According to official history, in 1949 a “popular revolution” triumphed in China. This idea, defended as much by the democratic West as by the Maoists, forms part of a monstrous mystification produced by the Stalinist counter-revolution about the supposed creation of “Socialist states”. It is certain that in the period between 1919 and 1927 China lived through an important working class movement, which was fully integrated into the international revolutionary wave that shook the capitalist world in that epoch, but this movement was ended by a massacre of the working class. What the bourgeoisie’s ideologues present on the other hand, as the “triumph of the Chinese Revolution”, was only the installation of a state capitalist régime in its Maoist variant, the culmination of a period of imperialist struggles on the terrain of China that began in 1928, after the defeat of the proletarian revolution.
In the first part of this article we will lay out the conditions in which the proletarian revolution arose in China, drawing out some of the principle lessons. The second part is dedicated to the period of the imperialist struggles, which gave rise to Maoism, while at the same time denouncing the fundamental aspects of this form of bourgeois ideology.
The evolution of the Communist International (CI) and its activity in China was crucial for the course of the revolution in that country. The CI represents the most important effort made by the working class up until now to give itself a world party with which to guide its revolutionary struggle. However, its late formation, during the world revolutionary wave, without having previously had sufficient time to consolidate itself politically and organically, led it, despite the resistance of the Left fractions[1] [1] into opportunist deviation when - faced with the defeat of the revolution and the isolation of Soviet Russia - the Bolshevik Party, the most influential in the International, began to vacillate between the necessity of maintaining the basis for a future renewal of the revolution, even at the cost of sacrificing the triumph in Russia, or the defence of the Russian state that had arisen from the revolution but at the cost of making treaties and alliances with the national bourgeoisies, treaties and alliances that represented an enormous fount of confusion for the international proletariat and lead to the acceleration of its defeat in many countries. The abandonment of the historic interests of the working class in exchange for promises of collaboration between classes, led the International to a progressive degeneration that culminated in 1928, with the abandonment of proletarian internationalism on the altar of so-called “defense of Socialism in one country”.[2] [2]
Lack of confidence in the working class progressively led the International, increasingly converted into a tool of the Russian government, to search for the creation of a barrier against the penetration of the great imperialist powers, through the support of the bourgeoisies of the “oppressed countries” of Eastern Europe, the Middle and Far East. This policy had disastrous results for the international working class, since through the political and material support of the CI and the Russian government for these supposedly “nationalist” and “revolutionary” bourgeoisies of Turkey, Persia, Palestine, Afghanistan... and finally China, these same bourgeoisies, who hypocritically accepted Soviet support without breaking their links either with the imperialist powers or with the landed aristocracy who they were supposedly fighting, crushed the workers’ struggles and annihilated the communist organisations with the arms supplied to them by the Russians. Ideologically, this abandonment of proletarian positions was justified by invoking the “Theses on the Colonial and National question” from the Second Congress of the IIIrd International (in whose writing Lenin and Roy had played a central role). These Theses certainly contain an important theoretical ambiguity, that distinguished wrongly between the “imperialist” and “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisies, which opened the doors to major political errors, since in this epoch the bourgeoisie, even in the oppressed countries, had finished being revolutionary and everywhere had acquired an “imperialist” character. Not only because the latter were tied to one or other of the great imperialist powers, but also because, after the working class had taken power in Russia, the international bourgeois formed a common front against all the revolutionary movements of the masses. Capitalism had entered into its decadent phase, and the opening of the epoch of the proletarian revolution had definitively closed the epoch of bourgeois revolutions.
Despite this error, these Theses were still capable of warding off some opportunist slidings, which unfortunately became generalised a little while later. The report of the discussion presented by Lenin recognised that in this epoch “A certain understanding has emerged between the bourgeois of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often, even perhaps in most cases, the bourgeois of the oppressed countries, although they also support national movements, nevertheless fight against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes with a certain degree of agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie, that is to say together with it”.[3] [3] Therefore, the Theses appeal for support principally amongst the peasants and, above all, they insist on the necessity of the Communist organisations maintaining their organic and principled independence faced with the bourgeoisie. “The Communist International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future proletarian parties - communist in fact and not just in word - in all the backward countries and training them to be conscious of their special tasks, the special tasks, that is to say, of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic tendencies... must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo”. But the International’s unconditional, shameful support for the Kuomintang in China forgot all of this: that the national bourgeoisie was already not revolutionary and was establishing close links with the imperialist powers, the necessity of forging a Communist Party capable of struggling against the democratic bourgeois and the indispensable independence of the working class movement.
The development of the Chinese bourgeoisie and its political movement during the first decades of the twentieth century, rather than demonstrating its supposedly “revolutionary” aspects, illustrates the extinction of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary character and the transformation of the national and democratic ideal, into a mere mystification, when capitalism entered its decadent phase. A survey of events shows us not a revolutionary class, but a conservative, accomodationist, class, whose political movement neither looked to totally displacing the nobility nor expelling the “imperialists”, but rather to place itself between them.
The historians usually underline the different interests that existed between the fractions of the Chinese bourgeoisie. Thus, it is common to identify the speculator/merchant fraction as being allied with the nobility and the “imperialists”, while the industrial bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia formed the “nationalist”, “modern”, “revolutionary” fraction. In reality, these differences were not so marked. Not only because both fractions were intimately linked by business and family ties but above all, because the attitudes of the merchant fraction and those of the industrial and intelligentsia were not so greatly different given that they both constantly looked for the support from the “Warlords” linked to the landed nobility, as well as the governments of the great powers.
By 1911 the Manchu Dynasty was already completely putrid and on the point of collapse. This was not some product of the action of a revolutionary national bourgeoisie, but the consequence of the division of China at the hands of the great imperialist powers, who had torn the old Empire apart. China had increasingly become divided into regions controlled by warlords, owners of greater or smaller mercenary armies, always fighting amongst themselves in order to sell themselves to the highest bidder and behind whom usually stood one or other of the great powers. The Chinese bourgeoisie felt that it had to replace the dynasty, as country’s unifying element, although without the aim of breaking up the régime of production in which the interests of the landlords and the “imperialists” were mixed with their own, but rather, in order to maintain it. It is in this framework that the events that took place between the so-called “1911 Revolution” and the “May 4th Movement of 1919” have to be placed.
The “1911 Revolution” began as a plot by conservative warlords supported by Sun Yat-sen’s bourgeois nationalist organisation, the T’ung Meng Hui. The Emperor did not know of the warlords’ plans. They set up a new régime in Wuhan. Sun Yat-sen, who was in the United States looking for financial support for his organisation, was called on to become president of the new government. Both governments entered into negotiations and within a few weeks it was agreed that both the Emperor and Sun Yat-sen should retire, and a unified government would take their place headed by Yuan Shih-K’ai who was head of the imperial troops and the true strong man of the Dynasty. The significance of all of this is that the bourgeoisie put aside its “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” pretensions, in order to maintain the unity of the country.
At the end of 1912 the Kuomintang (KMT) was formed; Sun Yat-sen’s new organisation represented this bourgeoisie. In 1913 the Kuomintang participated in presidential elections, restricted to the propertied social classes, which they won. However, the new president Sun Chiao-yen was killed. After this Sun Yat-sen allied himself with some military sucessionists from the central South of the country intending to form a new government, but was defeated by forces from Peking.
As we can see the feckless “nationalists” of the Chinese bourgeoisie were constrained by the games of the “warlords” and consequently by the great powers. The explosion of the First World War subordinated the political movement of the Chinese bourgeoisie still further to the play of the imperialists’ interests. In 1915 various provinces “declared independence”, the country was divided between the “warlords”, backed by one or other power. In the North, the Anfu government - supported by Japan - disputed predominance with Chili - backed by Great Britain and the United States. Czarist Russia, for its part wanted to turn Mongolia into its protectorate. The South was also disputed, Sun Yat-sen made new alliances with some warlords. The death of the Peking’s strong man aggravated even more the struggles between the warlords.
It was in this context, at the end of the war in Europe, that the “May 4th Movement of 1919” occurred, extolled by the ideologues as a “real anti-imperialist movement”. In reality this petty-bourgeois movement was not directed against imperialism in general, but specifically against Japan, which had taken the Chinese province of Shangtun as its prize at the Versailles Conference (the conference where the “democratic” victors redivided up the world), which the Chinese students opposed. However, it is necessary to note that the aim of not ceding Chinese territory to Japan was in the interests of the other rival power: the United States, which was finally to “liberate” the Shantung province from exclusive Japanese domination in 1922. That is to say, that despite the “radical” ideology of the May 4th Movement, it remained encased in imperialist struggles. And it could have done nothing else.
On the other hand, it is necessary to point out that during the May 4th Movement the working class expressed its own aspirations for the first time in its demonstrations, which not only raised the nationalist demands of the movement, but also their own demands. The end of the war in Europe could not put an end either to the conflicts between the warlords or to the struggle between the great powers for the redivision of the country. Little by little two, more or less unstable, governments emerged: one in the North with its seat in Peking, commanded by the warlord Wu P’ei-fu, the other in the South, with its seat in Canton, at whose head was found Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang. Official history presents the Northern government as representing the forces of noble “reaction” and the imperialists, while that in the South represented the “revolutionary” and “nationalist” forces, of the bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers. This is a scandalous mystification.
The reality is that Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang were always backed by the southern warlords. In 1920 the warlord Ch’en Ch’iung-ming, who had occupied Canton, invited Sun to form another government. In 1922 following the defeat of first attempts by the southern warlords to advance towards the North, he was thrown out of government, but in 1923 the warlords supported his return to Canton. On the other hand, there is the much talked of alliance of the Kuomintang with the USSR. In reality, the USSR made treaties and alliances with all the governments in China, including with those in the North. It was the North’s definitive inclination towards Japan that obliged the USSR to prioritise its relationship with the government of Sun Yat-sen, which for its part never abandoned its efforts to gain support from the different imperialist powers. Thus in 1925, just before his death when travelling to negotiations with the North, Sun passed through Japan soliciting support for his government.
It was this party, the Kuomintang representative of a national bourgeoisie (commercial, industrial and intellectual) integrated into the game of the great imperialist powers and the “warlords”, that was declared a “sympathizer party” by the Communist International. It is to this party that at one time or another the communists in China had to submit themselves, on the altar of so-called “national revolution”, for whom they served as “coolies”.[4] [4]
According to the official history the development of the Communist Party in China was a by-product of the movement of the bourgeois intelligentsia at the beginning of the century. Marxism had been imported from Europe along with other Western “philosophies”, and the formation of the Communist Party formed part of the growth of many other literary, philosophical and political organisations in this period. With ideas of this kind the historians have invented a bridge between the political movement of the bourgeoisie and that of the working class, making it appear as if they had been one and the same, and giving the formation of the Communist Party a specifically national significance. The truth is that the development of the Communist Party in China was fundamentally linked, not to the growth of the Chinese intelligentsia, but to the march of the international revolutionary movement of the working class.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) was created between 1920 and 1921 from small Marxist, Anarchist and Socialist groups who sympathised with Soviet Russia. As with many other Communist Parties, the CPC was born as an integral part of the CI and its rise was linked with the development of the workers’ struggles that were also following the example of the insurrectional movements in Russia and Western Europe. In 1921 there were a few dozen militants, but within a few years there were thousands; during the strike wave in 1925 membership reached 4,000, and by the insurrectional period of 1927 it had risen to 60,000. This rapid numerical expansion expressed, on the one hand, the revolutionary will that animated the working class in China in the period from 1919 to 1927 (the majority of militants in this period were workers from the great industrial cities). Nevertheless, it is necessary to say that the numerical growth of the Party did not express an equivalent strengthening of the Party. The overhasty admission of militants contradicted the traditions of the Bolshevik Party of forming a solid, tested, vanguard organisation of the working class, rather than a mass organisation. But worst of all was the adoption at its 2nd Congress of an opportunist policy, from which it was unable to detach itself.
In mid 1922, on instructions from the Executive of the International, the CPC launched the wretched slogan of the “anti-imperialist United Front with the Kuomintang” and the individual adhesion of communists to the latter. This policy of class collaboration, (which began to spread through Asia after the “Conference of the Toilers of the East” in January 1922) was the result of the negotiations secretly entered into beforehand between the USSR and the Kuomintang. By June 1923, the CPC’s 3rd Congress voted for all Party members to join the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang was itself admitted to the CI in 1926 as a sympathiser organisation, and took part in the CI’s 7th Plenary Session, in which the United Opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev...) were not eve allowed to attend. In 1926, while the KMT was preparing its final blow against the working class, in Moscow the infamous “theory” was elaborated that the Kuomintang was an “anti-imperialist bloc of four classes (the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie).
