The Theory of Crisis in the Marxist Tradition

Abstract

The failure of Marxism in the 1980s was essentially the failure of the Leninist tradition which had dominated Marxism since the 1930s. The supremacy of Leninism owed something to the fact that Stalin and Hitler between them physically exterminated the leading exponents of alternative traditions, but was primarily determined by the political defeats suffered by the Social Democracy of the Second International, above all in Germany. The triumph of Leninism led to the dismissal of the Social Democratic tradition of Marxism, yet this was a tradition which, for all its failures and defeats, had been forged in the experience of the crisis-ridden and struggle-torn development of the capitalist mode of production, by intellectuals who were neither academics nor state functionaries but were the builders of a mass socialist movement.