Workers' Liberty

I think there are two different things here. There is a difference between unity of the various Marxist (let us be generous and call all the other organisations of the left Marxist), and the unity of the workers’ movement and the attitude of Marxists to that movement. I agree with your comment,

“Marx and Engels were fiercely opposed to any sectarian self-isolation from the real workers' movement, but extremely cold-blooded about unity and splits when it came to relations between small socialist groups.”

I do not consider the various small organisations of the Left “workers parties”, and I will try to show below that I don’t think Marx or Engels would have done either. As you say unity of these organisations (if it was achieved on the basis of real agreement) would be good but it is not everything, unity of the workers movement, however, is not merely good but a fundamental requirement for progress let alone the replacement of capitalism. As far as disunity within the real workers movement, Marxists should do everything possible to avoid it, to prevent it, and instead try to produce the greatest possible unity of the working class, not just as a precondition for basic defence of class interests but as the fundamental environment within which Marxists can successfully develop their ideas, and educate the working class.

Before addressing some of the points you have raised above let me try to cut to the chase, and ask this question in two forms. Suppose the AWL had been around when the Labour Party was being formed? What would the AWL’s attitude to this development have been? Would the AWL have welcomed the creation of such a mass workers party? Would the AWL have seen it as a step backwards because the Labour Party’s programme was not socialist, and a step back from the supposedly Marxist programme of the SDF? Would the AWL have said that the SDF should have merely concluded an agreement with the ILP, Fabians, and Trade Unions to oppose capitalism without actually creating organisational unity in order to achieve this end? Indeed had the AWL been around would the AWL have sought to affiliate to the Labour Party, or would it only have done so if the Labour Party adopted the AWL’s platform? After all had the AWL decided to join the Labour Party such a decision would not have prevented it from arguing for its own platform within such an organisation, anymore than it presumed that the SDF had to accept the platform of the ILP or the Fabians.

Put the same question now. If the Trade Unions (and there are no other mass workers forums that are capable at present of doing this) decided again to create a new Workers Party – would the AWL given the opportunity to affiliate only do so if this party adopted a fully worked out Marxist Programme?

Now to the points in response above.

There is a clear difference between Marx and Engels’ attitude in the early days of the League of the Just, and their later attitude in relation to the Communist League and particularly First International, and the building of Socialist Parties. The early attitude was one in which they share a similar approach to that of Lenin, the need for a theoretically pure, disciplined organisation of professional revolutionaries. Their evolution was away from this concept. The reason seems to me to be quite clear from their writings, and particularly in the writings of Engels. The early conception was shaped by two things. Both Marx and Engels were still influenced by Hegelian baggage, which basically saw history as the enfoldment of “The Idea”. Within this it was the role of philosophers to uncover the true course of history, the rational forms, and from this would flow all those actions, which would bring reality into conformity with the idea. Based on this conception it is inevitable that those great minds, which are to be the foundation of change must have a theoretically pure programme. The second thing that influenced their attitude was the fact that they were operating mostly in Germany under illegal conditions, where a small secretive, conspiratorial organisation was not only desirable, but probably the only way of operating. It is not surprising that Lenin operating under similar conditions arrives at similar concepts of party organisation. But it is the organisational structure suitable for an absolutist society, not for a liberal democracy where a workers party can develop openly, and in which Marxists can agitate (largely) without the fear of arrest etc.

Marx and Engels attitude to the form or organisation changed precisely as a result of their evolving materialist conception of history, and the consequent throwing over of Hegelian idealist principles.

An example of the initial attitude is given in the relation to the Chartists. Engels says, of the situation in 1839, “The English Chartists, on account of the specific English character of their movement, were disregarded as not revolutionary.” (History of the Communist League 1885). A page later Engels comments, “However, the social doctrine of the League, indefinite as it was, contained a very great defect, but one that had its roots in the conditions themselves. The members, in so far as they were workers at all, were almost exclusively artisans.” He goes on praising these artisans that prefigured the real proletarian party “And I do not believe there was a single man in the whole League at that time who had ever read a book on political economy. But that mattered little; for the time being “equality”, “brotherhood”, and “justice”, helped them to surmount every theoretical obstacle. And the move away from the small ideologically pure organisation that characterised the early development becomes challenged from a second front.

