Was the Communist League (1847-52) a 'Leninist' Party

[Zanthorus]

Continuing from this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/again-and-once-p2186257/index.html#post2186257) thread, finally ladies and gentleman, after years of Stalin vs Trotsky debates, it's what you've all been waiting for, a hair-splitting debate over one of the minor issues of Marxology :D

I've put 'Leninist' in quotations in marks because whether the paternity of the disciplined, conspiratorial cadre organisation really lies with Lenin is I think still a matter for debate, but in a certain way it expresses the essence of what is at stake, namely whether, from 1847 to 1852, Marx and Engels were part of an organisation which bore resemblance to the disciplined party of professional revolutionaries enshrined and Stalinist (And also Trotskyist) mythology. I should probably note here that I don't think this debate necessarily bears much on the wisdom of the founding of the Third International, and one can defend that on grounds other than paternity through Marx, in fact I think it damages the case for that foundation unnecessarily when placed upon spurious historical analogies.


That text was a *defense statement* while the Communists were on trial.

Yes, a fucking terrible one. Marx's argument is basically that the Communist League could not possibly have been guilty of conspiring against the Prussian government because their actual aim was the worldwide overthrow of private property by the organised working-class! It's as if the defence in a petty vandalism case argued that the defendant could not possibly be guilty of the crime, since their actual intention was to level the country with the help of a strategically placed nuclear arsenal. If Marx's real intention in writing that piece was purely to provide a defence of the communists on trial then he had obviously lost a bit of his legal sense in between his university years and 1853. He even admits that the prosecution may have a point in that "the final goal of the League is the overthrowing of the social order, the method by which this is to be achieved is necessarily that of political revolution and this entails the overthrow of the Prussian state, just as an earthquake entails the overthrow of a chicken-house." (Did I mention that the Revelations is one of my favourite sources of Marx aphorisms?)

Let's face it, the Prussian government was never going to let a number of known communists in it's possession go without enacting some form of punishment. Marx himself surely knew this. Therefore I hypothesise that apart from the defence at least part of Marx's intention was to defend himself and his faction in the faction fight with the Willich-Schapper group, as is obvious from his bringing the issue up throughout the text. Willich obviously thought there was more to Marx's work than an innocent legal defence, since he took the effort of following it up with a refutation, which Marx in his turn replied to (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/01/knight.htm).

Further, according to the MECW footnotes cited on the index page of the MIA's edition (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/revelations/index.htm) of the work, the piece was republished in the Volkstaat in 1874 whilst Marx was still alive, and then again under Engels supervision in 1885 with Engels article on the history of the League attached as a preface. Clearly Marx himself thought the work of enough value in terms of historical material to have republished some twenty years after the trial was over. So, whatever it's purpose, it's clear that Marx himself (And Engels) continued to agree with the historical assessment of the League put forward in the piece.


By 1853... it was clear that the Communist League was a propaganda group not a mass party

1853? How many members did the League have in 1847? According to wiki anyway the total was about 1,000. Also I would argue that at the time Marx certainly did have some sense of the difference between a small propaganda group and a mass party. In the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere he and Engels supported the Chartists against the Owenite and other assorted Utopian Socialist sects and as far as I can tell the practice of the League was to support the extreme Left of the Chartists headed by Harney and Jones. Engels, for example, records the presence of Schapper as a speaker at a London meeting of the Chartists in an article (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/12/30b.htm) on the subject.


It dissolved itself on paper, but only on paper.

No, apart from the Willich-Schapper putschists it was completely dissolved. Marx and Engels in 1852 declared that they wanted nothing more to do with any kind of revolutionary organisation for the time being and in 1860 Marx was adamant (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1860/letters/60_02_29.htm):


"Since 1852, then, I have known nothing of ‘party’ in the sense implied in your letter. Whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849-52 were quite enough. The ‘League’, like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society."


Read his earlier stuff, especially his letters to Engels not for publication, and Marx puts things quite differently.

I've read most of the documents to do with the League from that period but nothing supporting your point of view comes immediately to mind. Since I've already given evidence from Marx's declarations after the fact that such was not the case I think the burden of proof is on you here to show that it was.


At that point the Communist League was *indeed* a pretty militarized party,

Well, lets look over the facts again. Regardless of what Marx and Engels may have thought, it remains the case that the Communist League was a small organisation of probably less than a thousand members spread across a number of different countries. It also remains the case that the only action the League ever actually engaged in was the setting up of various 'Workers' Educational' type societies in which their members played a prominent role, and distributing various League propaganda documents. When the 1848 revolutions came around the League, far from performing the role of a disciplined 'Leninist' style party, actually ceased to function completely (This is admitted by even the proponents of the thesis that the CL was 'Leninist' although to my mind it has never been satisfactorily explained). As I believe Miles noted in the other thread, there is a reason Marx and Engels put out the Neue Rheinische Zeitung instead of the organ of the CL itself which consisted of one issue published in mid-1847.

