*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And The Struggle To Defend Its Class-War Prisoners- In Honor Of The 140th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponent, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!
***********
Paris Commune

International Working mens Association 1872

Resolutions of the Meeting held to celebrate the Anniversary of the Paris Commune

Source: MECW, Volume 23, p. 128;
Written: by Marx between March 13 and 18, 1872;
First published: in La Liberté, March 24, 1872 and in The International Herald, March 30, 1872;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

I
“That this meeting assembled to celebrate the anniversary of the 18th March last, declares, that it looks upon the glorious movement inaugurated upon the 18th March, 1871, as the dawn of the great social revolution which will for ever free the human race from class rule.”

II
“That the incapacity and the crimes of the middle classes, extended all over Europe by their hatred against the working classes, have doomed old society no matter under what form of government-Monarchical or Republican.”

III
“That the crusade of all governments against the International, and the terror of the murderers of Versailles as well as of their Prussian conquerors, attest the hollowness of their successes, and the presence of. the threatening army of the proletariat of the whole world gathering in the rear of its heroic vanguard crushed by the combined forces of Thiers and William of Prussia.”

*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And Its Class-War Prisoners- Second Address

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work more ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponents, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Paris Communards!

Click on the title to link to the Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Internet Archive's copy of Marx's 1871 defense of the Paris Commune, "The Civil War In France".

This is a repost of a January 2009 entry also honoring the Paris Communards.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

*****

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

Markin comment:

As Karl Marx noted in the above linked pamphlet, although premature, perhaps, and although they seemingly made every mistake in the revolutionary catechism the Paris Commune and the Communards that defended it represented that first necessary manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a state needed on that road to our goal – the future communist, classless society. All Honor To The Memory Of The Communards!

*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And Defense Of Its Class-War Prisoners-Passports

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work more ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponents, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!

*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And Defense Of Its Class-War Prisoners-Third Address

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work more ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponents, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!

*From The Karl Marx- Friedrich Internet Archives- In Defense Of The Paris Commune And Its Class-War Prisoners- First Address

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Archive online copy of the material mentioned in the title on the defense of the Paris Commune and its class-war prisoners.

Markin comment:

Readers of this space are, by now, familiar with my interest in the defense of class-war prisoners and, perhaps, know that I express that interest through support to the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee (PDC). One of the reasons for that support of the PDC is its commitment to the non-sectarian defense of all class-war prisoners, a tradition in which it follows the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) principle expressed in the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That principle also animated the early James P. Cannon-led work of the International Labor Defense, the legal defense arm of the American Communist Party and of the early legal defense work of the Trotskyist American Socialist Workers Party.

Perhaps not as well known, although it would seem axiomatic to their theories, is the even earlier class-war prisoner defense work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as an expression of their concept expressed in the slogan “workers of the world unite.” In no place was this work ardently pursued that in their defense against all-comers of the Paris Commune during its short, historic existence and later, after it was crushed of its refugees, exiles, prisoners and their families. Much of this work was done early on through the Marx-created and led First International, and after its demise in the wake of that defeat through other Marx-influenced national organizations. I am posting some material here to provide some examples of their efforts.

The important point here is that, to my knowledge, there was, at most, only one proclaimed Marxist in the leadership of the Commune, and not much more adherence among the plebeians and artisans who heroically defended the Commune. So, mostly, those being defended by Marx and Engels were leftist political opponent, in some cases, severe political opponents. That approach is what has animated my own legal defense work and, hopefully, yours. Here, by the way, is another slogan to end this comment, fittingly I think-All Honor To The Paris Communards! Long Live The Memory Of The Paris Commune!

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

*********

The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Click on title to link to the Karl Marx Internet Archive's copy of "The Communist Manifesto".

The publication of the Communist League's Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in 1848, a document that has played a central role in world history since then, if not always happily. On March 12, 2007 I posted (reposted on March 12, 2008)a review of this document that I wrote in 2006 and proudly stand by today. Additionally, here I post Leon Trotsky’s article on the 90th Anniversary of the Manifesto in 1938 from the Trotsky Internet Archive. What unites the two pieces is the thought that we both share that the Manifesto read for Trotsky and reads for me today like it could have been written about conditions in either of these periods. Forward.

NINETY YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-Preface to Communist Manifesto by Leon Trotsky

Written: October 30,1937

First Published: In Afrikaans in South Africa for the first edition of the The Communist Manifesto in that language. First published in English the February 1938 edition The New International, New York; This version from Fourth International, New York, Volume IV, 10, October 1948, Pages 28-31;

Translated: Fourth International

Transcription/HTML Markup: David Waiters

Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the
GNU Free Documentation License

It is hard to believe that the centennial of the Manifesto of the Communist Party is only ten years away! This pamphlet, displaying greater genius than any other in world literature, astounds us even today by its freshness. Its most important sections appear to have been written yesterday. Assuredly, the young authors (Marx was twenty-nine, Engels twenty-seven) were able to look further into the future than anyone before them, and perhaps than anyone since them.

As early as their joint preface to the edition of 1872, Marx and Engels declared that despite the fact that certain secondary passages in the Manifesto were antiquated, they felt that they no longer had any right to alter the original text inasmuch as the Manifesto had already become a historical document, during the intervening period of twenty-five years. Sixty-five additional years have elapsed since that time. Isolated passages in the Manifesto have receded still further into the past. We shall try to establish succinctly in this preface both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.

1. The materialist conception of history, discovered by Marx only a short while before and applied with consummate skill in the Manifesto, has completely withstood the test of events and the blows of hostile criticism. It constitutes today one of the most precious instruments of human thought. All other interpretations of the historical process have lost all scientific meaning. We can state with certainty that it is impossible in our time to be not only a revolutionary militant but even a literate observer in politics without assimilating the materialist interpretation of history.

