For the success of the working class struggle the unity of two fundamental elements, namely the Marxist world view and the militant action of the working class, is essential. This unity has been profoundly shattered by the unfavourable conditions which began with the retreat of the revolutionary wave in Western Europe and which, especially after World War II, were characterised both by the dominance of Stalinism and by the resurgence of the capitalist system. Deprived for a long time of the revolutionary action of the working class, the “theory” degenerated and broke away from its true Marxist roots. Thus, a current of pseudo-Marxism, a direct product of these conditions of defeat, began to spread from the university chairs, especially in the Western European countries.

For left-wing intellectuals who appeared to be a little smeared with the oil of Marxism, the basic fact of life was nothing more than an endeavour to keep up with the bourgeois order. Those who were woven from this fabric, on the one hand, opened the doors of their study rooms wide open to bourgeois thought and idealist philosophical variations, and on the other hand, they accepted Marxism only on condition that they reduce it to the level of a method that would be the “scientific” veneer of their academic research.

Left intellectualism, which pontificated on Marxism while turning its back on the struggle of the working class against the capitalist order, had no interest in understanding or accepting Marx, who said that the main thing was not to interpret the world but to change it. “Thinkers” who found banal an identity that didn't hover on the clouds of false discourse but stood on the ground, grasped the reality of class society and openly took a militant stance in favour of the exploited, were always concerned with searching for “higher” ideas that would satisfy them! In such a search, almost completely distancing themselves from real politics, they set out to issue fatwas on Marxist political struggle and compete with each other in the academic world they had created for themselves. Their work has been slipping into philosophical writings, written in an ever more incomprehensible language, or sociological studies, etc., which in the final analysis serve nothing but the defence of the outmoded bourgeois order. The refuge of such left-wing intellectuals masquerading as Marxists was usually Western universities.

This “Marxism”, which was supposedly critical of Stalinism, never seriously confronted it; on the contrary, it even compromised with it when it suited it. In order to survive, such a tendency had to take into account the centres of power that existed in the world, while at the same time coveting the gaps created by the weakening of the influence of genuine Marxist thought within the workers’ movement. Therefore, when it came to a coherent defence of Marxism, it was not surprising that academic Marxism, which was exactly what one would expect from its own kind, broke with Stalinism when it suited it and made peace with it when it suited it. As an extension of this reality, even the most rigidly orthodox Stalinists have always been open to the influence of this pseudo-Marxism, usually implicitly.

Due to its level of economic development, its social structure and the peculiarities of its political history, the socialist movement in Turkey was very much shaped by official communism, i.e. Stalinism. For this reason, socialist circles in Turkey generally seemed to have a relatively distant attitude towards academic Marxism. In reality, however, the ideas it produced were eclectically mixed into the existing repertoire of political ideas in Turkey. But there is no doubt that after the 1980s, when the imperialist-capitalist system’s wide and deep integration of the world as a single entity reached its climax and the “socialist” bloc began to collapse, the ideological effects of pseudo-Marxism took on a more global character. The waves of ideas emanating from academic Marxism began to hit the shores of socialists in countries like Turkey more and more and to penetrate these areas more than before.

In particular, the intellectual and literary efforts of former socialist “cadres”, who were under the illusion of being Marxists in their youth and discovered the virtues of liberalism in their later years under the name of renewal, played an important role in this invasion. But there was nothing new under the sun. In Turkey, the value and importance of the renegade Kautskys, Bernstein, the father of liberal socialism, etc., were discovered with some delay. Those who had spent a period of their youth on the “thorny” paths of the revolutionary struggle and had turned into fairy-tale telling uncles and aunts in their middle age, advised their children not to follow these “naughty” paths. The ambition of the old revisionists and apostates to destroy scientific communism with their outdated ideas has given our country many “adult” socialists who now consider it an honour to walk on the path opened by academic Marxism!

Following in the footsteps of Bernstein and similar revisionists, “Marxists” began to raise their voices, especially from the late 1980s onwards, claiming that capitalism was now growing steadily, that the bourgeois state had become more responsive to democratic pressures, that the living standards of the working class had risen, and that a new middle class had thus emerged. The main concern of this kind of “Marxists” was to impress upon the minds of the younger generations that the revolutionary ideas of Marxism could no longer be valid by babbling that Marx was wrong on this or that point.

The political positions of the left intellectuals, who claimed to analyse the problems of our time in the backdrop of new developments, were in fact not at all brightly coloured by new ideas. The socialists from the pulpit, who tried to reduce Marxism to the level of a liberal opposition by taking it away from being a philosophy of action as a means of changing the world, systematically and with subtle strokes shaved off its “protruding” aspects and made it the subject of competition for their doctoral theses. Such studies, whose starting point was the analysis of Marx’s views, but which in fact sought to present him as an “outdated” thinker, became a source of theoretical “richness” to which some educated fools were attracted! Moreover, the more incomprehensible the work and the more complex its particular philosophical language, the greater its prestige! The philosophical sophistry labelled as “post-Marxist”, “structuralist”, “post-structuralist”, etc. has gained credibility to the extent that its meaning is obscured.

With the help of “Marxist” academics who pursue disconnected definitional approaches, claiming that Marx had left the separate definition of various problems incomplete, a so-called world of thought consisting of empty rhetoric has been created. Various phenomena of social life have been abstracted from the whole and turned into entities that make sense in themselves. In this way, concepts that can only approach reality when considered in their interrelationship with each other have been emptied of meaning. As a result of this break with Marxism and its dialectical and historical materialist method, academic Marxism was marked by empiricism, which absolutised the role of experiment in a metaphysical manner, and by positivism, which seemed to glorify science in its flight from objective reality, in short, by the style of philosophical speculation of the pre-Marxist period. “Invented” theories were no longer able to illuminate real trends in social development. An abstract methodological debate, detached from the object of study and reduced to the level of mere discourse, declared its dominance in the academic market. The scientific approach of the Marxist method, which does not allow itself to be deceived by the misleading appearances of historical and social phenomena, but tries to go deeper into them and reveal their interrelations and interactions, was considered inadequate! Instead, the air was filled with hollow definitions and generalisations, competing with each other as a result of the “vast” methodological research of academic Marxism.

As with any current of thought, it is an indispensable task for Marxism to be revised and enriched in order to meet the demands of the time. However, we must be wary of the revisionist enthusiasts who, hiding behind such a necessity, cloud the mind and cause considerable damage.

The main problem that disturbed the thinkers who revised Marxism was the clear preference for the proletariat in intellectual and political work. They try to alleviate this discomfort by emphasising the tendency towards class conciliation in every field. Revisionism, in its effort to establish in its own “philosophical” world the element of inter-class unity which does not exist in real social life, has an eclectic character which gives life to bourgeois ideology. Because of its fear of dialectical materialism, which enables it to grasp the real contradictions of the class struggle, it continues its intellectual gymnastics in a deliberately detached and distorted way from the totality of reality. That is why the revisionist views put on the market under the label of “new analyses” are fragmentary scraps of ideas that have been repeatedly refuted by Marxism.

It is not for nothing that the professors of “Marxism”, swimming in the waters of revisionism, pontificate that in all conjunctures when the revolutionary workers’ movement is undergoing a significant decline, one must despair of the revolutionary mission of the working class altogether. For in capitalist society a supra-class intellectual activity is indeed impossible. All the repressed feelings, anger and aspirations of intellectuals, who are ashamed to consider social phenomena “only” from the point of view of the working class, come out in periods of decline, as if to avenge the pressure exerted on them by the working class movement during the period of its rise. For this reason, it is not surprising that intellectuals who at one time seemed to be smeared in the oil of Marxism and who were supposedly in favour of the working class struggle, when the period changes, they appear as open anti-Marxists.

To give a concrete example, we can recall the book Farewell to the Proletariat by the French writer André Gorz, published in 1980, which later became famous as the bourgeoisie stepped up its ideological attack on the working class. It is because of the title of this book that it has become almost a symbol of the attitude that seeks to obscure the existence and importance of the working class. In fact, Gorz’s analyses lack coherence and internal consistency and are far from scientific seriousness. For this reason, his views do not carry any direct significance for us. However, in terms of the supply and demand activities taking place in the market of academic Marxism, the general framework of which we have tried to outline, his book constitutes an interesting example for our subject. Moreover, even if they have no scientific value, such books serve to cloud consciousness in the insidious ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie to discredit the importance of the working class as a whole and of the unionised and organised sections of the class.

Gorz, for example, has attempted to tackle once and for all the phenomenon of the working class, which some other writers have tried to discredit in a timid and incremental way. With the determination of a “scientist”, he has drawn his sword and shattered the veil that caused the “illusion of the proletariat” created by Marxism! According to Gorz, the working class created by capitalism has identified itself with the productivist logic of capital; it is a copy of capital and because of this characteristic it cannot bring about social transformation. According to him, the traditional working class is no more than a privileged minority. The historical subject (the industrial proletariat) put forward by Marx is dead and a new historical subject has emerged: the “non-class” of post-industrial proletarians. According to Gorz, the driving force for transformation is this non-class, a new lumpen proletariat that appears to be the blueprint for a new society.[i]

In the face of the working class, which capitalist development is enlarging by creating active and reserve industrial armies on a world scale, people like Gorz are experiencing a great internal discomfort. They are angry with Marxism and the proletariat. They tend to escape from the world of reality. For example, in Gorz’s intellectual world, the reality of a working class as defined by Marxism does not exist either in the past or in his own period. And his spirit, while addressing the outside world from the realm in which he lives, is imbued with a dual mission of warning about the past and the future: If you think of the past, know that (because authorities like Mr Gorz say so!) there was no such thing as the proletariat; it was a myth! If you want to grasp the future, then you must know that the so-called working class has disappeared with the expulsion of the worker from the production process as a result of capitalist development! The productive collective working class of the past has been replaced by a “non-working class of non-workers”!

One had to be at least as “daring” as Gorz in order to present the ever-increasing number of workers in jobs requiring no special qualifications and a huge army of unemployed (this part of the working class!) as the “scientific” justification for saying “goodbye” to the whole class. Or to be completely ignorant of Marxism...

According to Gorz, it is as if the obstacle to human emancipation is not the capitalist system of exploitation but the means of production (!). And therefore, if the proletariat, as a class, marches to power along the path enlightened by Marxism, it will become a copy of capital and create an analogue of capitalist relations of production (!). Gorz presents the workers’ power, which will ensure the emancipation of the worker dispossessed by capitalism, as a system that will destroy him as an individual. Therefore, according to him, what workers need is not Marxist thought, but “individualisation, autonomisation” (!). In short, intellectuals like Gorz aim their arrows of criticism at the revolutionary goals of the proletariat, either by accepting the ideology created by the so-called socialist countries as Marxism or by inventing a “Marxism” which they can vilify as they please. Although the Stalinist dictatorships have provided ample opportunity for this kind of intellectual chatter, their real concern is not the bureaucratic dictatorships, but to use them as an excuse to attack Marxism.

Those who defend various variants of the ideological attack on the revolutionary mission of the proletariat, wrapped up in “humanist” packaging, hate the idea that the only way to realise the goal of human emancipation is through the organised revolutionary struggle of the working class. They present the emphasis on “individualisation” as the magic key that will open the gates to the paradise of freedom. The well-placed intellectuals define Marxism as a form of collectivism inimical to human freedom and, with their empty words about freedom, persistently ignore the painful realities of bourgeois rule.

The so-called socialists, who seem to embrace Marxism but think that it does not contain enough humanism and that therefore a “Marxism” a little drenched in the sauce of bourgeois ideology of individual freedom will be more attractive to the masses, are a greater ideological source of danger than the outspoken anti-Marxists. For although they pretend to be Marxists, they are in fact inventing an ugly Marxism with the arguments they put forward. Marxism, which shows the way to the true emancipation of man, how the period of true freedom of mankind can be achieved, is presented as an ideology which does not care about the human element, which sacrifices the freedom of the individual for the sake of economic development. Since those who advocate such a conclusion have no real data on which to base their claims, all sorts of sophistries are put forward as supposed scientific evidence, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

The bourgeois intellectuals, who, thanks to their privileged position, do not really feel uncomfortable with the bourgeois system of domination, in fact coexist peacefully with the bourgeois ideology. They turn their backs on the fact that freedom, which concerns the broad masses of toilers, can only be won through the collective struggle of these masses. They cling to the lie that individual liberation is possible without such a struggle. Ignoring the nature of the relations of production that make individual freedom impossible under capitalist rule, and bypassing the contradiction between the individual and society inherent in class societies, they invent a dream of so-called individualisation-autonomisation abstracted from the social system. However, Marxism is the only world view that shows the way to overcome the individual-society contradiction and to enable the human species, which is in reality a social being, to live in a classless and exploitation-free social order that will make individual freedom possible.

Gorz argued that in modern capitalism production was carried out by an atomised mass of workers who no longer had autonomy and technical power, and he put forward this view as a justification for saying goodbye to the proletariat. According to him, during the period of the manufactory there was a material basis for skilled workers or the old labour aristocracy to gain consciousness and power. But later, in modern factory production, the possibility for thousands of ordinary workers to gain consciousness and power disappeared. The worker could no longer rule in the factory. The factory was no longer an economic unit. Therefore, the idea that “the factories belong to the workers” or “the power of workers’ councils” became a dream.[ii] When Gorz looked at large-scale factories, he only wanted to see the discipline of barracks, and he could treat the fact that capitalist development had trivialised thousands of workers and brought them together in large enterprises as proof that Marxism had failed. Indeed, if it were not for the Marxist analyses of the development of the capitalist process and the scope and role of the working class within it, it would perhaps be possible to embrace in the name of “science” the ideas that the likes of Gorz sprinkle around our world! Just as such nonsense appeals to some “educated” people who are sworn not to read and study Marxism from its own sources.

As a result, Gorz and his ilk present the phenomena pointed out by Marxism itself as developments that it could not have foreseen, and disguise the results of modern industry, which Marx welcomed by saying hello proletariat, as a reason for “goodbye”. In fact, it has been seen many times before that in periods when the working class movement is in a significant decline, those who surrender politically to the order with a complete psychology of defeat, in an effort to justify themselves, say that the class is disappearing. That is why we say that the “farewell” messages addressed to the proletariat are neither new, nor the first, nor will they be the last. But fortunately, the light of Marxism, which illuminates the process of capitalist development and the reality of the working class in its progress from the past to the future, continues to shine...