I will say, first of all, that comrade Donald Parkinson’s survey of l’affaire Rockhill is excellent, and a spur to no little professional jealousy on my part. He rightly focuses not on the narrow specifics of the case against Rockhill’s targets, but on the underlying problem of the role of intellectuals, and wisely centres the need for building a generally fruitful intellectual culture so the problem can play itself out, rather than - as we say in England - pulling a solution to the problem out of his arse.

I will avenge my jealousy by taking issue with an argument made almost in passing, as an example of the problems faced by an American socialist movement based mainly on “white collar” (I take it, in this instance, that this is convertible with ”university-educated“) workers:

Socialism primarily takes a moralistic tone; its programs are not based on any digestion and integration of a genuine scientific analysis of our social formation and the realities of class struggle, but the spontaneous demands of the day, without a serious assimilation of them into a Marxist framework. What theory one agrees with is often predetermined by the political conclusions one is reaching for - good theory is what makes the militant “feel good” about their existing practice.

There are good points here, of course: I think there is a basically hedonic attitude at work here, an unwillingness to self-criticise one’s first instinctive gut reaction, which can be badly misleading; and Marxists are indeed called to an uncompromising realism in their analysis.

Yet we are faced with the brute fact that socialism just is a moral project. I would assert that, but for a vanishingly small number of eccentrics, the motivation of all socialists throughout history has fundamentally been just such an instinctive reaction, against some or another evil (and I mean evil literally). For my own part, I chose communism decisively at the time of the Iraq War, more outraged at the lies than the murder for whatever reason. I do not know comrade Parkinson’s origin story, but I should be astonished to discover that he had locked himself away in his reading room, made a comprehensive scientific study of capitalism, and determined that its supersession by communism was inevitable according to immutable historical laws, and therefore became a communist. So it goes for intellectuals, but also for working class militants. It is not just that workers are maltreated, and perhaps bite back like beaten dogs; they intuit that their maltreatment is unjust, and seek redress in a moral project.

In doing so, perhaps, they encounter the doctrines of scientific socialism, and understand that this maltreatment finds its origin not in the caprice of this boss or that manager, but in the impersonal drives of the capitalist system, and by the same token that they are in a similar position to many others. They learn something about what to do about it, and so on. The role of scientific socialism is not to supersede the fundamental moral grounds of the socialist project, but variously to clarify those moral grounds, to explain injustice and maltreatment, and to guide action.

Parkinson takes as a central example of the Marxist intellectual posture Louis Althusser, the semi-dissident leftist philosopher of the French Communist Party, noting the vociferous defence in his work of the autonomy of scientific and intellectual work. Though I am no longer, as I once was, an Althusserian, I do think this is a strength of his. Yet as he himself acknowledged (as noted by Parkinson), the line was drawn so sharply that it could only result in what he called a “theoreticist” deviation that seemed to cut intellectual work off entirely, not only from the court politics of the PCF elite, but the wider struggle itself. That his central philosophical struggle was against humanism and teleology, I want to say, made this inevitable. In self-criticism, he arrived at the “class struggle in the field of theory” concept of philosophy, in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and the ‘Reply to John Lewis’; but surely this is just such a ‘pragmatist’ conception of theoretical work, of the sort Parkinson criticises in Rockhill; having concluded against ‘theoreticism’, he arrives at a conception of philosophy that precisely derives its meaning from the present concrete political objectives (glossed as “the class struggle in theory”). His rebuke to John Lewis, that the latter “does not want to talk about politics”, seems to be cut from the same cloth. Very well - but Althusser no longer wanted to talk about philosophy, as a distinct form of intellectual practice with its own methods of verification.

It is perfectly true that Althusser’s great French adversary, Roger Garaudy, was a promoter of a ‘historic compromise’ political line, and did so on the basis of a philosophical commitment to humanism. (I do not know much of the factional alliances of John Lewis in the CPGB, but he seems to have been a more honourable chap than Garaudy.) By identifying the problem as humanism, however, Althusser cut himself off from the sources: communism as a project, rather than as a scientific classification, entails particular views of human nature and human ends - perhaps unthematic - such that it is desirable, worth fighting for. But not only communism - scientific research itself, again as a project, entails a moral commitment to the truth (at least where there is no immediate payoff in terms of a valuable patent or whatever). This commitment cannot itself be discovered by scientific methods; one either thinks it’s a good idea or one doesn’t, and this is a moral choice that issues from moral formation, and is subject to criticism - again - only subsequently (and I would say, in this case, only trivially).

Does this return us to the danger, highlighted by Parkinson, of Stalin’s and Molotov’s ‘faith’ in the victory of their programme? To its orbit, perhaps; but part of honest intellectual life is understanding that one cannot find the socialist project as one finds the Higgs boson, or measures the concentration of capital in the German car industry. It is not that scientific research tells us nothing of human nature or human flourishing, but it cannot tell us decisively whether the destiny of humanity is communism, or a heap of irradiated ashes, or a future separate master and slave species achieved by means of eugenics, or whatever other science fiction scenarios can be dreamt up.

Instead, the socialist project, we must concede, stems from that spark of moral outrage, at children incinerated in a squalid war or starved in some avoidable famine, at workmates horsewhipped for organising. Our instincts are imprecise, and part of the role of intellectuals is to challenge them, and in doing so bring out more and different kinds of intellectuals from the toiling classes. But there is nothing wrong with socialist moralism per se; without it, there is no socialism at all.