When Hal Draper emerged from the by-then grotesque shadow of Max Shachtman, after the latter’s slow conversion from Trotskyist revolutionary to social-democratic Cold Warrior was complete, he was by no means completely transformed into an immaculate leftist. The strategy he demanded of his group was one of deep, semi-secret work in the particularly grim trade-unions characteristic of the American labour movement; he demanded “a broad progressive wing of the labor movement…adequately defined as a wing which advocates class-struggle unionism as against business unionism, whether it defines itself in “class struggle” language or not”. Those groups not engaged in such work he denounced as “micro-sects”1. His reasonably principled “third camp” position remains attractive to many repelled by the Left’s eagerness to climb into bed with all sorts of reactionaries, but even this can be seen as partially cynical – while the 1970s European labour bureaucracy was choc-a-bloc with Stalinists and fellow-travellers, its American equivalent was thoroughly Cold Warrior. In the same way that various unprincipled British groups (for instance) adapted themselves to the various pro-Soviet tendencies, so it was the “soft option” for those interested in a “broad progressive wing” of the American labour movement to maintain distance from the nationalist-revolutionary and Soviet blocs. (Seeing something of a shift towards a similar environment in the British unions, we should have no real difficulty in conceding to the Alliance for Workers Liberty the legitimate claim to the Draper “heritage”.)

Those of us who joined Communist Students will no doubt find much of that deeply problematic – the only thing we all agree on is that we must be openly Marxist and organise as openly Marxist, something Draper was unable to do in the extremely bureaucratic climes of US labour officialdom. So, why study Draper’s book at all?

The first reason is simple: at no point in the history of the Marxist movement has there been such a wide-ranging and subtle attempt to bring together the political theories of Karl Marx into one work. And quite a work it is – weighing in at four volumes in total, thematically divided, covering as close to the full development of Marx as it is possible, it is one of the two major achievements of Draper’s career. Because his political appeal has been somewhat “niche” on the Left, with orthodox Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Anarchists and everybody else queueing up to denounce him for one reason or another (including myself, obviously), the sheer enormity of the service he has done us in this effort gets lost. It is, at best, a shame when a factional difference (however principled and serious) obstructs a serious engagement with a Marxist’s theoretical work; in the case of a genuine intellectual landmark such as Karl Marx…, it is nothing short of tragic.

The other major achievement of Draper is quite different, but somewhat illuminating: the first complete English translation of the poems of Heinrich Heine. Heine is one of the key figures in revolutionary cultural history, a left-Romantic poet of the order and stature of William Blake, and the richness of his poetry takes some translating. Draper, then, required an intensely analytical grasp of German and a creative turn of phrase in English. Both contribute to Karl Marx. The knowledge of German meant he was not overly reliant on incomplete and Stalinised translations of the source texts (even if he preferred extant translations for the quoted text itself). As for English, it is in no doubt that he is true to the underexposed Marxist tradition of mordant wit, and if his capacity for acidic irony is more explicit in his shorter polemical works, there are very few moments when one feels lost in the extended and more abstract works either.

The text

Volume 1 is divided into two Parts: “The Political Development of the Young Marx” and “The Theory of the State”2 The first of these part is an exhaustive study of (relatively) few documents written by Marx and Engels between 1842 and 1845, the first being Marx’s articles for the extreme-liberal Rheinische Zeitung and the last the famous Theses on Feuerbach. Draper convincingly demonstrates the various processes that converged into the basic theses of Marxism, a communism of a qualitatively new type as compared with Marx’s dystopian-utopian contemporaries and predecessors.

It may seem an odd place to start – it seems rather distinct from the rest of the Volume and indeed most of the work as a whole, being concerned primarily with, after all, a Marx who was loyally Hegelian and given to precisely the abstract philosophical musings that it is Draper’s project to cut through substantially. Indeed, Draper emphasises repeatedly how far to the left Marx already was before his formal “conversion” to communism, and traces the political development largely in terms of a philosophical settling of accounts with the Young Hegelian milieu.
Yet such an impression would be misleading. In the first place, there would be no way to trace Marx’s development without very heavy reference to the break with Hegelianism proper.3 It is certainly the case that, at this point if at no other, attempting to dissociate Marx’s political interventions from his philosophical musings would be no more meaningful than, say, abstracting a medieval knight’s role as a soldier abroad from his position as a landowner at home. Secondly, and more importantly, there is a particular thread running through the entirety of Karl Marx – that the principal political innovation of Marxism was the combination of the egalitarian tendencies of previous socialisms and communisms with a deep and thoroughgoing commitment to democracy4. In this light, Part 1 is perhaps the most important section of all, for it is only possible to establish this link convincingly by looking at the first political program adopted by Marx (that of the RZ era); and it is only possible to examine that with attention to the philosophical underpinnings of the left-Hegelian movement.

Part 2, unsurprisingly, offers a theory of the state. The most distinguishing feature of Draper’s analysis is his emphasis on “the tendency towards state autonomy” – that is, the manner in which the state, despite existing primarily as a body of functionaries for the ruling class, comes to exert a power and influence of its own, and even quasi-class interests of its own.

It is easy to be cynical about this theory, then. Draper, after all, was one of the original Shachtmanites, whose distinguishing feature was the assertion that the Soviet bureaucracy had become a new ruling class in a qualitatively new kind of society they called “bureaucratic collectivism”. To establish the validity of this theory vis-a-vis Marxist categories (and, indeed, many of the Shachtmanites simply didn’t think it was necessary, notably James Burnham in his excoriation of dialectics5), it would obviously be necessary to establish two things – the State can become autonomous of the class that generated it; and it can act as a social force of its own. It is clear that the relentless focus on state autonomisation, first in the consideration of Bonapartism and then Oriental Despotism (and, indeed, the controversial rehabilitation of the latter category as a distinct mode of production) go at least some way towards doing so.6

Are we, then, to conclude that these 300 or so pages are little more than a midnight raid to establish a beach-head for Shachtmanism in the heavily guarded territory of the various Marxist orthodoxies? This would be more than unfair. Again, even if this were a covert throwing-down of a factional gauntlet, the challenge offered is substantial. Despite his focus on one aspect of the problematic of the State, Draper has nevertheless cobbled together a coherent theory of the state out of a great range of Marx’s works. Let the heresy-hunters of Stalinism, orthodox Trotskyism and the like respond in kind. Furthermore, he does not pretend – as orthodox Trotskyists are wont to do – that his theory necessarily follows from his analysis, and makes the link only subtly in one or two footnotes. It would not be difficult, for example, to use Draper’s analysis and research to buttress quite different theories of the Soviet Union – particularly the chapters on Bonapartism, an unstable scenario where a highly autonomised state is nonetheless tied to a ruling class other than itself.

Karl Marx, then, is to be read critically. It is a book, however, that does much of the work for you. There are 43 pages of citations alone. It is a work of scholarly exposition that nonetheless fully accepts its partisanship both for Marxism (against the hated bourgeois “Marxologists”) and for the democratic traditions within Marxism (against Stalinism and other philistinism).

As such, not only is it required reading on its own merits, but also as an object lesson, something of a baptism by fire in fact, in the critical reading necessary for Marxist theoretical practice. It functions as a comprehensive introduction to the problem of the State in Marxist theory (as the later volumes do for class, etc), but also an initiation into the debates.

Reading Karl Marx – Sections

1: Marx as a liberal. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

Think about:

• The relationship between Marx and “mainstream” liberals

• The relationship between Marx and Hegelianism

2: Marx’s break with liberalism. Chapters 3-5.

Think about:

• the relationship between Marx, at this stage, and the Utopians.

• The extent to which the Utopians’ influence rests on the aloofness from politics of the Hegelians on the one hand, and the predominance of artisanal workers among the Parisian working class on the other.

3: Marx, the workers and the state. Chapters 6-8.

• The extent to which the “orientation towards the proletariat” necessitates a new “class theory of the state”.

• The ways in which the latter breaks with the previous Hegelian-idealist view (cf. Ch. 3).

4: Character and self-emancipation. Chapters 9-10.

Nothing here will be particularly controversial – there can be no doubt that Marx and Engels were steadfast revolutionaries, or consistent advocates of revolution from below. Why, however, does Draper insist on making the link between these two chapters (in the second paragraph of Ch. 9)?

References

1Draper, Hal. “Anatomy of the Micro-Sect” (1973): http://marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/microsect.htm

2It should be noted that, bizarrely, this is not how Monthly Review divided the volume into the original two books, choosing rather to cleave Part Two into two further chunks in a fairly arbitrary way. Book 1, then, encompassed the first 14 chapters, Book 2 the last nine.

3 The other influential account of such a “break” is of course Althusser’s, whose account is strikingly similar in many respects to Draper’s (Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Tr. Ben Brewster. (London: Verso, 2005) pp35-38). Althusser, a philosopher by training, locates the “epistemological break” in the works of 1845, the last works considered by Draper; but also on the plane of philosophy rather than politics. The perspectives are complementary in many respects, but this is not the place for a full comparison.

4The pamphlet, “The Two Souls of Socialism”, outlines this core thesis more briefly than the four thick volumes of Karl Marx. http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm

5Burnham, James. “Science and Style”. Cited in Brenner, Frank and Alex Steiner, Marxism without its head or its heart (permanent-revolution.org, 2007) p104.

6I owe this observation to Mike Macnair.