Chapter 1: Marxism as a political strategy

  1. Q
    Q
    Let the discussion on chapter 1 commence.

    1. Marxism as a political strategy

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The essence of ‘revolutionary strategy’ is its long-term character: it is the frame within which we think about how to achieve our goals over the course of a series of activities or struggles, each of which has its own tactics.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]We must begin our review of the relevant strategic discussions with those of Marx and Engels and their early co-thinkers, and of the Second International down to the crisis of 1914-18. There are two reasons for this. The first is that in some respects our times are closer to theirs than they are to the ‘short 20th century’. On the one hand, the late 19th and early 20th century was both more ‘globalised’ and more dominated by financial capitals than the period of imperial blocs and wars, and the cold war, which dominated the 20th century. On the other, the first part of the period was one of the scattered forces of the workers’ movement beginning to pull themselves together, either from a low start, or after the defeat of the Paris Commune and of the First International; and this, again, is more like our own times than the period of massively dominant socialist and communist parties.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Secondly, 1918-21 saw the defeat of the historic strategic concept of Bolshevism (‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’) as well as those of Trotsky (‘workers’ government supported by the poor peasantry’) and Luxemburg (that the workers’ movement, set free by revolutionary crisis, would solve its own problems). The concrete form of the defeat was that Russia remained isolated.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]What happened instead was to render concrete the 1850s warnings of Marx and Engels against the premature seizure of power in Germany,16 which formed the basis of Kautsky’s ‘caution’ in the 1890s and 1900s. By choosing to represent the peasantry and other petty proprietors (especially state bureaucrats), the workers’ party disabled itself from representing the working class, but instead became a sort of collective Bonaparte.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The Bolshevik leaders could see and feel it happening to themselves,17 and in 1919-1923 the Comintern flailed around with a succession of short-lived strategic concepts, each of which would - it was hoped - break the isolation of the revolution. These strategic concepts are not simply rendered obsolete by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The fate of the other ‘socialist countries’ also proves them to be a strategic blind alley.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]When you are radically lost it becomes necessary to retrace your steps. In the present case, this means retracing our steps to the strategic debates of the early workers’ movement and the Second International, which defined the strategic choices available to socialists in the early 20th century, and in this sense led to the blind alley of 1918-91.[/FONT]

    ‘[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Marxism’ as a political platform[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Marxism as a political position makes some very simple claims, which are very concisely expressed in the preamble to the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier, drafted by Marx:[/FONT]
    “[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;[/FONT]
    “[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production (land, factories, ships, banks, credit);[/FONT]
    “[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif](1) The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif](2) The collective form, the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;[/FONT]
    “… [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]that this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class - or proletariat - organised in a distinct political party;[/FONT]
    “[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]That such an organisation must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation ...” 18[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This line can be seen as a strategy from two different angles. It is a strategy for the emancipation of the working class, through collective action for communism. It is a strategy for the emancipation of “all human beings without distinction of sex or race”, or for communism, through the emancipation of the working class. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This single/double strategy is the long-term goal pursued by Marx and Engels from the time of the Communist manifesto. The rest of their work - Marx’s critique of political economy, the development of ‘historical materialism,’ etc - consists of arguments for this strategy. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier contains a single additional element: that the proletariat must be “organised in a distinct political party”.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A ‘Marxist’ party, then, consists in principle of nothing more than a party which is committed to the ideas that the working class can only emancipate itself - and humanity - through struggling for communism, and that the struggle for communism can only be victorious through the action of the working class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] I use ‘communism’ here not to mean the ideas of ‘official’ communism or even the early Comintern, but rather the counterposition made much earlier by Marx and Engels in the Communist manifesto: communism implies overcoming the state, nationality, and the family as an economic institution,19 as opposed to ‘socialism’, which is statist and nationalist and can be feudal-reactionary.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] To call a party ‘Marxist’ thus does not in the least entail that it should be, for example, a Trotskyist party. A party which held to the strategic line of Kautsky’s Road to power (without the political conclusions of Kautsky’s theoretical statism and nationalism, which flowered more fully in his later work) would still be a Marxist party.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]
    The state and the nation
    [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]There are, however, two additional elements of strategy which can be found in Marx and Engels’ writings, which are not in the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier, but follow from the fundamental claims.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The first concerns the question of the state. Both Marx’s famous and Engels’ less famous critiques of the 1875 Gotha programme of the unification of the German socialist parties are emphatic that the workers’ movement must not propose dependence on the existing state or the “free state”.20 It should be emphasised that this is not a matter of making the overthrow of the existing state the precondition for all else. The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier mostly consists of partial demands consistent with the survival of capitalism. Both Marx and Engels, in criticising the Gotha programme, insist that compromises of expression for the sake of avoiding prosecution are perfectly acceptable; the fundamental problem they see in the draft in this respect is that it miseducates the workers by promoting dependence on the state (state aid, state education, etc).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The second is that the proletarian class is an international class and the proletarian movement is necessarily an international movement. This was again a strong strain in the critiques of the Gotha programme and was already present in the Communist manifesto. It follows logically from the international character of ... capitalism.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Thus Marx in the Critique of the Gotha programme: “It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle - insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist manifesto says, ‘in form’. But the ‘framework of the present-day national state’ - for instance, the German empire - is itself, in its turn, economically ‘within the framework’ of the world market, politically ‘within the framework’ of the system of states. Every businessman knows that German trade is at the same time foreign trade, and the greatness of Herr Bismarck consists, to be sure, precisely in his pursuing a kind of international policy.”21[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Beyond these points, for Marx and Engels and their co-thinkers, all else is tactics, whether it is trade union struggles, standing in elections, legality and illegality, insurrections, street-fighting and/or guerrilla warfare.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Class[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Widely defended arguments suggest that the core claim of Marxism - that the struggle for communism is the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and that the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved through the struggle for communism - is false. Instead, the struggle for the emancipation of the working class is part only of the struggle for human liberation: “Relations of oppression or exploitation arising from patriarchy, humanity’s predatory conduct towards the rest of the biosphere, racism, the denial of political and individual freedom, choice of sexual orientation or minority cultures” are equally important and cannot be “mechanically transferred back to the resolution of the central economic conflict.” And perhaps “growing complexity and fragmentation of societies” leads inter alia to “a weakening of the feeling of belonging to the working class and a spatial deconstruction of labour, which makes more fragile the forms of organisation of the traditional labour movement and encourages a decline in unionisation” (both from Cedric Durand in the 2006 LCR debate).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] These are very widespread views on the left; but they are mistaken. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It is possible to respond to them by pointing out that working class self-identification is as much a subjective as an objective reality, as Callinicos did in the 2006 LCR debate, and by pointing to the political futility displayed in Britain by supporters of these ideas. It can be added that the “growing fragmentation of labour” has not shown any tendency to recreate genuine petty family production: on the contrary, this continues to retreat globally. What it has recreated is widespread employment in relatively small workplaces. These were the conditions of the 19th century workforce - under which Chartism, the early trade union movement, the First International and the early socialist parties were created.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The implication, then, is not ‘good-bye to the working class’, but, rather, that the means of struggle need to change: they need to shift from workplace collective organisation to district collective organisation. It is also that trade unions need to become again - as Marx called them - an alliance of the employed and the unemployed;22 and one which performs significant welfare and education functions rather than simply being an instrument of collective bargaining on wages and conditions.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]At a more fundamental level of theory, the authors of the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier could neither have claimed that “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race”, nor that the working class needs a “distinct political party”if they had believed that the working class is what Eurocommunists and other theorists of ‘beyond the working class’ have argued. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It is not the employed workers’ strength at the point of production which animated Marx and Engels’ belief that the key to communism is the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat and vice versa. On the contrary, it is the proletariat’s separation from the means of production, the impossibility of restoring small-scale family production, and the proletariat’s consequent need for collective, voluntary organisation, which led them to suppose that the proletariat is a potential ‘universal class’, that its struggles are capable of leading to socialism and to a truly human society.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This is both a positive judgment and a negative judgment. On the side of the positive judgment, it is true that the defeats the workers’ movement has suffered since the new ‘roll-back’ offensive of capital began in the late 1970s give superficial reasons for doubt and despair. But even amid these defeats and in defeated struggles, the working class has shown the ability to draw in behind it all the oppressed and exploited in struggles like the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain, while new movements - often unexpected by the left - have arisen and shaken local states, as, again in the 1980s, in Brazil, South Korea and South Africa. These, too, have run into the sand. But the whole history of the workers’ movement - before Marx and Engels as well as after - is not one of continuous advance but of advance and retreat. The present retreats do not in themselves give grounds for supposing ‘good-bye to the working class’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The negative judgment consists in the proposition that, however weak the workers’ movement, general human emancipation on the basis of petty family property and production is impossible and hence the idea of this or that section of the petty proprietors, or the undifferentiated ‘people’, serving as a revolutionary subject is illusory. This judgment was founded on the whole history of radical movements down to Marx and Engels’ time. It has been emphatically confirmed in the 20th century - by, precisely, the defeats suffered by the workers’ movement through submerging itself in a ‘worker-peasant alliance’, ‘national movement’ or ‘broad democratic alliance’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The most serious of these defeats is Stalinism itself. Stalinism did not take and hold power in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat over the other classes. It took it in the name of the worker-peasant alliance and held it in the name of a ‘socialism’ in which the obvious existence of classes in the Stalinist states was denied.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The negative judgment is also demonstrated in a different way by the fact that the ‘social movements’ on which authors of this type place so much emphasis are themselves a broken reed. The ‘women’s movement’ in the US and Britain, where it began, has since the later 1970s been so divided by class, race, sexuality and politics as to be no more than an ideological expression. The same is true a fortiori of the ‘lesbian and gay movement’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] What began in the 1960s-70s as a common movement against racism has long splintered into a mass of much smaller ethnic and religious constituencies asserting individualised forms of identity politics. One group of elders, imams, etc are preferred interlocutors of the state; another layer of the ethnic minorities has entered into the business and professional classes; neither represents the youth, who periodically take to the streets.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] ‘Green politics’ in its broadest sense is another alternative favoured by advocates of the end of class politics. Yet it is even clearer than in the other ‘social movements’ that greens are forced to choose between one or another form of economic organisation. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] They are divided and unable to give a lead to society as a whole because they are unable to choose collectively one way or the other. And when a ‘distinctively green’ policy is produced, it offers precisely the reactionary utopia of a return to petty family production - or in extreme cases (‘deep greens’), the death of the vast majority of the present world human population in order to return to an idealised version of hunter-gatherer societies.23[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Party[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The idea that the working class needed to unite and organise for political action - action at the level of the state, addressing the society as a whole - was inherited by Marx and Engels from Chartism. It was opposed by the Proudhonists, who advocated simply building a co-operative movement. It was opposed by the Bakuninists in the name of revolutionary spontaneity, direct action and the revolutionary general strike.24[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The definition of the proletariat by its separation from the means of production (as opposed to peasants and artisans) means that the proletariat as a class includes the whole class - employed and unemployed, men, women and children - which is dependent on the wage fund. This, in turn, means that, though trade unions are one of the most immediate forms of worker organisation, it is only party organisation - organisation based in the working class districts, and tackling all the aspects of the experience of the class - which is really capable of expressing the unity of the class as a class, its independent interests, its existence as a class ‘for itself’. It is party organisation which can embed the particular trade union struggles in the solidarity of the broader masses and legitimate them against the attempts of the bosses to isolate them and present them as sectional claims.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In Britain in the recent past those Labour ward branches which had significant roots withered away, the Eurocommunists destroyed the old CPGB, and the Trotskyists were unable, due to their syndicalist-sectionalist sectarianism, to rebuild an alternative. This left the rank and file trade union militants isolated, exposed and demoralised in the face of the Thatcherite offensive. This was demonstrated positively in the 1984-85 miners’ strike by the ability of the strike to generate very broad solidarity, since it was based in mining communities rather than simply the pits, and was fought in the interests of the unemployed and children as well as presently employed workers. It was demonstrated negatively in the same struggle. The Eurocommunists removed the party key to the trade union and Labour broad left, and supported their Labour co-thinkers, the later Blairite ‘soft left’. As a result, the broad mass sentiment of solidarity had no political channels to flow into generalised active resistance to the government. A movement without a political party is not enough.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]More immediately, as Callinicos quite correctly pointed out in his intervention in the 2006 LCR debate, the Social Forums were in reality created by a party - the Brazilian Workers Party - and the European Social Forum was primarily animated by Rifondazione Comunista and to a considerable extent populated by party activists wearing one or another ‘social movement’ hat. A movement ‘without political parties’ will rapidly prove to be illusory.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This, of course, leaves on one side the question: what sort of party? In a sense, this was already debated between Marx and Engels and their co-thinkers on the one hand, and the Lassalleans and Bakuninists on the other. But systematic argument - and the disastrous errors of Stalinism and Trotskyism on the question - belong to the strategies of the 20th century.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]State and nation[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Another common argument is that the possibilities of working class political action have been reduced by the decline of the nation-state and emergence of transnational governance structures, and the internationalisation of production. But in truth, what’s new here? After all, I have quoted Marx, above, writing in 1875, as saying that “the ‘framework of the present-day national state’ - for instance, the German empire - is itself, in its turn, economically ‘within the framework’ of the world market, politically ‘within the framework’ of the system of states”.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A second wave of ‘globalisation theorists’, indeed, have moved beyond the idea that globalisation is something radically new, to the idea that it is a return in some sense to the economic-political characteristics of the late 19th century.25 They may like this or dislike it, but the fact remains that the nationalisation of production and exchange within competing trade blocs in the mid-20th century and the ‘managed trade’ of the cold war period were innovations in relation to the period when Marx and Engels wrote.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Something has indeed changed. What has changed is that the foundations of a series of illusions about working class strategy are gradually being destroyed. The system of rival imperial trade blocs promoted the illusion that a really autarkic national economic and political regime was possible. The grand example of this illusion was the Soviet Union. After World War II, US imperialism’s policy of the ‘containment’ of ‘communism’ led it, first, not to attempt immediately the reconquest of the USSR but to cooperate in the bureaucracy’s self-blockade and, second, to make economic and political concessions both to its former rivals in Europe and Japan, and to nationalists in the semi-colonial/former colonial countries. The effect of all three was indirect concessions to the working classes. This, too, in the period 1948-79 promoted the idea that the working class (or the oppressed peoples) could achieve permanent gains through the nation-state and within the existing nation-state system.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]After the disasters, from their point of view, of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the US turned to a policy of rolling back both ‘communism’ and the concessions made to other states and to the working class. Among the critical instruments of this shift have been the ideology and promotion of ‘human rights’, free marketeering and conservative NGOs as instruments for regime change, and the more aggressive deployment of international institutions (IMF, WTO, etc, etc). The result is to reduce nation-states’ room for manoeuvre and their willingness to make concessions to the local working class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The strategic implication is that against the internationally coordinated action of the capitalists, the working class needs to develop its own internationally coordinated action. Marx and Engels criticised the Lassalleans - and hence the Gotha programme - for putting their faith in the nation-state and (a corollary) putting off the internationally coordinated action of the working class - international strikes, etc - to an indefinite future of the ‘brotherhood of peoples’. The evidence both of the ‘short 20th century’ and of the beginning of the 21st is utterly overwhelming in favour of the correctness of this criticism and the strategic stance it expresses.[/FONT]

    ‘[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Unity is strength’[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In 1875 the German socialists made a choice with which Marx and Engels disagreed: to unify their forces on the basis of a programme which had a ‘diplomatic’ character and obscured their differences. The fusion happened at just the right time: the process of German unification under Prussian leadership was accelerating, and the German economy had arrived at industrial take-off. In consequence the unified Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) was immensely successful, growing in the later 19th and early 20th century to a vast and deeply rooted system of mass organisations.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The result was that the principle of unity at all costs became generalised and incorporated into the strategy of the socialist movement. Unifications and attempts to unify divided forces were promoted in France, Italy and elsewhere. The 1904 Congress of the Second International voted to call on divided socialist organisations in individual countries to unify. Supporters could point to the awful example of disunited and hence ineffective socialist movements in Britain, the USA and - perhaps surprising to modern far-left eyes - Russia.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Were the leaders of the Second International correct to incorporate the principle of unity at all costs into their strategy? The answer is complex and will require consideration of the great split during and immediately after 1914-18, the Comintern’s party concept, and the ‘united front’ policy. But some assessment can be made of the elementary idea.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The positive effects of broad unity - in substance a ‘snowball effect’ - were demonstrated in the rise of the SDP and, more broadly, the Second International. They have been reconfirmed positively by the growth of the communist parties in their ‘popular front’ periods, and more recently by the successes of such unitary attempts as the Brazilian Workers Party, Rifondazione’s opening to the Italian far left groups and Scottish Militant Labour’s creation of the Scottish Socialist Party. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]They have been reconfirmed negatively by the incapacity of the splintered Trotskyist and Maoist left to get beyond small squabbling groups: the SWP, in spite of its feigned lofty indifference to the groups smaller than itself, is perceived by the broad masses as being in the same league as them, and the same is true of the larger groups in every country. Even the LCR and Lutte Ouvrière, with approx 5% of the votes each in the 2002 presidential election, have been held back from a real breakthrough by their disunity.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]On the other hand, in a certain sense the European working class in 1914-18 paid the price of ‘unity at all costs’. It did so not at the outbreak of war, when the leaders were carried along by the nationalisms of the mass of the class, but when the character of the war became clear, as the statist-nationalist right wing held the whip hand over an anti-war left which was afraid to split the movement. Rather similarly, Chinese workers in 1927, Spanish workers in 1937-39, French workers in 1940, Indonesian workers in 1965 and Chilean workers in 1973 paid a savage price for the communist parties’ policy of ‘unity at all costs’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]More immediately, it is far from clear that the Gotha policy actually succeeded in ‘overcoming’ the differences between Eisenachers and Lassalleans. By the 1890s, the SDP had escaped from illegality and reached a size at which attitudes to the state and to government participation (at least in the provinces) became a live issue. The question of the state, government, coalitions and socialist strategy then resurfaced for debate in the SDP and (in varying forms) across the Second International. The questions were not posed in identical forms to the differences between Eisenachers and Lassalleans, but their underlying principle was common.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Around the turn of the 19th and 20th century we can identify roughly three ‘strategic hypotheses’ in the socialist movement. The right wing is traditionally identified with reference to Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary socialism,26 though it in fact included various forms of ‘pure trade unionist’ politics, ethical socialism and so on. The centre can be identified roughly with reference to Karl Kautsky’s (relatively late) The road to power.27 The left can similarly be identified, even more roughly, and equally on the basis of a late text, with Rosa Luxemburg’s The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions.28 “Even more roughly” because Luxemburg’s position is in some respects intermediate between the Kautskyites and the core of the left. Both the content of the debate in the Second International and its limitations are essential if we are to understand modern strategic questions rather than merely repeating old errors.[/FONT]
  2. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    [FONT=Verdana]‘[/FONT][FONT=Verdana]Unity is strength’
    [/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]In 1875 the German socialists made a choice with which Marx and Engels disagreed: to unify their forces on the basis of a programme which had a ‘diplomatic’ character and obscured their differences. The fusion happened at just the right time: the process of German unification under Prussian leadership was accelerating, and the German economy had arrived at industrial take-off. In consequence the unified Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) was immensely successful, growing in the later 19th and early 20th century to a vast and deeply rooted system of mass organisations.
    [/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]The result was that the principle of unity at all costs became generalised and incorporated into the strategy of the socialist movement. Unifications and attempts to unify divided forces were promoted in France, Italy and elsewhere. The 1904 Congress of the Second International voted to call on divided socialist organisations in individual countries to unify. Supporters could point to the awful example of disunited and hence ineffective socialist movements in Britain, the USA and - perhaps surprising to modern far-left eyes - Russia.[/FONT]
    From the introduction to the Engels-Bebel Correspondence:
    "During the discussion on unity [of both parties], which started in 1872, the Londoners [Marx & Engels] intervene because from their point of view the Eisenachers were making to many concessions to the Lassalleans, even in the Volksstaat [Free State - newspaper]. Bebel quite rightly assumed that Engels based his claims on false information from Hepner; he himself wished for the destruction of the Lassallean myth and beged Marx for a clear explanation [Darlegung] of his theoretical opinion [Auffassung] against Lassalle's [ideas]. It is true, he defended himself [by saying] that the opinion of Marx and Engels on Lassalle wasn't unknown, [but] that a ruthless attack [Vorgehen] would have hurt the feelings of the masses. One cannot forget that Lassalle's works formed the basic understanding of socialism by the masses; they were 20 times more in circulation than any other socialist work. Even worse, from London it was impossible for Engels to judge the German affairs [Verhältnisse] in correctly [genau] [...]."

    [...]

    The polemic [Auseinandersetzung] against Lassalle [his ideas] also could not take an offending form. Already ten years later, when Engels wanted to destroy Lassalle in a work regaring Bismarck's state socialism, Bebel was of the opinion that the old [ehemals eifrigsten] Lassalleans would not be disturbed by an attack on Lassalle. But it could not take a hostile form. Again ten years later Bebel had a discussion with Bernstein because his introduction to Lassalle was too light-hearted. He didn't have a problem with the destruction of the legend of Lassalle, and he wasn't afraid of a sharp polemic; but as a leader of the party he had to guard the party from further damage: the psychological effect from a personally sharp or even hateful critique could harm any sympathy gain from the masses.

    That same opinion explains Bebel's relation to Engel's critique of the question of unity. Here too the theoretician speaks to the party leader. Years later Bebel recalled: "You see, it wasn't easy to get to an agreement with the old ones [Marx & Engels] from London. What from our point of view was the right thing [berechnung], a correct tactic, was in their eyes a sign of weakness and an irresponsible negligence; but in the end unity was an important achievement."
    Am I right when I think that many parties on the radical left sometimes apply the same logic? The following is the answer given by Marx:

    Apart from this, it is my duty not to give recognition, even by diplomatic silence, to what in my opinion is a thoroughly objectionable programme that demoralises the Party.


    Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible – and the conditions of the item did not permit it – to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.


