Weekly Worker 620 Thursday April 13 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

The revolutionary strategy of centrists

Mike Macnair turns his attention to Kautsky’s perspective of patient organisation and party building in the years before World War I. There were undoubted strengths in this strategy. But fatal flaws too

In previous articles in this series I started with the partial strategic debate in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire, and progressed to Marxism as a strategy, and to the strategies of the right and left wings of the Second International. This article addresses the strategic conceptions of the centre.

The centre tendency in the German Social Democratic Party and Second International was also its ideological leadership. In spite of eventually disastrous errors and betrayals, this tendency has a major historical achievement to its credit. It led the building of the mass workers’ socialist parties of late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the creation of the Second International. The leftist advocates of the mass strike strategy, in contrast, built either groupuscules like the modern far left (such as the De Leonists) or militant but ephemeral movements (like the Industrial Workers of the World).

Down to 1914, Russian Bolshevism was a tendency within the centre, not a tendency opposed to it - even if Kautsky preferred the Mensheviks. Without the centre tendency’s international unity policy there would have been no RSDLP; without the lessons the Bolsheviks learned from the international centre tendency, there could have been no mass opening of the Bolshevik membership in 1905, no recovery of the party’s strength through trade union, electoral and other forms of low-level mass work in 1911-14, and no Bolshevik political struggle to win a majority between April and October 1917.

The centre tendency did not, of course, identify itself as such. It self-identified as the continuators and defenders of ‘orthodox Marxism’ against ‘anarchists’ (to its left, but not in the centre’s view) and ‘revisionists’ to its right. In this sense it was primarily defined by negative judgments on the coalition strategy of the right and the mass strike strategy of the left. Both Kautsky’s The social revolution (1902) and his The road to power (1909) are extremely cautious in making positive categorical predictive claims about strategy. There are nonetheless some core principled understandings about strategy which emerge from the arguments.

Organisation

The strength of the proletariat and its revolutionary capacity flows, for the centre, not from the employed workers’ power to withdraw their labour but from the power of the proletariat as a class to organise. It is organisation that makes the difference between a spontaneous expression of rage and rebellion, like a riot, and a strike as a definite action for definite and potentially winnable goals.

Moreover, as soon as we move beyond craft unionism, which relies on skills monopolies to coerce the employer, the difference between victory and defeat in a strike is the ability of the solidarity of the class as a whole to sustain the strikers in the face of the economic and political pressure the employers can exert. Finally, it is the need and (potential) ability of the proletariat as a class to organise democratically when we enter into a mass strike wave or revolutionary crisis that represents the potential alternative authority to the authority of the capitalist class.

Proletarian organisation need not only be deployed in the form of strike action. Solidarity and the power to organise can also create cooperatives of various sorts, workers’ educational institutions, workers’ papers, and workers’ political parties: and it can turn out the vote for workers’ candidates in public elections. Strong votes for a workers’ party will increase the self-confidence and sense of solidarity of the working class as a class and its ability to organise and act, not just electorally but in other arenas of struggle, such as strikes, for example.

The core of the political strategy of the centre tendency was to build up the workers’ organised movement, and especially the workers’ political party as its central institution. In their view, as the organised movement of the working class grew stronger, so would the self-confidence of the class and its ability to take political decisions and impose them on the bourgeoisie and the state. Both in the struggle for reforms and in mass strike waves or revolutionary crises, a powerful mass party of the working class which had at the core of its aims the perspective of the working class taking power and overcoming the regime of private property would be the essential instrument of the working class asserting an alternative form of authority.

It is important to be clear that the movement that the centre tendency sought to build was not the gutted form of the modern social-democracy/Labourism, which is dependent on the support of the state and the capitalist media for its mass character. The idea was of a party which stood explicitly for the power of the working class and socialism. It was one which was built up on the basis of its own resources, its own organisation with local and national press, as well as its own welfare and educational institutions, etc.

There is no real doubt that this view was a direct inheritance from Marx and Engels’s arguments from the time of the First International onwards. The Hegelian-Marxists’ claim that it was an undialectical vulgarisation of Marx and Engels, faced with the historical evidence, logically had to conclude that Engels had vulgarised Marx. This, in turn, has been shown by Draper and others to be false.

The self-emancipation of the majority

The second central feature of the strategic understandings of the centre tendency was that the socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority. This is fairly elementary and fundamental Marxism: it formed the basis of Marx and Engels’s opposition to various forms of socialist putschism and support for enlightened despots (Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s theory of revolution: critique of other socialisms has the details.) The object of the socialist revolution is precisely the self-emancipation of the working class majority and through this the emancipation “of all human beings without distinction of sex or race” (Programme of the Parti Ouvrier). The idea that this can be accomplished through the action of an enlightened minority is a self-contradiction.

The centre tendency drew two conclusions from this understanding - against the left, and against the right. The first was rejection of the mass strike strategy. On this issue, the centre presented the anarcho-syndicalists and the left with a version of Morton’s Fork. The first limb of the fork was that a true general strike would depend on the workers’ party having majority support if it was to win. But if the workers’ party already had majority support, where was the need for the general strike? The workers’ party would start with its electoral majority as a mandate for socialism, rather than with the strike. It was for this reason that the centre, in Bebel’s resolution at the 1905 Jena Congress of the SPD, was willing to demand the use of the mass strike weapon in defence of, or in the struggle for, universal suffrage.

The second limb of the fork was that the strategy of the working class coming to power through a strike wave presupposed that the workers’ party had not won a majority. In these circumstances, for the workers’ party to reach for power would be a matter of ‘conning the working class into taking power’ (Artous has accused Callinicos of having this strategy). However formally majoritarian the party might be, the act of turning a strike wave into a struggle for power would inevitably be the act of an enlightened minority steering the benighted masses.

The argument against the right was also an argument against minority action - but minority action of a different kind. The right argued that the workers’ party, while still a minority, should be willing to enter coalition governments with middle class parties in order to win reforms. The centre argued that this policy was illusory, primarily because the interests of the middle classes and those of the proletariat were opposed. Behind this argument was one made by Marx in 1850, that it would be a disaster for the workers’ party to come to power on the back of the support of the petty proprietors, since the workers’ party would then be forced to represent the interests of this alien class.

“We are devoted to a party which, most fortunately for it, cannot yet come to power. If the proletariat were to come to power the measures it would introduce would be petty-bourgeois and not directly proletarian. Our party can come to power only when the conditions allow it to put its own view into practice. Louis Blanc [French socialist who participated in a republican coalition government in 1848] is the best instance of what happens when you come to power prematurely.”¹ 

This logic applied all the more to the creation of a coalition government with the political representatives of the petty proprietors. By becoming part of such a coalition, the workers’ party would in practice accept responsibility for the petty-proprietor government. Again, the opposition to participating in coalitions as a minority was no novelty, but followed arguments already made by Marx and Engels. Thus, for example, Engels wrote to Turati in 1894, anticipating a possible Italian (democratic) revolution:

“After the common victory we might perhaps be offered some seats in the new government - but always in a minority. Here lies the greatest danger. After the February Revolution in 1848 the French socialistic democrats ... were incautious enough to accept such positions. As a minority in the government they involuntarily bore the responsibility for all the infamy and treachery which the majority, composed of pure republicans, committed against the working class, while at the same time their participation in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working class they were supposed to represent.”² 

This is a hard judgment, but it is one which has been repeatedly confirmed by history. Participation by communists in nationalist and ‘democratic’ governments, and ‘critical support’ policies, animated by the desire to ‘do something for the workers’, has in the course of the 20th century brought on the workers’ movement in several countries disasters far worse than those of 1848: the fates of the mass Indonesian, Iraqi and Iranian communist parties spring to mind. The effect of the coalition policy can be not merely defeat, but the destruction of the very idea of socialism and working class politics as an alternative to the capitalist order.

Patience

The centre’s strategic line was, then, a strategy of patience as opposed to the two forms of impatience; those of the right’s coalition policy and the left’s mass strike strategy. This strategy of patience had its grounds in the belief that the inner-logic of capital would inevitably tend, in the first place, to increase the relative numbers and hence strength of the proletariat as a class, and, in the second, to increase social inequality and class antagonism. Kautsky makes the argument most clearly in The social revolution. In this situation the workers’ party/movement could expect to build up its forces over the long term to a point at which it would eventually be able to take power with majority support.

This strategic line can be summed up as follows. Until we have won a majority (identifiable by our votes in election results) the workers’ party will remain in opposition and not in government. While in opposition we will, of course, make every effort to win partial gains through strikes, single issue campaigns, etc., including partial agreements with other parties not amounting to government coalitions, and not involving the workers’ party expressing confidence in these parties.

When we have a majority, we will form a government and implement the whole minimum programme; if necessary, the possession of a majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/pro-capitalist and petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and allow the class struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class.

Imperialism

I have left on one side the question of imperialism, which I discussed at considerable length in a series in the Weekly Worker in July-August 2004. As I indicated in the third article in this series, it has significant implications for the centre tendency’s strategy of patience. The inherent tendency in capitalism towards social polarisation is partially displaced from the imperialist countries onto the colonial countries.

In particular, the material division of labour on a world scale results in a proportional increase in the professional, managerial and state official middle classes in the imperialist countries - a phenomenon observed by Hobson of south eastern England and then in Lenin’s Imperialism, and one which has been considerably more marked in the period since 1945. An increasing proportion of the total population of the imperialist countries becomes wholly or partly dependent on the spoils of empire. Thus, the likelihood of the workers’ party actually achieving an electoral majority - as the strategy of patience demands - in any single imperialist country and outside of conditions of acute political crisis, is substantially reduced.

The state

What distinguished the centre tendency from the later Leninists most fundamentally was the belief that the working class could take over and use the existing capitalist state bureaucratic apparatus, a view developed most clearly in Kautsky’s The road to power. This, too, had its roots in claims made by Marx and - particularly - Engels.

In The civil war in France Marx had asserted precisely that the working class “class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” and had proposed the Commune as a model of the future workers’ regime.

In the first draft of The civil war in France, indeed, Marx had characterised the Commune by saying that “This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of state power. It was a revolution against the state itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.” ³ 

In an April 1871 letter to Kugelmann Marx wrote that “If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the continent” (original italics apart from “on the continent”).

But that was in the first flush of the revolutionary movement. In the aftermath of the Commune, the Bakuninists had argued that the mass strike revolution was to abolish the state. In response to the uselessness of the Bakuninists’ line, Marx and - in particular - Engels had ‘bent the stick’ against it in a number of texts.

In On authority (1872), Engels uses a series of arguments for the need for authority (ie, collective decision-making mechanisms) in modern cooperative production.⁴  But he explains them in a very unqualified way, which makes no distinction between the temporary subordination of one individual to another which is unavoidable in collective decision-making, and the permanent division of labour between managers and grunts which characterises both capitalist (and other class), and bureaucratic, regimes. Engels’s arguments in this respect were to be used both by Kautsky against the left, and by Lenin in the 1918-21 process of construction of the bureaucratic regime in Russia.

Engels’s 1891 afterword to The civil war in France is a little more ambiguous on ‘smashing up’ the state than Marx’s letter to Kugelmann: “In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap” (emphasis added).⁵ 

In Engels’s 1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class struggles in France, 1848-1850 we find Engels asserting that: “With [the SPD’s] successful utilisation of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly took on a more tangible form. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still further levers to fight these very state institutions. The workers took part in elections to particular diets, to municipal councils and to trades courts; they contested with the bourgeoisie every post in the occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had a say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion” (emphasis added).

It is clear from Engels’s correspondence in 1895 that he did not by any means intend to rule out illegal or forcible action, and was exasperated at the SPD leadership’s use of the Introduction to suggest that he did. But this does not alter the significance of the positive arguments, part of which have been quoted here.

Theory

Behind these ambiguities is a problem of theory. Marx and Engels had started out with an appropriation and ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s theory of the state: Hegel saw the state as growing out of the internal contradictions of ‘civil society’ (bürgerliche Gesellschaft); Marx and Engels identified bürgerliche Gesellschaft with capitalism. But they became conscious that the state as a social form in general is historically prior to the emergence of capitalism. In The civil war in France, Marx projects the rise of capitalism back onto the emergence of the absolutist state in the phase of the decline of feudalism.

Behind the argument of The civil war in France is, in fact, an earlier understanding that absolute monarchy must be broken by revolution. In England’s 17th century revolution (1850) Marx and Engels wrote that “Although M Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not even reach the simple conclusion that the transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy can take place only after violent struggles and passing through a republican stage, and that even then the old dynasty, having become useless, must make way for a usurpatory side line.”⁶ 

In quoting Marx’s letter to Kugelmann, I added emphasis to the words “on the continent”. Engels’s 1891 critique of the Erfurt programme makes a similar distinction: “One can conceive that the old society may develop peacefully into the new one in countries where the representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way: in democratic republics such as France and the USA, in monarchies such as Britain, where the imminent abdication of the dynasty in return for financial compensation is discussed in the press daily and where this dynasty is powerless against the people. But in Germany where the government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, when, moreover, there is no need to do so, means removing the fig-leaf from absolutism and becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness.”⁷ 

Marx’s late work found in the Ethnological notebooks indicates that he recognised the insufficiency of this account, which ties the state to early modern absolutism. In The origins of the family, private property and the state, Engels’s “execution of a bequest” of Marx’s anthropological work, Engels identifies the origins of the state with the break-up of clan society in antiquity: the social contradictions which produce the state are then given by the emergence of full alienable private property and classes.

The result, both in Marx’s Civil war in France version and in Engels’s Origins version, is that capitalism inherits “the state” from the prior social orders. It is then rational to suppose that socialism (either as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or as the ‘first phase of communism’), will inherit “the state” from capitalism.

What is missing is a general theory which will explain why the absolute monarchies had to be ‘smashed’ in order for fully capitalist states to emerge, in a process which was completed in the Netherlands in 1609 and England in 1688, but was not completed until 1871 in France and 1918 (and perhaps even 1945) in Germany.

But such a theory must also explain why the late antique state had to be ‘smashed’ in order for feudal state regimes to emerge, in a process completed in the former western Roman empire over the 7th-11th centuries, but which in Byzantium failed, ending in the conquest of the still stubbornly late antique state by the Ottoman regime in 1453. Similarly, in China a regime very similar to the late antique state recapitulated itself on changes of dynasty until it finally fell in the 1911-12 revolution, but in Japan such a state was ‘smashed’ in the 12th century, opening the way to a feudal development.

Such a theory could not to stop at the immediate outcome, the particularity of the late feudal bureaucratic-coercive state and its relationship to capitalism. Nor could it stop at the beginning, at the absolute generality of the emergence of the state in connection with the transition to class society (which was probably in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, China, India and Mesoamerica rather than, as Engels placed it in Origins, in Greek and Roman classical antiquity). It would have to grasp the relation of concrete state forms (city-state and god-empire, national kingdom as part of a larger religious unity, rule-of-law constitutional state as part of a system of states) to their class bases (slavery, feudalism, capitalism).

In approaching the matter in this way, it would become visible that Engels’s 1891 judgment that in France, the USA and England “the representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, [and], if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way” was false. The inner secret of the capitalist state form is not ‘bourgeois democracy’.  Rather, it has three elements: 1. the ‘rule of law’ - ie, the judicial power; 2. the deficit financing of the state through organised financial markets; and 3. the fact that capital rules, not through a single state, but through an international state system, of which each national state is merely a part.

This, in turn, carries the implication that Engels’s 1891 critique of the SPD’s failure in the Erfurt Programme to call for the democratic republic was true but insufficient, and that his 1895 claim that “It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still further levers to fight these very state institutions” was misconceived.

In the absence of an explicit democratic-republican critique of the state hierarchy forming part of the SPD’s agitation, the SPD’s participation in the local and sectoral governmental organs of the German Second Empire served, not to undermine the imperial state, but to integrate the workers’ movement behind that state and to support the development of bureaucratic hierarchies within the workers’ movement.

The problem of failure to grasp the character of the nation-state system as part of an international state system and subject to the world market was one the centre shared with the rightwing, and was more profoundly disastrous than the failure to grasp the problem of the class character of state forms. It, too, has its origins in Marx and Engels.

The nation-state

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” (Communist manifesto).

There is a peculiarity about this statement. Early in the Manifesto, we are told that “To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.” The ideas of Marx and Engels reflected in the Manifesto, moreover, were drawn from the appropriation and critique of German philosophy, English political economy, and French utopian socialism. Moreover, what immediately followed (not, of course, as a result of the Manifesto) was the outbreak of an international revolutionary wave affecting France, Germany, Austria, Hungary ...

Indeed, previous (bourgeois) revolutionary movements had also been international: the Europe-wide commune movement of the 12th and 13th centuries, protestantism (in particular Calvinism) and Enlightenment republicanism. Future, more proletarian revolutionary waves, were also to be international in character, as in the rise of class struggles which led up to the 1914-18 war, those of the end and immediate aftermath of that war, the aftermath of 1945, and the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Nonetheless, in the Critique of the Gotha programme Marx wrote that “It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle - insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist manifesto says, ‘in form’.” He went on, of course, to criticise the programme for “Not a word, therefore, about the international functions of the German working class! And it is thus that it is to challenge its own bourgeoisie - which is already linked up in brotherhood against it with the bourgeois of all other countries - and Herr Bismarck’s international policy of conspiracy.”

Engels’s contemporaneous critique in a letter to Bebel has a similar insistence on the workers’ party initially organising nationally, but its underlying international content: “There was, of course, no need whatever to mention the International as such. But at the very least there should have been no going back on the programme of 1869, and some sort of statement to the effect that, though first of all the German workers’ party is acting within the limits set by its political frontiers (it has no right to speak in the name of the European proletariat, especially when what it says is wrong), it is nevertheless conscious of its solidarity with the workers of all other countries and will, as before, always be ready to meet the obligations that solidarity entails.

Such obligations, even if one does not definitely proclaim or regard oneself as part of the ‘International’, consist for example in aid, abstention from blacklegging during strikes, making sure that the party organs keep German workers informed of the movement abroad, agitation against impending or incipient dynastic wars and, during such wars, an attitude such as was exemplarily maintained in 1870 and 1871, etc.”⁸ 

The growth of the SPD, however, gave rise to a shift in Engels’s attitude. An increased emphasis was placed on the defence of Germany as the country in which the workers’ movement was strongest. In 1891 the initial emergence of an alliance of France with Russia threatened a war in which Germany might be attacked on two fronts (as, in the event, happened in 1914).

Engels wrote to Bebel that “we must declare that since 1871 we have always been ready for a peaceful understanding with France, that as soon as our Party comes to power it will be unable to exercise that power unless Alsace-Lorraine freely determines its own future, but that if war is forced upon us, and moreover a war in alliance with Russia, we must regard this as an attack on our existence and defend ourselves by every method ...”

And “if we [Germany] are beaten, every barrier to chauvinism and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown down for years hence. If we are victorious our party will come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore the victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must not only desire victory but further it by every means.”⁹ 

The same position was publicly adopted by Bebel on behalf of the SPD, and Engels published it (as his own opinion) in France.

With this we have arrived at the position which the SPD took up in August 1914. It is, in fact, dictated by the inner-logic of the combination of the claims that “the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie” and that the (nation-) state is “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy”. In August 1914 these commitments left the centre as badly enmeshed in the defence of “national interests” as the right, and led them to support feeding the European working class into the mincing machine of the war.

Dialectic

It is a commonplace of the far left, following hints from Lenin elaborated by Lukacs and others, to accuse Kautsky in particular and the centre in general of an insufficient grasp of dialectic. I have argued against this approach before (‘Classical Marxism and grasping the dialectic’ Weekly Worker September 11 2003). In particular, it is clear that Kautsky and his immediate co-thinkers did not imagine an uninterrupted social peace which would allow the SPD to progress without crises and setbacks, and that they did grasp that history moves both in a slow molecular fashion and in an accelerated and chaotic fashion in periods of crisis.

The trouble was that their errors on the state and the nation-state rendered this understanding useless when it came to the test of war. They were to have the same result in the revolution of 1918 and when, in 1931-33, the SPD was confronted with the rise of Nazism.

The centre’s strategy of patience was more successful than the other strategies in actually building a mass party. Its insistence on the revolution as the act of the majority, and refusal of coalitionism, was equally relevant to conditions of revolutionary crisis: the Bolsheviks proved this positively in April-October 1917, and it has been proved negatively over and over again between the 1890s and the 2000s. However, because it addressed neither the state form, nor the international character of the capitalist state system and the tasks of the workers’ movement, the centre’s strategy proved to collapse into the policy of the right when matters came to the crunch.

 1. MECW 10 pp628-29, quoted in Meszaros, Beyond Capitalism (1995) p518 329n.

 2. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm.

 3. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm#D1s3ii.

 4. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm.

 5. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm.

 6. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm

 7. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm.

 8. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm.

 9. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_09_29.htm

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