By JOSÉ RICARDO FIGUEIREDO*

The reading of Marx disqualified as the “most instrumental”, the communist reading labeled Diamat, was the only one that led to revolutions that modified the relations of production towards socialism.

Juarez Guimarães presented the collection “The rebirth of Marx: main concepts and new interpretations”, organized by Marcello Musto, in the article “The Rebirth of Marx”, posted on the website the earth is round. The author and preface of the collection includes it in a set of works demonstrating the “living intelligence of Marxism after the end of the USSR”, now elaborated “without a central paradigm of reference”.

Juarez Guimarães notes the importance of publishing the complete works of Marx and Engels through the ongoing project MEGA2 for this rebirth of Marx, and highlights the participation of the Brazilian publishers Boitempo and Expressão Popular in this process. The following is the presentation of the collection, which is extremely interesting in its diversity of themes, from classic questions of Marxism to Marx's positions on burning issues today, such as ecology.

The expression “rebirth of Marx” is understandable, but it implies his death. Many have claimed that Marx died with the end of the USSR, undoubtedly a strategic defeat of socialism, and with the economic reforms in China, which seemed to be adopting a capitalist path.

But Marxists, because they knew history, knew that there are defeats, setbacks, and that there can be steps backwards to allow others to move forward. They also knew, because they knew dialectics, that that moment was not the proclaimed end of history due to the glorification of liberal democracy, because the contradictions of this system remained. The facts, although surprising and bitter, did not negate Marxism. That is why Marxism remained alive, in the works cited by Juarez Guimarães and others, as well as in the political action of a current that resisted and resists the neoliberal tide.

However, Guimarães' text reveals a well-defined predisposition: “The first and greatest contribution of this book is to deepen and document a reading and interpretation of Marx's work in autonomy and in unavoidable opposition to the so-called Diamat.”

The term Diamat certainly abbreviates the expression materialist dialectics, or dialectical materialism, which refers to Marx's philosophical conception, based on the understanding of Hegel's dialectics and its reinterpretation from a materialist perspective. The specific method of social sciences and history, based on concepts such as modes of production, classes and class struggles, is called historical materialism. These expressions are found in Soviet literature and also among Western Marxists.

If the rebirth of Marx demands “inescapable opposition” to the “Diamat”, it is clear which death is implicit in his rebirth: that of the Marx of the Diamat.

This “unavoidable opposition” to “Diamat” is summarized in a paragraph, which begins as follows: “In this, which was the most instrumental reading of Marx’s work, which can only be carried out in a regime of dogmatization, a single party and severe limitations on free debate, Diamat made seven operations of rupture with Marx’s work.”

There are readings of Marx inspired by social democracy, communism, Trotskyism and others, each of which underpins the political practices of these currents. In this sense, all of these readings would be “instrumental”. But the expression “more instrumental” suggests one that would resort to many distortions of Marxism, related to the “regime of dogmatization, of a single party and severe limitations on free debate”.

However, the reading of Marx that was dismissed as the “most instrumental,” the communist reading labeled Diamat, was the only one that led to revolutions that changed the relations of production towards socialism, not only in the USSR but also in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. At the same time, this communist reading was able to support advanced reformist processes of a democratic, anti-fascist nature, and of national independence. Therefore, the “most instrumental” reading of Marx was, in fact, and continues to be, instrumental to all revolutionary and advanced socialist experiences.

Juarez Guimarães goes on to list the “seven ruptures” of the “Diamat” with Marx’s work. The first would be “the centralization and decontextualization of the notion of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, understood as an autocratic regime of a single party and bureaucratically centralized state planning”.

Now, the concept of class dictatorship has always been clear, that is, the political and ideological domination of the economically dominant class in each mode of production, regardless of whether the political regime is more dictatorial or more democratic. In a country experiencing a socialist revolution, the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat is evidently contextualized and central.

However, more than any reading of Marx, the socio-political nature of the Soviet regime arose from the conditions in which the revolution that began in October 1917 took place. The exhaustion of the Russian people due to the First World War had been the main cause of the revolution, but the revolutionaries had to face military invasions from several countries until 1924. The nationalization of industries was a natural consequence of their abandonment by English and French owners. The full nationalization of the economy occurred with the forced collectivization of land, to confront mercantile speculation, when industrialization became urgent, because the Nazi risk grew with the political and, later, electoral rise of Hitler.

But the Soviet regime was not the only form of socialism. The Yugoslav communists experimented with a self-managed, market-based socialism. The Chinese communists always maintained a capitalist sector, which was largely developed and stimulated after the reforms of 1978. The Soviet regime was interpreted as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the Yugoslav regime was another form, and the Chinese regime is yet another form.

The second rupture of “Diamat” with Marx’s work would be “the self-understanding of Marxism as a kind of great and self-proclaimed general science, applied to societies and natural sciences, a true embodiment of dogmatism as a method”.

Now, this is not a question of “general science” or dogmatism. Hegelian and Marxist dialectics are philosophical conceptions. The best philosophies seek comprehensiveness and internal coherence. For example, a dualistic philosophical thought, materialist in matters of physical and biological sciences but idealist in human sciences, or one that is dialectical in human sciences and mechanistic in physics, is not coherent.

The monistic conception is consciously adopted by the founders of Marxism. Engels emphasizes the generality of the dialectical conception in Dialectic of Nature, using examples from various areas of science of his time. Marx offered to write the preface to a book by Charles Darwin, because of what the theory of evolution meant for the affirmation of materialism and dialectics. What is labeled dogmatism is, therefore, comprehensiveness and coherence, absolutely in line with Marx's philosophical thought.

Diamat's third betrayal of Marxism would be “a rigidly deterministic and evolutionist conception of history, as a succession of modes of production.”

Arguing about the centrality of modes or regimes of production for the political and ideological superstructure, Marx and Engels declare that their conception is based on something “from which one can only abstract in the imagination”: the way in which men produce their conditions of life. In this sense, the history of any society is necessarily the history of a succession of modes of production.

Perhaps Juarez Guimarães refers to the controversy regarding a supposed universality of the typology and sequence of modes of production from primitive communism to slavery, then feudalism, capitalism and socialism. This sequence, implicit in the Communist Manifesto, is reaffirmed by Friedrich Engels in several works, and became popular because Engels was the great disseminator of Marx's thought, with comprehensive and didactic texts.

But, in the Preface of the For the critique of political economy, Marx offers another typology and sequence of production regimes of the great civilizations: Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois. The terms ancient and modern bourgeois identify with slavery and capitalism respectively; the novelty is the Asian regime, a theme that is not developed there.

There are scattered mentions in The capital. Monumental works such as those of Egypt, the simple division of labor in Indian villages, and the parallelism between the forms of income earned by Asian monarchies and by the feudal lord are cited: income in labor, in product and, if there is sufficient mercantile development, in money.

The concept of the Asian mode of production would only begin to be known with the posthumous publication of a manuscript, which would be called Pre-capitalist economic formations, in the 1930s in the USSR, and in the 1950s in the West. There Marx cites three possible developments from primitive communism directly to Asian, slave or feudal civilizations. Thus, the idea of ​​a single evolution of all societies is broken.

A presentation of the Asian regime emerges: these are societies that preserve communist villages, autonomous in agriculture and crafts, but tributary to a state. The land is common, and the state often has a productive role, particularly in irrigation works. However, the socio-economic structure that had been characterized as Asian is extended to the Celts in Europe and to pre-Columbian civilizations in America.

This publication generated controversy. There were attempts to reconcile Marx and Engels' formulations, some interpreting the Asian mode as the last stage of primitive communism, others as an Asian form of feudalism. However, the debate, both inside and outside the USSR, consolidated the idea of ​​a specific mode of production. Since the expression Asian mode does not characterize a production relationship, and is also geographically incorrect, the alternative “tributary mode” was proposed.

The best-known pyramids in the world are in Egypt, and it is no surprise that very similar structures can be seen in Central America and Southeast Asia, always associated with peoples who practiced the tributary mode of production. This cultural coincidence between peoples who did not communicate with each other exemplifies the relevance of the concept of mode of production, on which Marx points out that the essential characteristics of the political and ideological superstructure of a society are based.

Economic determinism is emphasized in several works by Marx and Engels. It is relativized by both when they speak of “determination in its general aspects” or “determination in the last instance.” But they always reiterate the materialist basis of their method in social sciences: the relations of production, the social aspect of the modes of production. Therefore, to deny economic determinism about the superstructure, recognizing only a reciprocal influence of multiple factors in society, in an amorphous and inconclusive dialectic, is to ignore a fundamental pillar of Marx’s social science.

The fourth anti-Marxist heresy of communist thought, according to Guimarães, would be “an anathema of human rights as bourgeois through classist language”.

Now, human rights, as enshrined in the American and French revolutions, are evidently linked to those bourgeois revolutions; they express the advances and limits of human rights under the aegis of that class. The social struggle has significantly expanded these rights since the 1980th century and particularly after the Nazi-fascist defeat in the Second World War, but the neoliberal movement since the XNUMXs has imposed serious setbacks on workers' rights. As we can see, it is impossible to speak about human rights in concrete terms without using “class language”, that is, without considering class relations.

The fifth Soviet communist betrayal of Marxism would be “territorialization and a break with internationalism through the prediction of a possible construction of socialism in a single country.”

