05.07.2006
Taking Marxism seriously
Nick Rogers draws lessons for today from the experiences of Marx and Engels in the First International
In a recent article ('A Chartist trade union party?' Weekly Worker June 1) Dave Craig takes issue with my thesis about the role Marxism should play in a new workers' party ('What kind of new workers' party' Weekly Worker April 6). Comrade Craig acknowledges that I correctly identify the crises of both Labourism and Trotskyism (what I called the revolutionary left). However, he believes that I fail to set out a clear "process or dialectic" by which these crises are to be resolved - specifically that I do "not seem to see Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party as real forces emerging from the crisis".
This article seeks to respond to comrade Craig's challenge by focussing on the processes (or dialectic, if you like) that need to be encouraged so that we can begin to build a militant socialist challenge to capitalism and the British state. Like Dave Craig I do not believe that the kind of party the working class needs can step new-born onto the political stage. I agree that it must emerge from a process in which the sources of our current failures are challenged and overcome. It seems to me that the key strategic difference I have with comrade Craig is that I believe that such a party as a matter of priority must explore the legacy of the Marxist tradition and learn from both the achievements and failures of that tradition.
First International
An appropriate point of departure for examining what this means would seem to be the political practice of Marx and Engels. An earlier article by Dave Craig refers favourably to the political approach Marx took to the formation and development of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), commonly known as the First International ('The SA and the party question' Weekly Worker November 3 2005). The IWMA was launched in September 1864 and first Marx and then Engels were closely involved in its leadership until 1872-73. Marx was the author of all the principal documents of the IWMA from its inaugural address and provisional rules, through the papers produced by the general council for all its congresses, down to its 1871 analysis of the Paris Commune (The civil war in France). And he involved himself in the minutiae of organisation - even taking responsibility for issuing membership cards.
Comrade Craig wrote: "The First International was neither a Marxist party nor a revolutionary party. But it was an attempt to bring together the mass organisations of the working class ."¦ By being involved from the beginning Marx was able to have a major influence "¦ Marx recognised that the revolutionary consciousness of the working class in England had disappeared ... he had a sober recognition that the political consciousness of Europe's working class in 1864 was not what it had been in 1848. However, Marx seized the opportunity of developing a broad, mass working class party as the means of re-engagement with the working class."
Comrade Craig does not call for "a relaunch of the First International". But he does say, "What we can learn from Marx is something about the relationship between 'Marxists' and the working class movement and the state of class-consciousness. Ignoring this and simply arguing for a Marxist party is not 'Marxism', but a species of left propagandism."
Comrade Craig makes a valid point about the importance of engaging with the actual movement of the working class and the need for well-honed political skills. However, he draws flawed conclusions about our current tasks. This is partly because he misinterprets some of the key features of evolution of the IWMA. The significance of the year1864 was that Marx believed that the reactionary deep freeze that had enveloped European politics after the defeats suffered by the revolutions of 1848-49 was drawing to a close. He saw a number of events as signalling a new upsurge of political activity: the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861; the peasant uprising in Poland in 1863; the struggle against slavery in the United States; the launch of Lassalle's German Workers' Association in May 1863. Significantly the British working class seemed to be on the move. The British trade union movement, in the form of the new model craft unions, was reviving. What most enthused Marx was the determination these new working class forces had shown in the campaign to prevent Britain aiding the confederacy in the US civil war.
It was the opportunity in particular to have influence over the British working class that persuaded Marx to accept an invitation to participate in the launch meeting of the IWMA. It is important to note that Marx had played no previous part in the moves to bring this organisation into being. The IWMA in origin was an initiative of the British working class movement in collaboration with French workers and various émigré forces in contact with political movements in other European nations.
So the IWMA was a product not of working class defeat, but of working class revival. This was why Marx threw himself so wholeheartedly into its work - even while Engels at the beginning remained highly sceptical. During the 1850s and early 1860s - a very real period of defeat - by contrast Marx and Engels encouraged their supporters to focus on theoretical work - what they often called "swotting". Marx withdrew from the petty squabbles and faction-fighting of the German exile groups. The collapse of Chartism and the lack of significant trade union activity hardly provided an opportunity to engage with the British working class. Marx took advantage of the long political lull to assemble the core of the material that was to form the basis of his economic work (including the three volumes of Capital).
