‘Is Marxism Obsolete?’ by Charles Rappoport

Introduction and translation by Medway Baker.

Since the fall of the USSR and the definitive failure of the Russian Revolution, many among the left have begun to question the validity of Marxism, and Lenin’s elaboration of it. Some turn to anarchism; many others turn to “democratic socialism” or left-wing populism. There are also those who classify themselves as Marxists, but reject the legacy of October 1917 and the politics of the Bolsheviks: I include in this category both left-communists of the German/Dutch and right-opportunists (some of whom claim the legacy of Kautsky or other great Marxist thinkers).

In short, there are many on the left who have been asking the question: “Is Marxism (or Bolshevism) obsolete?” This is not a foolish question; the USSR, and along with it so many of the assumptions underlying communist politics, is a thing of the past. The official communists are deprived of their guiding light, the Trotskyists’ hope for political revolution in the USSR was crushed, and the organized left has retreated as neoliberal capitalism advances across the world. It is correct and, indeed, necessary to question past dogmas.

But Marxism goes beyond the USSR, and Bolshevism goes beyond its contemporary manifestations. It is easy to forget that Marx and Engels argued as a minority within the socialist organizations of their day for scientific socialism; that the Marxists of the Second International often argued as minorities within their parties for Marxist politics; that the nucleus of the Comintern, the antiwar left faction of the Second International, argued as a minority for revolution in the face of social democracy’s capitulation to imperialism.

Charles Rappoport was a French Marxist who argued as a minority for Marxist politics in the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), a member party of the Second International. The SFIO was dominated by two main tendencies. On the one hand were the Guesdists, followers of Jules Guesde, who claimed the legacy of Marxism while rejecting Marxist political strategy; it was in reference to this tendency that Marx famously pronounced, “[if this is Marxism, then] I am not a Marxist.” On the other hand were the reformists, of whom Jean Jaurès was a prominent leader. Despite the revolutionary sloganeering of the Guesdists, neither tendency was prepared to build a mass, revolutionary workers’ party capable of taking power during a crisis of state; this was proven at the beginning of the First World War, when Jaurès (a prominent pacifist) was assassinated, and Guesde chose to support the war.

Rappoport was a member of neither tendency, although he frequently found himself in alliance with the Guesdists—who rejected taking ministerial positions in the bourgeois state, etc.—in the struggle against reformism. He was fanatically committed to the notion of scientific socialism: of Marxism as a scientific research project, and of communism as “the triumph of science, of art, and of the creative genius of man,” which he opposed to its role as “slave of the wealthy” under capitalism. He declared, “That science become the people’s, and that the people become learned (not simply schooled), this is our ideal.” He was equally committed to Marxism as a revolutionary political project.

He broke with the Guesdists in the leadup to the First World War, accusing them of cretinism and charging them with responsibility for the failure of Marxism to take root in France; after the beginning of the war, he began ending his articles with “The Second International is dead. Long live the Third International!” Although he was suspicious of Lenin and did not identify himself as a Bolshevik—indeed, he at first denounced the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and predicted the failure of the Russian Revolution, accusing Lenin of Blanquism—he wholeheartedly supported the formation of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1920.

As Rappoport learned more about the situation in Russia, and as he worked within the Comintern, he came to largely accept Lenin’s politics, while remaining critical of the Comintern and later Stalin. He was always kept from the reins of power within the party, and especially after “Bolshevisation”, he was less and less able to engage critically with others in the movement. In effect, he was reduced to a pamphleteer, aside from his own projects.

It was during the Popular Front and the Great Purge that he finally became totally disillusioned with the official communist movement. In 1938, he resigned from the party. He characterized the PCF as the “registry office for Stalin’s orders, or those of his speaker, Comrade [Georgi] Dimitrov.” Even as he denounced Stalin and hoped for the eradication of the Stalinist regime, though, Rappoport defended the legacy of October, and understood that the USSR could serve to terrify the capitalists and inspire the nations of the colonial world—and this could only be positive in his view.

Before the dissident Marxists of France had a chance to begin charting a new course, the Second World War began. Charles Rappoport died in 1941, with France under Nazi occupation, the USSR under siege, and himself thoroughly disillusioned with the socialist movement—yet always a staunch defender of revolutionary Marxism, of scientific socialism.

Is Marxism Obsolete?

This is translated from a transcription of a speech Charles Rappoport gave at a conference on 1 February, 1933, titled “Le marxisme est-il périmé ?” by Medway Baker.

Marxist Theory

Comrades,

Marxist theory has been known for a long time. In 1918, we celebrated the centenary of Karl Marx’s birth in 1818. I’m telling you this because I wrote the article on Marx’s centenary while in La Santé Prison, where I had as jailmate Mr. Caillaux, the originator of the word of the day: “Marxism is obsolete.” And, as I was in prison and could not author articles under my own name during the war, I signed it “a free man!”

This year, we commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, on 14 March 1883.

Marxism is not an abstract theory. It is the algebra of revolution. It is the science of the proletariat, the truly revolutionary class, as Marx said and as we see every day in our own lives.

It is not surprising that those who have something to conserve, who are by definition conservatives, who want to maintain the existing society, combat Marxist theory, since Karl Marx said to capitalist society, “Brother, you must die!” And as the present society would sooner vanquish all humanity than consent to disappear itself, not a single year passes without writers, journalists, academics, and others trying to refute Marx. It has even become a specialty in Germany, where there is a whole category of people known by the German name Marxvernichter, which means “assassins of Marx,” and where every year we see the same assassination rehashed. This is why there is an entire literature on Marxism which, by its volume (although not by its value), will soon surpass all that we have written on Shakespeare, Goethe, or Kant, the three men about whom the most has been written.

The attacks against Marx are not surprising. Marx has never been more topical, Marxist ideas have never been so alive as today. I will give this presentation on Marxism without passion; objectively, because that is what Marx deserves, having been an objective thinker.

There are two aspects to Marx: there is his method, and there are his theories.

Let us see first whether the method is “obsolete.”

The Marxian Method

Marx’s method is before all else a materialist method. Marx was the enemy of verbalism, even that verbalism playing at revolutionism. He was against all those who, like the ingenious Alexander Herzen said of his friend Bakunin, incorrectly “took the second month of pregnancy to be the ninth.” The result? Miscarriage! He was against the émigrés who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, wanted to restart it as soon as possible. So that the revolution might triumph, we need to wait for the material conditions that will assure victory. He was the opponent of those who, under the pretext of taking a faster route, jumped from the sixth floor to the ground instead of taking the stairs. Evidently, this is a faster route. You’ll arrive sooner, but in what state!

Marx applied the materialist method. He studied reality before all, the material conditions of social life. He was, at the same time, a dialectician. This means that he understood that it is necessary to find in each society the self-destructive elements of that society, which develop inside it, as well as the constructive elements of the new society. One could say that each society carries in its womb the new society, as the mother carries the child.

And if Marx and his partisans give socialism the qualifier of “scientific,” it is because they found within capitalist society, the existing economic society, the self-destructive elements of that society as well as the constructive elements of the new society.

The Marxist method is based on the concept of evolution towards revolution. Now, the concept of evolution is at the base of all sciences and all modern concepts, with the difference that evolutionists in the vein of Spencer halt the law of evolution at the threshold of the current society: everything evolves except capitalism. The law of evolution must respectfully sidestep the Bank of France and the other banks—it loses its authority, it ceases to be applicable; everything evolves except capitalist property and the capitalist mode of production. Marx, on the contrary, with an implacable logic, said, “No! If everything changes, if everything transforms, there is no reason that capitalism and its mode of production should remain at their present stage; there is no reason that historical evolution should stop at the capitalist stage.”

Must we return to the dogmas of the invariability of species, of the stagnation of all that exists, to old geology, to old astronomy? Modern astronomy and geology demonstrate that the comets and the planets are formed gradually and that the earth has passed through diverse stages.

Marx is in agreement with the modern theory of evolution, which does not exclude the rapid passage from evolution to revolution: today’s theory of evolution admits, along with de Vries, the existence of abrupt passages—jumps—in the regular march of things.

Marx never pits evolution against revolution. Thus, the child, who develops in the mother’s womb, enters the world in a bloody storm. Jaurès tried in vain to persuade the bourgeoisie that we could go to Morocco by way of “peaceful penetration.” Despite his good intentions, his power of persuasion and his honesty, he couldn’t make this idea of “peaceful penetration” victorious. You know that we are still at war in Morocco.

So, according to the Marxian method, according to Marx’s dialectic, we should not pit evolution against revolution.

Are these ideas obsolete? Should we return to idealist verbalism? Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern philosophy, said that there are two sources of truth: there is the method of the bees, tributaries of the surrounding materials, of the plants and the flowers from which they draw their honey; and there is the method of the spiders, who draw everything from their own substance. The idealists “have a spider in their head”, which is to say that they draw everything from their head, which leads them to take words for realities.

In the present era, it is common to abuse strong words. During the war, all the idealist baggage was brought into the light. We were told every day that those who parted for the front were going to fight for “justice”, for “rights”, for “civilization”. This abuse of idealist phrases, empty of sense in our present society, continues today. This abuse has so little diminished that, yesterday even, there was a gathering of the small and middle proprietors at the Salle Wagram, organized by the reactionaries. In the name of which principles did they organize against the demands of the socialists and the democrats? It is in the name of equality before tax, it is in the name of the rights of man that the rich demand to pay as much as the poor, Rothschild as much as Rappoport!

In effect, in the name of the rights of man and the citizen, the poor must pay as much as the rich. It is this equality that they propose. And here we see the living things of all time, of today, of yesterday, of the distant past. So, will you criticize Marx for not trusting in the words that are so abused, for looking reality in the face? Ferdinand Lassalle said, “to say what exists is already a revolutionary feat,” because reality works for us because it contains explosive elements because history contains dynamite, truly revolutionary forces that blow up the old “obsolete” societies.

So, from the perspective of method, Marxism cannot be considered “obsolete.” It proceeds from the most modern ideas: movement, transformation, evolution, revolution.

Marx was horrified by emptiness, by the abstract, by words that could apply to everything and which explain nothing, by strong words exploited in order to hide small things or to hide even abominations.

The Class Struggle

The social base of Marxist theory is class struggle. Marx did not content himself (like the bourgeois sociologists) with this banality that consists of arguing that society is made up of individuals and not potatoes. He said, “No, it is not individuals that we should study in society, nor their needs; what must be studied is classes.” When you look at someone in the street and ask: “Who is he?” If we reply, “He is a man,” you reply, “That’s a bad joke, and you have no clue about the person you met.” But if we reply, “He is a man without work, he’s unemployed,” you are informed; if we reply, “That’s Ford, or Citroën,” immediately you know who you’re dealing with.

People still deny the existence of classes. The Times, in its headlines—its emptyheaded headlines—says, “Don’t speak of classes, that’s obsolete, the French Revolution surpassed that, it eliminated classes; all men are equal; Félix Faure was able to become President of the Republic; nothing can stop you from following your dreams; nothing is written in the Penal Code to prevent you, so classes have been eliminated.”

The Times forgets everything up to passenger classes on trains. It forgets, also, that there are even in Paris quarters for classes, and that, for example, in that in which I live, the one ironically called the Santé [Health] Quarter, mortality rates are multiple times higher than in the quarters of the rich classes. There are even class funerals, and so we promise capitalist society a first-class funeral.

Given the events since the war, it’s a macabre joke to say that class struggle does not exist.

We see in each country an organized working class; we also see the emergence of fascism. To go deeper, what does this mean? It is the class struggle of the highest degree. The dominant classes have learned something from Marx, and above all from the practice of class struggle by the revolutionary working class.

So long as governments have constituted police, the guardians of social peace, the guard dogs of property and society, we have contented ourselves with trusting the bourgeois state to defend class. But now, when through the evolution of temperaments, through permanent crises, we see that the state can be threatened under pressure from the masses, or placed in the impossible position of having to rigorously repress the new forces that arise; the dominant classes attract the unconscious from the middle and working classes, and pacify them with self-proclaimed anticapitalist watchwords, cry out at the capitalists, at the bankers—adding “Jews”—and organize themselves in a bluntly demagogic fashion. This is the defense of class, this is the strategy of class, and today these are new forces of terrorist repression available to the regular forces of the capitalist state. This is class struggle in its most violent form. Now, can we deny class struggle? Can we deny the claims of class?

Marx demonstrated this historic fact. He was not, furthermore, the first to demonstrate it. Guizot, the great historian contemporary to Marx, explained the development of the French monarchy by class struggle. It was the monarch who supported the bourgeoisie to diminish the influence of the nobility.

To try to understand modern history and explain, without the idea of class struggle, what is happening today in England, in Russia, in France, in Italy: it cannot be done. This is the indispensable factor for the comprehension of history.

Even our enemies begin to speak of classes. The terms “class” and “capitalist society” were once dismissed as absurd, as the bourgeois economists and theorists told us. They considered these to be socialist exaggerations. Now, everyone speaks of capitalist society or capitalism, and the fascists are forced to declare themselves anticapitalist.

The Marxist Political Economy

Now let us move on to Marxist political economy.

Marx did not begin his treatise on political economy with banalities like “everyone, to eat, to clothe themselves, etc., is obligated to produce.” No, Marx began by defining commodities, capitalist society, by explaining the law of value of commodities: the wealth of our society is not made up of goods meant to satisfy our needs, but of commodities, that is to say, goods meant to enrich a specific class. Marx examined, therefore, which laws determine the value of commodities. This is labor. In this, he agrees with the great classical economists. But Marx specified that it was not simply labor that determines the value of commodities. If you decided to transport a bag of flour on your back from Marseille to Paris, without traveling by rail, your labor would be useless and would not add anything of value to the flour. Labour only determines the value of a product when this labor is accomplished under normal technical conditions. The theory of value leads to the theory of capital gains, by which Marx demonstrated that capitalist profit is made up by labor unpaid by the capitalist to the laborer, by the exploitation of the commodity known as labor power.

Marx, in his analysis of capitalist society, formulated the theory of capital concentration, of the gradual expropriation and disappearance of the middle classes.

Are these ideas obsolete? Can Caillaux contest the concentration of capital? Are the trusts not modern, capitalist economic forms? And are all these capitalist forces not enough confirmation of the law of capital concentration? Is the most capitalist country in the world, the United States, not dominated by capitalist magnates, as Marx said; by those we call “kings”? Kings of oil, of rail, of automotive. There are even kings of pork and steak in Chicago. These are true monopolies of all the material wealth. These are the grand masters who dominate that immense country.

In France, there is still a mass of petty proprietors. But when we examine things up close, we see, for example, six big banks dominating all the markets—and even dominating the state. We can therefore not deny, in this era of billionaires, of big banks, of large stores, of great commerce, that the law of capital concentration exists.

The reformist Bernstein wanted to demonstrate that middle classes exist. He gathered up all the savings books of all the maids to say that there are still, in them, small capitalists. But Marx never claimed that owning a thousand or ten thousand francs made one a capitalist! To be a capitalist, according to Marx’s definition, one must use the means of production to exploit the labor of others and therefore have the ability to live without performing labor. This is not the case with a maid.

I believe that Caillaux has never read Marx, even while declaring Marxism obsolete. What is obsolete is this method that consists of refuting a great thinker without even reading them. Bernstein knew Marx, and he placed joint-stock companies at the forefront of his argument, by saying: there is no concentration of capital, as there are many millions of shareholders. He forgot nothing except to explain the mechanism of joint-stock companies, where he who has the largest block of shares is the true master of the joint-stock company, while the others are nothing but extras.

Everywhere, it’s the same thing. And when a crisis arises, when all the little “capitalists” are swept away, all that remains is the one with the largest block of shares; and if he’s running low on money, the capitalist state will come to his aid, as we’ve seen recently.

In the present era, especially after the war, can we speak of the disappearance of the middle classes? Let us ascertain this in each country. The radical or democratic parties in England, in France, in Germany are the representatives, the chargés d’affaires of the middle classes. If these classes were flourishing, they would dominate all the others; meanwhile, we see the British Liberal Party, with Lloyd George, reduced to impotence. In Germany, the democrats have vanished. We see but two blocs now: the bourgeois reactionary bloc on the one hand, and the proletarian revolutionary bloc on the other. In France, did the May 1932 elections give the lefts a total majority? They capitulated without a struggle to the bourgeois reaction. It is always the reactionary capitalists, the most powerful capitalists, who have the final say in the ministerial composition.

We have published side by side the portraits of Daladier and Mussolini, to demonstrate their resemblance. But when the Socialists proposed not even the socialist programme, but the most tepid of radical programmes to these democratic Mussolinis, the capitalists rejected them. Daladier complained, he practically cried, and faced with the intransigence of the reactionary capitalists he raised up his own lamentations as a plea.

Marx spoke of the anarchy of capitalist production. Is this not demonstrated by the Brazilian coffee thrown into the sea, or by the wheat we use to heat locomotives? In Brazil they throw millions of pounds of coffee in the ocean. They even spend a lot of money on this. So must we not recognize as true Marx’s analysis, which demonstrates that the capitalists are condemned to anarchy because they produce but for profit, for an undetermined market? Go, determine the extent of the global clientele! It is said that the capitalists are smart enough to determine, with their specialists, their publicists, their experts, the volume of the global market. But can we do it? Was the greatest crisis of the past years not produced in the countries of the trusts? It is precisely in America, land of the colossal trusts, that the crisis is the greatest.

This proves that capitalism cannot liberate itself from anarchy. It produces abundance. But on the other hand, there are 30 million unemployed, according to figures from the League of Nations—which is still not communist, by the way. Along with their families, this represents a population of 120 million at least. Is unemployment not a product of capitalism? This phenomenon was studied in admirable detail by Marx when he plotted out the immense riches created by modern technology, alongside a reserve army of unemployed dying of hunger beside the shops filled with commodities. Is, by chance, this theory of capitalist crisis an obsolete theory? One must argue in bad faith or be as ignorant as an academic to claim this.

A large number of Americans have discovered, in America, technocracy. They have demonstrated, with numerous statistical findings, the marvels of technology. They can make a factory work 24 hours without a single worker and augment 4000 times the productivity of certain jobs. But Marx, precise as ever, often cited the words of Aristotle—the greatest thinker of Antiquity—who, in order to justify slavery, said, “If we were to invent machines that could weave and do other work, we could leave slavery behind.” Marx loved to cite this, to demonstrate how we have realized the brilliant idea of Aristotle. We have achieved truly miraculous productivity; we have machines that can do anything, admirable machines, and this is a product of capitalism that we will not refuse. Marx even gave a eulogy of the historical mission accomplished by the bourgeoisie, which has led to the appearance of giant cities and modern mechanical production. He wrote this in 1847. If he saw the present miracles of production, what would he have said! But we contest that these technical marvels, these admirable machines, instead of creating social and individual wellbeing, serve but a category of privileged people, and are raised up against the workers. Each new machine represents another massacre of workers, thousands of workers thrown to the street, without work.

Capitalist rationale is the rationing of the proletariat. The more capitalist society is rationalized, the less you have of the means of existence. This is confirmation of Marx’s dialectic, which demonstrated that every society perishes from its own contradictions. He consecrated his life to the study of contradictions inherent to capitalist society, the abuses that the society fatally engenders. And it does not suffice to destroy these abuses, as the ignoramuses say, but rather it is the very source of these abuses that it is a question of destroying: capitalist society!

Marx demonstrated that all these social contradictions are inherent to the capitalist mode of production, to the fact that the means of production are monopolized by an oligarchy, concentrated in the hands of a minority who enrich themselves while the majority, the working class, can live only by selling its labor-power to these owners of the means of production.

It is this that Marx asserted. Is it not true? Are there means of combating the crisis other than destroying its very cause? What do the technocrats say? They want to maintain capitalist society, that is, the cause of the crisis, its very base, the source of the contradictions of society; and at the same time they claim to want to eliminate its consequences. But what would happen if the technocrats became the leaders? There would be an organized or coordinated society, but this would be subordinated to capitalist interests. At the head of society, and, in the place of capitalists, it would be great engineers and technicians who dominate, always with an eye towards exploitation; because, as long as you leave the proletariat in its state, as people deprived of the instruments of production, they will inevitably be slaves, whether of Ford or of his engineers. Nothing would change. Instead of plutocracy, there would be technocracy.