Further to the point, the late Engels certainly did not share the view of the League as a highly militarised cadre organisation. Quite the opposite, in his 1885 history (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm) he states that the chief merit of the League was it's open and democratic nature in contrast to the pre-1847 League of the Just's conspiratorial and putschist traditions, and this was the reason why he and Marx consented to join:


"It suffices to say that in the spring of 1847 Moll visited Marx in Brussels and immediately afterwards me in Paris, and invited us repeatedly, in the name of his comrades, to enter the League. He reported that they were as much convinced of the general correctness of our mode of outlook as of the necessity of freeing the League from the old conspiratorial traditions and forms."

Moreover, I think it is significant that as Monty Johnstone notes (http://www.marxists.org/archive/johnstone/1967/xx/me-party.htm), Lenin himself, by any measure a keen student of the history of the ins and outs of the 'Marx party' regarded any comparison between the RSDLP(b) and the activities of Marx in the late 1840's as erroneous, stating in 'Two Tactics of Social-Democracy that' (As quoted by Johnstone):


“It was only in April 1849, after the revolutionary newspaper had been published for almost a year ... that Marx and Engels declared themselves in favour of a special workers’ organization! Until then they were merely running an ‘organ of democracy’ unconnected by any organizational ties with an independent workers’ party. This fact, monstrous and incredible from our present-day standpoint, clearly shows us what an enormous difference there is between the German workers’ party of those days and the present Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.”

Finally, I think it is significant that out of all Marx's writings on various organisations, the Communist League is the singular instance which advocates of a 'Leninist' concept of the party can look to as presaging their own conceptions. No-one except the most determined of falsifiers can claim to find evidence of advocacy of a militarised cadre party in Marx's writings on Chartism, the IWMA, the German Social-Democratic Party and the Parti Ouvrier, or in Engels piece on the Knights of Labour. I would just like to emphasise that point before getting too deep into the minutae of the history of the League.

[KC]

This topic is pretty damn funny.


If Marx's real intention in writing that piece

I hate split threads. What piece?

[Zanthorus]

'Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/revelations/index.htm)'. The passage I originally quoted to show that the League was not concieved as an 'organised proletarian party' but instead one which 'strove to create' the latter which led in turn to 'A Spartacist Historian' here doubting the veracity of my claims and arguing that the CL was the circa 1921 Bolshevik party about eighty years before it's time was as follows:

Other secret societies aimed at organising the proletariat into a party, without concerning themselves with the existing governments. This was necessary in countries like Germany where both bourgeoisie and proletariat had succumbed to their semi-feudal governments and where in consequence a victorious assault on the existing governments, instead of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie or in any case of the so-called middle classes, would at first help them to gain power...

The “Communist League”, therefore, was no conspiratorial society, but a society which secretly strove to create an organised proletarian party because the German proletariat is publicly debarred, igni et aqua, from writing, speaking and meeting. Such a society can only be said to conspire against the status quo in the sense that steam and electricity conspire against it.

It is self-evident that a secret society of this kind which aims at forming not the government party of the future but the opposition party of the future could have but few attractions for individuals who on the one hand concealed their personal insignificance by strutting around in the theatrical cloak of the conspirator, and on the other wished to satisfy their narrow-minded ambition on the day of the next revolution, and who wished above all to seem important at the moment, to snatch their share of the proceeds of demagogy and to find a welcome among the quacks and charlatans of democracy.

[Dave B]

There is a review of the history of the communist league to and its relevance to Bolshevism by Kautsky below;

Karl Kautsky Social Democracy versus Communism
3. The Beginning of Bolshevism



The Communist League, which Marx and Engels joined in 1847, was obliged to be a secret organization under the political circumstances then prevailing on the continent of Europe. And such, indeed, it was at the beginning. Such an organization presupposes the vesting of its leadership with dictatorial power. Marx and Engels declined to accept this, however. They joined the League only after it had ceased to be a conspiracy, although it had been obliged to remain a secret organization due to the absence of all freedom of organization. Engels reports about it as follows:

“The organization (of the Communist League itself was entirely democratic, with elected officials, always subject to removal, thereby putting an end to all urge for conspiracy, which requires dictatorship.” (Introduction to K. Marx, The Cologne Trial, Zurich 1885, p.10)

The First International of 1864, like its predecessor, the Communist League, was also compelled to maintain secret organizations in some countries. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels fought repeatedly against transforming the International into a conspiratory organization, as Mazzini would have it. Marx won over Mazzini. The first International was organized not dictatorially but democractically. Marx was also opposed to the manner in which the General Workingmen’s Association was organized in Germany in 1863, in which Lassalle wielded dictatorial power. In contrast to the Lassalleans, the Eisenach group under Bebel and Liebknecht, who had Marx’s support, was organized in 1869 democratically. The dictatorial form of organization in Germany gave way to the democratic form.

Nevertheless, the urge for a conspiratory organization with unlimited dictatorial power for the leader and blind obedience of the members continued to manifest itself wherever the organization had to be a secret one, where the masses did not as yet possess their own movement and where the political organization was regarded not as a means of educating the proletariat to independence but as a means of obtaining political power at one stroke.

Not the class struggle but the putsch, the coup d’etat is thus brought into the foreground of interest, and together with this a form of militarist thinking there is carried into the party organization the kind of thinking which relies upon victory in civil war rather than upon intellectual and economic elevation of the masses. The latter are regarded as mere cannon fodder, whose utilization can be made all the easier the more obedient they are to any command, without independent thought and will of their own.

The Social Democracy of Russia was conceived as a democratic organization, in accordance with Marxian principles. But Lenin soon discovered that this was a mistake. He began to demand ever greater powers for the central organ of the party and increasingly circumscribed powers for the membership.

Paul Axelrod, Vera Zassulitch, Alexander Potresov, Julius Martov and, later, George Plekhanov opposed him. Even Rosa Luxemburg, who was more inclined to side with him in other matters, expressed misgivings on the score of dictatorship which Lenin sought to introduce in the party.

In his pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) Lenin went so far as to assert:

“Bureaucratism against democracy – that must be the organizational principle of the revolutionary Social-Democracy against the organizational principle of the opportunists.” (p.51.)

I take the following from a criticism of Lenin by Rosa Luxemburg in Die Neue Zeit (XXII.2). She declared:


“The establishment of centralization in the Social Democracy on the basis of blind obedience, to the very smallest detail, to a central authority, in all matters of party organization and activity; a central authority which does all the thinking, attends to everything and decides everything; a central authority isolating the centre of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu-as demanded by Lenin-appears to us as an attempt to transfer mechanically the organizational principles of Blanquist conspiratory workmen’s circles to the Social Democratic mass movement. (p.488, 489.)

“Lenin’s ideas are calculated principally to promote control of party activity and not its development, to foster the limitation rather than the growth, the strangulation rather than the solidarity and expansion of the movement.” (p.492.)

That was how Rosa Luxemburg characterized Leninism from its very beginning


http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1930s/demvscom/ch03.htm

Although Leninists vanguardists like to draw a clear distinction between themselves and Blanquism by taking a narrow definition of Blanquism,

Blanquism was before Bolshevism considered in more general terms.

Thus;


The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only seize the helm of state, but also by energetic and relentless action, to keep power until they succeeded in drawing the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. this conception involved, above all, the strictest dictatorship and centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm


And in fact Trotsky described the Bolsheviks thus as generic Blanquist, in the last chapter of his Our Political Tasks in 1904.


I think that to some extant Marx & Engels had Blanquist/vanguardist tendencies in their early days, as in;

The Class Struggles In France and recanted in the Introduction by Frederick Engels in 1895;



The proletarian masses themselves, even in Paris, after the victory, were still absolutely in the dark as to the path to be taken. And yet the movement was there, instinctive, spontaneous, irrepressible. Was not this just the situation in which a revolution had to succeed, led certainly by a minority, but this time not in the interests of the minority, but in the real interests of the majority?----- (what is that if it isn't vanguardism?)

If, in all the longer revolutionary periods, it was so easy to win the great masses of the people by the merely plausible and delusive views of the minorities thrusting themselves forward, how could they be less susceptible to ideas which were the truest reflex of their economic position, which were nothing but the clear, comprehensible expression of their needs, of needs not yet understood by themselves, but only vaguely felt?

To be sure, this revolutionary mood of the masses had almost always, and usually very speedily, given way to lassitude or even to a revulsion to its opposite, so soon as illusion evaporated and disappointment set in. But here it was not a question of delusive views, but of giving effect to the very special interests of the great majority itself, interests, which at that time were certainly by no means clear to this great majority, but which must soon enough become clear in the course of giving practical effect to them, by their convincing obviousness.

And if now, as Marx showed in the third article, in the spring of 1850, the development of the bourgeois republic that had arisen out of the "social" revolution of 1848 had concentrated the real power in the hands of the big bourgeoisie—monarchistically inclined as it was—and, on the other hand, had grouped all the other social classes, peasants as well as petty bourgeoisie, round the proletariat, so that, during and after the common victory, not they, but the proletariat grown wise by experience, must become the decisive factor—was there not every prospect here of turning the revolution of the minority into the revolution of the majority?


History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/intro.htm

[Kiev Communard]

Although Leninists vanguardists like to draw a clear distinction between themselves and Blanquism by taking a narrow definition of Blanquism,

Blanquism was before Bolshevism considered in more general terms.

Yes, to a certain extent Bolshevism was a combination of Blanquism as a political strategy with a Kautskyan economic programme (i.e. the blending of "resolute vanguard Party" with a notion of socialism as "state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people"), so I do not think we should absolve Kautsky (for all his self-righteous proclamations of the support for "democracy") from his own share of guilt here.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Kautsky made key mistakes, but the road to power before and during revolutionary periods - presented as an alternative to reform coalitions and parliamentary cretinism on the one hand and mass strike, councilist, and really spontaneist fetishes on the other - wasn't one of them.