutionaries. 

The PSI in Italy split in 1921 when the left wing broke away to form the Italian communist party and again in 1922 when it expelled leading reformists. There were similar splits in 1920 in France.

The Labour party, having risen from the union movement as a Parliamentary party was never really consistently a Marxist party though it certainly flirted with it at points. 

I'd say that there was always competing strands of gradualist reformists who wanted to work within existing political structure to improve working class conditions and representation and revolutionaries. This was true before 1917 but that obviously brought exacerbated the split. [/quote]

[Jacob]

Yeah the economy is very bad to live here right now. Prices are out of control, I am having to cut back my consumption everywhere.

But, for whatever crazy reason, the stock market is booming.

I'm beginning to think that sections of the stock-market may be somewhat detached from economic conditions.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah the economy is very bad to live here right now. Prices are out of control, I am having to cut back my consumption everywhere.

But, for whatever crazy reason, the stock market is booming.

I'm beginning to think that sections of the stock-market may be somewhat detached from economic conditions.

It has been that way for a considerable amount of time. 

[Jacob]

It has been that way for a considerable amount of time. 

I can be a bit slow sometimes.

[Sheilbh]

It had broken down well before then. The German SPD (by far the most important socialist party in Europe) had adopted the Erfurt programme which regarded as a synthesis between Marxist historical inevitability of socialism with a programme of gradualist improvements while the forces of history played themselves out. This was falling apart even before the formal split in the 1914 between pro-war gradualists and anti-war internationalists/revolutionaries. 

The PSI in Italy split in 1921 when the left wing broke away to form the Italian communist party and again in 1922 when it expelled leading reformists. There were similar splits in 1920 in France.

The Labour party, having risen from the union movement as a Parliamentary party was never really consistently a Marxist party though it certainly flirted with it at points. 

I'd say that there was always competing strands of gradualist reformists who wanted to work within existing political structure to improve working class conditions and representation and revolutionaries. This was true before 1917 but that obviously brought exacerbated the split.

I agree with all that.

I think as you say 1914 and then 1917 are the key moments the divides really sharpening but they did exist before not least because internicine fights among strands of the left seem to get intense even when it's three exiles in a pub in Zurich.

But I think there's a difference between the labour wing of the left and the political wing. I think the slightly more fluid situation of different strands working within the same union is still a thing in the 20s. So you have Marxist trade union bosses in the UK, as well as more explicitly Communist led unions in Europe (like the CGT in France) and even in the US in the period of labour radicalism there is a significant Marxist strand.

And I think in some countries - including the UK and US - the primary impact of Marxists and where they have had appeal is within the labour movement more than within politics.

I think a lot of that gets snuffed out with the increasing impact of Comintern, the Stalin-Trotsky split and then the official line turning against "social fascism".

[Syt]

vituperative

It doesn't happen much these days, but I had to look up what this word means. You nerd

[The Minsky Moment]

If you look at the background of American socialists and Marxists in the late 19th and early 20th century, it's a very mixed group in terms of education and background.  Many didn't finish high school and many worked low level industrial or trade jobs.  Some did have more middle-class backgrounds but a typical example would be someone like Gene Debs who worked as a clerk in his father's grocery store but also was a high school drop out who worked as a laborer in a rail yard.   The idea of a typical Marxist as an upper middle class academic in a university is really importing late 20th century stereotypes back into an earlier period.  There weren't very many Marxists at Harvard or Yale in 1900.  You'd be more likely to find them in small Midwestern cities with petit bourgeois or working class background, or among the ranks of European and Jewish immigrants in the big eastern cities working in the garment trades or related businesses.

This also raises the question of what is means to be Marxist; Marxism-Leninism was mostly unknown outside Russian circles until 1919 and even after that was only one tendency of Marxist influence thought.

[Norgy]

The relationship between trade unionism and Marxism is an interesting one, and I think it's something that is sometimes overstated.  Marxism added a veneer of intellectual rigour to the age-old guild practice of 'we stick together to push up our take', but Marx also made some claims about social development and the labour theory of value that are pretty dubious.  Marx's writings were influential, but more in terms of how they were used as opposed to their content.

Bernstein's reformist agenda won out, but the Marxist tag was of course nice to use for those opposed to trade unions.

Recent polls show Labour ahead among the trade union members, but the Progress Party is quite significant too.

An interesting diversion is how American trade unions were fundamentally different to European ones in the post-war era. There were few traces of leftism in US trade unions, compared to say the metalworkers' union even in Norway, which was the more radical one here. Along with the elevator builders' union, which was taken over by Maoists some time in the 1970s.

Unions are in general not monolithic power blocs, but organised interest groups with their very own problems with power struggles etc.

I would, at the end of the day (god, I hate myself for using that phrase), say trade unions have been more of a force for progress than not.

[grumbler]

Labor unions are to labor what corporations are to capital. They both exist to serve a specific function for a specific group of people and both are often counterproductive due to a focus on short-term results.

[Sheilbh]

An interesting diversion is how American trade unions were fundamentally different to European ones in the post-war era. There were few traces of leftism in US trade unions, compared to say the metalworkers' union even in Norway, which was the more radical one here. Along with the elevator builders' union, which was taken over by Maoists some time in the 1970s.

I'm not an expert on it by any stretch but I've read a little bit about interwar American labor radicalism and the first red scare and it is like a fascinating glimpse of another world that just does not exist.

Ours were never experimental enough to try Maoists I think in the seventies we had at least one union leader with fairly strong evidence they were spying for the KGB and another who appears to have been spying for MI5.

Edit: On the other hand one of the big four Trotskyist cults that riddle the British was very focused on entryism within the trade union movement and trying to control industrial democracy.

Unions are in general not monolithic power blocs, but organised interest groups with their very own problems with power struggles etc.

I would, at the end of the day (god, I hate myself for using that phrase), say trade unions have been more of a force for progress than not.

I am 100% behind unions. I think the decline of organised labour is one of the big causes of lots of problems we have in the developed west right now.

But totally agree on that issue especially the point when they try to coordinate.

[Norgy]

Eugene V. Debs beats Trump as he ran for president behind bars.