The turn to "swotting" was not intellectual self-indulgence, but sprang from a determination to build the theoretical and ideological resources necessary to have a major political impact when more revolutionary times returned.
These resources were to serve the Marx-Engels team well in the ideological and political struggles within the IWMA. Marx wrote to Engels after the general council of the IWMA unanimously adopted his draft of the inaugural address: "It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used. We must be [strong in deed, mild in manner]." The reference to "mild in manner" provides grist to the mill of those who argue that Marx was not really concerned with creating a Marxist party. What is all too easy to overlook is the "strong in deed" component of Marx's assessment.
At no time in his work with the IWMA did Marx (even when at his most diplomatic and cautious) compromise his fundamental political principles. The lessons that Marx and Engels drew from the revolutions of 1848-49 were encapsulated in the March 1850 'Address of the central committee to the Communist League'. The most profound lesson was that the working class must take enormous care to maintain its organisational and political independence. The defence of independent working class organisation was the watchword of Marx's contribution to the IWMA.
It was as a trade union international that the IWMA was to achieve its most concrete practical results - and first come to the notice of the European ruling classes. The general council - based from 1864 to 1872 in London - oversaw highly successful measures to stop employers importing strike-breakers from continental Europe. And it organised loans and support for major industrial struggles such as the Paris bronze workers' lockout, the Geneva building workers' strike and bloody confrontation in Belgian coalfields.
Yet during the 1860s the Proudhonists, together with supporters of Mazzini and Owenites, formed a bloc that resisted participation in the political process, and even support for trade unionism and strike action. These 'mutualist' forerunners of anarchism believed in setting up cooperative forms of productive organisation and mutual credit societies that would supersede the competitive system of capitalism from within.
Trade union activity and the fight for better short-term wages and working conditions, let alone fighting election campaigns, involved, according to the 'mutualists', unprincipled collaboration with the current social system. What is more, any advance in wages would quickly be overhauled by a general rise in prices (an early take on the concept of wage inflation). In reality the politics of the Proudhonists offered so little threat to existing bourgeois regimes that Proudhon lived in France unmolested by Louis Napoleon.
In Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle - with his "iron law of wages", state-financed "cooperative factories" and negotiations with Bismarck - propagated a species of the same politics.
In 1865 a debate took place on the general council between Weston, an Owenite, and Marx. Marx's contribution was later discovered in Engels's papers and published in 1898 as the pamphlet Value, price and profit. Marx argued that the struggles of trade unions could improve working class conditions by changing the distribution of the social product between capital and labour (by reducing the rate of surplus value extorted by capital). He went on to warn that trade unions "fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class: that it to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system."
The battle over these issues was not decisively won until the Brussels congress of 1868. The publication of Capital in 1867 and the considerable efforts devoted to the dissemination of its ideas were crucial to that victory. And even before its publication, as a reading of the inaugural address or the debate with Weston demonstrates, extensive material from Capital found its way into Marx's writing and discourse within the IWMA.
There were similar struggles over Polish self-determination - again, against the Proudhonists - and Irish self-determination - in part a campaign by Marx to halt the drift among elements of the British trade unionists towards Gladstonian liberalism. In the latter years of the IWMA Marx fought Bakunin over the forms of working class organisation and the very legitimacy of the objective of a workers' state.
Marx and Engels also developed their own ideas as a result of their engagement with the IWMA. Examples include the question of national self-determination; the need to break the oppression of Ireland before the British working class could move to achieve its own emancipation; and the role of women in the workers' movement (Marx supported women's self-organisation within the IWMA).
The finest example of a major theoretical advance by Marx as a result of his work with the IWMA are his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx was able to develop his ideas about the requirements for a workers' revolution and about the nature of the workers' state that would follow it. He emphasised the crucial role of democratic accountability. With the publication of The civil war in France, the IWMA and Marx together achieved widespread fame (or more precisely notoriety). European rulers even demanded that the British government outlaw the IWMA.
