Marx • Engels • Marxism
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[3] __NOTE__ Title is on page 1 and 3; only page 1 has bullets; page 3 has nothing between three words, just three words on 3 lines. __TITLE__ MarxRnj Progress Publishers.Moscow
__FIX__ Do a markup for that small PP symbol with two boxes, 3-finger hand on left and pi on right? [4]PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The translations in this book are taken from the English edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works in 45 volumes prepared by Progress Publishers, Moscow.
Changes have been made in accordance with the fifth Russian edition of the Collected Works.
B. H. JIEHHH
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__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1934Contents
KARL MARX. (A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism) ................... 9
The Marxist Doctrine................ 13
Philosophical Materialism.............. 13
Dialectics..................... 16
The Materialist Conception of History......... 18
The Class Struggle................. 20
Marx's Economic Doctrine.............. 22
Value......................."
23
Surplus Value................... 25
Socialism ..................... 34
Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat .... 37
FREDERICK ENGELS................. 43
THE MARX-ENGELS CORRESPONDENCE....... 53
I. General Review ................. 55
SPEECH AT THE UNVEILING OF A MEMORIAL TO MARX
AND ENGELS, November 7, 1918........... 60
THE THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENT PARTS
OF MARXISM .................... 62
I......................... 63
II......................... 64
III...............'.......... 66
THE HISTORICAL DESTINY OF THE DOCTRINE OF KARL
MARX......................... 68
I......................... 68
II......................... 69
III......................... 70
6 __RUNNING_HEADER__ CONTENTS``LEFT-WING" COMMUNISM-AN INFANTILE DISORDER
(Excerpt)....................... 72
II. An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks' Success . . 72
WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE AND HOW THEY FIGHT THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS (A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists) (Excerpts) 76 Appendix III.................... 87
A PROTEST BY RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS .... 91 OUR PROGRAMME .................. 103
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Burning Questions of Our Movement
(Excerpts)....................... 108
I. Dogmatism and "Freedom of Criticism"....... 108
A. What Does "Freedom of Criticism" Mean? .... 108 D. Engels on the Importance of the Theoretical Struggle 112
II. The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of
the Social-Democrats................ 117
A. The Beginning ol the Spontaneous Upsurge .... 117
B. Bowing to Spontaneity. Rabochaya Mysl .... 122
ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK (The Crisis in Our Party) (Excerpt)................... 132
R. A Few Words on Dialectics. Two Revolutions . . . 132 MARX ON THE AMERICAN "GENERAL REDISTRIBUTION" 138
TWO TACTICS OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY IN THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION (Excerpt)........... 145
Epilogue. Once Again the Osvobozhdeniye Trend, Once Again
the New-/sfo-a Trend................ 145
III. The Vulgar Bourgeois and the Marxist Views on
Dictatorship.................. 145
GUERRILLA WARFARE................ 155
I .......................... 155
II ......................... 157
III ......................... 159
IV.......................... 164
PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KARL MARX'S LETTERS TO Dr. KUGELMANN...... 167
PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF LETTERS BY JOHANNES BECKER, JOSEPH DIETZGEN, FREDERICK ENGELS, KARL MARX, AND OTHERS TO FRIED RICH SORGE AND OTHERS......... 176
How the Classics Estimated Intellectualist Opportunism in Social-Democracy.................. 186
7 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA. The
Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale
Industry....................... 194
Preface to the Second Edition............. 194
AGAINST BOYCOTT. Notes of a Social-Democratic Publicist
(Excerpts)....................... 199
V........................ 199
VII ........................ 206
MARXISM AND REVISIONISM............. 208
MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIC-CRITICISM. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (Excerpt)...... 217
Chapter Six. Empiric-Criticism and Historical Materialism 217
4. Parties in Philosophy and Philosophical Blockheads 217
THE ATTITUDE OF THE WORKERS' PARTY TO RELIGION ........................ 229
DIFFERENCES IN THE EUROPEAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 241
CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM................. 247
REFORMISM IN THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT..................... 253
THE RIGHT OF NATIONS TO SELF-DETERMINATION (Excerpt)....................... 267
8. The Utopian Karl Marx and the Practical Rosa Luxemburg ....................... 267
ON THE SLOGAN FOR A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE 275 ON THE QUESTION OF DIALECTICS......... 280
THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION AND THE RIGHT OF
NATIONS TO SELF-DETERMINATION. Theses (Excerpt) 285
5. Marxism and Proudhonism on the National Question 285
THE DISCUSSION ON SELF-DETERMINATION SUMMED
UP (Excerpts) .................... 287
7. Marxism or Proudhonism?............. 287
9. Engels's Letter to Kautsky............ 295
IMPERIALISM AND THE SPLIT IN SOCIALISM ..... 29?
THE MILITARY PROGRAMME OF THE PROLETARIAN
REVOLUTION (Excerpt) ............... 319
THE TASKS OF THE PROLETARIAT IN OUR REVOLT TION (Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party) (Excerpt) 317
What Should Be the Name of Our Party^Qne That WiU Be
'•=-••,
8 Correct Scientifically and Help to Clarify the Mind of the
Proletariat Politically?............... 317
LETTERS ON TACTICS ................ 322
First Letter. Assessment of the Present Situation (Excerpt)
322
THE STATE AND REVOLUTION. The Marxist Theory of the
State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution
(Excerpts)....................... 329
Chapter II. The State and Revolution. The Experience of
1848-51....................... 329
3. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852 . . 329
Chapter V. The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of
the State...................... 331
1. Presentation of the Question by Marx . ;...... 331
2. The Transition from Capitalism to Communism . . . 334
3. The First Phase of Communist Society....... 339
4. The Higher Phase of Communist Society...... 342
MARXISM AND INSURRECTION. A Letter to the Central
Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. (B.)........... 350
ADVICE OF AN ONLOOKER ............. 356
PROPHETIC WORDS ................. 359
THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RENEGADE KAUTSKY (Excerpt)............. . 365
How Kautsky Turned Marx into a Common Liberal ... 365
THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY........................ 376
GREETINGS TO THE HUNGARIAN WORKERS .... 385
A GREAT BEGINNING. Heroism of the Workers in the Rear.
``Communist Subbotniks" (Excerpt)........... 390
THE STATE. A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University,
July 11, 1919..................... 406
ECONOMICS AND POLITICS IN THE ERA OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.......... 425
THE TASKS OF THE YOUTH LEAGUES. Speech Delivered
at the Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young
Communist League, October 2, 1920 ......... 436
OUR REVOLUTION (Apropos of N. Sukhanov's Notes) ... 453
ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MILITANT MATERIALISM 457
Notes ......................... 467
Name Index ,..,,,,,..,.,,........ 499
~
Karl Marx
[9] __ALPHA_LVL1__ Karl MarxMarx, Karl, was born on May 5, 1818 (new style), in the city of Trier (Rhenish Prussia). His father was a lawyer, a Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. The family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary. After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy. He concluded his university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. In Berlin, he belonged to the circle of "Left Hegelians" (Bruno Bauer and others) who sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusions from Hegel's philosophy.
After graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to become a professor. However, the reactionary policy of the government, which deprived Ludwig Feuerbach of his chair in 1832, refused to allow him to return to the university in 1836, and in 1841 forbade young Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn, made Marx abandon the idea of an academic career. Left Hegelian views were making rapid headway in Germany at the time. Ludwig Feuerbach began to criticise theology, particularly after 1836, and turn to materialism, which in 1841 gained the ascendancy in his philosophy (The Essence of Christianity). The year 1843 saw the appearance of his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. "One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect" of these books, Engels subsequently wrote of these works of Feuerbach. "We [i.e., the Left Hegelians, including Marx] all became at once Feuerbachians." At that time, some radical 10 __RUNNING_HEADER__ KARL MARX bourgeois in the Rhineland, who were in touch with the Left Hegelians, founded, in Cologne, ar opposition paper called Rheinische Zeitung (the first issue appeared on January 1, 1842). Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became editor-- inchief and moved from Bonn to Cologne. The newspaper's revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx's editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple censorship on the paper, and then on January 1, 1843, decided to suppress it. Marx had to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843. Of the major articles Marx contributed to Rheinische Zeitung, Engels notes, in addition to those indicated below (see Bibliography^^1^^), an article on the condition of peasant winegrowers in the Moselle Valley.^^2^^ Marx's journalistic activities convinced him that he was insufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he zealously set out to study it.
In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, Jenny von Westphalen, a childhood friend he had become engaged to while still a student. His wife came of a reactionary family of the Prussian nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during a most reactionary period---1850-58. In the autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in order to publish a radical journal abroad, together with Arnold Ruge (1802-80; Left Hegelian; in prison in 1825-30; a political exile following 1848, and a Bismarckian after 1866-70). Only one issue of this journal, Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, appeared; publication was discontinued owing to_^ the difficulty of secretly distributing it in Germany, and to disagreement with Ruge. Marx's articles in this journal showed that he was already a revolutionary, who advocated "merciless criticism of everything existing", and in particular the "criticism by weapon",^^3^^ and appealed to the masses and to the proletariat.
In September 1844 Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx's closest friend. They both took a most active part in the then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of particular importance at the time was Proudhon's doctrine, which 11 Marx pulled to pieces in his Poverty of Philosophy, 1847); waging a vigorous struggle against the various doctrines of petty-bourgeois socialism, they worked out the theory and tactics of revolutionary proletarian socialism, or communism (Marxism). See Marx's works of this period, 1844-48, in the Bibliography. At the insistent request of the Prussian Government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, as a dangerous revolutionary. He went to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League*; they took a prominent part in the League's Second Congress (London, November 1847), at whose request they drew up the celebrated Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848. With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new world-conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat---the creator of a new, communist society.
On the outbreak of the Revolution of February 1848,6 Marx was banished from Belgium. He returned to Paris, whence, after the March Revolution,^^6^^ he went to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published from June 1, 1848 to May 19, 1849, with Marx as editorin-chief. The new theory was splendidly confirmed by the course of the revolutionary events of 1848-49, just as it has been subsequently confirmed by all proletarian and democratic movements in all countries of the world. The victorious counter-revolutionaries first instigated court proceedings against Marx (he was acquitted on February 9, 1849), and then banished him from Germany (May 16, 1849). First Marx went to Paris, was again banished after the demonstration of June 13, 1849,^^7^^ and then went to London, where he lived till his death.
His life as a political exile was a very hard one, as the correspondence between Marx and Engels (published in 1913) clearly reveals. Poverty weighed heavily on Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels's constant and selfless financial aid, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital but would have inevitably been crushed 12 by want. Moreover, the prevailing doctrines and trends of petty-bourgeois socialism, and of non-proletarian socialism in general, forced Marx to wage a continuous and merciless struggle and sometimes to repel the most savage and monstrous personal attacks (Herr Vogfi). Marx, who stood aloof from circles of political exiles, developed his materialist theory in a number of historical works (see Bibliography), devoting himself mainly to a study of political economy. Marx revolutionised this science (see "The Marxist Doctrine", below) in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (Vol. I, 1867).
The revival of the democratic movements in the late fifties and in the sixties recalled Marx to practical activity. In 1864 (September 28) the International Working Men's Association---the celebrated First International---was founded in London. Marx was the heart and soul of this organisation, and author of its first Address^^9^^ and of a host of resolutions, declarations and manifestos. In uniting the labour movement of various countries, striving to channel into joint activity the various forms of non-proletarian, pre-Marxist socialism (Mazzini, Proudhon, Bakunin, liberal trade-- unionism in Britain, Lassallean vacillations to the right in Germany, etc.), and in combating the theories of all these sects and schools, Marx hammered out a uniform tactic for the proletarian struggle of the working class in the various countries. Following the downfall of the Paris Commune (1871)---of which Marx gave such a profound, clear-cut, brilliant, effective and revolutionary analysis (The Civil War in France, 1871)---and the Bakuninist-caused cleavage in the International, the latter organisation could no longer exist in Europe. After the Hague Congress of the International (1872), Marx had the General Council of the International transferred to New York. The First International had played its historical part, and now made way for a period of a far greater development of the labour movement in all countries in the world, a period in which the movement grew in scope, and mass socialist working-class parties in individual national states were formed.
Marx's health was undermined by his strenuous work in the International and his still more strenuous theoretical oc_ cupations. He continued work on the refashioning of polit 13 ical economy and on the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages (Russian, for instance). However, ill-health prevented him from completing Capital.
His wife died on December 2, 1881, and on March 14, 1883, Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London. Of Marx's children some died in childhood in London, when the family were living in destitute circumstances. Three daughters married English and French socialists: Eleanor Aveling, Laura Lafargue and Jenny Longuet. The latter's son is a member of the French Socialist Party.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Marxist Doctrine __ALPHA_LVL3__ [introduction.]Marxism is the system of Marx's views and teachings. Marx was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general. Acknowledged even by his opponents, the remarkable consistency and integrity of Marx's views, whose totality constitutes modern materialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory and programme of the working-class movement in all the civilised countries of the world, make it incumbent on us to present a brief outline of his world-conception in general, prior to giving an exposition of the principal content of Marxism, namely, Marx's economic doctrine.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ Philosophical MaterialismBeginning with the years 1844-45, when his views took shape, Marx was a materialist and especially a follower of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose weak points he subsequently saw only in his materialism being insufficiently consistent and comprehensive. To Marx Feuerbach's historic and `` epochmaking'' significance lay in his having resolutely broken 14 with Hegel's idealism and in his proclamation of materialism, which already "in the eighteenth century, particularly FrenchJ materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against ... religion and theology, but also ... against all metaphysics", (in the sense of "drunken speculation" as distinct from "sober philosophy"). (The Holy Family, in Literarischer Nachlass.) "To Hegel..." wrote Marx, "the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world.... With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought" (Capital, Vol. I, Afterword to the Second Edition). In full conformity with this materialist philosophy of Marx's, and expounding it, Frederick Engels wrote in Anti-Dnhring (read by Marx in the manuscript): "The unity of the world does not consist in its being.... The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved ... by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science...." " Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be.... But if the ... question is raised: what thought and consciousness really are, and where they come from; it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of Nature, which has developed in and along with its environment; hence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of Nature, do not contradict the rest of Nature's interconnections but are in correspondence with them....