    The Lassallean leaders came because circumstances forced them to. If they had been told in advance that there would be haggling about principles, they would have had to be content with a programme of action or a plan of organisation for common action. Instead of this, one permits them to arrive armed with mandates, recognises these mandates on one's part as binding, and thus surrenders unconditionally to those who are themselves in need of help. To crown the whole business, they are holding a congress before the Congress of Compromise, while one's own party is holding its congress post festum. One had obviously had a desire to stifle all criticism and to give one's own party no opportunity for reflection. One knows that the mere fact of unification is satisfying to the workers, but it is a mistake to believe that this momentary success is not bought too dearly.
    For the rest, the programme is no good, even apart from its sanctification of the Lassallean articles of faith.
    I think that, in the case of the Third International, this letter to bracke formed the theoretical and exemplary basis for the development of the United Front tactic. But today's parties of the lef don't even always succeed at learning from this example; let alone applying this tactic.
  3. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    It is possible to respond to them by pointing out that working class self-identification is as much a subjective as an objective reality, as Callinicos did in the 2006 LCR debate, and by pointing to the political futility displayed in Britain by supporters of these ideas. It can be added that the “growing fragmentation of labour” has not shown any tendency to recreate genuine petty family production: on the contrary, this continues to retreat globally. What it has recreated is widespread employment in relatively small workplaces. These were the conditions of the 19th century workforce - under which Chartism, the early trade union movement, the First International and the early socialist parties were created.

    The implication, then, is not ‘good-bye to the working class’, but, rather, that the means of struggle need to change: they need to shift from workplace collective organisation to district collective organisation. It is also that trade unions need to become again - as Marx called them - an alliance of the employed and the unemployed; and one which performs significant welfare and education functions rather than simply being an instrument of collective bargaining on wages and conditions.
    I said this in my CSR chapter on class relations (Chapter 2), that "relatively small workplaces" are the result of a growth of the "niche" petit-bourgeoisie.



    Now, as for the alliance of the employed and the unemployed, the One Big Union concept that Macnair briefly criticized needs to be look at in further detail (and also note the correct separation between the economic function and the political, not continued illusions of growing the political function out of the economic):

    Note: I had meant to post this earlier, but other things distracted me from it. This is from the June 1 issue of Working People’s Advocate. -- HJM

    The Character and Structure of
    Revolutionary Industrial Unionism


    At the core of the Workers Party in America’s general strategy, as outlined in “Our Road to Liberation,” is revolutionary industrial unionism. Martin Sayles describes what this strategy means to the Party and the workers’ movement.

    THE WORKERS PARTY in America adopted revolutionary industrial unionism as part of an overall strategy designed to give us a clear outline of how to help organize and build the workers’ movement into one that can not only challenge capitalist rule, but defeat it and establish a working people’s republic.

    As members of the Party have learned through our own bitter experiences over the years, without a clear strategy and plan, even the best political organization fails. Being vague and coy about what we want to do and, more importantly, how we want to do it only breeds mistrust among our fellow workers.

    We in the Workers Party have no hidden agenda — no special path that only the select few know. Our strategy is there for all to see.

    This alone sets us apart from many other self-described socialist and communist organizations. They will talk about the need for “struggle” and the “fight for socialism,” but when you ask them what that means and how they plan to achieve their goals, they fall silent.

    Sometimes, the silence is due to an inability to actually answer the question. That is, they have no strategy, and they amble on, staggering from protest to protest (some of which they organize themselves), thinking that if they do enough of the right kind of mindless “activism” then they will magically achieve “socialism.”

    Others, however, owe their silence to an unwillingness to answer. Their strategy is a well-guarded secret, and revealing it would rob them of that secret. They cover themselves with “mass lines” and “transitional methods;” they treat unity of revolutionary forces as a “tactic” to enhance their own sect. Real unity would be too much of a threat to their own control.

    And, in all reality, revolution is the last thing they want. It would unleash too many forces that it simply could not control.

    SO, what is our strategy? More specifically, what is revolutionary industrial unionism? Put simply, the revolutionary industrial union, or RIU, is the concrete development of workers’ power within the shell of capitalist society. It is the vehicle and means by which the working class will liberate itself at the points of production and distribution.

    The strategy of revolutionary industrial unionism is, at once, defensive and offensive. This is because the RIU, as a workers’ organization, is both a defensive and offensive one.

    A union of any kind is, by its nature, a defensive organization. It defend the basic interests, rights and livelihoods of working people on a daily basis. The RIU is no exception.

    Unlike the corporatist company unions that “negotiate” away what workers have gained in the past, or the reactionary labor unions that ask for crumbs when they could demand the whole piece, the revolutionary industrial union fights for everything it can get for its fellow workers — including workers who are not involved in the RIU — at all times.

    From the “bread and butter” issues to heath and safety to fighting workplace discrimination, the revolutionary industrial union makes it its business to defend all working people, regardless of whether or not they support us. It is here, through this kind of organization, that demands for meaningful reform have a home.

    The RIU understands the reality contained in the classic labor slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” As we’ve seen with the recent attacks on autoworkers, when one section of working people is put under the gun, all sections end up under fire. The capitalists have already begun to use the success they had imposing massive concessions on workers at the Big Three to squeeze our brothers and sisters in other industries and services in the economy.

    BUT THIS IS just one half of the equation. After all, there’s nothing really revolutionary about a union or other labor organization defending what working people have gained in the past — although you really couldn’t tell that looking at the situation today.

    What makes the RIU revolutionary is its ability to go on the offensive, to move from simply fighting for better wages and working conditions to challenging the power of the capitalists and their managers. It does this through allowing working people to organize and educate themselves about how to administer their workplaces and their communities.

    The cornerstone principle of revolutionary industrial unionism is the achievement of workers’ control of production and distribution — of the industries and services in the economy. Because of this, the RIU is structured in such a way that any working person can take an active and leading role in the revolutionary reconstruction of the economy and society.

    In this sense, the RIU serves as a school of communism. That is, it aids in the intellectual, cultural, political, economic and social development of working people so that they can responsibly and rationally lead our society into its future. Further, the RIU provides a practical structure and framework through which working people can rule in the transition from capitalist class society to communism.

    AT THE HEART of the structure of revolutionary industrial unionism is the One Great Union of all workers.

    This union represents the strength the workers’ movement draws from as the vehicle of revolutionary change. The RIU is the engine of that vehicle; without it, the workers’ movement cannot mobilize to take on and decisively defeat the exploiting and oppressing classes.

    This is where the industrial element of revolutionary industrial unionism comes in. As opposed to the craft and professional unions, which organize by job classification and trade, we organize by industry, from top to bottom. No worker is left out of the union, except by their own choice. And even in those instances, the RIU nevertheless makes all efforts to build bonds of solidarity and unity with them.

    William Trautmann, one of the leaders of the original Workers’ International Industrial Union, best described the role of the union in revolutionary industrial unionism: “[For] a labor organization to correctly represent the working class must have two things in view: first, it must combine wage workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the working people in their struggle for fewer hours, more wages and better conditions; second, it must offer a final solution of the labor problem — an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bull-pens and scabbing of one against the other.”

    By bringing all workers together into One Great Union, the ability of the capitalists and their managers to “whipsaw” — to pit one group of workers against another in a race to the bottom — is non-existent. Strikes and other types of labor actions would no longer be isolated; the One Great Union would see to it that picket lines — even informational ones! — are honored by all workers. And attempts to use the bosses’ courts to shut down workers’ action would be meaningless and unenforceable.

    The exploiters would no longer be able to point out the window to an army of unemployed workers and say to a worker demanding better, “If you ask for more, I’ll just fire you and hire one of them.” This is because unemployed workers are our brothers and sisters, too, and are welcome in the One Great Union.


