Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor American Communist Leader James P. Cannon -How to Organise and Conduct a Study Class

On The 100^th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  


Instead we have a still sad 100^th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me.  


Markin comment:


Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
*******
How to Organise and Conduct a Study Class

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Written: December 13, 1924
Source: Fighting for Socialism in the “American Century” (c) Resistance Books 2001. Resistance Books 2001 ISBN 1876646217; Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters


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The following article was first published in the Daily Worker magazine supplement, December 13, 1924. At the time, Cannon was the educational director of the Workers Party.


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The problem of educational work is many-sided. Enthusiasm for this work among the party members must be aroused and maintained. A general recognition of its fundamental importance must be established. It must be organically connected with the life and struggles of the party, and must not become academic and sterile. And it must be conducted in a systematic manner, becoming an established part of the life of the party throughout the year. This last will not just “happen”. It will take much work and the introduction of correct organisational and technical principles. All our theories will come to nothing if our educational apparatus does not function properly.

Many classes have landed on the rocks because they were not conducted properly. One of the most frequent inquiries we have received from comrades who are undertaking party educational work is: “What is the best way to conduct a study class?” It is the purpose of this article to give an answer to this question based on the collective experience in the field of educational work from which a few general principles can be extracted.

Let us begin at the beginning and proceed step by step. When the responsible party committee in the given localities has decided to establish a class, let us say, for example, in the “ABC of Communism”, the next move must be to appoint a leader for the class. This leader must understand that the class will not move of itself, but must be organised and directed from beginning to end, otherwise it will fall to pieces. The comrade in charge of the class must then proceed to enrol students, having them register for the class and making sure he has a sufficient number who agree in advance to attend the classes before he sets the time for calling it. As soon as a sufficient number of students have been enrolled, a date is set for the first class and all the students are notified.

At this point we should speak a word about the danger of haphazardness in the attendance at the classes on the part of any of the students. The party committee must decide that the attendance at class once a week, or more frequently, as the case may be, is a part of the member’s party duty and should excuse him from party obligations for those nights. The systematic and regular attendance at class by all students must be constantly stressed, and the party committee and the leader of the class must constantly fight against the tendency, which always grows up, to regard the study class as a series of lectures at which one can “drop in” whenever he feels like it. Good results can only be obtained when the class is an organised body and is regularly attended by the same students.

Methods of conducting classes

The methods of conducting the classes which have proved most successful from past experience can be roughly divided into two general methods. These methods may be modified and varied in many ways, according to local circumstances, experience and qualifications of the teacher, etc.

These two methods are:

1. The lecture-question method.

2. The method of reading from and discussing the text in the class.

The lecture-question method. This is the method most frequently employed by experienced teachers, and one which yields the most satisfactory results if qualified comrades can be found to conduct the class along this line. The use of this method presupposes that the teacher, who is himself thoroughly familiar with the subject matter of the text, possesses some ability and experience as a lecturer. It is not necessary, however, for him to be a professional. The average communist who has a firm grasp of his subject will find that with a little practice he can succeed in holding the attention of a class.

Under this method the teacher delivers a lecture for the period of about one hour on some phase of the general subject, dealt with in the text. In addition he requires the students to read, outside the class, in connection with his lecture, certain portions of the text and sometimes portions of other books which deal with the same subject. When the class comes together for the second time it is opened with a question period of about thirty minutes during which the lecturer quizzes the students on the subject matter of the previous week’s lecture and the reading in connection with it. It is best to have a short recess at the end of the question period in order to get a fresh start for the lecture. A lecture of about an hour then completes the evening’s work. Again the students are referred to sections of the text for reading in connection with the lecture. The same procedure is then followed at each successive meeting of the class until the end of the course.

When this method is employed it is not advisable to have indiscriminate discussion in the class, as this will almost invariably divert the attention of the class from the immediate subject at hand and destroy the possibility of consecutive instruction. For a teacher to conduct a class according to this method he must take it firmly in hand, establish his authority at the very beginning, and maintain it throughout the course. Nothing is more fatal to the success of such a class than for the opinion to grow up amongst some of the students that the teacher knows less then they do about the subject. For he will then be unable to maintain the proper discipline in the class and hold it to its course. Whenever a study class, organised for the purpose of consecutive study of a certain aspect of communist theory or tactics, begins to resolve itself into a group for general discussion or a debating society, its early demise can be confidently expected.

Reading and discussing the text. This method also works out very well, especially in elementary classes. In this method, as in all others, however, the first prerequisite is a class leader who takes a responsible attitude towards the work and who takes it upon himself to organise and lead the class and hold it down to the matter in hand. This class leader should by all means thoroughly study the text before the class commences and make himself master of it.

The class conducted according to this method proceeds by the class leader calling upon the students, one after another, to read a few sentences or a paragraph from the text. After each student finishes reading the part assigned to him, the leader asks the student who has read the passage to explain it in his own words. If he fails to bring out the meaning clearly or interprets the passage incorrectly, the question is directed to other students, the leader himself finally intervening to clarify the matter if necessary.

Proceeding along this line the class will cover a chapter or so of the text each evening. Before the reading commences each time, the leader should conduct a brief quiz of the class on the part of the text dealt with on the preceding evening in order to bring out the points clearly for the second time, refresh the memory of the students, and connect the preceding class with the one about to begin.

In the course of a few months, proceeding along this line, the class will get through the “ABC of Communism” and will have acquired a grasp of the fundamental theories of the movement. Moreover, if the class has been conducted successfully, if it has had the good fortune to have a leader that can inspire confidence and enthusiasm and who can hold it together as an organised body in spite of all difficulties, the students of the class, or at least a large part of them, will emerge from their first course of training with a strong will and spirit to acquire more knowledge and thereby equip themselves better to become worthy fighters in the cause of communism.

The success of the study class work is to a very large extent dependent upon organisation, leadership and class discipline. It should start on time and stop on time each evening. It must not accommodate itself to casual students or chronic latecomers. It should not degenerate into a mere discussion group over the general problems of the movement but must confine itself in a disciplined manner to the specific subjects dealt with in the course. It should be conducted in a businesslike fashion from start to finish, students being enrolled and the roll called each evening. Above all it should have a leader who, notwithstanding lack of previous experience, will take his task so seriously as to thoroughly master the subject himself. Then he will be able to establish sufficient authority in the class to lead it step by step to the end of the course.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor American Communist Leader James P. Cannon-Internationalism is the Central Principle of Our Entire Movement (1974)

On The 100^th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  


Instead we have a still sad 100^th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me.  

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-


Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
*******
From the Intercontinental Press, September 1974

James P. Cannon

February II, 1890-August 21, 1974

James P. Cannon died at the age of eighty-four of a heart attack August 21 at his home in Los Angeles. By coincidence, August 21 marked the thirty-fourth anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky.

Cannon was a founding member of the Communist Party in the United States, and was a founder and leader of the world Trotskyist movement. His political life spanned sixty-six years of participation in the class struggle — from the pre-World War I socialist movement to the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of his death he was national chairman emeritus of the Socialist Workers party.

At the age of twenty-one, Cannon joined the Industrial Workers of the World, becoming a skilled agitator and organizer. In the example set by Eugene V. Debs and other leading opponents of imperialist war, he refused to support the slaughter of World War I. As a member of the left wing of the Socialist party, he hailed the victory of the Russian revolution in 1917.
As a member of the American section of the Third International, he learned from the Bolsheviks what kind of party was necessary to carry the revolutionary struggle to victory—a fighting, disciplined, democratic party based on a clear-cut Marxist program. When the Stalinist bureaucracy arose in the Soviet Union, Cannon rejected its doctrine of "socialism in one country," and after his expulsion from the Communist party in 1928, founded

The Militant with a handful of co-thinkers who became the nucleus of the future Socialist Workers party. In 1938 Cannon and others collaborated with Trotsky in establishing the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.

Together with other members of the SWP, he was sentenced to prison because of political opposition to the war aims of U. S. imperialism. Cannon emerged from prison in 1945, after serving a year and twenty days of a sixteen-month sentence, to help lead the party through the postwar upsurge and the subsequent witch-hunt of the 1950s. While many other revolutionists became discouraged and turned away from Marxism in that period, Cannon remained confident that the United States was subject to the same historical laws as other capitalist states and would one day witness the revolutionary rise of the working class.

The leadership team he helped forge held the party together in anticipation of a more favorable political climate. This began to appear in the 1960s. The 1,250 socialists who, at the time of his death, were gathered in Oberlin, Ohio, for the 1974 Socialist Activists and Educational Conference testify to the success of his effort to lay a solid basis for a revolutionary-socialist party in the United States.

In the tradition of the American Trotskyist movement, the conference at Oberlin held a "Political Tribute to Jim Cannon," at which party leaders and activists who had worked with Cannon during his long career paid homage to his contributions to the socialist movement.

Speakers at the meeting were Jack Barnes, national chairman of the Socialist Workers party; Karolyn Kerry, a comrade and co-worker of Cannon's for forty years; Andrew Pulley, national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance; Peggy Brundy, one of a team of comrades who lived in the Cannon household during the last few years, sharing the chores and helping organize Cannon's work; Joseph Hansen, the editor of Intercontinental Press; and George Novack, collaborator with Cannon in the revolutionary-socialist movement for forty-one years.

By the time the meeting of tribute was held, messages and telegrams from Cannon's comrades and friends had begun to arrive from around the world.
The Oberlin meeting concluded by launching a financial campaign—the James P. Cannon Party-Building Fund — to help move forward the struggle to build the revolutionary-socialist party to which Cannon dedicated his life. Participants at the meeting contributed or pledged more than $50,000 toward this effort.
Readers who wish to share in this effort are invited to send their contributions to the James P. Cannon Party-Building Fund, 14 Charles Lane, New York, N. Y. 10014.
*******
Internationalism is the Central Principle of Our Entire Movement

James P. Cannon delivered the following speech via tape to the tenth anniversary celebration of Intercontinental Press on May 5, 1974.