2. The first chapter of the Manifesto opens with the following Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." This postulate, the most important conclusion drawn from the materialist interpretation of history, immediately became an issue in the class struggle. Especially venomous attacks were directed by reactionary hypocrites, liberal doctrinaires, and idealistic democrats against the theory which substituted the struggle of material interests for "common welfare," "national unity/' and "eternal moral truths" as the driving force of history. They were later joined by recruits from the ranks of the labor movement itself, by the so-called revisionists, i.e., the proponents of reviewing ("revising") Marxism in the spirit of class collaboration and class conciliation. Finally, hi our own time, the same path has been followed in practice by the contemptible epigones of the Communist International (the "Stalinists"): the policy of the so-called People's Front flows wholly from the denial of the laws of the class struggle. Meanwhile, it is precisely the epoch of imperialism, bringing all social contradictions to the point of highest tension, which gives to the Communist Manifesto its supreme theoretical triumph.

3. The anatomy of capitalism, as a specific stage in the economic development of society, was given by Marx in its finished form in Capital (1867). But even in the Communist Manifesto the main lines of the future analysis are firmly sketched: the payment for labor power as equivalent to the cost of its reproduction; the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists; competition as the basic law of social relations; the ruination of intermediate classes, i.e., the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; the concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-diminishing number of property owners, at the one pole, and the numerical growth of the proletariat, at the other; the preparation of the material and political
preconditions for the socialist regime.

4. The proposition in the Manifesto concerning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, had been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, Social Democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders came to the front against the so-called "theory of impoverishment." They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat, or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely, U.S. capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.

5. As against the Manifesto, which depicted commercial and industrial crises as a series of ever more extensive catastrophes, the revisionists vowed that the national and international development of trusts would assure control over the market, and lead gradually to the abolition of crises. The close of the last century and the beginning of the present one were in reality marked by a development of capitalism so tempestuous as to make crises seem only "accidental" stoppages. But this epoch has gone beyond return. In the last analysis, truth proved to be on Marx's side in this question as well,

6. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." This succinct formula, which the leaders of the Social Democracy looked upon as a journalistic paradox, contains in fact the only scientific theory of the state. The democracy fashioned by the bourgeoisie is not, as both Bernstein and Kautsky thought, an empty sack which one can undisturbedly fill with any kind of class content. Bourgeois democracy can serve only the bourgeoisie. A government of the "People's Front," whether headed by Blum or Chautemps, Caballero or Negrin, is only "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Whenever this "committee" manages affairs poorly, the bourgeoisie dismisses it with a boot.

7. "Every class struggle is a political struggle." "The organization of the proletariat as a class [is ] consequently its organization into a political party." Trade unionists, on the one hand, and anarcho-syndicalists, on the other, have long shied away—and even now try to shy away—from the understanding of these historical laws. "Pure" trade unionism has now been dealt a crushing blow in its chief refuge: the United States. Anarcho-syndicalism has suffered an irreparable defeat in its last stronghold—Spain. Here too the Manifesto proved correct,

8. The proletariat cannot conquer power within the legal framework established by the bourgeoisie. "Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Reformism sought to explain this postulate of the Manifesto on the grounds of the immaturity of the movement at that time, and the inadequate development of democracy. The fate of Italian, German, and a great number of other "democracies" proves that "immaturity" is the distinguishing trait of the ideas of the reformists themselves.

9. For the socialist transformation of society, the working class must concentrate in its hands such power as can smash each and every political obstacle barring the road to the new system. "The proletariat organized as the ruling class"—this is the dictatorship. At the same time it is the only true proletarian democracy. Its scope and depth depend upon concrete historical conditions. The greater the number of states that take the path of the socialist revolution, the freer and more flexible forms will the dictatorship assume, the broader and more deepgoing will be workers' democracy,

10. The international development of capitalism has predetermined the international character of the proletarian revolution. "United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The subsequent development of capitalism has so closely knit all sections of our planet, both "civilized" and "uncivilized," that the problem of the socialist revolution has completely and decisively assumed a world character. The Soviet bureaucracy attempted to liquidate the Manifesto with respect to this fundamental question. The Bonapartist degeneration of the Soviet state is an overwhelming illustration of the falseness of the theory of socialism in one country.

11. "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character." In other words: the state withers away. Society remains, freed from the straitjacket. This is nothing else but socialism. The converse theorem: the monstrous growth of state coercion in the USSR is eloquent testimony that society is moving away from socialism.

12. "The workingmen have no fatherland." These words of the Manifesto have more than once been evaluated by philistines as an agitational quip. As a matter of fact they provided the proletariat with the sole conceivable directive in the question of the capitalist "fatherland." The violation of this directive by the Second International brought about not only four years of devastation in Europe, but the present stagnation of world culture. In view of the impending new war, for which the betrayal of the Third International has paved the way, the Manifesto remains even now the most reliable counselor on the question of the capitalist "fatherland,"
Thus, we see that the joint and rather brief production of two Young authors continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto1? But this does not imply that after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol-worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself. We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances.

1. Marx taught that no social system departs from the arena of history before exhausting its creative potentialities. The Manifesto excoriates capitalism for retarding the development of the productive forces. During that period, however, as well as in the following decades, this retardation was only relative in nature. Had it been possible in the second half of the nineteenth century to organize economy on socialist beginnings, its tempos of growth would have been immeasurably greater. But this theoretically irrefutable postulate does not invalidate the fact that the productive forces kept expanding on a world scale right up to the world war. Only in the last twenty years, despite the most modern conquests of science and technology, has the epoch of out-and-out stagnation and even decline of world economy begun. Mankind is beginning to expend its accumulated capital, while the next war threatens to destroy the very foundations of civilization for many years to come. The authors of the Manifesto thought that capitalism would be scrapped long prior to the time when from a relatively reactionary regime it would turn into an absolutely reactionary regime. This transformation took final shape only before the eyes of the present generation, and changed our epoch into the epoch of wars, revolutions, and fascism.

2. The error of Marx and Engels in regard to the historical dates flowed, on the one hand, from an underestimation of future possibilities latent in capitalism, and, on the other, an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat. The revolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution as the Manifesto had calculated, but opened up to Germany the possibility of a vast future capitalist ascension. The Paris Commune proved that the proletariat, without having a tempered revolutionary party at its head, cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that ensued brought about not the education of the revolutionary vanguard, but rather the bourgeois degeneration of the labor aristocracy, which became in turn the chief brake on the proletarian revolution, In the nature of things, the authors of the Manifesto could not possibly have foreseen this "dialectic."

3. For the Manifesto, capitalism was—the kingdom of free competition. While referring to the growing concentration of capital, the Manifesto did not draw the necessary conclusion in regard to monopoly, which has become the dominant capitalist form in our epoch and the most important precondition for socialist economy. Only afterwards, in Capital, did Marx establish the tendency toward the transformation of free competition into monopoly. It was Lenin who gave a scientific characterization of monopoly capitalism in his Imperialism.

4. Basing themselves on the example of "industrial revolution" in England, the authors of the Manifesto pictured far too unilaterally the process of liquidation of the intermediate classes, as a wholesale proletarianization of crafts, petty trades, and peasantry. In point of fact, the elemental forces of competition have far from completed this simultaneously progressive and barbarous work. Capitalism has ruined the petty bourgeoisie at a much faster rate than it has proletarianized it. Furthermore, the bourgeois state has long directed its conscious policy toward the artificial maintenance of petty-bourgeois strata. At the opposite pole, the growth of technology and the rationalization of largescale industry engenders chronic unemployment and obstructs the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie. Concurrently, the development of capitalism has accelerated in the extreme the growth of legions of technicians, administrators, commercial employees, in short, the so-called "new middle class." In consequence, the intermediate classes, to whose disappearance the Manifesto so categorically refers, comprise even in a country as highly industrialized as Germany about half of the population. However, the artificial preservation of antiquated petty-bourgeois strata in no way mitigates the social contradictions, but, on the contrary, invests them with a special malignancy, and together with the permanent army of the unemployed constitutes the most malevolent expression of the decay of capitalism.

5. Calculated for a revolutionary epoch the Manifesto contains (end of Chapter II) ten demands, corresponding to the period of direct transition from capitalism to socialism. In their preface of 1872, Marx and Engels declared these demands to be in part antiquated, and, in any case, only of secondary importance. The reformists seized upon this evaluation to interpret it in the sense that transitional revolutionary demands had forever ceded their place to the Social Democratic "minimum program," which, as is well known, does not transcend the limits of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, the authors of the Manifesto indicated quite precisely the main correction of their transitional program, namely, 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." In other words, the correction was directed against the fetishism of bourgeois democracy. Marx later counterposed to the capitalist state, the state of the type of the Commune. This "type" subsequently assumed the much more graphic shape of Soviets. There cannot be a revolutionary program today without Soviets and without workers' control. As for the rest, the ten demands of the Manifesto, which appeared "archaic" in an epoch of peaceful parliamentary activity, have today regained completelytheir true significance. The Social Democratic "minimum program," on the other hand, has become hopelessly antiquated.

6. Basing its expectation that "the German bourgeois revolution ... will be but a prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution," the Manifesto cites the much more advanced conditions of European civilization as compared with what existed in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth century, and the far greater development of the proletariat. The error in this prognosis was not only in the date. The revolution of 1848 revealed within a few months that precisely under more advanced conditions, none of the bourgeois classes is capable of bringing the revolution to its termination: the big and middle bourgeoisie is far too closely linked with the landowners, and fettered by the fear of the masses; the petty bourgeoisie is far too divided and in its top leadership far too dependent on the big bourgeoisie. As evidenced by the entire subsequent course of development in Europe and Asia, the bourgeois revolution, taken by itself, can no more in general be consummated. A complete purge of feudal rubbish from society is conceivable only on the condition that the proletariat, freed from the influence of bourgeois parties, can take its stand at the head of the peasantry and establish its revolutionary dictatorship. By this token, the bourgeois revolution becomes interlaced with the first stage of the socialist revolution, subsequently to dissolve in the latter, The national revolution therewith becomes a link of the world revolution. The transformation of the economic foundation and of all social relations assumes a permanent (uninterrupted) character.

For revolutionary parties in backward countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, $ clear understanding of the organic connection between the democratic revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat—and thereby, the international socialist revolution—is a life-and-death question.

7. While depicting how capitalism draws into its vortex backward and barbarous countries, the Manifesto contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semicolonial countries for independence. To the extent mat Marx and Engels considered the social revolution "in the leading civilized countries at least," to be a matter of the next few years, the colonial question was resolved automatically for them, not in consequence of an independent movement of oppressed nationalities but in consequence of the victory of the proletariat in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The questions of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semicolonial countries are therefore not touched upon at all by the Manifesto. Yet these questions demand an independent solution. For example, it is quite self-evident that while the "national fatherland" has become the most baneful historical brake in advanced capitalist countries, it still remains a relatively progressive factor in backward countries compelled to struggle for an independent existence.
"The Communists," declares the Manifesto, "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things." The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin.

8. The most antiquated section of the Manifesto—with respect not to method but to material—is the criticism of "socialist" literature for the first part of the nineteenth century (Chapter III) and the definition of the position of the Communists in relation to various opposition parties (Chapter IV). The movements and parties listed in the Manifesto were so drastically swept away either by the revolution of 1848 or by the ensuing counterrevolution that one must look up even their names in a historical dictionary. However, in this section, too, the Manifesto is perhaps closer to us now than it was to the previous generation. In the epoch of the flowering of the Second International, when Marxism seemed to exert an undivided sway, the ideas of pre-Marxist socialism could have been considered as having receded decisively into the past. Things are otherwise today. The decomposition of the Social Democracy and the Communist International at every step engenders monstrous ideological relapses. Senile thought seems to have become infantile. In search of all-saving formulas the prophets in the epoch of decline discover anew doctrines long since buried by scientific socialism.

As touches the question of opposition parties, it is in this domain that the elapsed decades have introduced the most deepgoing changes, not only in the sense that the old parties have long been brushed aside by new ones, but also in the sense that the very character of parties and their mutual relations have radically changed in the conditions of the imperialist epoch. The Manifesto must therefore be amplified with the most important documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the essential literature of Bolshevism, and the decisions of the conferences of the Fourth International.

We have already remarked above that according to Marx no social order departs from the scene without first exhausting the potentialities latent in it. However, even an antiquated social order does not cede its place to a new order without resistance. A change in social regimes presupposes the harshest form of the class struggle, i.e., revolution, If the proletariat, for one reason or another, proves incapable of overthrowing with an audacious blow the outlived bourgeois order, then finance capital in the struggle to maintain its unstable rule can do nothing but turn the petty bourgeoisie ruined and demoralized by it into the pogrom army of fascism. The bourgeois degeneration of the Social Democracy and the fascist degeneration of the petty bourgeoisie are interlinked as cause and effect.

At the present time, the Third International far more wantonly than the Second performs in all countries the work of deceiving and demoralizing the toilers. By massacring the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat, the unbridled hirelings of Moscow not only pave the way for fascism but execute a goodly share of its labors. The protracted crisis of the international revolution, which is turning more and more into a crisis of human culture, is reducible in its essentials to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

As the heir to the great tradition, of which the Manifesto of the Communist Party forms the most precious link, the Fourth International is educating new cadres for the solution of old tasks. Theory is generalized reality. In an honest attitude to revolutionary theory is expressed the impassioned urge to reconstruct the social reality. That in the southern part of the Dark Continent our cothinkers were the first to translate the Manifesto into the Afrikaans language is another graphic illustration of the fact that Marxist thought lives today only under the banner of the Fourth International. To it belongs the future. When the centennial of the Communist Manifesto is celebrated, the Fourth International will have become the decisive revolutionary force on our planet.

Anarchism vs. the revolutionary fight for state power -From The Pen Of Friedrich Engels

Militant

Vol.64/No.45 November 27, 2000


Anarchism vs. the revolutionary fight for state power


Printed below are excerpts from the writings of Frederick Engels on anarchism, a petty-bourgeois current against which Engels and Karl Marx, founders of the modern communist movement, waged a political struggle within the working--class movement in the 1860s and 1870s.

The main anarchist grouping at the time was headed by Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin. They preached that the state, not capitalism, was the problem facing working people. Workers should abstain from political activity and instead declare a general strike to wait for the old regime to collapse. The Bakuninists postured as "anti-authoritarian" while in reality "constitut[ing] themselves as a secret society with a hierarchical organization, and under . . . [an] absolutely dictatorial leadership" directed by Bakunin himself, Engels explained.

The first and the third items reprinted below can be found in Marx and Engels’s Selected Works, volume 2, and the second piece in their Selected Correspondence, both published by Progress Publishers.

BY FREDERICK ENGELS
("Apropos of Working-Class Political Action," a reporter’s record of a speech delivered on Sept. 21, 1871, at the London conference of the International Workingmen’s Association.)

Complete abstention from political action is impossible. The abstentionist press participates in politics every day. It is only a question of how one does it and of what politics one engages in. For the rest, to us abstention is impossible. The working-class party functions as a political party in most countries, by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention. Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals. To preach abstention to them is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics. The morning after the Paris Commune, which has made proletarian political action an order of the day, abstention is entirely out of the question.

We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics! The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.

The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press--those are our weapons. Are we to sit back and abstain while somebody tries to rob us of them? It is said that a political act on our part implies that we accept the existing state of affairs. On the contrary, so long as this state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognize the prevailing order.


(From a letter to T. Cuno in Milan, Italy, Jan. 24, 1872.)

Bakunin has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of Proudhonism and communism. The chief point concerning the former is that it does not regard capital i.e., the class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers which has arisen through social development, but the state as the main evil to be abolished.

While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers are of the same opinion as we i.e., that state power is nothing more than the organisation which the ruling classes--landowners and capitalists--have provided for themselves in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital, the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is precisely the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.

But since for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can keep the state--that is, any state, whether it be a republic, a monarchy, or anything else--alive. Hence complete abstention from all politics. To commit a political act, especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle. The thing to do is to carry on propaganda, heap abuse upon the state, organize and when all the workers, hence the majority, are won over, all the authorities are to be deposed, the state abolished and replaced with the organization of the International. This great act with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.

All this sounds extremely radical and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes; that is why the Bakuninist theory has speedily found favor also in Italy and Spain among young lawyers, doctors, and other doctrinaires. But the mass of the workers will never allow itself to be persuaded that the public affairs of their countries are not also their own affairs; they are naturally politically-minded and whoever tries to make them believe that they should leave politics alone will in the end be dropped by them. To preach to the workers that they should in all circumstances abstain from politics is to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans.


(From "On Authority," an article published in December 1873.)

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon--authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune(1874)

Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
****************
Works of Frederick Engels 1874

The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune


First published: in Der Volksstaat, No.73, 26 June 1874;
Translated: Ernest Untermann for International Socialist Review, Volume IX, No. 2, August 1908;
Transcribed: for marxists@marx.org, May 2002.


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AFTER THE FAILURE of every revolution or counter revolution, a feverish activity develops among the fugitives, who have escaped to foreign countries. The parties of different shades form groups, accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, charge one another with treason and every conceivable sin.

At the same time they remain in close touch with the home country, organise, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that the trouble will start afresh within twenty-four hours, that victory is certain, and distribute the various government offices beforehand on the strength of this anticipation.

Of course, disappointment follows disappointment, and since this is not attributed to the inevitable historical conditions, which they refuse to understand, but rather to accidental mistakes of individuals, the mutual accusations multiply, and the whole business winds up with a grand row. This is the history of all groups of fugitives from the royalist emigrants of 1792 until the present day. Those fugitives, who have any sense and understanding, retire from the fruitless squabble as soon as they can do so with propriety and devote themselves to better things.

The French emigrants after the Commune did not escape this disagreeable fate.

Owing to the European campaign of slander, which attacked everybody without distinction, and being compelled particularly in London, where they had a common center in the General Council of the International Working Men's Association, for the time being, to suppress their internal troubles before the world, they had not been able, during the last two years, to conceal the signs of advancing disintegration. The open fight broke out everywhere. In Switzerland a part of them joined the Bakounists, mainly under the influence of Malon, who was himself one of the founders of the secret alliance. Then the socalled Blanquists in London withdrew from the International and formed a group of their own under the title of "The Revolutionary Commune". Outside of them numerous other groups arose later, which continue in a state of ceaseless transformation and modulation and have not put out anything essential in the way of manifestos. But the Blanquists are just making their program known to the world by a proclamation to the "Communeux".

These Blanquists are not called by this name, because they are a group founded by Blanqui. Only a few of the thirty-three signers of this program have ever spoken personally to Blanqui. They rather wish to express the fact that they intend to be active in his spirit and according to his traditions.

Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionist. He is a socialist only through sentiment, through his sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor any definite practical suggestions for social remedies. In his political activity he was mainly a "man of action", believing that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution. Of course, he could organize such a group under Louis Phillippe's reign only as a secret society. Then the thing, which generally happens in the case of conspiracies, naturally took place. His men, tired of beings held off all the time by the empty promises that the outbreak should soon begin, finally lost all patience, became rebellious, and only the alternative remained of either letting the conspiracy fall to pieces or of breaking loose without any apparent provocation. They made a revolution on May 12th, 1839, and were promptly squelched. By the way, this Blanquist conspiracy was the only one, in which the police could never get a foothold. The blow fell out of a clear sky.

From Blanqui's assumption, that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves previously organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals.

We see, then, that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the preceding generation.

These conceptions of the march of revolutionary events have long become obsolete, at least for the German worker's party, and will not find much sympathy in France, except among the less mature or the more impatient laborers. We shall also note, that they are placed under certain restrictions in the present program. Nevertheless our London Blanquists agree with the principle, that revolutions do not make themselves, but are made; that they are made by a relatively small minority and after a previously conceived plan; and finally, that they may be made at ally time, and that "soon".

It is a matter of course that such principles will deliver a man hopelessly into the hands of all the self-deceptions of a fugitive's life and drive him from one folly into another. He wants above all to play the role of Blanqui, "the man of action". But little can be accomplished by mere good will. Not every one has the revolutionary instinct and quick decision of Blanqui. Hamlet may talk ever so much of energy, he will still remain Hamlet. And if our thirty-three men of action cannot find anything at all to do upon what they call the field of action, then these thirty-three Brutuses come into a more comical than tragic conflict with themselves. The tragic of their situation is by no means increased by the dark men which they assume, as though they were so many slayers of tyrants with stilettos in their bosoms, which they are not.

What can they do? They prepare the next "outbreak" by drawing up lists of proscription for the future, in order that the line of men, who took part in the Commune, may be purified. For this reason they are called "The Pure" by the other fugitives. Whether they themselves assume this title, I cannot say. It would fit some of them rather badly. Their meetings are secret, and their resolutions are supposed to he kept secret, although this does not prevent the whole French quarter from ringing with them next morning. And as always happens to men of action that have nothing to do, they became involved first in a personal, then in a literary quarrel with a foe worthy of themselves, one of the most doubtful of the minor Parisian journalists, a certain Vermersch, who published during the Commune the "Pére Duchene", a miserable caricature of the paper published by Hébert in 1793. This noble creature replies to their moral indignation, by calling all of them thieves or accomplices of thieves in some leaflet, and smothering them with a flood of billingsgate that smells of the dungheap. Every word is an excrement. And is with such opponents that our thirty-three Brutuses wrestle before the public!

If anything is evident, it is the fact that the Parisian proletariat, after the exhausting war, after the famine in Paris, and especially after the fearful massacres of May, 1871, will require a good deal of time to rest, in order to gather new strength, and that every premature attempt at a revolution would bring on merely a new and still more crushing defeat. Our Blanquists are of a different opinion.

The route of the royalist majority in Versailles forebodes to them "the fall of Versailles, the revenge of the Commune. For we are approaching one of those great historical moments, one of those great crises, in which the people, while seemingly sunk in misery and doomed to death, resume their revolutionary advance with new strength."

In other words, another outbreak will "soon" come. This hope for an "immediate revenge of the Commune" is not a mere illusion of the fugitives, but a necessary article of faith with men, who have their mind set upon being "men of action" at a time when there is absolutely nothing to be done in the sense which they represent, that of an immediate outbreak.

Nevermind. Since a start will be made soon, they hold that "the time has come, when every fugitive, who still has any life in him, should declare himself."

And so the thirty-three declare that they are: 1) atheists; 2) communists,; 3) revolutionaries.

Our Blanquists have this in common with the Bakounists, that they wish to represent the most advanced, most extreme line. For this reason they often choose the same means as the Bakounists, although they differ from them in their aims. The point with them is, then, to be more radical in the matter of atheism than all others. Fortunately it requires no great heroism to be an atheist nowadays. Atheism is practically accepted by the European working men's parties, although in certain countries it may at times be of the same caliber as that of a certain Bakounist, who declared that it was contrary to all socialism to believe in God, but that it was different with the virgin Mary, in whom every good socialist ought to believe. Of the vast majority of the German socialist working men it may even be said that mere atheism has been outgrown by them. This purely negative term does not apply to them any more, for they maintain no longer merely a theoretical, but rather a practical opposition to the belief in God. They are simply done with God, they live and think in the real world, for they are materialists. This will probably be the case in France also. But if it were not, then nothing would be easier than to see to it that the splendid French materialist literature of the preceding century is widely distributed among the laborers, that literature; in which the French mind has so far accomplished its best in form and content, and which, with due allowance for the condition of the science of their day, still stands infinitely high in content, while its form has never been equalled since.

But this cannot suit our Blanquists. In order to show that they are the most radical, God is abolished by them by decree, as in 1793: "May the Commune for ever free humanity from this ghost of past misery (God), from this cause of its present Misery." (The non-existing God a cause!) There is no room in the Commune for priests; every religious demonstration, every religious organisation, must be forbidden."

And this demand for a transformation of people into atheists by order of the star chamber is signed by two members of the Commune, who had opportunity enough to learn in the first place, that a multitude of things may be ordered on paper without being carried out, and in the second place, that persecutions are the best means of promoting disliked convictions. So much is certain, that the only service, which may still be rendered to God today, is that of declaring atheism an article of faith to he enforced and of outdoing even Bismarck's anti-Catholic laws by forbidding religion altogether.

The second point of the program is Communism.

Here we are more at home, for the ship in which we sail here is called "The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in February 1848." Already in the fall of 1872 the five Blanquists who withdrew from the International had adopted a socialist program, which was in all essential points that of the present German Communism. They had justified their withdrawal by the fact that the International refused to play at revolution making after the manner of these five. Now this council of thirty-three adopts this program with its entire materialist conception of history, although its translation into Blanquist French leaves a good deal to desire, in parts where the "Manifesto" has not been almost literally adopted, as it has, for instance, in the following passage: "As the last expression of all forms of servitude, the bourgeoisie has lifted the mystic veil from the exploitation of labor, by which it was formerly obscured: Governments, religions, family, laws, institutions of the past and the present, finally revealed themselves in this society, reduced to the simple antagonism between capitalist and wage workers, as instruments of oppression, by the help of which the bourgeoisie maintains its rule and holds the proletariat down."

Compare with this "The Communist Manifesto", Section 1: "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoise has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverend awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. Etc."

But as soon as we descend from theory to practice, the peculiarity of the thirty-three manifests itself: "We are Communists, because we want to reach our goal without stopping at any intermediate stations, at compromises, which merely defer the victory and prolong the slavery."

The German Communists are communists, because they clearly see the final goal and work towards it through all intermediate stations and compromises, which are created, not by them, but by historical development. And their goal is the abolition of classes, the inauguration of a society, in which no private property in land and means of production shall exist any longer. The thirty-three, on the other hand, are communists, because they imagine that they can skip intermediate stations and compromises at their sweet will, and if only the trouble begins, as it will soon according to them, and they get hold of affairs, then Communism will be introduced the day after tomorrow. If this is not immediately possible, then they are not communists.

What a simple hearted childishness, which quotes impatience as a convincing argument in support of a theory!

Finally the thirty-three are "revolutionaries."

In this line, so far as big words are concerned, we know that the Bakounists have reached the limit; but the Blanquists feel that it is their duty to excel them in this. And how do they do this? It is well known that the entire socialist proletariat, from Lisbon to New York and Budapest to Belgrade has assumed the responsibility for the actions of the Paris Commune without hesitation. But that is not enough for the Blanquists. "As for us, we claim our part of the responsibility for the executions of the enemies of the people" (by the Commune), whose names are then enumerated; "we claim our part of the responsibility for those fires, which destroyed the instruments of royal or bourgeois oppression or protected our fighters."

In every revolution some follies are inevitably committed, just as they are at any other time, and when quiet is finally restored, and calm reasoning comes, people necessarily conclude: We have done many things which had better been left undone, and we have neglected many things which we should have done, and for this reason things went wrong.

But what a lack of judgment it requires to declare the Commune sacred, to proclaim it infallible, to claim that every burnt house, every executed hostage, received their just dues to the dot over the i! Is not that equivalent to saying that during that week in May the people shot just as many opponents as was necessary, and no more, and burnt just those buildings which had to be burnt, and no more? Does not that repeat the saying about the first French Revolution: Every beheaded victim received justice, first those beheaded by order of Robespierre and then Robespierre himself! To such follies are people driven, when they give free rein to the desire to appear formidable, although they are at bottom quite goodnatured.

Enough. In spite of all follies of the fugitives, and in spite of all comical efforts to appear terrible, this program shows some progress. It is the first manifesto, in which French workingmen endorse the present German communism. And these are moreover working men of that caliber, who consider the French as the chosen people of the revolution and Paris as the revolutionary Jerusalem. To have carried them to this point is the undeniable merit of Vaillant, who is one of the signers of the manifesto, and who is well known to be thoroughly familiar with the German language and the German socialist literature. The German socialist working men, on the other hand, who proved in 1870 that they were completely free from jingoism, may regard it as a good sign that French working men adopt correct theoretical principles, even when they come from Germany.

***An Exercise In Historical Materialism- E. P. Thompson’s “The Making Of The English Working Class”- A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson.

Book Review

The Making Of The English Working Class, E.P. Thompson, Vintage Books, New York, 1966

One of the working premises of historical materialism, simply and hopefully not too simply put, is that it is necessary to see historical phenomena not merely in immediate observable isolation but also in reference to the past events that formed the “pre-history” of the event observed, the current strands that make up the phenomena, and some future projections of what those events mean as the next stage begins to unfold. The making, and unmaking of classes, especially of the modern industrial working class where there is enough written material to make some reasonably judgments is particularly suited to an analysis using the methodology of historical materialism. And old-time British Marxist (and former British Communist Party member) did just that feat in bringing the social, political, economic, and, hell, even military strands that helped form the English working class, a class that proved to be the key catalyst and fore-running model for the industrial revolution in the West. Building off the work of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-thinker, and others in the 19th century and early 20th century Thompson has looked to the other, more then current sources (1960s) to fill out a broader interpretation that Engels was able to provide.

Of course no subject as large as the making of a class in modern society is capable of being contained even in the eight hundred pages of Thompson’s work, a work that moreover concentrates on the late 18th century emergence of a genuine radical tradition in England and works it way through to the great Reform Bill of 1832. Nevertheless starting with the democratic plebeian response in England to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 Thompson brings to life the first stirrings of what Marx’s (and later Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky) termed the transformation of a variated, somewhat undifferentiated mass coming from many quarters of earlier rural society (farm hands, artisans, casual city laborers, lumpen elements, religious sects, etc), a class in itself, into a class for itself. A class with some class consciousness of “the other” to put it in neat sociological terms.

The key name to remember here is Thomas Paine who had his fingerprints over all kinds of plebeian political movements in Europe and America. The formation of pro-Jacobin clubs in England (the corresponding societies, of course, led by London’s) , their ups and downs, especially once one got outside of the major cities and at those time when the English government was actively confronting various stages of that French revolution militarily forms the first part of the book. A modern radical plebeian tradition is firmly entrenched, if sometimes of necessity forced underground, from that period.

In the second part of the book Thompson deals with the various social, political, economic and cultural trends from the late 18th century on which form the objective basis for the creation of a distinct working class as a result of the upheavals in the nature of work. What we call the Industrial Revolution with the coming of harnessing of steam power. One key point here is the role of Methodism (Wesleyism) and other fringe religious sects in gaining adherents who would be disciplined enough for the work, and sober enough too.

Naturally Thompson also takes up the intertwined issues of the great increase in capitalist farming for the market in the war years that left many “masterless” men (women and children too) available to form the factory labor pool. And from the other end the demise of small specialty shop-ownership and craft artisanship in the face of mass production, usually cheaper mass production, under the emerging factory system is given full coverage by Thompson. I might add that he also makes a useful corrective about the Luddite movement that raged for a short period in reaction to that factory system. It was not merely a machine-smashing retrograde reaction to downward mobility by those previously respected skilled artisans and displaced farm hands but a fight to maintain quality in the face of “shoddy” as well.

The final part of the book finds Thompson patching together the various post-Napoleonic movements toward working class organization once the “victory” of the factory system was apparent, particularly the struggles for trade union recognition and simple democratic rights like freedom of expression and of the press. The various responses by reformers, and so-called reformers, like the famous socialist-industrialist Robert Owens, also are given full play. The most important aspect addressed by Thompson in the period though was the on-going (and now neglected, or “hidden”) struggle between what we would today describe as “direct action” reformers (hell, revolutionaries) and “gradualists” (hell, reformers), most associated with the name of Corbett, who would leave the capitalist/monarchist system intact. Some things never change.

In any case this review is just a snapshot of all the important scholarship that E.P. Thompson provided under one cover. And since it has been some years since this work was first introduced in the 1960s I am sure that some young communist or other social activist could do some useful work bringing it even further up to date with the material uncovered since Thompson’s time.

From The Marx-Engels Archives- England’s 17th Century Revolution-Abolish The Monarchy Now!

Markin comment:

Every once in a while it is beneficial to go back to the archives to see what our political forebears were up to. And since we are very much in a period where the study of Marxist classics, and socialist concepts in general, is on the order of the day Marx and Engels, our historic founders in the second half of the 19th century, have something to tell us about how to organize those inquiries. Especially about England.


Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue 1850

England’s 17th Century Revolution

A Review of Francois Guizot’s 1850 pamphlet
Pourquoi la revolution d'Angleterre a-t-elle reussi?

Written: February 1850;
First Published: in Politisch-Ökonomische Revue, No. 2, February 1850;

In this pamphlet, M. Guizot [1784-1874, French historian; one-time head of government] intends to prove that Louis Philippe and the politics pursued by M. Guizot should not really have been overthrown on February 24, 1848, and that only the wicked character of the French is to be blamed for the fact that the July Monarchy of 1830, after an existence of 18 troublesome years, collapsed so ignominiously and did not acquire the endurance that the English monarchy has enjoyed since 1688.

Reading this pamphlet, one realized that even the ablest men of the ancien regime, as well as men who cannot be denied certain historical talents, have become so confused by the fateful events of that February that they have lost all sense of history and, indeed, no longer understand their previous actions. Instead of gaining, from the experience of the February Revolution, some insight into the totally different historical situation and into the entirely different position that the classes occupy in society under the French Monarchy of 1830 and under the English Monarchy of 1688, M. Guizot dissolves these difference with a few moralistic phrases and asserts in conclusion that the policy overthrown on February 24 was “only one that could master the revolution, in the same way that it had controlled the state”.

Specifically formulated, the question M. Guizot sets out to answer is: Why did bourgeois society in England develop as a constitutional monarchy longer than it did in France?

Characteristic of M. Guizot’s knowledge of the course of bourgeois development in England is the following passage:

“Under George I and George II, the public spirit took a different direction: Foreign policy ceased to be the major interest; internal administration, the maintenance of peace, financial, colonial, and commercial questions, and the development and struggle for parliamentary government became the major issues occupying the government and the public.”

M. Guizot finds in the reign of William III only two points worth mentioning: the preservation of the balance of power between Parliament and crown, and the preservation of the European balance of power through the wars against Louis XIV. Under the Hanoverian dynasty, “public opinion suddenly takes a “different direction”, nobody knows how or why. Here one sees how M. Guizot superimposes the most commonplace phrases of French parliamentary debates on English history, believing he has thereby explained it. In the same way, Guizot also imagines that, as French Prime Minister, he carried on his shoulders the responsibility of preserving the proper equilibrium between Parliament and crown, as well as the European balance of power, and in reality he did nothing but huckster French society away piecemeal to the moneyed Jews of the Paris

M. Guizot does not think it worth mentioning that the struggle against Louis XIV was simply a war of competition aimed at the destruction of French naval power and commerce; nor does he mention the rule of the finance bourgeoisie through the establishment of the Bank of England under William III, nor the introduction of the public debt which then received its first sanction, nor that the manufacturing bourgeoisie received a new impetus by the consistent application of a system of protective tariffs. For Guizot, only political phrases are meaningful. He does not even mention that under Queen Anne the ruling parties could preserve themselves, as well as the constitutional monarchy, only by forcibly extending the term of Parliament to seven years, thus all but destroying any influence the people might have had on government.

Under the Hanoverian dynasty, England had already reached a stage of development where it could fight its wars of competition against France with modern means. England herself challenged France directly only in America and the East Indies, whereas on the Continent she contended herself with paying foreign sovereigns, such as Frederick II, to wage war against France. And while foreign policy assumed such a new form, M. Guizot has this to say: “Foreign policy ceased to be the major interest”, being replaced by “the maintenance of peace”. Regarding the statement that the “development and struggle for parliamentary government” became a major concern, one may recall the incidents of corruption under the Walpole Ministry, which, indeed, resemble very closely the scandals that became daily events under M. Guizot.

The fact that the English Revolution developed more successfully than the French can be attributed, according to M. Guizot, to two factors: first, that the English Revolution had a thoroughly religious character, and hence in mo way broke with all past traditions; and second, that from the very beginning it was not destructive but constructive, Parliament defending the old existing laws against encroachment by the crown.

In regard to the first point, M. Guizot seems to have forgotten that the free-thinking philosophy which makes him shudder so terribly when he sees it in the French Revolution was imported to France from no other country than England. Its father was Locke, and in Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke

In regard to the second point, Guizot completely forgets that the French Revolution, equally conservative, began even more conservatively than the English. Absolutism, particularly as it finally appeared in France, was an innovation there too, and it was against this innovation that the parlements [French Diets] revolted to defend the old laws, the us et coutumes [usages and customs] of the old monarchy with its Estates General. And whereas the French Revolution was to revive the old Estates General that had quietly died since Henry IV and Louis XIV, the English Revolution, on the contrary, could show no comparable classical-conservative element.

According to M. Guizot, the main result of the English Revolution was that it made it impossible for the king to rule against the will of Parliament and the House of Commons. Thus, to him, the whole revolution consists only of this: that in the beginning both sides, crown and Parliament, overstep their bounds and go too far, until they finally find their proper equilibrium under William III and neutralize each other. M. Guizot finds it superfluous to mention that the subjection of the crown to Parliament meant subjection to the rule of a class. Nor does he think it necessary to deal with the fact that this class won the necessary power in order finally to make the crown its servant. According to him, the whole struggle between Charles I and Parliament was merely over purely political privileges. Not a word is said about why the Parliament, and the class represented in it, needed these privileges. Nor does Guizot talk about Charles I’s interference with free competition, which made England’s commerce and industry increasingly impossible; nor about the dependence on Parliament into which Charles I, in his continuous need for money, feel the more deeply the more he tried to defy it. Consequently, M. Guizot explains the revolution as being merely due to the ill will and religious fanaticism of a few troublemakers who would not rest content with moderate freedom. Guizot is just as little able to explain the interrelationship between the religious movement and the development of bourgeois society. To him, of course, the Republic [Crowmwell’s] is likewise the work of a mere handful of ambitious and malicious fanatics. Nowhere does he mention the attempts made to establish republics in Lisbon, Naples, and Messina at that time — attempts following the Dutch example, as England did.

Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not even reach the simple conclusion that the transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy can take place only after violent struggles and passing through a republican stage, and that even then the old dynasty, having become useless, must make way for a usurpatory side line. Hence, Guizot can say only the most trivial commonplaces about the overthrow of the English Restoration monarchy. He does not even cite the most immediate causes: the fear on the part of the great new landowners, who had acquired property before the restoration of Catholicism — property robbed from the church — which they would have to change hands; the aversion of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie to Catholicism, a religion in now way suitable for its commerce; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts, for their own and their courtier’s benefit, sold all of England’s industry and commerce to the French government, that is, to the only country then in a position to offer England dangerous and often successful competition, etc. Since M. Guizot omits the most momentous points, there is nothing left for him but the highly unsatisfactory and banal narration of mere political events.

For M. Guizot, the great mystery is the conservative nature of the English Revolution, which he can ascribe only to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas in fact it can be found in the enduring alliance between the bourgeoisie and a great part of the landowners, an alliance that constitutes the major difference between it and the French Revolution, which destroyed the great landholdings with its parcelization policy. The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie — which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII — did not find itself in opposition — as did the French feudal landowners in 1789 — but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact, their lands were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, there were able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it.

For Guizot, English history ends with the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy. For him, everything that follows is limited to a pleasant alternating game between Tories and Whigs, that is, to the great debate between M. Guizot and M. Thiers. In reality, however, the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy is only the beginning of the magnificent development and transformation of bourgeois society in England. Where M. Guizot sees only gentle calm and idyllic peace, in reality the most violent conflicts and the most penetrating revolutions are taking place. Under the constitutional monarchy, manufacturing at first expands to an extent hitherto unknown, only to make way for heavy industry, the steam engine, and the colossal factories. Whole classes of the population disappear, to be replaced by new ones, with new living conditions and new requirements. A new, more gigantic bourgeoisie comes into existence; while the old bourgeoisie fights with the French Revolution, the new one conquers the world market. It becomes so all-powerful that even before the Reform Bill gives it direct political power, it forces its opponents to enact legislation entirely in conformity with its interest and its needs. It wins direct representation in Parliament and uses it for the destruction of the last remnants of real power left to the landowners. It is, finally, at the present moment engaged in a thorough demolition of the beautiful codes of the English Constitution, which M. Guizot so admires.

And while M. Guizot compliments the English for the fact that the reprehensible excesses of French social life, republicanism and socialism, have not destroyed the foundations of their sanctified monarchy, the class antagonisms of English society have actually reached a height not found anywhere else, and the bourgeoisie, with its incomparable wealth and productive powers, confronts a proletariat which likewise has incomparable power and concentration. The respect that M. Guizot offers to England finally adds up to the fact that, under the protection of the constitutional monarchy, more, and more radical, elements of social revolutions have developed than in all other countries of the world together.

At the point where the threads of English history come together in a knot, when M. Guizot cannot even pretend to cut with mere political phrases, he takes refuge in religious catchwork, in God’s armed intervention. Thus, for example, the holy spirit suddenly descends on the army and prevents Cromwell from declaring himself king. Before his conscience, Guizot saves himself through God, before his profane public, he does so through his style.

In reality, not only do les rois s'en vont [the kings depart] but also les capacites de la bourgeoisie s'en vont [the capacities of the bourgeoisie disappear].