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The other side of the coin to the mechanical materialists 'downgrading of the ideological struggle has been a tendency for certain socialist academics to treat the ideological struggle as something quite separate from practical conflicts. This is especially true of the reformists of the now defunct Marxism Today and of the Labour left.
But the struggle of ideas always grows out of struggle in the world of material practice, where ideas have their root, and always culminates in further such material struggles. It was the everyday activity of craftsmen and merchants under feudalism which gave rise to heretical, Protestant, religious formulations. And it was the all too real activity of armies which fought across the length and breadth of Europe which, at the end of the day, determined the success or failure of the new ideology.
The new idealists often claim their theoretical inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, but he was insistent on the connection between theoretical and practical struggle:
'When the problem of the relation of theory and practice arises, it does so in this sense: to construct on a determined practice a theory that, coinciding and being identified with the decisive elements of the same practice, accelerates the historical process in act, makes the practice more homogeneous, coherent and efficacious in all its elements, that is, giving it the maximum force; or else, given a certain theoretical problem, to organise the essential practical elements to put it into operation. '[63]
If you want to challenge capitalism's ideological hold today, you cannot do so unless you relate to people whose everyday struggles lead them to begin to challenge certain of its tenets. And if you want to carry the challenge through to the end, you have to understand that the ideological struggle transforms itself into practical struggle.
The transformation of practice into theory and theory into practice does not take place of its own accord. "A human mass does not 'distinguish' itself and does not become independent 'by itself' without organising itself, and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is, without organisers and leaders ... "[64]
A rising class develops a clear set of ideas insofar as a polarisation takes place within it, and what is, at first, a minority of the class carrying the challenge to the old ideology through to its logical conclusion.
At a certain stage in the ideological and practical struggle that minority crystallises out as a separate 'party' (whether it calls itself that or not). It is through the struggle of such parties that the development of the forces and relations of production find expression in new ideas, and that the new ideas are used to mobilise people to tear the old superstructure apart. In a famous passage in What is to be Done?, Lenin said that 'political ideas' are brought to the working class from outside. If he meant that workers played no part in the elaboration of the revolutionary socialist world view he was wrong. [65] If he meant that practical experience did not open workers up to socialist ideas he was wrong. [66] But if he meant to stress that socialist ideas do not conquer the class without the separation off of a distinct socialist organisation, which is built through a long process of ideological and practical struggle, he was absolutely right.
The famous discussions of the mechanical materialists were about the 'role of the individual in history'. [67] But it was not the individual, but the party, which became central for the non-mechanical, non-voluntaristic materialism of the revolutionary years after 1917.
Trotsky explains in his masterpiece, the History of the Russian Revolution, that revolutions occur precisely because the superstructure does not change mechanically with every change in the economic base:
'Society does not change its institutions as the need arises the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once and for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure. '[68]
The 'radical turns which take place in the course of a revolution 'are not simply the result of' episodic economic disturbances '. 'It would be the crudest mistake to assume that the second revolution [of 1917] was accomplished eight months after the first owing to the fact that the bread ration was lowered from one and a half pounds to three quarters of a pound. 'An attempt to explain things in these terms 'exposes to perfection the worthlessness of that vulgarly economic interpretation of history which is frequently given out as Marxism '. [69]
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