This celebration of Joe and Reba Hansen's tenth year as the producers of the great international publication Intercontinental Press, combined with the celebration of their forty years of active work — and I mean work —in the movement, should make it clear from the start that this movement was not born yesterday.

Then, if we add to these two momentous events the fact that we are also celebrating the forty-sixth year of The Militant, it sets the theme for the whole celebration, which might be properly called "Where We Started and Where We Are Going."

We started with the conception, which we learned from Trotsky, that the central principle of all revolutionary activity in this epoch must be the conception of internationalism — as opposed to the nationalist theory of Stalin and his gang of "socialism in one country." We have stuck firmly to this principle throughout all the intervening years. And that is the reason, first of all and above all, why we are still here and still going forward.

On top of all their other work since they joined the movement in 1934, Joe and Reba have been consistent upholders of the principle of internationalism and have promoted this idea, as they promote everything they believe in, by active work for its fulfillment. For that, we honor them above all tonight, and the Tenth Anniversary of Intercontinental Press is a good time to say it out loud.

The world we live in is formally divided up into all kinds of countries great and small, but in reality this nationalism is an obsolete idea. In reality, we live on one planet, and all the countries and all parts of it are joined together in mutual interdependence. And what is done by one country affects all the others as the part affects the whole.

This requires that they all find a way to work together as one —until eventually they actually all become one single country. Or if you want to express it another way, one single planet, each part contributing its share to the whole, and the whole affecting the lives of each single unit. The whole system of capitalism, with its exploitation of the many who do the useful and productive work by a very small minority who produce nothing and contribute nothing, has long been obsolete. Just as the division of the world into national states belongs to the past and has no rightful place in the present and will be done away with entirely in the future.

"We believe in socialist future'

We believe in the socialist future and are confident that it will be realized. But this will not happen by itself. The perpetuation of capitalism can lead to nothing but destruction in economic crises, wars, and eventual destruction of the entire human race, if it is allowed to go its own course. But we firmly believe it will not be allowed to do that the working class of the world, whose power is unlimited, will act in time to avoid such a catastrophe by eliminating capitalism and inaugurating the socialist society of the future.

But even this historical process will not take place automatically. It requires the intervention of those who are conscious of the great historical necessity and are capable of explaining it to others, until a sufficient number of the workers acquire the same consciousness and act accordingly in a socialist revolution.

We begin our movement with the recognition that internationalism is the central principle of our entire movement, and that internationalism means, first of all and above all, collaboration of those people in all countries who recognize the international character of our historical problem.

International collaboration means that those who understand the historical problem, and agree on the basic principles which must guide the movement towards its solution, must learn how to work together, exchange ideas, think together, learn from each other — and learn how to solve all the problems which arise in the course of historical development by this collaboration of each and every individual in our movement, in all countries and on all continents.

This indispensable collaboration on an international scale will not happen automatically any more than the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist order will happen automatically. Both require deliberate thought and conscious effort to solve the problems of working together, of collaborating in this great historical task. This holds true also in the present national fields in each and every country. People must learn how to work together and think together so that the work and thought of each individual becomes a contribution to the whole.

The great lessons of the Russian revolution, which marked the historic turning point from capitalism to socialism on a world scale, were accomplished by the collaboration of many people of different abilities, of different talents and different capacities, who had combined their efforts in a revolutionary party. And this party, in turn, supplied the leadership to the working class which alone has the power to make the revolution and transform society.

The two comrades whom we honor tonight are models of this capacity to work together, not only as a team of two but as a part of a larger team in this country and, especially in the last ten years, have made their great contributions to the development of the international movement as models of collaborators and team workers. They have contributed mightily to the dissemination of this idea to comrades around the world through the magnificent publication which they started, and have continued to publish and reach ever wider circles of readers, Intercontinental Press.

Among the many contributions that Joe and Reba have made in national and international collaboration has been the understanding, and the application in practice, of the fundamental idea that every person in the movement is important; and that everyone's contribution, in whatever field it may be, makes up a part of the whole which makes the movement possible.

I believe this celebration tonight will be another contribution to the great idea that everyone's work for the party is important; and as Trotsky expressed it once, that each of us carries on his shoulders a particle of the fate of humanity, and that thereby our lives are not lived in vain.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor American Communist Leader James P.Cannon

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-


Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
********
From Young Spartacus, September, 1974

James P. Cannon
1890-1974

The death of veteran communist James P. Cannon on 21 August brought to an end a long life of dedicated service to the working class. While still a teenager Cannon joined the Industrial Workers of the World as a revolutionary syndicalist. Later he entered the Socialist Party and took his place in the revolutionary wing of the social democracy. Under the impact of the Russian Revolution Cannon was among those who formed the Communist Party, and during the difficult years of reaction in the 1920's led the International Labor Defense.

With the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International Cannon came forward as one of the principal defenders of the Leninist program and was expelled from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism. Cannon built the Trotskyist party in this country and tempered its cadres above all through his principled programmatic intransigence, for which Trotsky paid him tribute. For revolutionary opposition to imperialist war Cannon and the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party were the first to be jailed under the Smith Act.

After the post-war upsurge Cannon had to struggle to preserve the party and its cadres from the demoralizing isolation of the long McCarthy era and from the influence of the growing revisionism of Pablo in the Fourth International. Cannon and the SWP, however, withdrew from an international fight against Pabloism. Cannon's tragic political degenera¬tion was part of the final succumbing of the SWP to this revisionism in the early 1960's.
For years the SWP has trampled upon the revolutionary program and heritage that for so many decades in so many struggles had been defended by Cannon.

It is with revulsion that we watch the Kautskys of the SWP today shamelessly recall the revolutionary achievements of Cannon in order to kick off a fund-raising jamboree for building this reformist party.
The birth of the Spartacist League in the struggle against revisionism in the SWP is a process that Cannon once understood well: the cadres of the revolutionary party of the future must and will come from those who remain steadfast to the principles of proletarian socialism. With this sense of revolutionary continuity, we firmly assert our rightful heritage to the traditions of Cannonism and our determination to rebuild the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
***********
From the American Left History blog, dated December 10, 2007.

The Making Of An American Communist Leader- The Early Days Of James P. Cannon


BOOK REVIEW

JAMES P. CANNON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT, 1890-1928, BRIAN PALMER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, 2007

I have reviewed many of the writings of the American revolutionary James P. Cannon elsewhere in this space. This review should serve as an interim evaluation of this excellent biography of the premier Communist leader to come out of that movement in the 20th century. As such it is long overdue and, as pointed out below timely. I have read through this book once but want to read it again before making a full evaluation. I also want to dig more deeply into the incredible number of footnotes, perhaps more than the average reader may comprehend, the author has provided. More later. Kudos to Professor Palmer.


If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.

At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent `death of communism' it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American Socialist Revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.

For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction and copious footnotes by the author give an analysis of the important fights that occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities, where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party. These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third party bourgeois candidates; trade union policy; class war defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the `dog days' of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal dispute in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.

As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. I have, as is the nature of the case, dwelt here on Cannon’s development as a Communist in the early days of that party. When I update this review I will discuss his formative years in Kansas, his father’s tutelage in his development as a socialist, his self-education in the rough and tumble of socialist and IWW (Wobblies) politics and some details of his personal life as they affected his political development. For now, if you want to know what it was like in the 'hothouse' (some would say loony bin) in the early days this is the book for you. Hopefully the author will continue this biography further to the later more decisive events that finished Cannon’s education as a communist leader.

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-Introduction to Capital (1932)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
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Karl Korsch 1932

Introduction to Capital (1932)

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First Published: as the introduction to Korsch's edition of Das Kapital in Berlin 1932;
Translated: by T. M. Holmes from the text as reprinted in the Ullstein paperback edition of Volume I, 1970;
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003;
Proofread: by Chris Clayton 2006; Ulli Diemer 2011.


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Marx’s book on capital, like Plato’s book on the state, like Machiavelli’s Prince and Rousseau’s Social Contract, owes its tremendous and enduring impact to the fact that it grasps and articulates, at a turning point of history, the full implications of the new force breaking in upon the old forms of life. All the economic, political, and social questions, upon which the analysis in Marx’s Capital theoretically devolves, are today world-shaking practical issues, over which the real-life struggle between great social forces, between states and classes, rages in every corner of the earth. Karl Marx proved himself to posterity to be the great forward-looking thinker of his age, in as much as he comprehended early on how decisive these questions would be for the approaching world-historical crisis. But even as great a thinker as Marx could not have grasped these questions theoretically and incorporated them in his work, had they not already been posed, in some form or another, as actual problems in the real life of his own epoch.

Fate treated this German veteran of ‘48 in a peculiar way. He was banished, by both republican and absolutist governments, from the original context of his practical activity, and thus removed in good time from the narrow, backward conditions of Germany, and projected into the historical mainstream which was to be the setting for his real achievements. By the age of 30 Karl Marx had achieved, through his study of Hegel’s thought, a profound and comprehensive, albeit philosophical, grasp of life. But now, precisely in consequence of the forcible transposition of his fields of operation, before and after the failed revolution of 1848, he was able, during his successive periods of exile, firstly in Belgium and France, and later in England, to come into immediate theoretical and practical contact with the most progressive developments in the real life of that time.

On the one hand there were the French socialist and communist movements, advancing beyond the achievements of the great Jacobin-bourgeois revolution towards new, proletarian objectives; and on the other hand the fully developed structure of modern capitalist production, with its corresponding relations of production and distribution, which had emerged in England from the Industrial Revolution of 1770-1830. These elements of Marx’s vision – French political history, English economic development, the modern labour movement – all ‘transcended’ the contemporary scene in Germany, and Marx devoted decades of thought and research to the incorporation of these elements into his scientific work, especially into his magnum opus, Capital. It was this combination of sustained energy and wide-ranging vision that lent to Capital the extraordinary vitality by virtue of which it remains entirely ‘topical’ in the present day. One might even say that in many respects it is only now beginning to come into its own.

