Workers' Liberty

The idea of a vanguard party is the idea of Lenin. The basic thread is this. Marx is criticised for seeming to put forward the idea in the Communist Manifesto that the progress to the socialist revolution is an automatic process as the working class becomes more class conscious. As Marx was an active revolutionary and sought to build revolutionary organisations whose aim was to educate, organise, and agitate within the working class this criticism of Marx seems a bit off to me. In fact in the Manifesto itself Marx sets out the need for a Workers Party, and also sets out the role of what Marxists (the Vanguard) should be. Lenin, however, picks up on this theme, and particularly within a strand of thought within the revisionist Marxists, the Economists, who do put forward the idea that such an evolution is inevitable, and that all it is necessary to do is to keep educating the workers until they are ready to take power. Lenin points out that because as Marx sets out "the ruling ideas of every age, are the ideas of the ruling class", this maturation of the working class into being a fully evolved class conscious mass will never happen. The dominant ideas are only thrown off during particular revolutionary episodes, crises during which the true nature of society is revealed to the workers, and their condition within it. In order to seize the day during these revolutionary periods it is necessary to have a vanguard which is disciplined, and ready to seize power. Given the conditions udner which Lenin was operating in Russia as an absolutist state, the kind of vanguard party he was advocating made sense it was the kind of organisation Marx had belonged to in the Communist League.

But this idea of a separate Communist vanguard party is at odds with the kind of workers party and role for Marxists within it thatMarx had proscribed, and that Lenin advocated in relation to the developing workers movement in the US at the end of the 19th century. Marx and Engels ideas were a rejection of the kind of organisation that the Communist League was (a secretive, politically pure vanguard) precisely because they had adopted a materialist view of history in which change is brought about not by men of ideas as Hegel had argued who hand down wisdom from on high, but by social classes - in the case of socialism, the working class. With that conception the priority given by Marx and Engels was not the furthering of some small revolutionary organisation, but the degelopment of the workers movement itself.

The concept of Lenin for a revolutionary organisation which seeks to develop its ideas and principles to the utmost degree seems fine to me. How else can the Marxists in such an organisation educate the workers and help them achieve class consciousness unless they understand things themselves. There seems nothing incompatrible in that with Marx's idea about the role of Marxists within the workers Party. What does seem incompatible to me is the idea, that in order to ensure the purity of the ideas of such an organisation, to avoid being dragged down into the swamp as Lenin put it, such an organisation has to organisationally separate itslef from other trends within the workers movement. It may wish to form itslef into a faction within the workers party in order to maintain some kind of clarity, but it seems to me that from the time that Lenin wrote "What is to Be Done" the trend was set for the revolutionaries to organisationally separate themselves from the reformists, to create their own communist party, and the language and disputes that took place between the two strands led inevitably to such a separation, and disastrous results from which the workers movement has not recovered. And whilst revolutionary Marxists would point to the class collaborationist policies of those that for the last 100 years have led the reformist wing of the workers movement, to their management of capitalism, and the fact that they have if anything as a result led to the workers being less class conscious now than they were a hundred years ago, a look at which group has achieved most progress in the actual condition of the working class during that period would have to conclude that it is the reformists.

The question of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a different matter. This does not refer to a political dictatorship such as that of Stalin. It refers to the dominat position of a class, not an individual or Party. So for example, Marxists would say that we currently live under the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, because the capitalists dominate the economic system, they have created a capitalist state which ensures their interests are met, the institutions of society such as schools, media, church etc. are all controlled by the capitalists and promote capitalistic ideas, and culture etc.

The Dictatorship of the proletariat is the reverse of this, it is the working class taking hold of the means of production, of establishing a workers state, which promotes the interests of the workers and is under the complete ddemocratic control of the workers (quite the reverse of a political dictatorship in fact), and it is working class culture, working class ideas which dominate the society and reinforce the power of the workers just as capitalist ideology and culture reinforce the position of the bourgeoisie now.

As for bureaucrats and bureaucracy we should remember that capitalism has lots of bureaucrats too. The CEO's of big business (whilst mostly being capitalists in their own right) are bureaucrats too, employed by the top 1% to run their affairs. The top 1% permit a few shady dealings of these bureuacrats as the faux frais of production, but when it goes too far and these bureaucrats start running businesses for their own benefoits they are stamped on as is happening with the people from Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco at the moment in the US. The best way to control these bureaucrats in a socialist society is as you say for everyone to do some of these jobs in turn, but the high division of labour probably makes htis impractical. But employing bureuacrats on short term contracts, on average wages, moving them around so they cannot form established social groups, and also ensuring that elected officials are also full recallable, elected on for fixed short terms, and also paid average wages is one way of preventing them becoming a force above society.