This policy had disastrous consequences for the working class movement in China. While strike movements and demonstrations arose spontaneously and impetuously, the Communist Party, merged with the Kuomintang, was incapable of orientating the working class, of putting forward independent class politics, despite the incontestable heroism of the communist militants who were frequently found in the front ranks of the workers’ struggles. Equally bereft of unitary organisations of political struggle, such as the workers’ councils, at the demand of the CPC itself the working class put its confidence in the Kuomintang, in other words of the bourgeoisie.
However, it is equally certain that the policy of subordination to the Kuomintang encountered frequent resistance inside the CPC (as was the case with the current represented by Chen Tu-hsiu). From the 2nd Congress there had already been an opposition to the Theses defended by the delegate of the International (Sneevliet) according to which the KMT was no longer a bourgeois party, but a class front to which the CPC had to subordinate itself. Throughout the whole period of the union with the Kuomintang voices arose inside the Communist Party to denounce the anti-proletarian preparations of Chiang Kai-Shek; asking, for example, that the arms supplied by the USSR should go to arm the workers and peasants and not to strengthen Chiang Kai-shek’s army as happened, and eventually posing, the need to leave the trap that the KMT constituted for the working class: “The Chinese revolution has two roads: one is the one that the proletariat can mark out and by which we can advance our revolutionary objectives; the other is that of the bourgeoisie and this will ultimatly betray the revolution in the course of its development”.[5] [5]
Nevertheless, it was impossible for a young and inexperienced party to overcome the erroneous and opportunist directives of the Executive of the International and it fell into them itself. As a result, the working class was unable to stop the Kuomintang stabbing it in the back, because while the Kuomintang was preparing to do so, the proletariat was being pulled into a struggle against the landlords opposed to the Kuomintang. And therefore the revolution in China had few opportunities to triumph, because on the international level the backbone of the world revolution - the German proletariat - had been broken since 1919, the opportunism of the IIIrd International only precipitated the defeat.
Maoism has used the weakness of the working class in China as an argument to justify the movement of the CPC towards the countryside from 1927. The working class in China at the beginning of the century was certainly miniscule in relation to the peasantry (a proportion of 2 to 100), but its political weight was not limited in the same proportions. There were around 2 million urban workers (without counting the 10 million more or less proletarianised artisans populating the cities) highly concentrated on the banks of the Yangtze, in the costal city of Shanghai and in the industrial zone of Wuhan (the triple city Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang); in the Canton-Hong Kong complex and the mines of Hunan province. This concentration gave the working class extraordinary potential for paralysing and taking under its control the vital centres of capitalist production. Also in the Southern provinces there existed a peasantry that was closely linked to the workers, since they provided the work force of the industrial cities, which could constitute a force of support for the urban proletariat.
Moreover, it would be a mistake to judge the strength of the working class in China from its numbers in relation to the other classes in the country. The proletariat is a historic class, that draws its strength from its international existence, and the example of the revolution in China clearly demonstrates this. The strike movement, did not have it’s epicentre in China, but in Europe; it was an expression of the expanding wave of the world revolution. The workers in China, as in all parts of the world, launched themselves into struggle faced with the example of the triumphant revolution in Russia and the attempted insurrections in Germany and other European countries.
At the beginning, since the majority of the factories in China were foreign owned, the strikes had an “anti-foreigner” tinge and the national bourgeoisie thought they could use this to apply pressure on the foreign powers. However, the strike movement took on an increasingly class character, against the bourgeoisie in general, without making a distinction between “national” and “foreign” bosses. Strikes for workers’ demands developed from 1919 onwards, despite repression (it was not uncommon for workers to be beheaded or burnt in the fireboxes of locomotives). In the middle of 1921, a textile strike broke out in Hunan. At the beginning of 1922, there was a 3 month sailors’ strike in Hong Kong, which finished when they won their demands. In the first months of 1923 a wave of about 100 strikes broke out, in which more than 300,000 workers participated; in February the warlord Wu P’ei Fu ordered the repression of the railway strike leading to the killing of 35 workers while, the wounded were mutilated. In June 1924 there was a three month general strike in Canton/Hong Kong. In February the cotton workers of Shanghai launched a strike. This was the prelude to the gigantic strike movement that swept all of China in the Summer of 1925.
In 1925 Russia fully supported the Kuomintang government in Canton. Already from 1923 an alliance between the USSR and the Kuomintang had been openly declared, a military delegation from the Kuomintang headed by Chiang Kai-shek had visited Moscow, while at the same time a delegation from the International provided the Kuomintang with its statutes and organisational and military structure. In 1924, the first official Congress of the Kuomintang sanctioned the Alliance and in May the Whampoa Military Academy was set up with Soviet arms and military advisors, directed by Chiang Kai-shek. In fact, what Russia did was to form a modern army, in the service of the bourgeois fraction regrouped in the Kuomintang, which had been without one until then. In March 1925 Sun Yat-sen visited Peking (with whose government the USSR still maintained relations) in order to try and form an alliance that would unify the country, but he died of an illness before he could put forward his aim.
It was into this framework of an idyllic alliance that the full force of the working class movement burst, reminding the bourgeoisie of the Kuomintang and the opportunists of the International about the international class struggle.
A wave of agitation and strikes arose from the beginning of 1925. On the 30th of May English police in Shanghai fired on a workers’ and students’ demonstration, killing twelve demonstrators. This was the detonator for a general strike in Shanghai, which rapidly spread to the main commercial ports of the country. On the 19th of June a general strike also broke out in Canton. Four days later the British troops of the British concession of Shameen (bordering Canton) opened fire on another demonstration. The workers in Hong Kong launched a strike in response. The movement spread, reaching as far as Peking where on the 30th of July a demonstration of 200,000 workers took place while peasant agitation deepened in the province of Kwangtung.
In Shanghai, the strike lasted three months, in Canton/Hong Kong a strike/boycott was declared that lasted until October of the following year. Here, workers’ militias began to be formed. The working class in China demonstrated for the first time that it was a force really capable of threatening the whole capitalist régime. Despite this, one consequence of the “30th May Movement” was that the Canton government consolidated and extended its powers towards the South, this movement also shook the class instincts of the “nationalist” bourgeoisie regrouped in the Kuomintang, which until then had left the strikes “to get on with it”, since the strikes were mainly focused against the foreign factories and concessions. The strikes in the summer of 1925 generally assumed an anti-bourgeois character, without “respect” for the national capitalists either. Thus, the “revolutionary” and “nationalist” bourgeoisie, with the Kuomintang at its head (backed by the great powers and with the blind support of Moscow), furiously launched itself into a confrontation with its mortal class enemy: the proletariat.
In the last months of 1925 and the first months of 1926 there occurred what the historians call the “polarisation of the Left and the Right wings of the Kuomintang”, which according to them includes the fragmentation of the bourgeoisie into two, one part remaining loyal to “nationalism” and the other moving towards an alliance with “imperialism”. However, we have already seen that the most “anti-imperialist” fractions of the bourgeoisie never stopped trying to deal with the “imperialists”. What happened in reality, was not the fractionalisation of the bourgeoisie, but its prepartion to confront the working class, throwing out unnecessary elements inside the Kuomintang (the communist militants, a part of the petty-bourgeoisie and some generals loyal to the USSR). Then, the Kuomintang feeling that it had sufficient political and military force, tore off the mask of “the block of four classes” and appeared as what it always had been: the party of the bourgeoisie.
At the end of 1925, the boss of the “left wing” Liao Chung-K’ai was killed and the harassment of communists began. This was the prelude to Chiang Kai-shek’s coup, which made him the Kuomintang’s strong man, the man to initiate the bourgeois reaction against the proletariat. On 20th March, Chiang, in front of the cadets of the Whampao Military Academy proclaimed martial law in Canton; he then closed down the workers’ organisations, disarmed the strike pickets and arrested many communist militants. In the months that followed, communists were removed from any posts of responsibility in the KMT.
The Executive of the International, completely under the control of Stalin and Bukharin, showed itself to be blind to the reaction of the Kuomintang and despite the resistance from inside the CPC, ordered that the alliance be kept up, hiding these events from the members of the International and the CPs.[6] [6] Chiang Kai-shek brazenly demanded that the USSR support him militarily in order that he could carry out his Northern expedition, which began in July 1926.
As with many other actions of the bourgeoisie, the Northern expedition is falsely presented as a “revolutionary” event, as having the intention of spreading the “revolutionary” régime and unifying China. But the pretensions of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek were not so altruistic. His cherished dream (as with the other warlords) was to possess the port of Shanghai and to obtain from the great powers the administration of its rich customs duties. To this end he relied on a very important element of blackmail: his capacity to contain and crush the workers’ movement.
When the Kuomingtang’s military expedition began, it declared martial law in the regions which it already controlled. Thus, at a time when the deluded workers in the North were preparing to support the forces of the KMT, it was totally banning workers’ strikes in the South. In September the “left wing” took Hankow, but Chiang Kai-shek refused to support it and set himself up in Hanchang. In October he ordered the communists to stop the peasant movement in the South and the army put an end to the strike/boycott in Canton/Hong Kong. This was a clear signal to the great powers (especially Britain) that the Kuomintang’s advance towards the North did not have “anti-imperialist” pretensions and a little time later secret negotiations began with Chaing.
From the end of 1926 the industrial areas along the Yangtze river boiled with agitation. In October the warlord Sia-Chao (who had just gone over to the Kuomintang) advanced on Shanghai, but stopped some kilometers from the city, allowing the “enemy” troops of the North (under the command of Sun Ch’uan-fang) to enter the city first in order to suffocate the imminent uprising. In January 1927, the workers spontaneously occupied the British concessions in Hankow (in the triple city of Wuhan) and Jiujiang. Then, the Kuomintang army halted its advance in order, in the best tradition of reactionary armies, to permit the local warlords to repress the workers’ and peasants’ movements. At the same time, Chaing Kai-shek publicly attacked the communists and crushed the peasant movement in Kwangtung (in the South). Such is the scenario in which it is necessary to place the Shanghai insurrectionary movement.
The Shanghai insurrectionary movement marked the culminating point of a decade of constant struggles and rise of the working class. This is the highest point the Revolution in China reached. However, conditions were extremely unfavourable for the working class. The Communist Party found itself disjointed, struck down, subordinated and tied hand and foot by the Kuomintang. The working class deceived by its illusions in the “block of four classes” was unable to give itself the council type unitary organisms necessary for the centralisation of its struggle.[7] [7] Meanwhile, the guns of the imperialist powers were pointed towards the city and the Kuomintang as it was drawing closer to Shanghai supposedly unfurled the flag of the “anti-imperialist revolution”, whose real objective was to crush the workers. Only the revolutionary will and heroism of the working class can explain its capacity to have taken, in these conditions, the city that represented the heart of Chinese capitalism, although it was only for a few days.
The Kuomintang resumed its advance in February 1927. By the 18th, the Nationalist army was in Jiaxing, 60 kilometers from Shanghai. Then, with the prospect of the imminent defeat of Sun Ch’uan fang, a general strike broke out in Shanghai: “the movement of the proletariat in Shanghai, from the 19th to the 24th of February was objectively an attempt by the proletariat of Shanghai to consolidate its hegemony. With the first news of the defeat of Sun Ch’uan fang in Zhejiang, the atmosphere in Shanghai became red hot and in the space of two days, there exploded with the potential of a elemental force a strike of 300,000 workers who transformed it irresistibly into an armed insurrection which ended up achieving nothing, due to a lack of leadership...”.[8] [8]
Taken by surprise, the Communist Party vacillated about launching the slogan of insurrection, while it was taking place on the streets. On the 20th, Chiang Kai-shek once again ordered the suspension of the attack on Shanghai. This was the signal for Sun Ch’uan fang’s forces to unleash repression, in which dozens of workers were killed, momentarily containing the movement.
In the following weeks Chiang Kai-shek, skillfully manoeuvered in order to avoid being relieved of the command of the army and to silence rumours about his alliance with the “right wing”, the great powers and his preparations against the working class.
At last, on the 21st of March, the definitive insurrectional attempt took place. A general strike was proclaimed on this day, in which practically all the 800,000 workers of Shanghai took part. “The whole proletariat was on strike, as was the greater part of the petty-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, artisans,etc...) (...) within a few dozen minutes the whole police force was disarmed. By 2 o’clock the insurgents already possessed about 1500 rifles. Immediately afterwards the insurgent forces moved against government buildings and disarmed the troops. Serious fighting tool place in the Chapi neigbourhood (...) Finally, at four in the afternoon, on the second day of the insurrection, the enemy (approximately 3,000 soldiers) were definitively defeated. This wall broken, all of Shanghai (with the exception of the concessions and the international neighbourhood) was in the hands of the insurgents”.[9] [9] This action, after the revolution in Russia and the insurrectional attempts in Germany and other European countries was another blow to the capitalist world order. It showed all the revolutionary potential of the working class. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus was already working and the proletariat did not find itself in conditions to confront it.
The workers took Shanghai, only to open the gates to the national “revolutionary” army of the Kuomintang, which finally entered the city. No sooner had he installed himself in Shanghai, than Chiang Kai-shek began to prepare the repression of the workers, reaching an agreement with the speculator bourgeoisie and the city’s underworld gangs. Likewise, he started to approach the representatives of the great powers and the Northern warlords openly. On the 6th April Chang Tso-lin (with Chiang’s agreement) raided the Russian embassy in Peking and arrested militants of the Communist Party who were later murdered.
On the 12th of April a massive and bloody repression organised by Chiang was unleashed in Shanghai. Gangs of lumpenproletarians from the secret societies who had always played the role of strikebreakers were let loose against the workers. The troops of the Kuomintang - the supposed “allies” of the workers - were directly employed to disarm and arrest the proletarian militias. The proletariat tried to respond on the following day by declaring a general strike, but contingents of demonstrators were intercepted by troops, leading to numerous victims. Martial law was immediately imposed and all workers’ organisations were banned. In a few days five thousand workers were killed, amongst them many militants of the Communist Party. Raids and killings continued for months.
Simultaneously, in a coordinated action, the forces of the Kuomintang that had remained in Canton unleashed another massacre, exterminating thousands more workers.
With the proletarian revolution drowned in the blood of the workers of Shanghai and Canton, there was still resistance particularly in Wuhan. However, here again the Kuomintang, and more specifically its “left wing”, cast off the “revolutionary” mask and in July passed to Chaing’s side unleashing repression here also. Likewise, the military hordes were let loose to destroy and massacre in the countryside of the Central and Southern provinces. The murdered workers throughout China were counted in their tens of thousands.
The Executive of the International tried to cover up its nefarious and criminal policy of class collaboration, by putting the whole responsibility on to the CPC and its central organs, and more specifically on the current which had rightly opposed this policy (that of Chen Tu-hsiu). In order to finish off this work, it ordered the already weak and demoralised Communist Party of China to embark on an adventurist policy which ended in the so-called “Canton insurrection”. This absurd atempted “planned” coup was not supported by the proletariat of Canton and all it achieved was to unleash yet more repression. This practically marked the end of the workers movement in China, from which it would not recover to carry out a significant expression in the following 40 years.
The policy of the International towards China a focus of the Left Opposition’s denouncation of the rise of Stalinism (Trotsky’s current also ended up by incorporating Chen Tu-hsiu). This was a late and confused current of opposition to the degeneration of the 3rd International, and although it maintained itself on the proletariat’s class terrain in respect to China, when it denounced the subordination of the CPC to the Kuomintang as the cause of the defeat of the revolution, it could never overcome the false framework of the Second Congress of the International’s Theses on the national question which, in turn, was one of the factors which would lead it into opportunism (ironically Trotsky supported the new class front in China during the inter-imperialist confrontation of the 30’s), until it passed into the camp of the counter-revolution during the course of the Second World War.[10] [10] In any case, all the revolutionary internationalists who remained in China were henceforth called “Trotskyist” (for years Mao Tse-tung would persecute the few internationalists who still opposed his counter-revolutionary policy as “Trotskyist agents of Japanese imperialism”)
The Communist Party was literally annihilated, with around 25,000 Communists killed at the hands of the Kuomintang while the rest were imprisoned or persecuted. The remnants of the Communist Party, along with some detachments of the Kuomintang fled to the countryside. But this geographical displacement corresponded to a still more profound political displacement. In the following years the Party adopted a bourgeois ideology, its social base - led by the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeosie - was predominantly peasant and took part in inter-bourgeois military campaigns. The Chinese Communist Party, despite having conserved the name, had stopped being a Party of the working class and was converted into a bourgeois organisation. But this is a historical question that will be dealt with in the second part of this article
***
By way of a conclusion, we want to draw out some lessons highlighted by the revolutionary movement in China:
* The Chinese bourgeoisie did not stop being revolutionary only when it launched itself against the proletariat in 1927. Already from the “1911 Revolution” on, the “nationalist” bourgeoisie had demonstrated its readiness to share power with the nobility, to ally itself with the warlords and to subordinate itself to the imperialist powers. Its “democratic”, “anti-imperialist” and even “revolutionary” aspirations were nothing but the cover to hide its reactionary interests, which were exposed when the proletariat began to represent a threat. In the epoch of capitalism’s decadence the bourgeoisie of the weak countries are as reactionary and imperialist as the other powers.
* The class struggle of the proletariat in China from 1919 to 1927 cannot be explained in the purely national context. It constituted a link in the wave of the world revolution that shook capitalism at the beginning of the century. The elemental power with which the workers’ movement arose in China, a section of the world proletariat at that time considered as “weak”, enabled them spontaneously to take into their hands great cities, and demonstrates the potential that the working class has to overthrow the bourgeoisie, although for this to happen it requires revolutionary consciousness and organisation.
* The proletariat can have nothing more to do with making an alliance with any fraction of the bourgeoisie. However, its revolutionary movement can draw behind it sections of the urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie (as the Shanghai insurrection and the Kwangtung peasant movement demonstrated). Nevertheless, the proletariat must not merge its organisations with those of other strata, in some kind of “Front”. On the contrary, it has to maintain its class autonomy at all times.
* To be victorious, the proletariat requires a political party which orientates it in the decisive moments, as much as the council type organisations that cement its unity. In particular, the working class has to provide itself with its World Communist Party, firm in principle and tempered in struggle, in sufficient time, before the explosion of the next international revolutionary wave. Opportunism, which sacrifices the future of the revolution on the altar of immediate “results” and leads to class collaboration must be permanently fought in the ranks of revolutionary organisation.
Leonardo.
[1] [11] In the context of this article we cannot deal with the struggle carried out by the left fractions in the International against its opportunism and degeneration, a struggle that took place at the same time as the events in China which we are relating here. As far as we are aware, the latter were alone to have produced a Manifesto signed jointly by the whole Opposition, including the Italian Left. This was the Manifesto “To the Communists of China and the whole world!”, published in La Vérité, 12th September 1930. In this respect, we recommend our book The Italian Communist Left, and the series of articles published in the International Review on the Dutch Left.
[2] [12] The degeneration ran parallel to the degeneration of the state that had arisen from the revolution, which lead to the reconstitution of state capitalism in its Stalinist form. See the “Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC”.
[3] [13] Lenin - Report of the National and Colonial Commission of the Second Congress of the Communist International - July 26th 1920 and the Theses on the National and Colonial Question from the Second Congress. Taken from The Second Congress of the Communist International Vol 1, published by Pathfinder books, 1977.
[4] [14] The expression is Borodin’s; he was the International’s delegate in China in 1926. E.H. Carr Socialism in One Country vol 3.
[5] [15] Chen Tu-hsiu. Quoted by the same in his “Letter to all members of the CPC” December 1929. Taken from the already cited work La Question Chinoise..., p. 446
[6] [16] Only some weeks before Chaing Kai-shek had been named as an “honorary member” and the Kuomintang a “sympathiser party” of the International. Even after the coup, the Russian advisers refused to supply 5,000 rifles to the workers and peasants of the South and reserved them for Chaing’s army.
[7] [17] Much has been said about the role played by the unions in the revolutionary movement in China. It is certain that in that period the unions grew in the same proportion as the strike movements. However, in so far as these did not try to contain the movement in the framework of germinal economic demands, it policy was still subordinated to the Kuomintang (also, they were also obviously influenced by the CPC. Thus, the movement in Shanghai took as its declared aim the opening of the gates to the “Nationalist” army. In December 1927 the Kuomintang unions participated in the repression of the workers. In that the workers only had one means of massive organisation, the unions, this did not represent an advantage, but a weakness.
[8] [18] Letter from Shanghai by 3 members of the CI’s mission in China, dated the 17th of March 1927.
[9] [19] A Neuberg, The Armed Insurrection. This book was written around 1929 (after the 6th Congress of the International). It contains some valuable information on the events of this period, however, it tends to see the insurrection as a coup; furthermore it makes a crude apologia for Stalinism. On the other hand, it ought not to be surprising that the insurrection attempt in Shanghai, despite its size and its bloody repression, is hardly mentioned (if it is not completely hidden), both in the history books - be they “pro-Western” or “pro- Maoist”- and in the Maoist manuals. It is on this basis that it is possible to maintain the myth according to which the events of the 20’s were a “bourgeois revolution”
[10] [20] For a complete understanding of our position on Trotsky and Trotskyism read our pamphlet El Trotskismo contra la clase obrera.
In August 1914, the First World War broke out. It was to claim 20 million victims. The determining responsibility of the trades unions, and above all the social-democracy, in the slaughter was clear to all.
In the German Reichstag, in SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) voted unanimously in favour of war credits. At the same time, the unions called for the “sacred union”, banning all strikes and declaring themselves for the mobilisation of all the nation’s forces for war.
This is how the social-democracy justified the vote in favour of war credits by its parliamentary group: “In the time of danger, we will not abandon our fatherland. In this, we feel we are in accord with the International, which has always recognised the right of every people to national independence and self-defence, just as we are in agreement with it in condemning all wars of conquest. Inspired by these principles, we vote the war credits that are demanded”. The fatherland in danger, national defence, a people’s war for civilisation and liberty, were the “principles” on which social-democracy’s parliamentary representatives took their stand.
This was the first great betrayal by a proletarian party in the history of the workers’ movement. As an exploited class, the working class is an international class. This is why internationalism is the most fundamental principle for any proletarian revolutionary organisation; for any organisation to betray this principle leads it inevitably into the enemy camp: the camp of Capital.
German capital could never had started the war had it not been certain of the support of the unions and the leadership of the SPD. While their treachery was thus hardly a surprise for the bourgeoisie, it provoked a terrible shock in the workers’ movement. Even Lenin could not at first believe that the SPD had really voted for war credits. On first hearing the news, he thought that this was black propaganda aimed at dividing the workers’ movement[1] .
Indeed, given the years of increasing imperialist tensions, the IInd International had intervened very early against the preparations for imperialist war. At the Congress of Stuttgart in 1907and of Basle in 1912 – and even right up to the last days of July 1914 – it had taken position against the ruling class’ war-mongering, against the bitter resistance of an already powerful right-wing.
The SPD MPs voted for war as representatives of Europe’s greatest workers’ party, the product of decades of labour (often in the most unfavourable conditions, for example in the period of the anti-socialist laws, when the party was banned). The party owned dozens of both daily and weekly publications. In 1899, the SPD possessed 73 papers, whose overall circulation had reached 400,000 copies; 49 of them came out six times a week. In 1900, the party had more than 100,000 members.
The treachery of the SPD leadership thus confronted the revolutionary movement with a fundamental question: could this mass working class organisation be allowed to pass, bags and baggage, into the enemy camp?
The leadership of the German SPD was not alone in its treachery. In Belgium, Vandervelde, the International’s president, became a minister in a bourgeois government, as did socialist Jules Guesde in France. The French Socialist Party declared unanimously in favour of war. In Britain, where there was no conscription, the Labour Party took on the organisation of recruiting. In Austria, although the Socialist Party did not formally vote for war, it conducted a frantic campaign in its favour. In Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Holland, the socialist leaders all voted for war credits. In Poland, the Socialist Party took the position for the war in Galicia and Silesia, but against it in Russian Poland. In Russia, the picture was uneven: the old leaders of the workers’ movement like Plekhanov or the anarchist Kropotkin, but also a handful of Bolsheviks in exile in France, called for defence against German militarism. In Russia itself, the social-democrat fraction in the Duma made a declaration against the war. This was the first official declaration against the war by a parliamentary group in one of the main warring countries. The Italian Socialist Party took position against the war from the outset. In December 1914, the party excluded a group of renegades who, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, aligned themselves with the pro-Entente bourgeoisie, and made propaganda in favour of the war. The Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Tesniaks) also adopted a firm internationalist position.
The International, the pride of the working class, disintegrated in the flames of the World War, to be transformed, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, into a “heap of wild beasts in the grip of nationalist fury, tearing each other apart for the greater glory of bourgeois order and morality”. The SPD became a “stinking corpse”. Only a few groups in Germany – Die Internationale, Lichtstrahlen, the Bremen Left – the group around Trotsky and Martov, some of the French syndicalists, the Dutch De Tribune group around Gorter and Pannekoek, and the Bolsheviks, resolutely defended the internationalist standpoint.
Alongside this decisive betrayal by most of the II International’s parties, the working class was subjected to an ideological battering which succeeded in injecting it with a fatal dose of nationalist poison. In 1914, it was not just the petty-bourgeoisie which was enrolled behind Germany’s expansionist aims: whole sectors of the working class were also galvanised by nationalism. Moreover, bourgeois propaganda maintained the illusion that the war would be finished “in a few weeks, by Christmas at the latest”, and everybody would be able to go home.
On the eve of war, despite the extremely unfavourable conditions, the minority of revolutionaries who stood firm on the principle of proletarian internationalism did not give up the struggle.
With the vast majority of the working class still intoxicated with nationalism, on the eve of 4th August 1914, the main representatives of the social-democratic left organised a meeting in Rosa Luxemburg’s flat; present were Käthe and Herman Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, Ernst Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck. They were few, but their activity during the next four years was to have an immense influence.
Several vital questions were on the meeting’s agenda:
The general situation was obviously very unfavourable. That was no reason for resignation for these revolutionaries. Their attitude was not to reject the organisation, but on the contrary to continue and develop the struggle within it; and to fight determinedly to preserve its proletarian principles.
Within the social-democratic parliamentary group in the Reichstag, the vote in favour of the war credits was preceded by an internal debate where 78 MPs declared themselves for the vote, and 14 against. The 14, including Liebknecht, followed party discipline and voted for the credits. This was kept secret by the SPD leadership.
There was a lot less apparent unity in the party at the local level. Many local sections (Orstvereine) immediately sent protests to the leadership. On 6th August, a crushing majority in the Stuttgart local section defied the parliamentary fraction. The left even managed to exclude the right from the party, and to take control of the local paper. In Hamburg, Laufenberg and Wolfheim rallied the opposition; in Bremen, the Bremerbürger Zeitung intervened determinedly against the war; protests also came from the Braunschweiger Volksfreund, the Gothaer Volksblatt, the Duisburg Der Kampf and from papers in Nuremberg, Halle, Leipzig and Berlin, reflecting the opposition of large sections of the party rank and file. During a meeting at Stuttgart on 21st September 1914, Liebknecht’s attitude was criticised. He himself was to say later that to have acted as he did, under fraction discipline, had been a disastrous mistake. Since every paper was subject to censure from the outbreak of the war, the expressions of protest were immediately reduced to silence. The SPD opposition thus relied on making itself heard abroad. The Swiss Berner Tagwacht became the voice of the SPD left wing; the internationalists also found expression in the review Lichtstrahlen, edited by Borchardt from September 1913 to April 1916.
An examination of the situation inside the SPD shows that although the leadership had betrayed, the organisation as a whole had not been enrolled in the war. This is why the perspective appeared clearly: to defend the organisation, we cannot abandon it to the traitors; we have to exclude them and break clearly with them.
During the meeting at Luxemburg’s flat, the question was posed of leaving the party, either as a mark of protest or out of disgust at its treachery. This idea was unanimously rejected on the grounds that the organisation should not be abandoned, since this would mean offering it on a plate to the ruling class. It was impossible to leave the party, built at the cost of such immense efforts, like rats leaving a sinking ship. This was why fighting for the organisation did not mean leaving it but fighting to reconquer it.
At that moment, nobody thought of leaving the organisation. The balance of forces did not oblige the minority to do so .Nor for the time being was it a matter of building a new, independent organisation. This attitude of Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades set them among the most committed defenders of the need for organisation.
The fact is that the internationalists had begun the combat long before the working class recovered from its intoxication. As a vanguard, they did not wait for the reactions of the working class as a whole, but took the lead in the class’ combat. While the nationalist poison continued its work on the class, which was under the ideological and physical fire of imperialist war, the revolutionaries – in the most difficult conditions of illegality – had already unmasked the conflict’s imperialist nature. Here again, in their work against the war, the revolutionaries did not simply wait for wider fractions of the proletariat to come to consciousness by themselves. The internationalists assumed their responsibilities as revolutionaries, as members of a proletarian political organisation. Not a day passed during the war when the future Spartakists were not working to defend the organisation and lay the foundations for the break with the traitors. This was a far cry from the so-called spontaneism of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartakists.
The revolutionaries immediately entered into contact with internationalists in other countries. As their best-known representative, Liebknecht was sent abroad and made contact with the Socialist Parties in Belgium and Holland.
The struggle against the war was fought at two levels: first, in Parliament, which the Spartakists could still use as a tribune; and second, more importantly, through the development of a network of resistance at local level in the party and in direct contact with the working class.
It was thus that in Germany, Liebnecht was to become the standard-bearer of the struggle.
Within Parliament, he succeeded in drawing more and more deputies to him. Clearly at first, fear and hesitation dominated. But on 22nd October 1914, five SPD deputies left the chamber in protest; on 2nd December, Liebknecht was alone in voting against war credits, but in March 1915 about 30 deputies left the chamber, and a year later in August 1916, 36 deputies voted against the credits.
Of course the real centre of gravity lay in the activity of the working class itself, on the one hand at the roots of the workers’ parties and on the other in the workers’ mass actions, both in the streets and in the factories.
Immediately after the outbreak of war, the revolutionaries had clearly and energetically taken a position on its imperialist nature [2]. In April 1915, the first and only issue of Die Internationale was published; 9,000 copies were printed and 5,000 were sold on the first evening (hence the name of the group “Die Internationale”).
The first illegal anti-war leaflets were distributed during the winter of 1914-15, including the most famous of them: “The main enemy is in our own country”.
Propaganda material against the war circulated in many local meetings of militants. Liebknecht’s refusal to vote for war credits was well-known and quickly made him the most famous adversary of the war, first in Germany and then in the neighbouring countries. All the positions taken up by the revolutionaries were considered as “highly dangerous” by the bourgeois security services. In the local meetings of militants, representatives of the traitorous party leaders denounced militants who distributed propaganda material against the war. Often the latter would be arrested following the meeting. The SPD was split to the core. Hugo Eberlein was to report, during the KPD’s founding Congress on 31st December 1918, that links existed with more than 300 towns. To put an end to the growing anti-war resistance in party ranks, the leadership decided in January 1915, in agreement with the military High Command, to silence Liebknecht definitively by drafting him into the army. This meant he could no longer speak freely or take part in meetings of militants. On 18th February, Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned until February 1916; in July she was arrested again and remained in prison until October 1918. In September 1915, Ernst Meyer, Hugo Eberlein and the 70-year-old Franz Mehring, were all imprisoned, with many others.
Even in these extremely difficult conditions they continued to work against the war and did everything they could to continue their organisational work.
Meanwhile, the reality of war was beginning to sober more and more workers from their nationalist intoxication. The offensive in France had broken down and had been replaced by a long trench war. By the end of 1914, 800,000 soldiers had already died. In the spring of 1915, the war in the trenches of France and Belgium cost hundreds of thousands of lives. On the Somme, 60,000 soldiers died in one day. Disillusionment spread rapidly at the front, but above all the working class on the home front was plunged into dire misery. Women were mobilised into armaments factories while food prices rose terribly, to be followed by rationing. March 18 1915 saw the first women’s demonstration against the war. On 15th and 18th October there were bloody confrontations between police and demonstrators against the war in Chemnitz. In November 1915, some 15,000 demonstrators marched in Berlin against the war. The working class was stirring in other countries too. In Austria, numerous wildcat strikes broke out, against the orders of the unions. In Britain, 250,000 miners from the South Wales coalfields went on strike; in Scotland, strikes broke out among the engineers of the Clyde Valley. In France, there were strikes in the textile industry.
Slowly, the working class began to emerge from the fog of nationalism and to show its readiness to defend its interests as an exploited class. Everywhere, the “sacred union” began to tremble.
An epoch ended with the outbreak of World War I and the treason of the parties of the IInd International. The International died because several of its member parties no longer represented an internationalist orientation. They had ranged themselves alongside their respective national bourgeoisies. An International made up of different national member parties does not betray as such; it dies and no longer has any part to play for the working class. It can no longer be corrected as such.
But the war had clarified things within the international workers’ movement: on the one hand were the traitor parties; on the other the revolutionary left which continued to defend class positions coherently and inflexibly, but which formed at first a small minority. Between the two stood a centrist current, oscillating between the traitors and the internationalists, constantly hesitating to take unambiguous positions, and refusing to break clearly with the social-patriots. In Germany itself, opposition to the war divided into several groups:
After a first phase of disorientation and lost contacts, from the spring of 1915 onwards, international conferences of Socialist Women (26-28th March) and Young Socialists (5-7th April) were held in Bern. After several adjournments, from 5-8th September, 37 delegates from 12 European countries met in Zimmerwald (not far from Bern). The biggest delegation from Germany, with 10 delegates from three opposition groups: the centrists, the Die Internationale group (Meyer, Thalheimer), and the ISD (Borchardt). Whereas the centrists called for an end to the war without any social upheaval, the left made the link between war and revolution the central question. After bitter discussion, the Zimmerwald conference broke up, adopting a Manifesto calling on the workers in every country to struggle for the emancipation of the working class and the goal of socialism, by the most intransigent proletarian struggle. By contrast, the centrists refused to include any reference to the need for an organisational break with social-chauvinism, or to the call to overthrow one’s own imperialist government. Nonetheless, the Zimmerwald Manifesto had a huge echo in the working class and among the troops. Despite being a compromise, criticised by the left because the centrists still hesitated in the face of clear cut positions, the Manifesto was nonetheless a decisive step in the unification of revolutionary forces.
In a previous article in the International Review, we have already criticised the Die Internationale group, which at first hesitated over the need to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.
The revolutionaries thus gave an impetus to their process of unification and their intervention encountered and ever greater echo.
On 1st May 1916, some 10,000 workers demonstrated against the war. Liebknecht spoke, to shout out “Down with the war! Down with the government!” At these words, he was arrested, which sparked off a huge wave of protest. Liebknecht’s courageous intervention served as a stimulus and orientation for the workers. The revolutionaries’ determination to struggle against the social-patriotic current, to continue the defence of proletarian principles, did not lead them into greater isolation, but encouraged the rest of the working class to enter the struggle.
In May 1916, the Beuthen miners struck for a wage increase. In Leipzig, Brunswick and Koblenz, workers demonstrated against hunger and the cost of living. A state of siege was decreed in Leipzig. The action of the revolutionaries, and the fact that despite the censorship and banning of meetings, news about the growing resistance to the war began to spread, gave further impetus to the combativity of the working class as a whole.
On 27th May 1916, 25,000 Berlin workers demonstrated against Liebknecht’s arrest. The next day, 55,000 workers began the first political mass strike against his imprisonment. In Brunswick, Bremen, Leipzig and many other towns, there were solidarity meetings and demonstrations against food shortages. Workers’ meetings were held in a dozen towns. Here we have a clear concretisation of the relationship between revolutionaries and the working class. The revolutionaries are neither outside nor above the working class, they are simply its clearest and most determined part, gathered together in political organisations. But their influence depends on the receptivity of the working class as a whole. Even if the number of elements organised in the Spartakist movement was still small, hundreds of thousands of workers nonetheless followed their slogans. More and more, they were the spokesmen for the spirit of the masses.
Consequently, the bourgeoisie did everything it could to isolate the revolutionaries from the class, by a wave of repression. Many members of the Spartakist League were placed in preventative detention. Rosa Luxembourg and almost the entire Spartakus central committee were arrested during the second half of 1916. Many Spartakists were denounced by SPD bureaucrats for having distributed leaflets in the SPD’s meetings; the police gaols filled up with Spartakist militants.
While the massacres on the Western front (especially at Verdun) claimed more and more victims, the bourgeoisie demanded more and more of the workers on the home front, in the factories. No war can be fought unless the working class is ready to sacrifice its entire life for the profit of capital. Now, the ruling class was encountering an increasingly strong resistance.
Protests against hunger developed constantly (the population was only receiving a third of its needs in calories). During the autumn of 1916, protests and demonstrations took place almost daily in the great towns: September in Kiel, November in Dresden, a movement of the Ruhr miners in January 1917. The balance of forces between capital and labour was little by little being overturned. Within the SPD, the social-patriotic leadership encountered more and more difficulties. Despite its collaboration with the police, which arrested and sent to the front any oppositional worker, and despite its ability to keep a majority in the votes within the party through manipulation, the leadership was unable to put down the growing resistance to its attitude. Bit by bit, the revolutionary minority began to gain influence within the party. From the autumn of 1916, more and more of the local sections (Orstvereine) refused to pay their dues to the leadership.
By unifying its forces, the opposition from this moment on tried to eliminate the central committee in order to take control of the party.
The SPD central committee could see clearly that the balance of forces was beginning to go against it. Following the meeting of a national conference of the opposition, on 7th January 1917, the central committee decided to expel the entire opposition. The split had come. An organisational break was inevitable. Internationalist activity, and the political life of the working class, could hence forth no longer develop within the SPD but only outside it. Following the expulsion of revolutionary minorities, all proletarian life in the SPD was extinguished. Work within the SPD was no longer possible: the revolutionaries had to organise outside[3] .
The opposition was henceforth confronted with a question: what sort of organisation? Suffice it to say here, that during this period of spring 1917 the different currents in the German Left went in different directions.
In a future article we will go, at greater depth, into an appreciation of the organisational work at that time.
At the same time, internationally, the pressure of the working class was going beyond a decisive threshold. In February (March by the Western calendar), the workers and soldiers in Russia once again, as they had done in 1905, created their workers’ and soldiers councils. The Tsar was overthrown. A revolutionary process began which was very soon to spread to neighbouring countries and throughout the world. The event gave birth to an immense hope in the workers’ ranks.
The struggle’s further development can only be understood in the light of the Russian Revolution. The fact that the working class had overthrown the ruling class in one country, that it had begun to shake the foundations of capitalism, acted as a beacon showing the direction to follow. And the working class throughout the world began to look in this direction.
The working class’s struggle in Russia met a powerful echo, and above all in Germany.
A wave of strikes broke out in the Ruhr between 16-22nd February 1917. Mass actions took place in many German towns. Not a week passed without some important act of resistance, demands for higher wages or better provisions. Disorders due to problems of food supply were reported in almost all the great cities. When a new reduction in food rations was announced in April, the workers’ anger overflowed. From 16th April, a great wave of mass strikes broke out in Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Hanover, Brunswick and Dresden. The army chiefs of staff, the main bourgeois politicians, and the leaders of the SPD and the unions all worked together to try to control the strike movement.
More than 300,000 workers in 30 factories were on strike. This was the second great mass strike after the struggles in July 1916 over Liebknecht’s arrest.
The working class in Germany thus followed closely in the steps of its class brothers in Russia, who were confronting capital in a gigantic revolutionary struggle.
They fought with exactly the methods described by Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, written after the struggles of 1905: mass meetings, demonstrations, discussions and common resolutions in the factories, factory assemblies, right up to the formation of workers’ councils.
Since the unions had been integrated into the state in 1914, they had served as a rampart against the reaction of the working class. They sabotaged the struggle by every means available. The proletariat had to act by itself, organise by itself and unify by itself. No organisation created in advance could spare it this task. And the workers in Germany, the most developed country of its time, showed that they could organise themselves. Contrary to all the speeches we hear today, the working class is perfectly capable of entering massively into struggle and of organising to do so. In this perspective, the struggle could no longer take place within the union and reformist framework, that is by industrial branch, separated from each other. The working class showed that henceforth, it is capable of uniting irrespective of trade or industry, and of entering into action for demands shared by all: bread and peace, and the liberation of its revolutionary militants. Everywhere the demand went up for Liebknecht’s liberation.
Struggles can no longer be carefully prepared in advance, as if by a general staff, as they were in the previous century. The task of the political organisation is not to organise the workers but to assume the role of political leadership.
During the 1917 strike wave in Germany, the workers confronted the unions directly for the first time. Although the latter had been created by the class itself during the previous century, from the outset of the war they had become the defenders of capital in the factories and henceforth formed an obstacle to proletarian struggle. The workers in Germany were the first to discover that they could only go forward by going against the unions
The beginning of the Russian Revolution had its first effects among the soldiers. The revolutionary events were discussed with immense enthusiasm; fraternisation between German and Russian troops was frequent on the Eastern front. In the summer of 1917, the first mutinies took place in the German fleet. Here too bloody repression could stifle the first flames but it could no longer put a halt to the revolutionary movement in the long term.
The partisans of Spartakus and the Bremen Linksradikalen had a strong influence among the sailors.
In the industrial towns, the working class counter-attack continued to develop from the Ruhr to central Germany, from Berlin to the Baltic, everywhere the working class confronted the bourgeoisie. On 16th April, the workers of Leipzig published a call to the workers of other towns to unite with them.
The Spartakists were to be found in the forefront of these movements. From the spring of 1917 they recognised the significance of the movement in Russia and extended a bridge in the direction of the Russian working class, putting forward the perspective of the international extension of the revolutionary struggles. In their pamphlets, in their leaflets, in their polemics towards the working class they intervened ceaselessly against the centrists who with their oscillation and hesitations avoided taking clear positions. They contributed to an understanding of the new situation, ceaselessly exposed the betrayal of the social-patriots and showed the working class how to rediscover the path onto its own class terrain.
In particular, the Spartakists constantly put forward the positions that:
At this level, the proletariat in Germany occupied a central and decisive position!
The radical left was aware of its responsibility and fully understood what was at stake if the revolution in Russia remained isolated: “…On the fate of the Russian revolution: it will attain its objective only if it is a prologue to the European revolution of the proletariat. If on the other hand the European, German workers go on behaving as if they were spectators at this fascinating drama, gawping at it, then the power of the Russian soviets awaits the same destiny as the Paris Commune (that is, bloody defeat)” (Spartakus, January 1918).
That is why it was necessary for the proletariat in Germany, which was in a key position to extend the revolution, to become conscious of its historic role. “The German proletariat is the most faithful, the surest ally of the Russian revolution and of the international proletarian revolution” (Lenin)
A look at the content of the Spartakists’ intervention shows us that it was clearly internationalist and that it gave a correct orientation to the workers’ struggles: the overthrow of the bourgeois government with the perspective of the international overthrow of capitalist society; the exposure of the sabotaging tactics of those forces that were in the service of the bourgeoisie.
Although the revolutionary movement that began in Russia in February 1917 was mainly directed against the war it did not have the strength of itself to end that war by itself. To do that it was absolutely vital that the working class in the large industrial bastions of capitalism enter onto the scene. And it was with a profound awareness of this necessity that when the soviets seized power in October 1917, the Russian proletariat launched an appeal to all the workers of the belligerent countries:
For its part the world bourgeoisie was aware of the danger to its domination posed by such a situation. That is why it was bound at that moment to do all in its power to stifle the flame that had been lit in Russia. That is why the German bourgeoisie, with the general blessing of all, continued its war offensive against Russia even after it had signed a peace agreement with the soviet government at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918. In their leaflet entitled “The moment of decision”, the Spartakists published a warning to the workers about this:
However another year was to pass before the working class in the industrial centres was sufficiently strong to push back the murderous arms of imperialism.
But from 1917 onwards the reverberations of the victorious revolution in Russia on the one hand and the imperialists’ intensification of the war on the other pushed the workers more and more to want to put an end to the war.
The revolutionary flame did in fact spread to other countries.
As the German offensive continued against the young workers’ revolutionary power in Russia, the anger within the workers’ ranks overflowed. On 28th January 400,000 workers, mainly in the armaments factories, went on strike in Berlin. On 29th January the number of strikers rose to as many as 500,000. The movement spread to other cities: in Munich a general assembly of strikers launched the following appeal: “The workers of Munich send their fraternal greetings to the Belgian, French, English, Italian, Russian and American workers. We feel at one with them in their determination to put an end to the world war … We want to impose world peace in solidarity … Proletarians of all countries, unite!” (Quoted by R Müller, p 148 [of his 3-volume history of the German Revolution]).
During the mass movement, the most important of the war, the proletarians formed a workers’ council in Berlin. A Spartakist leaflet addressed them thus:
Another Spartakist leaflet stresses: “We must speak Russian in response to the reaction.” They called for street demonstrations in solidarity.
Given that the struggle had involved a million workers the ruling class was to chose a tactic that it would subsequently employ again and again against the working class. It was the SPD that was the bourgeoisie’s spearhead in torpedoing the movement from within. By taking advantage of the still-significant influence that it enjoyed among the workers this treacherous party managed to send three of its own representatives into the action committee, into the leadership of the strike, who did all they could to break the movement. They acted as saboteurs from within. Ebert clearly recognises this: “I went into the leadership of the strike with the deliberate intention of rapidly finishing it and saving the country from any harm … It was the ultimate duty of the workers to support their brothers and fathers at the front and supply them with the best arms. The workers of France and England don’t miss an hour’s work that can help their brothers at the front. Obviously, all Germans wish for victory,” (Ebert, 30th January, 1918). The workers were to pay a very high price for their illusions in social democracy and its leaders.
In 1914 the SPD had mobilised the workers for war, now they did all in their power to block the strikes. This shows the clear-sightedness and survival instinct of the ruling class, its awareness of the danger that the working class represents to it. The Spartakists for their part denounced long and loud the deadly danger that social-democracy represented and warned the proletariat against it. To the perfidious methods of social-democracy the ruling class added direct and brutal interventions against the strikers with the help of the army. A dozen workers were cut down and several tens of thousands were forcibly enlisted… although the latter contributed to the destabilisation of the army by agitating within it in the following months.
The strikes were finally broken on 3rd February.
We can see that the working class in Germany used exactly the same means of struggle as it did in Russia: mass strikes, workers’ councils, elected and revocable delegates, massive street demonstrations … and these have subsequently constituted the “classic” weapons of the working class.
The Spartakists developed a correct orientation for the movement but did not yet have a decisive influence. “There were a number of our militants among the delegates but they were dispersed, had no plan of action and were lost among the masses,” (Barthel, p591)
This weakness on the part of the revolutionaries, together with social democracy’s work of sabotage, were the decisive factors that led to the impasse that the movement of the class experienced at that moment.
The movement in Germany came up against a much stronger enemy than in Russia. The capitalist class here had in fact already learnt its lesson in order to do all in its power against the working class. Already at this time the SPD proved its ability to set traps to break the movement by taking the lead in it. In later struggles this was to prove even more destructive.
The defeat in January 1918 gave the capitalist forces the possibility to continue their war for a few more months. During 1918 the army was to engage in other offensives. For Germany alone and in 1918 only, this cost 550,000 deaths and almost a million wounded.
The workers’ combativity had still not been broken after the events of January 1918, in spite of everything. Under the pressure of the worsening military situation, a growing number of solders deserted and the front began to disintegrate. From the summer onwards, not only did the willingness to struggle begin to develop again in the factories but the army chiefs were also forced to acknowledge that they were unable to keep the soldiers at the front. For the bourgeoisie, a cease-fire consequently became an urgent necessity.
The ruling class thus showed that it had drawn the lessons of what had happened in Russia.
Although in April 1917 the German bourgeoisie had let Lenin cross Germany in a sealed train in the hope that the action of the Russian revolutionaries would lead to a development of chaos in Russia and so facilitate the realisation of Germany’s imperialist aims (the German army did not foresee at the time that what would ensue was the proletarian revolution of 1917), now they had at all costs to avoid an identical revolutionary development as that in Russia.
So the SPD entered the newly-formed bourgeois government to act as a brake on the movement. “In the circumstances if we refuse to collaborate we must expect a very serious danger … that the movement will overreach us and a Bolshevik regime momentarily appears at home too” (G Noske, 23.09.18)
At the end of 1918 the factories were once more in ferment, strikes broke out constantly in different places. It was just a matter of time before the mass strike movement was spread over the whole country. The growing combativity supplied the soil to nourish the action of the soldiers. When the army ordered a new offensive of the fleet in October, mutinies broke out. The sailors at Kiel and other Baltic ports refused to go to sea. On 3rd November a wave of protests and strikes took place against the war. Workers and soldiers councils were created everywhere. In the space of a week the whole of Germany was “submerged” by a wave of workers’ and soldiers councils.
In the period after February 1917 in Russia it had been the continuation of the war by the Kerensky government that had given a decisive push to the struggle of the proletariat, to the point that the government was driven from power in October so that a definitive end could be made to the imperialist butchery. In Germany the ruling class was better armed than the Russian bourgeoisie and did all it could to maintain its power.
So on 11 November, just a week after the development of workers’ struggles and their lightening extension and after the appearance of workers’ councils, the German bourgeoisie signed the armistice. Drawing the lessons of the Russian experience they did not make the mistake of provoking a fatal radicalisation of the proletarian wave by continuing the war at all costs. By ending it they tried to cut the ground from beneath the feet of the movement and so block its extension. Moreover they introduced into the campaign their most important piece of artillery: the SPD with the unions at its side.
At the end of December Rosa Luxemburg stated: “In all previous revolutions the opponents confronted each other in an open way, class against class, sword against shield … In today’s revolution the troops that defend the old order are not drawn up under their own flag and in the uniform of the ruling class … but under the flag of the revolution. It is a socialist party that has become the most important instrument of the bourgeois counter-offensive”.
In a future article we will go into the counter-revolutionary role of the SPD when confronted with the further development of the struggles.
The working class in Germany would never have been able to develop its capacity to put a stop to the imperialist butchery without the constant participation and intervention of revolutionaries within its ranks. The transformation from the situation of nationalist intoxication in which the working class was steeped in 1914 to the uprising of November 1918 which put an end to the war was possible only by the virtue of the tireless activity of revolutionaries. It was not pacifism that made the end of the massacres possible but the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat.
If from the beginning the internationalists had not courageously exposed the betrayal of the social patriots, if they had not raised their voices loud and clear in the assemblies, factories, in the streets, if they had not determinedly unmasked the saboteurs of the class struggle, the working class response could not have developed and could still less have reached a climax.
By casting a clear glance at this period in the history of the workers’ movement and assessing it from the point of view of the work of revolutionaries we can draw out the crucial lessons for today.
The handful of revolutionaries who continued to defend internationalist principles in August 1914 did not allow themselves to be intimidated or demoralised by their reduced numbers and the enormity of the task they had to accomplish. They maintained their confidence in their class and continued to intervene resolutely, in spite of the immense difficulties, to try and reverse the balance of class forces which was particularly unfavourable. In the party’s sections the revolutionaries rallied their forces as rapidly as possible and never turned their back on their responsibilities.
By defending excellent political orientations before the workers on the basis of a correct analysis of imperialism and the balance of forces between classes they showed the real perspective with the greatest clarity and they served to orient their class politically.
Their defence of the political organisation of the proletariat was also consistent. They did so as much when the point was not to abandon the SPD in the hands of the traitors without a struggle as when it was necessary to build a new organisation. In the next issue we will go into the main elements of this combat.
From the beginning of the war the revolutionaries intervened to defend proletarian internationalism, the international unification of revolutionaries (Zimmerwald and Kienthal) as well as that of the working class as a whole.
Because they realised that the war could not be ended by pacifist means but only through class war, civil war, and that it was therefore necessary to overthrow capitalist domination to free the world from barbarism, they intervened concretely to go beyond capitalist society.
This political work could not have been possible without the theoretical and programmatic clarification carried out before the war. Their fight, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, was in continuity with the positions of the Left within the Second International.
We can say that although the number of revolutionaries and their impact was small at the beginning of the war (Rosa Luxemburg’s apartment had room to hold the main militants of the left on 4th August 1914; all the delegates at Zimmerwald were able to get into three taxis), their work was to prove decisive. Even though at the beginning only small numbers of their press were circulated, the positions and orientations that they contained were crucial for the further development of the consciousness and the combat of the working class.
All this must serve as an example and open our eyes to the importance of the work of revolutionaries. In 1914 the class still needed four years to get over its defeat and present a massive opposition to the war. Today the workers of the industrial centres are not tearing each other to pieces in an imperialist butchery; they must defend themselves against more and more wretched living conditions that capitalism in crisis imposes upon them.
But in the same way as at the beginning of the century when they would never have been able to put an end to the war if the revolutionaries among them and not fought clearly and decisively, to carry out its struggle today and carry out its responsibilities as a revolutionary class, the working class urgently needs its political organisations and their intervention. We will concretise this point in future articles. DV
International Review 81, 2nd Quarter 1995
[1] “But no, it’s a lie! A falsification of those imperialist gentlemen! The real Vorwärts has very probably been sequestrated,” (Zinoviev writing about Lenin)
[2] Anton Pannekoek: Socialism and the great European war; Mehring: On the nature of the war; Lenin: The collapse of the IInd International, Socialism and the war, The tasks of revolutionary social-democracy in the European war; C. Zetkin and K Dunker: Theses on the war; R. Luxemburg: The crisis of social-democracy (also known as the “Junius Pamphlet”); K Liebnecht: The main enemy is at home.
[3] From 1914 to 1917 the membership of the SPD went from one million to about 200,000.
As this series has developed, we have shown how Marx’s revolutionary work went through different phases corresponding to the changing conditions of bourgeois society, and of the class struggle in particular. The last decade of his life, following the defeat of the Paris Commune and the dissolution of the First International, was therefore, as in the 1850s, primarily devoted to scientific research and theoretical reflection rather than open militant activity.
A considerable part of Marx’s energies during this period was directed towards his mammoth critique of bourgeois political economy, to the remaining volumes of Capital, which were never completed by him. Ill health certainly played a considerable part in this. But what has come to light in recent years is the extent to which Marx during this period was “distracted” by questions which, at first sight, might appear to represent a diversion from this key aspect of his life’s work: we refer to the anthropological and ethnological preoccupations stimulated by the appearance of Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society in 1877. The degree to which Marx was absorbed in these issues has been revealed by the publication in 1974 of his Ethnological Notebooks, which he had worked on in the period 1881-2, and which were the basis for Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels wrote the latter as a “bequest” to Marx, in other words in recognition of the central importance that Marx accorded to the scientific study of earlier forms of human society, in particular those preceding the formation of classes and the state.
Closely related to these investigations was Marx’s growing interest in the Russian question, which had developed from the early seventies but was given considerable impetus by the publication of Morgan’s book. It is well known that Marx’s reflections on the problems posed to the nascent revolutionary movement in Russia prompted him to learn Russian and accumulate a huge library of books on Russia. He was even led to conceal from Engels - who had to nag Marx constantly to press on to the completion of Capital - the amount of time he was devoting to the Russian question.
These preoccupations of the “Late” Marx have given rise to conflicting interpretations and controversies which bear comparison to the arguments over the work of the “Young” Marx. There is for example the view of Ryzanov, who on behalf of the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute published Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich and its preceding drafts in 1924, after they had been “buried” by elements in the Russian marxist movement (Zasulich, Axelrod, Plekhanov, etc). According to Ryzanov, Marx’s absorption in these matters, particularly the Russian question, was essentially the result of Marx’s declining intellectual powers. Others, in particular elements who have been on the “edge” of the proletarian political movement, such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Franklin Rosemont [1], have correctly argued against such ideas and have attempted to draw out the importance of the “Late” Marx’s concerns. But in doing so they have introduced a number of confusions that open the door wide to a bourgeois misuse of this phase of Marx’s work.
The article that follows is not at all an attempt to investigate the Ethnological Notebooks, Marx’s writings on Russia, or even Engels’ Origins of the Family in the depth that they require. The Notebooks in particular are almost unchartered territory and require a huge amount of exploration and “decoding’: they are very much in note form, a collection of marginal notes and extracts, and much of this written in a curious mixture of English and German. Furthermore, most of the “excavation” that has been done on them so far concerns the section dealing with Morgan’s book. This was certainly the most important section and served as the principal basis for The Origins of the Family. But the Notebooks also include Marx’s notes on JB Phear’s The Aryan Village (a study of communal social forms in India), HS Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (which focuses on the vestiges of communal social formations in Ireland) and J Lubbock’s The Origins of Civilisation, which reveals Marx’s interest in the ideological creations of primitive societies, particularly the development of religion). There is a great deal that could be said about the latter in particular, but we have no intention of trying to go into these problems here. Our aim is the much more limited one of affirming the importance and relevance of Marx’s work on these areas, while at the same time criticising certain of the false interpretations that have been made of them.
This is not the first time in this series that Marx’s interest in the question of “primitive communism” has come up. We have shown, for example, in International Review no.75, that the Grundrisse and Capital already defend the notion that the first human societies were characterised by an absence of class exploitation and private property; that vestiges of these communal forms had persisted in all the pre-capitalist class systems; and that these vestiges, together with the half-distorted memories that lived on in popular consciousness, had frequently provided the basis for the revolts of exploited classes in these systems. Capitalism, by generalising commodity relations and the economic war of each against all, had effectively dissolved these communal remnants (at least in those countries where it had taken root); but in doing so had laid the material foundations for a higher form of communism. The recognition that the further back you traced the history of human society, the more you found it to be based on communal forms of property, was already a vital argument against the bourgeois notion that communism was somehow against the fundamentals of human nature.
The publication of Morgan’s study of American Indian society (in particular the Iroquois) was thus of considerable importance to Marx and Engels. Although Morgan was no revolutionary, his empirical studies provided a striking confirmation of the thesis of primitive communism, making it plain that institutions which, as foundation stones of the bourgeois order, were deemed to be eternal and immutable, had a history: they had not existed at all in remote epochs, had emerged only through a long and tortuous process, had altered in form as society had altered in form - and could thus be altered and indeed abolished in a different kind of society.
Morgan’s view of history was not altogether the same as that of Marx and Engels, but it was not incompatible with the materialist view. In fact it laid considerable stress on the central importance of the production of life’s necessities as a factor in the evolution of one social form into another, and attempted to systematise a series of stages in human history (“savagery”, “barbarism”, “civilisation”, and various sub-phases within these epochs) that Engels essentially took over in his Origins of the Family. This periodisation was extremely important for understanding the whole process of historical development and the origins of class society. Furthermore, in Marx’s previous works, the source material for studying primitive communism was mainly drawn from archaic, and extinct, European social forms (eg the Teutonic and the classical) or those communal vestiges which persisted in the Asiatic systems being wiped out by colonial development. Now Marx and Engels were able to broaden the scope by extending their study to peoples who were still in the “pre-civilised” stage, but whose institutions were advanced enough to make it possible to understand the mechanics of the transition from primitive or rather barbarian society to a society based on class divisions. In short, this was a living laboratory for the study of evolving social forms. Small wonder that Marx was so enthusiastic and strove to understand it in such depth. Pages and pages of his notes go into vast detail about the kinship patterns, customs and social organisation of the tribes that Morgan studied. It is as if Marx is seeking to get as clear as possible a picture of a social formation which provides empirical proof that communism is no idle dream, but a concrete possibility rooted in humanity’s material conditions.
“Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State”: Engels’ title reflects the main sub-divisions of Marx’s notes on Morgan, in which Marx seeks to establish how, on the one hand, these “sacred” pillars of bourgeois order had once not existed, and how, on the other, they had evolved from within the archaic communities.
Thus, Marx’s notes concentrate on the fact that in “savage” society (ie, hunter-gatherer societies), there is virtually no idea of property at all except for a few personal possessions. In more advanced (‘barbarian’) societies, particularly with the development of agriculture, property at first remains essentially collective, and there is still no class living off the labour of another. But the germs of differentiation can be discerned through the organisation of the “gens”, of clan systems within the tribe where property can be passed on through a more restricted group. “Inheritance: its first great rule came in with the institution of the gens, which distributed the effects of a deceased person among his gentiles”(The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, edited by Lawrence Krader, the Netherlands, 1974, p 128). The “worm in the bud” of private property is thus contained within the ancient communal system, which existed not because of humanity’s innate goodness but because the material conditions in which the first human communities evolved could permit of no other form; in changing material conditions connected to the development of the productive forces, communal ownership was eventually transformed into a barrier to this development and was superseded by forms more compatible with the accumulation of wealth. But the price paid for this development was the appearance of class divisions - the appropriation of social wealth by a privileged minority. And here again, it was through the transformation of the clan or gens into castes and then classes that this fateful development took place.
The appearance of classes also results in the appearance of the state. Marx’s recognition of a tendency inside the Iroquois “governing” institutions for there to be a separation between public fiction and real practise is developed by Engels into the thesis that the state “is by no means a power imposed on society from the outside” (Origins of the Family); that it was no plot imposed by a minority but emerged from the soil of society at a certain stage of its development (a thesis magnificently confirmed by the experience of the Russian revolution and the emergence of the transitional Soviet state out of the post-revolutionary situation). Like private property and classes, the state arises out of contradictions appearing in the original communal order. But at the same time, and no doubt with the experience of the Paris Commune still very fresh in his mind, Marx is clearly fascinated by the Iroquois “council” system, going into considerable detail about the structure of decision making and the customs and traditions that accompanied the tribal assemblies: “The Council - instrument of government und supreme authority uber gens, tribe confederacy ... simplest u lowest form of the Council - that of the Gens; a democratic assembly, wo every adult male u female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it; it elected and deposed its sachem u. chiefs .... It was the germ of the higher council of the tribe, and that still higher of the confederacy, each of which was composed exclusively of chiefs as representatives...” (ibid, p 150).
Thus, just as the notion that property was originally collective struck a blow against bourgeois notions of political economy, the “Robinsonades” which saw the urge towards private property as innate in human nature, Morgan’s work confirmed that human beings had not always needed an authority controlled by a specialised minority, a state power, to manage their social life. Like the Commune, the Iroquois councils were proof of humanity’s ability to govern itself.
The quotation above mentions the equality of men and women in the tribal democracy. Again, Marx notes that even here, the signs of a differentiation can be seen: “In this area as elsewhere Marx discerned germs of social stratification within the gentile organisation, again in terms of the separation of “public” and “private” spheres, which he saw in turn as the reflection of the gradual emergence of a propertied and privileged tribal caste. After copying Morgan’s observation that, in the Council of Chiefs, women were free to express their wishes and opinions “through an orator of their own choosing”, he added, with emphasis, that the “decision (was) made by the (all-male) Council’” (Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois”, in Arsenal, Surrealist Subversion, no. 4, 1989). But as Rosemont goes on to say, “Marx was nonetheless unmistakably impressed by the fact that, among the Iroquois, women enjoyed a freedom and a degree of social involvement far beyond that of the women (or men!) of any civilised nation”. This understanding was part of the real breakthrough that Morgan’s researches enabled Marx and Engels to make on the question of the family.
As early as the Communist Manifesto, the tendency around Marx and Engels had denounced the hypocritical and oppressive nature of the bourgeois family and had openly advocated its abolition in a communist society. But now Morgan’s work enabled the marxists to demonstrate through historical example the fact that the patriarchal, monogamous family was not the irreplaceable moral foundation of any social order; in fact it was a rather late arrival in humanity’s history and, here again, the further back one looks, the more it becomes evident that marriage and child-rearing were originally communal functions, that a “communism in living” (Notebooks, p 115) prevailed among the tribal peoples. This isn’t the place to go into the very complicated details about the evolution of marriage institutions noted by Marx and summarised by Engels, or to assess Engels’ views in the light of more recent anthropological research. But even if some of their assumptions about the history of the family were mistaken, the essential point remains: the patriarchal family where the man considers the woman to be his private property is not “the way things have always been” but a product of a particular kind of society - a society founded upon private property (indeed, as Engels points out in Origins of the Family, the very term “family”, from the Latin “familias” is totally bound up with slavery, since it originally meant, in ancient Rome, the household of a slaveowner, those over whom he had the power of life and death - slaves and women included). In a society where neither classes or private property existed, women could not be seen as chattels or servants and indeed enjoyed a much higher status than in “civilised” societies; the oppression of women thus develops with the gradual emergence of class society, even if, as with private property and the state, its germs can already be seen in the old community.
This social and historical view of the oppression of women was a refutation of all the openly reactionary views which assume some inherent, biological basis for the “inferior” status of women. The key to women’s inferior status down the ages is not to be found in biology (even if biological differences have their input into the development of male dominance) but in history - in the evolution of particular social forms corresponding to the material development of the productive forces. But this analysis also goes against the feminist interpretation which (however much it might borrow from the marxist position) also inevitably tends to make the oppression of women something biologically inherent, though this time in the male rather than the female. In any case, both feminism and the out-and-out reactionary view lead to the same conclusion: that women’s oppression can never be abolished as long as society is made up of men and women (“radical separatism”, for all its absurdity, is really the most consistent form of feminism). For the communists, on the other hand, if the oppression of women had its beginnings in history, it can also have its end - in the communist revolution that will provide men and women with the material conditions to relate to each other, and to bring up children, free of the social and economic pressures that have hitherto forced them into their respective, restrictive roles. We will return to this point in a subsequent article.
Both Dunayevskaya and Rosemont have noted, in their comments on the Notebooks, that the “Late” Marx’s interest in primitive communism represented a return to some of the themes of his youth, in particular of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The latter had represented a more “philosophical” anthropology; in the Notebooks Marx was moving towards a historical anthropology, but without renouncing the preoccupations of his earlier work. Likewise the theme of the man-woman relation had been posed, if somewhat abstractly, in 1844, and was now being dealt with “in the flesh’. These comments are accurate as long as one also bears in mind, as we showed in International Review 75, that the “themes of 1844” had continued to be a vital element in Marx’s thought in “mature” works like Capital and the Grundrisse, and didn’t suddenly revive in 1881. In any case, what does emerge from a reading of the Notebooks is Marx’s respect not only for the social organisation of the “savages” and “barbarians”, but also for their cultural achievements, their way of life, their “vitality”, which he saw as being “incomparably greater ... than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies” (‘Drafts of a reply” to Vera Zasulich, in Teodor Shanin, ed, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, New York, 1983, p107n). This respect can be seen from his frequent defence of their intelligence against bourgeois (and racist) “blockheads” like Lubbock and Maine, of the imaginative qualities inherent in their myths and legends; it can be seen, above all, in his detailed depiction of their customs, feasts, festivals and dances, of a mode of living in which work and play, politics and celebration had not yet become totally separate categories. This is a concretisation of one of the central themes that emerge from the 1844 MS and the Grundrisse: that in the pre-capitalist societies, and especially in the pre-civilised ones, human life was in many respects less alienated than it has become under capitalism; that the people of primitive communism provide us with a glimpse of the all-round human being of tomorrow’s communism. Thus Marx in his reply to Vera Zasulich on the Russian commune (see below) was quite prepared to endorse the view that “the new system to which modern society is tending “will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type’” (ibid, p107. Marx here was probably quoting from memory the lines by Morgan with which Engels closes The Origins of the Family).
This concept of a “revival” on a higher level is integral to dialectical thinking but it is a real puzzle to the bourgeois outlook, which offers us a choice between a linear view of history and a naive idealisation of the past. When Marx was writing, the dominant trend in bourgeois thought was a simplistic evolutionism in which the past, above all the primitive past, was repudiated as a fog of darkness and childish superstition, the better to justify “present day civilisation” and its enslavement or extermination of the primitives who stood in its way. Today the bourgeoisie carries on exterminating what’s left of the primitives, but it no longer has the same unshakable faith in its civilising mission, and there is a strong counter-trend, especially among the petty bourgeoisie, towards “primitivism”, the hopeless desire to return to the primitive way of life, now imagined as a kind of lost paradise.
For both these outlooks, it is impossible to look at primitive society lucidly, recognising both its “grandeur”, as Engels put it, and its limitations: the lack of real individuality and freedom in a community dominated by scarcity; the restriction of the community to the tribe, and thus the essential fragmentation of the species in this epoch; the inability of mankind in these formations to see himself as an active, creative being, and thus his subordination to mythical projections and unchallengeable ancestral traditions. The dialectical view is summed up by Engels in The Origins of the Family: “The power of these primordial communities had to be broken, and it was broken” - thus permitting humankind to free itself from the limitations enumerated above. “But it was broken by influences which from the outset appear to us as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral grandeur of the ancient gentile society”. A fall that is also an advance; elsewhere in the same work Engels writes that “Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the well-being and development of one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other”. These are scandalous concepts to bourgeois common sense, but, just like the “revival on a higher level” which complements them, they make perfect sense from the dialectical point of view, which sees history moving forward through the clash of contradictions.
It is important to quote Engels in this regard because there are many who consider that he deviated from Marx’s view of history into a version of bourgeois evolutionism. This is a broader question which we will have to take up elsewhere; for the moment suffice it to say that a whole body of literature, embracing academic “marxism”, academic anti-marxism, and various strands of modernism and councilism, has emerged in recent years to try to prove the degree to which Engels was guilty of falling into economic determinism, mechanical materialism and even reformism, distorting Marx’s thinking on a whole number of vital questions. The argument is often closely linked to the idea of a total break in continuity between the First and Second Internationals, a concept dear to councilism. But particularly relevant here is the fact that Raya Dunayevskaya, echoed by Rosemont, has also accused Engels of failing to carry out Marx’s bequest when he transposed the Ethnological Notebooks into The Origins of the Family.
According to Dunayevskaya, Engels’ book is at fault for talking about a “world historic defeat of the female sex” as being coincident with the appearance of civilisation. For her this is a simplification of Marx’s thought; in the Notebooks, the latter finds that the seeds of the oppression of women are already developing along with the stratification of barbarian society, with the growing power of the chiefs and the resulting transformation of tribal councils into formal rather than real organs of decision. More generally, she sees Engels as losing sight of Marx’s dialectical view, reducing his complex, multilinear views of historical development to a unilinear vision of progress through rigidly defined stages.
It may be the case that Engels’ use of the phrase “world historical defeat of the female sex” (which he took from Bachofen rather than Marx) gives more the impression of a one-off, concrete historical event than of a very long process which already has its origins inside the primitive community, especially its later phases. But this does not prove that Engels’ basic approach deviates from Marx: both are aware that the contradictions which led to the appearance of the “family, private property and the state” arise from contradictions within the old gentile order. Indeed, in the case of the state, Engels made considerable advances on the theoretical level: the Notebooks themselves contain very little raw material for the important arguments about the emergence of the state contained in The Origins of the Family; and we have already shown how, in this matter, Engels was entirely in accord with Marx in seeing the state as a product of a long historical evolution within the old communities.
We have also shown that Engels was in accord with Marx in rebutting the linear bourgeois evolutionism which fails to understand the “price” mankind has paid for progress, and the possibility of reappropriating, on a higher level, what he has “lost’.
If anything, Dunayevskaya fails to make the most pertinent criticism of Engels’ presentation of the history of class society in his book: its complete failure to integrate the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, its picture of a straightforward and universal movement from primitive society to slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Even as a description of the origins of “western” civilisation this is simplistic, since the slave societies of antiquity were influenced at a number of levels by the Asiatic forms which pre-existed them and co-existed with them. Engels’ omission here not only blots out a vast chapter in the history of civilisations, but also gives the impression of a fixed, unilinear evolution valid for all parts of the globe, and in this respect adds some grist to the mill of bourgeois evolutionism. Most important of all, his error was exploited later on by the Stalinist bureaucrats who had a vested interest in obscuring the whole concept of Asiatic despotism, since it proved that class exploitation could exist without any discernible form of “individual” private property - and thus that the Stalinist system could itself be seen as a system of class exploitation. And of course, as bourgeois thinkers, the Stalinists felt much more at home with a linear view of progress advancing inexorably from slavery to feudalism and capitalism, and culminating in the supreme achievement of history: the “real socialism” of the USSR.
Despite this important mistake, the attempt to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels is fundamentally at odds with the long history of collaboration between the two. Indeed, when it comes to explaining the dialectical movement of history, and of nature itself, Engels has given us some of the best and clearest accounts in the whole of marxist literature. The historical and textual evidence gives little support to this “divorce” between Marx and Engels. Those who argue for it often pose as radical defenders of Marx and scourges of reformism. But they generally end up by destroying the essential continuity of the marxist movement.
The defence of the notion of primitive communism was a defence of the communist project in general. But this was not only the case at the most historical and global level. It also had a more concrete and immediate political relevance. Here it is necessary to recall the historical context in which Marx and Engels elaborated their works on the “ethnological” question. In the 1870s and 1880s, a new phase in the life of capital was opening up. The bourgeoisie had just vanquished the Paris Commune; and while this did not yet mean that the entire capitalist system had entered into its epoch of senility, it certainly brought to a definite end the period of national wars in the centers of capitalism, and, more generally, the period in which the bourgeoisie could play a revolutionary role on the stage of history. The capitalist system now entered into its last phase of expansion and world conquest, not through a struggle by rising bourgeois classes seeking to establish viable national states, but through the methods of imperialism, of colonial conquests. The last three decades of the 19th century thus saw virtually the entire globe being seized and divided up amongst the great imperialist powers.
And everywhere the most immediate victims of this conquest were the “colonial peoples” - mainly peasants still tied to old communal forms of production, and numerous tribal groupings. As Luxemburg explained in her book The Accumulation of Capital, “Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon natural economy are of no use to capital” (chapter XXVII, p 368, London 1951). Hence the necessity for capital to sweep aside, by all the military and economic force at its disposal, those remnants of communistic production which it encountered everywhere in the newly-conquered territories. Of these victims of the imperialist juggernaut, the “savages”, those living in the most basic form of primitive communism, fared worst of all: as Luxemburg showed, while peasant communities could be destroyed by the “colonialism of the commodity”, by taxation and other economic pressures, the primitive hunters could only be exterminated or dragged into forced labour because not only did they range across wide territories coveted by capitalist agriculture, they produced no surplus capable of entering into the capitalist circulation process.
The “savages” did not simply lie down and surrender to this process. The year before Morgan published his study of the Iroquois, an Indian tribe from the eastern parts of the USA, the “western” tribes had defeated Custer at the Little Big Horn. But “Custer’s Last Stand” was in reality the last stand of the native Americans against the definitive destruction of their ancient way of life.
The question of understanding the nature of primitive society was thus of immediate political importance for communists in this period. First, because, just as Christianity had been the ideological excuse for colonial conquests in an earlier period of capitalism’s life, the 19th century ethnological theories of the bourgeoisie were often used as a “scientific” justification for imperialism. This was the period which saw the beginning of racist theories about the White Man’s Burden and the necessity to bring civilisation to the benighted savages. The bourgeoisie’s evolutionist ethnology, which posited a linear ascent from primitive to modern society, provided a more subtle justification for the same “civilising mission’. Furthermore, these notions were already beginning to seep into the workers’ movement, although they reached their apogee with the theory of “Socialist Colonialism” in the period of the Second International, with the “Jingo” socialism of figures like Hyndman in Britain. Indeed, the question of colonial policy was to be a clear line of demarcation between the right and the left fractions of social democracy, a test for internationalist credentials, as in the case of the Italian Socialist Party (see our pamphlet on the Italian communist left).
When Marx and Engels were writing on ethnological questions, these problems were only just beginning to emerge. But the contours of the future were already taking shape. Marx had already recognised that the Commune marked the end of the period of revolutionary national wars. He had seen the British conquest of India, French colonial policy in Algeria (where he went for a rest cure shortly before his death), the pillaging of China, the slaughter of the native Americans; all this indicates that his growing interest in the problem of the primitive community was not simply an “archaeological” one; nor was it restricted to the very real necessity to denounce the hypocrisy and cruelty of the bourgeoisie and its “civilisation’. In fact it was directly connected to the need to elaborate a communist perspective for the period then opening up. This was demonstrated above all by Marx’s attitude to the Russian question.
Marx’s interest in the Russian question went back to the beginning of the 1870s. But the most intriguing angle on the development of his thought on the question is provided by his reply to Vera Zasulich, then a member of that fraction of revolutionary populism which later, along with Plekhanov, Axelrod and others, went on to form the Emancipation of Labour group, the first clearly marxist current in Russia. Zasulich’s letter, dated 16 February 1881, asked Marx to clarify his views on the future of the rural commune, the obschina: was it to be dissolved by the advance of capitalism in Russia, or was it capable, “freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration ... of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis”.
Marx’s previous writings had tended to see the Russian commune as a direct source of Russian “barbarism”; and in a reply to the Russian Jacobin Tkachev (1875), Engels had put the emphasis on the tendency towards the dissolution of the obschina.
Marx spent a number of weeks pondering his answer, which ran into four separate drafts, all of the rejected ones being much longer than the letter of reply he finally sent. These drafts are full of important reflections on the archaic commune and the development of capitalism, and explicitly show the degree to which his reading of Morgan had led him to rethink certain previously held assumptions. In the end, admitting that ill health was preventing him from completing a more elaborated response, he summed up his reflections firstly by rejecting the idea that his method of analysis led to the conclusion that every country or region was mechanically fated to go through the bourgeois phase of production; and secondly by concluding that “the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source-material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development” (8 March 1881).
The drafts of the reply were not discovered until 1911 and were not published until 1924; the letter itself was “buried” by the Russian marxists for decades. Ryzanov, who was responsible for publishing the drafts, tries to find psychological reasons for this “omission” but it appears that the “founders of Russian marxism” were not very happy with this letter from the “founder of marxism’. Such an interpretation is strengthened by the fact that Marx tended to support the terrorist wing of populism, the People’s Will, against what he referred to as the “boring doctrines” of Plekhanov and Zasulich’s Black Repartition group, even though, as we have seen, it was the latter that formed the basis of the Emancipation of Labour group on a marxist programme.
The leftist academics who specialise in studying the Late Marx have made much of this shift in Marx’s position in the final years of his life. Shanin, editor of Late Marx and the Russian Road, the main compilation of texts on this question, correctly sees the drafts and the final letter as a superb example of Marx’s scientific method, his refusal to impose rigid schemas on reality, his capacity to change his mind when previous theories did not fit the facts. But as with all forms of leftism, this basic truth is then distorted in the service of capitalist ends.
For Shanin, Marx’s questioning of the linear, evolutionist idea that Russia had to go through a phase of capitalist development before it could be integrated into socialism proves that Marx was a Maoist before Mao; that socialism could be the result of peasant revolutions in the peripheries. “While on the level of theory Marx was being “engelsised” and Engels, still further, “kautskised” and “plekhanovised” into an evolutionist mould, revolutions were spreading by the turn of the century through the backward/’developing” societies: Russia 1905 and 1917, Turkey 1906, Iran 1909, Mexico 1910, China 1910 and 1927. Peasant insurrection was central to most of them. None of them were “bourgeois revolutions” in the West European sense and some of them proved eventually socialist in leadership and results. In the political life of socialist movements of the twentieth century there was an urgent need to revise strategies or go under. Lenin, Mao and Ho chose the first. It meant speaking with “double-tongues” - one of strategy and tactics, the other of doctrine and conceptual substitutes, of which the “proletarian revolutions” in China or Vietnam, executed by peasants and “cadres”, with no industrial workers involved, are but particularly dramatic examples” (Late Marx and the Russian Road, p24-25).
All of Shanin’s sophisticated musings about the dialectic and the scientific method thus reveal their real purpose: to provide an apologia for the Stalinist counter-revolution in the peripheries of capital, and to trace Mao’s or Ho’s horrible distortions of marxism to none other than Marx himself.
Writers like Dunayevskaya and Rosemont consider that Stalinism is a form of state capitalism. But they are full of admiration for Shanin’s book (“a work of impeccable scholarship that is also a major contribution to the clarification of revolutionary perspective today” (Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois’). And for good reason: these writers may not share Shanin’s admiration for the likes of Ho and Mao, but they too consider that the crux of Marx’s “Late” synthesis is the search for a revolutionary subject other than the working class. For Rosemont, Late Marx was “diving headlong into the study of (for him) new experiences of resistance and revolt against oppression - by North American Indians, Australian aborigines, Egyptians and Russian peasants”; and these interests “also look ahead to today’s most promising revolutionary movements in the Third world, and the Fourth, and our own” (ibid). The “Fourth world” is the world of the remaining tribal peoples; ergo, today’s primitive peoples, like those in Marx’s day, are part of a new revolutionary subject. Dunayevskaya’s writings are similarly full of a search for new revolutionary subjects, and they are generally made up of a hotch-potch of categories such as Women, Gays, Industrial Workers, Blacks and Third World “National Liberation” movements.
But all these readings of the Late Marx take his contributions out of their real historical context. The period in which Marx was wrestling with the problem of the archaic commune was, as we have seen, a “transitional” period in the sense that while it pointed to the future demise of bourgeois society (the Paris Commune being the harbinger of the future proletarian revolution), there was still a vast field for the expansion of capital into its peripheries. Marx’s recognition of the ambiguous nature of this period is summed up in a phrase from the “Second draft” of his reply to Zasulich: “...the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime..” (Karl Marx and the Russian Road, p103).
In this situation, where symptoms of decay had already appeared in the centers of the system, but the system as a whole continued to expand at an extraordinary pace, communists were faced with a real dilemma. For, as we have already said, this expansion no longer took the form of bourgeois revolutions against feudal or other outmoded class societies, but of colonial conquests, the increasingly violent imperialist annexation of the remaining non-capitalist areas of the globe. There could be no question of the proletariat “supporting” colonialism as it had supported the bourgeoisie against feudalism; the concern in Marx’s inquiry into the Russian question was rather this: could humanity in these areas be spared being dragged through the inferno of capitalist development? Certainly, nothing in Marx’s analysis suggested that every single country had to pass mechanically through the phase of capitalist development before a world communist revolution was possible; he had in fact rejected the claim of one of his Russian critics, Mikhailovskii, that his theory was a “historico-philosophical theory of Universal Progress” (letter to the editor of Otechesvennye Zapiski, 1878) which insisted that the process whereby the peasants were expropriated and turned into proletarians must inevitably be the same in all countries. For Marx and Engels, the key was the proletarian revolution in Europe, as Engels had already argued in his reply to Tkachev, and as was made perfectly explicit in the introduction to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1882. If the revolution was successful in the industrialised centers of capital, then humanity could be spared a great deal of torment right across the globe, and the vestigial forms of communal property could be directly integrated into the world communist system: “if the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two can supplement each other, then present Russian communal land ownership can serve as a point of departure for a communist development”.
This was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis at the time. Indeed, it is evident today that if the proletarian revolutions of 1917-23 had been victorious - if the proletarian revolution in the West had come to the aid of the Russian revolution - the terrible ravages of capitalist “development” in the peripheries could have been avoided, remaining forms of communal property could have become part of a global communism, and we would not now be faced with the social, economic and ecological catastrophe that is most of the “third world’.
Furthermore, there is a great deal that is prophetic in Marx’s preoccupation with Russia. Ever since the Crimean War Marx and Engels had had the profound conviction that some kind of social upheaval in Russia was about to take place (which partially explains their support for the People’s Will, who were judged to be the most sincere and dynamic revolutionaries in the Russian movement); and that even if it did not assume a clearly proletarian character, it would indeed be the spark that lit the general revolutionary confrontation in Europe [2].
Marx was mistaken about the imminence of this upheaval. Capitalism did develop in Russia, even without the emergence of a strong and independent bourgeois class; it did largely, though not completely, dissolve the archaic peasant commune; and the main protagonist of the actual Russian revolution was indeed the industrial working class. Above all, the revolution in Russia did not dawn until capitalism as a whole had become a “regressive social regime”, ie had entered its phase of decadence, a reality demonstrated by the imperialist war of 1914-18.
Nevertheless, Marx’s rejection of the necessity for each country to go through mechanical stages, his reluctance to support the nascent forces of capitalism in Russia, his intuition that a social upheaval in Russia would be the opening shot of the international proletarian revolution - in all this he was brilliantly anticipating the critique of Menshevik gradualism and “stageism” initiated by Trotsky, continued by Bolshevism and practically vindicated by the October revolution. By the same token, it is no accident that the Russian marxists, who had been formally correct in seeing that capitalism would develop in Russia, should have “lost” Marx’s letter: the majority of them, after all, were the founding fathers of Menshevism...
But what for Marx was a series of profound anticipations made in a particularly complex period in the history of capitalism, becomes with today’s “interpreters” of the Late Marx an ahistorical apology for new “roads to revolution” and new “revolutionary subjects” at a time when capitalism has been in decay for eighty years. One of the clearest indicators of this decay has been precisely the manner in which capitalism in the peripheries has destroyed the old peasant economies, the vestiges of the ancient communal systems, without being able to integrate the resulting mass of landless peasants into productive labour. The misery, the slums, the famines and wars which ravage the “third world” today are a direct consequence of this barrier reached by capitalist “development’. Consequently, there can be no question today of using archaic communal vestiges as a stepping stone to communist production, because capitalism has effectively destroyed them without putting anything in their place. And there are no new revolutionary subjects waiting to be discovered among the peasants, the displaced sub-proletarians, or the tragic remnants of the primitive peoples. The remorseless “progress” of decadence this century has if anything made it clearer than ever not only that the working class is the only revolutionary subject, but that the working class of the most developed capitalist nations is the key to the entire world revolution.
The next article in this series will look more closely at the way that the founders of marxism treated the “woman” question.
CDW
[1] Raya Dunayevskaya (aka F Forest) was a leading figure in the Johnson-Forest tendency which broke from Trotskyism after the second world war on the question of state capitalism and the defence of the USSR. But it was a very partial break that led Dunayevskaya into the dead end of the “News and Letters” group which took Hegelianism, councilism, feminism and plain old leftism and mixed them into a strange cult of personality around Raya’s “philosophical” innovations. She writes about the Ethnological Notebooks in her book Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, New Jersey, 1981), which seeks to recuperate both Luxemburg and the Ethnological Notebooks to the Idea of Women’s Liberation. Rosemont, whose article “Karl Marx and the Iroquois” contains a lot of interesting elements, is a leading figure in the American Surrealist Group, which has defended certain proletarian positions but which by its very nature has been unable to make a clear critique of leftism and still less of the petty bourgeois rebelliousness from which it emerged in the early 70s.
[2] According to another leftist academic in Shanin’s book, Haruki Wada, Marx and Engels even held out the prospect of some kind of “separate” socialist development in Russia, based on the peasant commune and more or less independent from the European workers’ revolution. He argues that the formulation in the Manifesto isn’t supported by the drafts to Zasulich, and that they corresponded more to Engels’ particular viewpoint than Marx’s. The paucity of Wada’s evidence for this is already exposed in another article in the book - “Late Marx, continuity, contradiction and learning”, by Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan. In any case, as we have shown in our article in International Review 72 (‘Communism as a political programme’) - the idea of socialism in one country, even when based on a proletarian revolution, was entirely foreign to both Marx and Engels.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn1
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn2
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn3
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn4
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn5
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn6
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn7
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn8
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn9
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftn10
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref1
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref2
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref3
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref4
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref5
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref6
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref7
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref8
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref9
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/081_china.htm#_ftnref10
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1927-china
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/maoism
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/content/3623/first-revolutionary-wave-world-proletariat
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement