Our comrade, Mac Intosh, died on 27 August. His sudden death has shocked us profoundly. He has been a mainstay of Internationalist Perspective since our founding in 1985; he will be sorely missed as a dear friend and comrade.
First and always, Mac Intosh was a militant, a revolutionary Marxist for whom participation in the class struggle was all; he made many valuable theoretical contributions to the political life of the left communist movement – all with the perspective of strengthening the participation of revolutionaries in the class struggle.
His early political experiences were shaped by the onset of the Cold War in his late teens. He was then animated by the growing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and, most importantly, by the upsurge in class struggle in Europe in 1968 and the years following. These intellectual and emotional leanings enabled him to denounce both of the major imperialisms in the Cold War and the national liberation movements that had grown in South America, Asia and Africa and their ideologues in Western Europe and North America. They also prepared him to greet enthusiastically the upsurge of class struggle among the industrial working class of Europe which heralded a new era of class conflict following the decades of reaction.
In the mid-sixties, he became a Marxist and met others breaking with leftism. He also became acquainted with the left communist traditions so important prior to and during the Second World War from which he became convinced of the critical importance of the class lines that separated the interests of the workers from those of the ruling class. At this time, two burning convictions were ignited and were to steer everything else: that the capitalist state in all its guises had to be destroyed; and that the class lines, drawn with proletarian blood in inter-imperialist wars and defeated revolutions, were the guides for revolutionary analysis and direction.
Indeed, he had enormous respect for and a strong emotional link with past generations of revolutionaries who had shared the same convictions, particularly those in the left communist traditions – the militants of left communism who defended the importance of workers councils and the militants of Bilan and Internationalisme – who stood against the bourgeois democracies, as well as against the Stalinist and the fascist states before and during the Second World War, refusing to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict.
In 1969, together with other comrades who shared the same views, he founded the group that published Internationalism in the US as part of the same effort in France with the group Revolution Internationale and later with World Revolution in the UK.
For all these militants, internationalism was essential at every level. Contributing to the formation of the International Communist Current in 1974 was a natural step for him. He was able to participate in interventions in major class struggles in both Europe and North America and, most importantly, contribute significantly to the ongoing theoretical work especially concerning state capitalism, the development of the war economy, geopolitics and the period of transition. However, when organisational tensions in the ICC came to a head about the revolutionary organisation and its role, Mac Intosh did not hesitate to take sides in the discussion of ‘centrism’, its organisational repercussions, and a resurgence of Leninist rhetoric. After a bitter and lengthy discussion, and the expulsion of a substantial number of comrades from the 1985 conference, he and others from several countries joined together to publish Internationalist Perspective.
The new group called itself “External Fraction of the ICC” (EFICC) because it continued to defend the platform of the ICC, even though, in its judgement, the organisation had betrayed its own principles. Soon, however, its critique expanded beyond the practice of the ICC to its theoretical base, and the name EFICC was dropped. But Mac Intosh pushed Internationalist Perspective (IP) to go further, from the critique of the mistakes of the ICC to the critique of the state of development of Marxist theory itself, against the widely accepted view that Marxism was a finished theory that only needed to be applied. He insisted on the need for IP to participate in what he called “a renaissance of Marxism”.
He himself contributed in no small way to this renaissance. He encouraged the group to take up and use the insights of Marx in his later works, which became widely available only in the 1970s, such as “the Grundrisse”, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” (the so-called sixth, unpublished chapter of volume one of Capital) and others. He put particular emphasis on Marx’s concept of capitalism’s transition from formal to real domination which was to provide the basis for IP’s understanding of the historical trajectory of capitalism, the development of state capitalism, the incorporation of the reformist parties and trade unions into the state apparatus, the capitalist nature of science and technology developed within the course of the capitalist mode of production, the penetration of the capitalist social relation and the law of value, not only in the entire sphere of production, but also in the spheres of circulation and consumption, and the submission of all aspects of human existence to the imperatives and logic of the production of value. Mac Intosh stressed the self-destructiveness of capitalism’s real domination, as inherent in the operation of the law of value itself. Following these discussions inside the group, IP comprehensively rejected the vision of “historical materialism” of traditional Marxism based on a mechanistic materialism, a crude economic determinism, a teleological philosophy of history based on laws that automatically or inevitably produce the end of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat, and an equation of the development of the productive forces in their capitalist forms with historical progress.
The period since the founding of IP has been a difficult one for revolutionary Marxists. We have been through the longest period between revolutionary upsurges, and the global capitalist system has developed and undergone important changes. The revolutionary optimism post-1968 has dissipated as a new reality of social life under global capitalism evolved. All Marxist groups have had to come to terms with this and there is no doubt the pro-revolutionary milieu has experienced a substantial attrition. Internationalist Perspective has not been immune to this. Mac Intosh was a driving force in maintaining its focus on open debate and theoretical deepening.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the War on Terror, the 2008 financial meltdown, the global resurgence of social struggles demanded deeper analysis of the global capitalist economy, geopolitics, the evolution of the collective worker, and the revolutionary subject. Mac Intosh made major contributions to discussions and writings on all of these issues as can be seen elsewhere on our website. At the same time, he worked on the meaning of genocide, and in particular the Holocaust, in the evolution of capitalism’s destructive onslaught on humanity. IP will publish a collection of his texts in the near future.
Over the last decades his interest in philosophical interpretations of social issues intensified. However, his interest in them was never for its its own sake, simply as an intellectual exercise. He was always curious about the various viewpoints to see what insights into issues might be revealed. He became particularly interested in the Neue Marx-Lektúre and its spin-offs, but was acutely aware of the political views of its various proponents, especially in their views on the state, which, in his analysis, is integral to the capitalist mode of production. Likewise, he saw in communization theory elements that could contribute to the renaissance of Marxism, in particular its focus on the necessity of communization as integral to the revolutionary process itself, together with the rejection of the positivity of labor, a hallmark of traditional Marxism. Communization, he insisted, will instantiate production and forms of work beyond labor and provide the social bases of a human community from which the value-form has been finally expunged. However, he also strongly criticised any omission of the role of consciousness in the destruction of capitalism and pointed out that views concerning its inevitability were reminiscent of Histomat. Whatever he got out of his studies was intended to add to the theoretical armoury of Marxism to contribute to the class struggle and the emergence of the revolutionary subject in its fight against capitalism and all exploitation. In this he never gave up his militant beliefs. He died a militant. And we should be proud of that.
Fierce in his convictions, Mac Intosh dared to open up a whole new path, embarking on the formation of Internationalism and the ICC. He did not hesitate to leave that organisation when its principles were betrayed. Analytically rigorous and articulate, courageous in polemic, he was compassionate in his dealings with others and always eager to encourage critical thought. Throughout his political life, Mac Intosh was our dear and respected comrade. We shall miss his soft voice and his inextinguishable sense of fun.
His comrades in Internationalist Perspective
September 2021
My condolences for the loss of your comrade, who was clearly a creative thinker as well as a decent human being. I look forward to reading more of his work.