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 Five-Karl Marx Before 1848 ("Young Spartacus"-September 1976)
By Joseph Seymour
Past issues of Young Spartacus have featured the first four installments of "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." The first part of the series was devoted to the Great French Revolution and its insurrectionary continuity through the Jacobin Communists Babeuf and Buonarroti. The second part treated the Carbonari Conspiracy, the French Revolution of 1830 and Buonarroti, the Lyons silk weavers uprising and the Blanquist putsch of 1839. The next article analyzed British Chartism in detail, and the fourth part discussed the origins of the Communist League. Back issues may be obtained for 25 cents per issue. Send your check or money order to Spartacus Youth Publishing Company, Box 825, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
Most of you know that the "young Marx" had something to do with the Young Hegelians and with Hegel's philosophy. The relation of Marx to the Young Hegelians and Hegelian philosophy actually involves two very different questions, and only the second is difficult, obscure and interesting Marx's relation to the Young Hegelians', which was a literary/ideological/ political movement among the radical intelligentsia, is actually quite straight-forward and easy to comprehend.
The Young Hegelians
Hegel lived through the epoch of revolution and counter-revolution, and he was probably the only really great thinker to be profoundly influenced by both the French Revolution and also the Metternichian reaction. He attempted to mediate on an ideological level between the revolutionary Europe of 1789-1815 and the reactionary Europe thereafter. Politically, he was a liberal, or constitutional monarchist.
Therefore, one aspect of Hegel's thought was an attempt to mesh the traditionalist ideology of post-1815 absolutism with elements of the Enlightenment of the French Revolutionary epoch. This was obviously impossible. As a result, even to this day there are those who claim that Hegel really was an orthodox Lutheran Christian, and those who claim that he really was an atheist. His writings had sufficient ambiguity making him appear to be both at a certain level of abstraction. Once Hegel died—and could no longer say what he meant—it was obvious that these tensions and contradictions in*his philosophy would blow up among his followers. And the blow-up came on the religious front.
There was enough in Hegel to indicate that he did, not take Christianity as the literal, gospel truth, but rather regarded the story of Christ as symbolic and allegorical. In 1836 a young Hegelian, David Strauss, wrote The Life of Jesus, arguing that Christ had "never existed but rather was only a popular myth. Since Prussia had a quasi -state religion, this book caused a big furor. The Hegelian school blew up and Strauss initiated the "left" Hegelians-the terms "left," "center" and "right" referring to the attitude toward religious orthodoxy.
The further evolution of the "left," or Young Hegelians is quite logical. From the rationalist criticism of religious orthodoxy of David Strauss developed the outright atheism of Bruno Bauer: if God doesn't exist, it follows that nature and the material environment shape humanity. From atheism, then, springs the naturalistic humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach: In the l830's, those who believed that man makes society also believed that he could construct an ideal society. So the naturalistic humanism of the Young Hegelians led logically to communism, a step first
taken by Moses Hess.
Basically the Young Hegelians represented in Metternichian Germany what the Enlightenment philosophes represented in pre-1789 France, a similarity which they fully recognized. However, around 1840 communism was not simply an idea, but in France was a movement which had acquired a mass artisan, working-class base.
The Rheinische Zeitung
In 1840 the king of Prussia died, and his death created certain expectations of liberalization. However, it turned out that the new king was more reactionary than his father. In response the liberal big bourgeoisie, centered in the Rhineland (then the most economically advanced part of Germany), a-adopted a more aggressive oppositional posture. They looked for writers to agitate and propagandize against absolutism, and they found the Young Hegelians.
The liberal bourgeoisie with their Young Hegelian ideologues founded the Rheinisctie Zeitung in Cologne. It is important to realize that the Rheinische Zeitung was supported by very prominent bourgeois forces. One of its leading backers, Ludwig Camphausen, became head of the Prussian government during the revolution of 1848.
Karl Marx, who was a respected member of the Young Hegelian circle, enters history as a literary contributor, staff writer and finally editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. Thus, Marx's, first political experience was as a propagandist for the liberal big bourgeoisie in the period when it had made a short-lived left turn against absolutism. At that time Marx was by no means the most left wing of the Young Hegelians; in fact, he was rather right -of-center.
