Marxists and the Workers Party

Communists and Proletarians

“In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?  The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.  They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.”

(Marx and Engels – “Manifesto of the Communist Party”)

With these words Marx and Engels set out clearly the position of Marxists in relation to the Workers Party. Yet, despite the clarity, despite the complete lack of ambiguity, set out in this position, Marxists have consistently set up parties, and more often sects, directly opposed to the real workers parties, have consistently made a fetish of their own sectarian principles as the only ones capable of shaping and moulding the proletarian movement, and have consistently placed their own interests above that of the movement as a whole.

Its no wonder that Marx himself was led to comment in the face of such “Marxists” that “if this is Marxism, then I am no Marxist.”

Enter the Working Class

From the very beginning, the socialist movement was divided amongst a rag-tag of sects, each convinced that it alone had the Philosopher’s Stone, the key that would unlock the door to proletarian revolution. Only when the working-class itself begins to enter the fray, first via the Chartist Movement, and later in the growth of mass working class parties, particularly in Germany, does this infantilism begin to be pushed to the fringes of the Movement, and the basis for the kind of fusion, envisioned by Marx and Engels, of Marxist ideas with a mass workers party begin to take hold. It is no coincidence that it is during this period that, not only are the greatest leaps forward in proletarian science to be witnessed, but alongside them a huge development of the working class movement itself.

The Sectarians

Yet, even then, there were “Marxists” who found some reason or another to stand aside from this real movement, finding solace in their own cocoon of Marxist purity, where the harsh realities of the class struggle could be ignored in favour of petit-bourgeois, romantic fantasies of some “pure” socialist movement, and revolution, just as the religious zealots are forced, time and again, to succumb to schism as one group after another discovers that only it is the defender of the true faith. Engels himself was led to comment on some of these organisations in Britain such as the SDF, which was to ossify into the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a party which has been one of the clearest examples of how “Marxists” have ignored the advice and teaching of Marx and Engels.  Engels advised his supporters, like Eleanor Marx, to avoid them like the plague, and orientate directly, instead, to the working-class masses, found in the Liberal Clubs.

What the Marxists Are

Certainly, the Marxists have to be an organised force. How else could they develop their own ideas and thereby seek to influence, educate and develop the workers movement.

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

(ibid)

But, the Marxists are precisely that a section of the workers party, its resolute Left-Wing, they are not another party standing in opposition to it, nor even, as has been the Trotskyist perspective in the Entryist tactic, another party simply masquerading as part of the Workers Party, whether for the purpose of seeking, like a cuckoo, to ultimately substitute itself for that party, or else, in its alternate variant, simply seeking to party build prior to splitting the Workers Party for its own sectarian ends.

Marxists and the Workers Parties Today

The latest example of this sectarianism has been the attitude of Marxist organisations, over the last ten years or so, to the Labour Party, but similar traits can be seen in the positions of Marxists elsewhere to Workers Parties, see the discussion in relation to Germany here.  It’s the reason no mass Workers Party in the US has developed, its closest approximation being the Democrats. 

Its true that there will be times when those parties to which the workers have, traditionally, given their allegiance become obsolete, that out of them grow new parties more closely associated with the working class, such as the development of the Labour Party effectively out of the old Liberal Party, but such developments must occur naturally, organically, as a result of the working class itself growing out of these parties, its class consciousness developing to a stage in which its ideas are no longer compatible with those of the old party. But, all too often, it has been Marxists themselves that have grown weary of the old Party, and sought to artificially create something new. The history is one which is symptomatic of the failure of Marxists to adhere to Marx and Engels advice, and the damage that has been done to the Workers Movement over the last 100 years as a consequence.

