Class struggle, two-line struggle and mass line
Note from AND editorial staff: The present text is the first part of a large and important study accomplished by the Nucleus of Studies for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the aim to provide the AND readers a deep grasping of how Marx and Engels have formulated their theory, deeply plunged into the class struggle practice, the road they followed and method they applied to arrive to Marxism as a scientific ideology of proletariat. As well the pratice, road and method used by their followers Lenin, chairman Mao and chairman Gonzalo to the concrete and particular realities of their respective countries and revolutionary proceedings.
Because it is an extensive work and of extraordinary importance AND will publish it in several parts.
Marx doctrine is omnipotent because it is exact. It is complete and harmonious giving the men a complete concept of the world, incompatible with all superstition, all reaction, all defense of the bourgeois oppression. Marxism is the legitimate successor of what has been best created by the humankind in the 19th century: the German philosophy, the English political economics and the French socialism”.
Lenin, The three sources and the three constitutive parts of Marxism
“Marxism consists of thousands of truths that can be condensed in just one: it is fair to rebel”.
Chairman Mao Tsetung, Speech in Yenan during Stalin’s birthday celebration
“In brief, the ideology of proletariat, Marx’s great creation, is the highest concept one can and could see on Earth; it is the concept, the scientific ideology that for the first time has given men, the class (mostly) and the people a theoretical and practical tool for transforming the world. And everything he foresaw has been fulfilled. Marxism has been developed, becoming marxism-leninism and nowadays marxism-leninism-maoism. We can see how such an ideology is the only one which is able to change the world, make the revolution and lead us to the irrenunciable aim: communism”.
Chairman Gonzalo, The century’s interview
The great Friedrich Engels affirmed that Marxism was a historical need and Karl Marx was a casualty. This statement encloses a deep dialectical materialist understanding of history and constitutes an important starting point for analysing the genesis of Marxism. It comes to, in a marxist rigour, the relationship between leadership – classes and masses as it has been systematized later by Lenin. As it also comes to the relationship between jefatura and guide-thinking which supports it, as it has been established by chairman Gonzalo.
What Engels’ statement shows us is that the scientific ideology of proletariat would necessarily be systematized; in fact, this ideology represents the necessary reflection, in the social consciousness, of the antagonistic class struggle between the bourgeois and working class. This struggle discloses itself in the course of the working movement and its revolutionary party, the Communist Party, as a two-line struggle. When Engels refers to causalty he means were it not for Marx, the systematizer of this scientific ideology, it would necessarily belong to another proletarian revolutionary such a hard task.
Marxism as a historical need
Marxism, therefore, is not an exclusive product of the geniality of the proletariat giant, Karl Marx. Marxism is fundamentally the product of the working class struggle against bourgeoisie and capitalism in Europe, at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century. Marxism is as well the product of the two-line struggle which occurred in the leadership of the European working movement and Communist Party at that period. And to the individual Karl Marx was possible to systematize the ideology, not only for being linked very early to the working movement but for being the founder of the Communist Party which, in a hard two-line struggle, has defeated along the years, Proudhon and Blanqui’s petty-bourgeois and utopian stances, Bakunin’s anarchist and pseud-scientific stance and the reformist influence of Lassale on the German social-democracy.
Class struggle has not only been the initial impulse of the scientific ideology; Marx-thought has developed, completed, transformed into Marxism because it has always been merged into the practice struggle and working class vicissitudes. As part of Marx’s geniality is his mass-line handling, a true class seal in his knowledge theory. Marx knew how to systematize the dispersed ideas of the European proletariat, could see behind the spontaneous consigns the historical solution for the strategical challenges of the proletarian revolution.
The Communist League, the Manifest of the Party, the 1848 Revolutions and the Class Struggles in France
After beeing expelled from Germany, in 1843, by the Prussian government and later, in 1845, from France, Marx, with Engels and a small group of communists, settled down in Brussels, Belgium. They have formed the so-called Enlacement Committee which worked out mainly with other German and French working organizations.