    OUT OF THE Units and Locals of the RIU comes the workplace committee. If the One Great Union itself is the heart of revolutionary industrial unionism, then the workplace committee is its soul.

    In “Our Road to Liberation,” we describe the workplace committee as “the school for workers’ control of production.... It is the workplace committee, as a part of the revolutionary industrial union, that oversees the development of self-management and self-organization at the point of production — that assists in the training and development of workers to coordinate production, work with other industries to maintain a steady supply chain, and move the product of workers’ collective labor from the factory to the store.”

    It is through the workplace committee that working people get their first experience of leading a new society. It is here that democracy begins its great and final transition from a form of governance and rule to a daily practice — from an ideology imposed from the outside to an innate part of our culture and thinking.

    As you see in the graphical representation of the structure of revolutionary industrial unionism, the workplace committee is elected by workers meeting in each organized unit of a workplace. Because the One Great Union includes all workers, including temporary and contract employees (provided they are workers), and seeks to include, at the very least, the voice of all workers at a facility, all working people find their interests in those elected to serve as a part of a workplace committee.

    In the period before the defeat of capitalism, the role of the workplace committee is primarily educational. Its role is to prepare workers for the day when they take control of production and distribution. In the transition from capitalism to the classless communist society, the workplace committee functions as the focal point for the reorganization and reconstruction of production and distribution.

    FROM THE FIRST day of the workers’ republic, the workplace committee’s chief task to improve and develop their facility’s capability to provide whatever goods and services they create or handle within the framework of the emerging economic system.

    The workplace committee coordinates with every factory, plant, shop and facility in its supply chain to make sure that all the materials needed to insure that production continues arrive on time and in good order. The workplace committee also makes sure that all necessary accounting and bookkeeping is done in a timely and efficient manner. They would also be responsible for coordinating with workplace units on the election of any ad hoc management or supervision that might be needed.

    Since each plant and facility is part of a larger economy, coordination is needed all along the line. Workplace committees would be responsible for electing delegates to meet in regional conventions and industry-wide congresses. These conventions and congresses would further the advance of the reconstruction of the economy in line with the new mode of production. They would make sure that the supply chain of parts and raw materials did not break down at any given point. In situations where the supply chain continues in places where capitalism continues to rule, the congresses, in conjunction with elected delegates from the workers’ republic, would engage in negotiations to secure continued delivery and production of the materials they provide.

    The industry-wide congresses would also coordinate among themselves — for example, delegates of the Congress of the Auto Industry with delegates of the Congress of Transportation, to work on an agreement for the movement and delivery of materials, parts and finished products — as well as meet in an economy-wide congress that includes all industries and services. The economy-wide congress, which would include delegates from workplace committees across the country (or a trans-national economic zone, such as the Eurozone), would be responsible for bringing together all of the ideas and strength of the economy and coordinating it to provide for all of society.

    The achievement of the communist mode of production in the economic arena requires two criteria be met during the transition away from capitalism: 1) that the production of goods and providing of services be reorganized for the needs of human society, not the acquiring of profit, and 2) that the forces of production and service be developed to a level where the elimination of material scarcity, which is the economic basis for classes, is sustainable.

    The coordination and planning carried out by these regional, industry-wide and economy-wide gatherings would have as their overarching aim the meeting of these two criteria.

    ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION is itself only part of the mission of revolutionary industrial unionism. The RIU also has a central role in the political reconstruction of society after the defeat of capitalist rule.

    In “Our Road to Liberation,” we advocate “the organization of our class into alternative political structures, known as workers’ councils and assemblies, that can wrest control from the ruling capitalist class, its government and state by taking over and/or creating a new basis for providing the essential services needed in a modern society and currently administered by the exploiting and oppressing classes. From sanitation collection to community peacekeeping and protection, we advocate the organizing of structures necessary to give birth to a new society within the shell of the old. For those structures that cannot be efficiently duplicated, we advocate their reorganization under workers’ control and integration into the new system.”

    What is the movement that will organize and build these workers’ councils and assemblies? What are these structures that will wrest control of society from the capitalists and that will “give birth to the new society within the shell of the old?” The Workers Party in America’s answer is revolutionary industrial unionism.

    Those same Units and Locals of the One Great Union that elect their fellow workers to be a part of the workplace committees to coordinate and control the economy will choose which of their brothers and sisters they want to serve in the workers’ councils to coordinate and control the new state and government.

    The workers’ councils themselves would also elect representatives to regional (or statewide) and national congresses of working people — and, when it becomes possible, a world congress of working people’s republics.

    Unlike the structure of a capitalist government, which is based on territorial districts dominated by the exploiting and oppressing classes, and their agents, the structure of the working people’s republic is based in the workplace, which shifts the balance of power away from the capitalists and to the working class.

    With the revolutionary industrial union as their foundation, the workers’ councils can quickly and decisively sweep away the old, rotting hulk of the capitalist system. Such a revolutionary seizure of political and economic power could very well be accomplished relatively peacefully, before the forces of the old, dispossessed capitalist state are able to gather their strength for a counteroffensive.

    This is because, as the workers’ councils are organized and develop, they can begin to take over the administration of services that most people look to the capitalist government to provide.

    Throughout history, ruling classes on the verge of revolutionary overthrow suffer systemic breakdowns that undermine their own ability to reassert control. Often times, one of the key failures of a revolutionary movement in this period is its unwillingness or inability to become an alternative source for essential services. That hesitation reduces the battle for control of society to a contest of brute force — a contest that the sitting class in power often wins.

    However, when a revolutionary movement provides that alternative source, they begin to starve the ruling class, its government and state, of key resources — not simply money (through tax withholding) or human resources (through strikes and other labor actions), but also the culture of reliance that the institutions of class rule rely on to maintain their power.

    Once the exploiting and oppressing classes find themselves starved of these resources, and workers have pushed the capitalist system to the brink of collapse, it will then be the task of the revolutionary political movement of the working class to carry through its mission in the class struggle: the final defeat and downfall of the capitalist state, the overthrow of the exploiting and oppressing classes, and the establishment of the working people’s republic.

    HOW THIS FINAL overthrow of capitalism and capitalist rule comes about, in many respects, is not up to us. What we as a revolutionary workers’ movement — as the revolutionary industrial union and as the political party of the working class — do will be based on how far the exploiting and oppressing classes, and their armed agents, are willing to go to maintain their grip on power.

    We in the Workers Party desire that the overthrow of capitalist rule be as peaceful as possible — that we settle the matter like civilized and responsible people should. However, we know that, when it comes to their hold on power, the exploiting and oppressing classes are anything but peaceful, civilized or responsible. Thus, while we can hope and work for the best, it would be insane to not prepare for the worst.

    The capitalists tell us that their electoral system is the way to change things. At the same time, though, they and their managers have set up numerous obstacles designed to keep parties they do not approve from contesting them on equal ground. Restrictive ballot-access laws and “pay-to-play” campaigning keep all but the wealthiest and most connected of politicians from attaining political office. To put it another way, the capitalists make sure that only those they agree with and support sit on their “executive committee,” as Marx called it.

    Nevertheless, this is how many workers see significant political change coming about. The high abstention rates we see in elections are due more to a general sense among working people that there is no candidate representing their interests that has a chance of winning than any rejection of participating in capitalist elections as both historically and practically obsolete.

    Because of this, the Workers Party sees participation in elections as a viable and necessary tactic within the overall strategy of revolutionary industrial unionism, and our Party will either field its own slate or support independent working-class candidates that stand for the same goal: the organization of the working class along the lines of revolutionary industrial unionism, in order to prepare for the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of a working people’s republic, and direct workers’ control of all industries and services.