The furore that greeted The civil war in France brought simmering political differences - especially with the British trade union leaders - to a head. Two leading figures, Odger and Lucraft, resigned from the general council. They were keen to seek parliamentary seats now that the 1867 extension of the franchise was on the statute books. An alliance with the Liberal Party seemed the most likely route to success.
Before the formation of the IWMA Engels had commented on the influence of bourgeois ideas on the British working class. Now they went much further in condemning the opportunism of many workers' leaders: ""¦ these men are more or less bribed by the bourgeoisie and the government". And in identifying the limitations in the role that can be played by trade unions: "The trade unions can do nothing by themselves "¦. [the IWMA] is the only society to inspire complete confidence in the workers."
The disruptive tactics of Bakunin and what Marx and Engels saw as betrayal by a section of the trade union leadership must have contributed to their proposal at the 1872 Hague congress to move the general council to the United States - in practice consigning the IWMA to history. For the rest of their lives Marx and Engels were to devote their political efforts to nurturing the growth of national political parties - the first explicit call for such parties to be formed having been issued at the IWMA's 1871 London leadership conference.
Lessons
So what lessons can we draw from the experience of Marx and Engels in the IWMA? First, the need to engage with where the working class is actually organised - not where we would wish it to be. That was the opportunity that Marx seized in September 1864 even though the First International was a very different creature from the Communist League of 1847.
Second, the importance of theory. A well-developed, solidly grounded corpus of theoretical work was the tool (or political ammunition) that enabled Marx to have an enormous impact on the development of the IWMA. But throughout the lifetime of the IWMA Marx also fought one struggle after another over the key strategic issues. Alongside the practical work of building international solidarity between workers, the story of the IWMA is of Marx's struggle to place the workers' movement across Europe (and the United States) on a firm ideological basis. In summary, that ideology consisted of: working class organisational and political independence; participation in the class struggle (the "guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system"); and a firm orientation towards the revolutionary goal of the political rule of the working class.
It is worth noting that Marx's focus on theoretical work did not ebb and flow with what he considered to be the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. Nor did the political conclusions he drew. His writings on the Paris Commune were published after Commune's defeat. Marx was well aware that no revolutionary upsurge was to follow. Nevertheless, securing a theoretical legacy from the experience of the Commune was a priority.
Third, politically pluralistic forms of organisation provide an opportunity to press home the theoretical struggle and to win working class militants to the most advanced ideas. After all, Marx first encountered his future son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, as a Proudhonist in the French section of the IWMA. Marx did not seek to exclude anyone from the IWMA exclusively for their ideas. In the earlier days of the IWMA he sought to block the affiliation of a lawyer with parliamentary ambitions and also of the French petty bourgeois socialist, Louis Blanc - but this was primarily on the ground of the non-proletarian social class they represented. Later Bakunin was expelled. However, this was an attempt to counter his secret, conspiratorial methods of organisation and because he had broken the assurances he had given about abandoning these methods to secure admission to the IWMA.
Fourth, the negative lesson that Marx was ultimately unable to stop the drift of the British trade union leaders to reformist politics. Indeed, the building of a working class party that did not in the end succumb to collaboration with the politics of the bourgeoisie was to elude Marx and Engels.
Engels's comments on the significance of the IWMA from the vantage point of 1890 are instructive in this respect: "When the working class of Europe has again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught on the power of the ruling classes, the [IWMA] came into being. Its aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian and Spanish Proudhonists and the German Lassalleans ... For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion ... by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the manifesto" (1890 preface to the German edition of the Communist manifesto).
The sad lesson of history is that the parties of the Second International, although formally Marxist, failed to resist the rush to national chauvinism in 1914. Earlier Liebknecht and Bebel, representing the German section of the IWMA, actively opposed the Franco-Prussian War and each served a prison sentence for their 'treachery'.
Contemporary crises
The question I now return to is that posed in the introduction: how are we to overcome the twin crises of Labourism and the revolutionary left? The crisis of Labourism is highlighted most starkly by the existence of New Labour and the neoliberal, anti-working class policies pursued by the present British government. Abject surrender in the face of the international bourgeoisie's offensive is, of course, a phenomenon not just of the Labour Party, but of the social democratic tradition around the globe. This is where more than a hundred years of reformist politics has landed the labour movement. A historical perspective, by the way, that gives us an advantage over Marx and Engels.
The crisis of the revolutionary left is marked by its extreme fragmentation, the undemocratic internal regimes of most of the fragments, the failure to encourage a critical engagement with Marxist theory, and a striking lack of influence over the working class.
This was the analysis I presented in my article of April 6. Dave Craig believes that I do not pose a sufficiently clear solution. That is largely because comrade Craig is not prepared to accept the solutions I do touch on - there simply is no quick fix. The concept of winning the mass of trade unions to a new Chartist trade union party, as comrade Craig suggests, is entirely illusory. The trade unions will not by themselves provide a solution to the crisis of working class organisation because their failure to resist New Labour - a consequence of the nature of trade unionism - is part of the problem. Nor will left Labour MPs split from the Labour Party while the trade union link remains in place and while walking out of the Labour Party means chucking away their parliamentary seat.
What is necessary is to set in motion a rejuvenation of what is at the core of the Marxist politics: working class organisation independent of bourgeois ideology (meaning a party that, while fighting for reforms, rejects reformism); and an understanding of the need to challenge for state power in order to achieve the emancipation of the working class. As we have seen, a study of Marx's nine-year participation in the IWMA is sufficient to demonstrate how crucial these lessons are.
True, as comrade Craig argues, that rejuvenation can only succeed as part of a dialectical process. One aspect of the 'dialectic' will involve campaigning for the trade unions to be more combative in their defence of the immediate interests of the working class. Since unions affiliated to the Labour Party still account almost half the votes at Labour Party conference and more than half the seats on the party's national executive committee - for anyone interested in engaging with the real movement of the working class - the Labour Party remains part of the terrain of struggle.
Even if only indirectly at trade union conferences when debating motions demanding that union representatives to the Labour Party back the union's policies. The Labour Representation Committee - despite the lack of ambition of its politics - is, on these grounds, a body that merits the attention of Marxists.
More important for a revival of Marxist politics is any forum that facilitates rapprochement between different Marxist traditions. Here, again, comrade Craig is correct to point to the experience of Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party. But on what basis do Marxists approach this type of organisation? Does the Socialist Workers Party fight for a Marxist perspective within Respect? Of course not. Does the SWP in any way encourage theoretical exchanges between members of Respect from different political backgrounds? Hardly. Does anyone think the SWP will deepen its theoretical understanding of how to achieve working class emancipation as a result of its involvement in Respect? Not very likely. Yet this was precisely Marx's approach to and experience within the IWMA.
The SSP is formed on a higher basis than Respect. It is a party. It is explicitly socialist. Its founding political organisation (Scottish Militant Labour) bequeathed it organisational resources and a newspaper. At least until recently, it benefited from a relatively open and tolerant internal regime.
Yet the SSP has produced little more than Respect in terms of theoretical output. Alan McCombes did write the book Imagine that also appeared under the name of Tommy Sheridan, but this almost proves the rule. The book was a product of the leadership - partly to justify the SSP's support for independence - rather than resulting from a debate within the party itself. For the SSP prides itself on being a "combat party" rather than a "talking shop". Engaging in the immediate class struggle is, of course, of priority for any socialist party, but ideas and theory are just as important. Again, Marx's practice within the IWMA provides an example of how to balance these two requirements.
The SSP's platforms rarely discuss theoretical issues with each other. This means in practice that they are not fully integrated into party life. The opportunistic exploitation of the personality clash currently ripping the SSP apart by the SWP and Committee for a Workers' International platforms is one aspect of the party's internal civil war.
The right to organise as a faction and to campaign to win political positions within a party is absolutely crucial to a healthy democratic culture. But political and theoretical debate should be the property of the whole party, not just of the platforms or of the leadership. A call for a party that takes Marxism seriously is in effect a call to end the elitist division of labour between party (or platform) leaderships that attend to theory and strategy, and the foot soldiers who engage in the 'combat'.