``Hegel was an idealist, that is to say, the thoughts within his mind were to him not the more or less abstract images [Abbilder, reflections; Engels sometimes speaks of `` imprints''] of real things and processes, but, on the contrary, things and their development were to him only the images, made real, of the `Idea' existing somewhere or other before the world existed." In his Ludwig Feuerbach---which expounded his own and Marx's views on Feuerbach's philosophy, and was sent to the printers after he had reread an old manuscript Marx and himself had written in 15 1844--45 on Hegel, Feuerbach and the materialist conception of history---Engels wrote: "The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is the relation of thinking and being ... spirit to Nature ... which is primary, spirit or Nature.... The answers which the philos, ophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to Nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded Nature as primary, belonged to the various schools of materialism." Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to confusion. Marx decidedly rejected, not only idealism, which is always linked in one way or another with religion, but also the views---especially widespread in our day---of Hume and Kant, agnosticism, criticism, and positivism in their various forms; he considered that philosophy a ``reactionary'' concession to idealism, and at best a " shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world".^^10^^ On this question, see, besides the works by Engels and Marx mentioned above, a letter Marx wrote to Engels on December 12, 1868, in which, referring to an utterance by the naturalist Thomas Huxley, which was "more materialistic" than usual, and to his recognition that "as long as we actually observe and think, we cannot possibly get away from materialism", Marx reproached Huxley for leaving a ``loop-hole'' for agnosticism, for Humism. It is particularly important to note Marx's view on the relation between freedom and necessity: " Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. 'Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood'" (Engels in Anti-Duhring). This means recognition of the rule of objective laws in Nature and of the dialectical transformation of necessity into freedom (in the same manner as the transformation of the uncognised but cognisable ``thing-in-itself'' into the `` thingfor-us'', of the "essence of things" into ``phenomena''). Marx and Engels considered that the ``old'' materialism, including that of Feuerbach (and still more the ``vulgar'' materialism of Biichner, Vogt and Moleschott), contained the following major shortcomings: (1) this materialism was " predominantly mechanical", failing to take account of the latest 16 developments in chemistry and biology (today it would be necessary to add: and in the electrical theory of matter); (2) the old materialism was non-historical and non-dialectical (metaphysical, in the meaning of anti-dialectical), and did not adhere consistently and comprehensively to the standpoint of development; (3) it regarded the "human essence" in the abstract, not as the "complex of all" (concretely and historically determined) "social relations", and therefore merely ``interpreted'' the world, whereas it was a question of ``changing'' it, i.e., it did not understand the importance of "revolutionary practical activity''.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ DialecticsAs the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx and Engels the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy. They thought that any other formulation of the principle of development, of evolution, was one-sided and poor in content, and could only distort and mutilate the actual course of development (which often proceeds by leaps, and via catastrophes and revolutions) in Nature and in society. "Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics [from the destruction of idealism, including Hegelianism] and apply it in the materialist conception of Nature.... Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written, before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature's process is dialectical and not metaphysical.''^^11^^
``The great basic thought," Engels writes, "that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away ... this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this 17 generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things.... For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain." Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is "the science of the general laws.of motion, both of the external world and of human thought",^^12^^
This revolutionary aspect of Hegel's philosophy was adopted and developed by Marx. Dialectical materialism "does not need any philosophy standing above the other sciences". From previous philosophy there remains "the science of thought and its laws---formal logic and dialectics".^^13^^ Dialectics, as understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel, includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology, which, too, must regard its subject matter historically, studying and generalising the origin and development of knowledge, the transition from raon-knowledge to knowledge .-
In our times the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegel's philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis ("the negation of negation"), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; "breaks in continuity"; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---0895 18 of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws---these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one. (Gf. Marx's letter to Engels of January 8, 1868, in which he ridicules Stein's "wooden trichotomies", which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist dialectics.)
__ALPHA_LVL3__ The Materialist Conception of HistoryA realisation of the inconsistency, incompleteness, and one-sidedness of the old materialism convinced Marx of the necessity of "bringing the science of society ... into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon".^^14^^ Since materialism in general explains consciousness as the outcome of being, and not conversely, then materialism as applied to the social life of mankind has to explain social consciousness as the outcome of social being. "Technology," Marx writes (Capital, Vol. I), "discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the immediate process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them." In the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and its history, in the following words:
``In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.
``The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on 19 the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or---what is but a legal expression for the same thing---with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic---in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
``Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.... In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society" (cf. Marx's brief formulation in a letter to Engels dated July 7, 1866: "Our theory that the organisation of labour is determined by the means of production").
The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or more correctly, the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena, removed the two chief shortcomings in earlier historical theories. In the first place, the latter at best examined only the ideological motives in the historical activities of human beings, without investigating the origins of those motives, or ascertaining the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations, or seeing the roots of these relations in the degree of development reached by material production; in the second place, the earlier theories did not embrace the activities of the masses of the __PRINTERS_P_19_COMMENT__ 2* 20 population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses, and the changes in those conditions. At best, pre-Marxist ``sociology'' and historiography brought forth an accumulation of raw facts, collected at random, and a description of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of society, by discarding subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of a particular ``dominant'' idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-- economic systems. People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e., what gives rise to the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings? What is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all of man's historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ The Class StruggleIt is common knowledge that, in any given society, the strivings of some of its members conflict with the strivings of others, that social life is full of contradictions, and that history reveals a struggle between nations and societies, as well as within nations and societies, and, besides, an alternation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline. Marxism has provided the guidance, i.e., the theory of the class struggle, for the discovery of the laws governing this seeming maze and chaos. It is only a study of the sum of the strivings of 21 all the members of a given society or group of societies that can lead to a scientific definition of the result of those strivings. Now the conflicting strivings stem from the difference in the position and mode of life of the classes into which each society is divided. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (with the exception of the history of the primitive community, Engels added subsequently). "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes---The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." Ever since the Great French Revolution, European history has, in a number of countries, tellingly revealed what actually lies at the bottom of events--- the struggle of classes. The Restoration^^15^^ period in France already produced a number of historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers) who, in summing up what was taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was the key to all French history. The modern period---that of the complete victory of the bourgeoisie, representative institutions, extensive (if not universal) suffrage, a cheap daily press, that is widely circulated among the masses, etc., a period of powerful and ever-expanding unions of workers and unions of employers, etc.---has shown even more strikingly (though sometimes in a very one-sided, ``peaceful'' and ``constitutional'' form) the class struggle as the mainspring of events. The following passage from Marx's Communist Manifesto will show us what Marx demanded of social science as regards an objective analysis of the position of 22 each class in modern society, with reference to an analysis of each class's conditions of development: "Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat." In a number of historical works (see Bibliography), Marx gave brilliant and profound examples of materialist historiography, of an analysis of the position of each individual class, and sometimes of various groups or strata within a class, showing plainly why and how "every class struggle is a political struggle".^^16^^ The above-quoted passage is an illustration of what a complex network of social relations and transitional stages from one class to another, from the past to the future, was analysed by Marx so as to determine the resultant of historical development.
Marx's economic doctrine is the most profound, comprehensive and detailed confirmation and application of his theory.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Marx's Economic Doctrine __ALPHA_LVL3__ [introduction.]``It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society", i.e., capitalist, bourgeois society, says Marx in the preface to Capital. An investigation into the relations of production in a given, historically defined society, in their inception, development, and decline---such is the content of Marx's economic doctrine. In capitalist society the production of commodities is predominant, and Marx's analysis therefore begins with an analysis of commodity.
23 __ALPHA_LVL3__ ValueA commodity is, in the first place, a thing that satisfies a human want; in the second place, it is a thing that can be exchanged for another thing. The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. Exchange-value (or simply, value) is first of all the ratio, the proportion, in which a certain number of use-values of one kind can be exchanged for a certain number of use-values of another kind. Daily experience shows us that millions upon millions of such exchanges are constantly equating with one another every kind of use-value, even the most diverse and incomparable. Now, what is there in common between these various things, things constantly equated with one another in a definite system of social relations? Their common feature is that they are products of labour. In exchanging products, people equate the most diverse kinds of labour. The production of commodities is a system of social relations in which individual producers create diverse products (the social division of labour), and in which all these products are equated to one another in the process of exchange. Consequently, what is common to all commodities is not the concrete labour of a definite branch of production, not labour of one particular kind, but abstract human labour---human labour in general. All the labour power of a given society, as represented in the sum total of the values of all commodities, is one and the same human labour power. Thousands upon thousands of millions of acts of exchange prove this. Consequently, each particular commodity represents only a certain share of the socially necessary labour time. The magnitude of value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour, or by the labour time that is socially necessary for the production of a given commodity, of a given use-value. "Whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.''^^17^^ As one of the earlier economists said, value is a relation between two persons; only he should have added: a relation concealed beneath a material wrapping. We can understand what value 24 is only when we consider it from the standpoint of the system of social relations of production in a particular historical type of society, moreover, of relations that manifest themselves in the mass phenomenon of exchange, a phenomenon which repeats itself thousands upon thousands of times. "As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.''^^18^^ After making a detailed analysis of the twofold character of the labour incorporated in commodities, Marx goes on to analyse the form of value and money. Here, Marx's main task is to study the origin of the money form of value, to study the historical process of the development of exchange, beginning with individual and incidental acts of exchange (the "elementary or accidental form of value", in which a given quantity of one commodity is exchanged for a. given quantity of another), passing on to the universal form of value, in which a number of different commodities are exchanged for one and the same particular commodity, and ending with the money form of value, when gold becomes that particular commodity, the universal equivalent. As the highest product of the development of exchange and commodity production, money masks, conceals, the social character of all individual labour, the social link between individual producers united by the market. Marx analyses the various functions of money in very great detail; it is important to note here in particular (as in the opening chapters of Capital in general) that what seems to be an abstract and at times purely deductive mode of exposition deals in reality with a gigantic collection of factual material on the history of the development of exchange and commodity production. "If we consider money, its existence implies a definite stage in the exchange of commodities. The particular functions of money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard or as universal money, point, according to the extent and relative preponderance of the one function or the other, to very different stages in the process of social production" (Capital, Vol. I).
'
25 __ALPHA_LVL3__ Surplus ValueAt a certain stage in the development of commodity production money becomes transformed into capital. The formula of commodity circulation was G---M---G ( commodity---money---commodity), i.e., the sale of one commodity for the purpose of buying another. The general formula of capital, on the contrary, is M---C---M, i.e., purchase for the purpose of selling (at a profit). The increase over the original value of the money that is put into circulation is called by Marx surplus value. The fact of this ``growth'' of money in capitalist circulation is common knowledge. Indeed, it is this ``growth'' which transforms money into capital, as a special and historically determined social relation of production. Surplus value cannot arise out of commodity circulation, for the latter knows only the exchange of equivalents; neither can it arise out of price increases, for the mutual losses and gains of buyers and sellers would equalise one another, whereas what we have here is not an individual phenomenon but a mass, average and social phenomenon. To obtain surplus value, the owner of money "must ... find ... in the market a commodity, whose usevalue possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value"^^15^^---a commodity whose process of consumption is at the same time a process of the creation of value. Such a .commodity exists---human labour power. Its consumption is labour, and labour creates value. The owner of money buys labour power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labour time requisite for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family). Having bought labour power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day---twelve hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (`` necessary'' labour time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (``surplus'' labour time), he creates `` surplus'' product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay. Therefore, from the standpoint of the process of production, two parts must be distinguished in capital: constant capital^vwhich is expended on means of production 26 (machinery, tools, raw materials, etc.), whose value, without any change, is transferred (immediately or part by part) to the finished product; secondly, variable capital, which is expended on labour power. The value of this latter capital is not invariable, but grows in the labour process, creating surplus value. Therefore, to express the degree of capital's exploitation of labour power, surplus value must be compared, not with the entire capital but only with the variable capital. Thus, in the example just given, the rate of surplus value, as Marx calls this ratio, will be 6:6, i.e., 100 per cent.
There were two historical prerequisites for capital to arise: first, the accumulation of certain sums of money in the hands of individuals under conditions of a relatively high level of development of commodity production in general; secondly, the existence of a worker who is ``free'' in a double sense: free of all constraint or restriction on the sale of his labour power, and freed from the land and all means of production in general, a free and unattached labourer, a ``proletarian'', who cannot subsist except by selling his labour power.
There are two main ways of increasing surplus value: lengthening the working day ("absolute surplus value"), and reducing the necessary working day ("relative surplus value"). In analysing the former, Marx gives a most impressive picture of the struggle of the working class for a shorter working day and of interference by the state authority to lengthen the working day (from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth) and to reduce it (factory legislation in the nineteenth century). Since the appearance of Capital, the history of the working-class movement in all civilised countries of the world has provided a wealth of new facts amplifying this picture.
Analysing the production of relative surplus value, Marx investigates the three fundamental historical stages in capitalism's increase of the productivity of labour: (1) simple co-operation; (2) the division of labour, and manufacture; (3) machinery and large-scale industry. How profoundly Marx has here revealed the basic and typical features of capitalist development is shown incidentally by the fact that investigations into the handicraft industries of Russia furnish abundant material illustrating the first two of the 27 mentioned stages. The revolutionising effect of large-scale machine industry, as described by Marx in 1867, has revealed itself in a number of ``new'' countries (Russia, Japan, etc.) in the course of the half-century that has since elapsed.
To continue. New and important in the highest degree is Marx's analysis of the accumulation of capital, i.e., the transformation of a part of surplus value into capital, and its use, not for satisfying the personal needs or whims of the capitalist, but for new production. Marx revealed the error made by all earlier classical political economists ( beginning with Adam Smith), who assumed that the entire surplus value which is transformed into capital goes to form variable capital. In actual fact, it is divided into means of production and variable capital. Of tremendous importance to the process of development of capitalism and its transformation into socialism is the more rapid growth of the constant capital share (of the total capital) as compared with the variable capital share.
By speeding up the supplanting of workers by machinery and by creating wealth at one extreme and poverty at the other, the accumulation of capital also gives rise to what is called the "reserve army of labour", to the "relative surplus" of workers, or "capitalist overpopulation", which assumes the most diverse forms and enables capital to expand production extremely rapidly. In conjunction with credit facilities and the accumulation of capital in the form of means of production, this incidentally is the key to an understanding of the crises of overproduction which occur periodically in capitalist countries---at first at an average of every ten years, and later at more lengthy and less definite intervals. From the accumulation of capital under capitalism we should distinguish what is known as primitive accumulation: the forcible divorcement of the worker from the means of production, the driving of the peasants off the land, the stealing of communal lands, the system of colonies and national debts, protective tariffs, and the like. " Primitive accumulation" creates the ``free'' proletarian at one extreme, and the owner of money, the capitalist, at the other.
The "historical tendency of capitalist accumulation" is described by Marx in the following celebrated words: "The expropriation of the immediate producers is accomplished 28 with merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property [of the peasant and handicraftsman], that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouringindividual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others.... That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and nourished along with, and under, it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" (Capital, Vol. I).
Also new and important in the highest degree is the analysis Marx gives, in Volume Two of Capital, of the reproduction of aggregate social capital. Here, too, Marx deals, 29 not with an individual phenomenon but with a mass phenomenon; not with a fractional part of the economy of society, but with that economy as a whole. Correcting the aforementioned error of the classical economists, Marx divides the whole of social production into two big sections: (I) production of the means of production, and (II) production of articles of consumption, and examines in detail, with numerical examples, the circulation of the aggregate social capital---both when reproduced in its former dimensions and in the case of accumulation. Volume Three of Capital solves the problem of how the average rate of profit is formed on the basis of the law of value. The immense stride forward made by economic science in the person of Marx consists in his having conducted an analysis, from the standpoint of mass economic phenomena, of the social economy as a whole, not from the standpoint of individual cases or of the external and superficial aspects of competition, to which vulgar political economy and the modern "theory of marginal utility"^^20^^ frequently restrict themselves. Marx first analyses the origin of surplus value, and then goes on to consider its division into profit, interest, and ground rent. Profit is the ratio between surplus value and the total capital invested in an undertaking. Capital with a "high organic composition" (i.e., with a preponderance of constant capital over variable capital in excess of the social average) yields a rate of profit below the average; capital with a "low organic composition" yields a rate of profit above the average. Competition among capitalists, and their freedom to transfer their capital from one branch to another, will in both cases reduce the rate of profit to the average. The sum total of the values of all the commodities in a given society coincides with the sum total of the prices of the commodities, but, in individual undertakings and branches of production, as a result of competition, commodities are sold, not at their values but at the prices of production (or production prices), which are equal to the capital expended plus the average profit.
