Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Four-The Origins Of The Communist League ("Young Spartacus-July-August 1976)
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: As a special feature Young Spartacus has been serializing the lectures on "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" presented by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour at the regional educational conferences of the Spartacus Youth League during the past year. The talk reproduced in this issue was given at the SYL Midwest Educational held in Chicago over the weekend of April 16-18. The first part of the series, which appeared in our Febru¬ary issue, was devoted to the Great French Revolution and its insurrectionary continuity through the conspiratorial Jacobin communists Babeuf and Buonarroti. The next section, appearing the following month, discussed the Carbonari Conspiracy, the French Revolution of 1830 and Buonarroti, the Lyons silk weavers uprising and the Blanquist putschin!839. The third installment in the April Young Spartacus analyzed Chartism in Britain. The concluding portion of the presentation on the origins of the Communist League will appear in our next issue. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation stylistic alterations have been reduced to a minimum.
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This talk is the fourth part of a projected seven-part SYL class series, entitled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." As such, the full significance of this presentation today cannot be understood without knowing something about the first three, which have been encapsulated in Young Spartacus, and then hearing the next three.
The basic theme, of the talk is how the communist movement was generated and conditioned by the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; how Marx assimilated that tradition, how Marxism was tested and in many ways found faulty by the revolutions of 1848, after which the bourgeois-democratic revolution in West Europe was off the historical agenda, and how Marx fundamentally changed his conception of political strategy between 1850 and 1853. This talk, therefore, deals with the origins of Marxism, the development of Marx' political strategy up to the eve of 1848 and its encapsulation and codification in the Communist Manifesto, which was published a few months before the outbreak of the February revolution in Paris in 1848.
First I'm going to discuss the general character of the European left in the 1840's. Next I'm going to go back [to the 1830'sJ and trace the history of the League of the Just, which, becoming the Communist League in 1847, was the inclusive organization of all German communist activists and which was the organization through which Marx became a communist leader in 1847. Then we're going to go back again to the ever-popular question of the "young Marx" and the origins of Marxism in the narrow sense—Hegel and all that. And finally I'll try to tie it all together in 1846, when Marx became a Marxist and found himself on the political stage as a communist factionalist.
Now, before we get into this talk, I want to make one point about method. As both political activists and living human beings we tend to have a fairly good natural sense of the importance of time in politics. You know that the American political scene looked somewhat different five years ago than today; that Maoism, for example, represented something rather different in 1971 than Maoism today.
But when we reflect on the revolutionary movement of Europe in 1815, in 1820, in 1830, in 1840, we lose the sensitivity to time of a working politician. Unless one struggles to think contemporaneously, then I believe the origins of Marxism will appear very obscure, simply because the French political alignment was very different in 1840, say, than in 1844, and again very different than in 1847. The period before 1848 was an extremely volatile period, during which politics was much more unstable than in the U.S. or even West Europe today and in which the political alignments on the left, including Marx1 opponents, changed. Marx praised Proudhon in 1842 and polemicized against him in 1847, because in that short period Proudhon's politics had radically changed. So, while some of my talk may seem antiquarian—you know, this happened in 1843 and then that happened in 1844—you should realize that a year is a long time in a faction fight, no less so in 1846.
Revolutionary Politics Before Marx
Marxism developed in a period of relative depression throughout the international workers and revolutionary movement. The period 1830 to 1842— that is, the period beginning with the successful bourgeois-democratic revolution in France and ending with the suppression of the Chartist general strike in Britain—represents a certain kind of cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. It began with a series of relatively successful bourgeois -democratic revolutions or revolutionary movements and it ended with the communist-centered proletarian movements, even the massive Chartist movement, going against the bourgeoisie and getting smashed.
