‘The Origins of Sectarianism’, from J.A.

[p027] ‘The Origins of Sectartanism’ IT is very helpful, as Peter Cadogan has undertaken to do, to rescue such a good, serious Marxist term as ‘sectarianism’ from its degraded status as a gutter-word. But I would like to take up one or two points, because some readers got the idea that Cadogan thinks sectarianism is an inevitable disease, and others that he is trying to be cleverer than Marx and Engels. ‘Sectarianism’ does not just mean mouthing ‘Left’ formulas to an unheeding world. Cadogan could enrich his concept of it, I think, if he looked back in the history of Chartism even before the ‘Communist Manifesto’ was published—for Place in the 1820s and Lovett in the 1830s had quite definite, dogmatic ideas which they sought to impose on the movement: those of ‘moral force’. They certainly wanted to create a sectarian leadership, from London, over the northern Chartists. Even before 1847 Utopian political movements could and did combine sectarianism with opportunism (just as evolution had been taking place even before Darwin explained it). In Britain we are not likely ever to come across ‘pure’ sectari- anism, because everything that even the purest of the pure may do to involve themselves in real activity confronts them with situations to which the ‘creed’ has no answers, and for which therefore they have to improvise, though without too openly ‘compromising the dogma—at least at first. Cadogan probably knows that the British Communist Party was cutting its teeth on ‘anti-war’ movements with parsons and other progressives even in 1932-33, when it was at the top of the scale denouncing the Labour Party as ‘social-fascist’ and breaking up its meetings. I do not think that John Saville has thoroughly grasped this point, which helps to make clear the underlying continuity from the ‘third period’ through the popular front to today, combining at all stages sectarianism with opportunism. I think Cadogan is quite right to regard Jones’s sectarianism after 1848 as a snatching after the disappearing coat-tails of Chartism. But it is a bit hard on Marx and Engels to blame it on them. What authority had they over him or any other Chartist leader? There is no strong reason to believe that even if they had backed Harney there could have been in that whole period a fruitful interpenetration of scientific socialism with the new forms of class movement in the trade unions and retail co-operatives. The leaders of the successful movements of the fifties, the broad-clothed and side-whiskered preachers of temperance and thrift, may have included'a few individuals who could project their minds forward to an independent Labour Party. John Stuart Mill, their ideologist-in-chief, glimpsed a long way further than his own day. But the movements as a whole were not yet large, and their leaders and ranks alike were for ten years at least generally in the mood to accept and co-operate with parliamentary radicalism. Whatever Marx, Engels or Harney had done, the idea of independent Labour politics. as a vehicle for socialism had to germinate for a generation. Marx recognized the counter-revolutionary character of this period throughout Europe, and with less short-run optimism than Engels. Mehring’s ‘Karl Marx: His Life and Work’ (p. 194) and Mayer’s ‘Friedrich Engels’ (p. 133) explain the context of the ‘notorious’ letter: ‘I am very well pleased with the genuine and public isolation in which we two are now situated.” Marx and Engels had. had to draw a line sharply between themselves and the petty-bourgeois émigrés from the Continent, by dismissing (rightly as the events showed) the dreams of the ‘governments in partibus infidelium’! of an. early return home to new democratic upheavals in France and Germany, Italy, Poland or Hungary. Basic economic analysis led to the hard conclusion that the exiles had three choices. They could go home, which at best meant the political capitulation that eventually led some of them into jobs under the Prussian autocracy. They. could settle down in prolonged exile in Britain. Or they could emigrate to the undeveloped parts of the world, par- ticularly America, where many of them turned up in history later on. Accordingly Marx and Engels doubted the soundness of Harney’s political judgmert when, as Mayer says (p. 133), he ‘accepted contributions from their enemies to the broadsheets which he published’. For the differences between Marx and Engels and the democratic exiles were not at all superficial, personal or episodic, but arose from a profound difference of method in evaluating the whole of society, its character and method of development. ‘Marx was really a sectarian’ has long been the stock-in-trade of opportunists against scientific socialism: you find this kind of reference in the literature of the early ILP. In the 1920s the Communist Party dealt correctly and firmly with chatter of this kind from the Brailsfords in the New Leader. Surely it is not necessary to repeat today that Marx was not on principle opposed to trade unions and the struggle for immediate demands. The pamphlet ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ quite clearly shows the role of trade unions, even though they may be unconscious of it, as organs of class struggle mobilizing . the workers as a class and influencing the rate of exploitation. Our historical researches are not for the purpose of ‘catching out’ our teachers, but to recognize the pressures working upon them where they made mistakes, so that we can recognize pressures of the same kind when they work upon us. Marxists are people who work for the future. We do not despise a movement merely because today it may be small. From this episode we can at least learn that in an unfavourable period the first task is to defend principles, even when defending principles does not make you many friends. Labour Review itself and The Newsletter, and the whole body of Marxist ideas of today, could not have been available for this generation by. any other process. J.A. 1Jn a heretical country’—i.e., governments in exile.