Two Types of Sectarianism

During the 1970’s, and early 1980’s, there was a revival of Marxist ideas. Indeed, the revival had begun in the 1960’s, but, by the 1970’s, it had led to the development of some sizeable organisations. Of these the “Third Campist” International Socialists (now SWP) was probably the largest. But, a consequence of the IS’s Third Camp political tradition was an innate “Economism”. Its disdain of any political organisation that did not match up to its model of political purity, that did not represent the politics only of “independent working class action” led it to oppose any involvement in the Labour Party – a party which acted in the interests of capitalism, was riddled with bourgeois ideology, which was committed to a reformist transformation of society, and, for much of the 1960’s and 70’s, was a party which was, in the majority of cases, organisationally moribund, with large paper memberships, but a largely empty shell of activists, and which, as a consequence, was extremely undemocratic, and bureaucratised. The flip side of this semi-anarchistic, syndicalist politics was its emersion in the industrial struggle, in the trades union struggle, a struggle which, by definition, is limited and reformist to the core, and, as with most organisations of the “Trostskyist” movement, also in the student movement, a movement, which, again, by definition, acts as a transmission belt of petit-bourgeois ideas into the workers movement.

The consequence of the IS’s politics was that, once again, a huge opportunity for Marxists to connect with the workers, in political struggle, was lost, and the ideological field of battle was largely surrendered, without a fight, to the right-wing leaders of that movement. The farce was that, at election times, the SWP were left, having abstained from the real political struggle of workers, inside the Labour Party, calling on workers to vote – often uncritically – for that same Labour Party, and the reality of their own relationship to the class manifested, whenever they did stand candidates, by their totally derisory number of votes.

The IS’s industrial activity was not without some objective basis. From around 1949 onwards the world economy had been in a 25 year long wave upswing. Typical of such periods, the increasing demand for labour enables, after a number of years, workers to demand and obtain higher wages, and better conditions. Such successes necessarily imbue the class with greater confidence, but also engender the idea that industrial struggle is all that is important, all that is required. A well organised group can in such conditions make headway in gaining positions within the trades unions, where very small numbers of activists often determine who is elected. 

Revolutionaries, by definition, are the most active, most militant members of the class, and it is these attributes that workers see as important, in electing their union representatives. But, the concomitant of this is that these revolutionaries replace political electoralism – a seeking of parliamentary votes – with industrial electoralism. Rather than being activist organisations geared to mobilising independent, direct action by rank and file members, the Rank and File, and Broad Left organisations developed, instead, as almost entirely electoral machines, geared to getting slates of revolutionaries elected to union positions. The other concomitant is that, having got themselves elected, the revolutionaries were then able to fool themselves into believing that this represented some sea change in class consciousness when, in fact, it was quite clear that few, if any, of the politics of the revolutionaries were shared by the rank and file members they had been elected to represent.

Of course, this type of politics, which flows, directly, from the ideas of the Shachtmanite/Burnhamite Third Camp, is fine, in periods when the working class is relatively strong, when such petit-bourgeois organisations can themselves experience some growth, and the appearance of success, but, once a conjunctural turn sets in, such organisations find themselves all the more cut adrift from the real working class, their perspectives completely disorganised, their frustration and demoralisation all the greater. Ultimately, they are forced to justify their own separate existence merely in terms of their political objectives, but now, with the force that should, for any Marxist, be at the centre of the strategy for the accomplishment of those objectives – the working class – in retreat, they are forced to simply mouth the mantras about “independent working class action”, whilst, in reality, looking to, and, at worst, allying themselves with other forces, to achieve these aims.

Without exception, those forces that have developed in the tradition of Third Campism have, in the last period of downturn, been led to abandon the centrality of the working class, in practice if not in their propaganda. In Britain, the SWP stand at one end of this spectrum allying themselves with the Islamists, at the other is the Euston Manifesto Group, allying itself, directly, with the bourgeois liberals, and, in the middle, groups like the AWL, which look to a progressive bourgeois democracy, or democratic imperialism, to provide solutions they are unable to mobilise the working class for, whilst, like Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of any responsibility for these forces, when, not unexpectedly, they fail to act progressively.

The other major organisation was the Militant Tendency, which in contrast to the IS did employ an Entryist tactic in the Labour Party. But, it was precisely that, a tactic. This was not Marxists being honest, genuine members of the Labour Party, seeking to develop that party with no separate interests of their own, as Marx and Engels had advised. This was a Party which sought to do nothing but build its own membership, to pursue its own goals, separate from those of the Party, and often at the expense of it, and the workers movement as a whole. One of the classic examples of that was the spectacle during the Miners Strike of 1984, of Militant members on marches carrying buckets to collect money not for the Miners, but for the Militant!

That is not to say that members of the Militant were not as assiduous in getting themselves elected to GC’s and other Labour Party bodies as IS militants were in getting themselves elected to trades union positions (the Militant too placed great store in such industrial work, a reflection of the fact that they remained more in the Marxist tradition than did the IS), or that, come election time, Militant members were not very active in canvassing – a good opportunity to sell papers and make contacts – and that, as a result, many individuals were held in some esteem by ordinary Leftish members of the Party.

But, as with other organisations adopting the Entryist tactic, the guiding motto had been established by Lenin long ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in his advice to the British Communists to “support the Labour Party like a rope supports a hanged man”. For the thousands of Labour Party members who considered this to be their party, placing its future in the hands of such executioners was, understandably, not a prospect to be cherished, and so, whatever their affinity to this or that individual, of such organisations, when it came to the crunch, the Kinnockite witch hunters were able to go about their business without a huge rebellion, though they were helped in great measure by the failure to fight, or to adopt alternative tactics by the revolutionaries, who, once again, sank back into the obscurity, and, now, near oblivion of the comfort zone of the pure microsect.

Upside Down Politics

And, having sunk back into this existence, every development can be turned to justify why it is, in fact, a principled position to adopt, why the moribund, undemocratic nature of the Labour Party, today, means that it is next to pointless for Marxists to fulfil their duty, as outlined by Marx and Engels, ignoring the work of the Marxists, in the Labour Party, in the 1960’s and 70’s, which was equally, if not more, moribund and bureaucratic.

The latest example, is the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, and the rule changes introduced in relation to party democracy and the conference. The response to these changes is a clear example of what is wrong with the Left. It is a repetition of that industrial electoralism of the IS of the 1960’s and 70’s, but now the focus is transferred into the Labour Party.  Instead of the focus of activity being the election of union representatives, the focus is, instead, the rather limited one, of being able to get motions discussed at party conference – presumably for no better reason than the opportunity of embarrassing the leadership if they get defeated. That’s no longer possible? Labour Party work is no longer possible, or at least worthwhile, then, concludes the sectarian.

But the whole purpose of Marxists activity in the labour movement in the trades unions, or the Workers Party, is not this. It is to work alongside the working class in ways which encourage its own self activity. Very little of that, on a day to day basis, has anything whatsoever to do with whether this or that motion is passed at Labour Party conference. In fact, it is to have an upside down view of working class politics. Getting this or that resolution passed (just as getting this or that revolutionary elected to a union position) only means anything if it is the result of a huge groundswell of support for that measure within the class, and that requires not manipulation or Leninist organisational skills to get things passed, or people elected, but the slow boring job of arguing, day after day, with ordinary real workers, and not just those activists who already in large part hold the same views as those seeking to influence them.

But how is that slow laborious work to be done unless Marxists are in the Labour Party discussing those ideas, selflessly building the party, at a rank and file level, drawing workers into it from the limited arena of industrial struggle. Yes, political discussions can be undertaken in the workplace, or in the community organisation, but, as used to be pointed out to the IS, by Marxists, once, such discussions are pointless, unless those workers can, then, be drawn into a wider political arena – and that arena cannot be some tiny sect.