“Meanwhile a second, essentially different communism was developing alongside that of the League and of Weitling. While I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force etc.” (ibid)

This was the beginning of the abandonment of Hegelian idealist conceptions, an abandonment that Marx had arrived at simultaneously. The effect of this on their conception of the party to be built, compared to those held up to that time, is further elaborated by Engels. “This discovery…..was, however, of immediate importance for the contemporary workers’ movement. Communism among the French and Germans, Chartism among the English now no longer appeared as something accidental, which could just as well not have occurred. These movements now presented themselves as a movement of the modern oppressed class, the proletariat, as the more or less developed forms of the historically necessary struggle against the ruling class….”

The attitude to this movement thus becomes transformed. No longer are the Chartists to be “disregarded as not revolutionary” but to be viewed as the representative of the proletariat in however undeveloped a form, and therefore as the vehicle of the revolutionary class a vehicle that the communists must relate to rather than shun despite its inadequate platform, its undeveloped form. It is the basic outline of the attitude of Communists to the Workers Party formulated in the Communist Manifesto an attitude completely at odds with the earlier conceptions of the need for a theoretically pure, small party of basically intellectuals. The break from this conception is elaborated by Engels when he says,

“Now we were by no means of the opinion that the new scientific results should be confided in large tomes exclusively to the “learned” world….It was our duty to provide a scientific foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction….We founded a German workers society in Brussels…We kept in touch with the revolutionary section of the English Chartists through Julian Harney…..We entered likewise into a sort of cartel with the Brussels democrats (Marx was vice-president of the Democratic Society) and with the French social democrats of the Reforme. In short, our connections with the radical and proletarian organisations and press organs were quite what one could wish.”

Marx and Engels concept of the role of Marxists in relation to the workers and their parties, which they now saw developing in front of them, is set out in the Communist Manifesto – “The communists do not form their own Party separate from the other workers parties.” It is a theme Engels repeats in relation to the building of a workers party in the US, and elsewhere. In your response above you say in relation to the merger of the Eisenachers and Lassalleans to further the creation of a workers party in Germany,

“He reconciled himself to it, and let his Critique of the Gotha Programme be kept under wraps until after his death (1891), but he didn't like it.”

If you can show me where Marx clearly states that he actually opposed the merger I will agree with you. I do not think the quote you have given demosntrates Marx’s opposition to the merger, but opposition to the platform on which the merger was undertaken, for the reasons I have already stated i.e. a more minimal program that was theoretically sound would have been better, leaving open the possibility of the Marxists to continue to argue within the merged organisation for their ideas within the context of class struggle and joint action. That is the opinion of Lewis Feuer. In his editors note to Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme in his collection of Marx and Engels Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy he comments, “Despite his criticism Marx welcomed the achievement of a united German socialist party.” There are many weaknesses in Feuer’s Introduction to the book, and he may be wrong in his interpretation here, but in the absence of any clear statement of Marx’s opposition to the merger itself I have to go along with him on this point and take Marx at his word, when he say that one step of real progress is worth a dozen programs.

You raise the example of Engels and the split with Bakunin in the First International. But let’s examine that. First of all Bakunin as the representative of Anarchism. Can you imagine any current revolutionary group even belonging to an International containing Anarchists? The background to the split was the fact that after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 the First International was coming under increasing pressure, and the attention of police spies, agent provocateurs etc. Bakunin’s organisation was riddled with such people, it was common for revolutionaries to act as double agents, triple agents etc. (it is thought that Stalin then Koba acted as a double agent) and not uncommon for factional advantage within these conspiritorial groups to shop your factional opponents. In an letter written by Engels to Theodor Cuno “Anarchism and Conspiratorial Ethics” he outlines a criticism of Anarchism and Bakunin, and highlighting some of these threats to the International from the Anarchists. But Engels position is illustrated by his comments, where, after outlining what he calculates the strength of the Anarchists to be, he says “So long as these gentlemen (the Anarchists) keep within legal bounds, the General Council will gladly let them have their way. This coalition of the most diverse elements will soon fall apart, but as soon as they start anything against the Rules or the Congress resolution the general Council will do its duty.”

