In previous articles in this series I started with the
partial strategic debate in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire, and
progressed to Marxism as a strategy, and to the strategies of the right and
left wings of the Second International. This article addresses the strategic
conceptions of the centre.
The centre tendency in the German Social Democratic Party
and Second International was also its ideological leadership. In spite of
eventually disastrous errors and betrayals, this tendency has a major
historical achievement to its credit. It led the building of the mass workers’
socialist parties of late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the creation
of the Second International. The leftist advocates of the mass strike strategy,
in contrast, built either groupuscules like the modern far left (such as the De
Leonists) or militant but ephemeral movements (like the Industrial Workers of
the World).
Down to 1914, Russian Bolshevism was a tendency within
the centre, not a tendency opposed to it - even if Kautsky preferred the
Mensheviks. Without the centre tendency’s international unity policy there
would have been no RSDLP; without the lessons the Bolsheviks learned from the
international centre tendency, there could have been no mass opening of the
Bolshevik membership in 1905, no recovery of the party’s strength through trade
union, electoral and other forms of low-level mass work in 1911-14, and no
Bolshevik political struggle to win a majority between April and October 1917.
The centre tendency did not, of course, identify itself as
such. It self-identified as the continuators and defenders of ‘orthodox
Marxism’ against ‘anarchists’ (to its left, but not in the centre’s view) and
‘revisionists’ to its right. In this sense it was primarily defined by negative
judgments on the coalition strategy of the right and the mass strike strategy
of the left. Both Kautsky’s The social revolution (1902) and his The
road to power (1909) are extremely cautious in making positive categorical
predictive claims about strategy. There are nonetheless some core principled
understandings about strategy which emerge from the arguments.
The strength of the proletariat and its revolutionary
capacity flows, for the centre, not from the employed workers’ power to
withdraw their labour but from the power of the proletariat as a class to organise.
It is organisation that makes the difference between a spontaneous expression
of rage and rebellion, like a riot, and a strike as a definite action for
definite and potentially winnable goals.
Moreover, as soon as we move beyond craft unionism, which
relies on skills monopolies to coerce the employer, the difference between
victory and defeat in a strike is the ability of the solidarity of the class as
a whole to sustain the strikers in the face of the economic and political
pressure the employers can exert. Finally, it is the need and (potential)
ability of the proletariat as a class to organise democratically when we enter
into a mass strike wave or revolutionary crisis that represents the potential
alternative authority to the authority of the capitalist class.
Proletarian organisation need not only be deployed in the
form of strike action. Solidarity and the power to organise can also create
cooperatives of various sorts, workers’ educational institutions, workers’
papers, and workers’ political parties: and it can turn out the vote for
workers’ candidates in public elections. Strong votes for a workers’ party will
increase the self-confidence and sense of solidarity of the working class as a
class and its ability to organise and act, not just electorally but in other
arenas of struggle, such as strikes, for example.
The core of the political strategy of the centre tendency
was to build up the workers’ organised movement, and especially the workers’
political party as its central institution. In their view, as the organised
movement of the working class grew stronger, so would the self-confidence
of the class and its ability to take political decisions and impose them on the
bourgeoisie and the state. Both in the struggle for reforms and
in mass strike waves or revolutionary crises, a powerful mass party of the
working class which had at the core of its aims the perspective of the working
class taking power and overcoming the regime of private property would be the
essential instrument of the working class asserting an alternative form of
authority.
It is important to be clear that the movement that the
centre tendency sought to build was not the gutted form of the modern social-democracy/Labourism,
which is dependent on the support of the state and the capitalist media for its
mass character. The idea was of a party which stood explicitly for the power of
the working class and socialism. It was one which was built up on the basis of
its own resources, its own organisation with local and national press, as well
as its own welfare and educational institutions, etc.
There is no real doubt that this view was a direct
inheritance from Marx and Engels’s arguments from the time of the First
International onwards. The Hegelian-Marxists’ claim that it was an
undialectical vulgarisation of Marx and Engels, faced with the historical
evidence, logically had to conclude that Engels had vulgarised Marx. This, in
turn, has been shown by Draper and others to be false.
The second central feature of the strategic understandings
of the centre tendency was that the socialist revolution is necessarily the act
of the majority. This is fairly elementary and fundamental Marxism: it formed
the basis of Marx and Engels’s opposition to various forms of socialist
putschism and support for enlightened despots (Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s
theory of revolution: critique of other socialisms has the details.)
The object of the socialist revolution is precisely the self-emancipation
of the working class majority and through this the emancipation “of all human
beings without distinction of sex or race” (Programme of the Parti Ouvrier).
The idea that this can be accomplished through the action of an enlightened
minority is a self-contradiction.
The centre tendency drew two conclusions from this
understanding - against the left, and against the right. The first was
rejection of the mass strike strategy. On this issue, the centre presented the
anarcho-syndicalists and the left with a version of Morton’s Fork. The first
limb of the fork was that a true general strike would depend on the workers’
party having majority support if it was to win. But if the workers’ party
already had majority support, where was the need for the general strike? The
workers’ party would start with its electoral majority as a mandate for
socialism, rather than with the strike. It was for this reason that the centre,
in Bebel’s resolution at the 1905 Jena Congress of the SPD, was willing to
demand the use of the mass strike weapon in defence of, or in the struggle for,
universal suffrage.
The second limb of the fork was that the strategy of the
working class coming to power through a strike wave presupposed that the
workers’ party had not won a majority. In these circumstances, for the
workers’ party to reach for power would be a matter of ‘conning the working
class into taking power’ (Artous has accused Callinicos of having this
strategy). However formally majoritarian the party might be, the act of turning
a strike wave into a struggle for power would inevitably be the act of an
enlightened minority steering the benighted masses.
The argument against the right was also an argument against
minority action - but minority action of a different kind. The right argued
that the workers’ party, while still a minority, should be willing to enter
coalition governments with middle class parties in order to win reforms. The
centre argued that this policy was illusory, primarily because the interests of
the middle classes and those of the proletariat were opposed. Behind this
argument was one made by Marx in 1850, that it would be a disaster for the
workers’ party to come to power on the back of the support of the petty proprietors,
since the workers’ party would then be forced to represent the interests of
this alien class.
“We are devoted to a party which, most fortunately for
it, cannot yet come to power. If the proletariat were to come to power the
measures it would introduce would be petty-bourgeois and not directly
proletarian. Our party can come to power only when the conditions allow
it to put its own view into practice. Louis Blanc [French socialist who
participated in a republican coalition government in 1848] is the best instance
of what happens when you come to power prematurely.”1
This logic applied all the more to the creation of a
coalition government with the political representatives of the petty proprietors.
By becoming part of such a coalition, the workers’ party would in practice
accept responsibility for the petty-proprietor government. Again, the
opposition to participating in coalitions as a minority was no novelty, but
followed arguments already made by Marx and Engels. Thus, for example, Engels
wrote to Turati in 1894, anticipating a possible Italian (democratic)
revolution:
“After the common victory we might perhaps be offered some seats
in the new government - but always in a minority. Here lies the
greatest danger. After the February Revolution in 1848 the French
socialistic democrats ... were incautious enough to accept such positions. As a
minority in the government they involuntarily bore the responsibility for all
the infamy and treachery which the majority, composed of pure republicans,
committed against the working class, while at the same time their participation
in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working
class they were supposed to represent.”2
This is a hard judgment, but it is one which has been
repeatedly confirmed by history. Participation by communists in nationalist and
‘democratic’ governments, and ‘critical support’ policies, animated by the
desire to ‘do something for the workers’, has in the course of the 20th century
brought on the workers’ movement in several countries disasters far worse than
those of 1848: the fates of the mass Indonesian, Iraqi and Iranian communist
parties spring to mind. The effect of the coalition policy can be not merely
defeat, but the destruction of the very idea of socialism and working class
politics as an alternative to the capitalist order.
The centre’s strategic line was, then, a strategy of
patience as opposed to the two forms of impatience; those of the right’s
coalition policy and the left’s mass strike strategy. This strategy of patience
had its grounds in the belief that the inner-logic of capital would inevitably
tend, in the first place, to increase the relative numbers and hence strength of
the proletariat as a class, and, in the second, to increase social inequality
and class antagonism. Kautsky makes the argument most clearly in The social
revolution. In this situation the workers’ party/movement could expect to
build up its forces over the long term to a point at which it would eventually
be able to take power with majority support.
This strategic line can be summed up as follows. Until we
have won a majority (identifiable by our votes in election results) the
workers’ party will remain in opposition and not in government. While in
opposition we will, of course, make every effort to win partial gains through
strikes, single issue campaigns, etc., including partial agreements with other
parties not amounting to government coalitions, and not involving the
workers’ party expressing confidence in these parties.
When we have a majority, we will form a government and
implement the whole minimum programme; if necessary, the possession of a
majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/pro-capitalist and
petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent
the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and
allow the class struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class.
I have left on one side the question of imperialism, which I
discussed at considerable length in a series in the Weekly Worker in
July-August 2004. As I indicated in the third article in this series, it has significant
implications for the centre tendency’s strategy of patience. The inherent
tendency in capitalism towards social polarisation is partially displaced from
the imperialist countries onto the colonial countries.
In particular, the material division of labour on a world
scale results in a proportional increase in the professional, managerial and
state official middle classes in the imperialist countries - a phenomenon
observed by Hobson of south eastern England and then in Lenin’s Imperialism,
and one which has been considerably more marked in the period since 1945.
An increasing proportion of the total population of the imperialist countries
becomes wholly or partly dependent on the spoils of empire. Thus, the
likelihood of the workers’ party actually achieving an electoral majority - as
the strategy of patience demands - in any single imperialist country and
outside of conditions of acute political crisis, is substantially reduced.
What distinguished the centre tendency from the later Leninists
most fundamentally was the belief that the working class could take over and
use the existing capitalist state bureaucratic apparatus, a view developed most
clearly in Kautsky’s The road to power. This, too, had its roots in
claims made by Marx and - particularly - Engels.
In The civil war in France Marx had asserted
precisely that the working class “class cannot simply lay hold of the
ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” and had
proposed the Commune as a model of the future workers’ regime.
In the first draft of The civil war in France,
indeed, Marx had characterised the Commune by saying that “This was, therefore,
a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican
or imperialist form of state power. It was a revolution against the state
itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people
for the people of its own social life.” 3
In an April 1871 letter to Kugelmann Marx wrote that “If you
look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I
say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as
before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another,
but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s
revolution on the continent” (original italics apart from “on the
continent”).
But that was in the first flush of the revolutionary
movement. In the aftermath of the Commune, the Bakuninists had argued that the
mass strike revolution was to abolish the state. In response to the
uselessness of the Bakuninists’ line, Marx and - in particular - Engels had
‘bent the stick’ against it in a number of texts.
In On authority (1872), Engels uses a series of
arguments for the need for authority (ie, collective decision-making
mechanisms) in modern cooperative production.4 But he explains them in a very
unqualified way, which makes no distinction between the temporary
subordination of one individual to another which is unavoidable in collective
decision-making, and the permanent division of labour between managers
and grunts which characterises both capitalist (and other class), and
bureaucratic, regimes. Engels’s arguments in this respect were to be used both
by Kautsky against the left, and by Lenin in the 1918-21 process of
construction of the bureaucratic regime in Russia.
Engels’s 1891 afterword to The civil war in France is
a little more ambiguous on ‘smashing up’ the state than Marx’s letter to
Kugelmann: “In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the
oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no
less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat
after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the
proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at
the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in
new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the
state on the scrap-heap” (emphasis added).5
In Engels’s 1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class
struggles in France, 1848-1850 we find Engels asserting that: “With [the
SPD’s] successful utilisation of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new
method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly
took on a more tangible form. It was found that the state institutions, in
which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still
further levers to fight these very state institutions. The workers took
part in elections to particular diets, to municipal councils and to trades
courts; they contested with the bourgeoisie every post in the occupation of
which a sufficient part of the proletariat had a say. And so it happened that
the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal
than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections
than of those of rebellion” (emphasis added).
It is clear from Engels’s correspondence in 1895 that he did
not by any means intend to rule out illegal or forcible action, and was
exasperated at the SPD leadership’s use of the Introduction to suggest
that he did. But this does not alter the significance of the positive
arguments, part of which have been quoted here.
Behind these ambiguities is a problem of theory. Marx and
Engels had started out with an appropriation and ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s theory
of the state: Hegel saw the state as growing out of the internal contradictions
of ‘civil society’ (bürgerliche Gesellschaft); Marx and Engels identified
bürgerliche Gesellschaft with capitalism. But they became conscious that
the state as a social form in general is historically prior to the emergence of
capitalism. In The civil war in France, Marx projects the rise of
capitalism back onto the emergence of the absolutist state in the phase
of the decline of feudalism.
Behind the argument of The civil war in France is, in
fact, an earlier understanding that absolute monarchy must be broken by
revolution. In England’s 17th century revolution (1850) Marx and Engels
wrote that “Although M Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he
does not even reach the simple conclusion that the transition from an absolute
to a constitutional monarchy can take place only after violent struggles and
passing through a republican stage, and that even then the old dynasty, having
become useless, must make way for a usurpatory side line.”6
In quoting Marx’s letter to Kugelmann, I added emphasis to
the words “on the continent”. Engels’s 1891 critique of the Erfurt programme
makes a similar distinction: “One can conceive that the old society may develop
peacefully into the new one in countries where the representatives of the
people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of
the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way:
in democratic republics such as France and the USA, in monarchies such as
Britain, where the imminent abdication of the dynasty in return for financial
compensation is discussed in the press daily and where this dynasty is
powerless against the people. But in Germany where the government is almost
omnipotent and the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real
power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, when, moreover, there is no need to
do so, means removing the fig-leaf from absolutism and becoming oneself a
screen for its nakedness.”7
Marx’s late work found in the Ethnological notebooks
indicates that he recognised the insufficiency of this account, which ties the state
to early modern absolutism. In The origins of the family, private property
and the state, Engels’s “execution of a bequest” of Marx’s anthropological
work, Engels identifies the origins of the state with the break-up of clan
society in antiquity: the social contradictions which produce the state are
then given by the emergence of full alienable private property and classes.
The result, both in Marx’s Civil war in France
version and in Engels’s Origins version, is that capitalism inherits
“the state” from the prior social orders. It is then rational to suppose that
socialism (either as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or as the ‘first
phase of communism’), will inherit “the state” from capitalism.
What is missing is a general theory which will explain why
the absolute monarchies had to be ‘smashed’ in order for fully capitalist
states to emerge, in a process which was completed in the Netherlands in 1609
and England in 1688, but was not completed until 1871 in France and 1918 (and
perhaps even 1945) in Germany.
But such a theory must also explain why the late antique
state had to be ‘smashed’ in order for feudal state regimes to emerge, in a
process completed in the former western Roman empire over the 7th-11th
centuries, but which in Byzantium failed, ending in the conquest of the
still stubbornly late antique state by the Ottoman regime in 1453. Similarly,
in China a regime very similar to the late antique state recapitulated itself
on changes of dynasty until it finally fell in the 1911-12 revolution, but in
Japan such a state was ‘smashed’ in the 12th century, opening the way to a
feudal development.
Such a theory could not to stop at the immediate outcome,
the particularity of the late feudal bureaucratic-coercive state and its
relationship to capitalism. Nor could it stop at the beginning, at the absolute
generality of the emergence of the state in connection with the transition to
class society (which was probably in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, China, India
and Mesoamerica rather than, as Engels placed it in Origins, in Greek
and Roman classical antiquity). It would have to grasp the relation of concrete
state forms (city-state and god-empire, national kingdom as part of a
larger religious unity, rule-of-law constitutional state as part of a system of
states) to their class bases (slavery, feudalism, capitalism).
In approaching the matter in this way, it would become
visible that Engels’s 1891 judgment that in France, the USA and England “the
representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, [and], if
one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit
in a constitutional way” was false. The inner secret of the capitalist state
form is not ‘bourgeois democracy’. Rather, it has three elements: 1. the
‘rule of law’ - ie, the judicial power; 2. the deficit financing of the state
through organised financial markets; and 3. the fact that capital rules, not
through a single state, but through an international state system, of
which each national state is merely a part.
This, in turn, carries the implication that Engels’s 1891
critique of the SPD’s failure in the Erfurt Programme to call for the
democratic republic was true but insufficient, and that his 1895 claim that “It
was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is
organised, offer the working class still further levers to fight these very
state institutions” was misconceived.
In the absence of an explicit democratic-republican critique
of the state hierarchy forming part of the SPD’s agitation, the SPD’s
participation in the local and sectoral governmental organs of the German
Second Empire served, not to undermine the imperial state, but to integrate the
workers’ movement behind that state and to support the development of bureaucratic
hierarchies within the workers’ movement.
The problem of failure to grasp the character of the
nation-state system as part of an international state system and subject to the
world market was one the centre shared with the rightwing, and was more
profoundly disastrous than the failure to grasp the problem of the class
character of state forms. It, too, has its origins in Marx and Engels.
“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the
proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The
proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with
its own bourgeoisie” (Communist manifesto).
There is a peculiarity about this statement. Early in the Manifesto,
we are told that “To this end, Communists of various nationalities have
assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in
the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.” The ideas
of Marx and Engels reflected in the Manifesto, moreover, were drawn from
the appropriation and critique of German philosophy, English political economy,
and French utopian socialism. Moreover, what immediately followed (not, of
course, as a result of the Manifesto) was the outbreak of an international
revolutionary wave affecting France, Germany, Austria, Hungary ...
Indeed, previous (bourgeois) revolutionary movements
had also been international: the Europe-wide commune movement of the 12th and
13th centuries, protestantism (in particular Calvinism) and Enlightenment
republicanism. Future, more proletarian revolutionary waves, were also to be
international in character, as in the rise of class struggles which led up to
the 1914-18 war, those of the end and immediate aftermath of that war, the
aftermath of 1945, and the late 1960s-early 1970s.
Nonetheless, in the Critique of the Gotha programme Marx
wrote that “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’.” He went on, of course, to criticise the programme for “Not a word,
therefore, about the international functions of the German working class! And
it is thus that it is to challenge its own bourgeoisie - which is already
linked up in brotherhood against it with the bourgeois of all other countries -
and Herr Bismarck’s international policy of conspiracy.”
Engels’s contemporaneous critique in a letter to Bebel has a
similar insistence on the workers’ party initially organising nationally, but
its underlying international content: “There was, of course, no need whatever
to mention the International as such. But at the very least there should have
been no going back on the programme of 1869, and some sort of statement to the
effect that, though first of all the German workers’ party is acting
within the limits set by its political frontiers (it has no right to speak in
the name of the European proletariat, especially when what it says is wrong),
it is nevertheless conscious of its solidarity with the workers of all other
countries and will, as before, always be ready to meet the obligations that solidarity
entails.
Such obligations, even if one does not definitely proclaim
or regard oneself as part of the ‘International’, consist for example in aid,
abstention from blacklegging during strikes, making sure that the party organs
keep German workers informed of the movement abroad, agitation against
impending or incipient dynastic wars and, during such wars, an attitude such as
was exemplarily maintained in 1870 and 1871, etc.”8
The growth of the SPD, however, gave rise to a shift in
Engels’s attitude. An increased emphasis was placed on the defence of Germany
as the country in which the workers’ movement was strongest. In 1891 the
initial emergence of an alliance of France with Russia threatened a war in
which Germany might be attacked on two fronts (as, in the event, happened in
1914).
Engels wrote to Bebel that “we must declare that since 1871
we have always been ready for a peaceful understanding with France, that as
soon as our Party comes to power it will be unable to exercise that power
unless Alsace-Lorraine freely determines its own future, but that if war is
forced upon us, and moreover a war in alliance with Russia, we must regard this
as an attack on our existence and defend ourselves by every method ...”
And “if we [Germany] are beaten, every barrier to chauvinism
and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown down for years hence. If we are
victorious our party will come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore
the victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must not only desire
victory but further it by every means.”9
The same position was publicly adopted by Bebel on behalf of
the SPD, and Engels published it (as his own opinion) in France.
With this we have arrived at the position which the SPD took
up in August 1914. It is, in fact, dictated by the inner-logic of the
combination of the claims that “the proletariat of each country must, of
course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” and that the
(nation-) state is “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious
struggle for class supremacy”. In August 1914 these commitments left the centre
as badly enmeshed in the defence of “national interests” as the right, and led
them to support feeding the European working class into the mincing machine of the
war.
It is a commonplace of the far left, following hints from
Lenin elaborated by Lukacs and others, to accuse Kautsky in particular and the
centre in general of an insufficient grasp of dialectic. I have argued against
this approach before (‘Classical
Marxism and grasping the dialectic’ Weekly Worker September 11 2003).
In particular, it is clear that Kautsky and his immediate co-thinkers did not
imagine an uninterrupted social peace which would allow the SPD to progress
without crises and setbacks, and that they did grasp that history moves both
in a slow molecular fashion and in an accelerated and chaotic fashion in
periods of crisis.
The trouble was that their errors on the state and the
nation-state rendered this understanding useless when it came to the test of
war. They were to have the same result in the revolution of 1918 and when, in
1931-33, the SPD was confronted with the rise of Nazism.
The centre’s strategy of patience was more successful than
the other strategies in actually building a mass party. Its insistence on the
revolution as the act of the majority, and refusal of coalitionism, was equally
relevant to conditions of revolutionary crisis: the Bolsheviks proved this
positively in April-October 1917, and it has been proved negatively over and
over again between the 1890s and the 2000s. However, because it
addressed neither the state form, nor the international character of the
capitalist state system and the tasks of the workers’ movement, the centre’s
strategy proved to collapse into the policy of the right when matters came to
the crunch.
1. MECW 10 pp628-29, quoted in Meszaros, Beyond Capitalism
(1995) p518 329n.
2. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm.
3. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm#D1s3ii.
4. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm.
5. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm.
6. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm
7. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm.
8. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm.
9. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_09_29.htm
First published in Weekly Worker – April 2006