Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat

Having discovered as early as 1844–45 one of the chief defects of the old materialism, namely, that it was unable to understand the conditions or appreciate the importance of revolutionary practical activity, Marx throughout his life, alongside his theoretical work, gave unflagging attention to questions of the tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat. An immense amount of material on this is provided by all of Marx’s works, and in particular by his four-volume correspondence with Engels, published in 1913. This material is still far from having been collected, brought together, studied and worked up. We must therefore confine ourselves here to the most general and brief remarks, emphasising that Marx rightly considered materialism without this side to be half-hearted, one-sided and lifeless. Marx defined the fundamental task of proletarian tactics in strict conformity with all the premises of his materialist-dialectical outlook. Only an objective account of the sum total of the relations of all the classes in a given society without exception, and consequently an account of the objective stage of development of that society and of the relations between it and other societies, can serve as the basis for the correct tactics of the advanced class. At the same time, all classes and all countries are regarded not statically but dynamically, that is, not in a state of immobility but in motion (whose laws follow from the economic conditions of existence of each class). Motion in its turn is regarded not only from the standpoint of the past but also from the standpoint of the future, and that not in the vulgar sense of the “evolutionists”, who see only slow changes, but dialectically: “in great historical developments twenty years are no more than a day,” Marx wrote to Engels, “though later on days may come in which twenty years are concentrated” (Correspondence, vol. III, p. 127). At each stage of development, at each moment, proletarian tactics must take account of this objectively inevitable dialectic of human history: on the one hand, making use of periods of political stagnation or of snail-paced, so-called “peaceful” development to develop the consciousness, strength and fighting capacity of the advanced class; and on the other hand, conducting all this work of utilisation in the direction of the “final aim” of the movement of that class and of creating in it the ability to solve great tasks in practice in the great days that “concentrate twenty years in themselves”. Two of Marx’s arguments are of special importance here: one from The Poverty of Philosophy, concerning the economic struggle and economic organisations of the proletariat, the other from the Communist Manifesto, concerning its political tasks. The first reads: “The great industry masses together in a single place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of their wages, this common interest which they have against their employer, unites them in the same idea of resistance, combination… The combinations, at first isolated, have formed in groups, and, in face of constantly united capital, the maintenance of the association became more important and necessary for them than the maintenance of wages… In this struggle, a veritable civil war, are united and developed all the elements necessary for a future battle. Once arrived at that point, association takes a political character.” Here we have the programme and tactics of the economic struggle and of the trade-union movement for several decades, for the whole long period in which the proletariat prepares its forces “for a future battle”. With this must be compared the numerous references by Marx and Engels, taking the English labour movement as their example, to how industrial “prosperity” leads to attempts to “buy the workers” (Correspondence with Engels, I, 136) and to divert them from the struggle; how this prosperity in general “demoralises the workers” (II, 218); how the English proletariat is becoming “bourgeois”: “this most bourgeois of all nations” (the English) “is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie” (II, 290); how its “revolutionary energy” is disappearing (III, 124); how one will have to wait a more or less long time for “the English workers to free themselves from their apparent bourgeois corruption” (III, 127); how the English labour movement lacks “the mettle of the old Chartists” (1866; III, 305); how the English labour leaders are becoming a type midway “between the radical bourgeois and the worker” (on Holyoake, IV, 209); how, owing to England’s monopoly, and so long as that monopoly lasts, “the British working man will not budge” (IV, 433). The tactics of the economic struggle, in connection with the general course (and outcome) of the labour movement, are considered here from a remarkably broad, comprehensive, dialectical and truly revolutionary standpoint.

On the tactics of the political struggle the Communist Manifesto advanced this fundamental thesis of Marxism: “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.” In the name of this, in 1848 Marx supported in Poland the party of the “agrarian revolution”, “that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846”. In Germany in 1848–49 Marx supported the extreme revolutionary democrats, and he never afterwards retracted what he then said about tactics. He regarded the German bourgeoisie as an element that was “inclined from the very beginning to betray the people” (only an alliance with the peasantry could have enabled the bourgeoisie fully to achieve its own tasks) “and to compromise with the crowned representatives of the old society”. Here is Marx’s summing-up of the class position of the German bourgeoisie in the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, an analysis that is, incidentally, a model of a materialism which examines society in motion, and not only from the side of the motion that faces backwards: “…without faith in itself, without faith in the people; grumbling at those above, trembling before those below;… frightened by the world storm; nowhere with energy, everywhere with plagiarism;… without initiative;… an accursed old man, condemned to lead the first youthful impulses of a young and robust people in the interests of his own senility…” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1848; see Literary Remains, vol. III, p. 212). About twenty years later, in a letter to Engels (III, 224), Marx declared that the revolution of 1848 had failed because the bourgeoisie preferred peace with slavery to the mere prospect of a struggle for freedom. When the period of the revolutions of 1848–49 was over, Marx came out against any playing at revolution (Schapper–Willich and the struggle against them), demanding the ability to work in the new period, which was preparing new revolutions in an apparently “peaceful” way. The spirit in which Marx required this work to be done can be seen from his assessment of the situation in Germany in 1856, the most deeply reactionary time: “The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War” (Correspondence with Engels, II, 108). So long as the democratic (bourgeois) revolution in Germany was not complete, Marx concentrated all attention in the tactics of the socialist proletariat on developing the democratic energy of the peasantry. He considered that Lassalle was “objectively betraying the workers’ movement to Prussia” (III, 210), among other reasons precisely because Lassalle was indulgent to the landowners and to Prussian nationalism. “It is despicable,” Engels wrote in 1865, exchanging views with Marx on a joint statement they were planning to make in the press, “in an agricultural country to attack only the bourgeoisie in the name of the industrial workers, while forgetting the patriarchal ‘exploitation by the stick’ of the rural workers by the feudal nobility” (III, 217). In the period 1864–70, when the epoch of the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany was coming to an end, the epoch of the struggle of the exploiting classes of Prussia and Austria over the way in which that revolution was to be completed from above, Marx not only condemned Lassalle, who was flirting with Bismarck, but also corrected Liebknecht, who had lapsed into “Austrophilism” and the defence of particularism; Marx demanded revolutionary tactics that would fight Bismarck and the Austrophiles with equal ruthlessness, tactics that would not adapt themselves to the “victor”, the Prussian Junker, but would at once resume the revolutionary struggle against him also on the ground created by the Prussian military victories (Correspondence with Engels, III, 134, 136, 147, 179, 204, 210, 215, 418, 437, 440–441). In the famous Address of the International of 9 September 1870, Marx warned the French proletariat against an untimely rising; but when it nevertheless took place (1871), Marx enthusiastically hailed the revolutionary initiative of the masses, who were “storming heaven” (letter of Marx to Kugelmann). The defeat of revolutionary action in this situation, as in many others, was, from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism, a lesser evil in the general course and outcome of the proletarian struggle than the abandonment of a position already occupied, a surrender without battle: such a surrender would have demoralised the proletariat and undermined its capacity for struggle. Fully appreciating the use of legal means of struggle in periods of political stagnation and of the rule of bourgeois legality, Marx in 1877–78, after the Anti-Socialist Law had been passed, sharply condemned the “revolutionary phrases” of Most, but no less, if not more, sharply attacked the opportunism that had for a time taken hold of the official Social-Democratic Party, which did not at once show steadfastness, firmness, a revolutionary spirit and readiness to go over to illegal struggle in reply to the Anti-Socialist Law (Letters of Marx to Engels, IV, 397, 404, 418, 422, 424; cf. also the letters to Sorge).