The most radical wing of the Young Hegelians was an anarcho-communist circle called "The Free," which included Bruno Bauer, the extreme libertarian Max Stirner, a young Russian exile named Mikhail Bakunin and' a callow youth named Friedrich Engels. Members of "The Free" kept smuggling communist propaganda into the Rheinische Zeitung, much to the dismay of its wealthy liberal backers.
Marx's first political fight was against these anarcho-communists, whom he purged from the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung. In one of his letters of the period Marx wrote:
"But I have allowed myself to throw out as many articles as the censor, for Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionizing the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and seasoned with a. little atheism and communism(which these gentlemen have never
studied)."
-letter to Arnold Huge, 30 November 1842
While Marx made the transition from liberal bourgeois democracy to communism the following year, this early faction fight reveals certain attitudes that would remain with him throughout his life. Marx was always contemptuous of petty-bourgeois radicalism, with' its desire to shock conventional opinion above all else. Conversely, Marx always took seriously the liberal big bourgeoisie whenever it opposed reaction; for example, his attitude toward Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party during the American Civil War.
Marx Becomes a Communist
In early 1843 the Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed, and Marx went into exile in Paris, where he encountered communism as a mass, artisan working-class movement. By late 1843 we know that Marx considered himself a communist and associated with the League of the Just, at that time under the influence of Cabet.
The period 1843-46 is now undoubtedly the most studied period of Marx's life. If you had fourteen lifetimes, you couldn't read all the works written about the young Marx. The older social-democratic and Stalinist traditions assume that when Marx became a communist in 1843, he was already in some sense a Marxist; that his refusal to join the League of the Just revealed that he was more advanced and had rejected its utopianism. I do not believe this proposition can be defended.
What kind of communist was Marx in 1843? This is a difficult question to answer for a number of reasons.
First, Marx himself didn't know. Even geniuses like Marx go" through transitional periods where they do not have a fully consistent outlook. A careful reading of his writings during this period produce different interpretations, perhaps because his early works are not internally consistent. In later life Marx didn't think it worthwhile to republish his earliest writings, because he considered them to have been largely self-clarification.
The early Marx rejected communal experiments and the notion of barracks communism which was prevalent at the time, promoted, for example, by Cabet and Weitling. Communism is not mechanical equality; it is not modelling society on the Prussian army. Communism is the full realization of individual potential based on the highest development of society. Marx adhered to this vision from the day he became a communist until his death. But again, he was not unique in rejecting primitive egalitarianism: Karl Schapper, Julian Harney and also Auguste Blanqui shared a similar vision of communist society.
The essential element of utopianism which Marx shared with contemporary communists in 1843-45 was the belief that the triumph of communism was based on the triumph of the communist idea. An objective reading of the early Marx shows a belief in the imminence of communism arising from its growing support among the masses. Marx did not reject violent revolution against the state. But he believed that with the mass acceptance of communism, such a revolution and the creation of a communist society would follow necessarily—easily and quickly.
Hegel and the Origins of Marxism
In 1844 one could not have been a follower of Marx; it wouldn't have meant anything. In 1846 one could, and there were "Marxists."- By 1846 Marx had developed a unique conception of history and derived from this a distinct revolutionary strategy for Germany.
To understand this, it is necessary to digress on the relation of Hegel to Marx. In developing what later came to be called historical or dialectical materialism, Marx in some ways went back to Hegel. He turned the weapons of Hegel against the naturalistic humanism of the Young Hegelians, whose greatest spokesman was Feuerbach.
Generally speaking, the world view of early nineteenth-century communism was derived from the Rousseauean concept of natural "rights. Marx incorporated Hegel's criticism of Rousseauean naturalism and of Enlightenment rationalism. The core of Enlightenment rationalism was belief in the sovereignty of the intellect and its capacity to master external reality. From this certitude derived a particular' and extreme form of political voluntarism—the belief that society could be made to conform to an ideal model. All tendencies of early nineteenth-century socialism were based on intellectual constructs appealing to natural rights, primitive pre-class society, scientific rationality or early Christianity.
In one sense Hegel's philosophy is an attack on the notion of the autonomy of thought, on the free-wheeling play of the intellect. He asserted that at any given time consciousness is shaped, limited and constrained by a long historical development. New ideas arise from the contradictions embodied in existing consciousness and, therefore, have a definite progression.
Marx accepted this conception and used it to attack the voluntarism of
contemporary communism. As Marx put it some years later:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under conditions directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." —The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852)
In the dispute over "the young Marx" versus "the old Marx," we support the mature, more Hegelian and less Feuerbachian Marx. However, both the pre-1914 Social Democratic and Stalinist traditions have transformed the Marxist dialectic into a crude, mechanical evolutionism associated with a two-stage theory of revolution. On the other hand, the New Left cult of the early Marx, & la 'Marcuse, is- a reversion to moralistic utopianism and the belief in the immediate realization of human liberation through petty-bourgeois intellectualism.
The new Marxist strategy was first sketched out in "The State of Germany" by Engels, published in early 1846 in the Chartist Northern Star:
"The political dominion of the middle classes is, therefore, of an essentially liberal appearance. They destroy all the old differences of several estates co-existing in a country, all arbitrary privileges and exemptions; they are obliged to make the elective principle the foundation of government—to recognize equality in principle, to free the press from the shackles of monarchical censorship...
"The working classes are necessarily the instruments in the hands of the middle classes, as long as the middle classes are themselves revolutionary or progressive.... But from that very day when the middle classes obtain full political power... from the day on which the middle classes cease to be progressive and revolutionary, and become stationary themselves, from that very day the working-class movement takes the lead and becomes the national movement." [emphasis in original]
The year 1846, then, is when Marxism comes into being as a distinct communist tendency. That year saw the creation of the first Marxist organization—the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels;/ the comprehensive exposition of the newly developed Marxist worldview in a polemic against Young Hegelian naturalistic humanism—The German Ideology; and the first statement of a new revolutionary strategy for German communism— "The State of Germany."
The Communist Correspondence Committee was a very small circle created to propagate the new Marxist doctrines, centrally but by no means exclusively among the German left. At one time or another, the Committee attempted to contact virtually every prominent socialist in Europe. This first Marxist organization was unsuccessful except in England, where Engels had long-standing ties to the left Chartist Julian Harney and through him to the Schapper wing of the League of the Just.
The Schapper group had not yet broken from its passive and pacifistic propagandism. However, Harney stood programmatically quite close to Marx and Engels. Harney had great respect for Schapper as a tested and heroic workers' leader, while remaining had not yet traversed the same path as Marx. Marx's belief that communism was the logically necessary outcome of naturalistic humanism comes through clearly in his letter to Feuerbach dated 11 August 1844. Marx says:
"In these writings you have provided— I don't know whether intentionally— a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down to earth, what is this but the concept of society'."
Marx's 1843-45 writings contained a defense of the general principles of communism against bourgeois criticism. They do not develop "or explicate a unique concept of communism. References to prominent socialists are either uncritical or laudatory. Thus, both Weitling and Proudhon are praised to the skies in 1843.
I will argue that between 1843 and late 1845 Marx had not yet broken with the Utopian aspects of contemporary communism. This statement requires further clarification, since Marx did have fundamental differences with some contemporary socialist schools. What we need is greater precision about the Utopian aspects of early communism—a term I much prefer to Utopian socialism, which implies a too-great doctrinal coherence.
Utopian socialism is sometimes identified with the rejection of class struggle in favor of a trans-class socialist movement. Some socialist leaders in the 1840's, notably Robert Owen and Etienne Cabet, were consciously class collaborationist and appealed to universal brotherhood.
In contrast, upon embracing communism Marx also adopted a working-class orientation. However, he certainly was not unique in this. There was the workerist messianism of Weitling; and Julian Harney of the left Chartists and Karl Schapper of the league of the Just had been leading working-class struggles long before Marx came on the scene. Marx inherited his proletarian orientation. He did not develop it.