At the beginning of 1847, Marx and Engels were invited to join the League of the Justs, a German underground working organization whose performance was mostly abroad, mainly in Paris and London. The League of the Justs was ideologically influenced by Proudhon’s petty-bourgeois socialism and, under a practical point-of-view, by the putschist tatics of Auguste Blanqui, with whose group they had worked during the 1839 rebellion, in Paris. Marx and Engels and their small group headquartered in Brussels, joined the League of the Justs as a Red Fraction and in the two Congresses, held in 1847, they had a victorious two-line struggle, mostly against the proudhonian influence that represented the French right-wing working movement.
At the beginning of that year, Marx had published The Misery of Philosophy which, according to Lenin, is the first mature work of Marxism. On this important book – an answer to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Misery – Marx attacked the idealist concepts of the proudhonian political economy, as well as his petty-bourgeois stance of only considering in the proletariat its miserable life condition; in this work Marx also develops the antagonistic concept in his materialistic dialetics.
The 2nd League Congress, held at the end of 1847, lasted more than ten days and the great Marx directed it personnaly being able to answer all questions of the working militants, explaining to the vanguard the principles of the scientific socialism, i. e. , the communism principles. This Congress has sanctionned the triumph of the Red Fraction in the League and the defeat of proudhonism. The organization consign “All men are brothers” was replaced by the immortal: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” . And the organization’s name was supposed to correspond to this new programme, so the League of the Justs was transformed into the League of the Communists. It had been founded, for the first time in history, the Communist Party which ideology was systematized in the Manifest of the Communist Party, published in London, in the beginning of February, 1848. The Manifest represents the appearance of Marxism as a guide-thought for the European working movement and the ideological support of jefatura reached by Marx in the communist movement of the old continent. From that onwards the scientific ideology of proletariat started being mixed completely with his founder’s name.
And this ideology could continue its development amidst the deepening of class struggle in Europe and the two-line struggle in the Communist Party. In 1848, a few weeks later, a wave of democratic-bourgeois revolutions agitated the whole Europe, especially Paris. The working class, as it had occurred before in England and in France, was active in the insurrections, but for the first time it had a guide-thought. Marx-Thought was the ideological expression of the passage of the proletariat from the class in-itself condition to the class per-se condition. The Manifest was the clamour of the Communist Party summoning the working class for seizing the political power through the revolutionary violence.
“The communists do not depreciate themselves, dissimulating their aims and goals. They openly proclaim that their objectives can only be reached by the violent overthrowing of all existing social order. May the ruling classes tremble before the idea of a communist revolution! The proletarians have nothing to lose with it but their chains. They have a whole world to gain. Proletarians of the whole countries, united!” (Marx and Engels, Manifest of the Communist Party).
The League of the Communists, as the only communist organization in Europe at that moment, maintained inevitably a double character: at the same time it was an international organization – not only a German workers’ organization, as portrayed in their Congress decisions – and was constituted on the majority of their members and leaders either by German revolutionaries or from countries whose second idiom was German. The Manifest itself was printed in German, in 1848, and its translation for a second language, English, only happened in 1852. Marx-Thought at that time was well-known as the “German scientific socialism”. The League of the Communists character is demonstrated in the organization field of action during the revolutions of 1848. The League performance was fundamentally on the German territory, fighting against the kingdom of Prussia and the empire of Austria, and for a democratic bourgeois revolution which would unite on a new basis a republican Germany.
France, in 1848, was once more the most intense scenery in the class struggle in Europe. In February an insurrection against the monarchy of the Orleans dynasty, in power since 1830, was waged. The French bourgeoisie, having the armed working class as its main ally, was able to overthrow the king Louis Philipe and establish the Republic. Right after this new overthrown of the monarchy, the French bourgeoisie starts its efforts for disarming the proletariat. The French proletariat, however, among the whole European working class, was the most experient in revolutions. In less than a century it operated as a secondary force in the Great 1789 Revolution; next, during the Napoleon Empire acted as soldier in the democratic expansion at the beginning of the 19th Century; later saw its few conquers, reached in the bourgeois revolution, to be withdrawn after the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, in 1815; the proletariat also participated in the 1830 insurrection that for the second time overthrew the Bourbons and once more saw its interests frustated with the settling down of a constitutional monarchy. The constitutional monarchy was then defeated in 1848, and this time the proletariat did not unify itself around the bourgeois banners; arms in hands flew its slogans: by the “right to work” and “ by the social-democratic republic”.
The inevitable class antagonism between the bourgeosie and the proletariat, evidenced by Karl Marx, in 1847, confirmed itself in June of the following year when for the first time in history there was a bloody armed direct confront of the working class against the bourgeoisie and its republic. The working insurrection had been defeated, but “the blood does not crush the revolution but it irrigates it”. The 1848 June lessons would have very important political and tactical implications for the development of the working movement and its Party.
As soon as the February revolution is waged in France, Marx is expelled from Belgium and travels to the revolutionary Paris where he is also ‘invited’ to leave; this time the ‘invitation’ was made by the new bourgeois government. The February revolution government was financing the trip of a large number possible of German workers and even from other nationalities for crossing the French frontiers towards the territories dominated by Prussia and Austria. The justification was the support to the bourgeois revolution also occurring in the Prussian and Austrian territories; several great people’s insurrections had happened in Berlim and Wien. The real objective, therefore, was ‘to cleanse’ the city of revolutionaries. But it became an important political objective for the League of Communists to head to Germany to intervene directly in the German democratic-bourgeois revolution. Still in Belgium, facing the tumultuous events all over the continent, the League leadership takes an important decision:
“We were all of us ready to storm Paris and so a new central authority decided to dissolve it, conveyed all powers to Marx and gave him the mandate for constituting in Paris a new central authority”. (Engels, For the History of the League of the Communists”.
The League of the Communists central authority’s decision was the acknowledgement and defense of Karl Marx’s jefatura condition. It was a great decision for, more than ever, the moment of a revolutionary peak demands the absolute centralization of the revolutionary leadership. The immediate implication of the acknowledgement of Marx’s jefatura condition was the resolution taken by him that the League should not participate in the “revolutionary” bodies organized by the bourgeois government of France which intended to invade Germany and impose the building of a democratic republic. Marx foresaw the failure of such a strategy which would, in a last instance, lead to the strengthening of the Prussian and Austrian monarchies.
Marx’s decision was that all members of the League should immediately cross the German frontiers, give support to and participate in the revolutionary process, putting into practice the political tactics displayed in the Manifest on the communists performances in the democratic-bourgeois revolutions. Thus, Marx and Engels leave to the German territories and settle down in Cologne, the main Renan town. The League of the Communists leadership and jefatura arrival to Cologne came with the publication of Requirements from the Communist Party in Germany where one can read:
“ It is of interest of the German proletariat, the petty-bourgeoisie and small peasantry that we support such demands with all possible energy. Only with the accomplishment of those requirements, the million of people in Germany – that have always been exploited by a few persons and the exploiters want them to continue in the same situation – will gain rights and seize the power which calls them together as the producers of all wealth”.
The above-mentioned demands were constituted by a group of 17 political propositions that systematized the democratic requirements introduced in the Manifest of the Communist Party. They were published on March 24th , 1848, in the German territory, a few days after the insurrections on March 18th , in Berlin and March 13th , in Wien. Those insurrections represented the peak of the German bourgeois struggle against the economic basis and its economic expression, the monarchy.
In Berlin, the capital of Prussia kingdom, the armed upsurge is violently smashed, the king Guilherme IV tries to be exonerated from the responsibility of the massacre and orders the withdraw of the troops from the city which starts being controlled by a civil militia. In Wien, the demonstration resulted in the dismissal of the main minister of the Austrian emperor, Fernando I. After settling down in Koln, Marx and Engels founded the New Renan Gazette that became the principal mouthpiece for the democratic revolution in Germany. It was the legal newspaper of the League of the Communists that continued underground because of the persecutions of Prussia Kingdom and Austrian Empire.
However, right after the working insurrection in Paris, on June, 1848, the German bourgeoisie, which was extremely vacillating on its struggle against the the feudal lords and monarchy, becomes more fearful and suspicious of its main ally, the proletariat. The Renan bourgeoisie, from the more industrial and polically advanced region, has surrendered in the struggle for the political leadership in the revolutionary process and yielded to the Berlin’s bourgeoisie which, in agreement to the king of Prussia, summoned a Constituent National Assembly. This Assembly, in 1849, voted a constitution whose main decision was the crowning of Guilherme IV as the emperor of Prussia.
The League of Communists did not have many conditions for acting in a revolutionary process which had not truly been carried out. Its previous performance being concentrated mostly abroad and the difficulty of a centralized action on the regions of Prussia and Austria have damaged the communists performance enormously. In 1849, the process for the reactionary persecution starts. In May the New Gazzete is closed by the Prussian government. And Marx is arrested again and expelled from Germany. In 1850 in Message from the Central Direction to the League of the Communists, Marx presents the evaluation of the German democratic evolution:
“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.”
The evaluation of the failure of the democratic revolution supported by the League of the Communists was the evaluation of the first concrete application of the tactics propugnated in the Manifest of the Communist Party. The inconsequency of the German bourgeoisie was condensed by Marx, on December 1848, like this: “… withou faith on itself, without faith in the people, moaning against the ones from above, trembling before the ones from below, egoistic for both sides and conscious of their egotism, revolutionary against the conservatives, conservative against the revolutionaries”, Marx anticipated the every time more pressing need of the proletariat not only to support the democratic revolutions but to take over its leadership as a necessity to be led in a consequent way. This important contribution to the scientific socialism resulting from the assessment of its personal leadership in the German revolution has been totally developed by the camarade Lenin during the 1905 Revolution, in the superior stage of the capitalism, i. e., the imperialism , and by chairman Mao as a specification of the democratic revolutions in the colonial and semicolonial countries.
However, the most important evaluation done by Karl Marx on the 1848 revolutions will be the French procedure for being the most radical and the deepest in which the class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was expressed. In his works, The class struggle in France and The 18 Brumary of Louis Bonaparte, Marx analysed the French History, especially from 1848 to 1851 when Napoleon III, after being elected president of France, seized the power in a coup d’Etat and restored the monarchy, named the Second Empire. As Engels indicates in the 1895 introduction, it will be in The class struggles that Marx will advance the development of the scientific socialism. Marx, applying the mass line, systematizes the slogan of the “Right to work” spontaneously raised by the French proletariat:
“In the first project of the Constitution, writen before the triumph journeys, it still consisted the “Right to work”. This strongly expressed consign condensed the revolutionary demands of the proletariat. ( … ) The right to work is, in a bourgeois sense, a nonsense, a piteous and unfortunate wish but behind the right to work is the power over capital and, behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, its submission to the working class and, therefore, the abolishing as much of the wage-earning as the capital and its mutual relations. Behind the ‘right to work’ was the June insurrection”.
Marx notes that on that “disperse idea” from the masses there was a great political question; behind the ‘piteous’ demand was the historical solution for the political objective of the proletariat on its conquer of Power. As Engels emphasizes in The class struggles, for the first time it is proclaimed the “formula in which unanimously the working parties from all countries of the world condense their demand of an economic transformation: the appropriation of the means of production by the society”. This synthesis was not in the Manifest; it was the product of the class struggle and Marx capacity to go “from the masses to the masses”. It was in this sense as well that Marx has systematized the consign of the French proletariat of “social-democrat republic” as the dictatorship of proletariat, the only one able to assure the accomplishment of the “appropriation of the means of production”.
“ This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of proletariat as a necessary transiction point for the suppression of the class differences in general, for the suppression of all production relations in which lay such differences, for the suppression of all social relations which correspond to these production relations, for the subversion of all ideas which result from those social relations”. (Karl Marx, The class struggles in France from 1848 to 1850).
The 1848 revolutions, mostly in France and Germany, with the direct leadership of Marx over the second revolution, and his deep assessment over the first one, constitute the closing of a phasis on the process for conformation of Marxism. They correspond to the conclusion of the formulation of Marx-Thought that by itself is systematized in a lettter – March 5th , 1852 – to one of his comrades, Joseph Weydemeyer, who was preparing in USA the first publication of “ The 18 Brumary of Louis Bonaparte”:
“As far as I am concerned, it is not mine the merit of having discovered neither the existence of classes in the modern society nor their struggle between themselves. Many before me – bourgeois historians – had exposed the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of them. What I have done was:
- 1 to demonstrate that the existence of classes is only linked to determined phasis of the historical development of producation;
- the class struggle leads necessarily to the dictatorship of proletariat;
- such a dictatorship only constitutes the transiction for the overcoming of all classes and for a classless society”.