‘The ultimate objective of this work’ is, in the words of the author, ‘to reveal the economic laws of motion of modern society.’ This statement already implies that Capital is not meant to be simply a contribution to the traditional academic study of economics. It is true, of course, that the book did play an important part in the development of economic theory, and has left its imprint on the technical literature of the subject right up to the present day. But Capital is also, as its subtitle declares, a ‘Critique of Political Economy’,[1] and this rubric signifies much more than the adoption of a critical attitude towards the individual doctrines advanced by this or that economic theorist; in Marx’s terms it signifies a critique of political economy as such. Looked at from the standpoint of Marx’s historical-materialist approach, political economy is, after all, not just a theoretical system involving true or false propositions. It embodies in itself an aspect of historical reality – or, to be more precise, it is one aspect of the ‘modern bourgeois mode of production’ and of the social formation that is built on it, one aspect, that is, of the particular historical reality which is critically analysed in Capital from its inception through its development and demise to its eventual transition to new and higher forms of production and society. If we think in terms of the academic categories we are used to today, then Marx’s Capital appears to be more an historical and sociological, rather than an economic theory.

But even this revised definition of Marx’s work, and the series of similar qualifications we might add, do not succeed in characterising the full range and depth of the Marxian scientific method and its subject matter. Capital does not belong to any one discipline, but neither is it a kind of philosophical allsorts, for it deals with ‘a quite definite object from a quite particular standpoint. In this respect Marx’s work may be compared with the famous book by Darwin on the Origin of Species. Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx revealed the laws governing the course of human history. Marx approached these laws in two ways: on the one hand he outlined the general historical law of development, which is called ‘historical materialism’, and on the other he propounded the particular law of motion of the modern capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society it gives rise to. The comparison of Marx with Darwin is not based simply on the pure coincidence of historical dates (though it is true that the Origin of Species and the first part of Marx’s work on capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, both appeared in 1859). As Marx himself suggested, and as Engels made clear in his speech at Marx’s graveside, the comparison expresses a much deeper connection than this. In one of those profound and exquisite, though often seemingly digressive footnotes with which Marx almost overloads Capital, he relates how Darwin first drew his attention to the ‘history of natural technology’ that is, to the ‘formation of plant and animal organisms as installments for the sustenance of plant and animal life’. And he poses the question:

‘Does not the history of the productive organs of social man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former but not the latter?’

These remarks express perfectly the relation between Darwin and Marx, stressing not only what they have in common, but also the distinction between them. Darwin’s study deals with natural history in the narrower sense, whereas Marx deals with a practical socio-historical developments which man not only experiences, but also shapes. Marx, however, unlike some of the modern obscurantists and demi-theologians of the so-called ‘humanities’, did not draw the conclusion that the description and study of man’s social life permits a lesser degree of intellectual and empirical rigour and a higher ratio of subjectivity than the natural sciences themselves. Marx was inclined to work from the opposite position, and explicitly set himself the task of outlining the economic development of society as a ‘natural-historical’ process.

We are not yet in a position to judge whether, or to what extent, Marx carried out this imposing project in Capital. That could only be decided in some future age, when, as Marx anticipated, his theory would no longer be subjected to the ‘prejudices of so-called public opinion’, but would be assessed on the basis of a truly ‘scientific criticism’. As things stand at present, however, this is still a long-term prospect.

While it might be impertinent to attempt such a definitive judgement at the present time, it is appropriate to provide this edition of Marx’s Capital with an indication at least of the rather peculiar relationship between the realized and the unrealized portions of the work.

Marx’s work on economics presents itself to us today as a gigantic torso – and this aspect is not likely to be substantially altered by the appearance of the hitherto unpublished material still extant. Let us leave out of account for now the very broad outlines of Marx’s earlier drafts, in which the critique of political economy is not yet isolated from the critique of law and government, from ideological forms in general, is not yet distinguished as an autonomous and primary object of investigation – even then there remains an enormous gap between what Marx planned and what he actually carried out in his work.

In 1850 Marx settled in London where ‘The enormous material on the history of political economy which is accumulated in the British Museum; the favourable view which London offers for the observation of bourgeois society; finally the new stage of development which the latter seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia’ decided him to begin his political-economic studies again ‘from the very beginning’. In the period after his arrival in London Marx commented twice on the overall plan of the political-economic work he had in mind, firstly in the manuscript of the ‘General Introduction’, written down in 1857, but subsequently ‘suppressed’ until Kautsky published it in the Neue Zeit in 1903 and secondly in the ‘preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy, which made its appearance in 1859. Here is the first of these two comments: ‘The order of treatment must manifestly be as follows: first, the general abstract definitions which are more or less applicable to all forms of society ... . Second, the categories which go to make up the inner organization of bourgeois society and constitute the foundations of the principal classes; capital, wage-labour, landed property; their mutual relations; city and country; the three great social classes, the exchange between them; circulation, credit (private). Third, the organization of bourgeois society in the form of a state, considered in relation to itself; the ‘unproductive’ classes; taxes; public debts; public credit; population; colonies; emigration. Fourth, the international organization of production; international division of labour; international exchange; import and export; rate of exchange. Fifth, the world market and crises’.

Two years later Marx published ‘the first two chapters of the first section of the first book on capital’ as a separate part (some 200 pages long!) entitled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He began the Preface to this work with these words: ‘I consider the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; state, foreign trade, world market. Under the first three heads I examine the conditions of the existence of the three great classes which make up modern bourgeois society; the connection of the three remaining heads is self-evident.’

Only a fragment of the first half of these comprehensive plans is realized in the work on capital that was actually completed, partly by Marx himself, and partly by others. At the end of 1862, when he had already decided that the ‘continuation’ of the Critique of Political Economy should be published by itself under the title Capital, he wrote to Kugelmann that this new book (by which he meant not only Volume I of Capital as we know it today, but all the other parts too!) ‘really only deals with those matters which should form the third chapter if the first section, namely capital in general’. For a variety of reasons, some internal to the work and others extraneous, Marx decided at about this time to cut down appreciably on the overall plan which he had maintained virtually unaltered up until then. He decided that he would present the whole of the material in three or four books, the first of which would deal with the ‘productive Process of Capital’, the second with the ‘process of Circulation’, the third with the ‘structure of the Overall Process’ and the fourth with the ‘History of the Theory’.

Marx himself only completed one of these four books of Capital. It appeared as Volume I of Capital in 1867 and a second edition followed in 1872. After Marx’s death his friend and literary collaborator Friedrich Engels pieced together the second and third books on the basis of the available manuscripts. They were published as Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital in 1885 and 1894. There are also the three volumes entitled Theories of Surplus Value, which were published by Kautsky between 1905 and 1910, again on the basis of Marx’s manuscripts, and which may be thought in a sense to stand for the fourth book of Capital. Strictly speaking, however, they are not a continuation of Capital but an incomplete version of an older manuscript which Marx wrote as early as August 1861-June 1863. This was not intended to be a part of Capital but forms the continuation of the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. Engels himself planned to publish the critical part of this manuscript as Volume IV of Capital after excising the numerous passages he had already used to build out Volumes 2 and 3. But what Marx does in Volume I runs counter to this intention. Not even that part of the manuscript that had already been published in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is taken over unaltered, but is rather submitted to a thorough revision in the first three chapters of the new work. One of the most important tasks of future editors of Marx will be to provide a complete and unabridged version of the manuscript of the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy for this is the earliest central exposition of Marx’s system of thought, and indeed the only one that he ever completed himself.

Although there is an enormous gap between the project that was contemplated and the work that was completed, Marx’s Capital, even the first volume on its own, impresses us both in form and content, as a finished and rounded whole. We should not imagine that while Marx was at work on Volulme I he saw the other volumes completed in his mind’s eye, and deployed in the first book a strictly apportioned one-quarter of all his thoughts on the subject. This conception is discredited by something that Rosa Luxemburg emphasized 30 years ago in an excellent study of Capital. She wrote that decades before the appearance at last of the third volume in 1894, ‘Marx’s doctrine as a whole had been popularized and accepted’ in Germany and in other countries ‘on the basis of the first volume’, which revealed ‘not a trace of theoretical incompleteness’.

There is little sense in trying to solve this apparent contradiction between the content and the reception of Capital by saying that this first volume already gives a complete picture of the relation between the two great classes in modern bourgeois society, the capitalist class and the working class, as well as describing the overall tendency of present-day capitalist development towards socialization of the means of production, while the questions that are dealt with in the subsequent volumes, the circulation of capital and the distribution of the whole surplus value between the different forms of capitalists’ income (such as profit, interest, ground-rent, and trading profit), are of less theoretical and practical relevance for the working class. Quite apart from the fact that Marx’s theory in Capital states that there are three and not two basic classes in bourgeois society (capitalists, wage-labourers and landowners), it would be an unthinkable over-simplification of the theory to say that it derives the laws of motion and development of modern society solely from the sphere of production and the convicts and contradictions arising in this sphere, and that it does not take account in this connection of the process of circulation too, and of the structural integration of both aspects in the overall process.

The real answer to the problem is that the investigation Marx undertakes in the first volume is only formally limited to the productive process of capitalism. In actual fact, in his treatment of this aspect, Marx grasps and portrays the totality of the capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that emerges from it. He describes and connects all its economic features, together with its legal, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical – in short, ideological – manifestations. This comprehensiveness is a necessary consequence of the dialectical mode of description, an Hegelian legacy which Marx appropriates formally intact, despite his materialistic ‘reversal’ of its philosophical-idealist content. The dialectic may be compared with the modern ‘axiomatic’ method of the mathematical sciences, in so far as this method uses an apparently logical-constructive procedure to deduce from certain simple principles the results already arrived at through detailed research.

This is not the place to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of applying the dialectical method to political economy. Suffice it to say that this method is used, with consummate skill, in Capital, and that its employment for an examination of the process of production implies the necessity of including in this investigation the whole of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society based upon it. Now there are a number of difficulties which arise for the uninitiated reader precisely out of the peculiar ‘simplicity’ of the conceptual development of the first few chapters of Capital. These difficulties are bound up with the dialectical mode of description, and I shall deal with them later on.

This, then, is the most important reason why the first volume of Capital shows ‘no trace of theoretical incompleteness’, why this, the only part of the work finished of by Marx himself, gives, despite the author’s explicit and oft-reiterated limitation of its formal purview to the ‘productive process of capitalism’, a much greater impression of unity than does the complete work formed by the addition of the subsequent volumes. But there is another reason too, and that is the artistic form which Volume 1 achieves as a whole, in spite of a style that often seems stiff and unnecessarily constrained. Marx once wrote a placatory letter to Engels in response to his friend’s good humoured complaints about the protracted delay in producing this work; the words of this letter are applicable not only to Capital, but also to some of Marx’s historical works, especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

‘Whatever shortcomings they may have, the merit of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and that can only be attained by my method of never having them printed until they lie before me as a whole. This is impossible with the Jacob Grimm method, which is in general more suited to works not diametrically constructed.’ (Marx: Letter to Engels, 31st July, 1865)

Capital presents itself to us then, as a ‘fantastic whole’ or a ‘scientific work of art’: it has a strong and compelling attraction for any reader who comes to it free from prejudice, and this aesthetic attraction will help the beginner to overcome both the alleged and the genuine difficulties of the work. Now there is something rather peculiar about these difficulties. With one qualification, which will be elaborated in due course, we can safely say that Capital contains, for the kind of audience Marx had in mind (‘I assume of course they will be readers who want to learn something new, who will be prepared to think while they are reading’), fewer difficulties than any of the more-or-less widely read manuals on economics. The reader who is at all capable of thinking for himself is hardly likely to meet serious difficulties, even with terminology. Some sections, such as chapters 10 and 13-15, on ‘The Working Day’, ‘co-operation’, ‘Division of Labour’, and ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’, and Part 8 on ‘Primitive Accumulation’, all of which Marx assured Kugelmann would be ‘immediately comprehensible’ to his wife, are indeed so predominantly descriptive and narrative – and the description is so vivid, the narration so gripping – that they can be immediately understood by anyone; and these chapters together constitute more than two-fifths of the whole book.

There are a number of other chapters, however, which do not belong to this descriptive type, and yet are virtually as easy to read, besides having the additional merit that they lead us directly to the heart of Capital. That is why I want to recommend to the beginner an approach that diverges somewhat from Marx’s advice on a suitable start for the ladies (wherein we may sense a certain deference to the prejudices of his own time!). I hope that the approach I recommend will enable the reader to attain a full understanding of Capital just as readily, or even more readily than if he were to begin with the difficult opening chapters.

It is best, I think, to begin with a thorough perusal of Chapter 7 on ‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value’. There are, it is true, a number of preliminary difficulties to be overcome, but these are all internal to the matter in hand, and not due, as are many difficulties in the preceding chapters, to a really rather unnecessary artificiality in the presentation. What is said here refers directly and immediately to palpable realities, and in the first instance to the palpable reality of the human work process. We encounter straightaway a clear and stark presentation of an insight essential for the proper understanding of Capital – the insight that this real-life work process represents, under the present regime of the capitalist mode of production, not only the production of use-values for human needs, but also the production of saleable goods – commercial values, exchange-values, or to put it simply, ‘values’. In this chapter the reader becomes acquainted, in the context of actual production, with the dual nature of the capitalist mode of production, and with the split character of labour itself, in so far as labour is carried out by wage-labourers for the owners of the means of production, in so far, that is, as proletarians work for capitalists. Given these insights the reader will be in a better position later on to understand the far more difficult investigation in the first three chapters, of the dual character of commodity-producing labour and the antithesis of commodity and money.

But we are not really in a position to tackle this just yet. For the time being we shall leave aside altogether those first chapters which have proved such a stumbling-block for generations of Marx readers, even though a considerable amount of their content would be accessible to us after having studied Chapter 7, especially the analysis of the ‘Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value’ in the first two sections of the first chapter. Marx declared, in the Preface to the first German edition that he had ‘popularised’ his treatment of these matters ‘as much as possible’ compared with their presentation in the Critique of Political Economy. But the third section on the ‘Form of Value’ is nowhere near as easy; in the thirteen years between 1859 and 1872 Marx revised this section no less than four times, and it does ‘indeed deal with subtleties’. Nor is the fourth section, on the `Fetishism of Commodities' very easy to read, but this is for different reasons, which will be gone into presently. The brief second chapter is quite easy, but the third is again extremely hard for the novice.

It is better then for the complete beginner not to try to come to grips at this stage with the opening chapters. After working carefully through Chapter 7, he should briefly scan Chapters 8 and 9, and then proceed to Chapter 10, on ‘The Working Day’, which is, as we have already said, a highly readable chapter. We should also observe that it is extremely important for its content, and that it marks, in some respects, a climax in the book. The eleventh chapter, with its ingeniously abstract arguments, which are only ‘simple’ in a dialectical sense, should certainly be passed over for the present, and from the twelfth we should pick out only as much as is necessary to understand the quite lucid distinction Marx draws in the first few pages between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ surplus-value. This is the distinction between increasing the surplus labour expended for profit by means of the absolute prolongation of the working day (Chapter 10), and increasing surplus labour by relatively curtailing that proportion of labour?time necessary to gain the subsistence of the worker himself, which is achieved by means of a general increase in the productive capacity of labour.

After this we move on to Chapters 13-15, which again were recommended by Marx as particularly easy reading. These chapters are easy, but in rather varying degrees. The simplest is the long fifteenth chapter on ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’, which represents, both in form and content, a second climax of the work. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters, on the other hand, both present greater conceptual difficulties. The fourteenth chapter in particular, although it contains a few very simple passages, also introduces some distinctions which are difficult and intricate at first sight. It is advisable to proceed from the first sections of this chapter, which discusses the ‘Two-fold Origin of Manufacture’, straight to the fourth and fifth sections, which deal with ‘Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in Society’, and ‘The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture’.

By this time the reader has already come to a preliminary understanding of a large and crucial matter. He has become acquainted with the actual process of work and production, the very heart of capitalism. It is now a matter of situating the process of work and production in its surroundings, and in the general process of which it is one phase. To this end we should turn next to Chapter 6 on ‘Buying and Selling of Labour-Power’, and then to Part VI on ‘Wages’, leaving out Chapter 22 on ‘National Differences of Wages’, which is rather difficult, even for the specialist, and reading for the moment just Chapters 19, 20 and 21.

The next step is Parts VII and VIII, which locates the process of production in the uninterrupted flow of reproduction and accumulation, that is in the continual process of self-perpetuation and self-development – up to a certain limit – of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that issues from it. Part VIII on ‘The so-called Primitive Accumulation’ is again one of the portions of the book which Marx recommended, as especially easy, for Frau Kugelmann and is justly famous for its breath-taking pace and electrifying verve. Besides being easy to read, this part which includes Chapter 33 on the ‘Modern Theory of Colonisation’, represents in an objective sense a third climax of the book. But the reader who is prepared to work eventually through the difficult parts as well as the simpler passages of the book should save this part up until he really does come to the end of Part 7, for Part 8 was intended by Marx as a final crowning touch to his work.

There are a number of reasons why this is advisable. In the first place the preceding chapters of Part 7 may also be classed by and large with the less arduous portions of the book, and so present no special hindrance. Furthermore, the beginner who comes to the chapter on ‘primitive accumulation’ too soon may well be misled into thinking, along with Franz Oppenheimer and many others, that the Marxian theory of primitive accumulation is the theory of Capital, or at best its essential basis, whereas in fact it is merely one component of the theory, indispensable but not predominant within it. It seems advisable therefore to read Parts 7 and 8 in the order in which they stand, and then, having achieved a provisional grasp of the general shape of the whole work, to proceed with a closer study of its detail.

There are two points above all which must be elucidated if we are to gain a deeper understanding of Capital. We have already touched upon the first point if mentioning that mistaken estimate of the significance of Part 8 in the overall theoretical framework of the book – a misjudgment that has wide currency both within and outside the Marxist camp. It is not just a question of this part however, but also of a number of other sections scattered throughout the book, and not developed into chapters in their own right. Among these passages are the fourth section of Chapter 1, on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’, the third section of Chapter 9, on ‘Senior’s “last hour”’ the sixth section of Chapter 15 on ‘The Theory of Compensation’, and, perhaps most intimately connected with on ‘primitive Accumulation’, the two sections of Chapter 24 on the ‘Erroneous Conception by Political Economy of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale’ and ‘The So-called Labour Fund’.

All these discussions, and a large number of other similar passages too, have this in common, that they represent a critique of political economy – in a more specific sense than that in which the whole work purports to be, as its subtitle declares, ‘A Critique of Political Economy’. The critical intention of these passages is immediately obvious from the kind of language they use, from their explicit reference to the ‘misconceptions’ of individual economists (like Senior) or of political economy as such, and from their description of the matter in hand as a ‘secret’ or as something ‘so-called’, masking something really quite different.

We may call these passages ‘critical’ then, in the narrower sense of the word, but on closer consideration we and that they in turn divide into two different types of rather unequal importance. The first type is that of ordinary academic criticism, where Marx, from his superior theoretical position, entertains himself and his readers with gleeful devastation of the aberrant quasi-scientific theories of post-classical bourgeois economists. To this category belong such passages as the brilliant demolition in Chapter 9 of the ‘theory’ of the well-known Oxford Professor Nassau Senior, on the importance of ‘the last hour’s work’, and the refutation of another ‘theory’ discovered by the same ‘earnest scholar’ and still surviving today in bourgeois economics, the ‘theory’ of the so-called ‘abstinence’ of capital. These parts of Marx’s economic critique are among the most enjoyable passages in the book, and usually conceal beneath their satirical-polemical exterior a considerable fund of pertinent and significant insights, conveyed to the reader in what we might call a ‘playful’ manner. Strictly speaking however, these passages do not belong to the essential content of Capital: they might appropriately have been incorporated in the fourth book Marx projected, on the ‘history of the theory’, of which he wrote to Engels (31st July, 1865) that it was to have a more ‘historical-literary’ character in comparison with the theoretical parts (ie, the first three books), and that it would be the easiest part for him to write, since all the problems are solved in the first three books, and this last one is therefore more of a recapitulation in historical form’.

The second category of specifically ‘critical’ arguments in Capital are of a quite different kind. There are a considerable clamber of passages here which are less bulky but extremely important as regards their content. There is, for example, the delineation of that conflict over the limits of the working day, a conflict that cannot be resolved by reference to the laws of commodity exchange. Most important of all there is the final section of Chapter 1 on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’, and the final part of the whole work on ‘The So-called Primitive Accumulation’ and the ‘secret’ it contains.

The Marxian ‘critique of Political Economy’ begins, as an economic theory, with the conceptual clarification of the real economic laws of motion and development of modern bourgeois-capitalist society.

This critique maintains the most scrupulous scientific consistency in order to follow through to their logical conclusion all the propositions advanced on this topic by the great economic theoreticians of the classical, ie revolutionary, period of bourgeois development, and concludes by exploding the very framework of these economic theories. Although in the section on the process of production and again, in the section on reproduction and accumulation, everything which can be said in economic terms about the origin of capital through surplus-value or unpaid labour is already stated, there still remains after all an unsolved problem to be elucidated, which proves in the last analysis, to be non-economic in character.

This problematic residue may be expressed in the following question: what was the origin, before all capitalist production began, of the first capital, and of the first relationship between the exploiting capitalist and the exploited wage-labourer? Already in the course of the economic analysis itself Marx had repeatedly pursued his line of enquiry almost to the point of posing this question – only to break off there each time; but now, in the final part of his work, he returns to this problem. First of all his critique destroys with merciless thoroughness the answer given to this ‘ultimate question’ of bourgeois economics not only by the straightforward champions of capitalist class-interests (Marx calls them the ‘vulgar economists’), but also by such ‘classical economists’ as Adam Smith. Marx shows that theirs was not an ‘economic’ answer at all, but simply purported to be historical, and was in fact nothing more than legendary. Finally he addresses himself, with the same merciless and methodical realism to this ‘economically’ unsolved and still open-ended question. He too proposes not an economic, but an historical answer – although in the last analysis his solution is not a theoretical one at all, but rather a practical one that infers from past and present history a developmental tendency projecting into the future. It is only when we appreciate clearly the way in which Marx deals with the question of ‘primitive Accumulation’ that we can understand the proper relation of this final part to the foregoing parts of his book, and also the position within Part 8 of the penultimate chapter, which concludes the historical examination of the origin and development of the acculturation of capital with a treatment of the ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’. These considerations also make clear the compelling methodological reasons why ‘The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’ belongs at the end, and not at the beginning or in the middle of Capital. It was for these reasons that Marx positioned it there, and, for the same reasons, the reader too should save it up until the end.

The other point which has still to be elucidated, concerns not the connection between the individual sections and chapters, but the way in which the thoughts and concepts themselves are developed. It also concerns the few really grave difficulties raised by certain parts of Marx’s work which we have not discussed yet – difficulties experienced not only by the untutored, but also by those who are at home in the subject, but are not philosophically trained. It is these difficulties that are chiefly responsible for the oft-reiterated complaint about the ‘obscurity of Capital’. The passages in question are, above all, the third section of the first chapter on the ‘Form of Value’, which we have already mentioned briefly, and one or two passages closely connected with it in Chapter 3, dealing with ‘Money’. Then there are a few other, rather less difficult parts, among them Chapters 9, 11 and 12, which we have also mentioned before, considered now in their proper relation to Chapters 16 to 18 on ‘Absolute and Relative Surplus Value’, which are often regarded superficially as a simple recapitulation of Chapters 9, 11, and 12. All these difficulties are integrally bound up with what is called the ‘dialectical method’.

The explanation Marx himself gave (in the Afterword to the second German Edition) of the importance of this method for the structure and exposition of Capital, has often been misconstrued – whether honestly or not – to mean simply that in the formulation of his work, and in particular of the chapter on the theory of value, Marx flirted here and there with the peculiar mode of expression of the Hegelian dialectic. When we look closer however, we recognise that even the explanation given by Marx himself goes much further than that. It implies in fact that he fully espoused the rational kernel (if not the mystical shell) of the dialectical method. For all the empirical stringency which Marx, as a scientific investigator brought to his observation of the concrete reality of socio-economic and historical facts, the reader who lacks a strict philosophical training will still find the very simple concepts of commodity, value, and form of value, rather schematic, abstract, and unreal at first sight. Yet these concepts are supposed to anticipate entirely, to contain within themselves, like a germ as yet undeveloped, the concrete reality of the whole process of being and becoming, genesis, development, and decline of the present-day mode of production and social order – and the concepts do indeed anticipate these realities. It is only that the connection is obscure or even invisible to the common eye. But the one who is aware of the connection, the author himself, the ‘demiurge’ who has re-created reality in the form of these concepts, refuses to betray the secret of his knowledge at the outset.

This is true above all of the concept of ‘value’. It is well known that Marx invented neither the idea nor the expression, but took it ready-made from classical bourgeois economics, especially from Ricardo and Smith. But he treated the concept critically, and applied it, with a realism quite untypical of the classical political economists, to the actually given and changing reality around him. For Marx, in contrast with even Ricardo, the socio-historical reality of the relations expressed in this concept, is an indubitable and palpable fact. ‘The unfortunate fellow does not see,’ wrote Marx in 1868, about a critic of his concept of value, ‘that, even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ in my book, the analysis of the real relationships which I give would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science. Every child knows that a country which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but for a few weeks, would die. Every child knows, too, that the mass of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society. That this necessity of distributing social labour in definite proportions cannot be done away with by the particular form of social production, but can only change the form it assumes is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change, in changing historical circumstances, is the form in which these laws operate. And the forms in which this proportional division of labour operates, in a state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange-value of these products.’

Compare this passage, however, with the first few pages of Capital, and consider what immediate impression these pages make on the reader who knows nothing as yet of the realistic ‘background’ to the author’s arguments. Initially, it is true, there are a number of concepts introduced here which are taken from the ‘phenomenal’ realm, from the experience of certain facts about capitalist production. Among these concepts is the one that expresses the quantitative relationship of various kinds of ‘use-values’ being exchanged for one another, the idea, that is, of ‘exchange-value’. This empirically-coloured notion of the contingent exchange relations of use-values promptly gives way however, to something quite new, arrived at by abstraction from the use-values of the commodities, something which only appears in the ‘exchange relationship’ of commodities, or in their exchange-value. It is this ‘immanent’ or inner ‘value’, arrived at by disregarding the phenomenon, which forms the conceptual starting point for all the subsequent deductions in Capital. ‘The progress of our investigation,’ declares Marx explicitly, ‘will show that exchange-value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or is expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.’

Even when this progression is followed through we are not returned to anything like an empirical, immediately given phenomenon. We move instead, through an absolute masterpiece of dialectical conceptual development unsurpassed even by Hegel, from the ‘Form of Value’ to the ‘Money Form’, and then proceed to the brilliant, and, for the uninitiated, correspondingly difficult, section on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’. Only here do we learn that ‘value’ itself, unlike the corporeal commodities and the corporeal owners of commodities, is not something physically real, nor does it express, like the term ‘use-value’, a simple relationship between an available or manufactured object and a human need. ‘Value’ reveals itself instead as an ‘inter-personal relationship concealed beneath a reified exterior’, a kind of relationship integral to a definite historical mode of production and form of society. It was unknown, in this obscured and reified form, to all previous historical epochs, modes of production, and forms of society, and it will be just as superfluous in the future to societies and modes of production no longer based on producing commodities.

This example illustrates the structure of Marx’s descriptions of things. Not only has that structure the intellectual and aesthetic advantage of an overwhelming force and insistence; it is also eminently suited to a science that does not submerge the preservation and further development of the present-day capitalist economic and social orders but is aimed instead at its subversion in the course of struggle and its revolutionary overthrow. The reader of Capital is not given a single moment for the restful contemplation of immediately given realities and connections; everywhere the Marxian mode of presentation points to the immanent unrest in all existing things. This method, in short, demonstrates its decisive superiority over all other approaches to the understanding of history and society in that it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; it regards every historically developed form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Anyone who wants to derive from his reading of Capital not just a few glimpses of the workings and development of modern society, but the whole of the theory contained in the book will have to come to terms with this essential characteristic of Marx’s mode of presentation. We should be deceiving ourselves if we were to think we could find a less strenuous access to Capital by reading it, so to speak, ‘backwards’ rather than from beginning to end. Not that it would be impossible to read it like that. If we did, we should certainly be spared, for example, the trouble of coming to grips in Chapter 11 with a number of laws concerning the relation between ‘Rate and Mass of Surplus-value’, all of which are valid only if we disregard the possibility of ‘Relative Surplus-value’ – which is not even raised until the next chapter. We should be spared the discovery in Chapter 16 after working through a similarly ‘abstracted’ treatment of the laws of relative surplus-value in the preceding chapters, that ‘from one standpoint any distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears illusory’ inasmuch as it transpires that ‘relative surplus-value is absolute, and absolute surplus-value is relative’; and the discovery then that both categories in fact merely represent abstract elements of real, concrete surplus-value – which reveals itself in turn as nothing more than one, highly abstract factor in the overall descriptive development leading up towards the actual phenomena of the economic reality around us.