Now, socialism will only be consolidated if and when it becomes dominant worldwide, but social transformations are not simultaneous in the world. There was the Russian revolution, and there were no others immediately. What could be expected from the revolutionary leaders, other than to try to do what was possible internally in the direction of socialism?

The sixth Soviet philosophical sin would be “the adoption of a culture centered on productivism in rupture with the ecological critique of organic predation in the modes of reproduction of capitalism”.

Both the satisfaction of popular demands and military security have always required maximum productivity in the USSR, so much so that its political crisis was largely due to the decline in the growth rate. Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms began in 1985, when the annual growth rate had fallen to 3,5%, very low by Soviet standards. The self-reform was disastrous and created the breeding ground for the regime's downfall in 1991.

But the issue is very general. Due to productivity gains, feudal craftsmanship was supplanted by manufacturing capitalism in the Netherlands, by large-scale competitive industrial capitalism in England, and by monopoly capitalism in Germany, the United States and Japan. Similarly, China's rise today is based on a rapid increase in productivity through its absorption and development of modern technologies.

The anti-productivism of this criticism of “Diamat” would be justified by the ecological issue. An informed counterpoint to this criticism can be read in the article “How the Soviets Beat Desertification”, by Ricardo Cavalcanti-Schiel, published on the website the earth is round. It narrates an important agro-ecological project from Stalin's time, as well as showing that ecological action does not need to be based on anti-productivism, since the reforestation described there guaranteed agricultural productivity.

In fact, the ecological perspective becomes utopian if it is based on anti-productivism. The preservation of our forests, for example, depends on the government having resources for environmental monitoring and investment, just as it depends on the people having alternatives to employing themselves in the old practices of deforestation, predatory mining, etc. And all of this depends on economic growth. The ecological perspective needs to point out ways to achieve growth.

The seventh Soviet betrayal, “finally”, would be “the rupture with the humanist foundations omnipresent in Marx’s work, which identify him as the radical updater of this tradition in history, as interpreted by Antonio Gramsci.”

This accusation of “breaking with Marx’s humanist foundations” is very serious and very vague. It contains everything bad, but it clarifies nothing. For this reason, more than the previous specific accusations, this one sounds like the traditional anti-communist vision of a dark and oppressive Soviet world, projected onto the Marxist theory considered there.

In the USSR, there was free, high-quality public health and education. There was no unemployment. Among other rights, factories had daycare centers for working mothers. The arts, sports, sciences, and culture in general were highly valued. What argument can be used to accuse the Marxist theorists who supported this society of “breaking with Marx’s humanist foundations”?

This is not to deny that there was dogmatization, simplification, and distortion in the name of Marxism in the USSR. For example, there is talk of a delay in Soviet genetics for ideological reasons. There is regret over the spread of Pavlov's mechanistic psychology and the disregard for Vygotsky's transformative psychology. There are many examples, particularly those that are directly political.

But we see that the “rebirth” of Marx, if guided by this “inescapable opposition to Diamat”, does not only imply the death of anything related to the USSR, but also of central concepts of Marxism. This Marx would be reborn amputated in his scientific and political virility.

This predisposition against Soviet formulations of Marxism is nothing new, even if it goes as far as denying Marxism itself. I would like to highlight an intense controversy in the 1960s and 1970s about the modes of production in Brazil and in the Americas in general, inspired by the questioning of Friedrich Engels' typology and traditional sequence and the emergence of the concept of the Asian mode.

Brazilian Marxists saw in our history primitive communism, among Indians and quilombolas, slavery, formally abolished in 1888, feudalism, still in force in those decades in the coronelista latifundia, and capitalism, developing mainly in the big cities. As a result, they defended agrarian reform by dividing the land to those who worked it as a revolutionary transformation of that society.

However, the feudal or semi-feudal characterization of the latifundia of that time was attributed to the deleterious influence of what was called Stalinism, and Juarez Guimarães calls it Diamat. Feudalism was abolished in historiography. One line of thought would understand that all of our colonization was carried out under capitalism, due to the mercantile destination of the production of our latifundia. Another line of thought would interpret the mercantile slavery of the modern colonies as a mode of production distinct from the slavery of antiquity, and which had transitioned to capitalism without passing through feudalism.

Those interested will find this debate, “reborn”, in the earth is round, in six articles that portray its main currents. They are: “The colonization of the Americas under debate”, by Mário Maestri, “The Brazilian historical formation under debate”, my own, “In search of a lost feudal Brazil”, by Maestri, “In search of the concept of mode of production”, my own, “On the dynamics of European colonization”, by Ronald León Núñez, and “On modern mercantile slavery”, my own.

*Jose Ricardo Figueiredo He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Unicamp. Author of Ways of seeing production in Brazil (Associated Authors\EDUC). [https://amzn.to/40FsVgH]

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