Arthur Rosenberg 1934
While on a journey in Holland in March 1843, the twenty-five-year-old Dr Karl Marx wrote to his friend Rugge a letter in which he described the follies of Frederick William IV of Prussia. He added:
The state is too serious a concern to be turned into a harlequinade. It is possible that a ship manned by idiots might run before the storm for a time. Its fate would nevertheless overtake it if for no other reason than that the idiots would not realise it. In our case this doom is the revolution that is at our doors.
This trumpet-blast was answered by Rugge in a mood of deep pessimism:
Although it is a hard saying, I must write it because it is the truth. I cannot imagine any nation that is so disunited as the German nation. You see workmen — and not men; thinkers — and not men; masters and servants, young people and those who are already settled in life, but not men. Is that not a battlefield where arms and legs and mutilated bodies lie heaped on one another while the life-blood runs out upon the ground? Hölderlin in Hyperion. That describes my mood; and unfortunately it is not a new one. The same cleavage works at different ages in the same manner in all humanity. Your letter is filled with illusory ideas. Your courage only serves to intensify my lack of spirit. You say that we — the contemporaries of these Germans — are going to experience a political revolution? Your wish is father to your thought, my friend. Oh, I have lived through it all! Hope is sweet and disappointment bitter, very bitter. It takes more courage to despair than to hope. Nevertheless, it is the courage of common sense, and we have reached the point at which we dare not let ourselves be disappointed any longer.
Rugge went on to add:
In so far as one can speak of a German spirit, it is contemptible, and it gives me no qualms of conscience to declare that it is owing to its contemptible nature that it appears as it does.
He concluded his letter with the words:
Our nation has no future. What does our reputation matter?
Marx refused to be discouraged. He agreed indeed with Rugge that a Germany of shopkeepers and fools could not be the scene of a revolution like the French or English revolutions. But in the eyes of Marx that only meant that a revolution in Germany must take on a special character; it must be no revolution of half-measures but must revolutionise the entire structure of society in a single effort. And Marx formulated his theory as to the nature of the coming revolution in Germany in his celebrated ‘Criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ which appeared in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. This review bore on its title-page the names of its two editors — Arnold Rugge and Karl Marx. Hence Marx’s article was also a tirade against the pessimism of his co-editor.
In this article Marx asked the question:
Can Germany accomplish a revolution that will not only raise it to the level of a modern nation but also to the pinnacle that will be attained in the immediate future by the other nations?
Marx went on to declare that the German middle class would certainly never be capable of carrying out this revolution, since it was nothing more than the type of the commonplace mediocrity that characterised all the other classes in the old Germany. But a new class was coming into existence in Germany which was no longer a part of the middle-class order of society, which was completely outside society, and which could only achieve its own freedom by overthrowing the entire existing world-order. This class was the industrial proletariat. In the course of its struggle the proletariat would attract to itself all the poor classes in society, in the country as well as in the towns, and by so doing would accomplish the truly great revolution — the German Revolution.
The emancipation of Germany from medievalism [wrote Marx] is only possible in the form of a simultaneous emancipation from the effects of an incomplete liberation from medievalism. It is impossible to destroy any form of slavery in Germany without destroying all forms of slavery. Germany is too thoroughgoing to be able to revolutionise in any other way than from the very foundation of society. The emancipation of Germany means the emancipation of mankind. Philosophy is the directive impulse of this emancipation; its life-blood is the proletariat.
The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher reveals with an unmistakable clarity the psychological path trodden by the youthful Marx. It was not an overwhelming consciousness of the necessity for freeing the proletariat from its hunger and misery that caused Marx to regard revolution as the sole means to achieve that aim. He did not proceed from the proletariat to revolution. Indeed he chose a path proceeding in a directly contrary direction. His path had its beginning in his own intellectual and spiritual qualities, and his choice was influenced by the ideals that Hölderlin had implanted in the young German intellectuals of the Vormärz. He sought to free himself from the pressure exercised upon him and his intellectual equals by the mediocre German police state. And the way to such a liberation lay only through a German revolution.
