M A R X AND ENGELS AND T H E CONCEPT OF
THE PARTY
Monty Johnstone
I
T H E concept of a proletarian party occupies a central position in the
political thought and activity of Marx and Engels. "Against the collective power of the propertied classes", they argued, "the working class
cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party
distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed from the propertied classes." This was "indispensable in order to ensure the triumph
of the social revolution, and its ultimate end, the abolition of classes."
Yet nowhere do the auhors of the Manifesto of the Communist
Party
set out in systematic form a theory of the proletarian party, its nature
and its characteristics any more than they do for social class or for
the state, to both of which it is closely related. Moreover, within the
broad general framework of their theory of class struggle and of
revolution, they evolved their ideas on the forms and functions of
proletarian parties as they went along, and related them to their
analyses of often very different historical situations. They did not work
out in advance any " p l a n " for the creation of a revolutionary proletarian party to which their subsequent theoretical work was geared;
and at no time did they themselves establish a political party. Having
already by the beginning of 1844 come theoretically to see the proletariat as the leading force for social emancipation, they were to base
themselves on existing organizations created by advanced sections of
that class and to condemn as sectarianism any attempt to impose preconceived organizational forms on the working class movement from
outside. In the sphere of party building, Marx could have said as
Moliere did of the plots of his plays: "Je prends mon bien oil je le
trouve."
Although members and leaders of party organizations for only a
few years, Marx and Engels devoted a considerable amount of time,
particularly in the latter parts of their lives, to giving advice on the
programmes and development of workers' parties in various countries,
seeing themselves as occupying a "special status as representatives of
international Socialism" and of "the general staff of the Party". When
we examine the totality of these party activities and views on parties
spread over half a century, we are faced with a considerable variety
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and complexity embodying at first sight a number of contradictions.
Moreover, our difficulty is increased by the fact that during the lifetimes of Marx and Engels the whole notion of a political party was to
develop and change along with the forms of activity open to it; and, as
we shall see, they were to use the term in several different senses,
without defining them. It has therefore been quite possible to draw
selectively on their activities and above all their writings in support of
the most opposite versions of their views.
A n understanding of the ideas of Marx and Engels on proletarian
parties is only possible if they are set in each case in their widely varying historical and semantic contexts. This I shall attempt to do by
examining the major "models" of the party in their work, each of
which corresponds to a stage or stages in the development of the working class movement in a given period or in given countries. These I
take a s : («) the small international Communist cadres' organization
(the League of Communists—1847-52); (b) the "party" without an
organization (during the ebb of the labour movement—1850s and early
'60s); (c) the broad international federation of workers' organizations
(the First International—1864-72); (d) the Marxist national mass party
(German Social Democracy—1870s, '80s and early '90s); (e) the broad
national labour party (Britain and America—1880s and early '90s)
based on the Chartist model. I have chosen to examine the views of
Marx and Engels together for they were in fundamental agreement on
all the questions discussed here; and over an important period, in keeping with a division of labour agreed between them, Engels dealt on
behalf of both of them with requests for political advice from all over
the world, continuing arid extending this work after Marx's death into
the era of the Second International.
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II
Having found themselves in 1844-45 in agreement on some of the
basic principles of Marxism, Marx and Engels were to embark on a
lifetime collaboration involving both the further development of their
theoretical ideas and the attempt "to win over the European and in
the first place the German proletariat". F r o m the beginning of 1846,
based on Brussels, they initiated the setting up of Communist Correspondence Committees, notably in Belgium, Britain, France and
Germany. These were to concern themselves with the internal affairs
of what Engels was later to call "the Communist Party in the process
of formation"; though in this period both he and Marx were speaking
of "the Communist Party" and "our p a r t y " in the traditional sense
of a societe de petts^—-however with them it was seen as expressing
the interests of a class—rather than a political organization in anything
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approaching the modern sense. Among those who received the lithographed circulars and pamphlets issued from Brussels were the leaders
of the League of the Just which, formed in 1836, was a small international secret society, consisting mainly of German artisans, that in
recent years had particularly concerned itself with setting up and working within workers' educational associations. This was the organization
that Marx and Engels now entered on the invitation of its leaders who
indicated that they were convinced of the general correctness of their
views and agreed to their stipulation that the old conspiratorial forms
related to the organization's Blanquist past should be scrapped. At
a congress in the summer of 1847, it was reorganized as the League of
Communists, adopting new rules giving it official Communist aims at
a second congress at the end of the year. A new and thoroughly democratic constitution laid down that annual congresses were "the legislative authority of the League" and provided for the electivity,
accountability and revocability at any time by their electors of all leading committees. It was as a "detailed theoretical and practical programme" of the L e a g u e that Marx and Engels were commissioned
to write their famous Manifesto of the Communist
Party.
The Communist League was an international association of workers
in a number of Western European countries, in which Germans predominated and which paid special attention to G e r m a n y . Although
"for ordinary peace times at least" it was seen by Marx and Engels as
"a pure propaganda society", it was forced by the conditions of the
time to operate as a secret society during most of the five years of its
existence. It had its origins, wrote Engels in 1892, in "two independent
currents": on the one hand "a pure workers' movement" and, on the
other, "a theoretical movement, stemming from the disintegration of
Hegelian philosophy", associated predominantly with Marx. " T h e
Communist Manifesto of 1848," he goes on, "marks the fusion of both
currents".
In the Manifesto are set out out some of the basic ingredients of
Marx's and Engels' conception of the party. It puts forward the
Communists' claim to leadership of the working class by virtue of their
superior theoretical consciousness, which belongs to the essence of this
conception. T h e previous year in his polemic against Proudhon, Marx
had described the Socialists and Communists as "the theoreticians of
the proletarian class". Now he and Engels present the Communists
as the theoretical vanguard of the class which has "no interests separate
and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole" and does not "set
up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and
mould the proletarian movement". They were distinguished from "the
other working class parties" only in that in national struggles "they
point out and bring to the forefront the common interests of the entire
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proletariat, independent of all nationality" and that, in the various
stages of the struggle against the bourgeoisie, "they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole". They were
in their practice "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward
all others", whilst in their theory they had "over the great mass of
the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of
march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement", which they conceived as "the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the
immense majority".
When Marx and Engels speak in the Manifesto of the "organization
of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political p a r t y " ,
they clearly have in mind the English model which Marx had described in The Poverty of Philosophy the year before. Here he had
shown how in their struggle, first in trade u n i o n s and then also by
constituting " a large political party under the name of Chartists",
the mass of workers had developed from an amorphous, fragmented,
potential class an sich into a fully-fledged, national class fur sich
engaged of necessity in political struggle. "
At the primitive stage of development and organization of the working class on the continent at this time with the Communist League as
a tiny cadres' organization of some 200-300 m e m b e r s spread throughout Western Europe, the Manifesto indicated that "the Communists
do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties."
In fact at this time there was only one workers' party organized on
a national scale, the Chartists, and the British Communists, Julian
Harney and Ernest Jones worked in it as leaders of its left wing. In
other countries, the members of the League were to join such parties as
the French Social Democrats of Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc,
which Marx described as " a coalition between petty bourgeois and
workers". In Germany in the 1848 revolution they joined the Democratic Party, "the party of the petty bourgeoisie", whose most
advanced wing they f o r m e d until the spring of 1849. Whilst the form
of these tactics was dictated by the circumstances of the time, they do
contain an element which is common to all their party models: the
avoidance of sectarian isolation, the finding of fields of work where
the Communists can get "the ear of the working class."
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It must be clear from the above that the Communist League, an
international secret society comprising "only a small c o r e " of militants, cannot be described as a political party even in the usual sense
in which the term was most frequently used at the time and is applied
in the Manifesto itself to the large national organizations in which the
Communists were to work. As the Soviet Marx scholar E. P. Kandel
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argues in one of the regrettably few books published on the League,
Marx and Engels saw the League only as "the germ, the nucleus" of
their party, notwithstanding the fact that they called its programme
the Manifesto of the Communist Party.™ The conditions of the time,
he writes, "did not provide possibilities for the League of Communists
to turn into a real p a r t y " . A glance at the League's role in the
revolution of 1848-49 will bear this out.
Returning to Germany in the spring of 1848 after the start of the
revolution, together with the bulk of League members who had been
living abroad, Marx and Engels went to Cologne. After initially getting the League's Central Committee operating from there, they appear
to have concentrated all their efforts from about the middle of May
on the production of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. This famous radical
daily paper, whose first number appeared on 1 June, campaigned under
the editorship of Marx for a determined struggle to carry through to
the end the democratic tasks in this bourgeois democratic revolution.
Seeing the very great difficulties for the League in issuing directives
to its dispersed supporters, Marx and Engels concluded that "such
directives were . . . much better disseminated through the press."
In recent years, a bitter controversy has raged between Boris Nicolaevsky, the old Menshevik who died in America in 1966, and E. P.
Kandel around the alleged dissolution of the League in the summer
of 1848. Whether in fact Marx used special discretionary powers
(bestowed on him at the beginning of the revolution) to dissolve the
League in June 1848, as Nicolaevsky alleges on the basis of the prison
deposition of P. G. R o s e r , one of those sentenced at the Cologne
trial of League leaders in 1852, or whether, as Kandel argues, the
possibility of such a dissolution is contradicted by the "high evaluation
of the past role of the League throughout the whole period of 1847—
52 given by Marx and Engels", who never in their accounts of the
League's activity referred to such a dissolution, we shall probably
never know for certain. Unless further research brings some new
documents to light we shall have to make up our minds on the
balance of probabilities. There is however no dispute on the fact that,
as Engels testified later, "the few hundred League members vanished
in the enormous mass that had been suddenly hurled into the movem e n t " . Kandel accepts that in the summer of 1848 the Cologne
Central Committee ceased to function and was (in late August or
September, he now thinks) dissolved and its powers transferred to the
London District Committee. Further, Soviet historians accept as
"credible" Roser's account of a meeting that he attended in the spring
of 1849 between Marx and Joseph M o l l who had been sent by the
new London Central Committee to reorganize the League in G e r m a n y .
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According to Roser, Marx "declared that with the existing freedom
of speech and of the press the League was superfluous".
A number of contemporary Marxist historians have unfortunately
found it necessary to interpret these tactics in terms of a later Marxian,
and a fortiori Leninist, concept of the party. They therefore argue that
"the editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was the political
centre of leadership of the proletarian party in Germany, of the
Communist L e a g u e " ,
"the true general staff of the proletarian
p a r t y " , to which "now fell in practice the tasks of the Central
Committee of the Communist L e a g u e " . In the accounts of the history
of the League and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that Marx and Engels
wrote in the 1860s and '80s there are no such anachronistic formulations to be found. Nor for that matter are there in Lenin, a keen
student of the history of Marxism, who wrote in 1905: "It was only
in April 1849, after the revolutionary newspaper had been published
for almost a year . . . that Marx and Engels declared themselves in
favour of a special workers' organization! Until then they were merely
running an 'organ of democracy' unconnected by any organizational
ties with an independent workers' party. This fact, monstrous and
incredible from our present-day standpoint, clearly shows us what an
enormous difference there is between the German workers' party of
those days and the present Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party."
April 1849, as Lenin indicates in the passage quoted, was to see an
important change in Marx's and Engels' revolutionary strategy. Marx
and other Communists issued a statement announcing their resignation
from the Rhineland District Committee of the Democratic Associations
and urging "a closer union of workers' associations" of which a
national congress was planned. They appear to have concluded that
the German workers had now developed sufficient political experience
for it to be a practical proposition to work for a broad mass workers'
party based on the workers' associations and independent of the petty
bourgeois Democrats with their "indecision, weakness and cowardice". It was too late however for these plans to get off the ground.
T h e outbreak of the insurrection in South and West Germany (Reichsverfassungskampagne)
was to begin soon afterwards and its defeat by
mid-July signified the the end of the German revolution.
Most of the old leaders of the League came together again in exile
in London in the autumn of 1849 where the Central Committee was
reconstituted and proceeded to reorganize the League in Germany, of
necessity as a secret society. On the assumption that "a new revolution is impending", Marx and Engels drew up their famous Address
of March 1850 on behalf of the League's Central Committee. It notes
that in the two years of revolution, although the League's members as
individuals had stood in the forefront of the struggle, the "former firm
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organization of the League was considerably slackened". Whilst the
democratic party had organized itself more and more in Germany,
"the workers' party" (by which they here must mean either the labour
movement as a whole or the general interest of the proletariat as a
class) "lost its only firm foothold" (by which the Communist League is
meant). T h e conclusion thai; is drawn as the leitmotif of the 11-page
address i s : " A n end must be put to this state of affairs, the independence of the workers must be restored", and they must not allow themselves to be drawn into a large opposition party embracing all shades
of democratic opinion. " T h e workers, and above all the League,"
they write, "must exert themselves to establish an independent, secret
and public organization of the workers' p a r t y " . T h e League would
clearly form the secret organization and its branches should become
"the central point and nucleus of workers' associations in which the
attitude and interests of the proletariat will be discussed independently
of bourgeois influences".
These workers' associations, existing
throughout Germany and normally of a social, cultural and educational
character, would provide the broad mass basis and public organization
of the independent workers' party that was to be created. After the
expected democratic revolution, the workers must contest elecions to
a national assembly with their own independent candidates, consisting
"as far as possible of members of the L e a g u e " .
Eduard Bernstein started the fashion, now followed among others
by Mr. George Lichtheim and Professor Bertram Wolfe, of describing the March Address as "Blanquist". Yet the concept of party and
revolution is certainly very far from being Blanquist in the normally
accepted sense of the term, though there are indeed points of convergence with Blanqui's tactics in 1848, which were in a number of
ways untypical, and with the forms of struggle foreseen for the forthcoming revolution by the emigre Blanquists with whom Marx and
Engels concluded a short-lived agreement in 1850. What the Address
makes quite clear is that what it envisages is not a putsch carried out
by a revolutionary elite but the organizing of the most broadly based
workers' party, which in the next revolution will march together with
the petty bourgeois democrats, whom it will help bring to power and
then push forward to m a k e the maximum inroads into capitalist
property. In the "revolutionary excitement that the workers should
keep alive as long as possible", they "must attempt to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard" with commanders and
a general staff elected by themselves. It is significant, as Dr. Rudolf
Schlesinger has noted, that the Address, which was confidential, does
not suggest that these detachments should be subordinated to Communist control, but indicates rather that they should "put themselves
at the command . . . of revolutionary community councils" which the
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09
workers will have established. The Address recognizes that the
German workers will need to go through "a lengthy revolutionary
development" before themselves taking power, and stresses the need
for their "clarifying their minds as to what their class interests a r e " ,
with the obvious implication that the League should function as a
propaganda society.
When in the late summer of 1850 Marx concluded that European
capitalism had entered a period of prosperity and there would be no
new revolution in the period ahead, he was faced with opposition
from an important section of League members headed by Willich
and Schapper. Combatting their voluntarism he said that, instead of
studying the real conditions, they had made "the will alone into the
driving force of revolution". T h e League in London split on this
issue and the Central Committee was transferred back to Cologne
where it functioned for a while until its members were arrested and, in
November 1852, sentenced by a Cologne court. Shortly afterwards the
League in London was dissolved on Marx's proposal and its "continuation on the continent declared to be no longer opportune".
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After the split in the Communist League in the autumn of 1850 and
even before its formal dissolution two years later, Marx and Engels
had begun to withdraw into an "authentic isolation", preferring the
"position of the independent writer" to that of "the so-called revolutionary p a r t y " . The relief expressed by Marx to Engels on 11
February 1851 at the end of "the system of mutual concessions, of
inadequacies endured for the sake of appearances", was matched by
Engels' joy two days later that from now on they were responsible to
themselves alone. " H o w do people like us, who flee official positions
like the plague, fit into a ' p a r t y ' ? " he thunders. "What good to us,
who spit on popularity . . . is a 'party', i.e. a band of asses who swear
by us because they take us for the likes of t h e m ? " Strong words—
but it would be wrong, as Franz Mehring says, to take the actual
expressions used too seriously, and totally indefensible to divorce
them from their actual context and argue, as Bertram Wolfe does, that
they represent their real private opinions about the party to be contrasted with statements made by them thirty and forty years later (some
of which he quotes) which were "written for the eyes of o t h e r s " .
They reflect the frustrations of the first difficult period of exile after
the defeat of the revolution and the recognition that no new one was
impending. They represent their reaction to the "petty squabbles"
of the emigration, from which they were withdrawing in order to
return to their studies, interrupted since 1848, in the hope of gaining,
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above all in the sphere of political economy, "a scientific victory for
our p a r t y " .
What however was this "party" of which they continued to speak
after the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852, in a period
when, as Marx wrote to the poet Freiligrath in 1860, he "never again
belonged . . . to any secret or public society", and considered that his
"theoretical works were of greater benefit to the working class than
participation in associations whose days on the continent were o v e r " ?
What we have here is not a party in the normal sense that Engels was
using when he indicated in December 1852 that "no political party can
exist without an organization", but rather in the first instance a
return to the use of the term that we saw them make in the mid-'40s
to designate Marx and the small band broadly sharing his basic views,
whom the Prussian police reports as well as Marx's supporters in this
period refer to as the "Marx p a r t y " . Already in March 1853, within
four months of the dissolution of the League, Marx is writing to
Engels: "We must definitely recruit our party afresh", since the few
adherents that he names, despite their qualities, do not add up to a
party. They aimed to get this group—"our clique", as Engels calls
them fairly jocularly in a letter to Weydemeyer in America in 1 8 5 3 —
to prepare themselves by study for the revolutionary struggles that they
were confident lay a h e a d . M a r x was anxious to co-ordinate the public
activities of the members of this "party embryo", as Wilhelm Liebknecht was to call it later. When, in 1859, Lassalle published a
pamphlet on the Italian war of that year expressing a point of view
with which they disagreed, Marx wrote to Engels criticising their wayward comrade's failure first to apprise himself of their opinion. "We
must insist on party discipline or everything will land in the dirt", he
added.
Marx however also spoke of "our party" in a more transcendental
sense as when in 1860, in the letter to Freiligrath from which I have
already quoted, he counterposed to the party in the "ephemeral sense",
which in the shape of the Communist League had, he said, "ceased to
exist for me eight years a g o " , "the party in the great historical
sense". The Communist League, like Blanqui's Societe des Saisons
and hundreds of other societies, "was only an episode in the history of
the Party, which is growing everywhere spontaneously from the soil
of modern society". F o r Marx the party in this sense was the embodiment of his conception of the "mission" of the working class, concentrating in itself "the revolutionary interests of society",
to
accomplish "the historical tasks which automatically arose" from its
general conditions of existence. It was in this sense also that Marx
understood the term "party" when he reported to Engels in 1859 that
he had told a deputation from an emigre German workers' g r o u p :
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"We had received our appointment as representatives of the proletarian
party from nobody but ourselves. It was, however, endorsed by the
exclusive and universal hatred consecrated to us by all the parties and
fractions of the old world.'" Does this statement indicate a "conception of charismatic election", and strains of "prophetism" in M a r x ?
Leaving aside the somewhat arrogant form in which the claim is made
(and Marx could certainly be arrogant, especially when in these difficult years of poverty and ill-health he was stung by the follies of some
of his fellow-exiles), there remains the idea of Marx and Engels seeing
themselves, by virtue of their scientifically evolved theoretical understanding as a locum tenens for the German working class p a r t y ,
which for the moment enjoyed only a "theoretical existence". This
is however a temporary and exceptional conception for them, a special
case in no way typical of the mainstream of their thought, which is
found only at this early stage in the life of the still little developed
German working class in the hiatus between the disappearance of
the Communist League and the appearance of new working class
organizations that they were confident would emerge to take its place.
They were decidedly not trying to substitute themselves for such
organizations which at that time did not exist. After a real movement
came once more into existence in the 1860s they never again saw
themselves as self-appointed representatives of the proletarian party.
On the contrary, wherever a real working class movement existed and
struggled against the existing order, even when it was led by people
with whom they had strong theoretical differences, they identified themselves with it and saw it as a manifestation of the party "in the great
historical sense". Thus Marx was to tell Kugelmann that the Paris
Commune was "the most glorious deed of our Party since the June
insurrection in Paris"
in much the same way that Engels was to
refer to the Commune as "without any doubt the child of the International intellectually, although the International did not lift a finger
to produce i t . "
In 1892, writing for French Socialists on the movement in Germany, Engels stressed that he was speaking "only in my
own name, in no wise in the name of the German party. Only the
selected committees and delegates of this party have the right to do
that".
It is perhaps worth noting that, although in the fifties he saw no
basis for an organized workers' party in Germany, he was in 1857
urging that in Britain the Chartist leader Ernest Jones should "form
a party, for which he must go to the factory districts". What he had
in mind was a recruiting campaign by the National Charter Association in the industrial areas, drawing on the old Chartist traditions, to
develop itself into a broadly based working class party in which a
leading role would be played by Jones himself whom Engels was to
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describe on his death in 1869 as "the only educated Englishman who
was, at bottom, entirely on our s i d e " . Thus even in their years in
the wilderness Marx and Engels retained and sought to realize where
possible their basic concept of the party as an organization in which
Socialist theory fuses with the labour movement.
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IV
T h e formation of the First International in 1864 gave Marx (and
somewhat later E n g e l s ) the opportunity to break out of their relative
isolation and join up with the Western European labour movement
that was now reviving on a much wider scale than its continental
predecessor of the 1840s. Whilst not abandoning his theoretical work,
Marx turned his attention more and more right up to the Hague Congress of 1872 to organizing, uniting and leading this broad international
federation of affiliated working class organizations. Like the Communist League, the International was not founded by Marx and Engels
but sprang spontaneously from the labour movement of the t i m e ,
to which by virtue of their theoretical and intellectual pre-eminence
they came to give direction and perspective. Unlike the Communist
L e a g u e , however, they did not at any stage regard the International
as a Communist Party. Nor did they operate with their supporters as
an organized party, fraction or secret society inside the broad framework of the International. Nonetheless, in speaking in the Inaugural
Address of the International of "numbers . . . united by combination
and led by knowledge", Marx was broadly paraphrasing his party
concept of the fusion of Socialist theory with the labour movement,
and in the International especially after the Paris Commune he and
Engels were to develop more fully than hitherto their views on party
organization. In contrast to the Communist League with its advanced
theoretical programme, Marx framed the International's programme—
the preamble to its Rules that he drew u p — " i n a form acceptable
from the present standpoint of the workers' movement", as he told
Engels. This movement had to embrace the Liberal leaders of the
British trade unions, the French, Italian and Spanish Proudhonists and
the German Lassalleans. It admitted both individual members and
affiliated organizations.
T h e principle that it should "let every
section freely shape its own theoretical p r o g r a m m e " ,
led Marx to
propose the acceptance of the sections of Bakunin's International
Alliance of Socialist Democracy into the International, which it applied
to enter in 1868, despite his very strong objections to its programme
and suspicions from the outset of Bakunin's motives in joining.
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In the early years of the International, in drawing up its documents,
Marx restricted himself "to those points which allow of immediate
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agreement and concerted action by the workers and give direct nourishment and impetus to the requirements of the class struggle and the
organization of the workers into a class". H e realized at the start that
it would "take time before the reawakened movement allows the old
boldness of speech". However, relying "for the ultimate triumph of
the ideas set forth in the Manifesto . . . solely and exclusively upon
the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had
to ensue from united action and discussion,"
he succeeded as the
movement developed in gaining support for demands of an increasingly Socialist character.
Thus by 1868, despite a dwindling
Proudhonist opposition, the International, which began without any
commitment to public ownership, had come out officially for collective
ownership of the mines, railways, arable land, forests and means of
communication.
T h e Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, memorably vindicated
by Marx on behalf of the General Council in The Civil War in
France, raised very sharply the question of the most effective forms
of political action to secure working class political power, which the
growth of working class suffrage,
as well as the "abstentionist"
campaign being run by the Bakuninists in the International, had also
helped to make topical. After a discussion in which both Marx and
Engels participated,
the London Conference adopted its famous
Resolution IX, quoted at the beginning of this essay, with which for
the first time in its history the International officially came out in
favour of the "constitution of the working class into a political
p a r t y " . This objective was incorporated into the Rules of the International at its Hague Congress a year later. What is meant here however by this much quoted but little analysed formulation? In his very
stimulating and well-documented but often contentious study of the
London Conference, Dr. Miklos Molnar of Geneva, interprets this
resolution, along with those dealing with dues and statistics, as preparing the ground for the International to "become a sort of centralised
international p a r t y " . Whilst up till then Marx had seen it as a "network of affiliated societies", Molnar argues that he later conceived
and at the London Conference openly came out with "the idea of
transforming all these societies and heterogeneous groupings into an
international p a r t y " .
Molnar is unable to quote any statements from Marx or Engels to
support his interpretation of the London Conference resolution and
he ignores some very solid evidence indicating that they intended something quite different by it. T h u s in 1893 Engels was to welcome the
formation of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, saying that "this
new party was the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed" when they passed their resolution at
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the 1871 Conference "in favour of an independent political p a r t y " .
Further, in the leaflet, The Manchester Foreign Section to all Sections
and Members of the British Federation,
that Engels drafted in
December 1872, he wrote that the resolution "merely demands the
formation, in every country, of a distinct working class party, opposed
to all middle class p a r t i e s " . T h a t is to say, he continues, "it calls
here in England upon the working class to refuse any longer to serve
as the fag-end of the 'great Liberal party', and to form an independent
party of their own, as they did in the glorious times of the great
Chartist m o v e m e n t " .
Thus we are back to the model of the mass
Chartist movement—"the first working men's party of modern
times" —which, as explained above, was what the authors of the
Communist
Manifesto had in mind when they spoke there of the
"organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a
political p a r t y " .
By 1871 Marx and Engels also had another more recent model in
mind. This was the German Social Democratic Workers' Party, formed
at Eisenach two years earlier, The anti-war stand taken by its leaders
Bebel and Liebknecht in the Reichstag the previous year were cited
by Marx at the London Conference as an example of the importance
of having workers' representatives in national parliaments, as they
had been by Engels when he wrote to the Spanish Federal Council of
the International on 13 February 1 8 7 1 .
In this important letter,
written just before the Paris Commune, Engels argues that "experience
has shown everywhere that the best way to emancipate the workers
from this domination of the old parties is to form in each country a
proletarian party with a policy of its own, a policy quite distinct from
that of the other p a r t i e s " .
Thus from 1871, Marx and Engels envisaged the International working for the establishment of independent national workers' parties.
They had no wish to prescribe one form or another—neither the more
"Marxist" type of party like the Eisenachers who had developed
"under the influence of (their) theoretical v i e w s " , nor the less theoretically developed but more broadly based Chartist movement—as the
model for all countries.
Nor were they aiming, as Molnar asserts,
at having the International "'provided with a common d o c t r i n e " .
The "common theoretical programme" that Marx had foreseen in 1869
being created "by degrees" by the exchange of ideas throughout the
International " was conceived in fairly broad terms. Two days after
the close of the London Conference Marx made a speech at a dinner
for the delegates in which he stressed that "the International had not
put forth any particular creed. Its task was to organize the forces of
labour and link the various working men's movements and combine
t h e m " . (Ironically enough a full report of this speech is reproduced
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by Molnar as an a p p e n d i x ! ) Even at the end of August 1872 at the
height of the most bitter battle with the Anarchists, to whose theories
Marx and Engels personally were irreconcilably opposed, Engels made
it clear that they considered that Bakunin and his followers had the
right within the International to carry out "propaganda for their
programme".
T h e conflict between Marx and Bakunin, as Julius Braunthal points
out in his Geschichte der Internationale,
"was set alight not by
theoretical contradictions but on the question of the organization of
the I n t e r n a t i o n a l " .
His libertarian demagogy notwithstanding,
Bakunin sought to place that organization under the unseen and irresponsible tutelage of a hierarchically organized secret society or
societies. "If you form this collective and invisible dictatorship, you
will triumph, the well-led revolution will triumph. If not, it won't",
he wrote on 1 April 1870 to his supporter, Albert R i c h a r d .
T h e real issue at stake between Marx and Bakunin was whether the
International should be run as a public democratic organization in
accordance with rules and policies laid down at its congresses or
whether it should allow Bakunin to "paralyse (its) action by secret
intrigue", and federations and sections to refuse to accept congress
decisions with which they disagreed. " Although Marx and Engels
at times undoubtedly overestimated the actual ramifications of
Bakuninist secret societies (it was sometimes difficult for the old conspirator himself to keep track of them all and to distinguish between
reality and the fantastic projects of his scheming b r a i n ) and were
guilty in the heat of battle of some polemical exaggeration and
inadequately substantiated personal a t t a c k s (none of which however
descended to the level of the anti-Semitic venom that this supposed
internationalist injected into his abuse of M a r x ) , Bakunin gave them
ample grounds for rallying their forces to secure his defeat and expulsion at the Hague Congress in September 1872.
Marx's and Engels' proposals for increased powers for the General
Council, adopted at that congress, should not be seen as aiming to
implement a version of the Mazzinist proposal for "a sort of central
government for the European working classes" of which Marx had
secured the rejection at the beginning of the International, nor the
thoroughly authoritarian leadership understood by the French Blanquists in their demand for the International to be "the international
vanguard of the proletarian revolution" and their criticism of it after
the Hague Congress for being too much of a "parliamentary institut i o n " . All that they were proposing was that the right of the General
Council to expel sections, voted at the Basle Congress of 1869 with
Bakunin's wholehearted s u p p o r t ,
should be extended to include
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federations, but under conditions which, as Marx emphasised, "subjected the actions of the General Council to a c h e c k " .
In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, faced with persecution from
the reactionary forces of Europe and disruption from the Bakuninists,
Marx and Engels had no alternative but to fight to give the International an effective centralized leadership. Yet, in so doing, they
precipitated its end. Their proposals provided Bakunin with a popular
"anti-authoritarian" plank for mobilising opposition to the General
Council in Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Belgium, with which a substantial portion of the British, who had supported Marx earlier against
the Proudhonists and had no Anarchist sympathies, were to associate
themselves. Rather than risk a General Council under the control
in the immediate future of the Blanquists, with whom they had had
to ally themselves to defeat Bakunin, or perhaps later of Bakuninists,
they persuaded the Hague Congress to transfer its seat to New York.
This congress, as Engels was to recognize by the autumn of 1874,
had marked effectively the end of the First International.
The
"proletarian world", he wrote, had become "too big, too extensive" for
such "an alliance of all the proletarian parties in every country" to
recur. The next International, he thought, after the influence of Marx's
writings had spread, would be "directly Communist and will openly
proclaim our principles".
Paradoxically a major factor preventing the revival of the First
International that Marx and Engels had hoped for in the first period
after the Hague Congress was the development of the national workers'
parties of which its new statutes were designed to promote the growth,
but with which in practice their development as autonomous organizations tended to clash. Molnar is right when he says of these parties
that the International "gave birth to them and died from t h e m " .
Dr Roger Morgan, in his very well-documented study of the first and
most important of t h e m , has shown in detail how the emergence of
the Eisenach Party, replacing as it had to the International's German
language group led by J. P. Becker from Geneva, led to a dropping off
of the direct activities of the International in Germany through the
Eisenachers' preoccupation with their own national campaigns.
Marx and Engels never stuck to a given organizational form if they
thought the real movement had outgrown it and it had become a
"fetter" on its further development. Although their stand in 1871-72
did not save the First International, it did help to provide political and
organizational principles for the new parties that were to emerge and in
most cases take on a more or less Marxist character.
It also helped
to ensure that the Second International, finally formed with Engels'
enthusiastic s u p p o r t in 1889, although not "directly Communist", was
very strongly influenced by Marxism. Commenting on the unanimous
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decision of its Second Congress in 1891 to exclude the representatives
of the Anarchist groups, Engels wrote: "With this the old International came to an end, with this the new one begins again. It is
purely and simply the ratification, nineteen years later, of the Hague
Congress resolutions".
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V
When in 1863 Lassalle founded the General German Workers'
Union (ADAV) he performed, in Marx's view, an "immortal service"
by reawakening the independent workers' movement after fifteen years
of slumber.
Yet, although recognizing what was positive in such
an independent workers' organization as the A D A V and for a short
time in 1864-65 contributing to its journal, he and Engels generally
described it as a "workers' s e c t " rather than a workers' party. They
saw the Lassallean attempt to prescribe to the workers the course to
be followed "according to a certain dogmatic r e c i p e " , its inadequate
agitation (at least before 1868) for full political freedom, its leadership
cult and the " 'strict' organization", which the A D A V tried to carry
even into the trade unions that they set u p ,
as expressions of its
sectarian character. Opposing all this, Marx wrote in 1868 to A D A V
President Schweitzer that especially in Germany, "where the worker
is bureaucratically disciplined from childhood up and believes in
authority and the bodies placed over him, it is above all important to
teach him to act independently".
F r o m 1865 Marx concentrated on the formation of sections of the
International in Germany to which individual members were recruited.
He saw these as preparing the ground for a national workers' party,
the creation of which was being facilitated by Bismarck's surge
forward to German unification. An important ideological contribution to this was made by the publication exactly a century ago of the
first volume of Capital, with which Marx hoped "to raise the Party as
high as possible"
and which the next year was greeted at the
national congresses the two major German workers' organizations—the
ADAV
and the Association of German Workers' Organizations, led
by Bebel and Liebknecht. " At a congress at Eisenach in 1869, Bebel's
Association joined with opposition elements in the A D A V to form
the German Social Democratic Workers' Party on the basis of a
programme that showed the influence of Marxism, although its
demand for a "free people's state" and certain Lassallean formulations did not meet with the approval of Marx and E n g e l s .
Whilst
in some respects not as directly Socialist as the A D A V , the new
party had over it the great advantage, in Marx's and Engels' eyes, of
being unambiguously opposed to Bismarck's nationalism and the
Prussian military state and of being organized along thoroughly demo1 f,G
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cratic lines. In it, Marx and Engels came to recognize a genuine
proletarian p a r t y and, for the first time since the dissolution of the
Communist League in 1852, to apply the expression "our party" to
an organized political party of the d a y .
When in 1875 a unity congress was arranged at Gotha between the
two German workers' organizations and a draft programme for the
new party was issued, M a r x and Engels wrote their famous criticisms
of its theoretical insufficiencies for private consideration by leaders
of the Eisenachers. "Every step of real movement is more important
than a dozen programmes", wrote Marx. "If, therefore, it was not
possible . . . to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply
Siave concluded an agreement for action against the common
e n e m y " . Despite these misgivings M a r x and Engels associated themselves with the new united party and before very long had come to
refer to it too as "our party'", and at the end of his life Engels was
praising the fusion for the "immense increase in strength" that it had
brought a b o u t .
Whilst rejoicing at the impressive growth of the new party, Marx
and Engels always took up the cudgels when they saw signs of "a
vulgarization (Verluderung) of Party and t h e o r y " in its ranks. Thus
in September 1879 they sent a strongly worded circular to Party leaders
criticizing their conciliatory attitude towards certain "representatives
of the petty bourgeoisie"
who were attempting to "combat the
proletarian character of the P a r t y " and thereby acting as "an adulterating e l e m e n t " within it. They found it "incomprehensible" that the
Party could "tolerate . . . in its midst any l o n g e r " people who were
saying that the workers were too uneducated to emancipate themselves. In 1882 Engels wrote to Bebel that he had no illusions that
it would "one day come to a dispute with the bourgeois-inclined
elements in the Party and to a separation between the right and left
w i n g s " , preferably after the Anti-Socialist Law that had been introduced in 1878 had been repealed.
In the last years of his life Engels approved in its broad essentials
the line followed by the Party and the new programme that it adopted,
after he had criticized its first draft, at the Erfurt Congress of 1 8 9 1 .
H e expressed his pride in " o u r " electoral successes which in 1893 he
saw approaching the two-million mark and over-optimistically predicted
an electoral majority and a Socialist government in power between
1900 and 1 9 1 0 . In 1895, a few months before his death, he worked
out in his introduction to The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 by
Marx the theoretical justification of the "entirely new method of
proletarian struggle" that had been opened up by the "successful utilisation of universal suffrage", relegating to the past "the time of surprise
attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities
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at the head of unconscious m a s s e s " . However, he stressed to Paul
Lafargue that the tactics outlined there could not be followed in their
entirety in France, Belgium, Italy and Austria and that "in Germany
they may become inapplicable t o m o r r o w " .
Engels considered the designation Social Democratic "inappropriate
for a party whose economic programme is not merely generally
Socialist but directly Communist and whose ultimate political objective is the abolition of the whole state and thus also of democracy".
Professor Harold Laski, in his introduction to the Labour Party's
centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto, was unable to recognize
that Marx and Engels developed their concept of the party further
after 1848. " T h e idea of a separate communist party dates from the
Russian Revolution", he asserts; "it had no place in the thought of
either Marx or of E n g e l s " ,
who, for instance, he argues, "never
sought to found a separate German Communist P a r t y " . H e does not
see that for them "German Communism" which, as Engels wrote to
Sorge, in 1864 "did not yet exist as a workers' p a r t y " gradually came
to do so after 1869 in the shape of the Socialist parties led by Bebel
and Liebknecht.
Nor do the views of Marx and Engels on the development of a
Marxist party in France in the same period lend any support to Laski's
sweeping assertion that "they will always support working-class parties,
even when these are not communist, without forming a separate party
of their own", regardless of the fact that "such a party may have an
inadequate p r o g r a m m e " . In fact, in 1882, Engels gave his support to
Guesde and the left-wing minority when they walked out of the St.
Etienne Congress of the French Workers' P a r t y ,
which then split
into a Guesdist and a "possibilist" party. H e described this separation
of "incompatible elements" as "inevitable" and " g o o d " .
Writing
to Bernstein, he reported that the "possibilist" right wing had
"replaced the Communist preamble" of the 1880 party programme
drafted by Marx "by the Rules of the International of 1 8 6 6 " , which,
he said, " h a d to be framed so broadly because the French Proudhonists were so backward, and still it would not have been right to
exclude t h e m " . If, like the possibilists, you created "a party without
a programme, which everyone can join, then it isn't a party any more",
he argued. " T o be for a moment in a minority with a correct
programme—quoad organization—is still better than to have a big but
thereby almost nominal semblance of a following".
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VI
The idea of a broad labour party, favoured by Marx and Engels in
the case of Britain and the United States of America and developed
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must fully by the latter after his friend's death, when in the 1880s and
'90s a spontaneous labour movement sprang into life in both countries,
would seem to be exactly what they were opposing in Germany and
France. Thus, writing to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky at the end of
1886, Engels says that in the forthcoming American elections " a
million or two of working men's votes . . . for a bona fide working
men's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand
votes for a doctrinally perfect p r o g r a m m e " .
Whilst he had no
illusions about the theoretical backwardness of the Knights of Labour
and of Henry George whose "banner" this party had set u p , he did
not think the time had arrived to make a full criticism of either of
them. "Anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the working men's party—no matter on what platform—I
should consider a great mistake," he explained.
This should take
place through "the unification of the various independent bodies into
one national labour a r m y " , he wrote in his preface to the American
edition of 1887 of his Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844. It should have "the conquest of the Capitol and the White House
for its g o a l " .
In a series of articles in the "Labour Standard" in 1881 Engels had
urged the British labour movement to form its own "working men's
political p a r t y "
and send its own representatives to parliament.
With a brilliant anticipation of the form of organization to be adopted
two decades later by the Labour P a r t y , he wrote: " A t the side of,
or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general
Union, a political organization of the working class as a w h o l e . "
When, out of the militant upsurge of 1888-89 and the first successes
of independent labour candidates in 1892, the Independent Labour
Party was formed in 1893, Engels publicly "urged all Socialists to join
it, believing that, if wisely led, it would eventually absorb every other
Socialist organization".
Although there were "all sorts of funny
people" among the I.L.P. leaders, he wrote to Sorge at this time, "the
masses are behind them and will either teach them manners or throw
them overboard".
T h e new party's development in the next two
years, however, did not live up to his expectations and by the beginning of 1895 he saw among the British workers "nothing but sects and
no p a r t y " .
Engels was clearly judging the new party not by the
criterion of its adherence to the theory of Marxism but by the extent
to which it was "a distinct workers' party" promoting and reflecting
the masses' "own movement—no matter in what form so long as it is
only their own m o v e m e n t " .
Such very disparate weight given to the importance of a correct
theoretical understanding, to the character of the party programme and
the breadth of its appeal as those given by Engels (and Marx) in
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relation to Germany and France, on the one hand, and to Britain and
America, on the other, certainly indicate two different conceptions of
the proletarian party. The differences are not however absolute and
do not represent some inexplicable contradiction in the thought of the
founders of scientific socialism. On the contrary, they will be seen
as logically complementary if we examine their application, in each
case, on the basis of Engels' explanation, in the letter to Mrs. Kelley
Wischnewetsky quoted above, that "our theory is not a dogma but the
exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive p h a s e s " . Britain and the U.S.A. were at this time both countries
with substantial industrial working classes that had developed important and often militant industrial organizations, but where those who
had understood anything of Socialism were a tiny handful. Here then
was an analogy, as Engels pointed out to Sorge, with the part "played
by the Communist League among the workers' associations before
1848" in G e r m a n y .
And here it was therefore perfectly consistent
for him to recommend that American Marxists should "act in the same
way as the European Socialists have acted at a time when they were
but a small minority of the working class",
at the time that the
Communist Manifesto indicated that the Communists did "not form
a separate party opposed to other working class p a r t i e s " . Since 1848,
however, the position on the continent had advanced considerably.
Germany in 1869 and to a lesser extent France in 1880 had reached the
stage of having parties developing roots among the working class on
the basis of more or less developed Socialist programmes, and any
attempt to fuse with other organizations or to win more votes through
"adulterating" or scrapping such programmes seemed to Marx and
Engels to represent a "decidedly retrograde s t e p " . But for Britain
and America, where the workers had been bound politically to
bourgeois parties, any move towards a broad united party of their own
on however backward a theoretical basis was an advance, the "next
great step to be accomplished".
It was the self-imposed isolation of the main organized bodies of
Marxists in the two countries that led Engels to criticize them for being
and acting only like s e c t s which "contrived to reduce the Marxist
theory of development into a rigid d o g m a " .
It was fundamentally
his objection to such "Anglo-Saxon sectarianism", rather than pique
at Hyndman's "tactless" behaviour, as Cole and Postgate, and after
them Carew H u n t ,
blandly assert, that was responsible for Engels
dissociating himself from the Social Democratic Federation in Britain
as from the Socialist Labour Party in the United States. However, he
thought that these organizations, having "accepted our theoretical
programme and so acquired a b a s i s " would have a role to play if
they worked among the "still quite plastic m a s s " of workers as "a core
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of people who understand the movement and its aims and will therefore themselves take over the l e a d e r s h i p " at a later stage. Experience
had shown that "it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up
or hiding our own distinct position or even organization".
The
Marxists would then have a big contribution to make to the emergence
of the "ultimate p l a t f o r m " of the labour movement in their countries
which "must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by
the whole militant working class of E u r o p e " .
A t such a stage,
Engels doubtless foresaw the coming into being of a "new party" such
as more than four decades previously he had predicted would arise
from "the union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of
French Communism in an English manner" by the fusion of the
"theoretically more backward, less developed" but "genuinely proletarian" Chartists with the "more far-seeing" Socialists to make the
working class "the true intellectual leader" of their country.
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VII
F a r from "discarding the notion of party . . . to return to the notion
of c l a s s " ,
as Sorel asserts, Marx and Engels saw the party as a
Moment in the development of the proletariat without which "it cannot act as a class". F o r the working class "to be strong enough to win
on the decisive day", Engels wrote to Trier in 1889, it must "form a
separate party distinct from all others and opposed to them, a conscious class party", adding with some oversimplification that this was
what " M a r x and I have been arguing ever since 1847". In 1865, in
" T h e Prussian Military Question and the German Workers' Party",
which he discussed with Marx before publication, Engels defines the
workers' party, with which he is not in the pamphlet prepared to
identify the only existing German workers' organization of the time,
the Lassallean A D A V , as "that part of the working class that has
attained consciousness of the separate interests of the c l a s s " . When
they sometimes speak loosely of the proletarian party as though it were
identical with the class as a w h o l e ,
it would seem clear from the
contexts that they are referring synecdochically to the class when
what they mean in fact is its "politically active p o r t i o n " , which more
and more of the class will come to support as it "matures for its selfemancipation".
Theoretical consciousness and the Selbsttatigkeit (spontaneous selfactivity) of the working class are present, as the key elements in their
conception of the proletarian party, in all periods of Marx's a n d
Engels' thought and activity from 1844 on, combining in different
proportions in different conditions. They always represent comple236
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mentary factors in the Marxian conception of the evolution of the
proletariat to full maturity and Selbstbewusstsein
(consciousness),
rather than expressing a " ' d u a l i s m ' " in Marx's thought as Maximilien
Rubel, of Paris, a r g u e s . Rubel tries to fit Marx's conception of the
party into the Procrustean bed of the highly disputable theory that
there is in his work a "fundamental ambiguity" between his materialist
sociology and a Utopian ethic that he inherited and that serves as his
"postulate" for social revolution. With the aid of quotations collected
totally a-historically from a wide range of Marx's and Engels' writings
between 1841 and 1895 he seeks to distinguish " a double conception
of the proletarian party" in their work, differentiating between "the
sociological concept of the workers' party, on the one hand, and the
ethical concept of the Communist party, on the o t h e r . "
Karl Marx,
asserts Rubel, "distinguishes formally between the workers' party and
the body (ensemble) of Communists whose task is of a theoretical and
educative order; the Communists are thus in no wise called to properly
political functions".
Being "a form of non-institutionalized representation which represents the proletarian movement, in the 'historical'
sense of the term", the latter "cannot identify themselves with a real
organization subject to the constraints of political alienation"
and
"obeying formally established rules and statutes". The class movement of the proletariat, says Rubel, cannot be identified with the political agitation of parties. "On the contrary", he goes on, "it is
represented by the trade unions if these understand their revolutionary
role and fulfil it faithfully".
(This last assertion, endeavouring to
present Marx and Engels as Syndicalists, completely ignores inter alia
Marx's and Engels' rejection before the Eisenach Congress of just such
an argument by Johann Philip Becker. "Old Becker must have gone
right off his rocker", Engels wrote to Marx then. " H o w can he decree
that the trades union has to be the true workers' association and the
basis for all organization.")
T h e Manifesto of the Communist Party, from which Rubel quotes,
as well as the whole history of its authors' party work on which we
have drawn, shows absolutely clearly and explicitly that they saw the
Communists using their theoretical foresight, which for Rubel is some
sort of transcendental ethical quality far removed from the corrupting
political struggle, precisely to act politically to "push forward" and
give leadership in the political struggles of their t i m e . Moreover the
Manifesto was issued as the programme of the Communist League, a
political organization "obeying formally established rules and
statutes"!
242
243
244
245
240
247
248
240
250
251
252
Only in the most exceptional and temporary periods did the
Communists operate outside a "real organization", although—as in
the case of the First International—that organization did not always
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E C O N C E P T O F T H E P A R T Y
143
need to be a Communist Party. T h e latter differed from "other working
class p a r t i e s "
in that it had a Communist programme and was
guided by Communist theory. However, believing that the workers
"from out of their own class feeling" would "work their way u p " to an
acceptance of Marxist t h e o r y with the help of those "whose minds
are theoretically clear" to shorten the process considerably,
Marx
and Engels thought that sooner or later many of these other parties
would either come to adopt Communist programmes or be absorbed by
others that had. In this belief they were strengthened at the end of their
lives by the example of German Social Democracy that was developing
into the type of essentially Communist mass party towards which they
believed that other workers' parties, from their different starting points
and in their own national forms, would ultimately advance. They saw
such a fully developed proletarian party representing the fusion of
Socialist theory not just with a tiny handful of advanced workers as in
the Communist League but with large and growing sections of the
working class.
Marx and Engels saw the fullest possible internal democracy as an
essential feature of a proletarian party. Disturbed by expulsions from
the Danish Socialist Party of leading left-wing opponents of its leadership, Engels wrote to Trier in the letter quoted above: " T h e workers'
movement is based on the sharpest criticism of existing society; criticism is its vital element; how then can it itself avoid criticism, try to
forbid controversies? Is it possible for us to demand from others freedom of speech for ourselves only in order to eliminate it afresh in
our own r a n k s ? " When in 1890 the German Party leadership reacted
in a high-handed way to the opposition of the so-called Jungen (with
whom Engels disagreed politically) expressed through four Social
Democratic papers that they controlled, he wrote to Sorge: " T h e Party
is so big that absolute freedom of debate inside it is a necessity. . . .
T h e greatest party in the land cannot exist without all shades of
opinion in it making themselves fully felt". F o r Engels such internal
democracy, diversity and debate did not contradict but was demanded
by German Social Democracy's existence "as the strongest, best disciplined and most rapidly growing Socialist P a r t y " , just as obversely
he and Marx had at a certain stage in the history of the First International seen a stronger General Council with disciplinary powers to
use in exceptional cases as a condition for its democratic functioning.
Marx's famous principle that "the emancipation of the working classes
must be conquered by the working classes themselves",
on which
he and Engels insisted again and again, is complemented, not contradicted, by their concept of the party. " T h e German Social Democratic
Workers' Party, just because it is a workers' party necessarily pursues
a 'class policy', the policy of the working class," wrote Engels in 1873
253
254
255
256
257
258
25811
144
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
in The Housing Question. "Since each political party sets out to
establish its rule in the state, so the German Social Democratic
Workers' Party is necessarily striving to establish its rule, the rule of
the working class, hence 'class d o m i n a t i o n ' " .
The organization by
the proletariat of its own party was the "primary condition" of the
struggle of the working class and "the dictatorship of the proletariat
. . . the immediate a i m . " Marx and Engels never went further than
this in discussing the relationship of the proletarian party to their conception of proletarian dictatorship
which they saw as representing
a "political transition period" between capitalism and C o m m u n i s m .
There is nothing in their work to justify Stalin's attempt to present as
Marxist his theory that Socialism demands a one-party system, least
of all in the form operated by him where a small tyrannical clique
substituted itself for the working class in laying some of the foundations
of Socialism. On the contrary, Engels' criticism of Blanqui is directed
precisely against such a regime. "From Blanqui's conception of every
revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority," he
wrote in 1874, "follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after it
succeeds: the dictatorship, of course, not of the whole revolutionary
class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who carried out
the coup and who are themselves already in advance organized under
the dictatorship of one or a few individuals". Certainly the Paris
Commune, which Marx described as "the conquest of the political
power of the working c l a s s e s " and Engels as "the dictatorship of the
proletariat" (by which he meant the same thing), was no one-party
s t a t e and was based on the election of all officials by universal suffr a g e and measures to "safeguard itself against its own deputies and
officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at
any m o m e n t " .
The late Mr Carew Hunt, in his book Marxism Past and Present, is
on peculiarly weak ground when he bases his restatement of the wellworn argument that the one-party system was "written into Marx's
doctrine of dictatorship" on the assertion that "it is inconceivable that
Marx, who would go to any lengths to crush a Socialist opponent,"
would have permitted adversaries "to organize themselves politically
to defeat the objects for which the revolution had been carried o u t " .
T h e main example that Carew H u n t obviously has in mind is that of
Bakunin and his supporters, of whose appearance in the First International E. H. Carr writes: " T h e wooden horse had entered the Trojan
citadel". In a letter to Bolte in 1873 Marx wrote: "In open opposition to the International these people do no harm but are useful, but
as hostile elements inside it they ruin the movement in all countries
where they have got a foothold". H e and Engels rejected the Bakuninists' argument that the International, forced to meet the needs of the
2,59
200
201
202
203
204
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
145
day-to-day struggle against capitalism, could be organized to accord
as closely as possible with a future libertarian society. Whilst Marx
and Engels would certainly have taken exceptional authoritarian
measures against reactionary opponents in a civil war or a "pro-slavery
rebellion", there are no grounds for arguing that they would have
favoured the suppression of political opposition and dissent as a normal
feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
T h e role of the proletarian party is circumscribed by the very conception of dialectics and historical development put forward by Marx
and Engels. Born at a certain moment in the life of the working class,
evolving in step with the different stages in the development of that
class in different countries and periods and in its turn reacting on
and speeding up this development, its success in helping to establish
working class power would lay the basis for its own disappearance.
Working class power, by raising the consciousness of the widest sections
of the population by a big educational expansion, by establishing
"really democratic institutions" which would see "the people acting
for itself by itself", could be assumed gradually to close the gap
between a growing "educated and trained core" of hundreds of thousands
in the party and the rest of the class, removing the raison
d'etre of the former conceived as a separate echelon. Finally, though
Marx had no illusions that this would take place quickly,
the
economic measures taken by the proletariat in power would end its rule
by abolishing its existence as a class and, with it, the existence of the
state "in the present political s e n s e " . In the "association which will
exclude classes and their a n t a g o n i s m " to which Marx believed the
transitional working class dictatorship would give way, the continued
existence of a proletarian party would clearly be an anachronism.
273
274
275
270
277
278
279
280
281
NOTES
1.
R e s o l u t i o n relative t o the G e n e r a l R u l e s ( a d o p t e d at the H a g u e C o n gress of the International W o r k i n g M e n ' s A s s o c i a t i o n , S e p t e m b e r 1872,
res u m i n g R e s o l u t i o n I X of the L o n d o n C o n f e r e n c e of the International
in S e p t e m b e r 1871 drafted b y M a r x a n d E n g e l s ) , i n The
International
Herald ( L o n d o n ) , N o . 37, 14 D e c e m b e r 1872. T h i s translation f r o m the
F r e n c h original is used here in preference t o that appearing in K. M a r x
and F . Engels, Selected
Works, hereafter n o t e d as S.W. ( M o s c o w , 1950),
I, p. 325, f r o m w h i c h it differs p o s s i b l y significantly, b e c a u s e it is
specifically referred t o by E n g e l s to clear u p a misinterpretation of the
m e a n i n g of the resolution. ( F . E n g e l s , The Manchester
Foreign
Section
To all Sections
and Members
of the British Federation,
in K. M a r x and
F. Engels, On Britain,
M o s c o w , 1962, p. 500). It is also u s e d by Marx
as the English text of the resolution in a letter sent t o H. Jung at the
end of July 1872 with the phrase "constituting . . . propertied classes"
and the w o r d s "the a b o l i t i o n of classes" underlined. (K. M a r x / F . Engels,
Werke, hereafter n o t e d as Werke, Berlin, 1966, 33, p. 507).
146
2.
3.
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
cf. M . I. M i k h a i l o v , Voznikovenie
Marksizma.
Bor'ba
Marksa
i
Engel'sa za Sozdanie Revoliutsionnoy
Proletarskoy
Partii ( M o s c o w , 1956),
p. 15, w h e r e , w i t h o u t offering a n y evidence, the author states that M a r x
and E n g e l s p r o c e e d e d f r o m s u c h a "plan".
See, especially K. M a r x , Introduction
t o The Critique
of Hegel's
Philosophy
of Right,
i n T . B. B o t t o m o r e , Ed., K. M a r x , Early
Writings
( L o n d o n , 1963), pp. 5 8 - 9 .
4.
O n l y f r o m 1 8 4 7 - 1 8 5 2 w e r e M a r x and E n g e l s m e m b e r s of a party
o r g a n i z a t i o n o f a k i n d — t h e L e a g u e of C o m m u n i s t s — t h o u g h f r o m 1864
(and effectively f r o m 1870 in the case of E n g e l s ) till 1872 they played a
leading part i n t h e International W o r k i n g M e n ' s A s s o c i a t i o n (the First
International).
5.
F . E n g e l s t o E . Bernstein, 2 7 F e b r u a r y — 1 M a r c h 1883, K. M a r x a n d
F . E n g e l s , Selected
Correspondence
( M o s c o w , n . d . — 1 9 5 6 ? ) , hereafter
n o t e d as Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 4 3 2 .
6.
7.
F . E n g e l s t o A . B e b e l , 11 D e c e m b e r 1884, ibid., p. 457.
See, e.g. M . D u v e r g e r , Political
Parties ( L o n d o n , 1954), pp. x x i i — x x x ;
U . Cerroni, "Per una teoria d e l partito politico", in Critica
Marxista
( R o m e , 1963), I, 5 - 6 , pp. 18 ff.
8.
F . E n g e l s , On the History
9.
10.
11.
of the Communist
League,
S.W.,
II, p. 312.
Ibid., p. 313.
See, e.g. K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s , The German
Ideology,
Marx I Engels
Gesamtausgabe
( M . E . G . A . ) ( M o s c o w - L e n i n g r a d , 1933), I, 5, pp. 31 and
437; K. M a r x t o P. V . A n n e n k o v , 28 D e c e m b e r 1846, K. M a r x and
F . E n g e l s , Selected
Correspondence
( L o n d o n , 1943), hereafter n o t e d Sel.
Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 18; K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s , Circular against Kriege,
Werke
(Berlin, 1959), 4, p. 3.
E n g e l s , op. cit., pp. 307, 3 1 3 - 4 ; K. M a r x , Herr Vogt, Werke
(Berlin,
1961), 14, pp. 4 3 8 - 9 ; H . F o r d e r , Marx und Engels am Vorabend
der
Revolution
(Berlin, 1960), pp. 1 2 8 - 1 3 5 . F o r a different and n o t fully
credible version, see D . Ryazanoff's I n t r o d u c t i o n t o D . Ryazanoff, Ed.,
The Communist
Manifesto
of K. Marx and F. Engels ( L o n d o n , 1930),
pp. 1 4 - 2 0 .
12.
Rules and Constitution
of the Communist
op. cit., pp. 3 4 0 - 3 4 5 , esp. p. 342.
13.
K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s , Preface t o G e r m a n E d i t i o n of Manifesto
of
Communist
Party, hereafter n o t e d as Manifesto,
S.W., I, p. 2 1 .
Manifesto,
op. cit., p . 6 1 .
14.
15.
E n g e l s , History,
16.
F . E n g e l s , Socialism
S.W.,
League,
II, p. 315; K. M a r x , Herr
in Germany,
Vogt,
op. cit.,
the
p. 440.
(Berlin, 1963), 2 2 , p. 2 4 8 .
17.
K. M a r x , The Poverty
18.
T h e original G e r m a n text u s e s t h e w o r d "besondern",
m e a n i n g "special",
but t h e E n g l i s h edition of 1888, revised by F . E n g e l s , prefers "sectarian".
Manifesto,
p. 44.
Ibid., p. 4 2 .
19.
20.
21.
22.
of Philosophy
Werke
in D . Ryazanoff, Ed.,
( M o s c o w , n.d.), p. 140.
Ibid., p. 4 1 . S e e discussions o f M a r x ' s and E n g e l s ' c o n c e p t of party in
this c o n t e x t in H. F o r d e r , op. cit., pp. 2 9 0 - 2 9 1 .
K. M a r x , op. cit., p. 194. cf. K. M a r x , Political
Indifferentism,
Werke
(Berlin, 1962), 18, p. 3 0 4 : " T h e trade u n i o n s . . . organize the w o r k i n g
class into a class."
147
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
23.
K. M a r x , The Poverty
of Philosophy,
op. cit., p. 194.
23a. Ibid., p. 195.
24. L. I. G o l ' m a n , Voz.nikoven.ie
Marksizma.
Bor'ba Marksa
i Engel'sa
za
Sozdanie
Revoliutsionnoy
Proleturskoy
Partii ( M o s c o w , 1962), p. 70.
25.
Manifesto,
26.
See ibid., p. 6 0 , w h e r e reference is a l s o m a d e t o the A g r a r i a n R e f o r m e r s
in A m e r i c a . T h e latter w a s h o w e v e r m o r e of a farmers' agitation than
a workers' party. (See D . RyazanofT, Ed., op. cit., pp. 2 4 2 - 2 4 5 ) .
p. 4 4 .
27.
H a r n e y ' s and Jones' m e m b e r s h i p of the C o m m u n i s t L e a g u e is indicated
in a letter f r o m K. M a r x to F . E n g e l s a b o u t 12 M a r c h 1848, f r o m w h i c h
the relevant extract is printed in J. Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist
(Lond o n , 1952), p. 2 3 1 . S e e a l s o A . R. S c h o y e n , The Chartist
Challenge
( L o n d o n , 1958), pp. 1 4 2 - 3 , 158-9.
28.
Manifesto,
29.
K. M a r x , The Eighteenth
Brumuire
of Louis Bonaparte,
S.W., I, p. 249.
T h i s q u o t a t i o n a n d the passage in w h i c h it is t o b e f o u n d m a k e rather
a m o c k e r y of M r . R o b e r t C o n q u e s t ' s unsubstantiated assertion
{Marxism
Today,
A m p e r s a n d B o o k s , L o n d o n , 1964, p. 42) that "it is strictly
contrary t o (Marx's) doctrines . . . t o b e l i e v e that a party c a n represent
b o t h the proletariat and a n o t h e r class."
30.
K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s , Address
of the Central
Committee
to the
Communist League ( M a r c h 1850), hereafter n o t e d as March Address,
S.W., I,
p. 98.
31.
F . E n g e l s t o F . K e l l e y W i s c h n e w e t s k y , 27 January 1887, Sel. Cor.
d o n ) , p. 4 5 5 .
p. 60.
(Lon-
32.
Ibid.,
33.
F . E n g e l s , Marx
p. 297.
p. 455.
34.
E . P. Kandel', Marks
i Engel's—Organizatory
( M o s c o w , 1953), p. 264.
35.
Ibid., p. 264. G . Winkler, of the Institute of M a r x i s m - L e n i n i s m , Berlin,
attacked this c o n c l u s i o n as "surprising" in his r e v i e w of Kandel's b o o k
i n Zeitschrift
fur Geschichtswissenschaft
(Berlin, 1954) II, 4, p. 542,
arguing that the L e a g u e ' s c o n g r e s s of June 1847 c o n c l u d e d essentially
its transformation into a proletarian party (p. 545). T h i s is the line that
has m o s t l y b e e n t a k e n by t h e historians of the G e r m a n D e m o c r a t i c
R e p u b l i c (see Grundriss
der Geschichte
der deutschen
Arbeiterbewegung,
Berlin, 1963, p. 4 2 ) t h o u g h the n e w official history (W. Ulbricht and
others, Ed., Geschichte
der deutschen
Arbeiterbewegung,
Berlin, 1966, I,
p. 66) adds qualifications.
36.
F . E n g e l s , On the History
37.
See B. N i c o l a e v s k y , " T o w a r d a Llistory of 'The C o m m u n i s t League',
1 8 4 7 - 1 8 5 2 " , in International
Review
of Social
History
(Amsterdam,
1956), I, 2, pp. 2 3 4 - 2 4 5 , esp. 237, 244; E . P. Kandel', "Iskazhenie istorii
bor'by M a r k s a i Engel'sa z a proletarskuyu partiyu v r a b o t a k h n e k o t o r y k h p r a v y k h sotsialistov", in Voprosy
Istorii ( M o s c o w ) , 1958, N o . 5,
pp. 120 ff; B . I. N i c o l a e v s k y , " W h o is D i s t o r t i n g H i s t o r y ? " in
Proceedings of the American
Philosophical
Society
(Philadelphia), V o l . 105,
N o . 2, April 1961, pp. 2 0 9 - 2 3 6 ; E . P. K a n d e l , "Eine schlechte Verteidig-
and the Neue
Rheinische
Zeitung
of the Communist
(1848-1849),
Soyuza
League,
S.W.,
II,
Kommunistov
op. cit., p. 318.
148
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
u n g einer s c h l e c h t e n Sache", in Beitrage
zur Geschichte
der
deutschen
Arbeiterbewegung
hereafter Beitrage, (Berlin, 1963), V . , 2 , pp. 2 9 0 - 3 0 3 .
38.
T h e full text of this d e p o s i t i o n , introduced b y the late Dr. W . B l u m e n berg, is printed in International
Review
of Social History,
(Amsterdam,
1964), I X , 1, pp. 8 1 - 1 2 2 . S e e esp. pp. 8 8 - 9 , 96.
39.
R o s e r did n o t join the C o m m u n i s t L e a g u e till the spring of 1849 {Ibid.,
p. 90). H i s e v i d e n c e o n its a l l e g e d d i s s o l u t i o n i n 1848 is therefore of
necessity presented s e c o n d - h a n d . (Ibid., pp. 8 8 - 9 , 96.)
40.
Voprosy
41.
N i c o l a e v s k y w a s w r o n g t o assert that the March
Address
of 1850
"criticised . . . in particular the d e c i s i o n t o dissolve the L e a g u e " (B.
N i c o l a e v s k y and O. M a e n c h e n - H e l f e n , Karl Marx: Man and
Fighter,
L o n d o n , 1936, p. 2 0 6 ) since n o m e n t i o n is m a d e there of s u c h a
dissolution!
Istorii,
op. cit., p. 124.
42.
F . E n g e l s , Marx
43.
44.
Beitrage, op. cit., p. 303.
See, e.g. E . P. K a n d e l , Ed., Marx und Engels und die ersten
proletarischen Revolutionise
(Berlin, 1965), pp. 105, 502 (n.60). T h e relevant
extracts f r o m Roser's d e p o s i t i o n are g i v e n in E . P. K a n d e l and S. Z.
L e v i o v a , E d . , Soyuz Kommunistov:
sbornik dokumentov,
( M o s c o w , 1964),
pp. 2 1 8 - 2 2 4 .
45.
A positive reference is m a d e t o this a c t i o n o f the L o n d o n Central C o m mittee i n t h e March
Address,
op. cit., p. 99, w h i c h places M o l l ' s
visit "in the winter of 1 8 4 8 - 4 9 " as against Roser's setting it "in the
spring o f 1849" (I.R.S.H., op. cit., p. 89).
46.
I.R.S.H.,
47.
48.
E . P. K a n d e l , Beitrage, op. cit., p. 299.
S. Z. L e v i o v a o n the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung,
in A . I. M a l y s h and
O. K. Senekina, E d . , Iz istorii formirovaniya
i razvitiya
Marksiz.ma
( M o s c o w , 1959), p. 255.
and the N.Rh.Z.,
op. cit., p. 2 9 9 .
op. cit., p. 90.
49.
W . U l b r i c h t a n d others, Ed., op. cit., pp. 1 1 7 - 8 .
50.
V . I. L e n i n , Two Tactics
of Social
( M o s c o w , 1936), III, pp. 1 3 1 - 2 .
Democracy,
in his Selected
51.
Werke,
52.
F . E n g e l s , Germany:
Revolution
and Counter-Revolution
1936), p. 48. See, e.g. G. Becker, Karl Marx und Friedrich
Koln, 1848-1849
(Berlin, 1963), pp. 2 3 4 - 2 5 6 .
Works
(Berlin, 1959), 6, p p . 4 2 6 , 584.
Address,
(London,
Engels in
53.
March
54.
Ibid.,
pp. 9 8 - 1 0 8 .
op. cit.. p. 99.
55.
Ibid.,
p. 98.
56.
Ibid.,
p. 99.
57.
Ibid., p. 102. cf. Address
of Central
Committee
to the League,
June
1850, Werke
(Berlin, 1960), 7, pp. 3 0 8 - 9 : " T h e workers' party c a n
possibly very w e l l use other parties and fractions of parties for its ends,
but it s h o u l d n o t subordinate itself to a n y other party."
58.
Ibid.,
59.
Ibid., p. 103, cf. June Address,
op. cit., p. 310; M . I. M i k h a i l o w , in I. S.
G a l k i n , Ed., Aus der Geschichte
des Kampfes
von Marx und Engels fur
die proletarische
Partei (Berlin, 1961), pp. 1 3 2 - 3 .
p. 103.
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
60.
March
61.
62.
63.
G. L i c h t h e i m , Marxism ( L o n d o n , 1961), pp. 1 2 4 - 5 .
B. D . W o l f e , Marxism ( L o n d o n , 1967), pp. 1 5 3 - 4 , 157, 163.
E . Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen
dcs Sozialismus
und die
Aufgaben
der Sozialdemokraten
(Stuttgart, 1899), p. 29.
See, e.g. A . B . Spitzer, The Revolutionary
Theories
of L. A.
Blanqui
( N e w Y o r k , 1957), p. 9; S. M o o r e , Three Tactics:
the Background
in
Marx ( N e w Y o r k , 1963), p. 2 2 .
See D . Ryazanoff, Zur Frage dcs Verhdltnisses
von Marx zu
Blanqui,
in Unter dem Banner
des Marxismus,
II, 1 / 2 (Berlin-Vienna, 1928),
pp. 1 4 0 - 1 4 5 .
64.
65.
Address,
149
Address,
op. cit., p. 105.
66.
March
67.
68.
69.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 104.
Ibid., p. 104; R. Schlesinger, Marx:
p. 270.
op. cit., pp. 101, 107.
His
Time
and Ours
( L o n d o n , 1950),
70. March Address, op. cit., p. 108.
70a. K. M a r x , Revelations
on the Communist
Trial in Cologne,
Werke (Berlin.
1960), 8, p. 4 1 2 .
7 1 . K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 19 N o v e m b e r 1852, Werke, (Berlin, 1963), 28, p.
195.
72. K. M a r x to F . E n g e l s , 11 F e b r u a r y 1851, Werke (Berlin, 1963), 27, p. 184.
73. F . E n g e l s to K. M a r x , 12 F e b r u a r y 1851, ibid., p. 186.
74.
K. M a r x to F . E n g e l s , 11 F e b r u a r y 1851, ibid., p. 185.
75. F . E n g e l s to K. M a r x , 13 F e b r u a r y 1851, ibid., p. 189.
76. Ibid., p. 190.
77. F . M e h r i n g , Karl Marx ( L o n d o n , 1936), p. 209.
78. W o l f e , op. cit., p. 196.
79. K. M a r x t o J. W e y d e m e y e r , 1 F e b r u a r y 1859, in K. M a r x / F . Engels,
Letters
to Americans,
1848-1895,
hereafter n o t e d as L.A. ( N e w Y o r k ,
1963), p. 6 1 .
80.
See M . D o m m a n g e t , Les
81.
82.
K. M a r x t o J. W e y d e m e y e r , L.A., p. 62.
K. M a r x t o F . Freiligrath, 2 9 F e b r u a r y 1860, Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 146.
Italics in original.
Idces
d'Auguste
Blanqui
(Paris, 1957), p. 355.
83.
Ibid., p. 147.
84.
85.
F . E n g e l s , Germany:
Revolution
and Counter-Revolution,
op. cit., p. 114.
F . M e h r i n g , op. cit., pp. 2 1 8 - 2 2 0 ; F . E n g e l s t o J. W e y d e m e y e r , 12 April
1853, L.A., p. 58.
86.
87.
K. M a r x to F . E n g e l s , 10 M a r c h 1853, Werke, 2 8 , p. 224.
F . E n g e l s to J. W e y d e m e y e r , 12 April 1853, ibid., p. 576. (This part of
the letter is not included in L.A.)
See, e.g. ibid., p. 5 8 1 , w h e r e E n g e l s c o m m e n t s acidly o n t h o s e w h o
t h o u g h t t h e y n e e d n o t b o t h e r t o "swot" as it w a s the job of "der pere
M a r x " t o k n o w e v e r y t h i n g ! A l s o , W . Liebknecht's a c c o u n t (see his
Karl Marx:
Biographical
Memoirs,
C h i c a g o , 1901, p. 85) o f M a r x
"driving" his "party" e v e r y d a y into the R e a d i n g R o o m o f the British
Museum.
88.
89.
W . L i e b k n e c h t , Karl
Marx
zum
Geddchtnis
( N u r e m b e r g , 1896), p. 113.
150
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
K. M a r x to F . E n g e l s , 15 M a y 1859, Werke (Berlin, 1963), 29, p. 4 3 2 .
Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 146.
Werke (Berlin, 1964), 30, p. 495. (This part of the letter is n o t included
in the E n g l i s h Sel. Cor.)
Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 147.
See, e.g. Manifesto,
op. cit., p. 4 2 .
K. M a r x , The Class Struggles
in France,
1848-1850,
S.W., I, p. 136.
103.
K. M a r x , Revelations,
op. cit., p. 4 5 8 .
K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 18 M a y 1859, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 123. Italics
in original.
M . R u b e l , " R c m a r q u e s sur le c o n c e p t d e parti proletarien chez Marx",
in Revue francaise de Sociologie,
II, 3 (Paris, 1961), p. 176.
R. Quilliot, "La c o n c e p t i o n d u parti ouvrier", in La Revue
Socialiste
(Paris), F e b r u a r y — M a r c h , 1964, p. 172.
H a l f a century later s u c h a c o n c e p t i o n w a s d u b b e d as "substitutism" b y
T r o t s k y w h o i m p u t e d it t o L e n i n and attacked h i m in the n a m e of
M a r x i s m for a l l e g e d l y f a v o u r i n g the party substituting itself for the
the w o r k i n g class w h i c h , h e argued, w o u l d lead t o a single "dictator"
substituting himself f o r the party. (See I. D e u t s c h e r , The Prophet
Armed
( L o n d o n , 1954, pp. 9 0 - 9 1 . )
F . E n g e l s , Karl Marx:
Critique
of Political
Economy,
Werke
(Berlin,
1961), 13, p. 469.
F o r an u n w a r r a n t e d generalisation f r o m this historically determined
special case, see R. G a r a u d y , Humanisme
Marxiste
(Paris, 1957), p. 299.
T o the q u e s t i o n (asked i n r e l a t i o n t o a situation s u c h as that w h i c h arose
i n H u n g a r y in 1 9 5 6 ) : " W h e r e t h e n is the w o r k i n g c l a s s ? " , G a r a u d y ,
w h o q u o t e s Marx's statement, w r i t e s : " A M a r x i s t can o n l y r e p l y : it is
w h e r e v e r a m a n or a g r o u p of m e n is c o n s c i o u s of the historical mission
of the w o r k i n g class and fights to a c c o m p l i s h it." G a r a u d y ' s m o r e
recent writings w o u l d suggest that he is t o d a y m o r e c o n s c i o u s o f t h e
dangers implicit in s u c h a paternalistic a p p r o a c h than he w a s ten years
a g o w h e n h e w r o t e these lines.
K. M a r x t o L. K u g e l m a n n , 12 April 1871, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 309.
104.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 12 (and 17) S e p t e m b e r 1874, ibid.,
105.
106.
Socialism in Germany,
op. cit., p. 247.
K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 2 4 N o v e m b e r 1857, Sel.
Italics in original.
107.
F . E n g e l s t o K. M a r x , 2 9 January
Chartist, op. cit., p. 247.
108.
E n g e l s w a s o n l y able t o c o m e o n t o the G e n e r a l C o u n c i l of the International w h e n h e m o v e d f r o m M a n c h e s t e r t o L o n d o n in the a u t u m n of
1870. ( S e e G. M a y e r , Friedrich
Engels: a Biography,
L o n d o n , 1936, p.
197.)
109.
S e e D . Ryazanoff, Die Entstehung
der Internationalen
Arbeiterassoziation, i n Marx-Engels
Archiv (Frankfurt a.M., n.d.—either 1925 or 1926),
I, pp. 1 1 9 - 2 0 2 .
110.
See K. M a r x t o F . B o l t e . 23 N o v e m b e r
317-8.
111.
S e e W . Schmidt, Zum Vcrhdltnis
zwischcn
dcm Bund
und der I. Internationale,
in Beitrage, 1964, V I , S.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
Cor.
p. 330.
( L o n d o n ) , p. 101.
1869, in J. Saville, Ernest
1871, Sel
Cor.
der
Jones:
( L o n d o n ) , pp.
Kommunisten
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
151
112.
S e e K. M a r x t o M . Barry, 7 January 1872, Werke (Berlin, 1966), 33, p.
370. B a k u n i n apparently b e l i e v e d , o n t h e strength of n o t h i n g m o r e than
a jesting remark m a d e to h i m b y M a r x i n 1848 that at the t i m e of the
International the C o m m u n i s t L e a g u e still existed as a secret society.
(See Michel Bakounine
et I'ltalie, 1871-1872,
Pt. 2, Archives
Bakounine,
L e i d e n , 1963, I, 2, p. 127, a n d A . L e h n i n g , I n t r o d u c t i o n t o
Michel
Bakounine
et les Conflits dans 1'Internationale,
1872, op. cit., II, p. x i x .
113.
114.
S.W., I, p . 348.
D r . Ernst E n g e l b e r g , i n his Johann
Philipp
Becker
in der I.
Internationale
(Berlin, 1964), p. 30, is h o w e v e r g o i n g m u c h t o o far w h e n h e
asserts that b y this f o r m u l a t i o n of 1864 M a r x m e a n t "the disciplined,
centralised party" w i t h its "scientific theory".
115.
S.W.,
116.
117.
K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 4 N o v e m b e r 1864, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 163.
S e e F . E n g e l s , P r e f a c e t o the G e r m a n e d i t i o n (1890) of the
Manifesto,
op. cit., p. 30.
I, p p . 3 5 0 - 3 5 3 .
118.
General
119.
Documents
of the First International
(Moscow, n.d.—1966?), Vol. Ill,
p. 311.
S e e Marx's M a r g i n a l N o t e s o n t h e A l l i a n c e ' s P r o g r a m m e a n d R u l e s ,
15 D e c e m b e r 1868 i n ibid., p p . 2 7 3 - 7 . ( B e s i d e t h e w o r d s " f o n d u e enticrem e n t d a n s la g r a n d e Association
Internationale
des Travailleurs"
i n the
p r o g r a m m e , M a r x w r i t e s : " f o n d u e dans, et f o n d e e contre!"-—p. 273.)
120.
Rules
of the I.W.M.A.,
S.W., I, p p . 3 5 1 - 3 .
121.
K. M a r x t o L . K u g e l m a n n , 9 O c t o b e r 1866, Sel Cor.
122.
K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 4 N o v e m b e r 1864, ibid., p. 163.
123.
F . E n g e l s , op. cit., p. 30.
124.
See, e.g. J. F r e y m o n d ' s Introduction t o La Premiere
Recueil de Documents
( G e n e v a , 1962), I, pp. x - x i .
125.
126.
La Premiere Internationale,
op. cit., I, p p . 4 0 5 - 6 .
I n 1867 B i s m a r c k h a d i n t r o d u c e d universal m a n h o o d suffrage into the
N o r t h G e r m a n C o n f e d e r a t i o n and e x t e n d e d it t o the n e w G e r m a n R e i c h
in 1871. U r b a n w o r k e r s in Britain had b e e n g i v e n the v o t e u n d e r the
S e c o n d R e f o r m Bill of 1867.
127.
S e e La Premiere
Internationale,
op. cit., II, p p . 191 ff. A fuller report
of E n g e l s ' s p e e c h , w h i c h a l o n e refers specifically t o the n e e d f o r the
workers t o f o r m a n i n d e p e n d e n t party, is g i v e n i n Werke (Berlin, 1962),
17, p. 4 1 6 .
128.
The
129.
International
Herald,
( L o n d o n ) , p. 214.
Internationale:
N o . 37, 14 D e c e m b e r 1872. (See, a b o v e , N o t e
1.)
M . M o l n a r , Le Declin
de la Premiere
Internationale
( G e n e v a , 1963),
p. 137. A n u m b e r of S o v i e t historians h a v e i n the past interpreted the
L o n d o n C o n f e r e n c e decisions in the s a m e w a y that M o l n a r d o e s here.
See, e.g. I. M. K r i w o g u s and S. M . Stezkewitsch, Abriss der
Ge^hichte
der I. und II. Internationale
(Berlin, 1960), p. 1 3 0 : "In the decisions o n
the o r g a n i z a t i o n a l q u e s t i o n w e r e e x p r e s s e d the a i m of m a k i n g the International into an international political party of t h e w o r k i n g class." cf.
K. L. S e l e z n e v , K. Marks i F. Engels' o revoliutsionnoy
partii
proletariata ( M o s c o w , 1955), p. 26; A . Y . K o r o t e e v a , " T h e H a g u e C o n g r e s s of the
First International", i n I. S. G a l k i n , Ed., op. cit., p. 596. G. Stekloff, in
his History of the International
(London, 1928), p. 181, argued that M a r x
152
T H E S O C I A L I S T REGISTER,
1967
w a s thinking in terms of m a k i n g the I . W . M . A . into a n international
workers' party with the G e n e r a l C o u n c i l as its e x e c u t i v e c o m m i t t e e in
the a b s e n c e of national parties that c o u l d o p p o s e this. ( M o l n a r , p. 134,
n.18, dissociates himself f r o m this e x t r e m e view.) In recent years h o w e v e r
S o v i e t c o l l e a g u e s h a v e c o m e m o r e correctly t o see the L o n d o n C o n f e r e n c e decisions as a i m i n g at "the creation in e a c h c o u n t r y o f a n indep e n d e n t proletarian party." (See B. E . K u n i n a , "Iz Istorii deyatel'nosti
M a r k s a v G e n e r a l ' n o m S o v e t e I. Internatsionala, 1 8 7 1 - 7 2 , " in L. I.
G o l ' m a n , Ed., Iz Istorii
Marksizma
i Mezhdunarodnogo
rabochcgo
Dvizheniya
( M o s c o w , 1963), p. 349; I. A . B a k h , E d . , Pcrvyi
Internatsional
( M o s c o w , 1965), II, p. 137.
130.
I n t e r v i e w w i t h K. M a r x , in the World ( N e w Y o r k ) , 18 July 1871, reprod u c e d in New Politics, II, 1 ( N e w Y o r k , 1962), p. 130.
131.
M . M o l n a r , op. cit., p. 35.
132.
The Workman's
Times, 25 M a r c h 1893. T h e report carried there of this
important s p e e c h m a d e b y E n g e l s o n 18 M a r c h 1893 at a L o n d o n meeting c o m m e m o r a t i n g the Paris C o m m u n e d o e s not appear in the
Werke,
or i n t h e R u s s i a n Sochineniya
w h o s e s e c o n d edition they f o l l o w , w h o s e
tables of dates f r o m E n g e l s ' life d o not m a k e any reference t o it. (Sec
Werke,
22, p. 673.) It is, h o w e v e r , q u o t e d by S. Biinger,
Friedrich
Engels und die britische
Sozialistische
Bewegung
von 1881-1895
(Berlin,
1962), p. 207. T h i s latter w o r k draws o n a w i d e range of original sources
and gives an e x t r e m e l y v a l u a b l e factual and analytical treatment of this
period. It is t o b e h o p e d that with the g r o w t h of studies in labour
history in this c o u n t r y it will s o o n find a n E n g l i s h translator and
publisher.
133.
H i s a u t h o r s h i p is indicated in letters t o F . A . S o r g e f r o m K. M a r x o n
21 D e c e m b e r 1872 a n d f r o m F . E n g e l s o n 4 January 1873, in Briefc und
Auszuge
aus Brief en von J oh. Phil. Becker, J. Dietzgen,
F. Engels,
K.
Marx, u.A. an F. A. Sorge u. Andere (Stuttgart, 1906), p p . 86, 88.
134.
K. M a r x and F . E n g e l s , On Britain
135.
Ibid.,
136.
F . E n g e l s , Socialism:
137.
S.W.,
( M o s c o w , 1962), p. 500.
p. 500.
Utopian
and
Scientific
( L o n d o n , 1932), p. x x x .
I, p. 4 1 .
138.
La Premiere
139.
Scl. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 315.
Internationale,
op. cit., II, pp. 195, 224.
140.
Ibid.,
141.
F . E n g e l s to A . B e b e l , 14 N o v e m b e r 1879, Werke (Berlin, 1966), 34,
p. 4 2 1 . ( T h e translation in Scl. Cor., M o s c o w , p. 398, is poor.)
pp. 314-5.
142.
" T h e A s s o c i a t i o n d o e s n o t dictate the f o r m o f political m o v e m e n t s , "
said M a r x t w o m o n t h s b e f o r e the L o n d o n C o n f e r e n c e . "In e a c h part of
the w o r l d s o m e special aspect of the p r o b l e m presents itself, and the
w o r k m e n there address t h e m s e l v e s t o its c o n s i d e r a t i o n in their o w n
w a y . " ( T h e World, 18 July 1871, op. cit., p. 130.)
143.
M o l n a r , op. cit., p. 137.
143a. Documents
of the First International,
144.
R e p o r t published b y the World
in M o l n a r , op. cit., p. 237.
145.
F . E n g e l s , Report
p. 141.
on the
op. cit., I l l , p. 310.
( N e w Y o r k ) , 15 O c t o b e r 1871, r e p r o d u c e d
Alliance
of Socialist
Democracy,
Werke,
18,
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
153
146.
147.
J. Braunthal, Geschichte
der Internationale
( H a n n o v e r , 1961), I, p. 186.
La Revue de Paris, 1896, p. 131, q u o t e d b y A . L e h n i n g i n his Introduct i o n t o Michel Bakounine
et 1'Italic, Part 2 , Archives
Bakounine,
op. cit.,
I, 2, p . x x x v i . Italics in original, cf. ibid., p p . 2 5 1 - 2 , and La
Premiere
Internationale,
op. cit., II, pp. 4 7 4 - 5 .
148.
K. M a r x t o P. L a f a r g u e , 19
Annali ( M i l a n , 1958), I, p. 176.
April
1870, in Istituto
G.
Feltrinelli,
148a. See, e.g. Circulaire
a toutes
les federations
de VAssociation
Internationale
des Travailleurs
( f r o m the Sonvillier C o n g r e s s , 1871), in
Archives
Bakounine,
op. cit., I, 2, e s p . p. 4 0 5 , w h i c h rejects "any leaders h i p e n d o w e d w i t h authority (toute
autorite
directrice)
e v e n if it has
b e e n elected and c o n s e n t e d t o b y t h e workers."
149.
S e e E . H . Carr, Michael
N e t t l a u , Michael
Bakunin
copyist), Part 3, p. 7 2 4 .
Bakunin
( L o n d o n , 1937), pp. 4 2 0 - 4 2 3 ; M .
( L o n d o n , 1898, privately p r o d u c e d by a u t o -
150.
See, e.g. F . M e h r i n g , op. cit., p p . 4 2 9 , 4 9 1 - 2 .
151.
See, e.g. Archives
Bakounine,
op. cit., I, 2, pp. 1 2 4 - 6 , w h e r e B a k u n i n
refers t o the Jews as "an e x p l o i t i n g sect, a b l o o d s u c k i n g p e o p l e , a u n i q u e
d e v o u r i n g parasite, tightly and intimately organised . . . cutting across
all t h e differences of political o p i n i o n " , a n d M a r x and the R o t h s c h i l d s
are said t o h o l d e a c h o t h e r in h i g h e s t e e m !
152.
K. M a r x t o F . E n g e l s , 4 N o v e m b e r
Italics in original.
153.
E . V a i l l a n t and others, Internationale
Bakounine,
op. cit., II, pp. 363, 366.
154.
Der Vorbote
( G e n e v a ) , M a r c h 1870, p p . 4 1 - 2 ; Archives
Bakounine,
op.
cit., I, 2, pp. 2 1 1 - 2 , 2 1 4 - 5 ; J. G u i l l a u m e , LTnternationalc:
Documents
et Souvenirs
(Paris, 1905), I, p p . 2 0 7 - 8 .
155.
H. G e r t h , E d . , The First International:
of 1872 ( M a d i s o n , 1958), p. 2 8 7 .
Minutes
156.
Address
p. 205.
drafted by K. M a r x , Werke,
157.
H . C o l l i n s a n d C . A b r a m s k y , Karl
ment ( L o n d o n , 1965), pp. 248 ff.
158.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 12 ( a n d 17) S e p t e m b e r 1874, Sel. Cor.
p. 330.
of the British
Federal
1864, Sel.
et
Council,
Marx
Cor.
( L o n d o n ) , p. 161.
Revolution,
in
Archives
of the Hague
and the British
Congress
Labour
18,
Move-
(London),
159.
Ibid.,
160.
161.
M o l n a r , op. cit., p. 188.
R. P. M o r g a n , The German
national (Cambridge, 1965).
p. 330.
162.
Ibid., pp. 1 8 2 - 8 , 204, 2 1 9 - 2 2 8 . S e e a l s o Werke (Berlin, 1965), 33, pp. 287,
3 2 2 - 3 , 3 6 1 - 2 , 4 6 1 - 2 , 467, 567; M e h r i n g , op. cit., pp. 4 8 2 - 3 ; Braunthal,
op. cit., p. 195.
163.
S.W.,
Social
Democrats
and
the
First
Inter-
II, p. 323.
163a. S e e F . E n g e l s , The Sonvillier
Congress
and the International,
Werke
(Berlin, 1962), 17, pp. 4 7 7 - 8 . A l s o D . L e k o v i c , " R e v o l u c i o n a r n a delatnost
P r v e internacionale k a o faktor razvitka marksizma", Prilozi
za
istoriju
socijalizma,
II, (Belgrade, 1964), esp. pp. 3 7 - 5 0 , w h i c h deals w i t h s o m e
very important p r o b l e m s of M a r x ' s and E n g e l s ' ideas o n organization in
this period, such as the relationship b e t w e e n centralism a n d a u t o n o m y ,
154
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
majority and m i n o r i t y a n d their c o n c e p t of sectarianism. See, further,
B. E . K u n i n a , in L . I. G o l ' m a n , Ed., op. cit., pp. 3 4 7 - 3 5 1 .
164.
165.
166.
167.
S e e F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 17 July 1889, in Briefe und Ausziige,
316-8.
F . E n g e l s , P. and L. Lafargue, Correspondence
( M o s c o w , n.d.),
p. 103.
pp.
Ill,
K. M a r x t o J. B. Schweitzer, 13 O c t o b e r 1868 (Draft), Sel.
Cor.
( L o n d o n ) , p. 250.
See, e.g. F . E n g e l s t o L. K u g e l m a n n , 10 July 1869, Werke (Berlin, 1965),
32, p. 6 2 1 .
168.
M a r x t o Schweitzer, op. cit., p. 250.
169.
F . E n g e l s t o K. M a r x , 2 4 S e p t e m b e r 1868, Werke,
170.
F . E n g e l s to K. M a r x , 30 S e p t e m b e r 1868, ibid., p. 170.
32, p. 161.
171.
K. M a r x t o J. B. Schweitzer, 13 O c t o b e r 1868, ibid., p. 570.
172.
F . E n g e l s t o K. M a r x , 25 July 1866, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 2 1 1 .
173.
K. M a r x t o L. K u g e l m a n n , 11 O c t o b e r 1867, in K. M a r x , Letters
Kugelmann
( L o n d o n , 1941), p. 50.
to
174.
M . M. M i k h a i l o v a , "K istorii raspostraneniya
L. I. G o l ' m a n , Ed., op. cit., p. 425.
in
I.toma
'Kapitala'",
174a. W . Liebknecht's c l o s i n g s p e e c h at N u r e m b e r g C o n g r e s s of the A s s o c i a t i o n o f G e r m a n W o r k e r s ' A s s o c i a t i o n s , 1868, in Die I. Internationale
in
Deutschland
(Berlin, 1964), p. 245.
175.
See, e.g. K. M a r x , Notes
18, p. 6 3 6 .
176.
S e e F . E n g e l s , Prefatory
S.W., I, pp. 5 9 0 - 5 9 1 .
177.
See, e.g. F . E n g e l s to A . B e b e l , 1 8 - 2 8 M a r c h 1875, Sel. Cor.
pp. 332, 333.
of the Gotha
on Bakunin's
Notes
"Statism
and
(1874) t o his Peasant
178.
Critique
179.
Ibid., p p . 1 5 - 1 6 . Italics in original.
Programme,
180.
K. M a r x t o F . A . Sorge, 19 O c t o b e r 1877, Sel. Cor.
181.
F . E n g e l s , Socialism:
Utopian
Anarchy",
S.W.,
War
in
Werke,
Germany,
(London),
II, p p . 1 3 - 4 5 .
and Scientific,
( L o n d o n ) , p. 350.
op. cit., p. v.
182.
K. M a r x t o F . A . Sorge, 19 S e p t e m b e r 1879, Sel. Cor.
183.
K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s t o A . B e b e l , W . L i e b k n e c h t , W . B r a c k e and others
(Circular Letter), M i d d l e o f S e p t e m b e r 1879, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 374.
( M o s c o w ) , p. 396.
184.
Ibid., p. 370.
185.
Ibid., p. 376.
186.
Ibid.,
187.
Ibid., p. 377.
188.
F . E n g e l s to A . B e b e l , 21 June
(Berlin, 1958), p. 6 4 .
189.
Ibid., p. 64. cf.
pp. 4 3 9 - 4 4 0 .
190.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . S o r g e , 24 O c t o b e r 1891, L.A.,
pp. 2 3 7 - 8 . C a r l o
S c h m i d , in his article "Ferdinand Lassalle und die Politisierung der
d e u t s c h e n A r b e i t e r b e w e g u n g " , in Archiv filr Sozialgeschichte,
(Hanover,
1963), III, p. 6, notes that it w a s especially at the Erfurt C o n g r e s s that
p.376.
Briefe
und
1882, in F . Engels, Briefe
Ausziige,
pp.
2 0 3 - 4 ; Sel.
Cor.
an
Bebel
(London),
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
191.
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
155
the party "officially dissociated itself i d e o l o g i c a l l y f r o m the o p i n i o n s of
Lassalle."
Interview
with the "Daily Chronicle",
1 July 1893, in F . E n g e l s , P. and L.
Lafargue, op. cit., I l l , p. 400.
S.W., I, p. 120.
Ibid., p. 123.
F . E n g e l s t o P. L a f a r g u e , 3 April 1895, Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 569.
F . E n g e l s , Foreword
(to t h e p a m p h l e t International
Questions
in the
"Volksstaat"),
Werke (Berlin, 1963), 2 2 , p. 4 1 8 .
H. J. Laski, Communist
Manifesto:
A Socialist
Landmark
(London,
1948), p. 7 5 .
197.
198.
Ibid., p. 39.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . S o r g e , 12 (and 17) S e p t e m b e r 1874, Sel. Cor.
don), p. 329. M y e m p h a s i s .
(Lon-
199.
200.
Laski, op. cit., p. 57. M y e m p h a s i s .
S e e P. L a f a r g u e t o F . E n g e l s , 10 A u g u s t 1882, E n g e l s - L a f a r g u e
pondence
( M o s c o w , 1959), I, pp. 1 0 2 - 3 .
Corres-
201.
202.
F . E n g e l s to E . Bernstein, 2 0 O c t o b e r 1882, Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 4 2 4 .
A c t u a l l y t h e possibilist p r e a m b l e , of w h i c h p r e s u m a b l y at that stage
E n g e l s h a d o n l y s e e n limited reports, w e n t m u c h further than the
1866 R u l e s t o the International. (See its text in E n g e l s - L a f a r g u e
Correspondence,
I, p. 108.)
203.
204.
E n g e l s to Bernstein, ibid., p. 424.
F . E n g e l s t o E . Bernstein, 28 N o v e m b e r 1882, in E . Bernstein, Die
Briefe
von Friedrich
Engels und Eduard Bernstein
(Berlin, 1925), pp. 1 0 2 - 3 .
205.
F . E n g e l s t o F . K. W i s c h n e w e t s k y , 28 D e c e m b e r 1886, Sel. Cor.
don), p. 4 5 4 .
206.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorgc, 2 9 N o v e m b e r 1886, ibid., p. 4 5 0 .
207.
E n g e l s t o W i s c h n e w e t s k y , ibid., p. 4 5 4 .
208.
209.
L.A., p. 290.
Ibid., p. 286.
210.
K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s , On Britain
Britain (1953), p. 4 8 1 .
(Lon-
( M o s c o w , 1953), hereafter noted as
On
211.
Ibid., p. 477.
212.
See, e.g. £. Bunger, op. cit., p. 29.
213.
On Britain
214.
The Workman's
215.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 18 M a r c h 1893, L.A.,
216.
F . E n g e l s t o H . Schluter, 1 January 1895, On Britain
(1953), pp. 5 3 7 - 8 .
217.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 29 N o v e m b e r 1886, Sel. Cor.
Italics in original.
( L o n d o n ) , p. 4 5 0 .
218.
S e e d i s c u s s i o n of these differences as "a s a m p l e of materialist dialectics"
b y V . I. L e n i n , Preface to Letters to Sorge, in his Selected
Works ( M o s c o w , 1939), X I , p p . 7 2 2 - 5 , 7 3 2 - 3 .
219.
Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 4 5 3 .
220.
Ibid., p. 4 5 0 .
221.
Preface
222.
Ibid.,
(1953), p. 477.
Times,
(1887), L.A.,
p. 2 9 1 .
25 M a r c h 1893.
p. 290.
p. 249.
156
223.
224.
225.
226.
227.
228.
229.
230.
231.
232.
233.
234.
235.
236.
237.
238.
239.
240.
241.
242.
243.
244.
245.
246.
247.
248.
249.
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
F . E n g e l s , Foreword
( 1 8 9 1 ) to Critique
of the Gotha Programme,
S.W.,
II, p. 14.
L.A., p. 290.
In respect o f t h e S . D . F . , see, e.g. Interview
with "Daily Chronicle",
op.
cit., p. 397; re S.L.P., see, e.g. F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 10 N o v e m b e r
1894, L.A., p. 2 6 3 .
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 12 M a y 1894, On Britain (1953), p. 536.
L.A., p. 2 6 3 .
G . D . H . C o l e and R. P o s t g a t e , The Common
People 1746-1938
(Lond o n , 1938), p. 4 0 3 .
R. N . C a r e w H u n t , The Theory
and Practice
of Communism
(London,
P e n g u i n E d . , 1963), p. 147, a n d Marxism
Past and Present
(London,
1954), p. 157.
F . E n g e l s t o A B e b e l , 30 A u g u s t 1883, On Britain (1953), p. 516.
Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 450.
Ibid., p . 4 5 5 .
L.A., p. 290.
Ibid., p. 2 9 0 .
F . E n g e l s , The Condition
of the Working
Class in England,
in On
Britain (1953), p. 2 7 3 .
G. Sorel, La decomposition
du marxisme
(Paris, 1910), p. 5 1 .
F . E n g e l s t o G. Trier, 18 D e c e m b e r 1889, Sel. Cor. ( M o s c o w ) , p. 4 9 2 .
F . E n g e l s , Werke (Berlin, 1962), 16, p. 68. (See a l s o pp. 6 6 - 7 8 . ) T h e
implications of this f o r M a r x ' s and E n g e l s ' c o n c e p t o f the party are
discussed i n E . Ragionieri's very v a l u a b l e essay, "II m a r x i s m o e la Prima
Internazionale", in Critica Marxista,
III, 1 ( R o m e , 1965), e s p . p p . 1 2 7 - 8 ,
1 4 9 - 1 5 0 . S e e a l s o H . H u m m l e r , Opposition
gegen Lassalle (Berlin, 1963),
p. 142.
S e e , e.g. K. M a r x , " A Servile G o v e r n m e n t " in New York Daily
Tribune,
28 January 1853. A l s o S.W., I, p. 556; S.W., II, p. 2 9 1 .
K. M a r x , The Chartists,
i n T. B. B o t t o m o r e a n d M . R u b e l , Ed., Karl
Marx: Selected
Writings
in Sociology
and Social Philosophy
(London,
P e n g u i n E d . , 1963), p. 206.
F . E n g e l s , The Origin of the Family,
Private
Property
and the
State,
S.W., II, p. 2 9 1 .
M . R u b e l , "Introduction a l'Ethique M a r x i e n n e " , i n K. M a r x , Pages
Choisies pour une Ethique Socialiste (Paris, 1948), p. x x i x .
Revue francaise
de Sociologie,
op. cit., p. 168; M . R u b e l , Karl
Marx:
Essai de Biographie
Intellectuelle
(Paris, 1957), p. 2 5 0 ; M . R u b e l , " D e
M a r x a u b o l c h e v i s m e : partis et conseils", i n Arguments
(Paris, 1962), N o .
2 5 - 2 6 , p. 33; M . R u b e l , " M i s e au P o i n t n o n D i a l e c t i q u e " , in Les
Temps
Modernes
(Paris, D e c e m b e r 1957), N o . 142, p. 1138. L u c i e n G o l d m a n n
gives a biting criticism of R u b e l ' s v i e w s i n his Recherches
Dialectiques
(Paris, 1959), p p . 2 8 0 - 3 0 1 , to w h i c h the last n o t e d article b y R u b e l w a s
intended as a reply.
R.franc. Sociol., op. cit., p. 175.
R u b e l , Karl Marx: Biographie,
op. cit., p. 288.
R. franc. Sociol., op. cit., p. 174.
Ibid.,
p.\16.
Introduction
a l'Ethique Marxienne,
op. cit., p. xlvii.
R e s o l u t i o n of the Central C o m m i t t e e of the G e r m a n language g r o u p
o f the I . W . M . A . , signed by Joh. P h . Becker, in Der Vorbote
(Geneva),
July 1869, pp. 1 0 3 - 5 .
MARX A N D E N G E L S A N D T H E CONCEPT O F T H E PARTY
157
250.
251.
F . E n g e l s t o K. M a r x , 30 July 1869, Werke, 32, p. 353. Italics in original.
S.W., I, p. 4 4 . See, e.g. The Demands
of the Communist
Party
in
Germany,
in D . Ryazanoff, E d . , Manifesto,
p p . 3 4 5 - 7 , written by M a r x
and E n g e l s at the outbreak of the 1848 R e v o l u t i o n as a p r o g r a m m e of
i m m e d i a t e d e m a n d s f o r w h i c h t h e m e m b e r s of t h e C o m m u n i s t L e a g u e
w e r e t o c a m p a i g n politically.
252.
S e e Rules and Constitution
of the Communist
League, op. cit., pp. 3 4 0 345.
253. Manifesto,
S.W., I, p. 4 4 . M y e m p h a s i s .
254.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 12 M a y 1894, Briefe und Auszuge,
p. 4 1 2 . T h e
translation of this passage, w h o s e phrasing has c o n s i d e r a b l e significance
for a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g of M a r x ' s and E n g e l s ' c o n c e p t i o n o f the sources
of r e v o l u t i o n a r y c o n s c i o u s n e s s , is not entirely satisfactory i n either On
Britain (1953), p. 536, o r L.A., p. 2 6 3 .
255. F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 2 9 N o v e m b e r 1886, Sel. Cor. ( L o n d o n ) , p. 4 5 1 .
256.
F . E n g e l s t o G. Trier, 18 D e c e m b e r 1889, K. M a r x / F . E n g e l s ,
Sochineniya
( M o s c o w , 1965), 37, p. 2 7 6 . T o the best of m y k n o w l e d g e
this part o f the letter, first p u b l i s h e d i n R u s s i a n i n 1932, h a s never b e e n
published either in its G e r m a n original or i n English. ( A t the time of
g o i n g t o press the Werke h a v e o n l y reached V o l u m e 34, carrying the
M a r x - E n g e l s c o r r e s p o n d e n c e with third p e r s o n s u p t o the e n d of 1880.)
257.
F . E n g e l s t o F . A . Sorge, 9 A u g u s t 1890, Briefe und Auszuge,
p p . 343-4.
cf. E n g e l s ' letters o n the s a m e t h e m e t o W . L i e b k n e c h t , 10 A u g u s t 1890
(W. L i e b k n e c h t , Briefwechsel
mit Karl Marx und Friedrich
Engels, T h e
H a g u e , 1963, pp. 3 7 5 - 6 ) , t o K. K a u t s k y of 3 F e b r u a r y , 11 F e b r u a r y a n d
23 F e b r u a r y 1891, 4 S e p t e m b e r 1892 (Friedrich
Engels' Briefwechsel
mit
Karl Kautsky,
V i e n n a , 1955, p p . 2 7 2 , 278, 2 8 3 , 363), and t o A . B e b e l ,
l ( - 2 ) M a y 1891 (Briefe
an Bebel, op. cit., p p . 1 7 7 - 8 . ) A l s o his and
M a r x ' s c o n d e m n a t i o n in 1873 of "unity o f t h o u g h t a n d a c t i o n " (a
principle inscribed in the p r o g r a m m e of Bakunin's R e v o l u t i o n a r y
O r g a n i z a t i o n of International Brothers) as a Jesuit c o n c e p t i o n m e a n i n g
" n o t h i n g o t h e r t h a n o r t h o d o x y and b l i n d o b e d i e n c e . " (UAlliance
de la
Democratic
Socialiste
et 1'Internationale,
i n La Premiere
Internationale,
op. cit., II, p. 393.
258.
F . E n g e l s , Introduction
(1895) t o K. M a r x , The Class Struggles
in
France, 1848-1850,
S.W., I, p. 118.
258a. K. M a r x , General Rules of the I.W.M.A.,
S.W., I, p. 350.
259.
F . E n g e l s , The Housing
Question,
S.W., I, p. 556. Italics i n original.
260.
Ibid., p. 556.
261.
O n the f u n d a m e n t a l l y anti-authoritarian a n d anti-bureaucratic nature of
Marx's c o n c e p t i o n o f this "dictatorship", see R. Miliband, " M a r x a n d
the State", i n Socialist
Register—1965
( L o n d o n ) , pp. 2 8 9 - 2 9 3 . See a l s o
H . D r a p e r , " M a r x a n d the D i c t a t o r s h i p of the Proletariat", i n Cahiers de
ITnstitut de Science Economique
Appliquee,
Serie S, Etudes de
Marxologte, N o . 6 (Paris, 1962), pp. 5 - 7 3 , w h e r e t h e a u t h o r r e p r o d u c e s the
principal M a r x - E n g e l s loci o n this q u e s t i o n .
262.
263.
K. M a r x , Critique
of the Gotha Programme,
S.W., II, p. 30.
J. V . Stalin, I n t e r v i e w with R o y H o w a r d , in The Communist
International ( L o n d o n ) , M a r c h — A p r i l , 1936, p. 14. " W h e r e several classes d o
n o t exist," argues Stalin, "there c a n n o t b e several parties, since (a) party
is part o f (a) class." M a r x and E n g e l s never t o o k s u c h a crude v i e w of
the class basis of parties. Whilst E n g e l s described parties as "the m o r e or
less a d e q u a t e political e x p r e s s i o n o f . . . classes and fractions o f classess"
158
264.
265.
266.
267.
268.
269.
270.
271.
272.
273.
274.
275.
276.
277.
278.
279.
280.
281.
THE SOCIALIST REGISTER,
1967
(Introduction
t o Class Struggles
in France, S.W., I, p. 110), h e n o t e d that,
d u e t o t h e u n e v e n political d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e w o r k i n g class, "the
'solidarity of the proletariat' is e v e r y w h e r e realized in different party
g r o u p i n g s w h i c h carry o n life and d e a t h f e u d s w i t h o n e another." ( F .
E n g e l s t o A . B e b e l , 2 0 June 1873, Sel. Cor., L o n d o n , p. 327.) M o r e o v e r ,
M a r x s a w e x c l u s i v e l y " i d e o l o g i c a l " factors as the raison d'etre of the
r e p u b l i c a n f a c t i o n of the b o u r g e o i s i e " , f o r instance, that i n 1848 s t o o d
in o p p o s i t i o n t o the Party of Order representing the m o n a r c h i s t section
o f that class (Eighteenth
Brumaire,
S.W., I, p. 234), just as E n g e l s forty
years later w a s t o see t h e anti-Prussian regional particularism of the
C a t h o l i c areas as the basis for the t h e n rising G e r m a n Centre Party
c o m p r i s i n g a m i x t u r e of class elements. ( F . E n g e l s , What Next?,
Werke,
2 2 , p. 8.)
F . E n g e l s , Programme
of the Blanquist
Commune
Refugees,
Werke,
18,
p. 529.
K. M a r x ' s s p e e c h at dinner t o delegates of L o n d o n C o n f e r e n c e of
I . W . M . A . i n M o l n a r , op. cit., p. 238.
F . E n g e l s , Introduction
(1891) t o K. M a r x , The Civil War in
France,
S.W., I, p . 440.
M e m b e r s of t h e C o m m u n e w e r e d i v i d e d i n t o a Blanquist majority and
a m a i n l y P r o u d h o n i s t m i n o r i t y o f m e m b e r s of t h e International. (See
E n g e l s , op. cit., p. 436.) V a r i o u s political g r o u p s , including the m i d d l e
class U n i o n R e p u b l i c a i n e , f u n c t i o n e d freely. It is h o w e v e r significant
that M a r x a n d E n g e l s after the e x p e r i e n c e of the C o m m u n e stressed
m o r e strongly t h a n ever b e f o r e t h e n e e d f o r i n d e p e n d e n t w o r k i n g class
parties t o give t h e kind o f c o n s c i o u s leadership and direction that had
b e e n lacking i n Paris. In this c o n n e c t i o n it s h o u l d b e b o r n e i n m i n d , as
E n g e l s w a s t o write t o Bernstein o n 1 January 1884, that in Marx's
Civil War in France ' t h e unconscious
t e n d e n c i e s o f the C o m m u n e were
put d o w n t o its credit as m o r e or less c o n s c i o u s plans." (Sel. Cor., M o s c o w , p. 4 4 0 . Italics in original.)
K. M a r x , The Civil War in France, hereafter Civil War, S.W., I, p. 4 7 1 .
F . E n g e l s , Introduction
(1891), ibid., p. 4 3 8 .
R. N . C a r e w H u n t , Marxism, op. cit., p. 155.
E . H . Carr, Michael Bakunin ( L o n d o n , 1937), p. 360.
K. M a r x t o F . B o l t e , 12 F e b r u a r y 1873, Werke (Berlin, 1966), 33, p. 566.
Italics i n original, cf. a l s o M a r x ' s a n d E n g e l s ' Circular Letter, 1879, o n
t h e "right" of "the representatives o f the petty b o u r g e o i s i e " t o f o r m their
o w n i n d e p e n d e n t party o u t s i d e t h e G e r m a n Social D e m o c r a t i c W o r k e r s '
Party. (Sel. Cor., L o n d o n , p. 376.)
See, e.g. F . E n g e l s , The Sonvillier
Congress,
Werke (Berlin, 1962), 17,
p. 477.
F . E n g e l s , Preface
(1886) t o Capital,
V o l . I ( L o n d o n , 1938), p. xiv.
Civil War, S.W., I, p. 4 7 1 .
Ibid., p. 4 7 3 .
First draft o f Civil
War, i n Arkhiv
Marksa
i Engel'sa,
III (VIII)
( M o s c o w , 1934), p. 2 0 8 .
F . E n g e l s t o J. P. Becker, 1 A p r i l 1880, Werke (Berlin, 1966), 34 p. 4 4 1 .
( T h e translation i n Sel. Cor., L o n d o n , p. 3 8 1 , is inaccurate.)
K. M a r x , Notes on Bakunin's
"Statism and Anarchy",
Werke, 18, p. 636.
Ibid., p. 634.
The Poverty of Philosophy,
op. cit., p. 197.