In 1974 my wie's bother in law was a technical salesperson for JCB the excavator company. He told me that when he was in Portugal just after their revolution the manager of the firm he was visiting was not allowed even to go to the pub with him, unless the workers at the factoiry agreed.

At some point in the socialist future when current ideas no longer predominate hopefully such controls won't be necessary as each individual does their job committed not to furthering their own ends, but of furthering the ends of the whole of society.

Arthur Bough

Vangaurd Party
Submitted by seanysean on 23 August, 2005 - 21:19.
Am I correct in my belief that idea of a vangaurd party is Leninist? Arthur talks about the need for the vangaurd not to be seperate from the workers party. This makes sense to me as I am inclined to believe that the revolution must come from a working class that is sufficiently advanced and educated that there is no need for a 'dictatorship of the prolateriat'. Frankly, I am suspicious of the concept of an elite vangaurd. I think their role, if they have one at all, is to help the working working class to become a 'class for itself'. Once this is achieved the vangaurd should disappear into the ranks of the workers party. I believe was Trotsky who said "Once everyone is a beaurocrat noone is a beaurocrat". If there is insufficient numbers of people capable of fitting the roles of beaurocracy required in a fledgling workers state then the elite vangaurd party would be a potential danger to class unity.

Your arguing more towards the right side of Libertarian Marxism "The dictatorship of the proletariat or rule of the people is the goal of Communism. This can only be achieved through a process of "centralization" by the state apparatus a centralized state has to be in place until full class conciseness is realized then a process of decentralization or true communism can begin the problem with centralization however is that it can sometimes lead to a vanguard party Anarcho-communism argues that there should not be a transitory period that we should move directly to decentralization of the state I dont hold this to be true for the simple fact that any society that is transformed over night without a time period of acclimation ultimately colapses and inevitablly leads backwards towards capitalism

The Workers Party has to fight on all levels. It has to be inextricably linked to the workers other organisations, such as the Trade Unions, Tenants and Residents Associations etc. In short any independent organisation of the working class established to deal with some aspect of workers lives should find political leadership in, and organisational support from such a party. Therefore, such a Party is not primarily an electoral organisation, it is an organisation which seeks to promote the workers interests by whatever means, and in whatever arena. In so doing it eductaes the workers, informs their struggles, provides them with their basic organisational and political form for changing society. But such a party would not be itself fully class conscious i.e. it would not be a Marxist Party of the kind envisaged by Lenin, precisely because it would be composed in the main of ordinary workers struggling to achieve such consciousness. The role of Marxists would be to assist this education and development from within this party. The best arrangement for this would be if this party was established from the beginning on the basis of allowing the affiliation of all socialist and workers organisations (apart from openly reactionary organisation obviously) who would be free to conduct their own agitation and propoganda. But if Marxists wanted to really win workers and to educate them it would require as I said previously that their main activity was the building of this party rather than their own organisation, otherwise workers would as they have shun them as sectarian.

Should such a party participate in elections. Most certainly. For the reasons I have outlined elsewhere quoting Engels in responsse to the Anarchists. Workers see things in political terms, they seek political rather than merely syndicalist solutions. Workers, certainly in a democracy, could never be expected to understand or support a party which shunned the direct political arena of elections and government. A workers party if it genuinely is a workers party is not going to start from the position of having an already worked out Marxist programme, is not going to be comprised of fully class conscious workers. The task of Marxists is to try to educate the members of this party, and steadily to raise the consciousness of its members, to lead it by experience, example, and education towards that class consciousness, and in doing so to raise the class consciousness of the broader circles of workers influenced by the Party. Such work cannot be undertaken if the Marxists simply become frustrated at the fact that the workers in this party are not yet Marxists, and although they must engage in debate and criticism of ideas and actions where they are inadequate, such debate has to be supportive and constructive - not simply accusing people of being renegades, traitors or whatever. That is where I think that lenin's conception of the party derailed the movement. The ludicrous thing looking at the issue of the First World War is that for all Lenin's urging the necessity of a pure party of professional revolutionaries, and his criticism of Kautsky and the leaders of the Second International, in practice the elcted representatives of this pure revolutionary party in Russia adopted the same positions as Kautsky!!! Partly, this is not surprising because Lenin's policy of revolutionary defeatism is both confused and confusing.

A Workers Party if elected will, as all such parties have, find that it is faced with the choice of pursuing its ideals or of managing capitalism. Exactly, what the response of such a party will be depends upon the success the Marxists have had in educating its members, upon the general level of class cosnciousness of its members, and of the workers it influences. The job of Marxists once again is not to brand the leaders and representatives of this party as traitors if, as all reformist parties have done, accommodates to the situation (such branding is likely to piss of the workers in the party that elected these leaders). Rather it is to explain why the situation has arisen, why the original programme upon which the party conducted its activity was inadequate. In that way, selfless support for the workers and their party and patient criticism and explanation, of what has happened, the Marxists not only raise the level of the workers consciousness, prepare them fir future events, but also win respect from the workers and automatically recruit others to their ranks (both from within the Party and without)without making this thier primary obejctive.

