Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough

by August H. Nimtz Jr., Philip Green (Editor)

According to Nimtz, no two people contributed more to the struggle for democracy in the 19th century than Karl Marx & Frederick Engels. Presenting the 1st major study of the two thinkers in the past 20 years & the 1st since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book challenges many widely held views about their democratic credentials & their attitudes & policies on the peasantry, the importance of national self-determination, the struggle for women's equality, their so-called Eurocentric bias, political & party organizing, & the possibility for socialist revolution in an overwhelmingly peasant & underdeveloped country like late-19th-century Russia.

Genres: History

391 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2000

About the author

August H. Nimtz is Professor of Political Science and African American and African Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (2000), Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The 'Absolute Democracy' or 'Defiled Republic' (2003), and a number of related articles in edited volumes and journals.

Reviews

[Jehiel L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx's path to communism was through radical democracy. Democracy was about the political power of the demos, the 'people'. Marx's early revolutionary democracy emphasised the political activity, force and power of the people. Marx came to the proletariat by understanding that class to be the subject of democracy, although initially this was formulated in terms of universal emancipation being a philosophical problem of proletarian self-knowledge. On the other hand, Marx’s emphasis on politics as practical criticism of social conditions meant an orientation to concreteness, of the class struggle and political struggle. Working out this relationship between political emancipation and social emancipation would become a key question for considering the significance of democracy.

The engagement with Chartism was the first concrete engagement with the importance of and limitations of democratic revolution. The Chartist movement at its height was the vanguard of the European workers’ movement, but its leaders would mostly end up reformists as they ran up against their own political limitations. Democracy was an organic proletarian demand, and democratic revolution was seen as an essential prerequisite for socialist revolution, however it was evident that fighting for democracy didn’t spontaneously give way to revolutionary socialism. On the other hand the True Socialists shunned the bourgeois-democratic revolution as a trap, pointing to the problems of Chartism as evidence. Marx and Engels would come to diagnose the problem of the day as the lack of unity between socialism and the workers’ movement. The workers' movement lacked leadership guided by revolutionism. The radicals lacked a strategic orientation to the workers' movement. The division between socialism and the workers’ movement was seen in Britain in the utopian socialist denigration of Chartism. The key to revolutionary possibilities in Britain was the coming together of these two forces in a greater whole, and grasping how concrete class interests and forces could make the demands for Chartism, compatible in the abstract with capitalism, into a movement with revolutionary potential in its conjuncture. In Europe overall, socialist leadership had to be brought to the workers so that proletarian leadership could be brought to the democratic movement.

The orientation of Marx and Engels in 1848 was to play the political role of the radical left wing of the broader democratic movement. The constituency of the democratic movement was the 'people': workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels did not think the bourgeoisie ought to lead the revolution, though they did think the revolution would be a victory for the bourgeoisie, and did give space to support the liberal bourgeoisie insofar as doing so was progressive. That the bourgeoisie are portrayed heroically in the Manifesto was in the context of seeking to win those on the radical left to the need to fight for the bourgeois revolution. The proletariat needed to be the vanguard of the democratic revolution and the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie would have to rely on its initiative. The degree to which peasants could have their own initiative was a concrete question, though in 1848 and afterwards Marx had confidence in the prospect of a new peasant war. The Marx party attempted to agitate among all classes of the people, including soldiers. It was Marx and Engels' rivals who counterposed to this alliance an appeal exclusively to the proletarians, these actors also objecting to participation in elections. Like trends that followed it decades later, such emphasis on the proletariat in a narrow sense was a cover for subordinating the proletariat to a hostile class. The inverse of this position was to advocate a purely proletarian dictatorship to enact the socialist revolution, which failed to orient the proletariat to winning the people away from the bourgeoisie.

The March Address is often misunderstood as emphasising the distinctiveness and separation of the proletariat as a principle, as a great stride forward from supposed trust in the bourgeoisie found in the Manifesto. By reading Trotskyism back into Marx and Engels, Nimtz on some occasions fails to make sense of the evidence he presents. The point of proletarian independence is to position the proletariat to turn back around to the people as the leading class. Almost immediately after the March Address, Marx is found arguing for Communist League involvement in peasant organisations. The call for the revolution in permanence was not a call for immediate socialist revolution. It was actually Marx’s rivals who were calling for immediate, socialist, purely proletarian revolution. Those like Gottschalk argued that Marx’s stress on fighting for bourgeois revolution was based on a dogma of historical development. They argued that a period of bourgeois rule was neither necessary nor wanted, and anti-absolutist revolution was a distraction from socialist revolution. This was rooted in an idea that no class but the proletariat could be trusted. But the truth was that the call for proletarian leadership of the bourgeois-democratic revolution was a strategic alignment. Any ‘limitation’ on the revolution was a question of concrete assessment of the conjuncture, on what terms the proletariat could win and lead an alliance of the people against reaction, it was not a question of necessary unbreakable historical stages. Premature seizure of power was not just a question of lacking sufficient economic development, but was a question of how conditions allowed for or did not allow certain balances of class alliances. Marx argued that, at the time, if the proletariat seized power it would have to enact petty bourgeois and not proletarian demands. The peasantry and petty-bourgeois would need to be involved in any seizure of power, issue is which class would be leading the way in that alliance. Even if the proletariat held the technical means of power, the situation may be such that they must defer to another class, the difference would be in whether the proletariat led or was subordinate.

Marx in the Address was only emphasising proletarian independence in a defensive and panicked way against his rivals, in the context of the 1848 movement coming to be dominated by liberal democrats which gave evidence to Marx’s opponents about the wrongness of supporting bourgeois revolution. Marx and Engels were always wary of the bourgeoisie, and the view was always that after the democratic revolution of 1848 would come not the task of immediate socialist revolution, but of winning an alliance of the people *against* the bourgeoisie newly in power. The constitution of the people as revolutionary was concrete: what was the level of consciousness and organisation of the proletariat? What other classes could be counted on in the revolution? How should links with them be established? The idea of ‘revolution in permanence’ was about stressing that it is possible and necessary for revolutionaries to navigate the waystations of the struggle as means toward the final goal, while keeping the final goal in political view. Far from being a great stride away from the Manifesto, Marx and Engels throughout their lives associated the March Address and their following positions with the tactical principles of the Manifesto and those of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels in 1885 used the locution of ‘permanence’ to describe the orientation of all these publications.

In 1856 debates reemerged on the question of strategic alliance. Faced with arguments for an alliance with the bourgeoisie, Marx affirmed the key ally of the proletariat to be the peasantry. He argued that a new German proletarian revolution hinged upon a new peasant war. 1848-9 made Marx and Engels more conscious of the role of the peasantry in democratic revolution, this even when they did not consistently play a positive role in the event itself. The peasantry in 1848-9 raised the stakes for winning the peasantry and the analysis was that the peasants were open to proletarian leadership. It was by failing to turn to the peasantry that the peasantry would become an uncontested audience for reaction. Engels' ‘Peasant War in Germany’ was the touchstone for a strategic orientation to the peasantry but also an assessment of its political character. The peasantry was a key audience for leadership but spontaneously deferred to the dominant class of the towns. The peasantry was open to proletarian leadership but this alliance had to be consciously forged. Universal suffrage was not enough to overcome the divide. In the absence of meeting the social needs of different classes, universal suffrage became a tool of reaction, as the bourgeois liberals called for universal suffrage while preserving the needs of the creditors over the peasants. The proletariat's adherence to the provisional government undermined any prospect of their unity with the peasants. The democratic demands had to be combined with demands for social transformation. The orientation to proletarian leadership of the people would be consistent for Marx and Engels.

The Paris Commune was a concrete expression of proletarian government. It completed the parliamentary principle, rule for the people by the people, only to go beyond it. It dissolved the bureaucratic machine state and placed power in the hands of the whole working people. It dissolved the standing army and replaced it with the armed people. Governance for it was expansive rather than repressive, calling upon all working people to take part, instead of a bureaucratic military clique. Marx and Engels to the Commune provided advice to enlist the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, as well as military advice for defence against counterrevolution. Allying with the peasantry was of particular importance. The mistreatment of the peasantry by the government made the Commune objectively in the interests of the peasants, but Marx clearly saw that this was not enough to secure the alliance. Marx was alert to a deep antagonism between townish and rural producers, an antagonism of economical differences and of social and political views. But the peasants’ antagonism with capitalist development opened them up to an alliance. The Commune had to rescue the peasant from his economic woes, rescue him from both expropriation by landlord and drudgery of impoverished proprietorship, by bringing to the peasant a combination of advanced agronomy and independence of production. The Commune, argued Marx, had to assure the peasant that by the new government he would not be expropriated but would be benefited in becoming an independent producer. The worker-peasant alliance was a precondition of the Commune's survival.

A decade later, Marx recognised that the Commune was not as a whole socialist. What mattered in the Commune was that working people were in power. Nimtz discusses the debate about Marx and Engels' assessment of the class character of the Commune. Engels had argued in a polemic that the Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat, while Marx never referred to the Commune in this way. Marx argued that the Commune was the conquest of political power of the working classes, and that it could not found a new form of class government by the nature of its social measures. However to achieve these social measures a proletarian dictatorship was required, which meant a proletarian army and war. Nimtz contends that Marx would have assessed the Commune to be a people's government, in which not only the proletariat but all the producing classes governed. It was important to recognise that a dictatorship involving the proletariat did not need to be a socialist dictatorship. Marx seemed to think that a socialist proletarian dictatorship required a proletariat much more developed than what existed in 1871. Lenin would in 1905 argue that the task of the Paris Commune was the democratic and not socialist dictatorship. It would become orthodoxy that the democratic revolution would be one of the people while the socialist revolution would be one of the proletariat, and that therefore the socialist revolution required a certain level of advanced capitalist development. However, Engels labelling of the Commune as a proletarian dictatorship had political significance, surely significant for Lenin when writing State and Revolution. That a proletarian dictatorship may be at the same time a people's revolution, that bring proletarian means being expansive toward the whole people, and that this was necessary for smashing the bureaucratic military state machine, was a key line of thought in Lenin's innovation during WW1 that the socialist and not only bourgeois-democratic revolution could and would be a people's revolution. It's by the fact that democracy involves the whole people that we can understand Lenin's argument in 1918 that the soviets represented a higher form of democracy, an argument which he alone made among Bolsheviks.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book to read on Marx and Engels. In 300 pages, Nimtz outlines their entire political practice and how a commitment to real democracy led to and guided the founding of the Communist movement.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shows how Marx and Engels organized and conducted themselves within broader movements. They werent' just theorists, they were activists. A lesson for todays academic marxists.

[Göksal Caner Malatya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marksizmin kurucularının sadece birer kütüphane faresi veya soyut teorisyenler değil, bizzat sınıf mücadelesinin en ön saflarında yer alan "örgütçü" siyasal liderler olduğunu kanıtlayan muazzam bir çalışmadır. Burjuva akademisinin Marx ve Engels’i eylemden yalıtarak zararsızlaştırma çabalarına karşı, onların komünist parti inşasındaki stratejik dehalarını belgeleriyle ortaya koyar. Burjuva demokratik devrimlerde proletaryanın nasıl bağımsız bir güç olarak konumlanması gerektiğini ve "Sürekli Devrim" fikrinin köklerini bu iki ustanın pratik siyasal hamlelerinde görürüz. Teori ve pratiğin diyalektik birliğini kavramak, komünist önderliğin doğasını anlamak için eşsiz bir kaynaktır.

[Dilan Ayyıldız · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitap Marx ve Engels’in pratikte devrimci mücadele içerisinde nasıl yer aldığını anlatan, sadece teorisyen değil birer devrimci olduklarını da ifade eden, buna dönük eleştirilere cevap niteliği taşıyan bir kitap. Kitap alıntılarla, derin detaylarıyla ve olaylarla ince ince bu konuyu işlemiş.

Fakat eğer tarihsel olayları ve sürecin nasıl işlediğini derinlemesine analiz etmek gibi bir amaç taşımıyorsanız ya da konu üzerine makale/tez yazmak gibi bir amacınız yoksa yani sizin için Marx ve Engels’in nasıl proleter devrimci mücadelenin temsilleri haline geldikleri özel bir çalışma alanı değilse kitap çok detaylı ve yorucu gelebilir. Daha genel hatlarıyla tarihsel süreci bilmek isteyip spesifik olarak bu konunun damarlarında gezinmek istemeyenler için daha önce okumuş olduğum David Riazanov’un “K. Marx F. Engels Hayat ve Eserlerine Giriş” kitabını önerebilirim.

Benim için çok yoğun ve fazla kapsamlı gelen bir kitap olduğu için, yarısına gelince ve artık takip etmekte güçlük çektiğimi görünce bırakmayı tercih ettim. Kitap detaycılığı bakımından ansiklopedik özellikler taşımakta. Eğer böyle detaylı bir kitap arıyorsanız tavsiye ederim. Fakat benim için D. Riazanov’un kitabı yeterli geldi.

[Kyle Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific political biography of Marx and Engels.