International Revolutionary Marxist Centre | |
---|---|
Abbreviation | IMRC |
Chairperson | Fenner Brockway |
Secretary | Julián Gorkin |
Founded | 1932 |
Dissolved | 1940 |
Split from | Labour and Socialist International |
Preceded by | International Working Union of Socialist Parties |
Headquarters | London |
Ideology | Centrist Marxism |
Political position | Left-wing to far-left |
The International Revolutionary Marxist Centre was an international association of left-socialist parties. The member-parties rejected both mainstream social democracy and the Third International.
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POLITICAL THEORY - Karl Marx
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Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet we’re also often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism’s most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn’t very surprising. In practice, his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose diagnosis of Capitalism’s ills helps us navigate towards a more promising future. Capitalism is going to have be reformed - and Marx’s analyse are going to be part of any answer. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany. Soon he became involved with the Communist party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating for the overthrow of the class system and the abolition of private property. He worked as a journalist and had to flee Germany, eventually settling in London. Marx wrote an enormous number of books and articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type of economy that dominates the western world. It was, in his day, still getting going, and Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics. These were some of the problems he identified with it: Modern work is “alienated” One of Marx’s greatest insights is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. But in order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves in the objects they have created’. Think of the person who built this chair: it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant It’s an example of how, at its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what’s good inside us. But this is increasingly rare in the modern world. Part of the problem is that modern work is incredibly specialised. Specialised jobs make the modern economy highly efficient, but they also mean that it is seldom possible for any one worker to derive a sense of the genuine contribution they might be making to the real needs of humanity. Marx argued that modern work leads to alienation = Entfremdung in other words, a feeling of disconnection between what you do all day and who you feel you really are and would ideally be able to contribute to existence. Modern work is insecure Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. And yet, as Marx knew, deep inside of us, we don’t want to be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of being abandoned. Communism isn’t just an economic theory. Understood emotionally, it expresses a deep-seated longing that we always have a place in the world’s heart, that we will not be cast out. Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. He called this primitive accumulation = ursprüngliche Akkumulation Whereas capitalists see profit as a reward for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx was far more damning. Profit is simply theft, and what you are stealing is the talent and hard work of your work force. However much one dresses up the fundamentals, Marx insists that at its crudest, capitalism means paying a worker one price for doing something that can be sold for another, much higher one. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation. Capitalism is very unstable Marx proposed that capitalist systems are characterised by series of crises. Every crisis is dressed up by capitalists as being somehow freakish and rare and soon to be the last one. Far from it, argued Marx, crises are endemic to capitalism - and they’re caused by something very odd. The fact that we’re able to produce too much - far more than anyone needs to consume. Capitalist crises are crises of abundance, rather than - as in the past - crises of shortage. Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car, a house, access to a decent school and hospital. That’s what so enraged Marx and made him hopeful too. Few of us need to work, because the modern economy is so productive. But rather than seeing this need not to work as the freedom it is, we complain about it masochistically and describe it by a pejorative word “unemployment.” We should call it freedom. There’s so much unemployment for a good and deeply admirable reason: because we’re so good at making things efficiently. We’re not all needed at the coal face. But in that case, we should - thought Marx - make leisure admirable. We should redistribute the wealth of the massive corporations that make so much surplus money and give it to everyone. This is, in its own way, as beautiful a dream as Jesus’s promise of heaven; but a good deal more realistic sounding. Capitalism is bad for capitalists Marx did not think capitalists were evil. For example, he was acutely aware of the sorrows and secret agonies that lay behind bourgeois marriage. Marx argued that marriage was actually an extension of business, and that the bourgeois family was fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, with people staying together not for love but for financial reasons. Marx believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency commodity fetishism = Warenfetischismus because it makes us value things that have no objective value. He wanted people to be freed from financial constraint so that they could - at last - start to make sensible, healthy choices in their relationships. The 20th century feminist answer to the oppression of women has been to argue that women should be able to go out to work. Marx’s answer was more subtle. This feminist insistence merely perpetuates human slavery. The point isn’t that women should imitate the sufferings of their male colleagues,it’s that men and women should have the permanent option to enjoy leisure. Why don’t we all think a bit more like marx? An important aspect of Marx’s work is that he proposes that there is an insidious, subtle way in which the economic system colours the sort of ideas that we ending up having. The economy generates what Marx termed an “ideology”. A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system: that a person who doesn’t work is worthless, that leisure (beyond a few weeks a year) is sinful, that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money. In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top—this is true in any human hierarchy—but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent. Marx didn’t only outline what was wrong capitalism: we also get glimpses of what Marx wanted the ideal utopian future to be like. In his Communist Manifesto he describes a world without private property or inherited wealth, with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education. Marx also expected that communist society would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures: “in communist society…it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” After Marx moved to London he was supported by his friend and intellectual partner Friedrich Engels, a wealthy man whose father owned a cotton plant in Manchester. Engels covered Marx’s debts and made sure his works were published. Capitalism paid for Communism. The two men even wrote each other adoring poetry. Marx was not a well-regarded or popular intellectual in his day. Respectable, conventional people of Marx’s day would have laughed at the idea that his ideas could remake the world. Yet just a few decades later they did: his writings became the keystone for some of the most important ideological movements of the 20th century. But Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He could recognise the nature of the disease, although he had no idea how to go about curing it. At this point in history, we should all be Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to go out and find the cures that will really work. As Marx himself declared, and we deeply agree: Philosophers until now have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
Organizational history
The International was formed in 1932, following a fringe meeting at the Socialist International conference in Vienna in 1931. The IRMC underwent a variety of names. It was initially called the Committee of Independent Revolutionary Socialist Parties and later the International Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Unity, but throughout the period it was generally known simply as the London Bureau (and nicknamed by some the 3½ International, in an analogy with the so-called 2½ International of 1921-3), although its headquarters were transferred from London to Paris in 1939 (on the grounds that in addition to the French affiliate, five parties-in-exile had their central committees there). Its youth wing was the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations.
