Democratic Marxism

the legacy of Hal Draper

Alan Johnson

pp. 199-220

in: Mark Cowling, Paul Reynolds (eds), Marxism, the millennium and beyond, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

How many today would disagree with Vasily Grossman's suggestion, in his book Forever Flowing, part novel, part meditation on the Soviet Gulag, that behind all those "crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; [the] skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues", stands the figure of Karl Marx?² The idea of a genetic link between Marx and Stalin has established itself as "normal science" and to paraphrase the poet Yevtushenko, the guard has been doubled, trebled over Marx's tomb. Marxism must confront the horrors of its twentieth century past if it is to have a twenty-first century future. Each and every foothold it offered the Gulag must be rooted out. This chapter examines one contribution to the task, Hal Draper's excavation of an alternative, radically democratic Marx and the development of a democratic Marxism by the group he helped to lead, the Workers' Party-Independent Socialist League (WP-ISL) from 1940 to 1958.

Cited authors

Marx Karl