All this we could avoid. But it is precisely upon this stringent method that the formal superiority of the Marxian analysis depends. It is a method which leaves nothing out of account, but which refuses to accept things uncritically on the strength of a superficial common-or-garden empiricism soaked in prejudice. If we cancel out this feature of Capital we are left in fact with the quite unscientific perspective of the vulgar economics Marx so bitterly derided. Vulgar economics ‘theorises’ by consistently invoking appearances against the laws that underlie them, and seems in practice only to defend the interests of that class whose power is ensconced in the immediately given reality of the present moment.[2] It seems not to know, or not to want to know, that beneath the surface of this immediate reality there lies a profounder dimension, more difficult to grasp, but just as real; a dimension that embraces not only the given reality itself, but also its continual alteration, its origins, development and demise, its transition to new forms of life in the future, and the laws governing all these changes and developments. It may well be advisable all the same, even for the reader who is prepared in principle to submit to the dialectical progression of the argument in Capital, to scan a few pages of Chapter 16 before reading Chapter 11. This will reveal in advance something of the tendency of the argument in Chapter 11, a tendency we find on closer inspection to have begun much earlier even than this.

We have adduced a number of examples to illustrate the ‘dialectical’ relationship between an initially rather abstract treatment of a given object or nexus, and the subsequent, increasingly concrete, treatment of the self-same phenomenon. This mode of development, which characterizes the whole structure of Marx’s Capital, seems to reverse, or to ‘stand on its head’ the order in which given realities are ‘naturally’ regarded by the non-scientific observer. There is, as Marx declares repeatedly, no concept of wages in his analysis before the nineteenth chapter; there is only the concept of the value (and sometimes the price) of the ‘commodity labour-power’. Not until Chapter 19 is the new concept of ‘wages’, which ‘appears on the surface of bourgeois society as the price of labour’, ‘deduced’ from the preparatory concept.

This dialectical mode of presentation is also connected with something else which the dialectically uninitiated (in other words the vast majority of present-day readers, whatever their academic qualification) find difficult to understand at first. This is Marx’s use, throughout Capital and in his other works too, of the concept and principle of ‘contradiction’, especially the contradiction between what is called ‘essence’ and what is called ‘appearance’. ‘All science,’ said Marx, ‘would be superfluous if the outward appearance of things coincided exactly with their essence,’ The reader will have to get used to this basic principle of Marxian science. He will have to get used to the sort of comment that is often made in Capital, to the effect that this or that ‘contradiction’ shown to be present in some concept, or law, or principle (in, for example, the concept of ‘variable capital’), does not invalidate the use of the concept, but merely ‘expresses a contradiction inherent in capitalist production’. In many such cases a closer inspection reveals that the alleged ‘contradiction’ is not really a contradiction at all, but is made to seem so by a symbolically abbreviated, or otherwise misleading, mode of expression; in the case we have just mentioned of ‘variable capital’ this is pointed out by Marx himself. It is not always possible, however, to resolve the contradictions so simply. Where the contradiction endures, and the anti-dialectician persists in his objection to it, even as function of a Strictly Systematic logical-deductive treatment of concepts, then this opponent will have to be placated with Goethe’s remark on metaphorical usage, which Mehring refers to in his interesting study of Marx’s style: ‘Do not forbid me use of metaphor; I could not else express my thoughts at all’

Marx employs the ‘dialectical’ device at many crucial junctures in his work, highlighting, in this way, the real-life conflicts between social classes, or the contrast between the realities of social existence and the consciousness of men in society, or the contrast between a deep-going historical tendency and the more superficial, countervailing tendencies which compensate, or even over-compensate for it in the short-run. These tensions are all pictured as ‘contradictions’, and this can be thought of as a sophisticated kind of metaphorical usage, illuminating the profounder connections and interrelation between things. Exactly the same could be said of that other dialectical concept of the ‘conversion’ of an idea, an object, or a relationship into its (dialectical) opposite, the conversion, for instance, of quantity into quality. This is not used so often as the concept of contradictions but it occurs at a number of decisively important points.

A number of appendices are provided to assist the practical use of this edition of Capital. These include notes on English coins, weights and measures etc mentioned in the book. But in addition to these we have also included an appendix of great theoretical importance. This contains Marx’s famous recapitulation of his political and economic studies and the general conclusions to which they had given rise, which appeared as the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859. This resumé provides a penetrating insight into Marx’s development as a student of society and economics, and into the essential features of his materialist conception of history. This was the conception he had worked through to in the mid-forties, leaving behind both Hegelian philosophical idealism and revolutionary-democratic political idealism. From 1845 he worked with Engels towards the completely matured version of this theory which received provisional formulation in the Preface of 1859.

Here Marx explicitly condemns what is obvious anyway from the pages of Capital, that he did not remotely intend to turn his new principle into a general philosophical theory of history that would be imposed from the outside upon the actual pattern of historical events. The same can be said of Marx’s conception of history as he himself said of his theory of value; that it was not meant to be a dogmatic principle but merely an original and more useful approach to the real, sensuous, practical world that presents itself to the active and reflective subject. Fifty years ago Marx parried certain mistaken conceptions about the method of Capital, entertained by the Russian sociologist and idealist Mikhailovsky, by explaining that Capital, and in particular the conclusions arrived at in Part 8 on Primitive Accumulation, was not intended as anything more than an historical outline of the origins and development of capitalism in Western Europe.

The theories propounded in Capital may be said to possess a more general validity only in the sense that any searching, empirical analysis of a given natural or social structure has a relevance transcending its particular subject matter. This is the only conception of truth compatible with the principles of a strictly empirical science. The present development of European and of a few non-European countries already demonstrates to some extent that Capital may justly claim to possess such validity. The future will confirm the rest.


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Footnotes
1. The sub-title, that is, of the second German edition, to which Korsch refers throughout. In this translation, however, quotations and chapter-numeration has been brought into line with the most accessible English editions (Moscow, and Lawrence and Wishart). These are based on the 1887 Moore-Aveling translation, itself based on the third German edition which was published after Marx's death.


2. One line of the German text has been jumbled at this point. I have supplied a probable reading by inference from the immediate context - trans.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-The Spanish Revolution (1931)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, 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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
*******
Karl Korsch

The Spanish Revolution (1931)

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First Published: in Die Neue Rundschau, September 1931
Translated by Karl-Heinz Otto, Andrew Giles-Peters, and Heinz Schutte
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;


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I
The last foreign minister of the fallen Spanish monarchy, Count Romanones, reports that the overpowering victory of the republican parties (who in the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, obtained the overwhelming majority of votes in almost all - 47 out of 51! - provincial capitals) and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy which resulted in a few hours "was a surprise for all." And Leon Rollin, correspondent of "New Europe," who is familiar with the most intimate secrets of the Spanish opposition, has explicitly confirmed it. It was a surprise for the king, who had wanted these elections "sincerismis" (most sincerely) (and had at the same time providently transferred the greatest part of his fortune across the border); it was a surprise for the European press which still a few weeks ago had celebrated the last Spanish autocrat during his short visit to Paris and London as the "first politician of Spain." And it was a surprise also for the victorious oppositionalists themselves who had only counted on victory in the big cities and already had prepared for new revolutionary action.

Instead of this, in one blow the whole old order collapsed without any attempt at resistance. The hitherto most reliable pillars of the monarchy, the army and the church, abandoned the king almost immediately and put themselves at the disposal of the persecuted émigrés, the sentenced traitors of yesterday who formed the revolutionary government of today. They offered the new government the same traditional loyalty and fidelity with which already in 1808, after the abdication of Ferdinand VII enforced by a Napoleon, a deputation of the grandees of Spain addressed the new King Joseph put on the throne by Napoleon: "Sire, the grandees of Spain have at all times been famous for their loyalty to their sovereign, and your majesty will also find in them the same fidelity and devotion." The infamous chief of the monarchist Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo, did the same. This general, who had changed over to the republic from the monarchy immediately after its fall and was received with open arms by the new republican power holders, is the same person who later at the time of the Cartes elections suppressed, in the name of the republican-conservative Interior Minister Maura, the alleged conspiracy of the popular revolutionary hero Ramon Franco, and a month after that the real general strike and insurrection of the urban and rural workers in Seville and Andalusia. General Sanjurjo used such brutal measures that the conservative English "Daily Mail" congratulated the revolutionary Spanish government for its strength of character proven on this occasion.

But all of this was still in the future in the beautiful spring days of April. This revolution of April, 1931, was later gloriously characterized by its leaders and eyewitnesses as more a fiesta than a fight. This was indeed for the Spain of today the "beautiful revolution," following the description by Karl Marx of the French Revolution of 1848, which was followed even in the same year by the social catastrophe of the June defeat of the Paris proletariat and on December 2, 1851, by the coup d'etat of the third Napoleon. In Marx's well-known characterization, written in the middle of the previous century for revolutionary France, it was "the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the conflicts which erupted in the revolution against the monarch were underdeveloped and slumbered side by side, because the social war, which formed its background, had only developed in a lofty existence, the existence of the phrase, of words."[1]

Indeed it is striking how little, in these first months between the municipal elections of April and the meeting of the constituent assembly (Cortes) in July, the newly formed provisional government, so aptly designated by the "Economist" as "republican-conservative and moderate socialist," was concerned with the social and class demands of the proletariat which required acute, practical immediate fulfilment. There is a striking difference between the two last European revolutions, which were unleashed in Russia in 1917 through the crisis of the world war, and in Spain through the new "peaceful" world economic crisis which has overtaken the world since the autumn of 1929. This difference is partly explained by the basically changed general European situation of today compared with the one of 1917-1920. It depends, on the other hand, on the thoroughly peculiar character of the Spanish workers' movement, which is not new but has already developed for the past sixty years.