For a period, the IRMC was close to the Trotskyist movement and the International Left Opposition. In the early 1930s, Leon Trotsky and his supporters believed that Stalin's influence over the Third International could still be fought from within and slowly rolled back. They organised themselves into the International Left Opposition in 1930, which was intended to be a group of anti-Stalinist dissenters within the Third International. Stalin's supporters, who dominated the International, would no longer tolerate dissent. All Trotskyists, and those suspected of being influenced by Trotskyism, were expelled.[1]
Trotsky claimed that the Third Period policies of the Comintern had contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and that its turn to a popular front policy (aiming to unite all ostensibly anti-fascist forces) sowed illusions in reformism and pacifism and "clear[ed] the road for a fascist overturn". By 1935 he claimed that the Comintern had fallen irredeemably into the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy.[2] He and his supporters, expelled from the Third International, participated in a conference of the London Bureau. Three of those parties joined the Left Opposition in signing a document written by Trotsky calling for a Fourth International, which became known as the "Declaration of Four".[3] Of those, two soon distanced themselves from the agreement, but the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Party worked with the International Left Opposition to declare the International Communist League.[4]
The Spanish section merged with the Spanish section of ICO, forming the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Trotsky claimed the merger was to be a capitulation to centrism.[5] The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, a left split from the Social Democratic Party of Germany founded in 1931, co-operated with the International Left Opposition briefly in 1933 but soon abandoned the call for a new International.
The secretariat of the International Centre remained with the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) for all but one of the eight years 1932–1940. Fenner Brockway, ILP leader, was chairman of the Bureau for most of this period, while in 1939, Julián Gorkin of the POUM became its secretary. By this time, the Bureau had member parties in more than 20 countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Palestine.
Member parties
- Austria - Red Front (1935, joined the Revolutionary Socialists of Austria )
- Bulgaria - United Socialist Party (from 1932 until 1936, contact was lost)
- France - Groups of the Workers' Unity Friends (from 1935 until 1936)
- France - Party of Proletarian Unity (PUP) (from 1933)
- France - Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (PSOP) (from 1935 as Revolutionary Left a faction of the SFIO)
- Germany - Socialist Workers' Party (SAPD) (from 1932 until 1938)
- Germany - Communist opposition (KP(O) (from 1939, observer only, unaffiliated)
- Germany - Lenin League (from 1933 until 1935)
- Germany - Marxists-Internationalists (from 1939)
- Germany - Neuer Weg (opposition faction within SAPD) (from 1938)
- Germany - Spark (1938)
- Greece - Communist Archio-Marxist Party of Greece (ΚΑΚΕ) (from 1938)
- Italy - Maximalist Italian Socialist Party (PSIm) (from 1933)
- Netherlands - Independent Socialist Party (OSP) (from 1932 until 1935, founder of RSAP)
- Netherlands - League of Revolutionary Socialists (BRS) (from 1936 until 1938)
- Netherlands - Revolutionary Socialist Party (Netherlands) (RSP) (from 1933 until 1935, founder of RSAP)
- Netherlands - Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (RSAP) (1935)
- Norway - Norwegian Labour Party (DNA) (from 1932 until 1935)
- Norway - Towards Daybreak (Mot Dag) (from 1933 until 1936)
- Palestine - Left Workers of Zion (Poalei Zion Smol) (from 1937)
- Palestine - Young Guard (Hashomer Hatzair) (from 1936)
- Poland - General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland (Bund) (from 1932)
- Poland - Independent Socialist Labour Party (NSPP) (from 1932 until 1936)
- Romania - Independent Socialist Party (PSI) (from 1933 until 1933, founder of PSU)
- Romania - Unified Socialist Party (Romania) (PSU) (from 1933 until 1936)
- Spain - Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) (from 1933))
- Sweden - Socialist Party (SSP) (from 1933 until 1938)
- United Kingdom - Independent Labour Party (ILP) (from 1932)
- United Kingdom - Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) (from 1936 until 1938)
- United States - Independent Labor League of America (ILLA) (from 1939)
- United States - League for a Revolutionary Workers Party
- USSR - Left Social Revolutionaries (from 1933 until 1938)
- International Communist Opposition
See also
Notes
- ^ Joseph Stalin, "Industrialisation of the country and the right deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.)", Works, Vol.11, pp. 255-302.
- ^ Trotsky, "Open Letter For The Fourth International", New Militant, August 3, 1935.
- ^ "Declaration of the Four" Archived 2011-07-18 at the Wayback Machine, The Militant, September 23, 1933.
- ^ George Breitman, The Rocky Road to the Fourth International, 1933–38
- ^ John G. Wright, "Trotsky's Struggle for the Fourth International", Fourth International, August 1946.
Literature
- Buschak, Willy. Das Londoner Büro. Europäische Linkssozialisten in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Stichting Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam, 1985
- Dreyfus, Michel (1980). "Bureau de Paris et bureau de Londres: le socialisme de gauche en Europe entre les deux guerres". Le Mouvement Social. No. 112 (Jul. - Sep., 1980), pp. 25-55
External links
- Andy Durgan, "International Volunteers in the POUM Militias."
- John G Wright (Joseph Vanzler), "A Trotskyist View of the London Bureau."
- Leon Trotsky, Trotsky on Britain.
- A Lead to World Socialism The Proceedings of the International's 2nd Congress
- A new hope for world socialism. (The resolutions adopted at the Revolutionary Socialist Congress, Paris, Feb. 19th-25th, 1938, together with the introductory speeches).