RE: [Marxism] Re A sectarian approach

[Dayne Goodwin <dayneg@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, [iso-8859-1] Joaquín Bustelo wrote:
>       . . .
> 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


        Joaquin should get proper credit for *both* making and attacking
the argument above, since no one else has claimed that "Marxists
everywhere and always try to organize Marxist groups, and never ever
dissolve them."

        Joaquin (ex-SWP leader) likes to assert that Marx and Engels' role
in the dissolution of the Communist League in June 1848 early in the
revolutionary upsurge supports his own depreciation in general of the need
for a revolutionary party.

        August Nimtz (ex-SWP member) who has become a scholar on the
political activity of Marx and Engels says that Marx and Engels considered
the 1848 dissolution of the Communist League to be a mistake.
        (Joaquin did not append my brief message to his response; since
it has the pertinent quote from Nimtz and the citation of his book, i
include that portion below.)
        I, Dayne Goodwin (ex-SWP member), want Marxmail readers to be
aware that Joaquin's assertion is misleading, at least controversial.

        Joaquin says that he simply disagrees with Nimtz' 'interpretation'
of Marx and Engels' "Address of the Central Committee to the League, March
1850."  I referred to Nimtz' 2000 book in my original message because
Nimtz' exposition is the most recent and the most clear and concise
account of Marx's politics which i have read.

        That Marx and Engels considered the 1848 dissolution of the
Communist League to be a mistake is not some idiosyncracy of Nimtz. I
think i read it first in Alan Gilbert's _Marx's Politics: Communists and
Citizens_ first published by Rutgers in 1981.  Later I read about it in
Hal Draper's earlier careful study of _Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume II: The Politics of Social Classes_ [Monthly Review Press, 1978].

        Joaquin does not analyze or quote from the March 1850 Address
<www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm> a
work which Nimtz joins Draper in regarding as one of the four most
important documents of Marx's politics (along with the Manifesto, the
Inaugural Address of the International, and The Civil War in France).
         Marx and Engels' March 1850 Address is the documentary side of
their action which finally succeeded in reviving the League.  The first
efforts to revive the League began in the winter of 1848-49.

        Joaquin refers to two articles written by Engels in 1884 and 1885
which Joaquin claims defend and vindicate the dissolution of the League. I
think Joaquin's claim is unfounded, partly because in neither of these
articles does Engels specifically acknowledge or defend his (and Marx's)
role in the dissolution of the League.  BTW Nimtz, like Joaquin, thinks
highly of these two Engels' articles but Nimtz, unlike Joaquin, doesn't
see that there is anything in them that contradicts Engels' 1850 view that
the dissolution of the League had been a mistake.
<www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/03/13.htm>
<www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm>

        My comments on Joaquin's use of these two articles are
interspersed in the relevant part of Joaquin's message below.
Dayne

On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, [iso-8859-1] Joaquín Bustelo wrote:
>       . . .
> . . . 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.
>

DG: I referred to Marx and Engels' 1850 "Address.." to show that they
regretted the dissolution of the League and to refute *Joaquin's*
suggestion that M&E celebrated the 1848 dissolution of the League.  In
regard to this specific issue, i have no reason to argue with either of
Engels' articles. I am not trying to refute Engel's 1884 (Marx died
in 1883) brief paean to the great work Marx did as the editor of the NRZ.
        I am not trying to refute Engel's 1885 outline history of the
League and its predecessors from 1836 to 1852, written as an antidote to
the then only existing right-wing history.  In this article Engels refers
to the 1848 dissolution as something that just happened:
        "As could easily be foreseen, the League proved to be much too
weak a lever as against the popular mass movement that had now broken out.
Three-quarters of the League members who had previously lived abraod had
changed their domicile by returning to their homeland; their previous
communities were thus to a great extent dissolved and they lost all
contact with the League..."


> 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^Ò 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^Ò 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:
>

DG: While presenting an image of continuity in this segue, Joaquin
actually drops out two paragraphs and the first few troublesome words of
the next paragraph where he begins quoting again.  The key elision is
the two sentences preceding the paragraph where Joaquin picks up his
'immediately following' quote, and the first three words of that
paragraph.  They are:

"The few hundred separate League members vanished in the enormous
mass that had been suddenly hurled into the movement.  Thus, the German
proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme
democratic party."
        "In this way, when we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our
banner was determined as a matter of course..."


> "[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."
>


DG:  Once again, the text prior to the paragraph Joaquin chooses to quote
isn't helpful for his argument.  The last sentences of the preceding
paragraph which Joaquin chooses not to quote and a missing initial word of
the paragraph he does quote give a more rounded, somewhat different view
of the 1850 reorganization of the League (the "he" at the beginning of
this quote is Heinrich Bauer):

"He brought the former members of the League, who had partly become
laggards and partly were acting on their own account, back into the active
organization, and particularly also the then leaders of the Workers'
Brotherhood.  The League began to play the dominant role in the workers',
peasants' and athletic associations to a far greater extent than before
1848, so that the next quarterly address to the communities, in June 1850,
could already report that the student Schurz from Bonn (later an American
ex-minister), who was touring Germany in the interest of petty-bourgeois
democracy, "had found all fit forces already in the hands of the League."
The League was undoubtedly the only revolutionary organization that had
any signifigance in Germany."
        "But what purposes this organization should serve depended very
substantially on whether the prospects of a renewed upsurge of the
revolution were realized..."


> 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.
>

DG: btw, the split in the London section of the Communist League was
consummated when Marx took leadership in proposing and securing the
expulsion of the Willich-Schapper faction.


> 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
>

        _________________________
On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Dayne Goodwin wrote:
>       . . .
>       I agree with August Nimtz' understanding of Marx and Engels' own
> evaluation of this dissolution as presented in their "Address of the
> Central Authority to the League, March 1850" [August H. Nimtz, Jr.  _Marx
> and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough_ (SUNY
> Press, 2000].  Nimtz *says* (page 103, quotes are from Marx and Engels'
> "Address...")
>
>       *The immediate background to the 'Address' was the effort to
> revive the League in Germany. . . Since it had been Marx and Engels who
> were chiefly responsible for the fateful decision in June 1848 to suspend
> the activities of the League, it was incumbent on them in calling for its
> revival to evaluate that decision.
>       . . . The result was that while the "democratic party, the party
> of the petty bourgeoisie, organized itself more and more in Germany, the
> workers' party lost its only firm foothold . . . and thus came completely
> under the domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats.
> An end must be put to this state of affairs, the independence of the
> workers must be restored." . . .
>       Thus, in no uncertain terms the document made clear that it had
> been a mistake for Marx and Engels to shelve the League.  Experience had
> taught that the decision disarmed the proletariat by depriving it of the
> leadership necessary to pursue its own class interests in the revolution.*
>       . . .

        __________________________
On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, [iso-8859-1] Joaquín Bustelo wrote:

> 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.
>
        . . .

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism