The Ballot, the Streets—or Both

From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution

August H. Nimtz

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781642590913
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kommunismus, Postkommunismus & Sozialismus

Nimtz uncovers in one that attempts to chart a course between plain opportunism and anarchist rejections of the electoral arena. Instead, electoral campaigns are seen as crucial for developing political education and organisation, and as a key way to measure your forces and communicate with the wider population. As radical left reformist projects, exemplified by Sanders and Corbyn, once again become a political force and the left has to think about what it means to run for office in a capitalist state, it's a good time to look back at how the left has historically conducted such debates.

LENIN’S ELECTORAL STRATEGY FROM MARX AND ENGELS THROUGH THE REVOLUTION OF 1905

CHAPTER 1

WHAT MARX AND ENGELS BEQUEATHED

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE BOLSHEVIK Revolution in 1917, Lenin engaged in a heated debate with what would be the intellectual forebears of today’s social democrats. He accused them—especially Karl Kautsky, the one-time “Pope” of European socialism—of misrepresenting Marx and Engels’s politics. Kautsky, he protested, “has turned Marx into a common liberal … [he] has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx.”¹ Of particular concern was how, in Lenin’s estimation, they portrayed Marx and Engels’s views on parliamentary democracy and the related issue of involvement in the electoral arena. These were vital questions, he argued, that went to the very heart of the significance of what the October Revolution had just instituted, the process by which it was achieved, and the potential lessons for aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere.

This chapter provides a synopsis of Marx and Engels’s views on both themes from their earliest to final pronouncements.² I also include a summary of what they thought about the prospects for revolution in Russia. Knowing what Marx and Engels had to say about parliamentary democracy and the electoral arena allows for a determination whether or not Lenin was justified in his accusations. A review of what they thought about the Russian movement also answers the oft-debated question concerning whether Lenin constituted continuity with the two founders of the modern communist movement—at least for these issues.

“THE EUROPEAN SPRING”

The revolutions of 1848–49 required that Marx and Engels address concretely and substantively for the first time parliamentary democracy and the electoral process. Like the participants in the “Arab Spring,” they, along with other activists, had to grapple with all the questions that come with the overthrow of despotic regimes—how to do it, what to replace them with, and how to ensure that the previously disenfranchised are actually in power.

Prior to the midcentury upheavals, Marx and Engels had certainly thought and written about the institution of democratic rule. The daily reality of absolutist Prussia, even in its more liberal domains where the two lived, the Rhineland, almost demanded that they do so. Marx’s first political writings addressed the irritant of state press censorship he faced as a cub reporter. His realization that the most influential mind for his generation, Georg Hegel, offered no real solutions to Germany’s democratic deficit propelled him on the road to communist conclusions. Constitutional monarchy, Hegel’s proposal, was far from “true democracy—the sovereignty of the people.”³ Rather than the world of philosophy, the study, he decided, of “actuality” or “the real movement of history” provided better results. And in the world as it existed when he set out to make his inquiries, history and “actuality” offered only two examples of political overturns that resulted in political democracy: France and the United States of America. The American case, I argue, generated the most valuable lessons for Marx.

What was so striking about the US experience for the young Marx was the combination of the most politically liberal society in the world with the grossest social inequalities, not the least of which was chattel slavery.⁴ If that was the best that liberal or political democracy had to offer, then clearly something else was required for “true democracy,” or “human emancipation.” How do we explain this apparent contradiction? In seeking an answer Marx arrived at conclusions that made him a communist. As long as inequalities in wealth, especially property, were allowed and reproduced—political economy—then “real democracy” was impossible. The wealthy minority could and would use their resources to ensure political outcomes that privileged their interests. Then how could “real democracy”—a classless society—be realized, and what segment of society had the interest and capability to do so? Political developments in Europe provided the answer—the proletariat. Marx’s new partner, Frederick Engels, reached similar conclusions by another route. The task for the two new communists was to link up with Europe’s vanguard proletarian fighters. The price for doing so, after winning key German worker-leaders to their views, was to write a document that proclaimed their new world view.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party sharply distinguished itself from the programmatic stances of other socialist tendencies in its position that the prerequisite for the socialist revolution was the democratic revolution—the necessity “to win the battle for democracy.” In related pronouncements clarifying their views, they wrote that, like the Chartists in England, the German proletariat “can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment accept it as their ultimate goal.”⁵ In no uncertain terms, the Manifesto, in four successive locations, made clear that it would take “force” to “overthrow the bourgeoisie” in order to reach the “ultimate goal.” Nevertheless, they maintained to the end that the means to that goal was the conquest of the “bourgeois revolution.” When a critic charged in 1892 that they ignored forms of democratic governance, Engels demurred, “Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”⁶

COMMUNISTS FOR THE BOURGEOIS DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

The ink was hardly dry on the Manifesto when the “European Spring” erupted. On February 22, 1848, street fighting and the erection of barricades began in Paris. The monarch Louis Philippe abdicated after two days and a provisional government was installed, the commencement of the Second Republic. The outcome in Paris inspired protests and uprisings in almost fifty other cities in Europe. A new phase in the age of the bourgeois democratic revolutions had opened—the struggle to institute republican government and parliamentary democracy for the first time in most countries on the continent. In France, the fight was for its reinstitution. Armed with a party, the Communist League, the body that commissioned the writing of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels immediately went into action. From Brussels, where they had been in exile, they moved to revolutionary Paris, where they made plans for realizing their new world view in Germany. They had to move quickly for on March 18, after two days of street fighting in Berlin, Frederick IV conceded to the demands of the demonstrators and agreed to grant a constitution.

The Manifesto, they recognized, needed to be supplemented given the new reality. Except perhaps for France, socialist revolution—what the document spoke to—was not on the immediate agenda in most countries, certainly not their homeland. Thus they composed, with the approval of the Central Authority of the League, the much neglected Demands of the Communist Party of Germany, effectively the extreme left position of the bourgeois democratic revolution. As a one-page leaflet it was disseminated much more widely than the Manifesto. The first three and thirteenth of the seventeen demands are instructive:

1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic.

2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence.

3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to become members of the German parliament …

13. Complete separation of Church and State. The clergy of every denomination shall be paid only by the voluntary contributions of their congregations.⁷

As well as constituting what they considered to be the essentials of a democratic republic, these were Marx and Engels’s first public pronouncements as communists on universal suffrage and representative democracy.

The Demands addressed another issue that the Manifesto didn’t—the peasant question. As the document stated, demands six through nine “are to be adopted in order to reduce the communal and other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailing the means available for defraying state expenses and without imperiling production.”⁸ Other demands indicated that the document did indeed have a multiclass audience in mind: “It is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to support these demands with all possible energy. Only by the realization of these demands will the millions in Germany, who have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom the exploiters would like to keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power to which they are entitled as the producers of all wealth.” In other words, an alliance of the proletariat, petit bourgeoisie, and small peasant—what Engels referred to in earlier writings as the alliance of “the people”—was the coalition Marx and Engels envisioned “to win the battle for democracy,” the bourgeois democratic revolution.

Once back in Germany, the Rhineland in particular, Marx and Engels sought to implement their vision. The subhead of their new newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [New Rhineland Newspaper] or NRZ, the Organ der Demokratie [Organ of Democracy], said it all. But not all Communist League members and contacts were in agreement with the perspective of the Demands. Regarding, first, the demand for a unified republic, Andreas Gottschalk, the League’s leader in Cologne, objected on the grounds that such a call would frighten the bourgeoisie. A constitutional monarchy was less threatening, he argued. He also complained about the elections to the All-German Frankfurt Parliament and the Prussian Constitutional Assembly in Berlin because workers would be required to vote for electors and have, thus, only an indirect vote. The elections, he urged, should be boycotted. Marx and Engels and the rest of the League leadership disagreed and argued for active participation in the elections.

Another difference of opinion concerned the coalition of class forces for instituting the democratic revolution, an issue that had implications (to be seen shortly) for Marx and Engels’s electoral strategy. Not only Gottschalk but another key figure in the workers’ movement, Stephen Born, thought that priority should be given to issues that directly affected the working class and looked skeptically on an alliance with the petit bourgeoisie and peasantry. This stance, which Marx and Engels criticized, betrayed the tendency on the part of craft workers still saddled with a guild or straubinger mentality to dismiss the importance of the democratic revolution—a kind of working-class provincialism. To be sectarian toward these other social classes threatened the realization of that revolution, given that workers constituted a minority of society. Such a posture meant effectively conceding the franchise for that fight to the bourgeoisie, who, as Marx and Engels had already begun to point out, would increasingly vacillate on the issue of democracy.

The differences of opinion that surfaced in the League pose the related question of democratic decision making within the organizations that Marx led—an issue that can only be briefly treated here. Suffice it to say that in Gottschalk’s case, owing to his disagreement with the League’s leadership about its electoral strategy, he was asked to tender his resignation. One of its rules stipulated that “subordination to the decisions of the League” was one of the “conditions of membership.” He told Marx that he disagreed with the rule and would indeed resign because “his personal freedom was in jeopardy.” What transpired gives credence to the argument that the League’s norms anticipated those that Lenin is most associated with: democratic centralism.⁹ Many years later Engels told a supporter in Denmark that the “labor movement depends on mercilessly criticizing existing society … so how can it itself avoid being criticized or try and forbid discussion? Are we then asking that others concede us the right of free speech merely so that we may abolish it again within our own ranks?”¹⁰ There is no evidence that he and Marx ever acted contrary to this stance, including in the case of Gottschalk. It was his actions—opposition to the League’s electoral strategy—and not his right to voice disagreement that were curtailed.

It...