First of all, there was never and does not exist in Spain until this day practically any Communist party. Neither are there signs that such a party might emerge in the near future. There was a time when the agricultural workers, vegetating in indescribable poverty in Andalusia and Estremadura, and the permanently overworked peasants of Galicia and Asturias, gaining from their tiny parcels of land a miserable support and the hated rent ("fuero") for an unknown landowner, listened attentively when they heard about the dividing up of the agricultural soil in the Soviet Union. But all this today is long gone. What appears today under the name of "communism" in the revolutionary movement in Spain is, as the Cartes elections of June 28 should have proven even to the foreign doubters, still only the shadow of a shadow. There are but three weak Communist sects, which are fighting more amongst themselves, and with the real revolutionary organizations of the Spanish proletariat, than with the bourgeois class enemy. Of these, one follows the orders of Stalin, the second those of Trotsky, while the third group alone, the Catalonian Federalist Communists led by the Spaniard Maurin, can be looked upon as a relatively home-grown product of the Spanish labor movement. None of these three directions exerts an effective practical influence within the Spanish labor movement. None of them is represented in the Cortes even by one single deputy.

However, the two branches of the workers' movement to be found in Spain which are also strong social forces have not in these first months dimmed the happy spring morning of the young Spanish revolution through an all too radical mounting of their particular class demands. It is not surprising that one of these two directions, the Social Democratic reformist party and union movement, has refused to raise these radical demands in the light of its whole statesmanlike and state-maintaining tradition, formed already during the pre-war period. But it must appear strange and surprising, to the highest degree for the other direction, the syndicalist revolutionary movement, not to have raised radical demands, in the light of the whole historical character of this movement. "If one looks at the workers' movement south of the Pyrenees only from the viewpoint of threats it contains to social peace, then the danger does not appear to come so much from socialism as from anarchism; of course less under the ideological form which it still had a few years ago, and in the platonic theories to which some survivors of the International may still commit themselves, and not even in the individual deeds of a number of fanatics, but rather from the new point of view of revolutionary syndicalism through which it can reorganize itself."

This historical prognosis, which was put forward by the bourgeois social politician Angel Marvaud in 1910, has been confirmed by the real development to a surprising degree. Today, after twenty years of further development of Spanish social democracy, which from its beginning represented a tendency of state preservation, and after the success accelerated by the war of the same state maintaining tendency in all other European social democratic parties also, the Spanish social democratic party stands, in spite of its extremely small number of members, with its 130 mandates as the strongest party in the constituent national assembly (Cartes). With its three ministers it is directly participating in the new bourgeois-republican governmental power, and even within this governing coalition, it is only still formally on the left wing, while in actual fact, however, it is much more on the right. It stands to the right of the radical bourgeois-revolutionary tendency which is represented in the present cabinet by the foreign minister Lerroux. And it stands far to the right of the federalist republican parties in Catalonia, Andalusia, and Galicia, in particular to the right of the popular-federalist party of the Catalonian state president Macia, who still to this day opposes in his area all demagogical instructions of the Madrid guardians of order with a stiff-necked and successful resistance.

The most glaring illustration of this character of today's Spanish governing socialists is provided by the fact that its leader, Largo Caballero, the present republican labor minister and at the same time chairman of the Social Democratic National Trade Union (UGT), possesses the dubious fame that he had already under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera participated in the government as a state councillor. At a time when the whole radical bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the revolutionary part of the working class fought with all means the unconstitutional regime of the dictatorship, and even the liberal and conservative ex-minister from the pre-dictatorship period boycotted the dictator and all his undertakings, there was a Spanish party loyal to the government, and that was the Spanish Social Democrats. They supported even the so-called joint committees (a kind of arbitration committee) which had been introduced by the dictator in imitation of Mussolini's labor-charter, and used the thus created indirect governmental organization for the coerced formation of a factual monopoly benefiting these hitherto relatively weak trade unions in their fight to eliminate the syndicalist trade unions prohibited and prosecuted by the dictatorship.

The fall of the dictatorship and the monarchy did likewise change this condition very little and not at all to the advantage of the revolutionary section of workers. The "joint-committees" of the dictator are still retained by the republic unchanged today, as are the direct measures of repression which the present "revolutionary" government applies to striking syndicalist workers through the Sanjurjos and Pistoleros they inherited from the dictatorship. But they serve much less the general purpose of a "defense of the state" than the much more palpable task of strengthening the reformist trade unions of the republican minister of labor Largo Caballero, who is also a reformist trade union secretary, through the renewed suppression of the syndicalist trade unions of the National Federation of Labor (CNT).

The aversion of the present Spanish social democratic party to energetically pursue any revolutionary proletarian class demands goes so far that the party considered their victory in the Cortes elections as being most inopportune. In accordance with a secret plan of the coalition parties, the Social Democrats were meant to be the opposition in the constituting National Assembly-now this role will perhaps be taken on by the right wing after some time. The socialists would have rather not been further participants in a bourgeois coalition government for a considerable period since by nature the freshly turned-over revolutionary ground calls for a new positioning of societal forces at great speed. Now, however, after their surprisingly large electoral victory, they had to be satisfied with announcing their categorical rejection of participating in a bourgeois government while simultaneously directing the three socialist ministers to remain on their posts until the final promulgation of the new constitution. In fact they can count themselves lucky in not having gained the absolute majority in the elections, for the discrepancy between their socialist talk and bourgeois deeds would have been much more embarrassing. And the pressure of the masses to part company with the bourgeois politicians and follow the course of the social revolution of the proletarian class would have assailed them with much greater force.

The tactics employed by the other line of the Spanish workers' movement were far more noteworthy than this "moderate" bearing of the Social Democrats during the initial developmental phase of the Spanish revolution now already coming, or so it seems, to an end. Anyone who in these weeks spent some time among the revolutionary workers of Spain and observed not only their theoretical programmes, but more so their practical activities and actual stance toward the new situation brought about by the April revolution, could not help considering the following impressions: perhaps there was a newly founded consciousness of power, or as I would rather suppose, the newly won freedom of movement was naively seen as a new era that would continue undisturbed after so many years of oppression. In any case, this whole great mass of workers, after sixty years of revolutionary propaganda and direct action, and a recent eight-year period of immensely accelerated powerful oppression from which they arose to a new life, was, nonetheless, still fanatically bound to their old revolutionary goals even today. Although they were still independent, active, and prepared for any sacrifice, at this one historical moment they never thought to wage from the beginning the "open warfare" against this new republican state that they theoretically declared against every form of state, with their traditional vigor or with still increased severity at the end. The bourgeois republic corresponded in no way to their programmatical demands; it only provided the momentary release from an immense pressure and compliance with some small but humanly practical and important wishes such as the freeing of their prisoners, a pause for breath in the never-ending persecution and a partial recognition of their organizations. Thus the revolutionary workers did not immediately oppose the new republic in a hostile manner, but were first and foremost concerned with consolidating their revolutionary mass organization, the syndicalist CNT, which had, after almost complete destruction, in less than two months gained a strength of 600,000 members and was still rapidly increasing its members, as well as looking after all other possible centers, so as to fashion a really free and autonomous worker's life in accord with their concept. When in mid-June they gathered in Madrid 432 delegates from all parts of Spain, representing industrial and rural workers, for their first national congress, they affirmed their traditional principles and expressly stated that this congress of the CNT "regards and will relate to the constituting Cortes as it would to every oppressing power." At the same time, however, they put forward a plan of minimum demands which they directed to this same Cortes, concerning those areas of social life they considered at this time as most important, namely: education and the school system ("as long as the state exists, one has to demand that the evil of analphabetism be eliminated!"), the freedom of the individual, freedom of speech and the press, the right of coalition and strike, the elimination of unemployment in city and country, and the breaking of the narrow bourgeois property concepts where they hinder the fulfilment of these productive demands.

One notices at first sight that among these demands there is not one which could not have been managed by a radical bourgeois and democratic revolution that was true to its own principles. In fact, there was not one demand that has not been recognized even by the liberal monarchists of the pre-revolutionary regime as theoretically justifiable. But nevertheless, at this hour not a single one of these demands has been fulfilled in revolutionary Spain, nor is their fulfillment being seriously considered. The provisional government, aghast at a definite and immediate break with the old powers, already during its first hour was concerned to again fetter, in concert with these old powers, as quickly as possible, this freedom-movement of the revolutionary forces created unavoidably in the movement of violent overthrow. It took advantage of the strike of telephone workers, beginning on July 6th in Barcelona as, at first, a mere trade union matter, later followed by strikes of solidarity in the remaining parts of the country, to provoke the uprising in Seville and the whole of Andalusia. It then put down this movement with brutal force and on July 24, 1931, ultimately prohibited by decree the syndicalist organizations in all of Spain, and thereby put the syndicalist movement "outside the law." With this complete return to the methods of the old militarist-reactionary system of suppression, the provisional government of the new Spanish state has, as it wished and intended, prevented the ongoing tendencies of a proletariat dissatisfied with the bourgeois revolution. Thereby and at the same time, it also impeded immensely the progress toward those immediate tasks recognized by itself, and which are regarded today, by the overwhelming majority of all classes of the Spanish people, as not postponable.

II
The immediate tasks of the present bourgeois revolution in Spain are above all the following: (1) creation of a new form of state which will at once maintain a large uniform economic area commensurate with the development of modern production and will satisfy the stormy and relentless demand of Catalonians, Galicians, and Basques for autonomous government of their own affairs in the fields of education, culture, public works, transport, law and police. (2) The immediate and complete separation of church and state, church and school, together with a return (without compensation) of those mobile and immobile goods of the people that are today possessed by the church: several thousand monasteries, and other institutions of the dead hand. Finally (3) the chief and central task - on the solution to which in all great revolutions of the last centuries the whole development, victory or defeat of the revolutionary principle decisively depended, from the great French Revolution of 1789 to the great Russian Revolution of 1917-the core task is and was in all cases the implementation of the agrarian revolution. The unsuccessful solution to this task already caused the last Spanish revolution of 1868 to fail and the Spanish republic of 1873 likewise to expire.