In this way, the well-known and indisputable fact of the divergence between prices and values and of the equalisation of profits is fully explained by Marx on the basis of the law of value, since the sum total of values of all 30 commodities coincides with the sum total of prices. However, the equating of (social) value to (individual) prices does not take place simply and directly, but in a very complex way. It is quite natural that in a society of separate producers of commodities, who are united only by the market, a conformity to law can be only an average, social, mass manifestation, with individual deviations in either direction mutually compensating one another.
A rise in the productivity of labour implies a more rapid growth of constant capital as compared with variable capital. Inasmuch as surplus value is a function of variable capital alone, it is obvious that the rate of profit (the ratio of surplus value to the whole capital, not to its variable part alone) tends to fall. Marx makes a detailed analysis of this tendency and of a number of circumstances that conceal or counteract it. Without pausing to deal with the extremely interesting sections of Volume Three of Capital devoted to usurer's capital, commercial capital and money capital, we must pass on to the most important section---the theory of ground rent. Since the area of land is limited and, in capitalist countries, the land is all held by individual private owners, the price of production of agricultural products is determined by the cost of production, not on soil of average quality but on the worst soil; not under average conditions but under the worst conditions of delivery of produce to the market. The difference between this price and the price of production on better soil (or in better conditions) constitutes differential rent. Analysing this in detail, and showing how it arises out of the difference in fertility of different plots of land, and out of the difference in the amount of capital invested in land, Marx fully reveals (see also Theories of Surplus-Value, in which the criticism of Rodbertus is most noteworthy) the error of Ricardo, who considered that differential rent is derived only when there is a successive transition from better land to worse. On the contrary, there may be inverse transitions, land may pass from one category into others (owing to advances in agricultural techniques, the growth of towns, and so on), and the notorious "law of diminishing returns", which charges Nature with the defects, limitations and contradictions of capitalism, is profoundly erroneous. Further, the equalisation of 31 profit in all branches of industry and the national economy in general presupposes complete freedom of competition and the free flow of capital from one branch to another. However, the private ownership of land creates monopoly, which hinders that free flow. Because of that monopoly, the products of agriculture, where a lower organic composition of capital obtains, and consequently an individually higher rate of profit, do not enter into the quite free process of the equalisation of the rate of profit. As a monopolist, the landowner can keep the price above the average, and this monopoly price gives rise to absolute rent. Differential rent cannot be done away with under capitalism, but absolute rent can---for instance, by the nationalisation of the land, by making it state property. That would undermine the monopoly of private landowners, and would mean the more consistent and full operation of freedom of competition in agriculture. That is why, as Marx points out, bourgeois radicals have again and again in the course of history advanced this progressive bourgeois demand for nationalisation of the land, a demand which, however, frightens most of the bourgeoisie, because it would too closely affect another monopoly, one that is particularly important and ``sensitive'' today---the monopoly of the means of production in general. (A remarkably popular, concise, and clear exposition of his theory of the average rate of profit on capital and of absolute ground rent is given by Marx himself in a letter to Engels, dated August 2, 1862. See Briefwechsel, Vol. 3, pp. 77-81; also the letter of August 9,1862, ibid., pp. 86-87.) With reference to the history of ground rent it is also important to note Marx's analysis showing how labour rent (the peasant creates surplus product by working on the lord's land) is transformed into rent paid in produce or in kind (the peasant creates surplus product on his own land and hands it over to the landlord because of "non-economic constraint"), then into money-rent (rent in kind, which is converted into money---the obrok of old Russia---as a result of the development of commodity production), and finally into capitalist rent, when the peasant is replaced by the agricultural entrepreneur, who cultivates the soil with the help of hired labour. In connection with this analysis of the "genesis of capitalistic ground rent", note should be taken 32 of a number of profound ideas (of particular importance to backward countries like Russia) expressed by Marx regarding the evolution of capitalism in agriculture. "The transformation of rent in kind into money-rent is furthermore not only inevitably accompanied, but even anticipated, by the formation of a class of property]ess day-labourers, who hire themselves out for money. During their genesis, when this new class appears but sporadically, the custom necessarily develops among the more prosperous peasants, subject to rent payments, of exploiting agricultural wage-labourers for their own account, much as in feudal times, when the more well-to-do peasant serfs themselves also held serfs. In this way, they gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating a certain amount of wealth and themselves becom- ing transformed into future capitalists. The old self-- employed possessors of land themselves thus give rise to a nursery school for capitalist tenants, whose development is conditioned by the general development of capitalist production beyond the bounds of the countryside" (Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 332). "The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home market" ( Capital, Vol. I, p. 778). In their turn, the impoverishment and ruin of the rural population play a part in the creation, for capital, of a reserve army of labour. In every capitalist country "part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing [i.e., non-agricultural] proletariat.... This source of relative surplus population is thus constantly flowing.... The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism" (Capital, Vol. I, p. 668). The peasant's private ownership of the land he tills is the foundation of small-scale production and the condition for its prospering and achieving the classical form. But such small-scale production is compatible only with a narrow and primitive framework of production and society. Under capitalism the "exploitation of the peasants differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit 33 the individual peasants through mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes" (The Class Struggles in France). "The small holding of the peasant is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the tiller of the soil himself to see how he can extract his wages" (The Eighteenth Brumaire). As a rule the peasant cedes to capitalist society, i.e., to the capitalist class, even a part of the wages, sinking "to the level of the Irish tenant farmer---all under the pretence of being a private proprietor" (The Class Struggles in France). What is "one of the reasons why grain prices are lower in countries with predominant small-peasant land proprietorship than in countries with a capitalist mode of production"? (Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 340.) It is that the peasant hands over gratis to society (i.e., the capitalist class) a part of his surplus product. "This lower price [of grain and other agricultural produce] is consequently a result of the producers' poverty and by no means of their labour productivity" (Capital, Vol.Ill,p.340). Under capitalism the small-holding system, which is the normal form of small-scale production, degenerates, collapses, and perishes. "Proprietorship of land parcels, by its very nature, excludes the development of social productive forces of labour, social forms of labour, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle raising, and the progressive application of science. Usury and a taxation system must impoverish it everywhere. The expenditure of capital in the price of the land withdraws this capital from cultivation. An infinite fragmentation of means of production, and isolation of the producers themselves." (Co-operative societies, i.e., associations of small peasants, while playing an extremely progressive bourgeois role, only weaken this tendency, without eliminating it; nor must it be forgotten that these co-operative societies do much for the well-to-do peasants, and very little---next to nothing---for the mass of poor peasants; then the associations themselves become exploiters of hired labour.) "Monstrous waste of human energy. Progressive deterioration of conditions of production and increased prices of means of production---an inevitable law of proprietorship of parcels." In agriculture, as in industry, capitalism transforms the process of production only at the __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3-0895 34 price of the "martyrdom of the producer". "The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance, while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil.... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth--- the soil and the labourer" (Capital, Vol. I, end of Chapter 13).
__ALPHA_LVL3__ SocialismFrom the foregoing it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development of contemporary society. The socialisation of labour, which is advancing ever more rapidly in thousands of forms and has manifested itself very strikingly, during the half-century since the death of Marx, in the growth of large-scale production, capitalist cartels, syndicates and trusts, as well as in the gigantic increase in the dimensions and power of finance capital, provides the principal material foundation for the inevitable advent of socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat, which has been trained by capitalism itself. The proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"). The socialisation of production cannot but lead to the means of production becoming the property of society, to the "expropriation of the expropriators". A tremendous rise in labour productivity, a shorter working day, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins, of small-- 35 scale, primitive and disunited production by collective and improved labour---such are the direct consequences of this transformation. Capitalism breaks for all time the ties between agriculture and industry, but at the same time, through its highest development, it prepares new elements of those ties, a union between industry and agriculture based on the conscious application of science and the concentration of collective labour, and on a redistribution of the human population (thus putting an end both to rural backwardness, isolation and barbarism, and to the unnatural concentration of vast masses of people in big cities). A new form of family, new conditions in the status of women and in the upbringing of the younger generation are prepared by the highest forms of present-day capitalism: the labour of women and children and the break-up of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume the most terrible, disastrous, and repulsive forms in modern society. Nevertheless, "modern industry, by assigning as it does, an important part in the socially organised process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery" ( Capital, Vol. I, end of Chapter 13). The factory system contains "the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of social production, but as the only method of producing fully __PRINTERS_P_35_COMMENT__ 3* 36 developed human beings" (ibid.). Marx's socialism places the problems of nationality and of the state on the same historical footing, not only in the sense of explaining the past but also in the sense of a bold forecast of the future and of bold practical action for its achievement. Nations are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social development. The working class could not grow strong, become mature and take shape without "constituting itself within the nation", without being `` national'' ("though not in the bourgeois sense of the word"). The development of capitalism, however, breaks down national barriers more and more, does away with national seclusion, and substitutes class antagonisms for national antagonisms. It is, therefore, perfectly true of the developed capitalist countries that "the workingmen have no country" and that "united action" by the workers, of the civilised countries at least, "is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat" (Communist Manifesto^^21^^). The state, which is organised coercion, inevitably came into being at a definite stage in the development of society, when the latter had split into irreconcilable classes, and could not exist without an ``authority'' ostensibly standing above society, and to a certain degree separate from society. Arising out of class contradictions, the state becomes "...the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a work in which the writer expounds his own views and Marx's).^^22^^ Even the democratic republic, the freest and most progressive form of the bourgeois state, does not eliminate this fact in any way, but merely modifies its form (the links between the government and the stock exchange, the corruption---direct and indirect---of officialdom and the press, etc.). By leading to the abolition of classes, socialism 37 will thereby lead to the abolition of the state as well. "The first act," Engels writes in Anti-Duhring, "by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of society as a whole---the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society---is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. The state interference in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the direction of the processes of production. The state is not `abolished', it withers away." "The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).^^23^^
Finally, as regards the attitude of Marx's socialism towards the small peasantry, which will continue to exist in the period of the expropriation of the expropriators, we must refer to a declaration made by Engels, which expresses Marx's views: "...when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation) , as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then of course we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him even today"^^21^^ (Engels, The Peasant Question in France and Germany, p. 17, published by Alexeyeva; there are errors in the Russian translation. Original in Die Neue Zeitzf>).
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Tactics of the Class StruggleAfter examining, as early as 1844-45, one of the main shortcomings in the earlier materialism, namely, its inability to understand the conditions or appreciate the importance 38 of practical revolutionary activity, Marx, along with his theoretical work, devoted unremitting attention, throughout his lifetime, to the tactical problems of the proletariat's class struggle. An immense amount of material bearing on this is contained in all the works of Marx, particularly in the four volumes of his correspondence with Engels, published in 1913. This material is still far from having been brought together, collected, examined and studied. We shall therefore have to confine ourselves here to the most general and brief remarks, emphasising that Marx justly considered that, without this aspect, materialism is incomplete, one-sided, and lifeless. The fundamental task of proletarian tactics was defined by Marx in strict conformity with all the postulates of his materialist-dialectical Weltanschauung. Only an objective consideration of the sum total of the relations between absolutely all the classes in a given society, and consequently a consideration of the objective stage of development reached by that society and of the relations between it and other societies, can serve as a basis for the correct tactics of an advanced class. At the same time, all classes and all countries are regarded, not statically, but dynamically, i.e., not in a state of immobility, but in motion (whose laws are determined by the economic conditions of existence of each class). Motion, in its turn, is regarded from the standpoint, not only of the past, but also of the future, and that not in the vulgar sense it is understood in by the ``evolutionists'', who see only slow changes, but dialectically: "...in developments of such magnitude twenty years are no more than a day," Marx wrote to Engels, "though later on there may come days in which twenty years are embodied" (Brief wechsel, Vol. 3, p. 127). At each stage of development, at each moment, proletarian tactics must take account of this objectively inevitable dialectics of human history, on the one hand, utilising the periods of political stagnation or of sluggish, so-called ``peaceful'' development in order to develop the class-consciousness, strength and militancy of the advanced class, and, on the other hand, directing all the work of this utilisation towards the " ultimate aim" of that class's advance, towards creating in it the ability to find practical solutions for great tasks in the great days, in which "twenty years are embodied". Two 39 of Marx's arguments are of special importance in this connection: one of these is contained in The Poverty of Philosophy and concerns the economic struggle and economic organisations of the proletariat; the other is contained in the Communist Manifesto and concerns the political tasks of the proletariat. The former runs as follows: "Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance---combination.... Combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups... and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them [i.e., the workers] than that of wages.... In this struggle---a veritable civil war---all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character." Here we have the programme and tactics of the economic struggle and of the trade union movement for several decades to come, for all the lengthy period in which the proletariat will prepare its forces for the "coming battle". All this should be compared with numerous references by Marx and Engels to the example of the British labour movement, showing how industrial ``prosperity'' leads to attempts "to buy the proletariat" (Briefwechsel, Vol. 1, p. 136), to divert them from the struggle; how this prosperity in general "demoralises the workers" (Vol. 2, p. 218); how the British proletariat becomes ``bourgeoisified''---"this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie" (Vol. 2, p. 290); how its "revolutionary energy" oozes away (Vol. 3, p. 124); how it will be necessary to wait a more or less lengthy space of time before "the British workers will free themselves from their apparent bourgeois infection" (Vol. 3, p. 127); how the British labour movement "lacks the mettle of the Chartists" (1866; Vol. 3, p. 305); how the British workers' leaders are becoming a type midway between "a radical bourgeois and a worker" (in reference to Holyoak, Vol. 4, p. 209); how, owing to Britain's monopoly, and as long aa that monopoly lasts, "the British 40 workingman will not budge" (Vol. 4, p. 433). The tactics of the economic struggle, in connection with the general course (and outcome) of the working-class movement, are considered here from a remarkably broad, comprehensive, dialectical, and genuinely revolutionary standpoint.