Toward the Leadership of German Communism
From his newly developed theory of history, Marx derived a unique revolutionary strategy for German communism. At that time the central tradition in German society was between the bourgeoisie and the 11 underdeveloped proletariat, her, it was between the economic-ascendant bourgeoisie and the sluggish state bureaucracy, which depended on the landed nobility, ''or the bourgeoisie to acquire governmental power required a democratic revolution like the French Revolution of 1789-93, but more radical, given the advanced state of European society. Such a revolution was a necessary precondition for the economic and political ascendancy of the proletariat. Marx maintained that communists should not deny, ignore or abstain from the coming bourgeois-democratic revolution, but participate in it supporting its most radical tendencies.
They somewhat mistrustful of Marx and Engels as inexperienced, literary intellectuals, however persuasive their ideas might be. Thus, Harney refused to affiliate with the Communist Correspondence Committee until Schapper had been won over.
In early 1846, the workerist, religious messianic Wilhelm Weitling, having been factionally defeated by Schapper in London, crossed the Channel to Brussels. There he was smashed by Marx in a famous confrontation where Marx shouted at the veteran workers' leader and martyr, "Ignorance never did anybody any good." Common battles against the messianic, revolutionary phrase-mongerer Weitling drew Schapper closer to Marx.
In late 1846, Engels went on a recruiting mission to Paris, where he was unsuccessful, but managed to console himself through physical pleasure. The Paris groupings of the League of the Just were Cabetian pacifists, and Engels made little headway among them.
When politics wasn't going so well, Engels still knew how to enjoy life. He wrote to Marx that he had become acquainted with "several cute grisettes and much pleasure," and invited Marx to join him in Paris. Now you know why Mrs. Marx never liked Engels that much.
What was the new doctrine which the Brussels-based Communist Correspondence Committee was propagating throughout Europe? In a report from Paris to the Brussels center (23 October 1846) Engels summarizes the pre-1848 Marxist line:
"So I therefore defined the object of the Communists in this way: 1) to achieve the interests of the proletariat in opposition to those of the bourgeoisie; 2) to do this through the abolition of private property and its replacement with a community of goods; and 3) to recognize no means for carrying out these objects other than a democratic revolution by force.”
The first two points were not particularly controversial and in no sense uniquely Marxist. It was the third point that really defined the Marxist tendency. Many contemporary socialists—for example, Schapper and Louis Blanc in France—considered a democratic government a necessary precondition for the triumph of communism, but they rejected revolution. The prominent advocates of violent revolution, like Weitling and the infinitely superior Auguste Blanqui, looked to a minority dictatorship of the communist party. Marxism was unique in espousing a democratic government—a sovereign parliament based on universal suffrage and achieved through a popular revolution.
In 1847 the bourgeois liberal oppositions in both Germany and France became more aggressive. The King of Prussia got into financial trouble and had to call the Assembly to raise taxes. Everybody's mind leapt back to the •calling of the Estates General in France in 1789. Metternich in Vienna wrote to the Prussian monarch advising him to dismiss the Assembly and collect the needed taxes willy-nilly. He followed Metternich's advice and as a result drove the liberals into an anti-monarchical fury. In France one also had the beginning of a bourgeois liberal oppositional campaign, which eventually led to the toppling of Louis Phillipe. So Marx's strategy of an alliance with the bourgeois liberal opposition appeared more realistic and, therefore, more attractive to German communists.
The Communist League and Manifesto
During 1847 the Schapper group, prodded by Harney, came over to Marx. In early 1847 the London-based League of the Just sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Marx.
Moll said the League was in general agreement with the Marxist position, having at most secondary differences. He invited Marx to join the League and to fight for his complete program. Marx agreed. It was through this regroupment that Marx became a leader of the hegemonic organization of German communists.
That same year witnessed the transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League and its acceptance of Marxist principles. Marx maintained that between the victory of a democratic revolution in Germany and the creation of a communist society on a European scale, there must be a transitional period. In the beginning the German proletariat would be neither politically nor economically dominant. Consequently, the Communist League must ally itself with the bourgeois-liberal opposition, while maintaining its own organization—as public as real security precautions permitted—and its own anti-bourgeois propaganda and agitation.
The transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League was symbolized by a change in its main slogan, "All Men Are Brothers." Marx objected to this slogan on the grounds that there were many men whose brother he did not wish to be ... like Metternich. So the slogan of the Communist League was, "Proletarians of All Lands, Unite." Incidentally, Marx did not author this slogan; we don't know who did.
In terms of strategic perspectives, Marx divided Europe into three parts and formulated radically different revolutionary perspectives for each. In Britain, and only in Britain, did Marx contend that a proletarian revolution was immediately possible and that a democratic government would lead directly to the rule of the workers party. Only Britain had a mass, working-class party: the Chartists.
In Germany and France, where the majority of the population were peasants, there would be a bourgeois-democratic revolution. A radical democratic party might come to power, but
not the communists.
Then there was the Russian Empire, where a bourgeois-democratic revolution was not possible; tsarist Russia could only be a counter-revolutionary force. A victorious democratic revolution in France and Germany would require a revolutionary war against the Empire of the Tsar. This was the Marxist strategic schema on the eve of 1848.
Pre-1848 Marxism insisted that the realization of communism had to pass through bourgeois-democratic rule. However, there were a number of different reasons given for this assertion, which implied different periodicities in the transition to proletarian class rule. One argument was that bourgeois-democratic freedoms were absolutely necessary to organize a mass workers party. In Britain where such freedoms existed, there was a mass workers party, the Chartists. In the Germany of Metternich1 s Holy Alliance, the workers were passive and atomized, while the Communist League was small and largely in exile.
Another argument focused on the subjective development of the proletariat. As long as the bourgeoisie was' out of power, in opposition to monarchical absolutism, the proletariat would have illusions in trans-class, popular democratic rule. Only when faced with bourgeois political rule would the workers in the mass recognize the fundamentally hostile class antagonism.
Marx and Engels also indicated that they considered Germany and even France too economically backward to establish proletarian rule. This notion implies a relatively long transitional period between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletariat's accession to power.
The Marxist strategic s c h e m a is most clearly stated in Engels' second draft for the Communist Manifesto written in October 1847 and later published under the title, "Principles of Communism." Composed in the form of a revolutionary catechism, Engels' draft makes explicit concepts which are only implicit in the Manifesto, and is therefore important in -understanding the strategic concepts underlying the latter.
Referring to the course of the revolution, Engels -writes:
"In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat. Directly in England, where the proletariat already constitutes the majority of the people. Indirectly in France and in Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians but also of small peasants and urban petty bourgeois, who are only now being proletarianized and in all their political interests are becoming more and more dependent on the proletariat and therefore soon will have to conform to the demands of the proletariat. This will perhaps involve a second fight, but one
that can only end in the victory of the proletariat." \emphasis in original]
The Revolutions of 1848 ended in the greatest defeat for the proletariat and socialist movement in the nineteenth century. The defeated revolutions showed that the strategic conceptions expressed in the Communist Manifesto were, in a number of fundamental ways, wrong.
First, the German liberal bourgeoisie turned out to be far more cowardly than the English, much less the French. They capitulated to Prussian absolutism with hardly a fight.
Second, the French peasantry turned out to be far more reactionary than expected. Universal suffrage in France resulted in a reactionary bourgeois regime which slaughtered the vanguard of the Paris proletariat. After this experience, Marx became more sympathetic to Blanqui's position that a victorious revolutionary Parisian proletariat should not give the peasants the vote until they had been "reeducated."
And third, the 1850's showed that the bourgeois revolution in an economic and social sense could proceed under a bonapartist government, namely, Louis Napoleon in France and Bismarck in Germany. The unification of Germany did not in fact require the overthrow of absolutism.
It is an indication of the real strength of Marxism that the Communist Manifesto, despite specific flawed strategic conceptions, retained and retains to this day its validity. Marx and Engels were not the only, or even the most prominent communists to fight in the revolutions of 1848. However, they were among the very few "red 48ers" to remain faithful to the communist cause after this truly epochal defeat. As such, Marx and Engels were able to transmit their revolutionary experience and their wisdom to a new proletarian generation when the pall of reaction began to lift in the early 1860's.
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