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Marx At the Millennium
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- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
196 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Cyril Smith
3 books6 followersCyril attended meetings of the Communist Party while a student at University College London in 1947, but was repelled what he saw as double-talk, lies and sectarianism. He then joined the Revolutionary Communist Party, and was a Trotskyist up until supporting the expulsion of Gerry Healy from the WRP in 1985. Cyril subsequently embarked on a thoroughgoing re-examination of his understanding of Marxism, culminating in “Marx at the Millennium,” published by Pluto Press in 1996. This work sought to strip the layers of interpretation and distortion covering the work of Karl Marx, and highlighted the need for a fresh study of Marx's writing. “Karl Marx and the Future of the Human,” was published by Lexington in 2004. Cyril taught statistics at the London School of Economics for many years until his retirement in the early 1990s and has given talks and written numerous magazine articles on themes relating to science, philosophy, economics and communism.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 13, 2021
As with Mark Twain, reports of Marxism's death have been grossly exaggerated.
When such reports were first made with the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal polemicists proclaimed it proudly and without reservation. Here in 2021, the same polemicists not only recognize Marxism's vitality but often tentatively credit Marx for foresight with regards to understanding captialism's cyclical struggle with crisis. If this praise is faint and halfhearted, it may be perhaps out of shame, and truly who could expect the anti-communists to sing Marx's praises regardless of historical circumstances?
So, in light of the shallowness of mainstream engagements with Marxism, one is of course compelled to turn to the Marxists, but there is a problem. By and large, these Marxists act as though the Soviet Union did not collapse! True, it was hardly the death of Marxism, but it was the death of something and that something in intimately related to Marxism. The secret, of course, is that these Marxists are themselves among the dead. Zombified parties carrying on the banner of a dead movement in the name of a societal model proven conclusively to be a dead end.
Marx at the Millennium is an expose of that secret. Or, rather, it is Smith attempt to settle his account with that secret, having been a proponent of it for nearly four decades. An avowed Trotskyist for most of his life, Smith found in his twilight years that the philosophy he had promoted for most his life was neither in line with Marx's thought nor was it useful in the class-struggle. Realizing this fact, Smith set about using his last decade to discover the real Marx. Marx at the Millennium was his first attempt at recording this discovery, and while it is less provocative than his second book Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, it is also undoubtedly more readable.
From a certain perspective, Marx at the Millennium is an introduction to Marx's thought. This perspective is not wrong. From another, it's an attempt to challenge Marxism, and this perspective is not wrong either. It is both. It is an attempt to place Marxism on a new basis, one that is authentically Marxist. It is as potentially useful to a 16 year old discovering Marx for the first time as it is a 66 year old party loyalist coming to be dissatisfied by the party line. Rather than simply explain Marx, Smith at the same time challenges the reader to unlearn "Marx."
In challenging the reader in this way, Smith is successful only in places. As Sig below me notes, Smith is fiercely polemical and not always charitable in his readings of others. This is where my agreement with Sig ends, but it's a fair point to make. Despite having served as a professor of statistics at the University of London for years, Smith makes no attempt here to meet academic standards. Even as it leads Smith to play fast and loose with the writings of others, I think this approach is ultimately useful. It allows Smith to bend the stick, to borrow a phrase from Lenin.
The Marxism that emerges from Smith's account is deeply Hegelian, one above all else concerned with self-development and self-realization. Capitalism is to be critiqued for the ways in which is impedes and warps this process of self-development, the class-struggle is radical insofar as it is comprised of working-class self-activity, so and so forth. Marxism that deviates from this is, to Smith's eye, emphatically anti-Marxist. Every chapter hits at these themes in one form or another.
The most valid points on with Smith's Marxism can be in turn critiqued, I think, are that Smith's account lacks a deep appreciation for the historical specificity of capitalist society. His account of human self-development is rich, but his engagement with how this self-development occurs through the class-struggle is limited. In fact, his expose on the historical bastardization of Marxism features virtualy no discussion of the class-struggle whatsoever, giving an essentially idealist account of the issue in which bad interpretations of Marx beget bad interpretations of Marx without any mediating factor of Marxist practice. While I think the harshness and severity of Smith's critiques of 'post-Marx Marxists' (to borrow a phrase from Dunayevskaya) is justified, he goes too far when he attempts to cleave the Marxists with poor understandings of Marx from the Marxist tradition itself: his essentially idealist account of the history of the tradition leaves him little other option, of course. Finally, despite a staunch rejection of vanguardism, Smith proposes no theory for what a more authentically Marxist organizational form might operate nor does he offer even preliminary probings into the subject. These are all points which have been raised by others, namely in Smith's debates with the now defunct Hobgoblin journal and Geoff Pilling.
These are all genuine issues with Smith's Marxism, but they're not issues that I think are addressed in any other introductory literature better. As Lenin famously once noted, intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism, and so Smith's intelligent idealist account of Marxism is a considerable step forward from the murk of stupid materialism in which it has been trapped for the past century. Smith is not valuable because he "got it right," but because he knew many of the ways in which others had gotten it wrong because he had been among their rank for such a considerable period of his life. Marx at the Millennium is an engagement with the failures of the radical tradition and an attempt to show what is alive in radical philosophy, a body of philosophy that radicals had largely abandoned. In this capacity, no book has come along to do this job better than Marx at the Millennium did it, and it's well worth a read for that alone.
When such reports were first made with the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal polemicists proclaimed it proudly and without reservation. Here in 2021, the same polemicists not only recognize Marxism's vitality but often tentatively credit Marx for foresight with regards to understanding captialism's cyclical struggle with crisis. If this praise is faint and halfhearted, it may be perhaps out of shame, and truly who could expect the anti-communists to sing Marx's praises regardless of historical circumstances?
So, in light of the shallowness of mainstream engagements with Marxism, one is of course compelled to turn to the Marxists, but there is a problem. By and large, these Marxists act as though the Soviet Union did not collapse! True, it was hardly the death of Marxism, but it was the death of something and that something in intimately related to Marxism. The secret, of course, is that these Marxists are themselves among the dead. Zombified parties carrying on the banner of a dead movement in the name of a societal model proven conclusively to be a dead end.
Marx at the Millennium is an expose of that secret. Or, rather, it is Smith attempt to settle his account with that secret, having been a proponent of it for nearly four decades. An avowed Trotskyist for most of his life, Smith found in his twilight years that the philosophy he had promoted for most his life was neither in line with Marx's thought nor was it useful in the class-struggle. Realizing this fact, Smith set about using his last decade to discover the real Marx. Marx at the Millennium was his first attempt at recording this discovery, and while it is less provocative than his second book Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, it is also undoubtedly more readable.
From a certain perspective, Marx at the Millennium is an introduction to Marx's thought. This perspective is not wrong. From another, it's an attempt to challenge Marxism, and this perspective is not wrong either. It is both. It is an attempt to place Marxism on a new basis, one that is authentically Marxist. It is as potentially useful to a 16 year old discovering Marx for the first time as it is a 66 year old party loyalist coming to be dissatisfied by the party line. Rather than simply explain Marx, Smith at the same time challenges the reader to unlearn "Marx."
In challenging the reader in this way, Smith is successful only in places. As Sig below me notes, Smith is fiercely polemical and not always charitable in his readings of others. This is where my agreement with Sig ends, but it's a fair point to make. Despite having served as a professor of statistics at the University of London for years, Smith makes no attempt here to meet academic standards. Even as it leads Smith to play fast and loose with the writings of others, I think this approach is ultimately useful. It allows Smith to bend the stick, to borrow a phrase from Lenin.
The Marxism that emerges from Smith's account is deeply Hegelian, one above all else concerned with self-development and self-realization. Capitalism is to be critiqued for the ways in which is impedes and warps this process of self-development, the class-struggle is radical insofar as it is comprised of working-class self-activity, so and so forth. Marxism that deviates from this is, to Smith's eye, emphatically anti-Marxist. Every chapter hits at these themes in one form or another.