A workers party that achieves power under capitalism will inevitably face the choice of managing capitalism or moving beyond capitalism as a means of resolving the situation. A workers party that has with the help of Marxist education raised itslef up to the level of working class class consciousness, and developed a programme based on that class consciousness and which makes the imbuing of that consciousness in the working class in all aspects of life its primary goal, which explains in advance to workers that should it achieve power it can only resolve their problems through a complete change in society, and against the physical opposition of the bosses, an opposition which it will require them to suppress outside simple Parliamentary action, such a party if elected faces no dilemma. It knows what to do, and so do the workers that elect it.
Arthur Bough

Your question poses another problem for Marxists - What to do if you are put in a position of leadership, but without the necessary class consciousness in the working class for socialism?

Trotsky speaks of the growing activism of workers in the months leading up to the February revolution, often, he says, revolving around Bolshevik agitation, although he had already admitted that a short time before that Bolsheviks were few and far between, and were likely to take a bashing from the workers if they spoke up against the war (so much for Russian workers being in any meaningful sense a class for themselves). But this seems a consequence resulting from Leninist conceptions. There is a delusion that, because workers congregate around this or that revolutionary, they have themselves reached some higher level of class consciousness. But speak to any TU militant and they will tell you this is BS. Workers naturally support militants who best represent them, who work conscientiously, rather than acting as careerists. That is why revolutionaries, who seek to fulfil this role, as shop stewards, are massively over represented at this level of organisation. The support for them is not for their political positions, but for their commitment. I first became a shop steward when I was 19, succeeded at one point in getting even non-union workers in my department to take action, and quickly got elected to positions both within the TU movement and LP. I also became involved in community actions, which drew in hundreds of residents, and took a leadership position in these too. Whilst, at no time did I hide my revolutionary politics, also at no time was I under the illusion that any of the people who elected me to these positions shared my politics. On the contrary, in many cases their politics were often right-wing reformist, and in some cases downright reactionary.

But the function of a Marxist is not to shirk the responsibility, but at the same time not get carried away with delusion. For example, over many years I had criticised the Labour Right and soft-left for going along with cuts in Local Government during the late 70’s and early 80’s. Having been elected to the Executive of the District Labour Party by a huge vote, way in excess of others that were elected, I was asked to stand for the local Council. In part this was prompted by people who were then current and former members of revolutionary groups, and partly was a tactic by the soft-left who wanted to put me on the spot – basically to put up or shut up. What is a Marxist to do in that position? To refuse to stand simply allows the right and soft left to say “Don’t tell us to risk surcharge if you are not prepared to do it yourself.” But being elected means advocating positions for which you know there is at best a bare majority of support within your LP and not even that outside. In the end, I made it clear at my selection meeting that I would not vote for any cuts, any rent or rate increases, or any other attacks on the working class, that I would view my role as being the same as a shop steward to encourage the self-organisation and activity of the working class within the local community and to act merely as their spokesman, that I certainly would not be acting as a Council manager, and that, if they selected me, it would be on the basis of them supporting that position. Within a few months of me and another revolutionary being elected by one of the biggest majorities for years, and despite the former right-wing Councillor standing against us as an Independent, the issue arose. The soft-left Chair of the Housing Committee proposed a rent increase. Myself and the other revolutionary Councillor refused to support it, and took the issue to the Branch. The other soft-left Councillor for the ward opposed us. The branch was effectively split, but we won a majority. The two of us refused to vote for the increase and walked out of the Council Chamber in protest, the soft left Councillor ignored the Branch decision and voted in favour. The two of us were expelled from the Labour Group, and we were able to make lots of propaganda for the fact that there is an alternative to simply managing the Local Council, that a fight could be put up. A couple of months later having been let back into the Labour Group, cuts in the budget were proposed. By this time the soft-left had regrouped and I had been deselected. I again refused to support the cuts, but this time, without majority support for such a position, I took the opportunity to resign on the basis of not being prepared to carry through attacks on the working class (apparently, it was most amusing to see the Town Clerk, in his full regalia of wig and stockings, read out my resignation letter in full setting out these revolutionary principles, and calling on the Council’s workers to resist any cuts and redundancies).

But in a sense this was nothing new to me, having been a union activist, because shop stewards face that problem all the time. We should not, therefore, be too critical of revolutionaries in leadership positions in the Trade Unions, assuming that their election means that it is a reflection of support for revolutionary politics or even militant trade union action at every available opportunity. Criticism of them for lack of principle, or bad tactics is another matter.

Arthur Bough

The following is an interesting quote from Engels.

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

Arthur Bough

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

Arthur Bough

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

Arthur Bough