Workers' Liberty

Janine, you may be right, but I think the chances are against. The last split, actually, of course was not 1931 but the split off of the Gang of Four to create the SDP, which is more of the kind of split you are proposing - though you may want to say that was not a major split. The consequence of that split, however, ws not at all what those that had been looking forward to the right leaving had hoped for. Not only did it give the Liberals a lease of life, but it for a time looked like the Lib-SDP alliance could replace Labour. It certainly had the effect of dashing any electoral hopes Labour had at the time. Whilst as marxists we shouldn't see such electoral fortune as the be all and end all, neither should we totally dismiss the significance either.

The second effect and partly a result of the first i.e. a general move to the Right in national politics, was to apply further pressure on the Labour party to move to the Right, to deal with the left etc. I doubt given the nature of the majority of Labour Party members as reformists with an overwhelming focus on Parliamentary politics (and I suspect a large number of those left in the party are Councillors of some variety or other)I doubt that a further such split creating invariably an electoral pole of attraction further to the Right, would create conditions within the Party conducive to the entry of the Far Left.

I was a member of the Labour Party for 30 years and I have lost count of the number of times you would hear people who were generally Leftward facing say "If they do such and such that's the last straw". But most of them saw such and such happen and it never was the last straw. Most of them are died in the wool Labour party people they can see nothing else. They might buy a paper from you, agree with you on many issues, but at the edn oft he day they will stick with the labour Party, or as has been the case over the last few years they will simply give up. A look at the membership of left groups over the last few years shows they certainly have not benefitted from the collapse of Labour Party membership.

I think that the chance of a split in the Labour party causing any sizeable number of LP members to fuse with left groups just ain't gonna happen. And as far as the TU's are concerned the chances of them supporting some new party are pretty slim too. The majority of TU's even those led by so called left's remain tied to the same ideas as the Labour party. At best to the left of the LP. If the right split then the unions that have been expelled will be back into the LP with no pressure whatsoever to think about some new party, and many of them will not be too bothered about the Far Left either. And if the split in the LP is such that it basically disintegrates there is as much chance that the TU's will follow the US model and simply offer to support whichever party gives them the most crumbs off the table.

No, I think the best thing to do is for Marxists to be inthe Labour party in whatever means they can, to go through the heightened arguments that are going to occur as the Balir leadership goes from crisis to crisis and disintegrates, to point out why Brown is not an option. As Trade UNion activity increases over the years ahead as I have no doubt it is going to as the world economy goes into a growth phase the ground will be laid for a new influx of young militant workers. That will be the basis for creating a workers party - provied the Marxists don't repeat the old sectrarian mistakes of instead seeing it as just another means of building their own party/organisation.

Arthur Bough

Although you can never say never in politics - I think any scope for work in the Labour Party is pretty much closed off. It is probably just as easy to influencing the few remaining bands of Labour leftists through more outward campaigning and through a more generalised political presence. Even in CLPs where the likes of Corbyn and Simpson exist, just what can be done through the Labour Party structures -Labour is a joke in most people's eyes and work within it not particularly healthy or productive. The political situation would now seem to be completely different from any other period since the birth of the Labour Party, so comparisons with previous poitical periods are not particularly helpful I would have thought.

What is important to me would seem to be maintaining a notion of what the socialist project actually is and intervening wherever possible, through whatever vehicle becomes available. Calling a spade a spade is vitally important and the AWL are to be congratualted on the analysis of Respect and Political Islam over recent months.

What can be done to create a viable Socialist Party remains to be seen, the campaign for a new workers' party (CNWP) would seem to have few takers and the less said about the various new incarnations of the Socialist Alliance the better, although clearly this contains a smattering of excellent activists.

I have come to the conclusion that what is needed is a complete reassessment of everything we do. I for one have been encouraged by the development of the 'Green Left' anti-capitalist current in the Green Party and the space for socialists to operate within the Greens would seem considerable, both in terms of influencing their general politics and direction, but also in terms of learning from some of the politics and culture of the Greens themselves. Further the scope for really developing projects such as Iraqui TU solidarity and No Sweat would seem more viable thorugh this channel than anywhere else.

What about some of the more negative aspects of the greens, well yes this is a problem, the party is imperfect from a marxist point of view (if a marxist point of view can be said to exist that is)- the fact is that a debate over these issues is in the offing and even the right wing localists of the Greens are preferable to some of the slime within the Labour Pary that comrades wil have had to exchange pleasantries with in the past.

There are few positive areas for socialists to operate at the current time, perhaps we need to slaughter a few sacred cows in order to find them.