Marx was not actuated in these ideas by egotistic motives. It was not that he desired special privileges for himself and his friends. His aim was to raise the Germans from serfdom to freedom so as to make them men. It was in his search for a means by which to achieve this revolution that Marx discovered the proletariat.
A hasty consideration of these facts might lead one to think that the youthful Marx was a crafty or a would-be crafty liberal. At first sight he seems to be a typical middle-class liberal who recognised that his own class did not possess sufficient strength of itself to attain its ends and therefore looked around for allies. The feudal ‘police and bondman’ state was the enemy. The educated and propertied middle class was not powerful enough to overthrow this enemy by its own force. Other forces — the peasant and the industrial workman — must be called upon to help. It was thus that France in 1789 had stormed the Bastille with the aid of the poor. It was thus that the French bourgeoisie had hunted Charles X from his throne in July 1830 with the help of the proletarian fighters on the Paris barricades. In the same way many Russian liberals sympathised in 1900 with the workmen’s movement and accorded it an important share in the common task of overthrowing Tsarism.
It was Marx’s lack of interest in the prosperity of the propertied middle class that distinguished him from this type of French and Russian liberal. His aim was to raise humanity to philosophic heights and to make out of a bondman a free and independent individual. This pinnacle of human development is as incompatible with the cash-books of a banker as with the castle of a feudal baron.
To this may be retorted: ‘All these idealistic demands’, ‘philosophic heights’, ‘true humanity’, etc, are only trappings to disguise a capitalistic striving after profits. The battle of Marxism against capitalism is only a sham fight. Marxism and liberalism are at bottom identical. They pursue a common aim: the destruction of a propertied, conservative order of society based upon family and tradition. That, however, is ‘the fight against feudalism’. Are the reproaches justified which today are levelled against Marx and Marxism particularly in lower middle-class and anti-Semitic circles?
The social aspect of the middle-class revolution consists in the substitution of the rule of the propertied middle class and of the intellectuals who form a part of it for that of the feudal aristocracy with its following of officers, bureaucrats, priests, etc. The middle class, nevertheless, cannot simply denounce government by aristocrats and priests and praise that by manufacturers and lawyers, in order to achieve its aim. It is compelled to develop a radical criticism of the entire order of society that is bound up with aristocratic government. In other words, it must attack the existing order of society as a whole. The middle class cannot cry out against old fetters and then substitute new ones for them. It must demand the abolition of all fetters. Nor can the middle class substitute government by plutocrats for government by aristocrats. It must substitute the liberation of mankind.
It was ideas of this nature that inspired the middle-class revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the moment the middle-class revolution is victorious it must divorce itself from its own ideology. For in order to establish the power of money on the ruins of feudalism it is necessary to throw up fresh barriers against the unpropertied classes. The place of the old fetters must be taken by new fetters that are distinguishable from them only in shape. This transformation took almost grotesque forms in the policy pursued by the French Constituent Assembly from 1789 to 1791.
Nevertheless, there are always to be found in such a situation a number of radical minds who separate from their class and go ahead of it. These minds hold firmly to the theories which they propounded before the revolution took place. Their desire is to give the fullest possible practical expression to their theories of liberty and equality. Thus Robespierre still clung to his hope of realising Rousseau’s ideals after the fall of the Bastille and the collapse of absolutism. Such logical minds are forced to seek for new elements and classes in the population with whose aid they may complete the work abandoned by the middle class. Robespierre appealed to the poverty-stricken masses of the population; Marx to the proletariat.
In the 1840s, when the German middle-class revolution was anticipated, Marx had before his eyes, in the examples of England and France, the attitude adopted after a successful revolution by the entire European middle class. Moreover, the theory and practice of contemporary German liberalism showed only too clearly what would be the attitude of the German middle class after a successful revolution. He was not, therefore, labouring under any illusions.