The Communist Manifesto advanced a fundamental Marxist principle on the tactics of the political struggle: "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.''^^20^^ That was why, in 1848, Marx supported the party of the "agrarian revolution" in Poland, "that party which brought about the Cracow insurrection in 1846".^^27^^ In Germany, Marx, in 1848 and 1849, supported the extreme revolutionary democrats, and subsequently never retracted what he had then said about tactics. He regarded the German bourgeoisie as an element which was "inclined from the very beginning to betray the people" (only an alliance with the peasantry could have enabled the bourgeoisie to completely achieve its aims) "and compromise with the crowned representatives of the old society". Here is Marx's summing-up of the German bourgeoisie's class position in the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution---an analysis which, incidentally, is a sample of a materialism that examines society in motion, and, moreover, not only from the aspect of a motion that is backward: "Without faith in itself, without faith in the people, grumbling at those above, trembling before those below... intimidated by the world storm... no energy in any respect, plagiarism in every respect... without initiative ... an execrable old man who saw himself doomed to guide and deflect the first youthful impulses of a robust people in his own senile interests...." (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848; see Literarischer Nachlass, Vol. 3, p. 212.)^^28^^ About twenty years later, Marx declared, in a letter to Engels (Brief wechsel, Vol. 3, p. 224), that the Revolution of 1848 had failed because the bourgeoisie had preferred peace with slavery to the mere prospect of a fight for freedom. When the revolutionary period of 1848-49 ended, Marx opposed any attempt to play at revolution (his struggle against Schapper and Willich), and insisted on the 41 ability to work in the new phase, which in a quasi-`` peaceful'' way was preparing new revolutions. The spirit in which Marx wanted this work to be conducted is to be seen in his appraisal of the situation in Germany in 1856, the darkest period of reaction: "The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War" ( Briefwechsel, Vol. 2, p. 108). While the democratic (bourgeois) revolution in Germany was uncompleted, Marx focussed every attention, in the tactics of the socialist proletariat, on developing the democratic energy of the peasantry. He held that Lassalle's attitude was "objectively ... a betrayal of the whole workers' movement to Prussia" (Vol. 3, p. 210), incidentally because Lassalle was tolerant of the Junkers and Prussian nationalism. "In a predominantly agricultural country", Engels wrote in 1865, in exchanging views with Marx on their forthcoming joint declaration in the press, "...it is dastardly to make an exclusive attack on the bourgeoisie in the name of the industrial proletariat but never to devote a word to the patriarchal exploitation of the rural proletariat under the lash of the great feudal aristocracy" (Vol. 3, p. 217). From 1864 to 1870, when the period of the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany was coming to an end, a period in which the Prussian and Austrian exploiting classes were struggling to complete that revolution in one way or another from above, Marx not only rebuked Lassalle, who was coquetting with Bismarck, but also corrected Liebknecht, who had lapsed into ``Austrophilism'' and a defence of particularism; Marx demanded revolutionary tactics which would combat with equal ruthlessness both Bismarck and the Austrophiles, tactics which would not be adapted to the `` victor''---the Prussian Junker^^29^^---but would immediately renew the revolutionary struggle against him despite the conditions created by the Prussian military victories (Briefwechsel, Vol. 3, pp. 134,136,147,179, 204, 210, 215, 418, 437,440-41). In the celebrated Address of the International of September 9, 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat against an untimely uprising, but when an uprising nevertheless took place (1871), Marx enthusiastically hailed the revolutionary initiative of the masses, who were "storming heaven" 42 (Marx's letter to Kugelmann).^^30^^ From the standpoint of Marx's dialectical materialism, the defeat of revolutionary action in that situation, as in many others, was a lesser evil, in the general course and outcome of the proletarian struggle, than the abandonment of a position already occupied, than surrender without battle. Such a surrender would have demoralised the proletariat and weakened its militancy. While fully appreciating the use of legal means of struggle during periods of political stagnation and the domination of bourgeois legality, Marx, in 1877 and 1878, following the passage of the Anti-Socialist Law,^^31^^ sharply condemned Most's "revolutionary phrases"; no less sharply, if not more so, did he attack the opportunism that had for a time come over the official Social-Democratic Party, which did not at once display resoluteness, firmness, revolutionary spirit and a readiness to resort to an illegal struggle in response to the Anti-Socialist Law (Briefwechsel, Vol. 4, pp. 397, 404, 418, 422, 424; cf. also letters to Sorge).
July-November 1914
Vol. 21, pp. 46-79
__ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END]
__ALPHA_LVL1__
Frederick Engels
What a torch of reason ceased to burn, What a heart has ceased to beat!^^32^^
On August 5 (new style), 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world. From the time that fate brought Karl Marx and Frederick Engels together, the two friends devoted their life's work to a common cause. And so to understand what Frederick Engels has done for the proletariat, one must have a clear idea of the significance of Marx's teaching and work for the development of the contemporary working-class movement. Marx and Engels were the first to show that the working class and its demands are a necessary outcome of the present economic system, which together with the bourgeoisie inevitably creates and organises the proletariat. They showed that it is not the well-meaning efforts of noble-minded individuals, but the class struggle of the organised proletariat that will deliver humanity from the evils which now oppress it. In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others. And this will continue until the foundations of class struggle and of class domination---private property and anarchic social production---disappear. The interests of the proletariat demand the destruction of these foundations, and
Frederick Engels
44 __RUNNING_HEADER__ FREDERICK ENGELStherefore the conscious class struggle of the organised workers must be directed against them. And every class struggle is a political struggle.
These views of Marx and Engels have now been adopted by all proletarians who are fighting for their emancipation. But when in the forties the two friends took part in the socialist literature and the social movements of their time, they were absolutely novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent, honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in the struggle against the despotism of kings, police and priests, failed to observe the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. These people would not entertain the idea of the workers acting as an independent social force. On the other hand, there were many dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it was only necessary to convince the rulers and the governing classes of the injustice of the contemporary social order, and it would then be easy to establish peace and general well-being on earth. They dreamt of a socialism without struggle. Lastly, nearly all the socialists of that time and the friends of the working class generally regarded the proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with horror how it grew with the growth of industry. They all, therefore, sought for a means to stop the development of industry and of the proletariat, to stop the "wheel of history". Marx and Engels did not share the general fear of the development of the proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on its continued growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
That is why the name and life of Engels should be known to every worker. That is why in this collection of articles, the aim of which, as of all our publications, is to awaken class-consciousness in the Russian workers, we must give a sketch of the life and work of Frederick Engels, one of the two great teachers of the modern proletariat.
Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a manufacturer. In 1838 Engels, without having completed his highschool studies, was forced by family circumstances to enter a commercial house in Bremen as a clerk. Commercial affairs did not prevent Engels from pursuing his scientific and political education. He had come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high school. The study of philosophy led him further. At that time Hegel's teaching dominated German philosophy, and Engels became his follower. Although Hegel himself was an admirer of the autocratic Prussian state, in whose service he was as a professor at Berlin University, Hegel's teachings were revolutionary. Hegel's faith in human reason and its rights, and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy that the universe is undergoing a constant process of change and development, led some of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher---those who refused to accept the existing situation---to the idea that the struggle against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and prevalent evil, is also rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all things develop, if institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the autocracy of the Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an insignificant minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of the bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel's philosophy spoke of the development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the development of the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social relations. While retaining Hegel's idea of the eternal process of development,* Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to life, they saw that it is not the development of mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from matter.... Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and
* Marx and Engels frequently pointed out that in their intellectual development they were much indebted to the great German philosophers, particularly to Hegel. "Without German philosophy," Engels says, "scientific socialism would never have come into being.''^^33^^
V. 1. LENIN
fRBDERlCK ENGELS
47Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces. On the development of the productive forces depend the relations into which men enter with one another in the production of the things required for the satisfaction of human needs. And in these relations lies the explanation of all the phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and laws. The development of the productive forces creates social relations based upon private property, but now we see that this same development of the productive forces deprives the majority of their property and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It abolishes property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives towards the very aim which the socialists have set themselves. All the socialists have to do is to realise which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this force the consciousness of its interests and of its historical task. This force is the proletariat. Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the centre of English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of a commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only sat in the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the workers were cooped up, and saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes. But he did not confine himself to personal observations. He read all that had been revealed before him about the condition of the British working class and carefully studied all the official documents he could lay his hands on. The fruit of these studies and observations was the book which appeared in 1845: The Condition of the Working Class in England. We have already mentioned what was the chief service rendered by Engels in writing The Condition of the Working Class in England. Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly
forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself. The political movement of the working class will inevitably lead the workers to realise that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the political struggle of the working class. Such are the main ideas of Engels's book on the condition of the working class in England, ideas which have now been adopted by all thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that time were entirely new. These ideas were set out in a book written in absorbing style and filled with most authentic and shocking pictures of the misery of the English proletariat. The book was a terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and created a profound impression. Engels's book began to be quoted everywhere as presenting the best picture of the condition of the modern proletariat. And, in fact, neither before 1845 nor after has there appeared so striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the working class.
It was not until he came to England that Engels became a socialist. In Manchester he established contacts with people active in the English labour movement at the time and began to write for English socialist publications. In 1844, while on his way back to Germany, he became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom he had already started to correspond. In Paris, under the influence of the French socialists and French life, Marx had also become a socialist. Here the friends jointly wrote a book entitled The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. This book, which appeared a year before The Condition of the Working Class in England, and the greater part of which was written by Marx, contains the foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism, the main ideas of which we have expounded above. "The holy family" is a facetious nickname for the Bauer brothers, the philosophers, and their followers. These gentlemen preached a criticism which stood above all reality, above parties and politics, which rejected all practical activity, and which only ``critically'' contemplated the surrounding world and the events going on within it. These gentlemen, the Bauers, looked down on the proletariat as an uncritical mass. Marx and Engels vigorously opposed this
48V. 1. LENIN
FREDERICK ENGELS
49absurd and harmful tendency. In the name of a real, human person---the worker, trampled down by the ruling classes and the state---they demanded, not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that is capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it. Even before the appearance of The Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx's and Ruge's Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher his "Critical Essays on Political Economy",^^34^^ in which he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution.
From 1845 to 1847 Engels lived in Brussels and Paris, combining scientific work with practical activities among the German workers in Brussels and Paris. Here Marx and Engels established contact with the secret German Communist League, which commissioned them to expound the main principles of the socialism they had worked out. Thus arose the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, published in 1848. This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides the entire organised and fighting proletariat of the civilised world.
The revolution of 1848, which broke out first in France and then spread to other West-European countries, brought Marx and Engels back to their native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung published in Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of all revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They fought to the last ditch in defence of freedom and of the interests of the people against the forces of reaction. The latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his Prussian citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.
Marx also settled in London. Engels soon became a clerk again, and then a shareholder, in the Manchester commercial firm in which he had worked in the forties. Until 1870 he lived in Manchester, while Marx lived in London, but this did not prevent their maintaining a most lively interchange of ideas: they corresponded almost daily. In this correspondence the two friends exchanged views and discoveries and continued to collaborate in working out scientific socialism. In 1870 Engels moved to London, and their joint intellectual life, of the most strenuous nature, continued until 1883, when Marx died. Its fruit was, on Marx's side, Capital, the greatest work on political economy of our age, and on Engels's side, a number of works both large and small. Marx worked on the analysis of the complex phenomena of capitalist economy. Engels, in simply written works, often of a polemical character, dealt with more general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory. Of Engels's works we shall mention: the polemical work against Diihring (analysing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences),* The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State^^91^^* (translated into Russian, published in St. Petersburg, 3rd ed., 1895), Ludwig Feuerbach^^88^^ (Russian translation and notes by G. Plekhanov, Geneva, 1892), an article on the foreign policy of the Russian Government (translated into Russian in the Geneva Sotsial-Demokrat,^^39^^ Nos. 1 and 2), splendid articles on the housing question,^^40^^ and finally, two small but very valuable articles on Russia's economic development (Frederick Engels on Russia, translated into Russian by Zasulich, Geneva, 1894).^^41^^ Marx died before he could put the final touches to his vast work on capital. The draft, however, was already finished, and after the death of his friend, Engels undertook the onerous task of preparing and publishing the second and the third volumes of Capital. He
* This is a wonderfully rich and instructive book.^^35^^ Unfortunately, only a small portion of it, containing a historical outline of the development of socialism, has been translated into Russian (The Develop - ment of Scientific Socialism, 2nd ed., Geneva, 1892).^^36^^
50V. I. LENIN
FREDERICK ENGELS
51published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894 (his death prevented the preparation of Volume IV).^^42^^ These two volumes entailed a vast amount of labour. Adler, the Austrian Social-Democrat, has rightly remarked that by publishing volumes II and III of Capital Engels erected a majestic monument to the genius who had been his friend, a monument on which, without intending it, he indelibly carved his own name. Indeed these two volumes of Capital are the work of two men: Marx and Engels. Old legends contain various moving instances of friendship. The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters, whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always---and, on the whole, quite justly---placed himself after Marx. "In Marx's lifetime," he wrote to an old friend, "I played second fiddle.''^^43^^ His love for the living Marx, and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless. This stern fighter and austere thinker possessed a deeply loving soul.
After the movement of 1848-49, Marx and Engels in exile did not confine themselves to scientific research. In 1864 Marx founded the International Working Men's Association, and led this society for a whole decade. Engels also took an active part in its affairs. The work of the International Association, which, in accordance with Marx's idea, united proletarians of all countries, was of tremendous significance in the development of the working-class movement. But even with the closing down of the International Association in the seventies, the unifying role of Marx and Engels did not cease. On the contrary, it may be said that their importance as the spiritual leaders of the workingclass movement grew continuously, because the movement itself grew uninterruptedly. After the death of Marx, Engels continued alone as the counsellor and leader of the European socialists. His advice and directions were sought for equally by the German socialists, whose strength, despite government persecution, grew rapidly and steadily, and by representatives of backward countries, such as the Spaniards, Rumanians and Russians, who were obliged to ponder and weigh their first steps. They all drew on the rich store of knowledge and experience of Engels in his old age.
Marx and Engels, who both knew Russian and read Russian books, took a lively interest in the country, followed the Russian revolutionary movement with sympathy and maintained contact with Russian revolutionaries. They both became socialists after being democrats, and the democratic feeling of hatred for political despotism was exceedingly strong in them. This direct political feeling, combined with a profound theoretical understanding of the connection between political despotism and economic oppression, and also their^rich experience of life, made Marx and Engels uncommonly responsive politically. That is why the heroic struggle of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of these tried revolutionaries. On the other hand, the tendency, for the sake of illusory economic advantages, to turn away from the most immediate and important task of the Russian socialists, namely, the winning of political freedom, naturally appeared suspicious to them and was even regarded by them as a direct betrayal of the great cause of the social revolution. "The emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself"^^44^^---Marx and Engels constantly taught. But in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat must win itself certain political rights. Moreover, Marx and Engels clearly saw that a political revolution in Russia would be of tremendous significance to the West-European workingclass movement as well. Autocratic Russia had always been a bulwark of European reaction in general. The extraordinarily favourable international position enjoyed by Russia as a result of the war of 1870, which for a long time sowed discord between Germany and France, of course only enhanced the importance of autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. Only a free Russia, a Russia that had no need either to oppress the Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians or any other small nations, or constantly to set France and Germany at loggerheads, would enable modern Europe, rid of the burden of war, to breathe freely, would weaken all the reactionary elements in Europe and strengthen the European working class. That was why Engels ardently desired the establishment of political freedom in Russia for the sake of the progress of the working-class movement in the
4*
52V. i.
West as well. In him the Russian revolutionaries have lost their best friend.
Let us always honour the memory of Frederick Engels, a great fighter and teacher of the proletariat!
Autumn 1895
Vol. 2, pp. 15-27
[53] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Marx-Engels CorrespondenceThe long-promised edition of the correspondence of the famous founders of scientific socialism has at last been published. Engels bequeathed the work of publishing it to Bebel and Bernstein, and Bebel managed to complete his part of the editorial work shortly before his death.