The trouble is, before a split can be argued for, we need a credible socialist organisation outside of the LP to act as a pole of attraction. And we patently don't have that now.

... we have lots of socialist organisations, and no credible ones.

www.shirazsocialist.blogspot.com

What can we do about unions which seem to be in "cahoots" with the companies they are, in essense, against? Take my union, USDAW, with "our" Tesco partnership for example. What options have we got?

M. Daycoi

...some want to argue that NOW is the time for Marxists to join it?

Well, I'm not British and am not going to tell British comrades what to do. It's basically just a tactical question anyway, not a principled one. But Arthur's we-must-be-in-Labour-at-all-costs perspective seems perilously close to the idea that it would be possible, if enough socialists joined the LP and fought against the Blairites internally, to make the LP a vehicle for serious socialist politics. Well, the Bennites and Socialist Organiser and others tried. Didn't work. I don't think you're likely to do better if you try it again.

The present AWL strategy re: the LP, as Janine describes it, seems to make sense to me, at the present time. But in any event the point is to build a party with (democratic) Marxist politics, not to just recreate "Old Labour." Arthur talks about a "workers party," but he doesn't talk about the kind of workers party that needs to be built.

Red, I am not suggesting that if sufficient people joined the Labour Party it would become a vehicle for serious socialist politics, any more than when Marx joined the German Democratic Party he beleived that that bourgeois party could become a vehicle for serious socialist politics. He joined it because it was the only available vehicle for talking directly to the workers. That is what Marx advised Marxists to do to not create parties separate from the workers parties. Of course had their been a Workers Party that was better than the Democratic Party and I mean a real Workers Party not just some small sect or organisation, then Marx would have joined that. There wasn't but Marx the materialist worked with what there was not with what he wished there was. That is why he and Engels welcomed the joining together of the Lassaleans and Eisenachers despite criticising the Gotha Programme, it is why Engels wrote Anti-Duhring to head off the split that Duhring and his followers were preparing because of the damage that such a split would do to the workers party by damaging the unity that the previous fusion had created.

You are wrong to about Socialist Organiser, though possibly not of the Bennites. Socialist Orgaiser's perspective always was to split the labour party. The idea was to build support around "the organisation" and create the conditions under which either the right would split away or the Left would see the need to create a new party. Although not as crass as the SWP or other Trotskyist organisations the I-CL was as guilty as others of seeing its priority as building the organisation as opposed to the organisation growing naturally as a result of building the workers party. This latter is my perspective, and I believe the coming years will see the potential for such growth as industrial militancy returns, and that militancy seeks a political expression in its natural historic home, in the Labour Party.

I have reproduced these texts from Engels before, but I think it is worth repeating them here.

The following are interesting quotes from Engels concerning the Workers Party and Marxists attitudes to it.
Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky
In Zurich
Abstract
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Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
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London, January 27, 1887
The movement in America, just at this moment, is I believe best seen from across the ocean. On the spot personal bickerings and local disputes must obscure most of the grandeur of it. And the only thing that could really delay its march would be a consolidation of these differences into established acts. To some extent that will be unavoidable, but the less of it the better. And the Germans have most to guard against this. Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learned by heart and to be repeated mechanically. The less it is drilled into the Americans from outside and the more they test it with their own experience--with the help of the Germans--the deeper will it pass into their flesh and blood. When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it. When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects, with the exception of the Anarchists, whose sudden appearance in various countries was but the effect of the violent bourgeois reaction after the Commune and could therefore safely be left by us to die out of itself, as it did. Had we from 1864, to 1873 insisted on working together only with those who openly adopted our platform where should we be to-day? I think that all our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line they will commit a great mistake.
Source:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1887/letters/87_01_27.htm
Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky
In Zurich
Abstract
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Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
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London, December 28, 1886
My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug tererden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the K[nights] of L[abour] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, to make of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn. A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually to understand their own actual position, the position made for them by the correlation of capital and wage labour. But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's party--no matter what platform--I should consider a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to H.G. or the K. of L.
Source
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_12_28.htm
Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England
Preface to the American Edition
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Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Frederick Engels, London, January 26, 1887;
First Published: in the American edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England, New York, 1887;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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The Labor Movement in America
Ten months have elapsed since, at the translator’s wish, I wrote the Appendix[1] to this book; and during these ten months, a revolution has been accomplished in American society such as, in any other country, would have taken at least ten years. In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil.[2] And yet, at that moment, the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal-miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the preparations, all over the country, for the great Eight Hours’ movement which was to come off, and did come off, in the May following. That I then duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated a working-class movement on a national scale, my “Appendix” shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie-fire, would shake American society to its very foundations.
The fact is there, stubborn and indisputable. To what an extent it had struck with terror the American ruling classes, was revealed to me, in an amusing way, by American journalists who did me the honor of calling on me last summer; the “new departure” had put them into a state of helpless fright and perplexity. But at that time the movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of confused and apparently !disconnected upheavals of that class which, by the suppression of negro slavery and the rapid development of manufactures, had become the lowest stratum of American society. Before the year closed, these bewildering social convulsions began to take a definite direction. The spontaneous, instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due .to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct class of American society; a class of — practically speaking — more or less hereditary wage-workers, ,proletarians. And with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political working-men’s party, with a platform of its own, and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal. In May the struggle for the Eight Hours’ working-day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of Labor by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labor Party organized in all great centres, and the New York, Chicago and Milwaukee elections. May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of U.S. bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working-class presented their coupons for payment.
In European countries, it took the working class years and years before they fully realized the fact that they formed a distinct and, under the existing social conditions, a permanent class of modern society; and it took years again until this class consciousness led them to form themselves into a distinct political party, independent of, and opposed to, all the old political parties formed by the various sections of the ruling classes. On the more favored soil of America, where no mediæval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth century, the working class passed through these two stages of its development within ten months.,
Still, all this is but a beginning. That the laboring masses should feel their community of grievances and of interests, their solidarity as a class in opposition to all other classes; that in order to give expression and effect to this feeling, they should set in motion the political machinery provided for that purpose in every free country — that is the first step only. The next step is to find the common remedy for these common grievances, and to embody it in the platform of the new Labor Party. And this — the most important and the most difficult step in the movement — has Yet to be taken in America.
A new party must have a distinct positive platform; a platform which may vary in details as circumstances vary and as the party itself develops, but still one upon which the party, for the time being, is agreed. So long as such a platform has not been worked out, or exists but in a rudimentary form, so long the new party, too, will have but a rudimentary existence; it may exist locally but not. yet nationally, it will be a party potentially but not actually.
That platform, whatever may be its first shape, must develop in a direction which may be determined beforehand. The causes that brought into existence the abyss between the working class and the capitalist class are the same in America as in Europe; the means of filling up that abyss are equally the same everywhere. Consequently, the platform of the American proletariat will in the long run coincide, as to the ultimate end to be attained, with the one which, after sixty years of dissensions and discussions, has become the adopted platform of the great mass of the European militant proletariat. It will proclaim, as the ultimate end, the conquest of political supremacy by the working class, in order to effect the direct appropriation of all means of production — land, railways, mines, machinery, etc. — by society at large, to be worked in common by all for the account and benefit of all.
But if the new American party, like all political parties everywhere, by the very fact of its formation aspires to the conquest of political power, it is as yet far from agreed upon what to do with that power when once attained. In New York and the other great cities of the East, the organization of the working class has proceeded upon the lines of Trades’ Societies, forming in each city a powerful Central Labor Union. In New York the Central Labor Union, last November, chose for its standard-bearer Henry George, and consequently its temporary electoral platform has been largely imbued with his principles. In the great cities of the North-West the electoral battle was fought upon a rather indefinite labor platform, and the influence of Henry George’s theories was scarcely, if at all, visible. And while in these great centres of population and of industry the new class movement came to a political head, we find all over the country two wide-spread labor organizations: the “Knights of Labor” and the “Socialist Labor Party,” of which only the latter has a platform in harmony with the modern European standpoint as summarized above.
Of the three more or less definite forms under which the American labor movement thus presents itself, the first, the Henry George movement in New York, is for the moment of a chiefly local significance. No doubt New York is by far the most important city of the States; but New York is not Paris and the United States are not France. And it seems to me that the Henry George platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a local movement, or at best for a short-lived phase of the general movement. To Henry George, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land is the great and universal cause of the splitting up of the people into Rich and Poor. Now this is not quite correct historically. In Asiatic and classical antiquity, the predominant form of class oppression was slavery, that is to say, not so much the expropriation of the masses from the land as the appropriation of their persons. When, in the decline of the Roman Republic, the free Italian peasants were expropriated from their farms, they formed a class of “poor whites” similar to that of the Southern Slave States before 1861; and between slaves and poor whites, two classes equally unfit for self-emancipation, the old world went to pieces. In the middle ages, it was not the expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. The peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein, and made liable to tribute to the lord in labor and in produce. It was only at the dawn of modern times, towards the end of the fifteenth century, that the expropriation of the peasantry on a large scale laid the foundation .for the modern class of wage-workers who possess nothing but their labor-power and can live only by the selling of that labor-power to others. But if the expropriation from the land brought this class into existence, it was the development of capitalist production, of modern industry and agriculture on a large scale which perpetuated it, increased it, and shaped it into a distinct class with distinct interests and a distinct historical mission. All this has been fully expounded by Marx (“Capital,” Part VIII: “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”). According to Marx, the cause of the present antagonism of the classes and of the social degradation of the working class is their expropriation from all means of production, in which the land is of course included.
If Henry George declares land-monopolization to be the sole cause of poverty and misery, he naturally finds the remedy in the resumption of the land by society at large. Now, the Socialists of the school of Marx, too, demand the resumption, by society, of the land, and not only of the land but of all other means of production likewise. But even if we leave these out of the question, there is another difference. What is to be done with the land? Modern Socialists, as represented by Marx, demand that it should be held and worked in common and for common account, and the same with all other means of social production, mines, railways, factories, etc.; Henry George would confine himself to letting it out to individuals as at present, merely regulating its distribution and applying the rents for public, instead of, as at present, for private purposes. What the Socialists demand, implies a total revolution of the whole system of social production; what Henry George demands, leaves the present mode of social production untouched, and has, in fact, been anticipated by the extreme section of Ricardian bourgeois economists who, too, demanded the confiscation of the rent of land by the State.
It would of course be unfair to suppose that Henry George has said his last word once for all. But I am bound to take his theory as I find it.
The second great section of the American movement is formed by the Knights of Labor.[3] And that seems to Se the section most typical of the present state of the movement, as it is undoubtedly by far the strongest. An immense association spread over an immense extent of country in innumerable “assemblies,” representing all shades of individual and local opinion within the working class; the whole of them sheltered under a platform of corresponding indistinctness and held together much less by their impracticable constitution than by the instinctive feeling that the very fact of their clubbing together for their common aspiration makes them a great power in the country; a truly American paradox clothing the most modern tendencies in the most mediaeval mummeries, and hiding the most democratic and even rebellious spirit behind an apparent, but really powerless despotism — such is the picture the Knights of Labor offer to a European observer. But if we are not arrested by mere outside whimsicalities, we cannot help seeing in this vast agglomeration an immense amount of potential energy evolving slowly but surely into actual force. The Knights of Labor are the first national organization created by the American working class as a whole; whatever be their origin and history, whatever their shortcomings and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution, here they are, the work of practically the whole class of American wage-workers, the only national bond that holds them together, that makes their strength felt to themselves not less than to their ,enemies, and that fills them with the proud hope of future victories. For it would not be exact to say, that the Knights ,of Labor are liable to development. They are constantly in full process of development and revolution; a heaving, fermenting mass of plastic material seeking the shape and form appropriate to its inherent nature. That form will be attained as surely as historical evolution has, like natural evolution, its own immanent laws. Whether the Knights of Labor will then retain their present name or not, makes no difference, but to an outsider it appears evident that here is the raw material out of which the future of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the future of American society at large, has to be shaped.
The third section consists of the Socialist Labor Party.[4] This section is a party but in name, for nowhere in America has it, up to now, been able actually to take its stand as a political party. It is, moreover, to a certain extent foreign to America, having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immigrants, using their own language and for the most part, conversant with the common language of the country. But if it came from a foreign stock, it came, at the same time, armed with the experience earned during long years of class struggle in Europe, and with an insight into the general conditions of working-class emancipation, far superior to that hitherto gained by American working-men. This is a fortunate circumstance for the American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate, and to take advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years’ struggle of their European classmates, and thus to hasten on the time of their own victory. For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. In so far this party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all things learn English.
The process of fusing together these various elements of the vast moving mass — elements not really discordant, but indeed mutually isolated by their various starting-points — will take some time and will not come off without a deal of friction, such as is visible at different points even now. The Knights of Labor, for instance, are here and there, in the Eastern cities, locally at war with the organized Trades Unions. But then this same friction exists within the Knights of Labor themselves, where there is anything but peace and harmony. These are not symptoms of decay, for capitalists to crow over. They are merely signs that the innumerable hosts of workers, for the first time set in motion in a common direction, have as yet found out neither the adequate expression for their common interests, nor the form of organization best adapted to the struggle, nor the discipline required to insure victory. They are as yet the first levies en masse of the great revolutionary war, raised and equipped locally and independently, all converging to form one common army, but as yet without regular organization and common plan of campaign. The converging columns cross each other here and there: confusion, angry disputes, even threats of conflict arise. But the community of ultimate purpose in the end overcomes all minor troubles; ere long the straggling and squabbling battalions will be formed in a long line of battle array, presenting to the enemy a well-ordered front, ominously silent under their glittering arms, supported by bold skirmishers in front and by unshakeable reserves in the rear.
To bring about this result, the unification of the various independent bodies into one national Labor Army, with no matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class platform — that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist Labor Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but a small minority of the working class. That line of action was first laid down in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1847 in the following words:
“The Communists” — that was the name we took at the time and which even now we are far from repudiating — “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
“They have no interests separate and apart from the interests of the whole working class.
“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and model the proletarian movement.
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out, and bring to the front, the common interests of the whole proletariat, interests independent of all nationality; 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of all countries, that section which ever pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have, over the great mass of the proletarians, the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
“Thus they fight for the attainment of the immediate ends, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they represent and take care of the future of the movement.”
That is the line of action which the great founder of Modern Socialism, Karl Marx, and with him, I and the Socialists of all nations who worked along with us, have followed for more than forty years, with the result that it has led to victory everywhere, and that at this moment the mass of European Socialists, in Germany and in France, in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and Sweden as well as in Spain and Portugal, are Fighting as one common army under one and the same flag.
Notes
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1. The Appendix to the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England was, except for the paragraph quoted in the next footnote, used by Engels as the basis of his Preface to the English edition of 1892. (See present volume, pp. 17-33.)
2. In the Appendix Engels wrote:
“There were two circumstances which for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences of the Capitalist system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native American population to “retire” in early manhood from wage-labour and to become’ farmers, dealers, or employers of labour, while the hard work for wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are faster and faster passing from the hands of the Nation and the States into those of private owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty millions striving hard to become — and with every chance of success, too — the leading manufacturing nation of the world — such a nation cannot permanently import its own wage-working class; riot even if immigrants pour in at the rate of half a million a year. The tendency of the Capitalist system towards the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies, works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed, the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants, but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level.”
3. The Noble Order of the Knights of Labour: A working-class organisation founded in Philadelphia in 1869. Existing illegally until 1878 it observed a semi-mysterial ritual. That year the organisation emerged from the underground, retaining some of its secret features. The Knights of Labour aimed at the liberation of the workers by means of co-operatives. They took in all skilled and even unskilled trades, without discrimination on account of sex, race, nationality or religion. The organisation reached the highest point of its activity during the eighties, when, under the pressure of the masses, the leaders of the Order were compelled to consent to an extensive strike movement. Its membership at that time was over 700,000, including 60,000 Negroes. However, on account of the opportunist tactics of the leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary class struggle, the Order forfeited its prestige among the masses. Its activity expired the next decade.
4. The Socialist Labour Party came into existence in 1876 as a result of the union of the American sections of the First International with other working-class socialist organisations in the United States. This party consisted mainly of immigrants, particularly Germans. Its activities were sectarian and its leaders were incapable of heading the mass movement of the American workers, as they refused to work in the trade unions.
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Condition of the Working Class in England
Marx-Engels Archive
Sourse
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1887/01/26.htm
Were Marx and Engels worried about joining a bourgeois Party? No. "When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it."
Were Marx and Engels insistent upon having a Party with the most pure socialist programme? No. "When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects, "
On the contrary Marx and Engels primary concern was to be where the workers were - not where they wanted them to be. Their attitude was based entirely on historical materialism - analysing things as they actually were not as they wanted them to be, and from that starting point trying to gradually work the movement up to what they wanted it to become.
It is unfortunate that the legacy of Leninist Hegelianism has diverted Marxists from that task, has led them to forget that it is the working class which is the revolutionary agent, and instead has led them to try to seek shortcuts through the creation of pure revolutionary parties. It has been not just 80 years wasted, but 80 years which has resulted in the regression rather than progression of working class consciousness.

Arthur Bough

"By the year 2000...the project for a much fuller democratisation of British state and society through the mcuh fuller democratisation of the Labour Party had...been decisively defeated. Every previous phase of the party's history was characterised by prolonged struggles between the leadership and recognisably distinct, organised and programmatically informed left oppositions. New Labour has restructured the party so that virtually no room is any longer allowed for this." (p. 290)

Doesn't sound like the most promising avenue for socialist politics these days.