A precisely similar example of the relationship between ideology and class warfare is to be found in the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Princes, knights and townspeople wanted to seize the revenues of the Church for themselves and to refuse to acknowledge priestly authority. In order to attain this aim they were forced, however, to call in question the entire social order that had been in existence in Europe for a thousand years. To papal dogmas they were compelled to oppose the principle of freedom and equality for every Christian. When, however, the new evangelical state church rose from the ruins of the Roman Church, and the new faith came to take the place of the old, men like Thomas Münzer refused to be content with what had already been achieved. The task that had been abandoned by princes and merchants should be completed by the peasantry. It was for the peasants to throw off the shackles of serfdom and thus achieve the promised freedom. Robespierre and the youthful Marx stood in the same relationship to middle-class liberalism as Thomas Münzer stood to Luther — as fire to water.
Ever since the revolution of 1688 the middle class had held the reins of government in England. In France it had finally grasped them in the July Revolution of 1830. But in Central and Eastern Europe monarchical feudalism reigned until 1848. It was the steady development of machinery and industry since the middle of the eighteenth century that conferred upon the middle-class movement its expansive force. At the same time the middle-class intellectuals sought to clarify and coordinate their ideas about their own class, aims and duties. This tremendous intellectual task was attacked from two sides by the English political economists and the German philosophers.
The English political economists — especially Ricardo — discovered that the source of all values lies in the human capacity for work. Although they had also ascertained correctly the division of results as between employer and employed, that is, that the former took the profits and the latter obtained a bare minimum on which to exist, they accepted this fact as a natural law which could not be broken or called in question. It was Hegel who discovered the schism in the middle-class society that sprang from the ruins of the old patriarchal order. He drew attention to the contrast between the small minority which grew ever richer and the great majority which steadily became more and more impoverished. This contrast seemed to him to proceed from an unalterable natural law. And in order to avoid a revolutionary solution of the problem Hegel proceeded to develop his conception of an omnipotent state founded upon Reason, in which the contrast between rich and poor afforded by the middle-class order of society would be overcome by a new and corporative order of society arranged according to professions. But Hegel’s own teaching was contradictory of this artificial solution. He believed in an incessant spiritual progress that was always in opposition to itself. Each appearance of the world spirit (Weltgeist) at a definite period in history of necessity gave rise to opposition. It was out of the conflict of power with power that a new and third force was born. This dialectic method when applied by Hegel to his own age clearly taught that the thesis (middle-class society) must be overcome by the antithesis (proletariat) in order to prepare the way for the new synthesis. In Hegel’s eyes each period in history constituted a unity. The world spirit displayed itself similarly in politics and philosophy, art and religion. If that be granted, then there is no longer any absolute historical value, since all the ideas of the philosophers, religious thinkers, etc, are the product of a definite historical period and must disappear with that period. Only the world spirit itself is absolute in its eternal progression. In these ideas of Hegel are to be found the chief elements composing Marx’s materialistic conception of history.
The critical minds among the middle-class intelligentsia in Germany as in England thus attained the uttermost limits of their self-analysis in the years preceding 1830. A single step farther must of necessity involve an upheaval of middle-class society.
In countries like France and England, in which the middle class had been politically victorious, it had drawn a sharp line of demarcation between itself and the poor and non-propertied masses. In England, as also in France under Louis Philippe, the suffrage was reserved for the propertied minority. The working classes, the peasantry and the labourers, were the objects of law-making. The ruling middle class sought to conserve everything in the old feudal governmental system that could be of use in protecting the existing order against the masses. The English middle class retained the monarchy, the House of Lords and the antiquated feudal ceremonial. The French bourgeoisie also retained the monarchy in addition to the highly-centralised administrative apparatus that had been set up under Louis XIV, destroyed during the revolution, and resurrected in an even more centralised form under Napoleon I.
The disappointed masses did not wish to renounce the freedom and equality which had been promised by the prophets of the middle-class revolution. They wanted democracy; the self-government of the masses; and the abolition of all the privileges of the newly-aggrandised middle class no less than of the old feudal nobles. Although democratic ideas of republicanism and universal suffrage were at first purely political, it was not long before the conception of economic reform was added to them.
