Was Marx a reactionary?

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Marx Was A Reactionary

This was the name of an interesting left communist website I saw 2 years ago. Unfortunately I believe its been taken down. Obviously they didn't think Marx was a reactionary, they were being provocative.

The idea is that the socialist movement faced enormous pressure from reformism and revisionism towards the later 19th century, well before Eduard Bernstein began his "evolutionary socialism". As I understand Engels himself was believed to have gone revisionist, his preface to Marx's "Civil War in France" saw electioneering and the ballot box as the means to socialism. There as a huge debate over this and there are different ways of interpreting what Engels meant.Young Rosa Luxemburg was involved in this debate and she won her spurs by telling off the elderly Engels. She literally "tore Uncle Freddy a new one" at some socialist congress.

The website I mentioned traced back this reformism earlier, even back to the time of Marx.Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program" wasn't published in his lifetime and he may have even toned down some of his earlier stuff.

Any thoughts on this. What was going on with Engels? Was Marx a "revisionist" or is this an absurd idea?

[Robespierre Richard]

Who cares? This isn't anywhere near part of Marxist theory and even if he did think so, that isn't anywhere within at least the edifice of Marxism-Leninism, not sure about other views. Anyone claiming otherwise would have a very hard time justifying it.

[S.Artesian]

Marx Was A Reactionary

Young Rosa Luxemburg was involved in this debate and she won her spurs by telling off the elderly Engels. She literally "tore Uncle Freddy a new one" at some socialist congress.




I don't think Rosa ever encountered Engels directly. Engels died in 1895. Rosa's essay on The Polish Question at the International Congress in London [which is to what I think you are referring] did not appear until 1896.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Okay. I vaguely remember a Rosa/Engels altercation from the Frohlich bio of Luxemburg which I read a long time ago but I probably got this garbled.

[Kronsteen]

I'd be astonished if Marx didn't have some confused ideas in his head - not least because they're well documented. He lambasted any theory which contained a hint of predestination or teleology, and his initial (short-lived) admiration of Darwin came mainly from Darwin's refusal to build such notions into his theory.

But then Marx read Pierre Tremaux, whose notions about speciation and adapation were similar to Darwin's but much vaguer, and extended to 'explain' national cultural characteristics. Marx thought it was brilliant, and even after Engels gently told him it was a load of crap, he still tried to defend and incorporate it into his picture of history.

And the predestination thing? Marx several times slipped into saying the revolution was inevitable - and even that the death throes of capitalism were only years away. He was wrong of course - he wasn't following his own insights.

BTW, I rather doubt that young Rosa could 'literally' provide Freddie English with a new anus, even if he had been alive alive at the time. :)

[Gorilla]

Young Rosa Luxemburg was involved in this debate and she won her spurs by telling off the elderly Engels. She literally "tore Uncle Freddy a new one" at some socialist congress.

I don't think Rosa ever encountered Engels directly. Engels died in 1895. Rosa's essay on The Polish Question at the International Congress in London [which is to what I think you are referring] did not appear until 1896.

I don't find Luxemburg's arguments there, or in her other writings on the Polish question, to be at all convincing and I can't imagine most of her original readers and hearers did either. And despite what I have listed in my tendency above, I happen to think she had the correct line on Poland specifically.

Not that her arguments are weak, although they are, but because they are evasive - speaking as she did from the subjective position of a Germanophone Jew in Poland the inevitably precarious status of Germanophones and Jews in any future independent Poland had to be on her mind, and by her speaking had to be on her hearers' minds as well.

I mean, you just can't address the question of historical Poland properly without addressing the minority question - and I understand that Luxemburg was determined to be a socialist tout court and not a "Jewish socialist" so I see why she didn't want to be the one to raise it. But by avoiding that specificity she comes off as evasive, has to lean too hard on more abstract arguments which become contrived and overwrought ("why not call for the independence of Alsace-Lorraine too?" well sure, Rosa, why not.) and by falsely universalizing gets trapped in some very reactionary corners especially e.g. on Ireland.

[ZeroNowhere]

As I understand Engels himself was believed to have gone revisionist, his preface to Marx's "Civil War in France" saw electioneering and the ballot box as the means to socialism.That's hardly 'revisionism'. Marx was not a voluntarist, so not a revisionist. Engels, too, referred to the "inevitability" of the social revolution, in the 90s, so was by no means revisionist. The fact that Engels didn't fall into some sort of anti-political current based on sectarian principles was hardly a novel development, and was held from the Communist Manifesto to Marx's 'Political Indifferentism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm)' and so on. Reformism has nothing to do with elections, and the content of something as a revolution has nothing to do with whether blood was spilled. It's not really surprising that the notion of revisionism has got somewhat vague; after all, as Henryk Grossman pointed out, Kautsky, one of the Marxist movement's primary opponents of revision, was nonetheless more or less in their camp on fundamental economic problems.

Really, it's fine if some left-communists wish to take up various principled stands against political struggle, but this gets problematic when such is foisted upon Marx in any period. Marx is one of those thinkers whom it is easy to be condescending to, or try to 'update' due to alleged inconsistencies or out-of-datedness, but not without being and looking foolish.