Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions

ABSTRACT

Marxism has been the name increasingly given by friend and foe to contemporary radical revolutionary movements in the last couple of centuries. That opens the seldom-asked question, what about the radical revolutionary movements and ideas which could not be so described? For them the collective term often used negatively was ‘vulgar’, or, less negative but still unacceptable to Marxists, ‘utopian’ and ‘vernacular’. That last turn indicated spontaneous radicalism of the lower classes, which lack the incise language (polish?) of academic debate. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘vernacular’ as the ‘language spoken in particular area by a particular group especially one that is not the official or written language’. It introduced often a history-passed-and-third-worldly accentuation. Experience has shown that most effective revolutionary movements were led by a group representing a mixture (interdependence?) of Marxism with vernacular radicalism, often described as Marxism with a ‘xxxx’ face (Chinese or Czechoslovak or something else). One can even conclude that for Marxism to make way it must link with radical local tradition, definitely not-Marxist. Moreover, it doesn’t quite ‘work’ singly, for its success depends on the mixture of Marxism and non-Marxism. It seems that particular role in that confrontation is defined by a conceptual (ideological?) set of collectively dominant ideas or ‘idols’. If so, a major blocking force to the advance of Marxist movements is, on top of the power of the existing state and political economy, some prevailing ideological elements accepted by the ‘masses’ since the Second International. Those would be ‘purism’, ‘scientism’, ‘progressivism’ and ‘statism’. We shall eventually touch in that context on supporting the revolutionary vernacular of the People’s Will party of Russia, its implications and its relations to Marx’s own Marxism.