Furthermore, Saint-Simon anticipated the technocrats in a famous parable, which even earned him a lawsuit. He said, “The kings, the parents of kings, the generals, the ministers, all of these could disappear, and society would not disappear. But the technicians, that’s another matter.” He understood the value of engineers, of architects, of doctors. This is not new. This is, I repeat, America discovered in America by Americans. But instead of starting from a logical premise, and observing the profound reason for this capitalist anarchy, this contradiction between technical progress and social misery, the “technocrats” plug up their ears and shut their eyes in order to maintain the exploitation of man by man.

Marxist Politics

I will move on now to the last chapter: Marxist politics.

Marx, basing himself in the analysis of capitalist society, didn’t address goodwill or the supposed common interest. As he based his sociology on the existence of classes opposed to one another, with antagonistic interests, he understood that among all these classes, only the proletariat was a revolutionary class. This is logical. Having nothing to conserve, the proletariat does not have any interest in being conservative. They possess only their own labor power. They are therefore a revolutionary class. They have nothing to lose but their chains and everything to win, as Marx said at the end of the Manifesto. How is it that the capitalists could be revolutionary? Have you ever known capitalists who demand shorter workdays and higher wages? Never has the capitalist class declared that it wishes to eliminate property. There may be some rare exceptions who prove the rule but never has a class committed suicide.

Marx understood this, while the utopians like Charles Fourier worked to persuade the bourgeoisie to be intelligent and organize social harmony and cooperation. Others, like Robert Owen, who sacrificed millions for social reform, sent sincere, good-faith letters, supplications, to the conventions where monarchs met to take counterrevolutionary measures. He worked to persuade these monarchs that by adopting his project, they could avoid revolution. He worked to persuade the wolves to not eat the sheep. Naturally, he was mocked, and his supplications were never addressed.

Marx was not against political action. He did not place trade unionism, the economic action of the working class, in opposition to its political action. He understood well the role of the state, which he defined thus: “The state is an administrative council of the dominant classes, united to oppress the exploited classes, the dispossessed classes.” He added, “It is necessary to destroy this force, and let us give power to the proletariat—this is what we call the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must give state power to the proletariat in order to eliminate inequality, or rather to remove the monopoly over the means of production from the capitalist oligarchs.” According to Marx, it is necessary to end the domination of possessing classes, to expropriate the proprietors. And by what means, other than by revolution?

It’s from Marx that we get the term “parliamentary cretinism.” Marx was not against parliamentary action, though. He used “parliamentary cretinism” to describe those who believed that they could realise social transformation through such means. Now, parliamentary cretinism is surpassed by ministerial cretinism.

There are those who believe that, with good ministers, we can transform society. Marx denied this. One of the greatest crimes of German social democracy was having believed that with the aid of “parliamentary cretinism” and participation in the bourgeois state, they could change the social model. Of course, you know what state Hitler’s Germany now finds itself in.

Is this not topical today? Is the conception of the conquest of power by revolutionary force obsolete? Never has a people, never has a class obtained its liberation on its knees. It is time to stand up, to struggle, to spill our own blood if we want to attain our emancipation. We cannot avoid revolution by relying simply on millions of voices. In 1904, in Amsterdam, Bebel stood against the ministerial participation supported by the reformists, and demanded that we declare the working class a “party of revolution.” But defining revolution, that was another matter. He said at the same congress, “We are growing by millions of voices; when we have the majority, the bourgeoisie will be drowned, they will be an islet in an ocean.” We see today the “islet” in the person of Hitler and his hitmen.

Marx never, in all his work, employed revolutionary phraseology. The revolution, for Marx, was like an underground fire, smoldering beneath his theories. He examined the origins of revolution without searching for revolutionary phrases. The latter is the specialty of certain other categories of people. It was not Marx’s specialty, as he was preoccupied with establishing facts, which were able to reveal logical conclusions: organise the working class with the knowledge that it is a revolutionary class, that it is not to negotiate, but to fight, as Jules Guesde said. It follows that we should not become ministers of state, that is to say members of the administrative council of the dominant classes. How! You want to enter in this administrative council to look after the day-to-day business of the bourgeoisie? To provide another example of class collaboration, how can Blum declare in his debates and articles that we have no interest in the bankrupting of bourgeois society? However, Mirabeau himself, that bourgeois revolutionary descended from the nobility, understood that the bankrupting of the nobility was a necessary step in the advent of the bourgeoisie. And here, there are those who do not understand that the collapse of capitalism can serve the proletariat! Our intention, our historical “mission” is not, according to Marx, to save capitalism from its inevitable bankruptcy, but to organize and develop the consciousness of the proletarian class.

Yes, there will be suffering; but will there not be even more in the upcoming war? Are we not threatened with a war of extermination? Will the reformists as well as the revolutionaries not disappear in the storm? Can we have confidence in the dronings of the pacifists in Geneva? Has this not all gone bankrupt?

Marx predicted this, declaring that capitalism is at the root of every modern war, and Lenin, in turn, demonstrated that in the era of imperialism, war is inevitable. We have only to state the facts standing before us. We see the impotence of the League of Nations. Despite the confidence people put in the League of Nations at the beginning, it did not prevent the war in the Orient; and if tomorrow, Germany, faithful to the social developments in that country, wanted to occupy the Polish corridor and begin a war, could the League of Nations stop it?

Marxism is not Obsolete

Marx presented his economics against the classical economics of the bourgeoisie. What was the principal, fundamental director of bourgeois economics? “Leave us be, let us do as we like!” But is there anyone in the world who can accept this principle and admit that it’s really saying, “let us make war, let us inflict misery”? Is individualism not bankrupt?

There is the theory of the elites, adopted by Mr. Caillaux, the originator of the phrase “Marxism is obsolete.” The elites, well, they’re naturally Mr. Caillaux and his friends. Us, we say: “There is another elite, and that is the working class, which begins to think, to organize, to become a global force.” We already have the example of the USSR, and I ask my opponents, who were the sociologist, or statesman, or historian who foresaw the advent of the proletariat in the historic role it is playing today?

Marx and Engels foresaw this historic role of the proletariat, and this was particularly difficult in 1847, as the proletariat existed but as a social fact, not yet as an organized force conscious of its historic goal: the end of capitalism. Marx and Engels saw but the beginnings of the working class, but thanks to their ingenious analysis, to their dialectical materialist method, they foresaw the historic role of the proletariat.

We can critique the difficulties of a country making up one-sixth of the globe and boycotted by all the rest. But there is in this a fact that exists: that the proletariat conquered power, that it holds power and is victoriously building socialism.

Is the historic role of the proletariat obsolete? No, Marxism is not obsolete. It is living, and it will live everywhere!

2019.01.252019.02.24

The Solution of Bukharin by Amadeo Bordiga

Translation of and introduction to Amadeo Bordiga’s “The Solution of Bukharin” by Leon Thalheimer.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin persists as a somewhat elusive character in the history of the Russian Revolution. Overshadowed by the figures of Stalin and Trotsky and their “mythic” conflict in the 1920s, the name of Bukharin was either forgotten or universally cursed until the 1970s. The study of the man and his ideas had an ambiguous meaning: on one hand, it represented the beginning a more honest and open study of the Revolutions of 1917 and their consequences. On the other hand, Bukharin was appropriated by a generation of reformers in the Eastern Bloc who turned him into the prophet of a project nothing short of bourgeois democracy and liberalism.

This tendency became more or less noticeable both in supporters and opponents of this “Bukharinism”. His most famous biographer, Stephen Cohen, seemed to find Bukharin in all attempts to reform the Eastern Bloc., from the Nagy cabinet to Dubček. The prominent Portuguese Communist Francisco Martins Rodrigues considered Bukharin to be no more than a bourgeois democrat. The appropriation of Bukharin’s legacy by the likes of Gorbachev further helped settle this image.

Nikolai Bukharin and the “Right” Opposition were accused of everything: defending the kulak, proposing the abandoning of the proletarian class party, capitulating to bourgeois democracy, fighting for capitalist restoration, and nurturing a renewed narodism [populism]. These accusations still echo for many and the history of Bukharin stays tarnished.

Amadeo Bordiga is seen in a vastly different light. Accused by all of being inflexible, unpractical, intransigent (a characterization that he himself came to partially admit, although proudly), he became the most famous name of the so-called Italian Communist Left, and more specifically of Programmismo tendency. His linear, almost mechanical writing style was entangled with a taste for poetic figures of speech, a very peculiar form of expression that suited his simultaneously dialectical and intransigent defense of Communism. The most superficial presentations of his work — such as this one, ironically — could leave no doubt: there is nothing farther apart from each other than Bordiga and Bukharin.

However, a more careful analysis would reveal the facts to be more complex. There is a much to be discovered in the depth of Bordiga’s thinking, such as his capacity to go beyond appearances and give life to Marxism in the concrete situation (much like Lenin). Both Bordiga and Bukharin were strongly grounded in Lenin’s final writings, appealing repeatedly to articles such as On Cooperation, Our Revolution and The Tax in Kind. However, as Bordiga himself admits, much of this wasn’t even Lenin’s original thought, but was already present in Marx, pointed out by Lenin in Our Revolution. The translation we now present is clear evidence of this fact.

Despite a great number of differences that undoubtedly exist between the two communists, this exact translation is important because it reveals a notable point of convergence and its numerous consequences. The importance of the worker-peasant alliance, the quickest route to complete the agrarian revolution, the best way to avoid bureaucratization and maintain proletarian power in the condition of international isolation and imperialist encirclement: these were all worries shared by Bukharin and Bordiga.

Furthermore, Bordiga, to the surprise of many, would go as far as saying that Bukharin’s “compromise” with the kulak, represented by the famous “Enrich yourselves!” was a truly Leninian compromise as outlined by Lukács in his Lenin.

The translation that follows is a very short extract of Amadeo Bordiga’s Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today [Struttura Economica e Sociale della Russia d’oggi]. This work is of great importance and represented the highest point of Bordiga’s intriguing analysis of the Russian Revolution, with its double character as a bourgeois and proletarian rev with its isolation leading to the strangling of the proletarian one. The chosen segment is very short, but crucial nevertheless, as it contains key parts of the whole argument. We recommend, after reading this extract, reading the larger translation made available by Libri Incogniti.

The Solution of Bukharin by Amadeo Bordiga, 1956-12

Translation of the chapters 111, 112 and 113 of Economic and Social Structure of the Russia of Today, Amadeo Bordiga. Traduction française: STRUCTURE ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIALE DE LA RUSSIE D’AUJOURD’HUI. 2° partie : “Développement des rapports de production après la révolution bolchevique” (1956-57). Published in italian in Il Programma Comunista N° 25 (december 1956).

When later Stalin was asked which fraction was worse, Left or Right, he replied that they were both worse and he made it clear that his plan was to crush both of them. In the meantime, what was the “Stalin” fraction? It was the one that consisted in not having a tendency, in not respecting principles, in administering the state for the state, in governing Russia for Russia, in replacing the position of class and the international position with a national and then imperial position: even assuming that neither Stalin nor his followers were originally aware of it.

It seems strange to those who write History “by taking an interest in people” that, from 1927, the right and the left came together to engage in an unequal struggle against the “leadership”. It would be strange to think that in insulting Stalin (ten times less than it should have), the Left was insulting a Right deviation in the theses from which Stalin, true weather vane of politics, had drawn before drawing, as we shall see, from the doctrine and theses of the Left But it is not strange if one makes history by the school of Marx and Lenin and not in the manner of Tecoppa. The explanation does not lie in Joseph Stalin’s “maffioso character”, but it rather another proof that the revolution had been historically “shortened” from a double revolution to a bourgeois-only revolution, wherein the latter the leaders cut each other’s heads to steal ideas and brains.

Trotsky himself, tied to the traditions of this struggle, devalued the “Right” even in his subsequent works, and he failed to understand the truth: that the Left and the Right were both on the ground of the Marxist principles, and that the “Center”, in each of its successive turning points in Russian as well as international politics, moved away a little more each time.

Trotsky has the immense merit of having, since 1923, individualized this demonstration which was to kill the Marxist party which alone had seized power: the handling of the apparatus of State, cruel and cold machine built to exert the terror on the class enemy, against the party apparatus – and such a pathological crisis stemmed from the retreat of the external revolutionary forces and the mistrust of an overwhelming non-proletarian population towards these revolutionary forces. On this question, the Italian left was completely with Trotsky – but for motives that have nothing to do with later “Trotskyism”. These episodes of abuse did not hurt the non-Marxist demand for “democratic respect for grassroots consultation”, they hurt the Marxist doctrine that the revolutionary dictatorship does not have as physical and concrete subject the people, nor even the national working class in general, but the international and historical communist party.

The path of the revolution that retreated from the socialist revolution to the bourgeois revolution was then marked by the maneuvers inflicted by history – and not by the caprice of the “non-collegiate” Stalin, nor by the defamed “capitulators of the Right” – at the machine of the Russian state. When Right and Left saw that most of the Bolshevik tradition and world communism was in danger, they united, but belatedly, after having suffered the end of the Curiatii – in the order Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin – in the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution that ultimately killed them.

So let us not be astonished if we rehabilitate Bukharin, not of the accusation of having been an agent of the foreign bourgeoisies — a charge that the disgusting exterminators themselves had to swallow as the insane who eat their own shit — but of the strong criticisms that Trotsky himself addressed to the famous “Enrich yourselves!”.

Marxist Appeal to the Dialectics

The first exigence of the Soviet Republic was to survive, either by means of the world revolution or by the “existential” means of the Russian State and the people of Russia; and this demand dominates the terrible historical dilemma of 1926. We showed in due time that if Bukharin followed Stalin in this historical orientation it was because he conceived of this withdrawal as a strengthening of Russia in view only of a gigantic “revolutionary” war against all the capitalist states that were trampling on the European working class. And it must be said that even Stalin proclaimed such a perspective on the eve of the Second Imperialist Conflict in which he had the brilliant idea of applying the same policy against the imperialist states as he had used against the internal “fractions”: exterminate them in several stages and remain the sole victor like Horatius Cocles! Strayed out of the way of the party and of the doctrine towards which he manifested a congenital impotence once he could no longer “steal” the ideas from the corpses, Stalin, once dead, paid dearly for all this by the humiliation that he received from those who the State Monsters of Capital did not want to kill but to imitate in a common race to the exploitation of the world, hand in hand, even if they have the faith of the thieves of Pisa .

So the economic problem is to survive. Which means, as we have said, finding a formula to truly connect industry and land — and we know the meaning of the transition from the formula of War Communism to the formula of the NEP, from the first to the second stage. It is now a question of understanding the development between the second and the third stage, stages of which we have given this series.

Center, Left, and Right were, in 1927, firmly attached to the theory of Lenin: that agriculture under the form of small enterprises is the death of the socialist revolution.

Lenin was indeed forced to accept, from a Marxist viewpoint, the anti-Marxist programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. He accepted this without hiding it, without ceasing to show that it was radically anti-Marxist. Only then were the Bolsheviks able to take power and lay the bases for the foundation of the Communist Parties of the world — Paris was well worth this Mass. However, the system of petty production had expanded by itself; which means that the potential of the countryside had taken huge steps backward, both technical and political.

The formula of slavery of the peasants by the workers’ state, foolishly advanced by some members of the “Left”, had failed. From one who does not produce, first because he cannot, then also because he does not want, nothing can be gained; neither by coercion nor by expropriation nor by murder.

And yet the dilemma remained: either starve or break out of rural fragmentation.

The nationalization of the land, and even more the statization of land ownership, serves only to prevent the formation of a new agrarian “great property”. Unfortunately, for the same reason, it ends up preventing the passage of the small to the big “enterprise”, and it locks the land in the technical limitations of its culture. But everyone wants the big agricultural enterprise that the industry could develop by providing it with new equipment – on the condition that the industrial workers be fed!

Trotsky and Zinoviev remain on the ground of Lenin: to pass, without coercion if possible, the very small peasant enterprise to enterprises where the collective work is directed by the State (the sovkhozes), that is to say with the State-owned land and the State’s exercise of capital (and so they are for intense industrialization).

Stalin wants to allow, by denationalizing the land, the reform of vast land possessions where a big farmer organizes collective production, obviously with employees, the rent going to the owner.

Bukharin, Stalin, and Voroshilov among a group of delegates to the Fourth All-Union Congress of Soviets, Moscow 1927

“Enrich yourselves!”

Bukharin defends, like the Left, the legal nationalization and is not for free property. The latter is a safeguard position not to fall back into the past and not lose power. But he understands that for big industry you need big capital. He sees that the industry can hardly start producing manufactured consumer goods (in addition to the production of goods for military use, necessary for the coming conflict, for him “offensive” – his dream rejected by Lenin at the time of Brest-Litovsk), at most it can produce capital goods to expand the industry itself, but not to transform agriculture. His formula is that the land remains in the state but the agrarian capital is formed outside of it.

Trade and the N.E.P. had already given rise to capital accumulation, but in the hands of traders, speculators who were no longer legally smugglers but Nepmen, hated by the peasants (but mostly because of the reactionary attachment of the latter to the management of the plot). This capital, threatened both socially and politically, is sterile from the point of view of production and the improvement of its technical potential.

Bukharin, who was often mocked by his master Lenin, knows his Capital perfectly. He knows that the classical primitive accumulation was born of the agrarian rent, as in England and elsewhere, and it is from this origin that the “bases” of socialism were born. He is nourished by other correct theories: that it is madness to think of having a tremendously expanding business, to treat in a mercantile form, as Trotsky justifies it, the industrial production itself, and not to see the growth of capitalist forms, state or private, but always capitalist. If in industry passing from private forms to state forms represent a progress in the countryside, yet there is no capital, neither private nor owned by the State, it is laughable to think that one can have not only socialism but even simply the statization of capital.

Bukharin is in line not only with Marx but also with Lenin. In the countryside you have to go from form 2 to form 3: from peasant petty production to private capitalism.

The land remains in the State, and the peasant rich “in land” disappears (it is not true that Bukharin and his people defended the kulak), but it is the “farmer of the State” that appears and the latter, with its working capital and its employees (in forms which are not radically different from the wage-earning of State-controlled and then owned factories), it produces on its own land a very large mass of products for the general economy, and it pays the rent to the state and no longer to the former landowner.

For the size of the average enterprise to grow it is needed, clearly, that the average enterprise capital grows as well as the number of rural proletarians. This result cannot be achieved if the agrarian entrepreneur does not accumulate and become larger. Another correct thesis, firm in the intelligent mind of Bukharin, was this: no State has the function of “building” and organizing, but only of forbidding, or of stopping forbidding. By ceasing to forbid the accumulation of social agrarian capital (Marx: the capital that is accumulated by individuals is only part of the social capital) the communist state takes a shorter route to climb the scale of forms, the ladder of Lenin.

The formula, the form of social structure that emerged from history, the kolkhoz, leads less rapidly from peasant fragmentation than the solution proposed by Trotsky (and Lenin), and especially that of Bukharin – and by affirming this we do not say that there was a choice between three possibilities when the controversy exploded. And this formula of the kolkhoz was not invented by Stalin, who was only a fabricator of formulas a posteriori with demagogic effect in which there is no genius (which needs parties and not heads in modern history, and perhaps ever) but great political force.

Yes, the brave Bukharin shouted: “Enrich yourselves!” But Stalin did much worse and was about to shout: “Make money from the land! Leave us only the industrial State, the armed force!”. He did not understand that whoever has the land has the State.

The phrase of Bukharin, which everyone remembers without being able to reconstruct its doctrine (it is difficult to do so from the texts), has this scope: “We open the doors of the land of the State to you; enrich yourselves with capital of the agrarian enterprise, and the moment we expropriate you from what you have accumulated will arrive more quickly, passing also in the countryside to step four: State Capitalism”.

For the fifth step, Socialism, one needs neither laws nor Congress debates, but only one force: the World Revolution. Bukharin did not understand it then and this was serious.

Stalin used Bukharin’s thesis to defeat the Marxist Left. When Bukharin saw that history pushed Stalin not to choose routes to economic Socialism but to bring the political state back to the capitalist functions, both internal and external, there was no longer any difference between the Right and the Left, nothing remained right of the Center, and all the revolutionary Marxists were, for reasons of principle much deeper and more powerful, against Stalin. They were certainly vanquished, but they belong to the fertile series of all crushed revolutions whose revenge will come, a revenge that can only be global.

2019.01.152019.01.24

100 Years Since Rosa Luxemburg’s Death: A Resolution On The Character of The New International

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s heroic death, we present this translation of Luxemburg’s thought on the building of a new International, translated and with an introduction by Rida Vaquas.

It is difficult to know how to commemorate someone who you have never really seen as dead, a woman who shapes the contours of your mental landscape with a startling intimacy. (Certainly, her words have sat with me and taken my hand in many difficult hours of the past six or seven years). Moreover, I am wary of the insipid kinds of commemoration that really kill a revolutionary by making them harmless. No revolutionary, besides perhaps Marx, has experienced the process described by Lenin of “hallowing their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it” more than Luxemburg. Whilst Lenin’s name can still provoke a few into a blind rage, very few give Luxemburg the credit of being a clear and present danger to the capitalist system, and the opportunists and cowards who lull themselves into being its supporters. To commemorate Luxemburg properly these days means making her so dangerous that not one of the descendants of the December Men (the SPD centrists) will dare invoke her name. To commemorate her properly means bringing out her ideas, her programme, her revolutionary will into blazing life.

What strikes me about Luxemburg these days is her clarity, a quality that has both unsettled and inspired those who encounter her over the years. Zinoviev described her as the “clear intelligence” of the German Communist Party in 1920. In 1922, the group Rote Jugend (Red Youth) described her as part of “the ones who brought together proletarian class consciousness, theoretical clarity and practical activity” who are now lost to us. With regards to her relationship with Leo Jogiches, her male biographer J.P. Nettl accused her of “blinding” clarity which was “the most destructive element in all human relationships”. What Nettl misses is that there was no way for Luxemburg to love without clarity.

To know how to love is to know how to see things for what they are. That means being able to appreciate them in the fullness of their existence outside of how you desire them to be. Rosa Luxemburg was not an incurable optimist because she did not know what German Social Democracy was like. She was an incurable optimist because she knew precisely what German Social Democracy was like and hence could discern its capacity for transformation all the more sharply. Clarity is not simply a weapon against false hope, it is a weapon against the distorting effects of despair upon political action. Nothing in Rosa Luxemburg yields to howling, which she rightly derided as “for the weak”.

However, it is all too easy to idealize her clarity, her ability to grasp the deliberately occluded dynamics of the world. It was not a gift and it was not a miracle. She obtained her clarity through years of hard work. This included serious and dedicated study, for which her multiple spells in prison were immensely useful, but also the more routine party work; going to Silesia to run an election campaign amongst workers there, writing articles for the various party newspapers, addressing demonstrations. It is essential that we do not exceptionalise Luxemburg for her clarity, but do everything we can to obtain it for ourselves.

This kind of clarity is not compatible with the brittle “unity” which calls for submerging our differences in principles under a red banner and getting on with it. That kind of unity is only a vulgar ‘follow the leader’ game that Luxemburg, a woman who unhesitatingly butted heads with every leading theorist of her time, had no patience for. It calls for a meaningful unity, a unity based on a shared political programme, that has been worked out over countless hours of discussion — one which seeks not to evade divisive questions, but answers them boldly.

The Resolution she presented to the second conference of the International Group (the forerunner to the Spartacist League), which I have translated below, exemplifies the kind of revolutionary internationalism we are still working towards.

Resolution on the Character of the New International

This resolution was passed unanimously at the second national conference of the “International Group” in Social Democracy. The conference took place on 19th March 1916, composed of delegates of 17 different cities. The second resolution Rosa Luxemburg proposed related to the obligations of Social Democratic parliamentarians, in which she advocated that war credits had to be rejected at every vote on the basis of socialist principles.

The new International, which must rise again after the disintegration of the old on 4th August 1914, can only be born out of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletarian masses in the biggest capitalist nations. The existence and effectiveness of the International is not a question of organisation, it is not a question of a common understanding between a small circle of people, who appear as representatives of the opposition-minded sections of the workers. It is a question of the mass movement of the proletariat of all countries returning to socialism. In contrast with the International which collapsed on 4th August 1914, whose only external authority and existence consisted of the loose relationships of small groups of party and trade union leaders, the new International must root itself in the convictions, the capacity for action and the daily praxis of the broadest proletarian masses in order to be a real political force. The International will be resurrected from below to this extent and through the same process: how the working class of all warring nations, freeing themselves from the fetters of the civil truce and the poisonous influence of their official leaders, will throw themselves into revolutionary class struggle. The first word of this struggle must be the systematic mass action to secure peace, and this alone can be the hour of birth for the new, living, active International.

As a symptom that the orientation of socialist circles across different countries in this direction is already underway and an international association is increasingly a requirement for these groups, the conference welcomes the direction of the “International”, i.e. the united opposition of German Social Democracy on the basis of the “Guiding Principles”, the Zimmerwald meeting from which the conference in Hague has emerged, and expects that its expressions will create new impulses in order to accelerate the birth of the International from the energetic will of the proletarian masses.

2018.11.292020.12.07

A Worker on Workers’ Education

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original article can be found here.

This article was originally written by Franz Förster (a painter) in 1909, in the leading theoretical journal of the SPD, Die Neue Zeit. It was a direct intervention into a heated debate around what the nature of political education should be taking place with German Social Democracy, which came to a head in the 1908 Nuremberg Party Congress over the curriculum of the party school. Whilst the revisionist wing of the party, including the Comrades Eisner and Maurenbrecher mentioned in this article, argued that the Party School should only teach hard facts and elementary sciences, the radical left, many of whom were employed at the Party School, emphasized the necessity of learning theory. Maurenbrecher was roundly criticized for suggesting it was pointless to learn about value theory unless one was first familiar with Thomas Aquinas. Luxemburg insisted on the need for “the theory which gives us the possibility of systematizing the hard facts and forging them into a deadly weapon”. ¹ This kind of insistence on “systematization” is present in this article, with theory being the basis of understanding, as opposed to knowledge of historical individualities.

The purpose of presenting this translation is not simply to provide a rerun for English-speakers about a particular debate within Social Democracy but to point towards the problems in the discussion of political education today, and ways forward. This article is caustic, polemical and eloquent; precisely because of the urgency of establishing what a class-based educational programme should do and how. Workers’ education (Arbeiterbildung) represented a turn away from the people’s education (Volksbildung) organized by philanthropic societies for self-improvement, it was intended to increase workers’ capacity to participate in the class struggle. The debate in the SPD really centered upon what skills are needed in this struggle and, implicitly, what shape this struggle should take.

A hundred years and innumerable defeats later, socialists have found ourselves in the middle of a resurgence of popular interest in “the Left”, however, we are still working out how we can build up socialist political infrastructures at the base of our movement. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that the historical institutions we look to as models weren’t conjured out of thin air by parties’ in much better situations than us; they were the product of hard and serious fights and constructed out of insufficient and inadequate parts.

Yet we also need to interrogate how political education works, if it is intended to reduce our dependence on leaders. This article rightly argues that “uncritically tailing leaders” conflicts with democratic principles, however, does teaching theory necessarily prevent this outcome if the leaders are the teachers of theory? Everyone who’s been through school knows that education can cement a hierarchy just as much as it can be used to dismantle it. In order to abide by Franz Mehring’s maxim “With the leaders if they are with us; without the leaders if they fail to act; in spite of the leaders if they oppose us”, there has to be the capacity to build shared understandings of the world and social change which do not hinge upon the leader of the moment, nor act as ideological legitimation for them.² If socialist theory is a “question of life” for the labour movement, we cannot be content with half-hearted gestures towards education being a good idea, but bring it into the realm of political contestation.

A Worker on Workers Education

By Franz Förster

After Comrade Eisner, tucked away in a casual statement made in justified annoyance, portrayed the “theorising” worker as a pitiable creature, who is not to be taken more seriously in his partial education, and even harms the party, it ought to have deterred any thinking Social Democratic worker from concerning himself with theories, let alone writing about them. And yet I dare.

The issues that I want to discuss were touched upon already by Comrade Kautsky in his article “Some Remarks about Marx and Engels”.

The proponents of the Nuremberg educational methods, the comrades Maurenbrecher and Eisner claim that Social Democratic workers need to know nothing about value theory or the materialist conception of history. Why? Because firstly they don’t have sufficient background knowledge, secondly because they don’t have enough time at their disposal which is necessary to work through the required material, according to this perspective. And thirdly, because knowledge of these theories for workers and eventually others represents a redundant luxury that one can do without, which Maurenbrecher demonstrates to us with his own person. Indeed, he doesn’t even hesitate to assert that theory, when taken up by the masses, could paralyse the party’s ability to act.

I will refrain from deriding the logic of Maurenbrecher or this claim, even though this restraint costs a great deal in the face of the situation.

A number of comrades, who were not completely satisfied with the level of understanding for our tasks within our own ranks, believed they could accept the curious assertion of Eisner and Maurenbrecher, without perhaps investigating the issue more precisely for the time being. It would be particularly astonishing if the atmosphere in trade union circles was in favour of the Nuremberg educational methods, when even they have reasons to turn against it. At the very least it is very premature to make the proposed educational methods into a shibboleth of revisionism.

If the proponents of new teaching methods say that workers lack the understanding of elementary knowledge and methodical reasoning that are necessary, this is only partially true. Because if understanding and recognition of value theory and the materialist conception of history only depended on mere reasoning, the entirety of our bourgeois social sciences could not oppose them uncomprehendingly. But it is well-known this is not the case. Countless examples could be invoked which show that many intelligent people, some who are even called Professor, commit the greatest offenses against logic as soon as they have to make a judgment on things which fall outside their bourgeois class interests. These are often offenses at which the class-conscious worker pityingly smiles. The effects of the laws of motion of our economy, discovered by Marx, have been sufficiently demonstrated to the working class first-hand. Their theories let us understand what is already familiar to us. The worker is more disposed to understanding socialist theory than members of other classes because as well as the thirst for knowledge, his class interests lend him support. For him, socialist theories are not academic questions, but questions of life itself. Because if he masters them, they become a powerful weapon in his hand in the struggle against his oppressors.

On the other hand, the academically educated new party member, who comes from the non-proletarian classes and therefore lacks the sharp proletarian class consciousness, has to finally free himself from the fetters of the bourgeois ideology which has been instilled in him. Of course, the proletarian way of thinking presents him with much greater difficulties, since enormous amounts of energy were uselessly consumed in the years of higher education. He is usually tired and resentful that he should now expend effort in learning the ropes of a different method of thinking that is completely alien to him. From this perspective, one can empathize with Comrade Maurenbrecher, that he is trying to save so much of the old cargo on the new ship. A longer quarantine would have done a lot of good here.

“If now the worker thinks, then nonetheless he should concern himself with history first and foremost”, that’s a history of quite a strange kind. Maurenbrecher’s method, to lose yourself in a welter of historical episodes, is a rather dangerous sport. These things have already flown over some people’s heads, so they don’t see the wood for the trees. The parts are more important to them than the whole. The danger of confusion through study of events alien to them, ripped out of context and without theory as rendered in the biographies of great men and princes, is particularly strong amongst workers. The workers, who have the doubtful fortune of having to listen to Comrade Maurenbrecher, only have a jumbled mass of historical details in store for them, without the connecting link of the materialist conception of history, because that is only for the leaders. It would “bamboozle” the heads of the workers. Once this is brought about, the soil is prepared for Maurenbrecher sowing the seeds of his bourgeois worldview, on which he – consciously or unconsciously – still stands with both feet.

From this superficial perspective, that Maurenbrecher wants to restrict the workers to, it follows that he and his friends give particular significance to the political constellation in South Germany, which is not merited. They are lost in trivialities, which will turn out to be illusions when disenchantment occurs.

When Comrade Maurenbrecher and his friend Eisner say: “Theory inhibits swift decisions, it is damaging to routine industrial struggles”, they ought to know, or their friends in trade unions ought to know, that serious struggles are not led with merely feelings and desire. As the goals of trade union struggle, just as much as political struggle, are predominantly economic (or would you dispute this too, Comrade Maurenbrecher?), it is our task, as class-conscious proletarians, to attain a clear account of the character of the economy and of bourgeois society. We achieve this through observation and evaluation of experience, in order to discern the laws of the movement, the decisive conditions for the onset of an event, to uncover the relationships between phenomena. A perspective into the past and future of society is only possible by virtue of awareness of the fundamental interconnections between events, only possible when we adopt the materialist conception of history. It alone enables us to turn the political and trade union movement towards the service of the working class wisely and purposefully, and even to overcome particular limitations.

Unquestionably, all of our knowledge about the infinite abundance of social life is only piecemeal. The nuggets of our more or less substantial knowledge must be brought together through a socialist worldview: this and the materialist conception of history consolidate the countless individual events of human affairs in the past and present into a whole. It is the key to understanding these matters. The understanding of our economy is therefore not dependent on the greater or lesser mass of knowledge you have stored up, but rather that whatever “learning” you have at your disposal is harmoniously unified through a clarified outlook, through a “theory”. That is how a worker can often be wiser and more educated than a heavily taught historian or national economist.

The appeal and impact of our party is also dependent on theoretical understanding. We don’t need blind faith, but rather scientific conviction, which gives us certainty and power. The freedom of action of the masses will not be weakened through this, rather strengthened. It is this insight, this knowledge of relevant factors, which guarantees success. A lack of insight absolutely cannot be replaced by “good leaders”. Aside from the fact that we come into sharp conflict with our democratic principles if we uncritically tail leaders, the history of the workers’ movement up until most recently shows us that a working class which is insufficiently aware of these relationships will deny allegiance even to the best leaders.

Perhaps the events which played out in the Nuremberg Party Congress are bringing forth the benefit that comrades concern themselves more with theoretical questions than they previously did.