RE: [Marxism] Re A sectarian approach

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dayne writes, in response to a previous post of mine, about the course
followed by Marx and Engels in 1848: "Yes, Joaquin has made these same
assertions many times on this list - but i still don't agree with
Joaquin's apparent opinion that the height of revolutionary socialist
organizational theory and practice occurred in the 1848-49 revolution in
Germany when Marx and Engels took leadership in liquidating the
Communist League so that they could participate in the democratic
revolution in a non-sectarian way."

Dayne Goodwin says that Marx and Engels's dissolution of the Communist
League in 1848 was a mistake; one that they reversed in 1850 by
reconstituting the League, and quotes from the March, 1850 Address (via
another ex-SWPer, August Nimtz) to show that Marx and Engels in early
1850 considered their actions two years earlier a mistake.

I would disagree with interpreting the 1850 Address in this way. There's
a HUGE leap from saying the working class needs to organize itself as a
politically independent force to saying the underground communist
propaganda league in exile that existed at the beginning of 1848 should
have continued functioning under the new conditions after the revolution
broke out.

And this, in a way, is precisely the concern in relation to Venezuela.
Sure, the working class needs to become a class-for-itself, a
self-organized, self-conscious political force, but that does not mean
that every small cadre of militants can best favor that development by
creating their own grouping, and most of all not by creating their own
"Leninist" grouping as these have functioned over the past many decades.


I don't know what August wrote apart from this quote; I am unfamiliar
with the book or article where the quote is taken from, or if I read it
at one time, I've now forgotten it. However, taking Dayne's presentation
as such, I want to note that I've based my case not just on what M&E did
at the time (1848), but on Engels's evaluation of it in his articles
"Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung" (1884) and "On the History of the
Communist League" (1885), which are substantially later than the March
1850 article cited to refute them.

The "Marx and the NRZ" article is particularly categorical in defending
a) the tactical approach laid out in Section II of the Manifesto
("Communists and Proletarians") b) in particular, as it relates to
Germany, Section IV, wherein the perspective of uninterrupted or
"permanent" revolution is presented, and c) what M&E did at that time as
the *correct* application of that line in 1848.

"Never has a tactical programme proved its worth as well as this one."
Engels says. "Devised on the eve of a revolution, it stood the test of
this revolution; whenever, since this period, a workers? party has
deviated from it, the deviation has met its punishment; and today, after
almost forty years, it serves as the guiding line of all resolute and
self-confident workers? parties in Europe, from Madrid to St.
Petersburg."

And immediately following that sentence comes his account of the events
of 1848, including the passage that I had alluded to or quoted many
times:

"[W]hen we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our banner was
determined as a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy,
but that of a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the
specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for
all on its banner. If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to
take up the movement, adhere to its already existing, most advanced,
actually proletarian side and to advance it further, then there was
nothing left for us to do but to preach communism in a little provincial
sheet and to found a tiny sect instead of a great party of action. But
we had already been spoilt for the role of preachers in the wilderness;
we had studied the utopians too well for that, nor was it for that we
had drafted our programme."

What did turn out to be a blind alley was the reconstitution of the
underground league in 1850. They did so with the hope that the triumph
of reaction in 1849 would prove to be a parenthesis in the revolutionary
process, and the League was reconstituted with an eye to a second
edition, augmented and corrected, of the 1848 "springtime of the
peoples." It was not to be.

"[W]hat purpose this organization should serve depended very
substantially on whether the prospects of a renewed upsurge of the
revolution were realized," eplained Engels in 1885. "And in the course
of the year 1850 this became more and more improbable, indeed
impossible. The industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for
the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new, unprecedented period
of industrial prosperity had set in; whoever had eyes to see and used
them must have clearly realized that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was
gradually spending itself." 

A significant wing of the reconstituted League refused to accept reality
and lurched of into the plots and dreams so typical of exile politics of
all stripes. Marx and Engels refused to follow this path, and as a
result there was a split in the London section of the League. This was
soon followed by the arrest of the Cologne Central Committee of the
League which meant, as a practical matter, its shattering as an
organizatrion with real roots in or ties to the German workers within
Germany. Marx and Engels led their section of the League in dissolving
itself as soon as the trial of those arrested in Cologne concluded
towards the end of 1852. The other wing of the League in London also
accepted the inevitable and dissolved a few months later. From then
until 1864, Marx, with Engels's help focused on the theoretical studies
that eventually became Capital and on journalistic writing to earn
money, but stanchly refused to take part in political organizations
until the First International was founded.

I cite the history that followed the 1850 address to show that an
interpretation of it that says Marxists everywhere and always try to
organize Marxist groups, and never ever dissolve them, was not, at
least, the view of Marx and Engels.

Joaquín


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