The most valid points on with Smith's Marxism can be in turn critiqued, I think, are that Smith's account lacks a deep appreciation for the historical specificity of capitalist society. His account of human self-development is rich, but his engagement with how this self-development occurs through the class-struggle is limited. In fact, his expose on the historical bastardization of Marxism features virtualy no discussion of the class-struggle whatsoever, giving an essentially idealist account of the issue in which bad interpretations of Marx beget bad interpretations of Marx without any mediating factor of Marxist practice. While I think the harshness and severity of Smith's critiques of 'post-Marx Marxists' (to borrow a phrase from Dunayevskaya) is justified, he goes too far when he attempts to cleave the Marxists with poor understandings of Marx from the Marxist tradition itself: his essentially idealist account of the history of the tradition leaves him little other option, of course. Finally, despite a staunch rejection of vanguardism, Smith proposes no theory for what a more authentically Marxist organizational form might operate nor does he offer even preliminary probings into the subject. These are all points which have been raised by others, namely in Smith's debates with the now defunct Hobgoblin journal and Geoff Pilling.
These are all genuine issues with Smith's Marxism, but they're not issues that I think are addressed in any other introductory literature better. As Lenin famously once noted, intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism, and so Smith's intelligent idealist account of Marxism is a considerable step forward from the murk of stupid materialism in which it has been trapped for the past century. Smith is not valuable because he "got it right," but because he knew many of the ways in which others had gotten it wrong because he had been among their rank for such a considerable period of his life. Marx at the Millennium is an engagement with the failures of the radical tradition and an attempt to show what is alive in radical philosophy, a body of philosophy that radicals had largely abandoned. In this capacity, no book has come along to do this job better than Marx at the Millennium did it, and it's well worth a read for that alone.
December 7, 2020
God, where to begin?
Smith is a very rhetorical and impassioned author. He wants to assert the claim that Marx is still relevant to the modern world. He does this by illustrating a history of Marxism, discussing Marx's concept of humanity, and of science. On paper, this is a fairly simple and modest task if done elegantly. Unfortunately, Smith stumbles and fumbles throughout the entire text in this area. Constant conjecture is made about Marxist thinkers, if not unmotivated polemic attacks based on irrational resentment. Despite wanting to tackle the inhumanity of Stalinism, Smith dedicates most of his time on people misinterpreting Marx, particularly Plekhanov and Lenin (whilst unsurprisingly Trotsky looks on disapprovingly from the sidelines) who were bad primarily because they subscribed to some form of materialism. The roots of Marx's epistemology are totally butchered, giving an asinine representation of scientific practice where Smith constantly tries to reaffirm and overdetermine the concept of humanism in Marx's work. Often it reads like a young Marxist's blogpost, one who has found snippets of material but hasn't sufficiently ruminated on it in depth, or has ever tried to charitably consider alternative perspectives. No mention of Lukacs, Althusser or the Frankfurt School. Modern issues are boiled so as to be utterly pornographic in how they're supposed to relate to alienation, as if that is just simply a given, despite the fact that humanity is a term that is constantly mentioned without being given a consistent definition that ever delves outside of some hyper-normative meaning that Smith is convinced the reader will be clued into.
I used this reading as part of an intro to Marx for a reading group, and I have to say that whilst Chapter 2 was interesting at times in giving a snippet of the aforementioned history of Marxism, so much of this was a 'how not to do it' guide and an example of the worst kind of incoherent leftist dogmatism that one can think of. I can understand frustration towards economists and rhetorical turns, but to dismiss the entire study thereof, including the efforts of Marxian economists as well as the efforts of post-Keynesian socialist economists as being some sort of cult initiation is ridiculous. Not understanding the basic composition of academic sciences and their relation to the social structure is equally just an aggravated rant. I honestly would not recommend this, even for the tidbits that were here. Go read David Harvey, Michael Heinrich, Tom Rockmore, or literally anyone else instead.
Smith is a very rhetorical and impassioned author. He wants to assert the claim that Marx is still relevant to the modern world. He does this by illustrating a history of Marxism, discussing Marx's concept of humanity, and of science. On paper, this is a fairly simple and modest task if done elegantly. Unfortunately, Smith stumbles and fumbles throughout the entire text in this area. Constant conjecture is made about Marxist thinkers, if not unmotivated polemic attacks based on irrational resentment. Despite wanting to tackle the inhumanity of Stalinism, Smith dedicates most of his time on people misinterpreting Marx, particularly Plekhanov and Lenin (whilst unsurprisingly Trotsky looks on disapprovingly from the sidelines) who were bad primarily because they subscribed to some form of materialism. The roots of Marx's epistemology are totally butchered, giving an asinine representation of scientific practice where Smith constantly tries to reaffirm and overdetermine the concept of humanism in Marx's work. Often it reads like a young Marxist's blogpost, one who has found snippets of material but hasn't sufficiently ruminated on it in depth, or has ever tried to charitably consider alternative perspectives. No mention of Lukacs, Althusser or the Frankfurt School. Modern issues are boiled so as to be utterly pornographic in how they're supposed to relate to alienation, as if that is just simply a given, despite the fact that humanity is a term that is constantly mentioned without being given a consistent definition that ever delves outside of some hyper-normative meaning that Smith is convinced the reader will be clued into.
I used this reading as part of an intro to Marx for a reading group, and I have to say that whilst Chapter 2 was interesting at times in giving a snippet of the aforementioned history of Marxism, so much of this was a 'how not to do it' guide and an example of the worst kind of incoherent leftist dogmatism that one can think of. I can understand frustration towards economists and rhetorical turns, but to dismiss the entire study thereof, including the efforts of Marxian economists as well as the efforts of post-Keynesian socialist economists as being some sort of cult initiation is ridiculous. Not understanding the basic composition of academic sciences and their relation to the social structure is equally just an aggravated rant. I honestly would not recommend this, even for the tidbits that were here. Go read David Harvey, Michael Heinrich, Tom Rockmore, or literally anyone else instead.
May 1, 2022
Marx at the Millennium might have been an interesting historical study of Karl Marx, that infamous nineteenth century German intellectual, economist and revolutionary. Unfortunately, its author, the late Cyril Smith, was not at all up to the task. He blunders again and again, sometimes in the most embarrassing fashion.
From the first sentence Smith's passion for the subject matter is clear. The problem is that Smith allows this passion to seriously affect the results of his study. Smith makes no attempt at objectivity. He sets out with his mind made up and shapes the evidence to suit his preconceptions. For instance, in Chapter 4, he twists the Theses on Feuerbach in order to posthumously turn Marx back into an idealist. A more general shaping of the evidence is Smith's over-emphasis of the "humanist" aspects Marx's writing.
Aside from that, there are sections of this book which are entirely superfluous. I mean Smith's incoherent ramblings on Stalin and the USSR. These add absolutely nothing to the text. One would think from the title that the book would be an evaluation of Marx's writings at the millennium (Y2K). Comparisons of Marx's views and those of the Bolsheviks could certainly have been made in a level-headed manner. I believe this would have made for much more interesting reading. But no, being a Trotskyist, Smith simply could not help himself. In fact, he gets so carried away in this regard that, in Chapter 5, he actually blames the Chernobyl Disaster, and the "disgraceful environmental record" of the USSR, on Stalin, who had, at that point, been dead for over three decades!
The long and short of it is that I simply cannot recommend this tedious book; it is not worth reading. Read Marx instead, if you like, and let the man speak for himself. I've long since moved on from the confusing world of socialist politics, but I remembered reading this book and felt that it deserved a (further) scathing review.
From the first sentence Smith's passion for the subject matter is clear. The problem is that Smith allows this passion to seriously affect the results of his study. Smith makes no attempt at objectivity. He sets out with his mind made up and shapes the evidence to suit his preconceptions. For instance, in Chapter 4, he twists the Theses on Feuerbach in order to posthumously turn Marx back into an idealist. A more general shaping of the evidence is Smith's over-emphasis of the "humanist" aspects Marx's writing.
Aside from that, there are sections of this book which are entirely superfluous. I mean Smith's incoherent ramblings on Stalin and the USSR. These add absolutely nothing to the text. One would think from the title that the book would be an evaluation of Marx's writings at the millennium (Y2K). Comparisons of Marx's views and those of the Bolsheviks could certainly have been made in a level-headed manner. I believe this would have made for much more interesting reading. But no, being a Trotskyist, Smith simply could not help himself. In fact, he gets so carried away in this regard that, in Chapter 5, he actually blames the Chernobyl Disaster, and the "disgraceful environmental record" of the USSR, on Stalin, who had, at that point, been dead for over three decades!
The long and short of it is that I simply cannot recommend this tedious book; it is not worth reading. Read Marx instead, if you like, and let the man speak for himself. I've long since moved on from the confusing world of socialist politics, but I remembered reading this book and felt that it deserved a (further) scathing review.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews