ALB
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Here is the considered position we took up at the time. Basically, that it was up to the Spanish workers to decide what to do in the circumstances. We respect their decision whatever our doubts.
”Whether the Spanish workers were wise in participating in a struggle so costly in human lives may be debatable, but as they have decided to take the plunge, and as they have the most violent partisans of capitalism against them, Socialists are, of course, on their side. It must be assumed that the Spanish workers weighed up the situation and counted the cost before deciding their course of action. That is a matter upon which their judgement should be better than that of people outside the country.”
It looks as if the alarmists have it, then. Not that those that say they think this are going to get up and do anything about it — because they don’t think anything can be. Alarmism tends to have that effect.
Interesting. No wonder he had no compunction after the war in giving a list of state-capitalist Russia’s fellow travellers to British intelligence. For which he has often been criticised — by other admirers of Russia.
By the way, by coincidence there is a talk and discussion in Orwell this Friday at 7.30 on Discord.
“Marx and Engels are Marcos’ gods, after all.”
I don’t think they were as he made clear Anyway, you and Robbo have driven him off this forum,
“I also wonder ALB just how much of it was related to their disputes with Bakunin.“
Possibly, as Bakunin had some nasty things to say about Germans and Jews, especially German Jews. But I think it will go back more to the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848 which Marx and Engels took part in as in effect radical bourgeois democrats and German nationalists (as they mistakenly believed that a bourgeois revolution in Germany would be quickly followed by a proletarian one), Engels even as a fighter. German democrats and radical nationalists regarded Russia as a major threat should they have won.
Our 1950 pamphlet quotes Engels as writing that at the time:
” Our foreign policy was simple: support for every revolutionary people, call for a general war of revolutionary Europe against the great mainstay of European reaction, Russia …”
I think that sticking to this position will have been at the root of their mistakes: Marx’s paranoia about Russia and Engels’s completely unacceptable comments about various Slav peoples.
You are exaggerating again TM. I don’t know why. Engels was both out of order and proved to be wrong on this matter but he didn’t go as far as you are trying to make out, mirroring professional “anti-communist” websites.
The words “peoples without history” is more usually rendered as “non-historic peoples” which, according to this article, meant peoples that did not have the capacity to constitute an independent nation-state. Which is not at all the same as saying that the peoples he had in mind did not have a history. He was well aware that the Czechs in particular did as he wrote about it elsewhere.
At the time the peoples (language groups) he was talking about were largely subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Independently of Engels, it was not the policy of the Social Democrats there to support the breakaway nationalism of the Czechs and Croats.
After the first world war artificial states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were set up but didn’t last the century.
I think that the violent language Engels still employed after 1848 in private about them would have been due to the fact that it was troops from these peoples that were used to put down the revolutionary wave in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1848. It seems he never forgave them. He should have of course since you can’t hold people responsible for what their ancestors did.
So he was not talking about China or Mexico as these were already established states and he was certainly not saying that China had no history. As to American Indians, although it could be said that they didn’t have the capacity to become an independent nation-state, that had nothing to do with it. In fact in his The Origin of the Family, Property and the State he was quite sympathetic to them as was Lewis Henry Morgan on whose work he based a large part of his pamphlet. He recognised that they had a history and wrote about it.
As I said, I don’t understand why you want to be put the worst possible interpretation on the mistakes Marx and Engels made, in line with those who seek to use these to malign the whole idea of socialism.
That’s a later, revised edition brought out in 1970 but with the cover of the 1950 one. I have dug out my copy of the 1970 one with a view to sending you its front cover to put there instead. I will send you it later today. The text if the 1950 version is not there .
“A techno-feudalistic society”
Another example of how the word “feudalism” has come to be associated with directly political forms of economic exploitation. It was the ideologists of bourgeois revolutions that made “feudalism” a dirty word, so using it in this way is a tribute to their success. There are better words to describe this sort of thing, which don’t give credit to these ideologues and which they won’t like, such as “crony capitalism” and “oligarchy”.
Incidentally, I think the old Deleonist SLP of America used to call the state capitalist USSR “industrial feudalism”.
Yes, that is where we have explicitly stated that we disagree with the political stance taken up by Marx and Engels and that they were wrong.
Their justification for taking up these positions was that Tsarist Russia was a threat to the “European Revolution” by which they meant not the socialist revolution but the revolution to establish and consolidate capitalist political conditions, ie political democracy in a nation- state, throughout Western and Central Europe.
This led them to take up the aberrant political positions you mention — and other such as support for the Franco-British-Turkish side in the Crimean War, opposition to all Slav nationalism (except Polish — they saw an independent Poland as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Europe ) since those speaking Slavic languages and practising Orthodox Christianity were seen as actual or potential tools of Russia, taking sides in European wars (in fact in all wars as in the US-Mexican one you mention).
Marx had what can be called an obsession about Tsarist Russia, arguing that it had been plotting for centuries to conquer the world and advancing a conspiracy theory that the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston was a Russian agent.
What Engels wrote about the non-Polish Slavs was also completely out of order, though I think he meant they should be Germanised rather than literally exterminated. Incidentally, no wonder Kautsky should object as he was half-Czech and had been a Czech nationalist before he became a socialist.
In their attitude towards Russia and the other Slavs (except the Poles) they were behaving as old 48ers as those German bourgeois democrats and nationalists who were involved in the abortive German Revolution in 1848-9 were known. And they were wrong. But, as was to be expected, they were products of their time.
The explicit repudiation by the Party of these positions taken up by Marx and Engels is in chapter 13 of the original 1950 edition of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War. Unfortunately it is not in the pamphlet section on this site. Maybe I will scan it as it should be ( unless somebody else wants to volunteer).
“I like the idea of a world without wage-labour and where everything is free.”
Like Marx then, though of course he didn’t think up either idea but learned them from already existing movements that capitalist conditions had thrown up. in the 1830s and 1840s. Before him workers had raised the demand “Abolish the Wages System” and critics of capitalism had called for “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Another reason for not over-doing the word “Marxism”. When describing us I deliberately put this in inverted commas for this reason as well as to indicate that we employed the same language and analysis to back up these demands that Marx did (though not because he did), as I’m sure you recognised.
No. But it was a bit of a journalistic flourish introduced by “it seems that”. What he was getting at was the (apparently) unchanging nature of Chinese society. A bit like his famous (?) comment about the idiocy of rural life. I don’t think he “despised” people in China. In fact he was seeing them as victims of the opium trade.
I was wondering when you would find that one on a right wing “anti-communist” site ! Lafargue’s wife was Marx’s daughter Laura so this was obviously a private joke. Also the German word was Neger which can also be translated as Negro.
All these quotes date from the mid-century when they had come to the conclusion that capitalism still had a long way to develop before it would have built up the material basis for a world socialist society. So they supported the further and most rapid development of capitalism to bring this about and removing the obstacles to it. That’s not our situation but it was theirs.
That was the language widely employed in the 19th century. Marx’s contemporary the pioneer cultural anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan even incorporated it in to his theory of social evolution (from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilisation), on which Engels based much of his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Society
Of course we wouldn’t use that terminology today but rather Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc or even Asiatic Mode of Production, Ancient Slave Society, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism.
Yes, it looks as if US capitalist class have got fed up with the antics of the president of their executive committee as ruling class. All the more reason, not to intervene to help them out.
Meanwhile Pluto Press have sent us publicity for some of their books about the election in which they say:
“Neither candidate will implement the reforms necessary to blunt the sharp edges of capitalism.”
Very revealing. That’s all leftists want : “to blunt the sharp edges of capitalism”. But of course no one can do that, at least not for long, not even Bernie. It’s the whole system of capitalist class ownership and production for profit that has to go.