    But our use of the ballot box is not self-limiting. While it represents an effective and comprehensive platform from which we can agitate for a workers’ republic, allows us to challenge in action the perception of capitalist elections as “democratic” and “civilized,” and gives us the opportunity to gauge the strength and potential of our work build RIU organizations thus far, it is not the means by which capitalism and capitalist rule will be swept from power.

    WINNING A capitalist election, however, does not automatically trans-late into taking control of the capitalist state. The armed agents of capitalism’s “law and order” are only loyal to the political government insofar as that government is controlled by the exploiting and oppressing classes. Once that arrangement is upset, the state becomes the guardian of class rule against the government. History is abound with examples of this; from Russia in 1917 to Spain in 1936 to Chile in 1973, it has been the armed agents of capitalist rule that have risen up against revolutionary, democratic and socially-progressive governments. There is little doubt that, if the Workers Party was to win a general election, the forces of the capitalist state would immediately move to stop such a transfer of power.

    In such a scenario, where armed agents of capitalism stage a coup d’état to stop us from coming to power peacefully, the revolutionary industrial union would enforce the will of working people by immediately seizing and taking control of all means of production and distribution, including all essential services, and constituting the working people’s republic. At that point, with the new republic in place and the transition from capitalism to communism begun, dealing with the state — dissolving its powers and breaking up its organizations — becomes a matter of elementary self-defense.

    Self-defense, including armed self-defense, is a necessary component of revolutionary industrial unionism, not because we like the idea of having to resort to such methods, but because we know the capitalists will use force and violence to suppress the working class.

    The organization of self-defense and security will be a necessary part of building the RIU. Whether it is for the purposes of defending a picket line, protecting a meeting or rally, or guarding workers’ organizations from scabs, company-hired thugs and even fascists, it will be necessary — and is just plain smart — to use whatever means necessary to defend ourselves.

    Even the revolution itself is an act of self-defense. Putting aside the fact that, as long as capitalism exists, working people are under attack and revolution is the only way to stop that attack, if we as working people are denied our right to assume power by reactionary elements using extralegal and anti-democratic means, then the only way we can defend ourselves and our right to democratically decide who runs society, and how, is through staging a revolution.

    TO SOME READERS, the strategy of our Party will sound familiar. And we will undoubtedly be asked: Isn’t “revolutionary industrial unionism” really just the theory of “socialist industrial unionism” advocated by the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party?

    Yes and no. Daniel DeLeon’s theory of socialist industrial unionism is the basis of our strategy, and the work he and the SLP did at the beginning of the last century is much of the inspiration for what our Party wishes to accomplish. Indeed, we in the Workers Party recognize that DeLeon was the only person to contribute something fundamentally new to communist theory in the generation that came after the death of Karl Marx. Unlike most of those commonly recognized as 20th century communist theoretical leaders — Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Guevara, etc. — DeLeon was the only one to develop a theory that was not simply an enhancement of what Marx or Engels wrote about during their lives.

    It is DeLeon’s theory that most self-described socialists and communists get their own generally vague concepts about workers’ councils and workers’ control of production. It was the SLP’s work in DeLeon’s time that inspired the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World and Workers’ International Industrial Union. It was their emphasis on the importance of workers’ control of production that, at least in part, preserved this essential element of communist principle and kept it from being buried under a mountain of misperception stemming from today’s “Marxist-Leninist” organizations.

    Does this make the Workers Party DeLeonist? Again, yes and no. We are DeLeonist in the sense that recognize and accept as our own his theory. We are not DeLeonist in the same sense that we are not Leninist, or even necessarily “Marxist:” we do not live and die by every word written or spoken by DeLeon, Lenin or Marx. Rather, we apply the scientific methods they used to build on their work.

    It is here that revolutionary industrial unionism differs from DeLeon’s theory. With the incorporation of the workplace committee and workers’ councils into the overall structure, RIU represents, in our view, and advance from DeLeon’s specific writings on socialist industrial unionism, while also keeping with the spirit and sense of his method and concept.

    “If this is true,” one might ask, “why are you not a part of the SLP?” We see the SLP as a kindred party — as an organization with many honest and dedicated proletarian socialists. But the party itself is dominated by elements drawn from the exploiting and oppressing classes, and that has had a distorting effect on its theory and practice for decades. If the working class members of the SLP were to liberate themselves from this outside domination, closer collaboration and unity between the SLP and the Workers Party would be on the agenda.
  4. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    [FONT=Verdana]Around the turn of the 19th and 20th century we can identify roughly three ‘strategic hypotheses’ in the socialist movement. [...] The centre can be identified roughly with reference to Karl Kautsky’s (relatively late) The road to power. The left can similarly be identified, even more roughly, and equally on the basis of a late text, with Rosa Luxemburg’s The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions. “Even more roughly” because Luxemburg’s position is in some respects intermediate between the Kautskyites and the core of the left.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Verdana]

    A partial elaboration of this idea, based on Lenin's works, can be found here:

    [/FONT]
    1. The General Idea of a Revolutionary Situation

    Both Kautsky and Lenin adhere to the idea of a “revolutionary situation” that has very different political dynamics from a peaceful situation and therefore requires a very different set of tactics. In the famous debate between Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg c. 1910, Kautsky’s (much misunderstood) position is: we are now in a peaceful situation but soon, very soon, we will be in a revolutionary situation. Luxemburg’s proposed tactics are inappropriate to the present peaceful situation, but everything will change in the near future when we enter a revolutionary situation. [I offer the very tentative hypothesis that one difference between Luxemburg and Kautsky is that Luxemburg simply did not operate with this distinction between a peaceful and a revolutionary situation that was fundamental for both Kautsky and Lenin.]

    One aspect of a revolutionary situation, as seen by both Lenin and Kautsky, is the idea that the political education of the masses accelerates tremendously. As Kautsky put it in Road to Power:
    When times of revolutionary ferment come, the tempo of progress all at once becomes rapid. It is quite incredible how swiftly the masses of the population learn in such times and achieve clarity about their class interests. Not only their courage and their desire to fight, but also their political interest is spurred on in the most powerful way by the consciousness that the moment has arrived for them to rise by their efforts out of the darkest night into the bright glory of the sun. Even the most sluggish become industrious; even the most cowardly, bold; even the most intellectually limited acquire a wider mental grasp. In such times political education of the masses takes place in years, that otherwise would require generations.
    Kautsky offered four conditions as necessary components of a revolutionary situation: a regime hostile to the people, a “party of irreconcilable opposition, with organized masses,” mass support given to the party, combined with a regime crisis of confidence. Lenin later offered his own four-part definition of a revolutionary situation that differs in details from Kautsky’s but is obviously derived from it.
    However, somewhere between 1910 and 1914, when Luxemburg struggled within the party for a general strike that would emphasize the need for a democratic republic, the renegate Kautsky did not only reject this because he thought her strategy would fail, but also because he claimed that the democratic republic was not part of the Erfurt programme in the first place.
  5. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Where the hell did he say that short-sighted s***? I know I've got my minimum and maximum programmatic beef with The Social Revolution, but there was some discussion by Paul Cockshott elsewhere about manipulating words around to imply the democratic republic (however hollowed Kautsky's 1902 view on it was) in the minimum part of the Erfurt Program:

    http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell...0807/0153.html

    [This eventually led to his paper on leadership and democracy, BTW.]
  6. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Where the hell did he say that short-sighted s***?
    I read it in a Luxemburg biography. But I wouldn't be surprized if it came from Nettle who mentions private discussions between the centrists and Luxemburg in his book. The following is also based on Nettle:

    End 1905, he joined the discussion on the lessons of the mass strike in Russia, he prefered to seduce the audience [...]: "I've never heard a debate before where we have all talked about blood and revolution . On hearing this, I can not help but to look from time to time at my boots to see if they are not already covered with blood". A few weeks later, meeting with the Kautskys and Rosa , Bebel said: "Beware, when the revolution arrives in Germany, Rosa will be on the left side and I'll be on the right side" Then he added jokingly: "But lets forget about that, we should not let it make our soup too salty".
    That's already in 1905.
  7. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    [FONT=Verdana]
    [/FONT][FONT=Verdana]What happened instead was to render concrete the 1850s warnings of Marx and Engels against the premature seizure of power in Germany, which formed the basis of Kautsky’s ‘caution’ in the 1890s and 1900s. By choosing to represent the peasantry and other petty proprietors (especially state bureaucrats), the workers’ party disabled itself from representing the working class, but instead became a sort of collective Bonaparte.
    [/FONT] [FONT=Verdana]The Bolshevik leaders could see and feel it happening to themselves, and in 1919-1923 the Comintern flailed around with a succession of short-lived strategic concepts, each of which would - it was hoped - break the isolation of the revolution.
    It probably refers to this quote from Engels (The Peasant War in Germany)

    [/FONT]
    The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.
  8. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I read it in a Luxemburg biography. But I wouldn't be surprized if it came from Nettle who mentions private discussions between the centrists and Luxemburg in his book. The following is also based on Nettle:

    That's already in 1905.
    "That's already in 1905"?

    To be fair, "I'll be on the right side" can easily be interpreted as being something like Bolshevik restraint during the July Days. 1905 was also a time when Karl "blood on his boots" Kautsky hadn't yet conceptualized something like the Bolshevik revolution, wherein power merely lay on the streets for the party to pick up. I'll give the Kautskys and Bebels of 1905 the benefit of the doubt.

    By choosing to represent the peasantry and other petty proprietors (especially state bureaucrats), the workers’ party disabled itself from representing the working class, but instead became a sort of collective Bonaparte.
    I shall reiterate what I said in a previous RevLeft post: when a dying Lenin suggested giving the party a more peasant demographic to counter bureaucratic manipulations in Rabkrin and elsewhere, he became a "lesser renegade."
  9. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Where the hell did he say that short-sighted s***?
    As for the other question – propaganda for a republic – here Comrade Kautsky also denies that he obstructed me. “That would never have occurred to him. “ All that was involved was one passage about a republic in my mass strike article, “whose wording seemed inexpedient” to the editors of the Neue Zeit. I myself then had my article published in the Dortmund Arbeiter-Zeitung. “But in vain will one search this article for that passage about a republic.” Comrade Kautsky has “not noticed” that I had published this passage somewhere else. “The cowardly veiling of principles with which Comrade Luxemburg reproaches us, “ he concludes, “is therefore reduced to this: that we objected to one passage in her article, which she herself has voluntarily dropped since then. Such strategy is no piece of heroism, Octavia!”

    In this representation of the facts, which places me in such a ridiculous light, Comrade Kautsky has fallen victim to singular errors. In reality it was not at all a question of “one passage” and the possible danger of its “wording”: it was a question of the content, of the slogan of a republic and the agitation for it – and Comrade Kautsky must excuse me, in the precarious position in which his presentation of the case has left me, if I call upon him as chief witness and rescuer in my greatest need. Comrade Kautsky wrote me this after he received my mass strike article:

    Your article is very beautiful and very important, I am not in agreement with everything and reserve the right to polemize against it. Today I don’t have time to do so in writing. Enough, I gladly accept the article if you delete pages 29 to the end. Under no circumstances could I print this. Even your point of departure is false. There is not one word in our program about a republic. Not out of oversight, not because of editorial caprice, but on well-considered grounds. Likewise the Gotha Program said nothing of a republic, and Marx, as much as he condemned this program, acknowledged in his letter that it wouldn’t do to openly demand a republic (Neue Zeit, 1, p.573). Engels spoke on the same matter regarding the Erfurt Program (Neue Zeit, XX, 1, p.11)

    I don’t have time to set forth to you the grounds which Marx and Engels, Bebel and Liebknecht acknowledged to be sound. Enough, that what you want is an entirely new agitation which until now has always been rejected. This new agitation, however, is the sort we have no business discussing so openly. With your article you want to proclaim on your own hook, as a single individual, an entirely new agitation which the party has always rejected. We cannot and will not proceed in this manner. A single personality, however high she may stand, cannot pull off a fait accompli on her own hook which can have unforeseeable consequences for the party.
    It goes on in the same vein for about another two pages.

    The “entirely new agitation, “ which could have “unforeseeable consequences” for the party, had the following wording:

    Universal, equal direct suffrage for all adults, without distinction of sex, is the immediate goal which ensures us the enthusiastic agreement of the broadest strata at the present moment. But this goal is not the only one which we must now preach. As long as we answer the infamous electoral reform bungling of the government and the bourgeois parties by proclaiming the slogan of a truly democratic electoral system, we still find ourselves – taking the political situation as a whole – on the defensive. In accord with the good old principle of every real battle tactic, that a powerful blow is the best defense, we must answer the ever more insolent provocations of the reigning reaction by turning the tables in our agitation and going over to a sharp attack all along the line. This can be done in the most visible, clear, and so to speak, lapidary form if our agitation clearly champions the following demand, which the first point our political program leads to: the demand for a republic.

    Up till now the watchword republic has played a limited role in our agitation. There were good reasons for this: our party wished to save the German working class from those bourgeois, or rather petty bourgeois republican illusions which were (for example) so disastrous in the history of French socialism, and still are today. From the beginning, the proletarian struggle in Germany was consistently and resolutely directed not against this or that form and excrescence of class society in particular, but against class society as such; instead of splintering into anti-militarism, anti-monarchism, and other petty bourgeois “isms,” it constantly built itself as anti-capitalism, mortal enemy of the existing order in all its excrescences and forms, whether under the cloak of monarchy or republic. And through forty years’ radical labor of enlightenment, we have succeeded in making this conviction the enduring possession of the awakened German proletariat: that the best bourgeois republic is no less a class state and bulwark of capitalist exploitation than the present monarchy, and that only the abolition of the wage system and class rule in every form, and not the outward show of “popular sovereignty” in a bourgeois republic, can materially alter the condition of the proletariat.

    Well then, it is just because the forty-year labor of Social Democracy has been such a fundamental prophylaxis against the dangers of republican petty bourgeois illusions in Germany that today we can calmly make a place in our agitation for the foremost principle of our political program, a place that is its due by right. By pushing forward the republican character of Social Democracy we win, above all, one more opportunity to illustrate in a palpable, popular fashion our principled opposition as a class party of the proletariat to the united camp of all bourgeois parties. For the frightening downfall of bourgeois liberalism in Germany is revealed most drastically in its Byzantine genuflection to the monarchy, in which liberal burgerdom runs only a nose behind conservative Junkerdom.

    But this is not enough. The general state of Germany’s domestic and foreign politics in recent years points to the monarchy as the center, or at least the outward, visible head of the reigning reaction. The semi-absolute monarchy with its personal authority has formed for a quarter century, and with every year more so, the stronghold of militarism, the driving force of battleship diplomacy, the leading spirit of geopolitical adventure, just as it has been the shield of Junkerdom in Prussia and the bulwark of the ascendancy of Prussia’s political backwardness in the entire Reich: it is finally, so to speak, the personal sworn foe of the working class and Social Democracy.

    In Germany, the slogan of a republic is thus infinitely more than the expression of a beautiful dream of democratic “peoples’ government,” or political doctrinairism floating in the clouds: it is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule, the Prussianization of Germany; it is only a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction. In particular, the most recent events point straight in the same direction: Junkerdom’s threats in the Reichstag of an absolutist coup d’etat and the Reich Chancellor’s insolent attacks on Reichstag voting rights in the Prussian Landtag, as well as the redemption of the “royal pledge” on the question of Prussian suffrage through the Bethmann reform bill.

    With a clear conscience I can here set forth this “entirely new agitation,” as it has already appeared in print without causing the party the slightest injury in body and soul. Although I had agreed (with a sigh, to be sure, but with resignation) to delete the section on the republic, Comrade Kautsky finally returned the whole mass strike article to me. Without altering a word I published the interdicted pages “29 to the end,” furnished with an introduction and conclusion, as a self-sufficient article in the Breslau Volkswacht of March 25 under the title A Time for Sowing: whereupon it was reprinted by a string of party papers – to my recollection in Dortmund, Bremen, Halle, Elberfeld, Königsberg, and in Thuringian papers. That is certainly no piece of heroism on my part: it’s just my tough luck that Comrade Kautsky’s reading of the party press at that time was as desultory as his consideration of the party’s position regarding the slogan of a republic. If he had, let us say, more maturely considered the subject, he could not possibly have mobilized Marx and Engels against me on the question of a republic. Engels’ article to which Kautsky refers is the critique of the party leadership’s draft of the Erfurt Program of 1891. Here Engels says in Section II, Political Demands:

    The draft’s political demands have one great flaw. What actually should have been said is not there. If all these ten demands were conceded we would indeed have diverse further means to carry the main political point, but in no way the main point itself.

    Engels substantiates the urgent need to clarify this “main point” of Social Democracy’s political demands with an allusion to the “opportunism prevalent in a great part of the Social Democratic press.” Then he continues:

    What then are these ticklish, but very essential points?

    First. If anything is certain, it is this: that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French Revolution has already shown. It is surely unthinkable that our best people should, like Miquel, become ministers under a Kaiser. At present it seems that legally, it won’t do to set a demand for a republic directly in the program – although this was admissible even under Louis Philippe in France, just as it now is in Italy. But the fact that one cannot even draw up an openly republican party program in Germany proves how colossal the illusion is, that we can genially, peacefully install a republic there – and not only a republic, but communist society.

    In any case, for the time being we can side-step the question of a republic. But in my opinion, what should and can be included is the demand for concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives. And for the present that would be sufficient, if one can go no further.
    Second. The reconstitution of Germany ...

    So, then, a unified republic ...

    On all these subjects, not much can be said in the program. I call this to your attention chiefly to characterize both the situation in Germany, where it will not do say such things, and the self-delusion that would transform this situation into a communist society by legal means. And further, to remind the party executive that there are still more weighty political questions besides direct legislation by the people and the free administration of justice before we reach the end. With the universal instability any of these questions could catch fire overnight: and what then, if we have never discussed, never come to an understanding on them.

    We see that Engels perceives “one great flaw” in the party program: that it does not include the demand for a republic, solely on the basis of categorical representations from Germany that, for political reasons, such things were out of the question. With visible discomfort and various misgivings, he decides to bite the sour apple and “in any case” to “sidestep” the demand for a republic. But what he unqualifiedly declares to be essential is discussion of the slogan of a republic in the party press:

    You there can judge better than I can here, whether it is possible to further formulate the above-mentioned points as program demands. But it would be desirable that these questions be debated within the party before it is too late. [Neue Zeit XX, 1, pp.11-12.]

    This “political testament” of Friedrich Engels was, let us say, peculiarly interpreted by Comrade Kautsky when he banned discussion of the necessity of agitation for a republic from the Neue Zeit as an “entirely new agitation” which allegedly “until now has always been rejected by the party.”

    As for Marx, in his critique of the Gotha Program he went so far as to declare that if it were not possible to openly advance a republic as the program’s foremost political demand, then all the demands for democratic details should have been omitted as well. He wrote, regarding the Gotha Program:

    Its political demands include nothing beyond the old, well-known democratic litany: universal suffrage, direct legislation, human rights, a people’s militia, etc. ...
    But one thing has been forgotten. Since the German workers’ party expressly declares that it acts within “the present nation state,” and hence its own state, the Prusso-German Empire ..., it should not have forgotten the main point: that all these pretty little things rest on recognition of the so-called “popular sovereignty,” that they are therefore only appropriate to a democratic republic. Since you do not feel yourselves in the position – and wisely, for the circumstances demand caution[1] – to demand a democratic republic as the French workers’ programs did under Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon, you should not have tried to hide behind the . . . dodge [the dots are substituted for a boisterous adjective of Marx’s – R.L.] of demanding things which only make sense in a democratic republic, from a state which is nothing but a military despotism embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, obviously influenced by the bourgeoisie, shored up with a bureaucracy, and watched over by the police.

    Even vulgar democracy which sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no suspicion, that it is in just this last state form of bourgeois society that the class struggle will be fought out to the end – even it towers mountain-high over this sort of democratism within the limits of the police-permitted and the logically impermissible. [Neue Zeit IX, 1, p.573.]

    Thus, Marx too spoke an entirely different language in puncto republic. Shortly before and after the Anti-Socialist law was in effect, Marx, like Engels, allowed – on the strength of assurances from Germany – that perhaps it wouldn’t do, to formally advance the demand for a republic in the program. But that today, a quarter century later, this demand in the agitation (and that is all we are concerned with here) should pass for something “entirely new” and unheard of – that is surely something which neither of them could have dreamed.

    To be sure, Comrade Kautsky points out that he has already propagandized for a republic in the Neue Zeit, in a manner “totally different” from that in which I, in my harmless way, do so now. He must know more about it than I: in this case my memory seems to fail me. But is more conclusive proof required than the most recent events, that in this matter the essential thing, the follow-up in practice, was not done? The increase of the Prussian civil list[C] offered once again the most splendid opportunity imaginable, and at the same time laid the undeniable duty on the party to sound the slogan of a republic loud and clear, and to look to its propaganda. The insolent challenge of this government bill, following the ignominious end of the suffrage bill, should have been unconditionally answered by unfolding the political function of the monarchy and its personal authority in Prusso-Germany; by emphasizing its connection with militarism, navalism, and the social-political stasis; by recalling the famous “discourses” and “remarks”’ on the “rabble of the people” and the “compote dish”; by recalling the “penitentiary bill”;[D] by revealing the monarchy as the visible expression of the entire imperial German reaction.

    The pathetic unanimity of all bourgeois parties in their Byzantine handling of the bill drastically shows once again, that in today’s Germany the slogan of a republic has become the shibboleth of class division, the watchword of class struggle. Of all this, nothing in the Neue Zeit or in Vorwärts. The increase of the civil list is not approached from the political side: it is treated chiefly as a fiscal question, as a question of the Hohenzollern family income, and this is dilated upon with more or less wit. But not one syllable in our two leading organs has championed the slogan of a republic.

    Comrade Kautsky is a more qualified Marxian scholar than I: he should know better, what pointed adjective Marx would have applied to this “dodge” and this sort of republicanism “within the limits of the police-permitted and logically impermissible.”

    Thus Comrade Kautsky is in error when he says I “bewail myself” of being “badly handled” by the editors of the Neue Zeit. I find only that Comrade Kautsky has handled himself badly.
    Theory and practice: Chapter One
  10. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Well, there's the slide to vulgar "centrism," then (Luxemburg's remarks being in 1910)...