Marxism in Our Time
Victot Serge
S
1.
INCE THE
Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, Marxism has
gone through many metamorphoses and suffered many attacks. Critics still
exist-and sometimes men of good will-who insist that it has been can–
celled, refuted, destroyed by history. The confused but energetic class·
consciousness of the last defenders of capitalism, however, sees in Marxism
its most dangerous spiritual and social enemy. The preventive counter-revo·
lutions of Italy and of Germany justly proclaim themselves "anti-Marxist."
On the other hand, almost all workers' movements which have won any
appreciable power have been inspired by Marxism. The CNT of Spain is
almost the only exception to this rule, and experience has shown only too
well the seriousness of its ideological bankruptcy, at a moment when the con·
sciousness of the masses was called on to become one of the decisive factors
in a revolution in the making-a revolution perhaps aborted today pre–
cisely because of the political incapacity of the revolutionaries.
The historic achievements of Marxism are not to be denied. The Marx–
ist parties of the Second International united and organized the ·pre-war
working class, raising it to a new dignity, shaping it democratically. In 191'4
they showed themselves prisoners of the capitalism which they fought even
as they adapted themselves to it. (They adapted themselves, in reality, a
good deal more than they fought.)But it was a Marxist party which, in the
chaotic currents of the R)lssian revolution, knew how to disentangle the
main lines of force, to orient itself constantly according to the highest
interests of the workers, to make itself, in the truest sense of the word the
midwife of a new world. Marxists bore the brunt of the class wars in the
post-war period; Spartacists in Germany, Tiessriaki in Bulgaria, Communists
everywhere. Later, at the moment of its highest flight, the Chinese revolution
was strongly influenced by the revolutionary Marxism of the Russians–
already much deformed, incidentally, by the reaction even then rising inside
the U.S.S.R. It is true that German Marxism in its two forms-Social–
Democratic and Communist-showed itself impotent before the Nazi of·
fensive. Along with the degeneration of Bolshevism, this is without question,
let us note in passing, the greatest defeat that Marxism has ever suffered.
Nonetheless, Marxism continues to mount the ladder of world history. While
irreconcilable oppositionists are persecuted and exterminated by Stalinism, the
Austrian Socialists carryon a struggle, desperate but heroic, which saves
them from demoralization; the Socialist miners of the Asturias in '34 deal
a set-back to Spanish fascism.
It would be absurd to isolate Marxist thought from these social realities.
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