In the years preceding 1848 the rebellion of the workmen against their lot was obliged at first to take democratic form after the example of Robespierre and of 1793. Such of the young middle-class intellectuals as were radically inclined were also unable to reconcile themselves to the plutocracy which had come to occupy the throne formerly occupied by feudalism. These youthful radicals set themselves at the head of the democratic movement. In England they formed the democratic working-class party known as the Chartists; while in France a number of opposition groups came into existence whose programmes embraced everything from purely political reform to its logical outcome, social revolution.
Feudalism still flourished in Germany. The Germany of 1847 stood politically where France had stood in 1788. The propertied middle class made ready to enter upon their inheritance. But behind the moderate liberals rose the menacing figure of Demos intent upon substituting a complete revolution for the partial revolution which was expected to occur. The radicals among the German intellectuals were the heirs of Hegel and developed his ideas to their logical conclusion. In the ranks of the young Hegelian revolutionaries stood Marx and Engels.
Karl Marx risked the final step and placed himself and his ideas outside the pale of middle-class society. He was now able to turn the economic notions of Ricardo to his own purposes. It was no longer a natural law that the factory worker should only receive a bare living-wage for his work; it was only the phenomenon characteristic of a particular historical period — the period of middle-class capitalism. The capitalist law of wages would disappear with the downfall of capitalism. Similarly the state is not the incorporation of eternal wisdom but only the political superstructure of a middle-class order of society. The state falls with the destruction of that order of society.
The materialist interpretation of history consists in the application of dialectical criticism to all aspects of human life. The value of every activity and interest is carefully weighed in the balance and found wanting. Nevertheless, criticism alone did not suffice to bring about the disappearance of the middle-class state and the middle-class standard of wages. Philosophic criticism showed that no form of life was eternal. This did not indeed mean that the subjects of critical analysis were mere figments of the brain any more than air disappears because of the discovery by a scientist of the elements composing it. The police force maintained by the middle-class state and the cash-boxes of the capitalists are bitter truths which cannot be avoided by stripping them of their ideological coverings. The revolution was the sole means of depriving the capitalists of power and of destroying them. And this last of all revolutions could only be carried out by the class which fate had liberated from all the traditions, theories and other restrictions imposed upon the feudal and middle-class societies — the proletariat.
The working class was thus in Marx’s system confronted with a task that was as unique as it was vast — the consummation of a philosophy. It was to be their task to put the theories of the philosophers into practice. The middle-class intellectuals destroyed their own class in their final and most courageous conclusions by mobilising a social underworld in order to prove the truth of their doctrines. Thus Marx saw an indissoluble association between theory and revolution. Theories are no more than intellectual toys without the revolution that gives them practical form. Marxism is a book of fundamental principles whose final chapter is revolution.
The working classes in France and England, Belgium and Germany, were up to 1848 becoming daily more and more conscious of their peculiar situation. They sought in consequence to improve their miserable condition, and dreamed of a new and better order of society in which ‘rich and poor’ should no longer exist. Nevertheless, the European proletariat achieved little before 1848 in the way of independent thinking and organisation. It contented itself with feeling its way slowly within the framework of the democratic movement. A few isolated and desperate outbreaks on the part of workmen did nothing to raise the working-class level.
Once Marx had made up his mind on the subject of his own system it became necessary for him to seek the support of the working class. Europe was faced with a democratic revolution. It was hoped that the proletariat would play the part in this revolution that Marx had assigned to it. Marx visited Brussels, Paris and London, in company with his friend Engels, in order to establish contact with the various democratic and proletarian groups. He sought to bring home to the German workmen abroad the nature of the historic mission which they were called upon to fulfil, and he founded the Communist Party with a mere handful of supporters. On the eve of the revolution of 1848 Marx published his Communist Manifesto, which contained the party’s programme.
