Marx, Engels, Lenin and the British workers' movement

2724 THE BRITISH working class is now preparing for the most decisive period of struggle in its long The great depth of the crisis facing world and British capitalism means that the employing class can only hope to cling onto power by preparing the most ruthless struggle against the working class.

This will involve an attempt to break up organizations which it has built up over decades But this crisis, which has developed particularly since the election of the Tory government cannot be resolved within the framework of capitalism.

The struggle against unemployment, speed-up and redundancies and defence of the unions all demand the preparation by the working class to take power.

Great economic changes, changes in the relationship of the classes, always prepare for great changes in thinking. Faced with completely new problems the English working class will increasingly be forced to make a gigantic leap forward in consciousness and go into battle armed with its history.

But, although driven into bitter struggles, many sections of the workers will enter the fight still clinging as a last resort tc nany of their old conceptions and forms of organization.

And the role of the reformists, Stalinists and revisionists is to try and see that the working class remain burdened with these historically redundant forms of thinking.

Stages

There is nothing automatic sciousness. revolutionary party at each stage.

While requiring great deters mination opment of the working-class's consciousness.

The first stage of this new turn is a great diner confronta.

now committed to a showdown with the unions and the working class, but the very existence of the unions as independent organs of working-class struggle. Marxism.

Britain will be no exception. The growth of the Workers Press is an indication of this.

The essential Marxist task is not just winning of support for its programme in the working class, but the training of cadres in theory.

This involves an implacable strugsle azainst the limitations of. THE SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE! Fill in the form below and SECRETARY, SOCIALIST 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, the working. class, against its forms of thinking, a struggle which must bring out the real content and historical implications of the present crisis.

The organic connection between present struggles of class history must be established amongst the most advanced and class-conscious section of workers.

The study of history has forged into a weapon crack many of the theoretical and practical questions that now demand solution.

And understanding of the continual fight for Marxism must be instilled into the present generation of workers.

For it is from this history that the Socialist Labour League derives its theory, strategy and tactics.

Capitalism can be overthrown only if the revolutionary movement can uring we sessuns ul cut mant nan hrina tha lacenne of the historical fight for Marxism' in Britain to bear, in a real living way, on the tasks which it and the working class face.

The task of tracing this continuity-from the time of Marx's and Engel's struggles in the British working class from the 1840s onwards—involves a break from the insularity which has long dominated the English working class.

But this fight for Marxism, reflecting the international struggle of the working class, is not a national question.

This theoretical conception has profound practical significance at a period when the preparation for the English revolution fuses ever more closely with the European revolution.

Middle-class revisionists have always declared Marxism — or, more strictly, Bolshevism — as something quite 'alien' and 'out of character' with the English working class.

What unites all revisionistsPabloites of the International Marxist Group, the 'state capitalist' International Socialism group as well as the New Left— is their hatred and fear of the Leninist Party.

They have sought to replace it send to NATIONAL LABOUR LEAGUE, LONDON, SW4. with brands of honest' English Marxism which could combine the worst features of petty-bourgeois dilettantism with trade union opportunism.

Seeking to tailor Marxism to opportunism, to cut out revolutionary content and its internationalism they have Morris and the 'true' English Marxists.

We have to entirely different theoretical standpoint. There is no 'national' Marxism; it is a science which seeks to draw out the lessons of all the gains, victories and defeats of the international working class and put these at the disposal of the working class in each country.

All those who start from some conception of a Marxism 'peculiar' to the conditions of any one country inevitably end up by adapting to the prevailing, bourgeois ideas in that country.

So the struggle for Marxism, in Britain right from the 1840s, has been centred on the struggle against opportunism, against all those in the working class and middle class who wanted to base themselves on • the most privileged and conservative layers.

And the same internationalist struggle was certainly at the centre of the preparations for the Russian Revolution.

Lenin and his followers were able to defeat Menshevism (opportunism) in their own movement only because they sought to establish its international nature and its connection with the development of the imperialist stage of capitalism.

It was because they recognized and understood Menshevism as an international tendency that the Bolsheviks overcame it in struggle; all those, including Kautsky, who did not start from this position ended up either by joining this tendency or cravenly adapting to it.

The struggle against opportunism has gone along with a constant struggle against 'practicalism' and a general aversion to theory and ideas.

Marxism can only be developed in the continual fight against the narrowness and parochialism which has dominated large sections of the British working class.

Lenin' warned that the Communist Party of Great Britain formed in 1920—would develop ADVANCE NOTICE Leaders of the Communist Par shortly after Its foundation in 1920. only to the extent that it was able to fight successfully against the opportunism and syndicalism that tended to predominate in the English working class.

In a negative sense Lenin's warnings were absolutely confirmed.

Stalinism took hold of the British Party perhaps more easily than it did any other Communist Party in the 1920s because the 'theory' and practice of a privileged bureaucracy in the Soviet Union found a ready response to the 'opportunism which infected many of the cadres, like Gallagher, Murphy and Bell who came together to establish British Communist Party.

But if Marx, Engels and Lenin were acutely aware of the weaknesses and limitations of the British working class, they were certainly equally well aware of its great strength and potential power.

None of the leading Marxists stood aside from even the slightest and most limited development in the working class.

After the defeat of Chartism in 1848, for example, Marx and Engels sought to understand the real lessons of this movement, its achievements and its limitations.

Reaction

Those like Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney, who had come nearest to grasping the revolutionary nature of Chartism, were unable to survive the period of reaction which inevitably followed the movement's collapse.

It was only the insistence upon a fight for theory in the difficult years of reaction following 1848 that prepared the way for a renewal and expansion of the revolutionary movement once the class struggle began to revive towards the end of the 1850s.

This revival, coinciding with the opening of the mid-Victorian boom, took the form of a struggle for trade unionism amongst the most highly-skilled sections of workers - engineers, SUNDAY, FEBRUAR ALEXANDRA PALACE Wood Green London, N22 boilermakers, carpenters, building trade workers.

Limited though this movement was compared with the size and scope of Chartism, Marx recognized its importance and turned his full attention towards it.

The bulk of his supporters on the General Council of the First International (established in 1864) came from these forces.

Marxists have never made a fetish of the 'backwardness' of the English working class. They have always tried to understand it as the product of definite historical forces, which has always been a relative and not an absolute barrier to the development of Marxism.

Again this is a vital lesson for the present struggles. The revolutionary party is now called on to intervene in all workers struggles, however limited they may seem from a formal point of view.

If the working class is merely looked at in a formal way, and there is not a relentless struggle to extract all the theoretical lessons from every development, however small, then there can be no development of Marxism.

Because both Marx and Engels recognized the great power of the trade union movement in the English working class they were prepared to struggle with great patience and with complete determination against the opportunist elements among the leaders of the skilled workers who were beginning to unionize in the 1850s.

This not only played a vital part in the struggle against the Anarchists in the First International, but it also prepared the great struggles which the working class was to wage its hundreds of thousands against these same opportunist leaders with the growth of unskilled trade unionism in the 1880s.

So the fight of Marx and Engels against the conservatism of the English trade union leaders in the 1860s was a theoretical anticipation of the fight of the working class of the 1880s in which Engels was able to play a decisive role.

In the early stages of a movement, the interest in its theory is inevitably confined to relatively small numbers. But it is precisely in such periods that the struggle to develop and enrich Marxism, no matter how difficult, no matter amongst how few workers, that the vital theoretical base is laid for the expansion of the movement during the upturn of the class struggle which brings hundreds of thousands and later millions onto the political arena for the first time.

It is only in this theoretical sense that we can speak about the movement's continuity, which is not primarily an organizational question.

If it is conceived as such, then it readily leads to the conclusion that the continuity has been decisively broken on several Young Socialists and All Trades Unions Allia GREAT NATIONAL RALLY AGAINST TORYISM ATE

occasions.

A case in point would certainly be the decision by Marx and Engels to wind up the First International in 1876. If seen as a narrow organizational question, then this could be taken as a victory for the Anarchists. But of course it was nothing of the sort.

It was in the course of the bitter struggle against Bakunin —to which both Marx and Engels gave their detailed and undivided attention-that great theoretical developments were made.

It was in the conflict over the nature of the state, which found its test in practice in the Paris Commune of 1871, that Marxism was able to deepen its understanding of the tasks confronting the working class. It is for this reason that Lenin is able to start 'State and Revolution' with an examination of workers' experiences in relation to the state in 1848 and in 1871, as analysed by Marx and Engels.

In the same way, the light which Trotsky and a handful of supporters continued to wage against Stalinism throughout the 1920s and 1930s was an indispensable theoretical preparation for the formation of the Fourth International in 1938.

Without the successful establishment of the International in the last years of Trotsky's life there would have been no successful development of the movement and struggle against Pabloite revisionism.

Bibliography THE best general collection of material dealing with Marx's and Engels's writings on the British working class is Marx and Engels 'On Britain'. This contains some of their material on Chartism, the trade unions, and Engels's famous 'Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844'.

Material on the First International is contained in the five volumes, 'Documents of the First International' which includes a record of the Minutes of the General Council as well as most of the important statements of the International, many of them drafted by Marx, including the famous Address to the International Workingmen's AssociaThere is also a similar collection of Lenin's writings: Lenin 'On Britain'. This should be supplemented by a study of Lenin's 'Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder', which deals in particular with the problems associated with the formation of the British Communist Party.

Careful study should also be made of the correspondence of Marx-Engels in 'Selected Correspondence. Although containing only a small proportion of their enormous correspondence, this provides good material on the British working class, from Chartism, through the years of Second International.