‘The Origins of Sectarianism’, from Peter Cadogan

[p028] ‘The Origins of Sectarianism’ The definition of sectarianism as ‘mouthing “Left” formulas to an unheeding world’ is J.A.’s, not mine. Both at the beginning and end of my article [Labour Review, vol. iii, no. 5, pp. 146-52, December 1958] I defined sectarianism as the consequence of abandoning the scientific method. J. A. writes about sectarianism before 1847. This in my opinion is unhistorical, for reasons given in this article. Sec- tarianism is a new historical quality that can only feature in politics coexistentially with scientific socialism, and therefore it cannot predate 1848. Before 1848 Chartism in general was Utopian. The workers of this country, having seen the upper and middle classes use Parliament to achieve their economic ends (for example the Corn Laws) took the view that winning the vote, the secret ballot and the other demands of the Charter would enable them to get economic results. Chartism until after 1848 was essentially a demand for ‘bread and butter’ through politics, but without socialism. . Yet given that Chartism was Utopian in general, it does not follow that it was all of a piece. Elements of sectarianism and of opportunism (class collaboration) were the subject of passionate argument, but they had not yet crystallized. A. R. Schoyen in ‘Chartist Challenge’ (1958) gives a detailed account of this situation. It is perfectly clear that Marx and Engels had very con- siderable ‘authority’ over Ernest Jones. I gave the evidence for that. (In fairness to the Marx of 1850-52 it should be pointed out that he had not yet mastered the English language and that his domestic fortunes were then at their lowest ebb. It was then that the bailiffs put him and his family on the street.) My case was not that ‘Marx was really a sectarian’. J. A. should be more careful. What I attempted to show was that at a particular time and place and for particular reasons Marx made a sectarian mistake. This was when Ernest Jones, with Marx as his mentor, denounced and opposed trade unions as reformist organizations in the years 1850-52. Both men later changed their attitudes, but it was too late. Chartism was dead. It was very much more than a question of what two individuals thought. Jones was the editor of a Chartist paper. He was a highly educated man who had just suffered two years of vicious imprisonment and solitary confinement for his devotion to his principles and the cause of the working class. His prestige was immense. With the disappearance of Feargus O’Connor the burden of leadership had fallen on his shoulders and those of George Julian Harney. Trusted as he was, he proceeded to lead Chartists into the desert of sectarian futility by his misreading of the times (endorsed by Marx) and his consequent opposition to the supporters of trade unionism of the Harney ‘school’. J. A. writes: ‘The pamphlet “Wage Labour and Capital” quite clearly shows the role of trade unions...’ I can only suggest that he reads the pamphlet again. It was written and rewritten as a lecture in the 1842-49 period and subsequently amended. The standard version is that of 1891 with an introduction by Engels. In this lecture, addressed to working men on the subject of wages, trade unions are not mentioned once. Communications Writing in 1847 in “The Poverty of Philosophy’, Marx set out the function of trade-unions in general theoretical terms: ‘Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, the common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination.’ This was a general proposition only. It reappears without development in the ‘Communist Manifesto’ written some months later: “The workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they form permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.’ It is important to note that in the definition of the function of trade unions given at the time Marx in no way suggests that they might have a political purpose as well, or that working in trade unions was a prime responsibility of com- munists. To quote the ‘Manifesto’, ‘The immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat’ (my emphasis—P. C.). Even seventeen years later, in 1865, this estimate of the part played by trade unions was still apparent. In that year he delivered his double lecture ‘Value, Price and Profit’ to the General Council of the First International. It takes up fifty-six pages, and only in the last one and a half is trade unionism discussed. The last and key paragraph (in the form of a resolution) is still an echo of 1848: ‘Trades unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.’ A moment earlier Marx had suggested to trade unionists that ‘instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banners the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”.” Now consider that last statement in the context of his general definition of the function of trade unionism. What do we see? We now know, with the hindsight of a century to help us, that between the two slogans he gives there is and must be a third. It was left to Tom Mann and Keir Hardie to discover it, empirically rather than in terms of general theory. It is this: ‘The trade union is the means whereby the worker fights for the wages and conditions he wants, it is a form of organ- ization in which he develops his political as well as his industrial consciousness. It is his primary agency in the struggle for socialist power and for the abolition of the wages system itself. Political organization is complementary to trade union organization. It is another aspect of the activity of the same people. It has a special responsibility for leadership in social ideas and in relation to the State but in the last analysis power belongs to organized numbers at the point of production.’ Except for the reference to ‘the wages system itself? this is no more than a summary of the ideas contained in the Charter of Workers’ Demands recently approved at the Newsletter conference. It is a series of generalizations reflecting and 57

[p029] LABOUR REVIEW made possible by a century of experience on the part of the British Labour movement. But it needs to be appreciated . that if it is true it marks a vital new development of Marxism. Do we realize that what we are saying today is not what was said by Marx and Lenin? a Marx thought of the revolution in terms of the action of the working class through its political parties—taking shape as the struggle developed. The barricades of Europe in 1848, the First International and the Paris Commune were the experiences he had to build on. Lenin and Trotsky, proceeding from that point, learnt the lessons of the soviets of 1905. Lenin then focused his attention on building ‘a party of a new type’. But although Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky cleared a way through a jungle of capitalist ideas and inspired and led great movements the world today is still without socialism. If we are going to succeed we have to go much further than they did. We need, among other things, a new development of the theory of the Labour movement in relation to the conquest of State power and a more explicit concept of the vital political role of the trade unions. As has been shown above we have already taken this step—or at any rate a step in this direction. It amounts to a crystallization of the experience of militant socialists over a period that dates at least from the great Dock Strike of 1889 and the foundation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. What has been done empirically can now be helped theoretically by. our seeing it in its national and world context, past, present and future. Just as Trotsky provided us with a vital theory of the transitional character of the Soviet system, so we (for rather different reasons!) must proceed with a theory of the tran- sitional period that will both precede and follow the socialist revolution in Great Britain. It is not true that our first task is to ‘defend principles’. Our first task is to discover the truth and live by it. Principles are ‘true’ to the extent that they approximate to reality’s changing character. It is reality that is fundamental. We cannot make a principle more significant than its subject- matter. Yet plenty of us have tried to do just that! Dialectical materialism has been established. It has its mandate in space, time and society. What is now required is not that it should be affirmed or denied but that it should be explored. Its truth will then become more demonstrable to more people. Science is self-evident to the scientist. It is the emergence of reality in consciousness. But time is the emergence of new qualities in reality. It is the business of the scientist therefore to be for ever delineating the character of these new qualities. A science that stands still is its own negation. Marxism, in its aspect of historical materialism, must be for ever added to like any other science. To think otherwise would be to deny time itself. Thus, to say that a thing is true now is not necessarily to say that past Marxists were ill-informed in not discovering it. It may well have been not discoverable. To establish that Marx, and perhaps Lenin, made a different valuation of trade unions to the one that is apparent to us may be to find them wrong. This is an extremely difficult question, and discussion of it is only necessary to the extent that it helps us to make a judgment about the present situation. The important thing here is not so much rightness or wrong- ness but development and difference. The past always contains indications of the future, and Marx with extremely little to go on in this instance seems to me to have missed something that was just barely discoverable. It is possible to maintain this because George Julian Harney, who probably had greater knowledge and experience of the British working class than any man then living, took the view we now take, and wanted to form a political party that would synthetize political and industrial struggle by including the trade unions. -- Marx, Engels, Lenin. and Trotsky, having laboured mightily themselves, have made things so much easier for us. The ‘58 July-August 1959 trouble is that they have also made it difficult by so blinding us with science that we tend to study them to the exclusion of their subject-matter. For this they would not forgive us! We must free ourselves from the absurd religiosity that has made ‘Marxism’ the laughing-stock of science for thirty years. Soviet science has got results by the pursuit of the scientific method despite official ‘Marxism’, in much the same way that the science and art of Galileo and his contemporaries got results despite the religious dogmatism of the ruling class of their time. Indeed, when Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’, he based it upon a Ptolemaic conception of the universe, with the earth at its centre, that he knew was already a hundred years out of date! He was not prepared to defy the conventions of his class. But he managed to work creatively nevertheless. Soviet science likewise pays lip-service to Stalinism and will continue to do so until such time as the Soviet people are so placed as to be able to discard the absurd notions of bureau- cratic ideological orthodoxy. But to return in conclusion to the central question and issue. If it be granted that a mistake was made in the 1850s it would be quite wrong to exaggerate its effect. History is not made by individuals alone, whatever their ideas. The most that could have been hoped for with better foresight and policy was the maintenance of a group of a few people ‘carrying the banner’ until changing circumstances proved them right. One great service they could have provided was that of a scientific socialist analysis of the movement of which they were part and its ideas. This was never done and has not been done satisfactorily even yet. That is one reason why this discussion is important. Engels in his 1888 preface to the ‘Communist Manifesto’ wrote: ‘It is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847’ (my emphasis—P.C.). It might now be pointed out that if I had not levelled a charge of general sectarianism at Marx in my original article, then this reply has done so now. I think that would be untrue. Consideration has been given to one point only—Marx and the trade unions. But Marx wrestled with the whole of man’s history. He took it upon himself to challenge the whole capitalist universe in the name of the workers of the world and of humanity. He completed only a fraction of his own design, yet mankind with good cause still thrills, or trembles, at his name. If in his study and pursuit of the grand design he missed something right under his nose then that only proves him human after all! And that in itself is not a bad thing. Peter Cadogan There are, I think, two basic weaknesses in Peter Cadogan’s article on “The Origins of Sectarianism’: (1) He has formed a mistaken impression of what constitutes sectarianism. (2) He has willy-nilly provided a theoretical justification for closing the door on the formation of a new revolutionary socialist party in the future. The Chartists, of whom Julian Harney was one, were for all practical purposes an independent working-class party before Marx and Engels adopted the idea. In fact it was from contact with the Chartists that Engels got the idea and passed it on to Marx. I do not think that Marx and Engels—whatever A. J. P. Taylor may say to the contrary—ever pretended that they had invented the idea. What they did was to supply the socialist theory. Not all the Chartists were socialists. Julian Harney was, however, and he worked closely with Marx and Engels and translated the ‘Communist Manifesto’ into English. In the ‘Communist Manifesto’ Marx and Engels describe the various stages of the development of the working-class struggle:

[p030] BOOK REVIEWS in the factory; in the nation-wide struggle, which necessarily becomes political and leads to the creation of a party for political action; in a consciously socialist party; in a socialist State. To say that Marx and Engels were responsible for the ‘first manifestation of sectarianism in England’ shows a curious understanding of earlier English Labour history. The attitude of the Owenites to Chartism was as sectarian as you like. I do not know enough about the Jones and Harney con- troversy to answer the question whether Marx and Engels were sectarian in backing one against the other. But the main fact is that in the early years in England of Marx and Engels there was no live working-class political party, and therefore nothing to be sectarian about. The Chartist movement collapsed after 1848; and working-class activity went entirely into trade unionism and co-operation. Politically, for about thirty years, the workers’ leaders tagged along behind the Liberal capitalists. Until the 1880s—long after Jones and Harney were dead— there was no working-class political party in Britain. Given the conditions of that period, it could not have been otherwise. But even if we were to recognize that Marx and Engels made sectarian mistakes in their dealings with individual Chartists, sectarianism had nothing to do with the decline of the Chartist movement. After 1842, when the second national Chartist petition was rejected, Chartism declined, for several reasons: (1) The ruling class was really frightened and began to make some concessions (the landlords and capitalists of course quarrelling among themselves as to who should concede what!). Thus in 1842 an Act of Parliament prohibited the employment in mines of women and of boys under ten. In 1844 another Act reduced the hours of children in textile factories to six and a half per day, and the hours of those over 13 to twelve per day. The workers were demanding a ten-hour day, so it was a grudging concession. But the workers had not expected to gain anything from the bosses without a struggle. (2) Trade revived, largely owing to the rapid«construction of railways from 1844 onwards. This led temporarily to more employment. Chartist supporters drifted into the Anti-Corn Law League (founded by capitalists like Cobden and Bright to fight the landlords over cheaper food), or else helped to form trade unions and co-operatives. The Rochdale pioneers, for example, began in 1844, (3) The Corn Laws were abolished in 1846, the ruling class being panicked into this by the Irish potato famine. In 1847 the landlords, in revenge for losing their corn duties, voted for an Act reducing hours in textile factories to ten hours a day and eight hours on Saturday. So when the thieves fell out the workers came into a little of their own. As to sectarianism and the Labour movement generally, in the ‘Communist Manifesto? Marx and Engels say: ‘The communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principies of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.’ It is sectarian to attack working-class parties which are carrying on the class struggle, but which may not accept a particular theory or programme. For example, it was sectarian of the Social Democratic Federation to secede from the Labour Representation Com- mittee in 1900 because the latter did not then adopt socialism as its objective. It is not sectarian to criticize leaders of working-class parties who deny the class struggle and take sides with the capitalists; for they are betraying the cause for which the working-class parties exist. For example, it was not sectarian of the SDF to attack Ramsay MacDonald's leadership. We know now that MacDonald was betraying socialism from the start (though calling himself a socialist) and that he made a secret bargain with the Liberals that the Labour Party would support them in the House of Commons. It was not sectarian of Lenin to attack the German, French and British Socialist leaders for supporting the world war, which was a betrayal of every principle of socialism and of working-class interests. It is not sectarian today to attack Labour ‘leaders’ who support Tory policy. But it would be sectarian to attack the Labour Party because it does not accept the theory of Marxism.