As a consequence, all the leading revolutionary cadres and all the political tendencies in the mid-1840's, when Marx and Engels first came on the scene, were profoundly shaped by these defeats. Etienne Cabet—a leader of the Society for the Rights of Man [formed 1832] and the most important socialist in France in the 1840's, had been sent into exile after the 1834 Lyons silk-weavers' uprising. Feargus O'Connor, the leader of the Chartists, was sent into exile after 1839 [the Chartist agitation to petition Parliament, leading to isolated uprisings] and imprisoned after 1842 [the Chartist insurrectionary general strike]. Karl Schapper, who was the leading cadre of the League of the Just, had also been sent into exile as a result of his role in the Blanquist putsch of 1839. So that unless one understands that the leadership of the principal revolutionary tendencies in the 1840's were rebounding against a series of defeated minority actions, that their attitudes and ideologies were profoundly shaped by that experience, then the political world that Marx entered and what Marx contributed become essentially incomprehensible.
Moreover, you need to realize the scale of the revolutionary movements at that time. Before 1848 there were only two mass movements of the left: the movement of Etienne Cabet in France and Chartism in Britain. All the other tendencies were either propaganda groups, such as the League of the Just; or literary sects, such as German True Socialism; or simply literary figures, such as Proudhon. These two mass organizations, therefore, exerted a profoundly shaping influence upon the League of the Just, whose main cadres were in exile in France and Britain. It is important, then, to have at least a working knowledge of the Cabet movement and Chartism in the 1840's.
Reaction to the Reaction
Etienne Cabet, as I said, was a leader of the Society of the Rights of Man who was forced into exile following the repression of 1835. Cabet returned to France at a time when all the revolutionary communist sects had been
driven underground in the wake of the 1839 Blanquist putsch. Cabet built a mass utopian-socialist movement on the basis of class collaborationist!!, pacifist anti-revolutionism and bourgeois philanthropism. Known as "Father Cabet" for his appeals to Christianity, he espoused "communism with a human face."
Above all Cabet was consciously anti-violent. Week after week his paper, Le Populaire, carried letters, for example, £rom wives of the Lyons silk-weavers who said,
"In the old days our husbands were communists and they believed in violence. We had to worry about the police coming at night and arresting our husbands. Now they have been converted to your kind of communism and we don't have to worry about that anymore."
Among the inner circle of Cabet was Herman Ewerbach, who was one of the leaders of the League of the Just, translated Cabet's writings into German and sought to give his movement an international dimension.
The other mass movement was Chartism, which during the 1840's was an extremely complex political phenomenon. Between 1839 and 1842 Chartism had been both an inclusive mass organization and, in its basic thrust, a revolutionary movement. After the defeat of the general strike of 1842 the Chartist movement moved to the right, became more exclusive and its leadership—around Feargus O'Connor —became bonapartist. O'Connor degenerated into cooperativism—raising, and apparently mismanaging, money to buy all the land in England in order that the workers could become smallholders. His schemes were not only Utopian but also downright shoddy.
Now, Chartism is complex largely because O'Connor was by no means the most right-wing leader arising out of the reaction to revolutionary Chartism. On the contrary, there were a whole series of Chartist leaders who wanted to liquidate Chartism entirely and form a political bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie. O'Connor staunchly opposed that. So, in one sense, he stood for class independence, even though relative to the earlier period he had moved far to the right and abandoned an insurrectionary perspective for petty-bourgeois cooperativism.
Chartism also contained a consciously Jacobin communist left wing led by Julian Harney. Yet in the 1840's Harney was reduced to being the left-wing lieutenant of O'Connor. Nevertheless, I would argue that in some ways Harney during this period [1843-44] was the most advanced socialist of his day; he believed in a mass organization of the proletariat, class independence and violent revolution. The problem was that Harney was not a factional politician. Or, to use a Spartacist characterization, he did not draw the proper organizational conclusions from his political ideas. Instead of fighting O'Connor—a fight he might well have lost—Harney attempted to placate O'Connor and do his own thing, which was mainly acting as an honest broker to the left-wing exiles in London. In particular, with the left wing of the Polish immigrants, some French Babouvists and German communists, he put together something in 1845 called the Fraternal Democrats, which, its name to the contrary, represented communism, although not Jacobin communism.
League of the Just
Now we come to the League of the Just and the Communist League. And again we must double back in time to the 1830's in Paris. At that time Paris had an enormous German population, and there was an inclusive ^organization closely affiliated with the French Society for the Rights of Man known as the League of Exiles. Just as during 1832-34 in the Society for the Rights of Man there was a parallel factional struggle in the League of Exiles between the Jacobin communists led by Buonarroti and the revolutionary bourgeois democrats. The factional struggle in the Society for the Rights of Man was arrested by the state suppression of that organization. But the German group was clandestine to begin with, since they were worried about being deported back to Germany. So that factional struggle- went to a conclusion in a split; the communists, the German artisan and communist intellectuals, took the majority, while Jacob Venedy, who was later a liberal delegate to the Frankfurt parliament of 1848, led the minority.
The German Jacobin communists reorganized as a secret paramilitary organization called the League of the Just. The organization, of course, contained a large number of German artisans, who were not steeped in the rationalist tradition of the French communist movement, so that the League of the Just remained impregnated with religious fundamentalism. There were not only atheists and rationalists and materialists but also Utopian Christian socialists such as Wilhelm Weitling, who wrote revolutionary propaganda couched in the language of Christian messianism. A self-taught tailor, Weitling wrote psalms and nursery rhymes such as "I want to be like Jesus who was also a communist, "for which Weitling was arrested for blasphemy. It was very powerful propaganda, for Weitling believed it himself. And it was effective in recruiting to communism backward German workers who had been raised as Lutherans and still believed in the Bible.
When Buonarroti died, his base was taken over by the young Auguste Blanqui. The leading cadres of the League of the Just participated in the Blanquist putsch of 1839, and as a result of the ensuing repression many of them were banished from France. So he remained in Paris, but others went to London and Switzerland. This exile tended to color very strongly the political groupings.
The Paris section of the League of the Just fell under the influence of the Cabet movement and, therefore, rejected the insurrectionary traditions of Blanquism in favor of goody-goody class collaborationism of the worst
kind. In Switzerland—which was kind of the Berkeley of Metternich's Europe-there were all sorts of odd communist sects, and Weitling degenerated into setting up study circles to preach the secret gospel about how Jesus Chris really wants you to be a communist Weitling genuinely believed communism was the Second Coming, but he was not a pacifist. He ran somewhat amok yet he had great authority. In 1843 Man declared that Weitling was the great representative of German worker communism.
The London branch of the-League of the Just was by far the most important. It was led by Karl Schapper, who has a fascinating history. While a student in 1834 Schapper was won to revolutionary democracy and soon thereaftei joined a small German revolutionary organization. Then, with about 20 01 30 other guys Schapper attempted to seize a police station in Frankfurt It didn't work. He was on the lam ii Switzerland, where he joined with the democratic-nationalist Mazzini, am with about 300 others they attempted to invade Italy. It didn't work. Got to Paris, joined the League of the Just allied with Blanqui, and this time, with a thousand men, attempted to overthrow the French state. It didn't work. He was on the lam again, and made his way to< Britain. Now, I would like to say that upon arriving in London he and 1500( guys attempted to overthrow Queen Victoria, but he changed his line Schapper was a genuinely heroic figure Engels writes that he and his partners had fights, and they took on 300 guys.
But in any case Schapper decided that his politics were not working very well. He was not an intellectual, but he was a thoughtful man, and he asked himself, "Why have all these move¬ments failed?" Obvious question. He created an organization called the German Workers Educational Society and arrived at a position which I would characterize as between Cabet and Chartism. Schapper concluded that in order for a revolution to succeed the revolutionaries had first to win over the masses. He in fact denied the struggle for revolution, arguing that once the communists had their democratic rights to organize and educate the masses, that would be adequate to bring about communism. Schapper thus wrote, "The German communists agree with English socialists in thinking that communism could be obtained by peaceful means and free discussion alone."
The London-based section of the League of the Just led by Schapper thus was influenced, on the one hand, by the Cabet movement and, on the other, by British Chartism. From the Cabet movement they derived their rejection of revolution, which Schapper tended to associate with putschism, that is, with the only historic experience which they had. Also, from the Cabet movement Schapper acquired an emphasis on propaganda and education— virtually the linear recruitment of the working masses, one by one, to communism through enlightenment. Indeed, his organization was called the German Workers Educational Society.
From the Chartist movement Schapper derived a strong rejection of class collaborationism, which characterized the Cabet movement in France. So his movement was very much the German Workers Educational Society, although they were certainly willing to associate with bourgeois radical intellectuals who had come over to communism—like Engels. Moreover, the German Workers Educational Society broadly embraced the traditions of French enlightenment and rejected Christianity. They were pacifists and propagandists, but proletarian pacifists and propagandists. In that sense Schapper and his followers were closer to Barney. They completely rejected barracks socialism, communalism and the equality of want.
Again and Once Again Factional Struggle
In 1844 Weiting, the overwhelmingly prominent political personality in German communism, was released from prison in Switzerland and went into exile in London. Weitling at once joined his old comrades now in the German Workers Educational Society. Well, they soon discovered that they were old comrades in the League of the Just but they were no longer comrades now. A factional struggle developed in 1845 pitting Weitling against Schapper. This faction fight involved only a very small group of individuals, but they were poli¬tical personalities who had not only enormous capacity but also great reputations. Interestingly enough, this factional struggle was recorded in writing, mainly because these people were very concerned with doctrine and ideas. And we in the Spartacist League owe thanks to comrade Vladimir Zelinski for translating from the German the discussion within the London branch of the League of the Just.
It is a very interesting discussion that without propaganda you get nothing:
It begins with Schapper asserting that everything must be based on reason. At that time there was among the workers a very strong sense that they were deprived of access to bourgeois culture. The workers’ educa¬tional organizations, such as the German Workers Educational Society, were not simply front groups to secure legal functioning. Rather, they provided the workers in the age before mass public education with a means to learn. (In fact, the origins of the massive German Social Democratic Party were a small educational society of workers who wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle, “Would you teach us what you know?" > Lassalle came, and mat's the beginning of the German Social Democracy.)
So this is Schapper:
"The reason for the failure of communism is lack of knowledge, lack of enlightenment. It was only the French Revolution which began to create a certain degree of enlightenment. Only through the struggle of opinion will communism develop firm roots."
But Weitling, the fundamentalist rabble-rouser, replies:
"Reason will play a pitiful role. The greatest deeds will result from the power of emotion. The crown of thorns of the martyrs wins more adherents than the moral needs of poets and orators."
In response Schapper emphasizes that without propaganda you get nothing:
"Communism could hitherto not be created because understanding was not sufficient. Our generation will no more realize communism than did the previous ones. Our activity is for the coming generation. These will carry through in practice what we have hitherto been able to propagate only by means of enlightened propaganda ... Let us build our guard against revolutions, where through them mankind is brought back again into servitude."
Weitling replies simply by praising revolution: "Revolutions come like a thunderstorm. No one can foretell their effects."
Now, with historical hindsight, we can discern that the Schapper tendency was more serious, even though Weitling aptly criticizes Schapper for relegating the revolutionary struggle to the distant future.
In 1845, therefore, the German communist movement had arrived at a Hobson's choice: either passive and pacifistic propagandist!! seeking to educate the entire working class, or revolutionary communist messianism, which did not even have the virtue of good military organization. Weitling never organized any unsuccessful putsches, because he was incapable of organizing anything.
In 1845, therefore, the German communist movement had arrived at a Hobson's choice: either passive and pacifistic propagandist!! seeking to educate the entire working class, or revolutionary communist messianism, which did not even have the virtue of good military organization. Weitling never organized any unsuccessful putsches, because he was incapable of organizing anything.
It is at this point that Marx enters the history of the communist movement. And—to sort of give the show away— Marx is important and became a leader because he found a way out of that dilemma, that false counterposition of propaganda and revolutionary action.
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