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Title: Marx and Anarchism Author: Rudolf Rocker Date: 1925 Language: en Topics: marxism Source: Retrieved on April 26, 2009 from http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/marx.htm Notes: Section numbering rearranged by The Anarchist Library
Some years ago, shortly after Frederick Engels died, Mr. Eduard
Bernstein, one of the most prominent members of the Marxist community,
astonished his colleagues with some noteworthy discoveries. Bernstein
made public his misgivings about the accuracy of the materialist
interpretation of history, and of the Marxist theory of surplus value
and the concentration of capital. He went so far as to attack the
dialectical method and concluded that talk of a critical socialism was
impossible. A cautious man, Bernstein kept his discoveries to himself
until after the death of the aged Engels; only then did he make them
public, to the consequent horror of the Marxist priesthood. But not even
this precaution could save him, for he was assailed from every
direction. Kautsky wrote a book against his heresy, and at the Hanover
congress poor Eduard was obliged to declare that he was a frail, mortal
sinner and that he would submit to the decision of the scientific
majority.
For all that, Bernstein had not come up with any new revelations. The
reasoning he put up against the foundations of the marxist teaching had
already been in existence when he was still a faithful apostle of the
marxist church. The arguments in question had been looted from anarchist
literature and the only thing worthy of note was that one of the best
known social democrats was to employ them for the first time. No
sensible person would deny that Bernstein’s criticism failed to make an
unforgettable impression in the marxist camp: Bernstein had struck at
the most important foundations of the metaphysical economics of Karl
Marx, and it is not surprising that the most respectable representatives
of orthodox marxism became agitated.
None of this would have been so serious, but for the fact that it was to
come in the middle of an even more important crisis. For almost a
century the marxists have not ceased to propound the view that Marx and
Engels were the discoverers of so called scientific socialism; an
artificial distinction was invented between so called utopian socialists
and the scientific socialism of the marxists, a distinction that existed
only in the imaginations of the latter. In the germanic countries
socialist literature has been monopolised by marxist theory, which every
social democrat regards as the pure and utterly original product of the
scientific discoveries of Marx and Engels.
But this illusion, too, vanished: modern historical research has
established beyond all question that scientific socialism only came from
the old English and French socialists and that Marx and Engels were
adept at picking the brains of others. After the revolutions of 1848 a
terrible reaction set in in Europe: the Holy Alliance set about casting
its nets in every country with the intention of suffocating socialist
thought, which had produced such a very rich literature in France,
Belgium, England, Germany, Spain and Italy. This literature was cast
into oblivion almost entirely during this era of obscurantism. Many of
the most important works were destroyed until they were reduced to a few
examples that found a refuge in the tranquillity of certain large public
libraries or the collections of some private individuals.
This literature was only rediscovered towards the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries and nowadays the fertile ideas
to be found in the old writings of the schools which followed Fourier
and SaintSimon, or the works of Considerant, Demasi, Mey and many
others, are a source of wonder. It was our old friend W. Tcherkesoff who
was the first to come up with a systematic pattern for all these facts:
he showed that Marx and Engels are not the inventors of the theories
which have so long been deemed a part of their intellectual bequest;[1]
he even went so far as to prove that some of the most famous marxist
works, such as, for instance, the Communist Manifesto, are in fact only
free translations from the French by Marx and Engels. And Tcherkesoff
scored a victory when his allegations with regard to the Communist
Manifesto were conceded by Avanti, the central organ of the Italian
social democrats,[2] after the author had had an opportunity to draw
comparisons between the Communist manifesto and The Manifesto of
Democracy by Victor Considerant, the appearance of which preceded the
publication of Marx and Engels’ pamphlet by five years.
The Communist Manifesto is regarded as one of the earliest works of
scientific socialism, and its contents were drawn from the writings of a
“utopian”, for marxism categorised Fourier with the utopian socialists.
This is one of the most cruel ironies imaginable and certainly is hardly
a testimonial to the scientific worth of marxism. Victor Considerant was
one of the finest socialist writers with whom Marx was acquainted: he
referred to him even in the days before he became a socialist. In 1842
the Allgemeine Zeitung attacked the Rheinische Zeitung of which Marx was
the editorinchief, charging it with being favourable to communism. Marx
then replied in an editorial in which he stated as follows: “Works like
those by Leroux, Considerant and above all the penetrating book by
Proudhon cannot be criticised in any superficial sense; they require
long and careful study before one begins to criticise them.”[3]
Marx’s intellectual development was heavily influenced by French
socialism; but of all the socialist writers of France, the one with the
most powerful influence on his thought was P. J. Proudhon. It is even
obvious that Proudhon’s book What is Property? led Marx to embrace
socialism. Its critical observations of the national economy and the
various socialist tendencies opened up a whole new world to Marx and
Marx’s mind was most impressed, above all, by the theory of surplus
value as set out by the inspired French socialist. We can find the
origins of the doctrine of surplus value, that grand “scientific
discovery” of which our marxists are so proud, in the writings of
Proudhon. It was thanks to him that Marx became acquainted with that
theory to which he added modifications through his later study of the
English socialists Bray and Thompson.
Marx even recognised the huge scientific significance of Proudhon
publicly, and in a special book, which is today completely out of print,
he calls Proudhon’s work What is Property? “The first scientific
manifesto of the French proletariat”. This work was not reprinted by the
marxists, nor was it translated into other languages, even though the
official representatives of marxism have made every effort to distribute
the writings of their mentor in every language. This book has been
forgotten and this is the reason why: its reprinting would reveal to the
world the colossal nonsense and irrelevance of all Marx wrote later
about that eminent theoretician of anarchism.
Not only was Marx influenced by the economic ideas of Proudhon, but he
also felt the influence of the great French socialist’s anarchist
theories, and in one of his works from the period he attacks the state
the same way Proudhon did.
All who have seriously studied Marx’s evolution as a socialist will have
to concede that Proudhon’ s work What is Property? was what converted
him to socialism. To those who do not have an exact knowledge of the
details of that evolution and those who have not had the opportunity to
read the early socialist works of Marx and Engels, this claim will seem
out of place and unlikely. Because in his later writings Marx speaks of
Proudhon scathingly and with ridicule and these are the very writings
which the social democracy has chosen to publish and republish time
after time.
In this way the belief was gradually formed that Marx had been a
theoretical opponent of Proudhon from the very outset and that there had
never been any common ground between them. And, to tell the truth, it is
impossible to believe otherwise whenever one looks at what the former
wrote about Proudhon in his famous work The Poverty of Philosophy in the
Communist Manifesto, or in the obituary published in the Sozialdemokrat
in Berlin, shortly after Proudhon’s death.
In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx attacks Proudhon in the basest way,
shrinking from nothing to show that Proudhon’s ideas are worthless and
that he counts neither as socialist nor as a critic of political
economy.
“Monsieur Proudhon, he states, has the misfortune of being peculiarly
misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad
economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In
Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher because he is reputed
to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and
economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double
error.”[4]
And Marx went even further: without adducing any proof, he charged
Proudhon of having plagiarised the ideas of the English economist Bray.
He wrote:
“In Bray’s book[5] we believe we have discovered the key to all the
past, present and future works of Monsieur Proudhon.”
It is interesting to find Marx, who so often used the ideas of others
and whose Communist Manifesto is in point of fact only a copy of Victor
Considerant’s Manifesto of Democracy. charging others with plagiarism.
But let us press on. In the Communist Manifesto Marx depicts Proudhon as
a conservative, bourgeois character[6]. And in the obituary he wrote for
the Sozialdemokrat (1865) we can find the following:
“In a strictly scientific history of political economy, this book
(namely What is Property?) would scarcely deserve a mention. For
sensationalist works like this play exactly the same role in the
sciences as they do in the world of the novel.”
And in this obituary Marx reiterates the claim that Proudhon is
worthless as a socialist and economist, an opinion which he had already
voiced in The Poverty of Philosophy.
It is not hard to understand that allegations like this, directed
against Proudhon by Marx, could only spread the belief, or rather the
conviction, that absolutely no common ground had ever existed between
him and that great French writer. In Germany, Proudhon is almost
unknown. German editions of his works, issued around 1840, are out of
print. The only one of his books republished in German is What is
Property? and even it had only a restricted circulation. This accounts
for Marx being able to wipe out all traces of his early development as a
socialist. We have already seen above how his attitude to Proudhon was
quite different at the beginning, and the conclusions which follow will
endorse our claims.
As editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the leading
newspapers of German democracy, Marx came to make the acquaintance of
France’s most important socialist writers, even though he himself had
not yet espoused the socialist cause. We have already mentioned a quote
from him in which he refers to Victor Considerant, Pierre Leroux and
Proudhon and there can be no doubt that Considerant and Proudhon were
the mentors who attracted him to socialism. Without any doubt, What is
Property? was a major influence over Marx’s development as a socialist;
thus, in the periodical mentioned, he calls the inspired Proudhon “the
most consistent and wisest of socialist writers”[7]. In 1843, the
Prussian censor silenced the Reinische Zeitung; Marx left the country
and it was during this period that he moved towards socialism. This
shift is quite noticeable in his letters to the famous writer Arnold
Ruge and even more so in his work The Holy Family, of a Critique of
Critical Criticism, which he published jointly with Frederick Engels.
The book appeared in 1845 with the object of arguing against the
tendency headed by the German thinker Bruno Bauer[8]. In addition to
philosophical matters, the book also dealt with political economy and
socialism, and it is especially these parts which concern us here.
Of all the works published by Marx and Engels The Holy Family is the
only one that has not been translated into other languages and which the
German socialists have not reprinted. True, Franz Mehring, Marx and
Engels’ literary executor, did, on the prompting of the German socialist
party, publish The Holy Family along with other writings from their
early years as active socialists, but this was done sixty years after it
was first issued, and, for another thing, their publication was intended
for specialists, since they were too expensive for the working man.
Apart from that, so little known in Germany is Proudhon, that only a
very few have realised that there is a huge gulf between the first
opinions which Marx expressed of him and that which he was to have later
on.
And yet the book clearly demonstrates the development of Marx’s
socialism and the powerful influence which Proudhon wielded over that
development. In The Holy Family Marx conceded that Proudhon had all the
merits that Marxists were later to credit their mentor with.
Let us see what he says in this connection on page 36:
“All treatises on political economy take private property for granted.
This base premise is for them an incontestable fact to which they devote
no further investigation, indeed a fact which is spoken about only
“accidellement”, as Say naively admits[9]. But Proudhon makes a critical
investigation the first resolute, ruthless, and at the same time
scientific investigation of the basis of political economy, private
property. This is the great scientific advance he made, an advance which
revolutionises political economy and for the first time makes a real
science of political economy possible. Proudhon’s What is Property? is
as important for modern political economy as Sieyes’ work What Is The
Third Estate? for modern politics.”
It is interesting to compare these words with what Marx had to say later
about the great anarchist theorist. In The Holy Family he says that What
is Property? is the first scientific analysis of private property and
that it had opened up a possibility of making a real science out of
national economy; but in his well known obituary for the Sozialdemokrat
the same Marx alleges that in a strictly scientific history of economy
that work would scarcely rate a mention.
What lies behind this sort of contradiction? That is something the
representatives of so called scientific socialism have yet to make
clear. In real terms there is only one answer: Marx wanted to conceal
the source he had dipped into. All who have made a study of the question
and do not feel overwhelmed by partisan loyalties must concede that this
explanation is not fanciful.
But let us hearken again to what Marx has to say about the historical
significance of Proudhon. On page 52 of the same work we can read:
“Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians he is
himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of
the French proletariat.”
Here, as one can see, Marx states quite specifically that Proudhon is an
exponent of proletarian socialism and that his work represents a
scientific manifesto from the French proletariat. On the other hand, in
the Communist Manifesto he assures us that Proudhon is the incarnation
of conservative, bourgeois socialism. Could there be a sharper contrast?
Whom are we to believe the Marx of The Holy Family or the author of the
Communist Manifesto ? And how come the discrepancy? That is a question
we ask ourselves again, and naturally the reply is the same as before:
Marx wanted to conceal from everyone just what he owed to Proudhon and
any means to that end was admissible. There can be no other possible
explanation; the means Marx later used in his contest with Bakunin are
evidence that he was not very scrupulous in his choice.
“The contradiction between the purpose and goodwill of the
administration, on the one hand, and its means and possibilities. on the
other hand, cannot be abolished by the state without the latter
abolishing itself, for it is based on this contradiction. The state is
based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the
contradiction between general interests and private interests. Hence the
administration has to confine itself to a formal and negative activity,
for where civil life and its labour begin, there the power of the
administration ends. Indeed, confronted by the consequences which arise
from the unsocial nature of this civil life, this private ownership,
this trade, this industry, this mutual plundering of the various circles
of citizens, confronted by all these consequences, impotence is the law
of nature of the administration. For this fragmentation, this baseness,
this slavery of civil society is the natural foundation on which the
modern state rests, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural
foundation on which the ancient society state rested. The existence of
the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable. The ancient
state and ancient slavery these straightforward classic opposites were
not more intimately riveted to each other than are the modern state and
the modern commercial world, these hypocritical Christian opposites.”
This essentially anarchist interpretation of the nature of the state,
which seems so odd in the context of Marx’s later teachings, is clear
proof of the anarchistic roots of his early socialist evolution. The
article in question reflects the concepts of Proudhon’s critique of the
state, a critique first set down in his famous book What is Property?
That immortal work had decisive influence on the evolution of the German
communist, regardless of which fact he makes every effort and not by the
noblest methods to deny the early days of its socialist activity. Of
course, in this the marxists support their master and in this way the
mistaken historical view of the early relations between Marx and
Proudhon is gradually built up.
In Germany especially, since Proudhon is almost unknown there, the most
complete misrepresentations in this regard are able to circulate. But
the more one gets to know the important works of the old socialist
writers, the more one realises just how much so called scientific
socialism owes to the “utopians” who were, for so long, forgotten on
account of the colossal “renown” of the marxist school and of other
factors which relegated to oblivion the socialist literature from the
earliest period. One of Marx’s most important teachers and the one who
laid the foundations for his subsequent development was none other than
Proudhon, the anarchist so libelled and misunderstood by the legalistic
socialists.
Marx’s political writings from this period for instance, the article he
published in Vorwaerts of Paris show how he had been influenced by
Proudhon’s thinking and even by his anarchist ideas.
Vorwaerts was a periodical which appeared in the French capital during
the year 1844 under the direction of Heinrich Bernstein. Initially it
was merely liberal in outlook. But later on, after the disappearance of
the Anales GermanoFrancaises, Bernstein contacted the old contributors
to the latter who won him over to the socialist cause. From then on
Vorwaerts became the official mouthpiece of socialism and the numerous
contributors to A. Ruge’s late publication among them Bakunin, Marx,
Engels, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, etc. sent in their contributions
to it.
In issue number 63 (7 August 1844) Marx published a polemical work
“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’.”
In it, he made a study of the nature of the state and demonstrated its
utter inability to reduce social misery and wipe out poverty. The ideas
which the writer sets out in the course of his article are wholly
anarchist ones in perfect accord with the thinking that Proudhon,
Bakunin and other theorists of anarchism have set out in this
connection. The readers can judge for themselves from the following
extract from Marx’s study:
“The state .... will never see in ‘the state and the system of society’
the source of social maladies. Where political parties exist, each party
sees the root of every evil in the fact that instead of itself an
opposing party stands at the helm of the state. Even radical and
revolutionary politicians seek the root of the evil not in the essential
nature of the state but in a definite state form, which they wish to
replace with a different state form.
“From the political point of view, the state and the system of society
are not two different things. The state is the system of society.
Insofar as the state admits the existence o f social defects, it sees
their cause either in the laws of nature, which no human power can
command, or in private life which does not depend on the state, or in
the inexpedient activity of the administration, which does not depend on
it. Thus England sees the cause of poverty in the law of nature by which
the population must always be in excess of the means of subsistence. On
the other hand, England explains pauperism as due to the bad will of the
poor, just as the King of Prussia explains it by the unchristian
feelings of the rich, and just as the convention explained it by the
suspect counterrevolutionary mentality of the property owners. Therefore
England punishes the poor, the King of Prussian admonishes the rich, and
the convention cuts off the heads of the property owners.
“Finally, every state seeks the cause in accidental or deliberate
shortcomings of the administration, and therefore it seeks the remedy of
its ills in measures of the administration. Why? Precisely because
administration is the organising activity of the state.
On 20 July 1870, Karl Marx wrote to Frederick Engels: “The French need a
thrashing. If the Prussians are victorious the centralisation of state
power will be helpful for the centralisation of the German working
class; furthermore, German predominance will shift the centre of gravity
of West European labour movements from France to Germany. And one has
but to compare the movement from 1866 to today to see that the German
working class is in theory and organisation superior to the French. Its
domination over the French on the world stage would mean likewise the
dominance of our theory over that of Proudhon, etc.”
Marx was right: Germany’s victory over France meant a new course for the
history of the European labour movement. The revolutionary and liberal
socialism of the Latin countries was cast aside leaving the stage to the
statist, antianarchist theories of marxism. The development of that
lively, creative socialism was disrupted by a new iron dogmatism which
claimed full knowledge of social reality, when it was scarcely more than
a hotchpotch of theological phraseology and fatalistic sophisms and
turned out to be the tomb of all genuinely socialist thought.
Along with the ideas, the methods of the socialist movement changed too.
Instead of revolutionary groups for propaganda and for the organisation
of economic struggles, in which the internationalists saw the embryo of
the future society and organs suited to the socialisation of the means
of production and exchange, came the era of the socialist parties and
parliamentary representation of the proletariat. Little by little the
old socialist education which was leading the workers to the conquest of
the land and the workshops was forgotten, replaced with a new party
discipline which looked on the conquest of political power as its
highest ideal.
Marx’s great opponent, Michael Bakunin, clearly saw the shift in the
position and with a heavy heart predicted that a new chapter in the
history of Europe was beginning with the German victory and the fall of
the Commune. Physically exhausted and staring death in the face he
penned these important lines to Ogarev on 11 November 1874:
“Bismarskism, which is militarism, police rule and a finance monopoly
fused into one system under the name of the New State, is conquering
everywhere. But in maybe ten or fifteen years the unstable evolution of
the human species will once again shed light on the paths of victory. “
On this occasion, Bakunin was mistaken, failing to calculate that it
would take a halfcentury until Bismarckism was toppled amid a terrible
world cataclysm.
Just as German victory in 1871 and the fall of the Paris Commune were
the signals for the disappearance of the old International, so the Great
War of 1914 was the exposure of the bankruptcy of political socialism.
And then something odd and sometimes truly grotesque happened, which can
only be explained in terms of complete ignorance of the old socialist
movement.
Bolsheviks independents, communists and so on, endlessly charged the
heirs of the old social democrats with a shameful adulteration of the
principles of marxism. They accused them of having bogged the socialist
movement down in the quagmire of bourgeois parliamentarism, having
misinterpreted the attitudes of Marx and Engels to the State, etc., etc.
Nikolai Lenin, the spiritual leader of the Bolsheviks, tried to give his
charges a solid basis in his famous book The State and Revolution which
is, according to his disciples, a genuine and pure interpretation of
marxism. By means of a perfectly ordered selection of quotations Lenin
claims to show that “the founders of scientific socialism” were at all
times declared enemies of democracy and the parliamentary morass and
that the target of all their efforts was the disappearance of the state.
One must remember that Lenin discovered this only recently when his
party, against all expectations, found itself in the minority after the
elections to the Constituent Assembly. Up to then the Bolsheviks, just
like the other parties, had participated in elections and had been
careful not to conflict with the principles of democracy. They took part
in the last elections for the Constituent Assembly of 1917, with a
grandiose programme, hoping to win an overwhelming majority. But when
they found that, in spite of all that, they were left in a minority they
declared war on democracy and dissolved the Constituent Assembly, with
Lenin issuing The State and Revolution as a personal self-justification.
To be sure, Lenin’s task was no easy one: on the one hand, he was forced
to make daring concessions to the antistatist tendencies of the
anarchists, while on the other hand he had to show that his attitude was
by no means anarchist, but purely marxist. As an inevitable consequence
of this, his work is full of mistakes against all the logic of sound
human thought. One example will show this to be so in his desire to
emphasise, as far as possible, a supposed antistate tendency in Marx,
Lenin quotes the famous passage from The Civil War in France where Marx
gives his approval to the Commune for having begun to uproot the
parasitic state. But Lenin did not bother to remember that Marx in so
saying it was in open conflict with all he had said earlier was being
forced to make concessions to Bakunin’s supporters against whom he was
then engaged in a very bitter struggle.
Even Franz Mehring who cannot be suspected of sympathy with the majority
socialists was forced to grant that this was a concession in his last
book, Karl Marx, where he says: “However truthful all the details in
this work may be, it is beyond question that the thinking it contains
contradicts all the opinions Marx and Engels had been proclaiming since
the Communist Manifesto a quarter century earlier.”
Bakunin was right when he said at the time: “The picture of a Commune in
armed insurrection was so imposing that even the marxists, whose ideas
the Paris revolution had utterly upset, had to bow before the actions of
the Commune. They went further than that; in defiance of all logic and
their known convictions they had to associate themselves with the
Commune and identify with its principles and aspirations. It was a comic
carnival game, but a necessary one. For such was the enthusiasm awakened
by the Revolution that they would have been rejected and repudiated
everywhere had they tried to retreat into the ivory tower of their
dogma.”
Lenin forgot something else, something that is certainly of primary
importance in the matter. It is this: that it was precisely Marx and
Engels who tried to force the organisations of the old International to
go in for parliamentary activity, thereby making themselves directly
responsible for the wholesale bogging down of the socialist labour
movement in bourgeois parliamentarism. The International was the first
attempt to bring the organised workers of every country together into
one big union, the ultimate goal of which would be the economic
liberation of the workers. With the various sections differing in their
thinking and tactics, it was imperative to lay down the conditions for
their working together and recognise the full autonomy and independent
authority of each of the various sections. While this was done the
International grew powerfully and flourished in every country. But this
all changed completely the moment Marx and Engels began to push the
different national federations towards parliamentary activity; that
happened for the first time at the lamentable London conference of 1871,
where they won approval for a resolution that closed in the following
terms:
“Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied
classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting
itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old
parties formed by the propertied classes; that this constitution of the
working class into a political party is indispensable in order to assure
the triumph of the Social Revolution and its ultimate end the abolition
of classes; that the combination of forces which the working class has
already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to
serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of
landlords and capitalists the Conference recalls to the members of the
International: that in the militant state of the working class, its
economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united.”
That a single section or federation in the International should adopt
such a resolution was quite possible, for it would only be incumbent on
its members to act upon it; but that the Executive Council should impose
it on member groups of the International, especially an issue that was
not submitted to a General Congress, was an arbitrary act in open
contravention of the spirit of the International and necessarily had to
bring energetic protests from all the individualist and revolutionary
elements.
The shameful congress at The Hague in 1872 crowned the labours
undertaken by Marx and Engels by turning the International into an
electoral machine, including a clause to the effect of obliging the
various sections to fight for the seizure of political power. So Marx
and Engels were guilty of splitting the International with all its
noxious consequences for the labour movement and it was they who brought
about the stagnation and degeneration of Socialism through political
action.
When revolution broke out in Spain in 1873, the members of the
International almost all of them anarchists ignored the petitions of the
bourgeois parties and followed their own course towards the
expropriation of the land, the means of production in a spirit of social
revolution. General strikes and rebellions broke out in Alcoy, San Lucar
de Barrameda, Seville, Cartagena and elsewhere, which had to be stifled
with bloodshed. The port of Cartagena held out longer, remaining in the
hands of revolutionaries until it finally fell under the fire of
Prussian and English warships. At the time, Engels launched a harsh
attack on the Spanish Bakuninists in the Volksstaat, taking them to task
for their unwillingness to join forces with the Republicans. Had he
lived long enough, how Engels would have criticised his communist
disciples from Russia and Germany!
After the celebrated 1891 Congress when the leaders of the socalled
“Youth” were expelled from the German social democratic party, for
levelling the same charges as Lenin was to do, against “opportunists”
and “kautskyists”, they founded a separate party with its own paper, Der
Sozialist, in Berlin. Initially, the movement was extremely dogmatic and
its thinking was almost identical to the thinking of the communist party
of today. If, for instance, one reads Teistler’s book Parliamentarism
and the Working Class, one comes across the same ideas as in Lenin’s The
State and Revolution. Like the Russian bolsheviks and the members of the
German communist party, the independent socialists of that time
repudiated the principles of democracy, and refused to take any part in
bourgeois parliaments on the basis of the reformist principles of
marxism.
So what had Engels to say of these “Youth” who, like the communists,
delighted in accusing the leaders of the Social Democrat Party of
betraying marxism? In a letter to Sorge in October 1891, the aged Engels
passed the following kindly comments: “The nauseating Berliners have
become the accused instead of staying the accusers and having behaved
like miserable cowards were forced to work outside the party if they
want to do anything. Without doubt there are police sties and
cryptoanarchists among their number who want to work among our people.
Along with them, there are a number of dullards, deluded students and an
assortment of insolent mountebanks. All in all, some two hundred
people.” It would be really interesting to know what fond descriptions
Engels would have honoured our “communists” of today with, they who
claim to be “the guardians of marxist principles”.
It is impossible to characterise the methods of the old social
democracy. On that issue Lenin has not one word to say and his German
friends have even less. The majority socialists ought to remember this
telling detail to show that they are the real representatives of
marxism; anyone with a knowledge of history will agree with them. It was
marxism that imposed parliamentary action on the working class and
marked out the path followed by the German social democratic Party. Only
when this is understood will one realise that the path of social
liberation brings us to the happy land of anarchism despite the
opposition of marxism.
[1]
W. Tcherkesoff: Pages d’Histoire socialiste; les precurseurs de
l’lnternationale.
[2] The article, entitled “Il Manifesto della Democrazia”, was first
published in Avanti! (Year 6; number 1901, of 1902).
[3] Rheinische Zeitung, number 289, 16 October 1842.
[4] Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy, foreword.
[5] Bray: Labour’s Wronszs and Labour’s Remedy, Leeds, 1839.
[6] Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto, page 21.
[7] Rheinische Zeitung, 7 January 1843.
[8]
B. Bauer was one of the most assiduous members of the Berlin circle
“The Free”, where outstanding figures from the world of German
freethought (of the first half of the nineteenth century) could be
seen; figures like Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity,
a profoundly atheist work, or Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His
Own. The authoritarian thought of Karl Marx was fated to clash with
the free thinking of B. Bauer and his friends, among whom we must
not forget E. Bauer, whose book Der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat [A
Critique of Church and State] was completely confiscated by the
authorities and burned (first edition, 1843). The second printing
(Berne, 1844) had better luck. But not the author, who was sentenced
and imprisoned for his antistate, antichurch ideas. (Editor’s Note.)
[9]
J. B. Say, an English economist of the day whose complete works Max
Stirner translated into German. Karl Marx’s phobia for French
anarchist thought (as we know, his Poverty of Philosophy is a
continuous criticism of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty) or for
German freethought (his massive book Documents of Socialism is a
vain, laughable attempt to make little of and dismiss The Ego
and His Own), also rose up against this sociologist, much
discussed at the time by anyone critical of the state and trying
to escape its tyranny. (Editor’s Note.)