This concept of building the workers party was not necessarily contradicted by Lenin’s ideas set out in “What is to be Done.” There is no reason why the Marxists should not organise themselves as a disciplined organisation within the workers party as a means of ensuring that they are able to all the better convince the rest of this party of their ideas, and in the context of a real revolutionary situation even of taking the lead of that movement and ensuring that the necessary tasks are undertaken. In the context of absolutist Russia such a concept was even more apt than in say England or France, and perhaps even Germany. Where the problem arises it seems to me is where that concept is taken a step further and such a party is counterposed to the actual workers party, where the idea that “The communists do not form a party separate from the other workers parties” is abandoned, and the old Hegelian elitist conception restored in which history is the revelation of the Idea, the Leninist Party through theoretical purity uncovers the Idea and through its disciplined organisation brings it to fruition when the historical conditions permit. It is this concept that leads to the idea of the problem of the labour movement being a problem of leadership - that if only the labour movement had the right leaders, leaders with the correct set of ideas, a fully worked out program the problem of the revolution would be resolved. It is an abandonment of materialsm, a standing of materialsm on its head. A materialst theory explains the leaders the movement has in terms of the level of development of the movement itself, the level of consciousness of the mass of workers determined partly by the role of the ideology conveyed to them by their own organisations, but largely by their condition of life, their economic conditions of existence, and the continued dominance of bourgeois ideas.

Marxists, organised in the kind of party envisaged by Lenin, but operating inside the workers party are forced to accept praxis to continually test their ideas in practice against the responses and experiences of the ordinary, but also class-conscious workers that made up the bulk of such workers parties. It is the means by which the Marxists not only develop their theory on a materialist basis, but by which they are also kept in touch with reality, prevented from marching too far ahead of the movement as it actually exists. Yet there is already within “What is to be Done” the seeds of the idea that convincing these ordinary workers of the correctness of the Communists ideas was too laborious a task, that it presented the risk of the Communists being dragged down themselves (and what does that say about the extent of the Communists confidence in their own ideas – a confidence that should have been unshakeable based on scientific analysis), and that in order to mainatin theoretical purity it was necessary for the Communists to have their own revolutionary party comprised of professional revolutionaries only. It was a step backwards to the ideas of the League of the Just, an attempt to do what Marx and Engels had already criticised. It reflected an impatience with the speed of dvelopment of the real workers movement, something Marx had witnessed before and cautioned against. The consequence of this imnpatience with the real workers movement was to seek to substitute for it, to create a separate communist party with its own “sectarian principles…. by which (it sought) to shape and mould the proletarian movement.”

But the actual separation of the Communists from the actual workers party takes place with the establishment of Communist Parties and the creation of the Third International. You say,

“I do not think the attempt to form separate, clearly-revolutionary parties after 1917 was a mistake. But in any case unity was not on offer. In Germany the SPD expelled the USPD (the majority of which later went over to the Communist Party) in 1916 for its opposition to the war; and the SPD leaders went on to use the right-wing Freikorps to murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.”

I certainly have no interest in defending the leaders of the SPD either in relation to their position on the war, the expulsion of the USPD, and certainly not in relation to the barabarous murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, but it is also necessary to look at the context of what was going on. Lenin had written “What is to be Done”, the RSDLP had divided into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks who, however, still managed to work together as far as the ordinary members of each organisation were concerned. Although Luxemburg criticised Lenin on a number of issues it was quite clear long before the war that the socialist movement internationally was dividing into two groups – revolutionaries and reformists. The expulsion of the USPD is not solely due to its opposition to the war (had it been then expulsion could have been justified in 1914 just as easily as 1916) but is in the context of the growing factional warfare taking place within the organisation and possibly a pre-emptive strike limiting the ability of the USPD to do more damage and take more people with it when it eventually splits, a split that seems inevitable given the ferocity of the condemnation of the leaders of the SPD (and the other Second International Parties) as having betrayed the working class.

Moreover, the murder of Luxemburg and Liebkecht is a barbaric act, but it is in the context of a revolution taking place. A revolution that is occurring a year after the Russian revolution and at the same time as the Civil War in Russia. How do things look to the SPD. In Russia the Bolsheviks have seized power true to their belief that all the other socialist parties had betrayed the working class in one form or another, that only the Bolsheviks had the true knowledge of how society was to develop and their purity could not be compromised, together with the Bolsheviks fear that the Revolution might go the same way as the Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks have closed down all the other socialist parties. Stalin who Lenin at this time was calling “My magnificent Georgian” was marauding round the country rounding up opposition, and dispensing retribution, something he was to make into an artform later.