Of all the questions, as they stand today and fill the agenda of the Spanish revolution, the relatively easiest one to answer is that of so-called federalism. When viewed superficially from outside, it appears as a catastrophic danger to the new republican statehood when the Madrid central government (where there are also some followers of federalist Catalonia In. the parliament!) now permits the constituting Cortes not only to submit a unitarian, but an extremely centralist constitutional concept, and when at the same time the Catalonian "State-President" Macia arranged in his area a formal plebiscite which determined with an overwhelming majority, almost unanimous, a quite different concept of the constitution for the united Catalonian provinces, namely the so-called Catalonian Statute. But already the British "Economist" points to, and rightfully so, the extraordinary watering down of privileges which had actually been demanded in this statute "for the independent Catalonian State within the Spanish Republic," and which would not even measure up to what in the unwritten constitution of the British Empire is called "dominion status." And another prosaic Englishman calls what is presently formed under the name of "Generalidad de Catalunya" (as a cross between a state and a mere utilitarian association of provinces), in a highly disrespectful manner, "a kind of glorified county-council."

Be that as it may, one sees that the former extreme separatist Macia and his followers have already dampened their original demands for independence to a high degree. The stick lies with the dog. It is not accidental that the Catalonian state leaves to the central Spanish state authorities such matters as foreign relations, declarations of war, and post, as well as "indirect taxes and custom's duty." The Catalonian bourgeoisie is well aware that just because Catalonia is industrially the most developed region of Spain, it will also in the future be dependent on the total Spanish market for the sale of their products which today are secured by high tariffs, Already several decades ago the well-known revolutionary ideologist Miguel de Unamuno accused the Catalonian bourgeoisie in a similar situation, that during their negotiations for Catalonian autonomy, "they had exchanged their soul for a custom tariff."

On the other hand, through this intelligent moderation of the Catalonian demands, the Madrid central government is put in a position where it can hardly refuse its agreement to this quite acceptable proposal. When it hitherto has done so, when Madrid and Barcelona today oppose each other apparently on this question like two enemy camps, then it is in this case not merely a formal political controversy of principles. The concern here is not just a more general contrast between a backward servile and bureaucratic and courtly atmosphere of Madrid and the quite different atmosphere of Catalonia, which is not only industrially, but also socially much further developed (where incidentally the working class takes up a quite different position in public life than anywhere else in Spain since here it follows indivisibly the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist line). The prohibition of syndicalist organizations decreed by the Madrid central government for the whole of Spain is in Catalonia to this day officially and actually being ignored.

Far more critical for the continuation of the Spanish revolution than the controversy between centralism and federalism is the unavoidable struggle between the old republican state and the real reactionary main force of the old monarchist Spain, the Catholic church. It is not as if the church were opposing the new republican state power with any kind of open enmity; quite to the contrary, the Catholic church (which has been until the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera a loyal follower of the dictatorial regime and until the overthrow of Alphonse XIII, a true ally of the monarchy) put herself firmly behind the new republican state right from the day of the collapse of the monarchy. She did not even withdraw her fullest confidence from a government that had condoned the storming of monasteries in May, a government in which two loyal sons of the Catholic church served in the most important functions (the minister-president Aleala Zamora and the minister of the interior Miguel Maura). And when the reactionary Archbishop of Toledo, the infamous Cardinal Segura, had to flee Spanish soil due to a careless statement, it was the Bishop of Taranza who immediately referred Spanish Catholics by means of a pastoral letter to the young German republic, where Catholicism bloomed as peacefully as had never been the case under the Kaisers.

Yet just in this prudent conforming by the church to its defeat, suffered with the fall of the Catholic monarchist state order, there lies one of the greatest dangers for the future development of the Spanish revolution. Both as a national Spanish and international European power, the Catholic church very soon after the critical twelfth of April has begun a masterly battle of retreat, which at the same time already bore the seeds for a new attack. The Catholic party was the first and the only one of those old parties defeated in the April 12 elections who gathered together their followers and a large section of former monarchists (as well as their leading newspaper "El Debater" and their parliamentary group "Accion National") for the elections to the constituting Cartes on June 28. At the same time, it organized immediately on an international scale all leading Catholic newspapers of Europe in a unified defensive campaign against the alarming secularization of the new republican affairs of state in Catholic Spain: the "Vie Intellectuelle" of the French Dominicans, the "Correspondent" of the Catholic school "Montalernbert," the "Etudes" of the Jesuits, the "Vita e Pensiero" edited by scholars of the Milan Catholic University and the German "Hochland." The tendency represented today by all these modern Catholic newspapers is best expressed by "Vie Intellectuelle" which clearly and succinctly characterized on May 10 the emerging new situation: "It is said that the church has lost the battle. It is said too rashly. At worst she has lost a battle not of her own making, but rather that of her ally, the monarchy. Now there will be a battle to be fought, and this time in her own domain-and that is the battle of democracia cristiana. One must compare this with the declaration given by the present minister-president, Aleala Zamora, during the first days following the setting up of the new republic: "It is imperative that we have the cooperation of the elements of order, of capitalism, and the clergy, because without them the republic would be ephemeral and ultimately doomed, since her failure would infinitely protract the possibility of stabilizing this regime." Thus one can build up a sufficiently clear picture of one of the possible ways in which the republic can develop and will develop, when the radical break with the reactionary power, so far strenuously being avoided by the present republican powers, is not in the course of events violently enforced and accomplished by new and stronger societal forces.

The only form in which one can expect the unleashing of such new societal forces in today's condition of the Spanish revolution-which, however, is already clearly indicated by the recent revolutionary upheavals in Andalusia-is the confrontation with the agrarian question pending now by historical necessity-and it probably will take this form. One would have to write a separate essay if one were to sketch merely an approximate picture of the most miserable and suppressed position of the Spanish rural workers and the so-called independent small holders, whose hopeless misery indeed equals that of the landless workers. Or, of the monstrous contrast between the giant estates of the large property owners and the slavish life of the farm workers ("braceros"), spiced still with regularly occurring periods of endless unemployment, of their ever and again flaring and desperate revolts being crushed bloodily time and time again, of the waste and retarded growth of the agricultural production capacity thus conditioned. All parties representing the public consciousness of Spain have unanimously recognized these unbearable conditions for a very long time. But all well-meaning projects of reform have repeatedly come to nothing against the thousand secret and open obstructions whim were bound to arise in a country where the king, the officer-corps, the church and the leaders of the pseudo-parliamentary government parties of the ever-changing restoration period 1876-1923 were all rooted to their whole being, with all their power and privileges and emoluments in huge land estates.

All these forces, and their willing instruments, ruled society officially and unofficially: the ordinary countryside and the little and middle-sized towns were exploited by brutal profiteering for personal interest and the infamous "kaziks" who prepared the ground for election on behalf of the governing men in Madrid. All agrarian conditions in Spain have thus been resting for five hundred years now in one and the same disconsolate immutability, whim in recent times has become all the more pressing and inflammatory due to the manifold scientific and experiental evidence for the technical possibilities and economic productivity of a radical reform. Apart from this we must recognize the fact that a progressive industrial development has only taken place in a few provinces in the east and northeast, and that agricultural production in Spain therefore determines the whole economic and social life of the nation to a far different degree than in the industrially developed countries. The agrarian problem therefore is of immense significance to the fate of the present Spanish revolution. At the same time one could guess the fatal and ultimately insoluble problems a revolutionary government is confronted with when it meekly avoids any interference with dusty medieval privileges instead of solving this great problem with fortitude and disregard. And one can see, as the present "provisional government" has, that the first minute and insufficient projects toward social reform can only be won during and after an already progressing agrarian revolt which this government suppressed by bloody repression.

We cannot any better characterize the circumstances into which the provisional government of the Spanish republic is already today visibly deeper and deeper enmeshed than by recapitulating the description given by an open enemy of this government, who is at the same time one of Spain's largest landowners, Count Romanones, who wrote in the article in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" which we have already mentioned:

In the last instance it will not be the big cities which will force their guidelines on this new political order but rather the country. People in the country are less interested in the political regime than in the question of distribution of the land. And it is among the day workers in the fields where we find the greatest threat of the present hour.

The rural agitation, particularly in the Andalusian provinces, must not be neglected when one knows how to apprehend the lessons of history. What happened in the provinces between 1870-92, with "the Black Hand," a kind of Mafia of Camorra organization in the south of Spain, with the rising of rural workers in Jerez, with the convulsions of Cordoba, Espejo, Montjlla, etc; all these events will repeat themselves now with greater destructive force. The mentality of the Spanish rural populace is the same today as it was sixty years ago; the economic conditions of their life have not changed for the better and the means for containing them are weaker than yesterday. This rural populace is less isolated than half a century ago. It is in contact with its brothers in the cities, and is in some places organized in societies with most extreme convictions, and is far more inclined towards violent and tumultuous action than in 1873. Neither does this require any goading from Moscow; their souls have already experienced frightful storms before the winds of Russia blew over them; not only can the Soviet propaganda induce them to an uprising but it is rather their own tendency, developed through the social conditions under which they have lived for centuries.

As far as these well chosen words, fitting for more than one purpose, of Count Romanones are only a characterization of the present actually pertaining situation, we need not add anything. If, however, the unspoken purpose of his description is to frighten the hesitant and indecisive statesmen of the republic with these terrifying difficulties of fulfilling their task, then one must say that such a task as the radical solution to the agrarian problem in present-day Spain cannot be conjured away by little diplomatic tricks and playful magic - the more so when the task is clearly situated in the whole objective situation and is regarded with urgency by the overwhelming majority of all the people's classes. Whether those men who were called to the leadership of the first phase of the Spanish revolution through the election of April 12 and June 28 wish to further or hinder it, the starting point and content of the second phase of this revolution will nevertheless be the struggle over the agrarian revolution.

Note

[1] Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.