In this Manifesto Marx drew a clear line of demarcation between the great task awaiting his party in the future — the overthrow of capitalism — and its more immediate work of assisting in ensuring the success of the coming democratic revolution in Europe.
On the subject of Germany the Communist Manifesto runs:
As soon as the bourgeois revolution begins in Germany, the Communist Party will make common cause with it against the absolutist monarchy, the feudal landed proprietors, and the lower middle class. At the same time the party will lose no opportunity for making apparent to the working class the enmity that exists between middle class and proletariat. It will do this in order that the social and political conditions which must of necessity arise out of the rule of the middle class, may be used by the workers as so many weapons to be turned against that class so as to ensure that the moment the reactionary classes have been overthrown in Germany the battle against the middle class will begin. The eyes of Communists are turned towards Germany because it is there that the middle-class revolution is about to break forth which will be carried out with the help of a far more advanced proletariat and under the more progressive influence of present-day European civilisation than were the revolutions in England and in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For this reason the German middle-class revolution will only be the prelude to a proletarian revolution.
The Communists in England were to support the Chartist movement, in France the Social-Democrat Party, and in Poland the nationalist revolutionaries who also desired an agrarian reform. In short, the Communists were to support all revolutionary movements that were directed against existing social and political conditions. Marx set before the Communists the duty of working everywhere for the unification of the democratic movements throughout the world. International cooperation among democrats in the Europe of 1848 was only natural in view of the fact that the feudal and monarchical governments had united themselves beneath the banner of the Holy Alliance. Nevertheless, Marx did not intend to supplant nationalism by internationalism.
In the Communist Manifesto is to be found a sentence that is frequently torn from its context: ‘The working class knows no country.’ The sentences that follow reveal what these words were intended to mean, namely, that the working class had no country simply because others were in possession of it — it was for the working class to conquer it for themselves. This does not mean that the conception of patriotism is senseless and something which ought to be combated. In the present political state of the world the idea of nationality exists and must be respected as a political reality. It cannot be destroyed merely by creating in the working class a feeling of belonging to no country in particular. Its disappearance will only come about through a social and economic development that will gradually unite the European states after a successful proletarian revolution.
The fall of the feudal monarchy and the middle-class liberals was to be followed by the rule of democracy — self-government by the proletariat. In Marx’s view true democracy in a modern industrialised state can only mean the government of the proletariat in the sense that the working class assumes the leadership of the middle class and the peasantry. Through ‘autocratic attacks upon the right of property’ common ownership would gradually be established. Marx concluded by painting in glowing colours a picture of the disappearance of the state itself as the final step in this evolutionary process:
When in the course of evolution class differences vanish and production is concentrated in the hands of the community, governmental authority will lose its political character. In its essence governmental authority is the utilisation of the organised force of one class for the suppression of another. But when the proletariat of necessity forms itself into a class in its fight against the middle class and through a revolution becomes the governing class itself and then abolishes the old methods of production, it abolishes with these old methods of production the fundamental causes of class differences, class differences themselves, and therefore its own authority as a class. In place of the old middle-class order of society with its class divisions and differences there comes into being an association in which the free development of the individual is the preliminary condition for the free development of all.
After the overthrow of the kings, nobles and great capitalists, a democratic government in the sense of 1793 would have to suppress counter-revolution with an iron hand and carry out the abolition of ownership. Nevertheless, the authoritarian state was not an end in itself. At the last the state — that vehicle of middle-class and feudal government — would dissolve itself and in its place would appear voluntary association. Hence the ‘ideal state’ is not one of Marx’s ideals, since in his view there should no longer be any state in the future, and its place should be taken by a voluntary association of independent individuals. It was thus that he hoped to realise the highest ambition of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries — the perfect freedom and equality of mankind.
The tasks actually facing Germany in 1848 were naturally far less ambitious. The immediate problem was the destruction of princely and aristocratic power. Marx and Engels actively participated in the revolution, and in Cologne in 1848-49 they published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as ‘a mouthpiece of democracy’. It proved to be the most daring and most influential newspaper at the disposal of German democracy. In its columns Marx and Engels preached a revolutionary war on the part of the German nation against Russia, as well as against Denmark and against the Austrian Slavs, in the hope that in such a war a dictatorship similar to that of 1793 would be established that would still farther carry on the revolution. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was both nationalist and militarist in an actively democratic sense. It was not a workman’s paper in the customary meaning of the word. Indeed the various occupational and class interests of the workers received scant attention in its pages.
This was left to Stephan Born, who in 1848-49 in Berlin and Leipzig sought to pursue a truly working-class policy — a policy founded upon conditions of work, wages and hours of work that defined the position of the working class within democracy in general and more especially within the middle-class order of society. Although he was a member of the Communist Party, Born worked independently of Marx and Engels, and his great services were ignored by Marx despite the fact that they were conducted along strictly revolutionary lines. For Marx as a practical German politician only the coming democratic revolution was then of importance. This revolution could only succeed through a merciless criticism and showing-up of the middle class. This criticism, however, must concentrate for the present upon the great political problems and not upon proletarian problems of wages, hours of labour, etc. At this stage in the revolution it was necessary to reveal the ‘treachery’ of the middle class in the Danish, Polish, agrarian and constitutional questions rather than in the wages issue.
In sentences in the Communist Manifesto that have become famous Marx defined the relations between the Communists and the working class:
The Communists are not a special party as compared with the other labour parties. They have no interests that are not those of the entire proletariat... The Communists are therefore the most determined and propulsive element in the labour parties in all countries. They simply possess a clearer insight into the conditions, course and results of the proletarian revolution than the majority of the proletariat.
Who were in fact the Communists of 1848? The choice of the title is to be explained as follows. In those days the term socialist merely denoted in general anyone who was interested in questions of property ownership and in criticism of the existing order of society. A Communist was a more revolutionary type of workman who was engaged in fighting capitalism. The only organised Communists were the members of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the policy of the party was not determined by the wishes of its members.
The only true communism was the teachings and opinions of Marx himself. The only equal whom Marx then and subsequently recognised was Friedrich Engels, whose views he listened to. All the others who worked with Marx and Engels in promoting the movement were treated by them with contempt. In proof of this it is only necessary to recall the expressions used by Marx and Engels in their letters to one another in speaking of Lassalle and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The party organisation was looked upon by Marx and Engels simply as a medium through which they could better influence the working class as a whole. And never once in any serious issue did they ask what were the wishes of ‘the rebels’. If the party were to make difficulties, or to fail to perform its functions, Marx and Engels believed it would be better either to abandon it or to dissolve it, and to confront the masses alone without the restrictions imposed by cooperation with a petty-minded deliberative body. On 13 February 1851, Engels gave open expression to these views in a letter to Marx. He wrote:
At long last and for the first time for years past we have an opportunity for showing that we do not need either the support or the applause of any party in any land and that we are wholly independent of such foolishness. From this moment onwards we are answerable for ourselves alone. When the time comes in which they have need of us, then we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then at least we have peace... Moreover, we have no need to lament because the petits grands hommes avoid us. Have we not pretended for many years that Krethi Plethi was our party, although we had no party there, and those whom we at least officially recognised as members of our party... did not comprehend the very ABC of our movement? How can men like ourselves, who avoid official positions like the plague, belong to a party? What would become of us scorners of popularity if we began to be popular? What have we to do with a party that is nothing more than a herd of asses, and that swears by us because its members look upon us as their equals?
This letter was written by Engels in the bitterness of exile, and after the failure of the revolution, at a time when Marx and Engels were ostracised by the other refugees. Although this fact explains the presence of many forcible expressions in the letter, the general tone is a faithful echo of their views. The two men invariably remained loyal to this principle and never bowed before the authority of their ‘party’ in any weighty question. The ‘Communists’ of the Manifesto were in truth only Marx and Engels themselves.
It may be discerned clearly from this how in those days Marxism was introduced into the working classes as something extraneous to them. Out of the working class itself sprang with elemental force only criticism of existing conditions, especially of their own living conditions, as well as a naive utopian belief in a better future and in the great uprising of the peoples which was to effect the overthrow of all proud and oppressive rulers. The working man himself did not realise, before his eyes had been opened for him by non-working-class counsellors, that he was himself to take over the leadership of this revolution and to advance by definite stages towards the realisation of the communal order of society. The working class was indeed prepared to play its part in a national revolution at the side and under the leadership of the radical middle class. Hence the bitter disappointment aroused in the German working class in particular by the ‘betrayal’ of the common cause by the middle classes in 1848-49.
The naive and inexperienced working class was thus in accord with Marx and Engels in its belief that the first necessity was the middle-class — the national — revolution. Although the working class was prepared to participate in this revolution loyally and obediently at the side of the middle class, Marx and Engels informed it that the middle class would prove itself incapable of bringing even its own revolution to a successful conclusion, and that therefore the national revolution must be conducted in a way in which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had sought to secure the intellectual leadership of the revolution of 1848-49. The theory of the political mission of the working class was thus inoculated into that class by the two most radical minds among the middle-class intellectuals — Marx and Engels. Since, however, the working masses were unaccustomed to such a task, it was obvious that it could not be achieved by the workers alone and unaided; and that it was only to be brought to a successful conclusion by means of a strongly-disciplined organisation that blindly followed the orders of its intellectual leaders. If the organisation should prove itself unwilling to submit to so stern a discipline, then it must be destroyed and a new organisation built up in its stead. It was out of this unique and variable relationship between the radical intellectual leaders and the proletarian masses that there emerged the dictatorship of the leaders over the proletariat. The purpose of the Communist teaching was that the workers should gradually come to recognise their historic mission in the doctrines of Marx and that they should themselves achieve their own liberation. Meanwhile they were very far from such knowledge, and until they had attained to it Marx and Engels were compelled to lead autocratically the infantile working-class movement.
After the collapse of the revolution of 1848-49 Marx and Engels went to England. The Communist Party broke up in consequence of the failure. Marx saw no possibility for decades to come of putting his theories into practice. The life had gone out of Marxism and the loss was not compensated by Marx’s theoretical work on ‘capitalism’. The First International, which was founded by Marx in 1864, was not a revolutionary party in the Marxian sense. It was not even a united political party. It was no more than a loose international union of working-men’s organisations of all kinds. Its membership included the liberal and middle-class English trade unions and Latin anarchists. Two small labour parties founded by Lassalle and Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany in the 1860s were among the closest supporters of Marx within the International — a fact that did not prevent Marx and Lassalle [1] from criticising their leaders in a forcible and unjust manner.
Throughout the constitutional struggles in Prussia from 1862 to 1866, when Bismarck was making war upon the liberal majority in the Prussian Diet and ruling unconstitutionally as a dictator, Marx indulged once more in hopes of a middle-class revolution in Prussia and Germany, and he looked upon Lassalle’s refusal to share this hope as little short of treachery. But Lassalle no longer believed in the German middle class as a means to revolution, and his object in a non-revolutionary period was to organise an independent class-conscious proletarian party that should be clearly distinguished from the liberals. Nor was Lassalle’s conscience in the least disturbed by the fact that in pursuit of his great aim he was temporarily brought into tactical association with Bismarck. Marx demanded from the Prussian working class that it should fight against the Hohenzollerns and the junkers in the sense laid down by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung; and once again he reminded it that the democratic middle-class revolution was its first objective. All subsequent criticism by Marx and Engels of the Social-Democrats in Germany, up to Engel’s criticism of the Erfurt Programme of 1891, is based upon a single reproach — the reproach of insufficient preparation for the middle-class revolution, of suppressing the republican principle, of an indefinite attitude towards ‘the state’, etc.
The year 1871 saw the great workmen’s uprising known as the Paris Commune. Marx had no part in preparing this rising and its leaders were not communists. The fact that among these leaders were to be found members of the International does nothing to prove the contrary; for the loose and varied nature of the International has already been explained above. The Commune proclaimed the substitution of self-government and free association for the centralised authoritarian state. The masses were to be represented in the municipal and provincial administrations by representatives who were not to receive more than a workman’s wage. These representatives were to incorporate the deliberative, law-giving and executive powers. Modest ‘communal’ officials were to replace the parliament and bureaucracy of the ancient feudal and middle-class state. An armed nation was to act as its own army and police.
The Paris Commune took a course that was very different from that visualised by Marx. Marx had postulated a centralised and ruthless revolutionary government, inspired by the mentality of 1793, which should beat down all enemies of the people by means of a concentration of all revolutionary forces. To proclaim a federalist and communal organisation of society in the middle of a civil war seemed to Marx sentimental folly. The Commune started to realise its plans at the very point where Marx made his revolution end — with the destruction of the state and the establishment of the rule of liberty. This served at least to bring the ideals of the Commune into some sort of connexion with those of Marx.
After the defeat of the Commune Marx induced the Committee of the International to place itself unreservedly on the side of the Paris workmen. In his famous pamphlet, published in 1871, Marx proclaimed that the cause of the Commune was his own cause. All differences in theory and practice were ignored and only praise accorded to the revolutionary achievement of the Paris workmen and the destruction of the state. Marx had adopted the Commune of 1871 for his own purposes, an action unique in history in that the Commune was neither politically nor theoretically the work of Marx.
Marx thus took a fateful step. It was thus — and thus only — that he acquired for communism a real revolutionary tradition. It was then that communism became for the first time the creed of all revolutionary workers throughout the world. This great success was bought at a price: the immediate dissolution of the centralised state authority became the classical model for a working-class revolution.
The First International broke up in the 1870s in consequence of its own internal dissensions and Marx’s autocratic methods. All prospects of revolution had vanished not only in Central and Western Europe but also in America. Governmental authority had become so firmly established in Germany and France, Austria-Hungary and Italy, England and the United States of America, that armed revolt seemed to have no chance of success. Capitalism became more and more powerful everywhere. At the same time the numbers and importance of the industrial proletariat experienced a concomitant increase. The political working-class movement again became daily more evident; and especially in Germany, where in 1890 the laws against the Socialists had undergone modification. Nevertheless, the European proletariat in the heyday of the Second International after 1889 no longer had the democratic revolution as their political objective as had their forebears of 1848. Instead, their energies were devoted to improving their social and economic condition within the capitalist state. It is true that the Second International adopted Marx’s theories. These, however, were forced to undergo a singular change to make them adaptable to a non-revolutionary age. Communism now served, above all else, to enable the proletariat to differentiate itself ideologically from the middle class. In other words — to secure for itself an independent class existence within capitalist society. The socialist working class — the Marxist parties now adopted the designations ‘Socialist’ or ‘Social-Democrat’ — no longer permitted itself to be dictated to by individual intellectuals in its party organisations and trade unions. The organised workman now claimed for himself the right of self-determination within his organisation.
Thus communism changed from a revolutionary doctrine used by the extreme radicals among the middle-class intellectuals to drive the working masses onwards, to a professional ideology with whose help the class-conscious workman defended and improved his position within the middle-class order of society. Although this change in communism between 1848 and the Second International indicated a great development in the personal activity and the self-confidence of the working class, it was at the same time a definite step backwards on the revolutionary path. There was, nevertheless, still a great country in the Europe of the 1890s where communism could regain its position of 1848, and where it was not obliged to evolve any farther in a Western European form. This country was Russia. There the middle-class revolution was imminent and the finest brains among the intellectuals desired to perfect the revolution in a Marxist sense with the help of the working class. Revolutionary communism of 1848 thus found the path to further development open to it in Tsarist Russia.
The young revolutionary Lenin arrived in St Petersburg from the Volga in 1893 to put the theories of Marx into practice.
1. Engels seems to have been meant here, rather than Lassalle — MIA.