Its not surprising that in the context of a revolution in Germany the SPD leaders look at what is happening across their borders, and fear what might be in store for them at the hands of German “Bolsheviks”. That does not excuse the cowardly act of the SPD leaders, but it puts it into context.

What was the actual catalyst for the split not just in the SPD, but the division of the whole International Socialist Movement, and the creation of the Third International. It is the support for the First World War by the Socialist Parties. But what was the the actual nature of this betrayal of the working class. Firstly, to characterise it in terms of the betrayal of the working class by the “leaders” of the workers parties is something of a cop out. The leaders of the workers parties were the leaders because they reflected the average level of development of the workers parties, and the majority of their members. The decision to line up behind the bourgeoisie was not a decision of the leaders of these parties totally removed from the mood of the majority of the workers or even of their most class-conscious elements organised in those parties. Any doubt about that can easily be dealt with simply by looking at how many of those workers and their most advanced section volunteered to join the armies and go and fight. With hindsight, it ought perhaps have told Marxists at the time that their belief that socialism was imminent, that the permeation of international socialist ideology into the workers movement that was going to lead to a European revolution any time soon was a mirage. The extent to which workers in each country were prepared to rush to sign up to kill each other, was an indication of how immature the workers movement still was, the extent to which socialist ideas still held no grasp of the workers even the most class conscious of them, and the extent to which bourgeois ideology still dominated.

The historic betrayal of the working class then actually amounts to the fact that even the most advanced section of the working class, those that were class-conscious enough to recognise the need to form a workers party were not yet Communists. What a revelation!! So the decision to form separate Communist Parties is justified on the basis that the workers parties are not Communist Parties, do not have that full understanding of the line ofmarch ahead. But where for Marx and Engels that obvious fact, that the workers – even their most advanced sections – are not Communists, was precisely the reason why the Communists should be a part of the workers parties in order to go through the process and experiences of the workers alongside them, to teach them and explain what is going on, under the Leninist conception of the party it becomes the justification for abandoning the most class conscious workers to flounder in confusion in order to go and deliberate over a more theoretically pure program.

The question of whether the actions of the parties of the Second International justified a split (and to go back to the separation of the issue at the beginning we are not talking about a split between two small revolutionary tendencies but precisely a split of the actual workers movement) can be looked at like this. Did the fact that working clases throughout Europe lined up to slaughter each other change the fact that the working class was the revolutionary class? No. Did the workers organised in the Socialist parties still represent the class conscious section of that working class, that section which in whatever confused manner saw the need for the working class to change society? Yes. In that case there was no material change which justified the abandonment of the concept developed by Marx and Engels that “The Communists do not form a party separate from the other workers parties.”

As far as the expuslion of the USPD is concerned that expulsion was made almost inevitable due to the growing division that arose out of the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party and the growing split within the workers movement which this conception inevitably leads to. But even apart from that had the Communists stuck with the original position of Marx and Engels they would have resisted a division of the movement by emphasising their desire to continue to be a part of the workers party, they would have where possible worked secretly within the workers parties as well as having their own propaganda, and would have continually emphasised to the workers that the division of the workers movement was the responsibility of the current leaders of the socialist party. They did not do so.

Moreover, if support for your own bourgeoisie in time of war were the real criteria then Engels would have fallen foul of this too. In an article written in 1848 Engels (and Marx does not appear to have refuted Engels position) wrote in the Chartist paper Northern Star,

“Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief (Abd-el-Kader) has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which the brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blameable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation.” (Defence of Progressive Imperialism in Algeria).

The fact that the position of the Second International parties did not give grounds for splitting the workers movement and abandoning the dictum of Marx and Engels that the Communists do not form a separate party was demonstrated by what happened later. Lenin tells the British Communists to affiliate to the Second International’s British affiliate – the Labour Party. The fact that Lenin talks about the British Communists supporting the Labour Party like a rope supports a hanged man, phraseology echoed by the British CP in their dealings with the LP gave some idea of how likely it was that such an approach would be warmly welcomed. Later the Fourth International developed the tactic of entryism into the Socialist parties. If there was no principled reason against working inside these parties, then there was no principled reason for splitting from them in the first place, as opposed to doing what it had always been the responsibility of Communists to do – to act as their left-wing, to educate the class conscious workers within them (particularly in the context of important historical events such as wars and revolutions).

But just from a common sense point of view think about how things must have appeared to the ordinary workers in these parties. First of all the Communists just at the moment when the workers need things explaining to them go off and create their own party and programme. In the process they turn to the workers in the old parties and basically say, “You are all a load of wankers, who’ve just betrayed the working class.” Then after a few more epithets in similar vein add, “Oh and by the way could we join your party.” That the mass of workers have become rather wary of Communists of whatever stripe is hardly surprising. And now the consequence has been that the workers parties themselves have degenerated if not collapsed, and the task is once more presented to the working class of building mass workers parties. A hundred years of development has been wasted.

The consequence of establishing the Communist Party separate from the workers party, as a means of shortcutting the slow development of the workers and instead of substituting for it, of trying to mould the workers movement from the outside with a separate set of ideas was manifested in Russia. Engels had specifically warned about the danger of trying to skip over the capitalist stage in Russia, arguing that it would only be possible on the basis of a previous successful proletarian revolution in the rest of Europe. (See Engels “On Social Conditions in Russia”). This objection can be dealt with in terms of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the incorrect belief common amongst all marxists at the time that socialism was imminent throughout Europe. But the question at least has to be asked both in terms of how to build the workers party today, and of avoiding the same kind of degeneration that occurred in Russia, what role did the Leninist conception of the Party and the separation of the Communist party from the existing workers parties play in the course of events. It was certainly crucial in achieving the initial success, but was it maybe at the cost of the later degeneration not only of the revolution, but of the workers movement in general.

Engels says, “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents, and for the realisation of the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of contradiction between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded, which again, do not proceed from the class relations of the moment or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are its own interests. Whoever is put in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.” (Engels “The Peasant war in Germany” written 1850)

Prescient words if ever there were any.

Arthur Bough

Although, this is not strictly relevant to this initial thread the question arises out of the Leninist concept of the Party, and the consequences of that development.

The workers revolution should theoretically be the most bloodless in history for the reason quoted in the paper this week from Shelley, “we are many and they are few.” This is unlike any previous social revolution that the working class should outnumber the bourgeoisie so preponderantly. Yet, as you again rightly point out in the paper all of the revolutions carried out in the name of the workers, or workers and peasants have if anything been attended by more bloodshed than previous social revolutions.

But in fact revolution as a whole does not have a very good track record in terms of social change. The bourgeois revolution undertaken in Britain in the 17th century, after considerable blood-letting during the Civil War resulted not in the political rule of the bourgeoisie, but the Dictatorship of Cromwell whose formation of the New Model Army mirrors Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party, a tight, dedicated, disciplined, ideological (read fervently puritan for the NMA)organisation which essentially substitutes for the class during the revolution when that class has shown its historical immaturity. A hundred and fifty years later, in what Marxists always look to as the more classic bourgeois political revolution, in France, almost an identical course of events occurs with the usurpation of power by Napoleon and the establishment of the Empire, to be followed again not by bourgeois political rule but by the Constitutional Monarchy of Louis-Phillippe, and the Second Empire Dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte.

The real bourgeois revolutionaries in fact were not Cromwell, Danton, Robespierre or any of the other political figures. The real bourgeois revolutionaries were men like Boulton and Watt, Stephenson and Brunel. They were the people that ensured that capitalism became the overwhelmingly dominant economic system, and that on its basis the capitalist class became the overwhelmingly most powerful class in society such that in the end the political revolution when it finally came was a bloodless Parliamentary affair.

It is perhaps time to reflect on the issue that Marxists divided on at the beginning of the last century revolution or reform. After all whatever criticism the limitations of social democracy, and the reforms and improvements to living standards that unions have been able to achieve in the last 100 years the condition of the working class in most developed countries is now one Marx probably could not have conceived as possible short of a socialist society. And that progress might have been all the greater, the working class more class conscious and capable of using its overwhelming preponderance, the fact that “we are many and they are few”, if the division of the workers movement which occurred at the beginning of the 20th century had not occurred. After all Marx himself thought that although revolutions were inevitable in the absolutist states the size and potential power of the working class made socialism at least conceivable by control of a Parliamentary majority in Britain.

Arthur Bough