The Marx-Engels correspondence, published a few weeks ago by Dietz, Stuttgart, consists of four big volumes. They contain in all 1,386 letters by Marx and Engels covering an extensive period, from 1844 to 1883.
The editorial work, i.e., the writing of prefaces to the correspondence of various periods, was done by Eduard Bernstein. As might have been expected, this work is unsatisfactory both from the technical and the ideological standpoint. After his notorious ``evolution'' to extreme opportunist views, Bernstein should never have undertaken to edit letters which are impregnated through and through with the revolutionary spirit. Bernstein's prefaces are in part meaningless and in part simply false---as, for instance, when, instead of a precise, clear and frank characterisation of the opportunist errors of Lassalle and Schweitzer which Marx and Engels exposed, one meets with eclectic phrases and thrusts, such as that "Marx and Engels were not always right in opposing Lassalle" (Vol. Ill, p. xviii), or that in their tactics they were "much nearer" to Schweitzer than to Liebknecht (Vol. IV, p. x). These attacks have no purpose except to serve as a screen and embellishment for opportunism. Unfortunately, the eclectic attitude to Marx's ideological struggle against many of his opponents is becoming
54 __RUNNING_HEADER__ THE MARX-ENGELS CORRESPONDENCEincreasingly widespread among present-day German Social-Democrats.
From the technical standpoint, the index is unsatisfactory---only one for all four volumes (Kautsky and Stirling are omitted, for instance); the notes to individual letters are too scanty and are lost in the editor's prefaces instead of being placed in proximity to the letters they refer to, as they were by Sorge, and so forth.
The price of the publication is unduly high---about 20 rubles for the four volumes. There can be no doubt that the complete correspondence could and should have been published in a less luxurious edition at a more reasonable price, and that, in addition, a selection of passages most important from the standpoint of principle could and should have been published for wide distribution among workers.
All these defects of the edition will, of course, hamper a study of the correspondence. This is a pity, because its scientific and political value is tremendous. Not only do Marx and Engels stand out before the reader in clear relief in all their greatness, but the extremely rich theoretical content of Marxism is graphically revealed, because in their letters Marx and Engels return again and again to the most diverse aspects of their doctrine, emphasising and explaining--- at times discussing and debating---what is newest (in relation to earlier views), most important and most difficult.
There unfolds before the reader a strikingly vivid picture of the history of the working-class movement all over the world---at its most important junctures and in its most essential points. Even more valuable is the history of the politics of the working class. On the most diverse occasions, in various countries of the Old World and the New, and at different historical moments, Marx and Engels discuss the most important principles of the presentation of the political tasks of the working class. And the period covered by the correspondence was a period in which the working class separated from bourgeois democracy, a period in which an independent working-class movement arose, a period in which the fundamental principles of proletarian tactics and policy were defined. The more we have occasion in our day to observe how the "working-class movement in various countries suffers from opportunism in consequence of thf
stagnation and decay of the bourgeoisie, in consequence of the attention of the labour leaders being engrossed in the trivialities of the day, and so on---the more valuable becomes the wealth of material contained in the correspondence, displaying as it does a most profound comprehension of the basic aims of the proletariat in bringing about change, and providing an unusually flexible definition of the tasks of the tactics of the moment from the standpoint of these revolutionary aims, without making the slightest concession to opportunism or revolutionary phrase-mongering.
If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of the whole correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of ideas expressed and discussed converges---that word would be dialectics. The application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political economy from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science, philosophy and to the policy and tactics of the working class---that was what interested Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed what was most essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly advance they made in the history of revolutionary thought.
We intend in the following account, after giving a general review of the correspondence, to outline the most interesting remarks and arguments of Marx and Engels, without pretending to give an exhaustive account of the contents of the letters.
I. General Review
The correspondence opens with letters written in 1844 by the 24-year-old Engels to Marx. The situation in Germany at that time is brought out in striking relief. The first letter is dated the end of September 1844 and was sent from Barmen, where Engels's family lived, and where he was born. Engels was not quite 24 years old at the time. He was bored with family life and was anxious to break away. His father was a despot, a pious manufacturer, who was outraged at his son's continual running about to political meet-
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THE MARX-ENGELS CORRESPONDENCE
57ings, and at his communist convictions. Engels wrote that had it not been for his mother, of whom he was deeply fond, he would not have spent at home even the remaining few days before he was due to leave. "You would never believe," he complained to Marx, "what petty reasons, what superstitious fears were put forward by the family against my departure.''
While he was still in Barmen---where he was delayed a little longer by a love affair---Engels gave way to his father and worked for about two weeks in the factory office (his father was a manufacturer). "Huckstering is too horrible," he writes to Marx. "Barmen is too horrible, the way they waste their time is too horrible, and above all things it is too horrible to remain, not merely a bourgeois, but a manufacturer, a bourgeois who actively opposes the proletariat." He consoled himself, Engels goes on to say, by working on his book on the condition of the working class (this book appeared, we know, in 1845 and is one of the best works of world socialist literature). "And perhaps one can while being a Communist remain in one's outward status a bourgeois and a huckstering beast as long as one does not write, but to carry on a wide communist propaganda and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry will not work. Enough. At Easter I quit here. Add to this the drowsy life of a thoroughly Christian-Prussian family---I cannot stand it any longer; I might in the end become a German philistine and introduce philistinism into communism." Thus wrote the young Engels. After the Revolution of 1848 the exigencies of life obliged him to return to his father's office and to become a "huckstering beast" for many long years. But he was able to stand firm and to create for himself, not Christian-Prussian surroundings, but entirely different, comradely surroundings, and to become for the rest of his life a relentless foe of the "introduction of philistinism into communism''.
Social life in the German provinces in 1844 resembled Russian social life at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the Revolution of 1905. There was a general urge for political life, a general seething indignation in opposition to the government; the clergy fulminated against the youth for their atheism; children in bourgeois families
quarrelled with their parents over their "aristocratic treatment of servants or workers''.
The general spirit of opposition found expression in the fact that everybody declared himself to be a Communist. "The Police Commissary in Barmen is a Communist," Engels writes to Marx. He was in Cologne, Diisseldorf, Elberfeld---wherever he turned he stumbled upon Communists! "One ardent Communist, a cartoonist... named Seel, is going to Paris in two months. F shall give him your address; you will all like him for his enthusiastic temperament and his love of music, and he could very well be useful as a cartoonist.''
``Miracles are happening here in Elberfeld. Yesterday [this was written on February 22, 1845], we held our third communist meeting in the largest hall and the best restaurant of the city. The first meeting was attended by 40 people, the second by 130 and the third by at least 200. The whole of Elberfeld and Barmen, from the moneyed aristocracy to the small shopkeepers, was represented, all except the proletariat.''
This is literally what Engels wrote. Everybody in Germany at that time was a Communist---except the proletariat. Communism was a form of expression of the opposition sentiments of all, and chiefly of the bourgeoisie. "The most stupid, the most lazy and most philistine people, who take no interest in anything in the world, are almost becoming enthusiastic over communism." The chief preachers of communism at that time were people of the type of our Narodniks, ``Socialist-Revolutionaries'',^^45^^ "Popular Socialists", and so forth, that is to say, well-meaning bourgeois, some to a greater, others to a lesser degree, furious with the government.
And under such conditions, amidst countless pseudosocialist trends and factions, Engels was able to find his way to proletarian socialism, without fearing to break off relations with a mass of well-intentioned people, who were ardent revolutionaries but bad Communists.
In 1846 Engels was in Paris. Paris was then seething with politics and the discussion of various socialist theories. Engels eagerly studied socialism, made the acquaintance of Cabet, Louis Blanc and other prominent socialists, and
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THE MARX-ENGELS CORRESPONDENCE
59ran from editorial office to editorial office and from circle to circle.
His attention was chiefly focussed on the most important and most widespread socialist doctrine of the time---- Prou(dhonism. And even before the publication of Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty (October 1846; Marx's famous reply, The Poverty of Philosophy, appeared in 1847). Engels, with Tuthless sarcasm and remarkable profundity, criticised Proudhon's basic ideas, which were then being particularly advocated by the German Socialist Griin. His excellent knowledge of English (which Marx mastered much later) and of English literature enabled Engels at once (letter of September 16, 1846) to point to the example of the bankruptcy of the notorious Proudhonist "labour Bazaars" in England. Proudhon disgraces socialism, Engels exclaims indignantly---it follows from Proudhon that the workers must buy out capital.
The 26-year-old Engels simply annihilates "true socialism". We meet this expression in his letter of October 23, 1846, long before the Communist Manifesto, and Griin is mentioned as its chief exponent. An "anti-proletarian, pettybourgeois, philistine" doctrine, "sheer phrase-mongering", all kinds of ``humanitarian'' aspirations, "superstitious fear of `crude' communism" (Loffel-Kommunismus, literally: "spoon communism" or "belly communism"), "peaceful plans to bestow happiness" upon mankind---these are some of Engels's epithets, which apply to all species of pre-- Marxist socialism.
``The Proudhon plan of association," writes Engels, "was discussed for three evenings. At first I had nearly the whole clique with Griin at their head against me.... The chief point was to prove the necessity for revolution by force." (October 23, 1846.) In the end he got furious, he writes, and drove his opponents so hard that they were obliged to make an open attack on communism. He demanded a vote on whether they were Communists or not. This caused great indignation among the Griinites, who began to argue that they had come together to discuss "the good of mankind" and that they must know what communism really was. Engels gave them an extremely simple definition so as to permit no opportunity for evasions. "I therefore defined,"
Engels writes, "the objects of the Communists in this way: (1) to achieve the interests of the proletariat in opposition to those of the bourgeoisie; (2) to do this through the abolition of private property and its replacement by community of goods; (3) to recognise no means of carrying out these objects other than a democratic revolution by force." ( Written a year and a half before the 1848 Revolution.)
The discussion ended with the meeting's adopting Engels's definition by thirteen votes against the votes of two Griinites. These meetings were attended by some twenty journeymen carpenters. Thus the foundations of the SocialDemocratic Workers' Party of Germany were laid in Paris sixty-seven years ago.
A year later, in his letter of November 23, 1847, Engels informed Marx that he had prepared a draft of the Communist Manifesto, incidentally declaring himself opposed to the catechism form originally proposed. "I begin: What is Communism?" writes Engels. "And then straight to the proletariat---history of its origin, difference from former workmen, development of the contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie, crises, results.... In conclusion the Party policy of the Communists.''
This historical letter of Engels's on the first draft of a work which has travelled all over the world and which to this day is true in all its fundamentals and as actual and topical as though it were written yesterday, clearly proves that Marx and Engels are justly named side by side as the founders of modern socialism.
End of 1913
Vol. 19, pp. 552-58
[60] __ALPHA_LVL1__ Speech at the UnveilingWe are unveiling a memorial to Marx and Engels, the leaders of the world workers' revolution.
Humanity has for ages suffered and languished under the oppression of a tiny handful of exploiters who maltreated millions of labourers. But whereas the exploiters of an earlier period, the landowners, robbed and maltreated the peasant serfs, who were disunited, scattered and ignorant, the exploiters of the new period, the capitalists, came face to face with the vanguard of the downtrodden people, the urban, factory, industrial workers. They were united by the factory, they were enlightened by urban life, they were steeled by the common strike struggle and by revolutionary action.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they proved by scientific analysis the inevitability of capitalism's collapse and its transition to communism, under which there will be no more exploitation of man by man.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they indicated to the workers of the world their role, their task, their mission, namely, to be the first to rise in the revolutionary struggle against capital and to rally around themselves in this struggle all working and exploited people.
We are living at a wonderful time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realised. We all see the dawn of the world socialist revolution of the proletariat breaking in several countries. The unspeakable
61 __RUNNING_HEADER__ SPEECH AT UNVEILING of MEMORIAL to MARX AND ENGELS glhorrors of the imperialist butchery of nations are everywhere evoking a heroic upsurge of the oppressed and multiplying their strength in the struggle for emancipation.
Let this memorial to Marx and Engels again and again remind the millions of workers and peasants that we are not alone in our struggle. Side by side with us the workers of more advanced countries are rising. Hard battles still lie ahead of them and us. In common struggle capitalist oppression will be broken, and socialism finally won!
Vol. 28, pp. 165-66
[62] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Three SourcesThroughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of "pernicious sect". And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no ``impartial'' social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers' wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling ``sectarianism'' in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression.
63 __RUNNING_HEADER__ THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENT. PARTS OF MARXISM 63It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts, that we shall outline in brief.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ IThe philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to ``refute'', undermine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwlg Feuerbach and Anti-Duhring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel's system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science---radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements---have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx's dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the
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THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENT PARTS OF MARXISM 65
the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man's labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx's economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social---hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism---but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.
5---0895
bourgeois philosophers with their ``new'' reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops--- how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man's social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrinesphilosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx's philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ IIHaving recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx's principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by
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THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENT PARTS of MARXISM 67
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can---and, owing to their social position, must---constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx's philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual s avery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx's economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour*
Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ IIIWhen feudalism was overthrown, and "free" capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was Utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But Utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
Prosveshcheniye No. 3, March 1913
Vol. 19, pp. 23-28
__RUNNING_HEADER__ THE HISTORICAL DESTINY OF THE DOCTRINE OF KARL MARX [68] __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Historical DestinyThe chief thing in the doctrine of Marx is that it brings out the historic role of the proletariat as the builder of socialist society. Has the course of events all over the world confirmed this doctrine since it was expounded by Marx?
Marx first advanced it in 1844. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, published in 1848, gave an integral and systematic exposition of this doctrine, an exposition which has remained the best to this day. Since then world history has clearly been divided into three main periods: (1) from the revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune (1871); (2) from the Paris Commune to the Russian revolution (1905); (3) since the Russian revolution.
Let us see what has been the destiny of Marx's doctrine in each of these periods.
socialism. In all countries, the revolution revealed the various classes of society in action. The shooting of the workers by the republican bourgeoisie in Paris in the June days of 1848 finally revealed that the proletariat alone was socialist by nature. The liberal bourgeoisie dreaded the independence of this class a hundred times more than it did any kind of reaction. The craven liberals grovelled before reaction. The peasantry were content with the abolition of the survivals of feudalism and joined the supporters of order, wavering but occasionally between workers' democracy and bourgeois liberalism. All doctrines of non-class socialism and rcon-class politics proved to be sheer nonsense.
The Paris Commune (1871) completed this development of bourgeois changes; the republic, i.e., the form of political organisation in which class relations appear in their most unconcealed form, owed its consolidation solely to the heroism of the proletariat.
In all the other European countries, a more tangled and less complete development led to the same result---a bourgeois society that had taken definite shape. Towards the end of the first period (1848-71), a period of storms and revolutions, pre-Marxian socialism was dead. Independent proletarian parties came into being: the First International (1864-72) and the German Social-Democratic Party.
The second period (1872-1904) was distinguished from the first by its ``peaceful'' character, by the absence of revolutions. The West had finished with bourgeois revolutions. The East had not yet risen to them.
The West entered a phase of ``peaceful'' preparations for the changes to come. Socialist parties, basically proletarian, were formed everywhere and learned to use bourgeois parliamentarism and to found their own daily press, their educational institutions, their trade unions and their co-- operative societies. Marx's doctrine gained a complete victory and began to spread. The selection and mustering of the forces of the proletariat and its preparation for the coming battles made slow but steady progress.
At the beginning of the first period Marx's doctrine by no means dominated. It was only one of the very numerous groups or trends of socialism. The forms of socialism that did dominate were in the main akin to our Narodism: incomprehension of the materialist basis of historical movement, inability to single out the role and significance of each class in capitalist society, concealment of the bourgeois nature of democratic reforms under diverse, quasi-socialist phrases about the ``people'', ``justice'', ``right'', and so on.
The revolution of 1848 struck a deadly blow at all these vociferous, motley and ostentatious forms of pre-Marxian
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THE HISTORICAL DESTINY OF THE DOCTRINE OF KARL MARX 71
pronounced demarcation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of all kinds. After the experience both of Europe and Asia, anyone who speaks of non-class politics and nonclass socialism, ought simply to be put in a cage and exhibited alongside the Australian kangaroo or something like that.
After Asia, Europe has also begun to stir, although not in the Asiatic way. The ``peaceful'' period of 1872-1904 has passed, never to return. The high cost of living and the tyranny of the trusts are leading to an unprecedented sharpening of the economic struggle, which has set into movement even the British workers who have been most corrupted by liberalism. We see a political crisis brewing even in the most ``diehard'', bourgeois-Junker country, Germany. The frenzied arming and the policy of imperialism are turning modern Europe into a "social peace" which is more like a gunpowder barrel. Meanwhile the decay of all the bourgeois parties and the maturing of the proletariat are making steady progress.
Since the appearance of Marxism, each of the three great periods of world history has brought Marxism new confirmation and new triumphs. But a still greater triumph awaits Marxism, as the doctrine of the proletariat, in the coming period of history.
The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached "social peace" (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ``sympathising'' intelligentsia.
However, the opportunists had scarcely congratulated themselves on "social peace" and on the non-necessity of storms under ``democracy'' when a new source of great world storms opened up in Asia. The Russian revolution was followed by revolutions in Turkey, Persia and China. It is in this era of storms and their ``repercussions'' in Europe that we are now living. No matter what the fate of the great Chinese republic, against which various ``civilised'' hyenas are now whetting their teeth, no power on earth can restore the old serfdom in Asia or wipe out the heroic democracy of the masses in the Asiatic and semi-Asiatic countries.
Certain people who were inattentive to the conditions for preparing and developing the mass struggle were driven to despair and to anarchism by the lengthy delays in the decisive struggle against capitalism in Europe. We can now see how short-sighted and faint-hearted this anarchist despair is.
The fact that Asia, with its population of eight hundred million, has been drawn into the struggle for these same European ideals should inspire us with optimism and not despair.
The Asiatic revolutions have again shown us the spinelessness and baseness of liberalism, the exceptional importance of the independence of the democratic masses, and the
Pravda No. 50, March 1, 1913
Vol. 18, pp. 582-85
``LEFT-WING'' COMMUNISM---AN INFANTILE DISORDER
[72] __ALPHA_LVL1__ ``Left-Wing'' Communism---It is, I think, almost universally realised at present that the Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party, or without the fullest and unreserved support from the entire mass of the working class, that is, from all thinking, honest, devoted and influential elements in it, capable of leading the backward strata or carrying the latter along with them.
The dictatorship of the proletariat means a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by their overthrow (even if only in a single country), and whose power lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production. Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. All these reasons make the dictatorship of the proletariat necessary, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate lifeand-death struggle which calls for tenacity, discipline, and a single and inflexible will.
I repeat: the experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown even to those
73 who are incapable of thinking or have had no occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute centralisation and rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie.This is often dwelt on. However, not nearly enough thought is given to what it means, and under what conditions it is possible. Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?
As a current of political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism has existed since 1903. Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the proletariat.
The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat's revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-- consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and---if you wish---merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people---primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection
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``LEFT-WING'' COMMUNISM---AN INFANTILE DISORDER
75with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.
The fact that, in 1917-20, Bolshevism was able, under unprecedentedly difficult conditions, to build up and successfully maintain the strictest centralisation and iron discipline was due simply to a number of historical peculiarities of Russia.
On the one hand, Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a very firm foundation of Marxist theory. The correctness of this revolutionary theory, and of it alone, has been proved, not only by world experience throughout the nineteenth century, but especially by the experience of the seekings and vacillations, the errors and disappointments of revolutionary thought in Russia. For about half a century---approximately from the forties to the nineties of the last century---- progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by a most brutal and reactionary tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory, and followed with the utmost diligence and thoroughness each and every "last word" in this sphere in Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism---the only correct revolutionary theory---through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.
On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement---legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated,
in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate "last word" of American and European political experience.
April-May 1920
Vol. 31, pp. 23-26
WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE
[76] __ALPHA_LVL1__ What the "Friends of the People"In general, the Russian Communists, adherents of Marxism, should more than any others call themselves SocialDemocrats, and in their activities should never forget the enormous importance of democracy.*
In Russia, the relics of medieval, semi-feudal institutions are still so enormously strong (as compared with Western Europe), they are such an oppressive yoke upon the proletariat and the people generally, retarding the growth of political thought in all estates and classes, that one cannot but insist on the tremendous importance which the struggle against all feudal institutions, absolutism, the social-estate system, and the bureaucracy has for the workers. The workers must be shown in the greatest detail what a terribly reactionary force these institutions are, how they intensify the oppression of labour by capital, what a degrading pressure they exert on the working people, how they keep capital in its medieval forms, which, while not falling short of the modern, industrial forms in respect of the exploitation of labour, add to this exploitation by placing terrible difficulties in the way of the fight for emancipation. The workers must know that unless these pillars of reaction** are
* This is a very important point. Plekhanov is quite right when he says that our revolutionaries have "two enemies: old prejudices that have not yet been entirely eradicated, on the one hand, and a narrow understanding of the new programme, on the other". See Appendix III (p. 87 of this volume.---Ed.).
** A particularly imposing reactionary institution, one to which our revolutionaries have paid relatively little attention, is our bureaucracy, which de facto rules the Russian state. The bureaucracy being made up mainly of middle-class intellectuals are profoundly bourgeois
77 overthrown, it will be utterly impossible for them to wage a successful struggle against the bourgeoisie, because so long as they exist, the Russian rural proletariat, whose support is an essential condition for the victory of the working class, will never cease to be downtrodden and cowed, capable only of sullen desperation and not of intelligent and persistent protest and struggle. And that is why it is the direct duty of the working class to fight side by side with the radical democracy against absolutism and the reactionary social estates and institutions---a duty which the SocialDemocrats must impress upon the workers, while not for a moment ceasing also to impress upon them that the struggle against all these institutions is necessary only as a means of facilitating the struggle against the bourgeoisie, that the worker needs the achievement of the general democratic demands only to clear the road to victory over the working people's chief enemy, over an institution that is purely democratic by nature, capital, which here in Russia is particularly inclined to sacrifice its democracy and to enter into alliance with the reactionaries in order to suppress the workers, to still further impede the emergence of a working-class movement.What has been said is, I think, sufficient to define the attitude of the Social-Democrats towards absolutism and political liberty, and also towards the trend which has been growing particularly strong of late, that aims at the ``amalgamation'' and ``alliance'' of all the revolutionary groups for the winning of political liberty.^^47^^
_-_-_both in origin and in the purpose and character of their activities; but absolutism and the enormous political privileges of the landed nobility have lent them particularly pernicious qualities. They are regular weathercocks, who regard it as their supreme task to combine the interests of the landlord and the bourgeois. They are Judushkas who use their feudal sympathies and connections to fool the workers and peasants, and employ the pretext of "protecting the economically weak" and acting as their ``guardian'' against the kulak and usurer to carry through measures which reduce the working people to the status of a "base rabble", handing them over to the feudal landlords, and making them all the more defenceless against the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy are most dangerous hypocrites, who have imbibed the experience of the West-European champion reactionaries, and skilfully conceal their Arakcheyev designs behind the fig-leaves of phrases about loving the people.
V. i.
tytlAT fllE "FRIENDS OF fBE PEOPLE" ARE
?9
This trend is rather peculiar and characteristic. It is peculiar because proposals for ``alliance'' do not come from a definite group, or definite groups, with definite programmes which coincide on one point or another. If they did, the question of an alliance would be one for each separate case, a concrete question to be settled by the representatives of the uniting groups. Then there could be no special ``amalgamation'' trend. But such a trend exists, and simply comes from people who have cut adrift from the old, and have not moored to anything new. The theory on which the fighters against absolutism have hitherto based themselves is evidently crumbling, and is destroying the conditions for solidarity and organisation which are essential for the struggle. Well then, these ``amalgamators'' and "alliance advocates" would seem to think that the easiest way to create such a theory is to reduce it to a protest against absolutism and a demand for political liberty, while evading all other questions, socialist and non-socialist. It goes without saying that the bottom will inevitably be knocked out of this nai've fallacy at the very first attempts at such unity.
But what is characteristic is that this ``amalgamation'' trend represents one of the last stages in the process of transformation of militant, revolutionary Narodism into politically radical democracy, a process which I have tried to outline above. A durable amalgamation of all the nonSocial-Democratic revolutionary groups under the banner mentioned will be possible only when a durable programme of democratic demands has been drawn up that will put an end to the prejudices of the old Russian exceptionalism. Of course, the Social-Democrats believe that the formation of such a democratic party would be a useful step forward; and their anti-Narodnik activity should further it, should further the eradication of all prejudices and myths, the grouping of the socialists under the banner of Marxism and the formation of a democratic party by the other groups.
The Social-Democrats, who consider essential the independent organisation of the workers into a separate workers' party, could not, of course, ``amalgamate'' with such a party, but the workers would most strongly support any
struggle waged by the democrats against reactionary institutions.
The degeneration of Narodism into the most ordinary petty-bourgeois radical theory---of which (degeneration) the "friends of the people" furnish such striking testimony--- shows what a tremendous mistake is made by those who spread among the workers the idea of fighting absolutism without at the same time explaining to them the antagonistic character of our social relations by virtue of which the ideologists of the bourgeoisie also favour political liberty--- without explaining to them the historical role of the Russian worker as a fighter for the emancipation of the whole working population.
The Social-Democrats are often accused of wanting to monopolise Marx's theory, whereas, it is argued, his economic theory is accepted by all socialists. Hut the question arises, what sense is there in explaining to the workers the form of value, the nature of the bourgeois system and the revolutionary role of the proletariat, if here in Russia the exploitation of the working people is generally and universally explained not by the bourgeois organisation of social economy, but by, say, land poverty, redemption payments, or the tyranny of the authorities?
What sense is there in explaining to the worker the theory of the class struggle, if that theory cannot even explain his relation to the employer (capitalism in Russia has been artificially implanted by the government), not to mention the mass of the ``people'', who do not belong to the fully established class of factory workers?
How can one accept Marx's economic theory and its corollary---the revolutionary role of the proletariat as the organiser of communism by way of capitalism---if people in our country try to find ways to communism other than through the medium of capitalism and the proletariat it creates?
Obviously, under such conditions to call upon the worker to fight for political liberty would be equivalent to calling upon him to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the progressive bourgeoisie, for it cannot be denied (typically enough, even the Narodniks and the Narodovoltsi^^48^^ did not deny it) that political liberty will primarily serve the interests of the
V. I. LENIN
THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE
bourgeoisie and will not ease the position of the workers, but ... will ease only the conditions for their struggle ... against this very bourgeoisie. I say this as against those socialists who, while they do not accept the theory of the SocialDemocrats, carry on their agitation among the workers, having become convinced empirically that only among the latter are revolutionary elements to be found. The theory of these socialists contradicts their practice, and they make a very serious mistake by distracting the workers from their direct task of organising a socialist workers' party.* It was a mistake that arose naturally at a time when the class antagonisms of bourgeois society were still quite undeveloped and were held down by serfdom, when the latter was evoking the unanimous protest and struggle of the entire intelligentsia, thus creating the illusion that there was something peculiarly democratic about our intelligentsia, and that there was no profound gulf between the ideas of the liberals and of the socialists. Now that economic development has advanced so far that even those who formerly denied a basis for capitalism in Russia admit our having entered the capitalist path of development---illusions on this score are no longer possible. The composition of the ``intelligentsia'' is assuming just as clear an outline as that of society engaged in the production of material values: while the latter is ruled and governed by the capitalist, among the former the fashion is set by the rapidly growing horde of careerists and bourgeois hirelings, an `` intelligentsia'' contented and satisfied, a stranger to all wild fantasy and very well aware of what they want. Far from denying this fact, our radicals and liberals strongly emphasise it and
go out of their way to prove its immorality, to condemn it, strive to confound it, shame it... and destroy it. These naive efforts to make the bourgeois intelligentsia ashamed of being bourgeois are as ridiculous as the efforts of our petty-bourgeois economists to frighten our bourgeoisie (pleading the experience of "elder brothers") with the story that it is moving towards the ruin of the people, towards the poverty, unemployment and starvation of the masses; this trial of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists is reminiscent of the trial of the pike, which was sentenced to be thrown into the river. Beyond these bounds begin the liberal and radical ``intelligentsia'', who pour out innumerable phrases about progress, science, truth, the people, etc., and who love to lament the passing of the sixties, when there was no discord, depression, despondency and apathy, and when all hearts were aflame with democracy,
With their characteristic simplicity, these gentlemen refuse to understand that the cause of the unanimity that then prevailed was the then existing material conditions, gone never to return: serfdom pressed down everybody equally ---the serf steward who had saved a little money and wanted to live in comfort; the enterprising muzhik, who hated the lord for exacting tribute, for interfering in and tearing him from his business; the proletarianised manor-serf and the impoverished muzhik who was sold into bondage to the merchant; it brought suffering to the merchant manufacturer and the worker, the handicraftsman and the subcontractor. The only tie that linked all these people together was their hostility to serfdom; beyond that unanimity, the sharpest economic antagonism began. How completely one must be lulled by sweet illusions not to perceive this antagonism even today when it has become so enormously developed; to weep for the return of the days of unanimity at a time when the situation demands struggle, demands that everyone who does not want to be a willing or unwilling myrmidon of the bourgeoisie shall take his stand on the side of the proletariat.
If you refuse to believe the flowery talk about the " interests of the people" and try to delve deeper, you will find that you are dealing with the Out-and-out ideologists of the petty bourgeoisie, who dream of improving, supporting and
6---0895
* There are two ways of arriving at the conclusion that the worker must be roused to fight absolutism: either by regarding the worker as the sole fighter for the socialist system, and therefore seeing political liberty as one of the conditions facilitating his struggle; that is the view of the Social-Democrats; or by appealing to him simply as the one who suffers most from the present system, who has nothing more to lose and who can display the greatest determination in fighting absolutism. But that would mean compelling the worker to drag in the wake of the bourgeois radicals, who refuse to see the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat behind the solidarity of the whole ``people'' against absolutism.
V. I. LENIN
WHAT THE "FRIENDS Of TUB PEOPLE" ARE
§3
the proletariat---and if it satisfies the requirements of science, then every awakening of the protesting thought of the proletariat will inevitably guide this thought into the channels of Social-Democracy. The greater the progress made in elaborating this theory, the more rapidly will SocialDemocracy grow; for even the most artful guardians of the present system cannot prevent the awakening of proletarian thought, because this system itself necessarily and inevitably entails the most intense expropriation of the producers, the continuous growth of the proletariat and of its reserve army---and this parallel to the progress of social wealth, the enormous growth of the productive forces, and the socialisation of labour by capitalism. However much has still to be done to elaborate this theory, the socialists will do it; this is guaranteed by the spread among them of materialism, the only scientific method, one requiring that every programme shall be a precise formulation of the actual process; it is guaranteed by the success of SocialDemocracy, which has adopted these ideas---a success which has so stirred up our liberals and democrats that, as a certain Marxist has put it, their monthly magazines have ceased to be dull.
In thus emphasising the necessity, importance and immensity of the theoretical work of the Social-Democrats, I by no means want to say that this work should take precedence over practical work,*---still less that the latter should be postponed until the former is completed. Only the admirers of the "subjective method in sociology", or the followers of Utopian socialism, could arrive at such a conclusion. Of course, if it is presumed that the task of the socialists is to seek ``different'' (from actual) "paths of development" for the country, then, naturally, practical work becomes possible only when philosophical geniuses discover and indicate these "different paths"; and conversely,
restoring their ("people`s'' in their jargon) economy by various innocent progressive measures, and who are totally incapable of understanding that under prevailing production relations the only effect such progressive measures can have is to proletarianise the masses still further. We cannot but be grateful to the "friends of the people" for having done much to reveal the class character of our intelligentsia and for having thereby fortified the Marxist theory that our small producers are petty bourgeois. They must inevitably hasten the dissipation of the old illusions and myths that have so long confused the minds of Russian socialists. The "friends of the people" have so mauled, overworked and soiled these theories that Russian socialists who held them are confronted with the inexorable dilemma of either revising them, .or abandoning them altogether and leaving them to the exclusive use of the gentlemen who announce with smug solemnity, urbi et orbi, that the rich peasants are buying improved implements, and who with serious mien assure us that we must welcome people who have grown weary of sitting at the card tables. And in this strain they talk about a "people's system" and the ``intelligentsia''---talk, not only with a serious air, but in pretentious, stupendous phrases about broad ideals, about an ideal treatment of the problems of life!...
:i
The socialist intelligentsia can expect to perform fruitful work only when they abandon their illusions and begin to seek support in the actual, and not the desired development of Russia, in actual, and not possible social-economic relations. Moreover, their theoretical work must be directed towards the concrete study of all forms of economic antagonism in Russia, the study of their connections and successive development', they must reveal this antagonism wherever it has been concealed by political history, by the peculiarities of legal systems or by established theoretical prejudice. They must present an integral picture of our realities as a definite system of production relations, show that the exploitation and expropriation of the working people are essential under this system, and show the way out of this system that is indicated by economic development.
This theory, based on a detailed study of Russian history and realities, must furnish an answer to the demands o
* On the contrary, the practical work of propaganda and agitation must always take precedence, because, firstly, theoretical work only supplies answers to the problems raised by practical work, and, secondly, the Social-Democrats, for reasons over which they have no control, are so often compelled to confine themselves to theoretical work that they value highly every moment when practical work is possible.
6*
84V. 1. LENIN
WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE
85once these paths are discovered and indicated theoretical work ends, and the work of those who are to direct the ``fatherland'' along the ``newly-discovered'' "different paths" begins. The position is altogether different when the task of the socialists is to be the ideological leaders of the proletariat in its actual struggle against actual and real enemies who stand in the actual path of social and economic development. Under these circumstances, theoretical and practical work merge into one aptly described by the veteran German Social-Democrat, Liebknecht, as:
Studieren, Propagandieren, Organisieren.*
You cannot be an ideological leader without the abovementioned theoretical work, just as you cannot be one without directing this work to meet the needs of the cause, and without spreading the results of this theory among the workers and helping them to organise.
Such a presentation of the task guards Social-Democracy against the defects from which socialist groups so often suffer, namely, dogmatism and sectarianism.
There can be no dogmatism where the supreme and sole criterion of a doctrine is its conformity to the actual process of social and economic development; there can be no sectarianism when the task is that of promoting the organisation of the proletariat, and when, therefore, the role of the ``intelligentsia'' is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary.
< Hence, despite the existence of differences among Marxists on various theoretical questions, the methods of their political activity have remained unchanged ever since the group arose.
The political activity of the Social-Democrats lies in promoting the development and organisation of the workingclass movement in Russia, in transforming this movement from its present state of sporadic attempts at protest, ``riots'' and strikes devoid of a guiding idea, into an organised struggle of the whole Russian working class directed against the bourgeois regime and working for the expropriation
of the expropriators and the abolition of the social system based on the oppression of the working people. Underlying these activities is the common conviction of Marxists that the Russian worker is the sole and natural representative of Russia's entire working and exploited population.*
Natural because the exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature, if we leave out of account the moribund remnants of serf economy; but the exploitation of the mass of producers is on a small scale, scattered and undeveloped, while the exploitation of the factory proletariat is on a large scale, socialised and concentrated. In the former case, exploitation is still enmeshed in medieval forms, various political, legal and conventional trappings, tricks and devices, which hinder the working people and their ideologists from seeing the essence of the system which oppresses the working people, from seeing where and how a way can be found out of this system. In the latter case, on the contrary, exploitation is fully developed and emerges in its pure form, without any confusing details. The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle has to be waged against the bourgeois class. And this struggle, aimed at satisfying his immediate economic needs, at improving his material conditions, inevitably demands that the workers organise, and inevitably becomes a war not against individuals, but against a class, the class which oppresses and crushes the working people not only in the factories, but everywhere. That is why the factory worker is none other than the foremost representative of the entire exploited population. And in order that he may fulfil his function of representative in an organised, sustained struggle it is by no means necessary to enthuse him with ``perspectives''; all that is needed is simply to make him understand his position, to make him understand the political and economic structure of the system that oppresses him, and the necessity
* Russia's man of the future is the muzhik---thought the representatives of peasant socialism, the Narodniks in the broadest sense of the term. Russia's man of the future is the worker---think the Social-Democrats. That is how the Marxist view was formulated in a certain manuscript.
* Study, propaganda, organisation.---Ed*
86V. I. LENIN
WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE
87and inevitability of class antagonisms under this system. This position of the factory worker in the general system of capitalist relations makes him the sole fighter for the emancipation of the working class, for only the higher stage of development of capitalism, large-scale machine industry, creates the material conditions and the social forces necessary for this struggle. Everywhere else, where the forms of capitalist development are low, these material conditions are absent; production is scattered among thousands of tiny enterprises (and they do not cease to be scattered enterprises even under the most equalitarian forms of communal landownership), for the most part the exploited still possess tiny enterprises, and are thus tied to the very bourgeois system they should be fighting: this retards and hinders the development of the social forces capable of overthrowing capitalism. Scattered, individual, petty exploitation ties the working people to one locality, divides them, prevents them from becoming conscious of class solidarity, prevents them from uniting once they have understood that oppression is not caused by some particular individual, but by the whole economic system. Large-scale capitalism, on the contrary, inevitably severs all the workers' ties with the old society, with a particular locality and a particular exploiter; it unites them, compels them to think and places them in conditions which enable them to commence an organised struggle. Accordingly, it is on the working class that the Social-Democrats concentrate all their attention and all their activities. When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organisations are formed among the workers to transform the workers' present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle---then the Russian worker, rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution.
1894 __ALPHA_LVL2__ Appendix IIIWhen I speak of a narrow understanding of Marxism, 1 have the Marxists themselves in mind. One cannot help remarking in this connection that Marxism is most atrociously narrowed and garbled when our liberals and radicals undertake to expound it in the pages of the legal press. What an exposition it is! Just think how this revolutionary doctrine has to be mutilated to fit it into the Procrustean bed of Russian censorship! Yet our publicists light-heartedly perform that operation! Marxism, as they expound it, is practically reduced to the doctrine of how individual property, based on the labour of the proprietor, undergoes its dialectical development under the capitalist system, how it turns into its negation and is then socialised. And with a serious mien, they assume that the whole content of Marxism lies in this ``scheme'', ignoring all the specific features of its sociological method, the doctrine of the class struggle, and the direct purpose of the inquiry, namely, to disclose all the forms of antagonism and exploitation in order to help the proletariat abolish them. It is not surprising that the result is something so pale and narrow that our radicals proceed to mourn over the poor Russian Marxists. We should think so! Russian absolutism and Russian reaction would not be absolutism and reaction if it were possible, while they exist, to give a full, accurate and complete exposition of Marxism, setting forth its conclusions without reservation! And if our liberals and radicals knew Marxism properly (if only from German literature), they would be ashamed thus to distort'it in the pages of the censored press. If a theory may not be expounded---keep silent, or make the reservation that you are giving a far from complete exposition of it, that you are omitting its most essential features; but why expound only fragments of it and then howl about its being narrow?
That, indeed, is the only explanation of the absurdity, possible only in Russia, that people are regarded as Marxists who have no idea of the class struggle, of the antagonism necessarily inherent in capitalist society, and of the development of this antagonism; people who have no notion of the revolutionary role of the proletariat; even people
V. 7. LENIN
WHAT THE "FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE" ARE
89
the necessity of this struggle, its content, course and conditions of development. It is impossible to provide a " slogan of struggle" unless we study every separate form of the struggle minutely, unless we trace every stage of the struggle during the transition from one form to another, so that we can define the situation at any given moment, without losing sight of the general character of the struggle and its general aim, namely, the complete and final abolition of all exploitation and all oppression.
Try to compare with Marx's "critical and revolutionary" theory the colourless trash which "our well-known" N. K. Mikhailovsky, in his ``criticism'', expounded and which he then did battle with, and you will be astonished that there can really be people who regard themselves as "ideologists of the working people", and confine themselves... to that "worn-out coin" into which our publicists transform the Marxist theory by obliterating everything that is vital in it.
Try to compare with the demands of this theory our Narodnik literature, which, after all, is also prompted by the desire to be the ideological spokesman of the working people, a literature devoted to the history and to the present state of our~economic system in general and of the peasantry in particular, and you will be astonished that socialists could be satisfied with a theory that confines itself to studying and describing distress and to moralising over it. Serfdom is depicted not as a definite form of economic organisation which gave rise to such and such exploitation, such and such antagonistic classes, certain political, legal and other systems, but simply as abuses by the landlords and injustice to the peasants. The peasant Reform is depicted not as a clash of definite economic forms and of definite economic classes, but as a measure taken by the authorities, who ``chose'' a "wrong path" by mistake, despite their very best intentions. Post-Reform Russia is depicted as a deviation from the true path, accompanied by the distress of the working people, and not as a definite" system of antagonistic relations of production with a certain development.
Now, however, there~can be no doubt that this theory is discredited, and the sooner Russian socialists realise that
who come out with purely bourgeois projects, provided they contain such catchwords as "money economy", its ``necessity'', and similar expressions, which require all the intellectual profundity of a Mr. Mikhailovsky to be regarded as specifically Marxist.
Marx, on the other hand, considered the whole value of his theory to lie in the fact that it is "in its essence critical* and revolutionary".^^49^^ And this latter quality is indeed completely and unconditionally inherent in Marxism, for this theory directly sets itself the task of disclosing all the forms of antagonism and exploitation in modern society, tracing their evolution, demonstrating their transitory character, the inevitability of their transformation into a different form, and thus serving the proletariat as a means of ending all exploitation as quickly and easily as possible. The irresistible attraction of this theory, which draws to itself the socialists of all countries, lies precisely in the fact that it combines the quality of being strictly and supremely scientific (being the last word in social science) with that of being revolutionary, it does not combine them accidentally and not only because the founder of the doctrine combined in his own person the qualities of a scientist and a revolutionary, but does so intrinsically and inseparably. Is it not a fact that the task of theory, the aim of science, is here defined as assistance for the oppressed class in its actual economic struggle.
"We do not say to the world: Cease struggling---your whole struggle is senseless. All we do is to provide it with a true slogan of struggle.''^^50^^
Hence, the direct task of science, according to Marx, is to provide a true slogan of struggle, that is, to be able to present this struggle objectively as the product of a definite system of production relations, to be able to understand
* Note that Marx is speaking here of materialist criticism, which alone he regards as scientific---that is, criticism which compares the political, legal, social, conventional and other facts, with economics, with the system of production relations, with the interests of the classes that inevitably take shape on the basis of all the antagonistic social relations. That Russian social rel ations are antagonistic can hardly be doubted. But nobody has yet tried to take them as a basis for such criticism.
90V. I. LENIN
with the present level of knowledge there can be no revolutionary theory apart from Marxism, the sooner they devote all their efforts to applying this theory to Russia, theoretically and practically---the surer and quicker will be the success of, revolutionary work.
Spring-summer 1894
Vol. 1, pp.^290-300, 326-29
[91] __ALPHA_LVL1__ A Protest by Russian Social-DemocratsA tendency has been observed among Russian SocialDemocrats recently to depart from the fundamental principles of Russian Social-Democracy that were proclaimed by its founders and foremost fighters, members of the Emancipation of Labour group,^^81^^ as well as by the Social-Democratic publications of the Russian workers' organisations of the nineties.- The Credo reproduced below, which is presumed to express the fundamental views of certain (``young'') Russian Social-Democrats, represents an attempt at a systematic and definite exposition of the "new views". The following is its full text:
``The guild and manufacture period in the West laid a sharp impress on all subsequent history and particularly on the history of Social-Democracy. The fact that the bourgeoisie had to fight for free forms, that it strove to release itself from the guild regulations fettering production, made the bourgeoisie a revolutionary element; everywhere in the West it began with liberte, fraternite, Sgalite (liberty, fraternity, equality), with the achievement of free political forms. By these gains, however, as Bismarck expressed it, it drew a bill on the future payable to its antipode---the working class. Hardly anywhere in the West did the working class, as a class, win the democratic institutions---it made use of them. Against this it may be argued that the working class took part in revolutions. A reference to history will refute this opinion, for, precisely in 1848, when the consolidation of Constitutions took place in the West, the working class represented the urban artisan element, the petty-bourgeois democracy; a factory proletariat hardly existed, while the proletariat employed in large-scale industry (the German weavers depicted by Haupt-
92V. I. LENIN
PROTEST BY RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
93mann, the weavers of Lyons) represented a wild mass capable only of rioting, but not of advancing any political demands. It can be definitely stated that the Constitutions of 1848 were won by the bourgeoisie and the small urban artisans. On the other hand, the working class (artisans, manufactory workers, printers, weavers, watchmakers, etc.) have been accustomed since the Middle Ages to membership in organisations, mutual benefit societies, religious societies, etc. This spirit of organisation is still alive among the skilled workers in the West, sharply distinguishing them from the factory proletariat, which submits to organisation badly and slowly and is capable only of lose -Organisation (temporary organisations) and not of permanent organisations with rules and regulations. It was these manufactory skilled workers that comprised the core of the SocialDemocratic parties. Thus, we get the picture: on the one hand, the relative ease of political struggle and every possibility for it; on the other hand, the possibility for the systematic organisation of this struggle with the aid of the workers trained in the manufacturing period. It was on this basis that theoretical and practical Marxism grew up in -the West. The starting-point was the parliamentary political struggle with the prospect---only superficially resembling Blanquism,^^52^^ but of totally different origin---of capturing power, on the one hand, and of a Zusammenbruch (collapse), on the other. Marxism was the theoretical expression of the prevailing practice: of the political struggle predominating over the economic. In Belgium, in France, and particularly in Germany, the workers organised the political struggle with incredible ease; but it was with enormous difficulty and tremendous friction that they organised the economic struggle. Even to this day the economic organisations as compared with the political organisations (leaving aside England) are extraordinarily weak and unstable, and everywhere laissent a desirer quelque chose (leave something to be desired). So long as the energy in the political struggle had not been completely exhausted, Zusammenbruch was an essential organisational Schlagwort (slogan) destined to play an extremely important historical role. The fundamental law that can be discerned by studying the working-class movement is that of the line of least resistance. In the West, this line was political activity, and Marxism, as formulated in the Communist Manifesto, was the best possible form the movement could assume. But when all energy in political activity had been exhausted, when the political movement had reached a point of intensity difficult and almost impossible to surpass (the slow increase in votes in the recent period, the apathy of the public at meetings, the note of despondency in literature), this, in conjunction with the ineffectiveness of parliamentary action and the entry into the arena of the ignorant masses, of the unorganised and almost unorganisable factory proletariat, gave rise in the West to what is now called Bernsteinism, the crisis of Marxism. It is difficult to imagine a more logical course than the period of development of the labour movement from the Communist Manifesto to Bernsteinism, and a careful study of this whole process can determine with astronomical exactitude the outcome of this `crisis'. Here, of course, the issue is not the defeat or victory of Bernsteinism---that is
of little interest; it is the radical change in practical activity that has been gradually taking place for a long time within the party.
``The change will not only be towards a more energetic prosecution of the economic struggle and consolidation of the economic organisations, but also, and most importantly, towards a change in the party's attitude to other opposition parties. Intolerant Marxism, negative Marxism, primitive Marxism (whose conception of the class division of society is too schematic) will give way to democratic Marxism, and the social position of the party within modern society must undergo a sharp change. The party will recognise society; its narrow corporative and, in the majority of cases, sectarian tasks will be widened to social tasks, and its striving to seize power will be transformed into a striving for change, a striving to reform present-day society on democratic lines adapted to the present state of affairs, with the object of protecting the rights (all rights) of the labouring classes in the most effective and fullest way. The concept `polities' will be enlarged and will acquire a truly social meaning, and the practical demands of the moment will acquire greater weight and will be able to count on receiving greater attention than they have been getting up to now.
``It is not difficult to draw conclusions for Russia from this brief description of the course of development taken by the working-class movement in the West. In Russia, the line of least resistance will never tend towards political activity. The incredible political oppression will prompt much talk about it and cause attention to be concentrated precisely on this question, but it will never prompt practical action. While in the West the fact that the workers were drawn into political activity served to strengthen and crystallise their weak forces, in Russia, on the contrary, these weak forces are confronted with a wall of political oppression. Not only do they lack practical ways of struggle against this oppression, and hence, also for their own development, but they are systematically stifled and cannot give forth even weak shoots. If to this we add that the working class in our country has not inherited the spirit of organisation which distinguished the fighters in the West, we get a gloomy picture, one that is likely to drive into despondency the most optimistic Marxist who believes that an extra factory chimney stack will by the very fact of its existence bring great welfare. The economic struggle too is hard, infinitely hard, but it is possible to wage it, and it is in fact being waged by the masses themselves. By learning in this struggle to organise, and coming into constant conflict with the political regime in the course of it, the Russian worker will at last create what may be called a form of the labour movement, the organisation or organisations best conforming to Russian conditions. At present, it can be said with certainty that the Russian working-class movement is still in the amoeba state and has not yet acquired any form. The strike movement, which goes on with any form of organisation, cannot yet be described as the crystallised form of the Russian movement, while the illegal organisations are not worth consideration even from the mere quantitative point of view (quite apart from the question of their usefulness under present conditions).
LENIN
A PROTEST
RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
95``Such is the situation. If to this we add the famine and the process of ruination of the countryside, which facilitate Streikbrecher-ism,* and, consequently, the even greater difficulty of raising the masses of the workers to a more tolerable cultural level, then ... well, what is there for the Russian Marxist to do?! The talk ahout an independent workers' political party merely results from the transplantation of alien aims and alien achievements to our soil. The Russian Marxist, so far, is a sad spectacle. His practical tasks at the present time are paltry, his theoretical knowledge, insofar as he utilises it not as an instrument for research but as a schema for activity, is worthless for the purpose of fulfilling even these paltry practical tasks. Moreover, these borrowed patterns are harmful from the practical point of view. Our Marxists, forgetting that the working class in the West entered political activity after that field had already been cleared, are much too contemptuous of the radical or liberal opposition activity of al) other non-worker strata of society. The slightest attempt to concen trate attention on public manifestations of a liberal political char acter rouses the protest of the orthodox Marxists, who forget that a number of historical conditions prevent us from being Western Marxists and demand of us a different Marxism, suited to, and necessary in, Russian conditions. Obviously, the lack in every Russian citizen of political feeling and sense cannot be compensated by talk about politics or by appeals to a non-existent force. This political sense can only be acquired through education, i.e., through participation in that life (however un-Marxian it may be) which is offered by Russian conditions. `Negation' is as harmful in Russia as it was appropriate (temporarily) in the West, because negation proceeding from something organised and possessing real power is one thing, while negation proceeding from an amorphous mass of scattered individuals is another. "For the Russian Marxist there is only one course: participation in, i.e., assistance to, the economic struggle of the proletariat, and participation in liberal opposition activity. As a `negator', the Russian Marxist came on the scene very early, and this negation has weakened the share of his energy that should be turned in the direction of political radicalism. For the time being, this is not terrible; but if the class schema prevents the Russian intellectual from taking an active part in life and keeps him too far removed from opposition circles, it will be a serious loss to all who are compelled to fight for legal forms separately from the working class, which has not yet put forward political aims. The political innocence concealed behind the cerebrations of the Russian Marxist intellectual on political topics may play mischief with him.''
We do not know whether there are many Russian SocialDemocrats who share these views. But there is no doubt that ideas of this kind have their adherents, and we therefore feel obliged to protest categorically against such views and to warn all comrades against the menacing deflection
* Strike-breaking.---Ed.
of Russian Social-Democracy from the path it has already marked out---the formation of an independent political working-class party which is inseparable from the class struggle of the proletariat and which has for its immediate aim the winning of political freedom.
The above-quoted Credo represents, first, "a brief description of the course of development taken by the workingclass movement in the West", and, secondly, "conclusions for Russia''.
First of all, the authors of the Credo have an entirely false conception of the history of the West-European working-class movement. It is not true to say that the working class in the West did not take part in the struggle for political liberty and in political revolutions. The history of the Chartist movement^^53^^ and the revolutions of 1848 in France, Germany, and Austria prove the opposite. It is absolutely untrue to say that "Marxism was the theoretical expression of the prevailing practice: of the political struggle predominating over the economic". On the contrary, ``Marxism'' appeared at a time when non-political socialism prevailed (Owenism, ``Fourierism'', "true socialism"^^54^^) and the Communist Manifesto took up the cudgels at once against nonpolitical socialism. Even when Marxism came out fully armed with theory (Capital) and organised the celebrated International Working Men's Association, the political struggle was by no means the prevailing practice (narrow trade-unionism in England, anarchism and Proudhonism in the Romance countries). In Germany the great historic service performed by Lassalle was the transformation of the working class from an appendage of the liberal bourgeoisie into an independent political party. Marxism linked up the economic and the political struggle of the working class into a single inseparable whole; and the effort of the authors of the Credo to separate these forms of struggle is one of their most clumsy and deplorable departures from Marxism.
Further, the authors of the Credo also have an entirely wrong conception of the present state of the West-- European working-class movement and of the theory of Marxism, under the banner of which that movement is marching. To talk about a "crisis of Marxism" is merely to
96V. I. LENIN
A PROTEST BY RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
97repeat the nonsense of the bourgeois hacks who are doing all they can to exacerbate every disagreement among the socialists and turn it into a split in the socialist parties. The notorious Bernsteinism^^55^^---in the sense in which it is commonly understood by the general public, and by the authors of the Credo in particular---is an attempt to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers' party into a reformist party. As was to be expected, this attempt has been strongly condemned by the majority of the German Social-Democrats. Opportunist trends have repeatedly manifested themselves in the ranks of German Social-Democracy, and on every occasion they have been repudiated by the Party, which loyally guards the principles of revolutionary international Social-Democracy. We are convinced that every attempt to transplant opportunist views to Russia will encounter equally determined resistance on the part of the overwhelming majority of Russian Social-Democrats.
Similarly, there can be no suggestion of a "radical change in the practical activity" of the West-European workers' parties, in spite of what the authors of the Credo say: the tremendous importance of the economic struggle of the proletariat, and the necessity for such a struggle, were recognised by Marxism from the very outset. As early as the forties Marx and Engels conducted a polemic against the Utopian socialists who denied the importance of this struggle.56 When the International Working Men's Association was formed about twenty years later, the question of the importance of trade unions and of the economic struggle was raised at its very first Congress, in Geneva, in 1866. The resolution adopted at that Congress spoke explicitly of the importance of the economic struggle and warned the socialists and the workers, on the one hand, against exaggerating its importance (which the English workers were inclined to do at that time) and, on the other, against underestimating its importance (which the French and the Germans, particularly the Lassalleans, were inclined to do). The resolution recognised that the trade unions were not only a natural, but also an essential phenomenon under capitalism , and considered them an extremely important means for organising the working class in its daily struggle against capi-
tal and for the abolition of wage-labour. The resolution declared that the trade unions must not devote attention exclusively to the "immediate struggle against capital", must not remain aloof from the general political and social movement of the working class; they must not pursue `` narrow'' aims, but must strive for the general emancipation of the millions of oppressed workers. Since then the workers' parties in the various countries have discussed the question many times and, of course, will discuss it again and again--- whether to devote more or less attention at any given moment to the economic or to the political struggle of the proletariat; but the general question, or the question in principle, today remains as it was presented by Marxism. The conviction that the class struggle must neces^ sarily combine the political and the economic struggle into one integral whole has entered into the flesh and blood of international Social-Democracy. The experience of history has, furthermore, incontrovertibly proved that absence of freedom, or restriction of the political rights of the proletariat, always makes it necessary to put the political struggle in the forefront.
Still less can there be any suggestion of a serious change in the attitude of the workers' party towards the other opposition parties. In this respect, too, Marxism has mapped out the correct line, which is equally remote from exaggerating the importance of politics, from conspiracy (Blanquism, etc.), and from decrying politics or reducing it to opportunist, reformist social tinkering (anarchism, Utopian and petty-bourgeois socialism, state socialism, professorial socialism, etc.). The proletariat must strive to form independent political workers' parties, the main aim of which must be the capture of political power by the proletariat for the purpose of organising socialist society. The proletariat must not regard the other classes and parties. as "one reactionary mass"^^57^^; on the contrary, it must take part in all political and social life, support the progressive classes and parties against the reactionary classes and parties, support every revolutionary movement against the existing system, champion the interests of every oppressed nationality or race, of every persecuted religion, of the disfranchised sex, etc. The arguments the Credo authors
7-0895
V. 1. Z.JEJVI&
A PROTEST BY RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
99advance on this subject merely reveal a desire to obscure the class character of the struggle of the proletariat, weaken this struggle by a meaningless "recognition of society", and reduce revolutionary Marxism to a trivial reformist trend. We are convinced that the overwhelming majority of Russian Social-Democrats will resolutely reject this distortion of the fundamental principles of SocialDemocracy. Their erroneous premises regarding the WestEuropean working-class movement led the authors of the Credo to draw still more erroneous "conclusions for Russia''.
The assertion that the Russian working class "has not yet put forward political aims" simply reveals ignorance of the Russian revolutionary movement. The North-- Russian Workers' Union^^58^^ formed in 1878 and the South-- Russian Workers' Union^^59^^ formed in 1875 put forward even then the demand for political liberty in their programme?. After the reaction of the eighties, the working class repeatedly put forward the same demand in the nineties. The assertion that "the talk about an independent workers' political party merely results from the transplantation of alien aims and alien achievements to our soil" reveals a complete failure to understand the historical role of the Russian working class and the most vital tasks of Russian Social-Democracy/ Apparently, the programme of the authors of the Credo inclines to the idea that the working class, following "the line of least resistance", should confine itself to the economic struggle, while the "liberal opposition elements" fight, with the ``participation'' of the Marxists, for "legal forms". The application of such a programme would be tantamount to the political suicide of Russian Social-Democracy, it would greatly retard and debase the Russian working-class movement and the Russian revolutionary movement (for us the two concepts coincide). The mere fact that it was possible for a programme like this to appear shows how well grounded were the fears expressed by one of the foremost champions of Russian Social-Democracy, P. B. Axelrod, when, at the end of 1897, he wrote of the possibility of the following prospect:
``The working-class movement keeps to the narrow rut of purely economic conflicts between the workers and employers and, in itself,
taken as a whole, is not of a political character, while in the struggle for political freedom the advanced strata of the proletariat follow the revolutionary circles and groups of the so-called intelligentsia" ( Axelrod, Present Tasks and Tactics of the Russian Social-Democrats, Geneva, 1898, p. 19).
Russian Social-Democrats must declare determined war upon the whole body of ideas expressed in the Credo, for these ideas lead straight to the realisation of this prospect. Russian Social-Democrats must bend every effort to translate into reality another prospect, outlined by P. B. Axelrod in the following words:
``The other prospect: Social-Democracy organises the Russian proletariat into an independent political party which fights for liberty, partly side by side and in alliance with the bourgeois revolutionary groups (if such should exist), and partly by recruiting directly into its ranks or securing the following of the most democratic-minded and revolutionary elements from among the intelligentsia" (ibid., p. 20).
,At the time P. B. Axelrod wrote the above lines the declarations made by Social-Democrats in Russia showed clearly that the overwhelming majority of them adhered to the same point of view. It is true that one St. Petersburg workers' paper, Rabochaya Mysl, seemed to incline toward the ideas of the authors of the Credo. In a leading article setting forth its programme (No. 1, October 1897) it expressed, regrettably, the utterly erroneous idea, an idea running counter to Social-Democracy, that the " economic basis of the movement" may be "obscured by the effort to keep the political ideal constantly in mind". At the same time, however, another St. Petersburg workers' newspaper, S. Peterburgsky Rabochy Listok (No. 2, September 1897), emphatically expressed the opinion that "the overthrow of the autocracy ... can be achieved only by a well-organised and numerically strong working-class party" and that "organised in a strong party" the workers will "emancipate themselves, and the whole of Russia, from all political and economic oppression". A third newspaper, Rabochaya Gazeta, in its leading article in issue No. 2 (November 1897), wrote: "The fight against the autocratic government for political liberty is the immediate task of the Russian working-class movement." "The Rus-
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