A good example, was the McDonell campaign. It was almost like de ja vu all over again with Marxist organisations, largely, if not entirely, outside the Labour Party, organisations which, day after day, thrill over their depiction of the moribund nature of the Labour Party, then calling on workers to join the Labour Party and support McDonnell, whilst they remain aloof outside it!!! Talk about lions led by donkeys. With organisations that once criticised the IS for similar follies acting this way it was history repeating itself as farce.

Marx and Engels Against the Sectarians

In contrast to the sectarianism of many of the post-Marx Marxists, Marx and Engels set out their own position clearly.

“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.

In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.”

In short, Marx and Engels description of a Workers' Party was not some dogmatic, programmatic definition, let alone the insistence, made later, by Leninists, that such a party should be some “pure” Marxist party. It was the straightforward definition of those parties which attracted the support of the working-class. In Germany, Marx and Engels, themselves, joined the Democratic Party, an openly bourgeois Party, but which attracted the support of workers, becoming, as they described it, its Left-Wing.

Later, and using this experience as his reference, along with the advice he and Marx had given in The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote to Marxists in the US advising them on the approach they should adopt. Some Leninists claim that Marx and Engels, in later life, changed their position from that outlined in The Communist Manifesto, that they regretted their joining the Democrats in 1848. But that is the argument Leninists have to make in order to justify their Leninism (which Lenin would probably have treated in similar vein to Marx - "If this is Leninism, then, I am no Leninist!").   The fact is that, even towards the end of his life, Engels adhered to the principles previously outlined, as his letter of 1887 below makes clear.

London, January 27, 1887

”When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it. When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects, with the exception of the Anarchists, whose sudden appearance in various countries was but the effect of the violent bourgeois reaction after the Commune and could therefore safely be left by us to die out of itself, as it did. Had we from 1864, to 1873 insisted on working together only with those who openly adopted our platform where should we be to-day? I think that all our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line they will commit a great mistake.”

Source:

(Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky)

Historical Materialism in Practice

Its important, again, here, to take account of the times. Marx and Engels had arrived at their theory of historical materialism around the same time that the Chartist Movement had, in fact, reached its highest level. The working class had been going through a period of defensive struggles since the beginning of the long wave downturn, which ended around 1843. It was not surprising that its activity had been forced to look for political solutions such as the Charter. It is not surprising that, in place of purely economistic, trades union solutions, it is in this period that the working class is re-armed with new political ideas such as Marxism.

Nor is it accidental that, in the period of upswing arising from 1843 that Marx and Engels have success, using the strategy they have outlined, in keying into the rising tide of militancy, the growing confidence and combativity of the working class, and forging the beginnings of the first conscious political organisations of the working-class in the shape of The First International.

It is also instructive to see how Marx and Engels' ideas about the nature of such political organisations changed during this period away from the forms such as The League of the Just, which represented a legacy of Hegelianism (the idea that social change is brought about through the discovery, the unfolding of the idea, by a select few intellectuals or advanced elements), with The Communist League occupying an intermediate position, and towards the real working class party that was, as Engels puts it, one with great latitude.

“However, the social doctrine of the League, indefinite as it was, contained a very great defect, but one that had its roots in the conditions themselves. The members, in so far as they were workers at all, were almost exclusively artisans.”

Engels is full of praise for these artisans who, given the objective reality of their petit-bourgeois nature, could not yet have formed the proletarian party, but this petit-bourgeois politics was necessarily limited, subjective and moralistic. It, basically, represented a petit-bourgeois view of the world, seen in the approach of some organisations, today, that moralises over this or that injustice, and concludes “something must be done”. An example is that of Albert Glotzer as outlined in my critique here.

“But it was also inevitable that their old handicraft prejudices should be a stumbling block to them at every moment, whenever it was a question of criticizing existing society in detail, that is, of investigating economic facts. And I do not believe there was a single man in the whole League at that time who had ever read a book on political economy. But that mattered little; for the time being “equality”, “brotherhood” and “justice” helped them to surmount every theoretical obstacle.”

But today, as Marx’s critique of this kind of petit-bourgeois socialism demonstrated, reliance on this socialist morality as a guide to action, on the principles of “equality”, “brotherhood”, and “justice”, are no longer adequate. Yet, despite the passage of more than 150 years, the conditions remain remarkably similar, the difference being that today’s petit-bourgeois socialists call themselves Marxists, and rather than their petit-bourgeois nature deriving from them being artisans, it derives from their background as students, ex-students and intellectuals, separated in large part from the real working-class.

“Meanwhile a second, essentially different Communism was developed alongside that of the League and of Weitling. While I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa. … Communism among the French and Germans, Chartism among the English, now no longer appeared as something accidental, which could just as well not have occurred. These movements now presented themselves as a movement of the modern oppressed class, the proletariat, as the more or less developed forms of its historically necessary struggle against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie; as forms of the class struggle, but distinguished from all earlier class struggles by this one thing, that the present-day oppressed class the proletariat, cannot achieve its emancipation without at the same time emancipating society as a whole from division into classes and, therefore, from class struggles. And Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.”

(Engels – “History of the Communist League”)

Leninism the Highest Stage of Sectarianism

History never proceeds in a straight line. In fact, it is almost like a law of history that, just at the moment when everything seems to be moving ahead strongly, an unforeseen event arises that switches the historical tracks. By the end of the 19th century, large socialist movements existed in much of Europe. In Continental Europe, these parties were, already, largely established as parties in which the ideas of Marxism were prevalent. Partly, that was a result of their different development from the origin of the Labour Party, in Britain, which developed out of the Liberal Party, on the backs of the trades unions, and which, as a consequence, from the beginning imprinted upon it, their own reformist politics.

In Germany, the Social Democrats were a party organising hundreds of thousands of workers as activists, and gaining the support of millions more. Already, with electoral success, the steady progress of the movement engendered the idea that socialism could be brought about, gradually, through parliamentary action, at the top, once again relegating the self-activity of the class to a secondary consideration. 

It shared a common approach to the development of socialism with Leninism, a reliance on action from above, on statism, a throw back to ideas first presented in The Communist Manifesto, and retained by Lassalle, ideas that had been rejected by Marx and Engels in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx rejects such a statist approach in favour of the self activity and self reliance of the working class on its own organisations, a position Marx was to outline in Vol. III of Capital, where he sets out the role of workers co-operatives, spreading progressively throughout the economy, as the basis of the socialist transformation of society, as the basis of the real social revolution, the transformation of private into collective, co-operatively owned property.

But, it was partly in response to the spread of these revisionist, reformist ideas that Leninism arises. That Lenin should take a step back from the position arrived at by Marx and Engels, in the conception of what should constitute the proletarian revolutionary party, is not that surprising using the Marxist method.

Lenin found himself in Russia, in conditions similar to those that Marx and Engels had found themselves in, in Germany, at the time of The League of the Just. The Russian working class was very small, the forces of Marxism tiny, and, to make matters worse, there was a terrible police state in place that made any kind of legal political activity almost impossible.

Although, especially after his own brother was executed for an attempt on the life of the Tsar, Lenin made clear his opposition to such terrorist tactics, as an alternative to the building of a workers party, he also retained a strong affinity to the bravery of such people, and refused to renounce the possibility of using such tactics when appropriate. Lenin was, above all else, a revolutionary in the tradition of the revolutionaries of the Great French Revolution, a revolutionary for whom revolution is all about the mobilisation of violence for political ends, and for whom politics dominates all, the revolutionary optimist for whom everything is possible, if only sufficient political will is mustered to achieve it.

With his eye set firmly on that goal, Lenin set himself the task of building an organisation capable of bringing that end about. He admired Cromwell, and his ideas and the party that Lenin developed has many of the features that Cromwell’s New Model Army displayed. Unfortunately, history was to repeat itself once again. Cromwell and The New Model Army was necessary, because the English bourgeoisie was too immature to secure social hegemony, let alone political hegemony, for itself. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were needed because the same was true of the Russian proletariat. Cromwell’s premature revolution led to the Bonapartist regime of The Protectorate, ultimately to see the restoration of feudal aristocratic rule. Lenin’s premature revolution saw the Bonapartist regime of Stalin, and its ultimate demise and the capitalist restoration.

Lenin’s view of the Marxist theory of the Workers Party is, as a result, necessarily one sided. Time and again Lenin refers to the ideological debates of the past, the insistence on theoretical precision of Marx and Engels, yet fails to place this in the appropriate context that, at all times, for Marx and Engels, the primary focus was on the building of the Workers Party on as broad a scale as possible, on maintaining the unity of that movement almost at all costs, and not trying to force the movement to adopt positions it was not ready to accept, that, as yet, it did not understand.

Compare Lenin’s position as outlined in “What is to be Done?” with the advice given by Engels to the Marxists in the US.

"….It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug tererden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own.”

Engels, here, could have been speaking about the "Leninist" organisations of the last 80 years or so that, having abandoned his and Marx’s advice, have increasingly found themselves relegated to small sects, out in the cold. It was only historical circumstance that prevented that fate accruing to Lenin himself.

Lenin quotes Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, but leaves aside the more important point that Marx, despite his railing against the inadequacy of that programme, of the fact that the Eisenachers had made unnecessary concessions to the Lassalleans, that there were elements in the programme that would have been better simply left out, rather than accept incorrect formulations, despite all this, Marx still commented that “one step of real progress is worth a dozen Programmes.” Lenin was also heavily influenced by Engels’ “Anti-Duhring” another masterpiece of polemic. But “Anti-Duhring” was written by Engels for a specific purpose, and one that speaks against Lenin’s exclusivism.

Duhring was leading a faction in the German Party that was heading towards a split. Engels stated reason for writing Anti-Duhring was not in order to heighten the tension and division in the party, but to try to reduce the damage that such a split might cause, to try to minimise the number that Duhring might take with him.

“The following work is by no means the fruit of any "inner urge". On the contrary.

When three years ago Herr Dühring, as an adept and at the same time a reformer of socialism, suddenly issued his challenge to his age, friends in Germany repeatedly urged on me their desire that I should subject this new socialist theory to a critical examination in the central organ of the Social Democratic Party, at that time the Volksstaat. They thought this absolutely necessary if the occasion for sectarian divisions and confusions were not once again to arise within the Party, which was still so young and had but just achieved definite unity.”

(Engels original Preface to “Anti-Duhring”)

Hence, completely in line with the attitude of Marx and Engels to the development of the Workers Party, and the role of Marxists within it, previously outlined, Engels is, here, far from wanting to purify the German Workers Party, but, on the contrary, cherishes the unity that had been so recently won, even on its inadequate programmatic basis, and wishes to oppose the sectarian splitters.

But, there is another aspect of Lenin’s position that has to be taken into consideration. By the time Lenin comes to write, “What is to be Done?”, in 1903, much of these discussions are a thing of the past. The German Social Democrats that Lenin takes as his model in that work had developed rapidly, and become a mass workers party led by Marxists. It is not surprising then that he should view the task as being the development of a workers' party that is, at the same time, a Marxist Party.

But this attitude, together with his determination that this party must, at least in Russia, have its eye set firmly on the task of political revolution, even if, at first, that revolution is to be a bourgeois democratic revolution, leads him to the conclusion that this party must be highly disciplined, must not allow “freedom of criticism” that might introduce revisionist ideas, and must purge itself of such elements. It is from these beginnings that, in the context of the developments of the next decade, and particularly of the outbreak of World War I, and the collapse of the main workers parties into nationalism, that Lenin is forced to conclude that separate “pure” Communist Parties have to be built.

Historical Accident

Lenin did stick with the basic principle, outlined by Marx and Engels, that the Marxists should stick with the workers, should patiently explain to them. But, for Lenin, this was seen more as the workers being expected to stick with the Marxists, a manifestation of his revolutionary optimism that the correct politics of the communists would necessarily cause the workers to rally to their banner, a big mistake, and one recognised by Marx and Engels, earlier, who warned against trying to force the pace, of asking the workers to adopt positions they did not yet understand.

Trotsky too was to apply this method. In a clear refutation to those that now complain about the difficult conditions for work in the Labour Party, Trotsky, in the far more difficult conditions of the Russian Communist Party of the 1920’s, when the organisation dealt with criticism by beating up and shooting its critics, when Trotsky was banned from publishing various articles, when he was whistled and spat at, when trying to make speeches at party meetings etc., still maintained that Marxists had to remain within that party, in order to stick with the workers, and harshly criticised those that wanted to take the easy option of removing themselves from it.

And to be fair to Lenin, in 1917, there was some basis for making such an argument. It was not at all inconceivable that such parties could become the main workers parties supplanting the existing parties of The Second International. It was still a sectarian stance, and one that was rapidly to be shown to be false, but not entirely unreasonable. In many ways, it is unfortunate that historical accident should have given the false impression that such a development was possible, unfortunate too that at least two of the most gifted Marxists of the time should find themselves in revolutionary Russia, and, with the impetus of that great revolution, should find themselves thrust forward into the developments that would so tragically split the workers movement, to such catastrophic effect, in the years that followed.

What is unreasonable is for subsequent “Leninists” to think that their micro sects are in any way compatible with the forces that Lenin was looking to, at the beginning of the last century, that historical conditions are anything like compatible, and that they can, therefore, consider any alternative to that set out in the far more comparable circumstances, of the late 19th century, by Marx and Engels, to put all their resources into building, selflessly, the workers parties, on however an inadequate a basis, in however difficult the conditions for such work, within those parties. The most important task for Marxists, in the current period, is the political, ideological and organisational rearmament of the working class. Such political work can only be undertaken in the mass political parties of the class, however inadequate those parties might be. Indeed, it is that inadequacy that makes the importance of the work all the greater.

The Relevance of Engels Advice Today

The advice given by Engels to the US socialists from that time applies with renewed force today.

“…What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn. A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform.”

“…But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's party--no matter what platform--I should consider a great mistake…”

(Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England, Preface to the American Edition)

“…To bring about this result, the unification of the various independent bodies into one national Labour Army, with no matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class platform — that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist Labour Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but a small minority of the working class. That line of action was first laid down in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1847 in the following words:

“The Communists” — that was the name we took at the time and which even now we are far from repudiating — “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”

“They have no interests separate and apart from the interests of the whole working class.

“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and model the proletarian movement…..”

“…That is the line of action which the great founder of Modern Socialism, Karl Marx, and with him, I and the Socialists of all nations who worked along with us, have followed for more than forty years, with the result that it has led to victory everywhere, and that at this moment the mass of European Socialists, in Germany and in France, in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and Sweden as well as in Spain and Portugal, are fighting as one common army under one and the same flag.”

(Condition of the Working Class in England, Marx-Engels Archive)

Were Marx and Engels worried about joining a bourgeois party? No. "When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it."

Were Marx and Engels insistent upon having a party with the most pure socialist programme? No. "When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects,"

On the contrary, Marx and Engels' primary concern was to be where the workers were - not where they wanted them to be. Their attitude was based entirely on historical materialism - analysing things as they actually were, not as they wanted them to be, and, from that starting point, trying to gradually work the movement up to what they wanted it to become.

It is unfortunate that the legacy of Leninist Hegelianism has diverted Marxists from that task, has led them to forget that it is the working class which is the revolutionary agent, and, instead, has led them to try to seek shortcuts through the creation of pure revolutionary parties. It has been not just 80 years wasted, but 80 years which has resulted in the regression rather than progression of working class consciousness.