News and Letters January-February 1998
Essay Article

On the 150th anniversary of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
Revolution in Permanence as Marx's Organizing Idea

by Franklin Dmitryev

On its 150th anniversary, Karl Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO is once again the object of much attention. With hope or dread, disdain or despair, commentators recall the MANIFESTO's anticipation of capital's penetration of every nook of the globe, its recurring economic crises and the suffering of the working masses.


But few turn seriously to the vision of the future embedded in the MANIFESTO. Few grasp that Marx's concept of organization is totally different from our century's Marxist parties-to-lead, Stalinist or anti-Stalinist. Marxist-Humanism points to these elements as key to spelling out the kind of responsibility revolutionists must assume today if we are ever to overcome the retrogression engulfing us.


A NEW CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION


The underlying tidal force--Marx's philosophy of revolution in permanence--has escaped the attention of all too many Marxists.


We today have the advantage of knowing Marx's philosophic moment of 1844, which laid the ground for all his future development. The core of his 1844 Humanist Essays is Marx's critical appropriation of Hegel's concept of absolute negativity. To Hegel, self-development occurs through negation of the negation. To Marx that meant that transcending this alienated reality takes not just the overthrow of the old but the creation of the new, a process he had labeled "revolution in permanence."


Marx thus rejected what he called "vulgar communism," which stopped at first negation, the goal of abolishing private property. The needed second negation meant transforming human relations, and the relationship between men and women showed just how deep the uprooting of existing society had to be.


Shortly afterward Marx presented his overall materialist conception of history to Friedrich Engels, who enthusiastically agreed to work with him. After having further clarified it through incisive critiques of various contemporary radical thinkers, they formed a new international organization, the Communist Correspondence Committees.


Marx's theoretical and organizational work led the Communist League to invite in his group and to call a Congress "where the critical views we had expressed would be laid down in an open manifesto as the doctrine of the League," as Marx later wrote. Engels brought a first draft of a theoretical program to the First Congress of the Communist League in June 1847, which Marx could not attend, and a second draft to the Second Congress in November, which, after lengthy and heated discussion, assigned Marx to write a manifesto. Marx finished writing the MANIFESTO at the end of January 1848, not long before the February Revolution in France.


As an integral part of expressing a new philosophy of revolution, the MANIFESTO revealed a concept of organization quite different from any previously seen. Some revolutionaries believed that a small group could organize an insurrection, take power, and institute socialism by decree. Utopian socialists wove plans from their heads for how society should be reorganized, with no relationship to an actual mass movement. Both currents existed in the Communist League.


Against both of those, the MANIFESTO projects the revolutionary proletariat, its self-activity and self-organization "into a class," as the revolutionary subject that can dig the grave of capitalism. But this does not imply that the role of the revolutionary organization is little more than to record and support the voices and actions of the masses. Consider what Marx wrote at the beginning of Part II, "Proletarians and Communists":


"The communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties. They have no interests...apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement...."


If the aim of "overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat" is NOT, as Marx says here, what distinguishes the communists, then what does?


The only distinction from other working-class parties is, according to Marx, that the communists "bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat," internationally, and that, "in the various stages of development [of the class struggle] they always...represent the interests of the movement as a whole." A few pages later, he spells this out as, "The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present, they also represent the future of the movement."


To Marx, steeped in the movement of negation of the negation, the future means not just the immediate aim of overthrow but what happens after the revolution:


"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."


This passage continues the critique of vulgar communism expressed in his 1844 Humanist Essays. Moreover, it not only marks the division between Marx and Engels versus the utopians but the difference between Marx's MANIFESTO and Engels' drafts of the program. Engels' first draft, "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith," does not go into what happens after the revolution beyond abolishing private property.


The second draft, "Principles of Communism," written after receipt of Marx's critique of the first, does contain a beautiful passage about "the all-round development of the abilities of all the members of society through doing away with the hitherto existing division of labor...." But Engels presented it as if it were nearly automatic:


"...through society's taking out of the hands of the private capitalists the use of all the productive forces...and managing them according to a plan corresponding to the means available and the needs of the whole of society, all the evil consequences of the present running of large-scale industry will be done away with.


In contrast, the MANIFESTO says that "the theory of the communists may be summed up" as "abolition of private property" ONLY IN THE SENSE that it means a transformation of production relations involving abolition of class society. A world that has witnessed the brutality of state-capitalism based on nationalized property and state planning can more easily grasp the distinction that only Marx seems to have recognized in his day, and the need to face the question of what happens after the revolution.


This is closely related to other differences between these texts. For one, unlike Marx's 1844 critique of man/woman relations as showing how total the uprooting of the old needs to be, Engels' first draft states, "We will only interfere in the personal relationship between men and women or with the family in general to the extent that the maintenance of the existing institution would disturb the new social order." This is not much changed in his second draft, and both drafts imply that this type of oppression "is rooted in private property and falls with it" (from second draft). The MANIFESTO, however, not only trumpets "Abolition of the family!" but says "the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production."


Unseparated from the MANIFESTO's ruthless criticism of capitalism, Part III of the MANIFESTO criticizes all other socialist and communist tendencies; these negations needed to be transcended themselves. Engels' first draft had no such battle of ideas, and his second contained a very short one, without the section Marx kept returning to in the next 30 years on "Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism." Its critique shows why Marx would tread carefully in envisioning the future society, avoiding "systems" and blueprints, without ever abandoning that vision as a guiding principle in organization, action and theory.


REVOLUTION AFTER 1848 DEFEAT


The experience of the 1848 Revolutions--their high points as well as their defeats--both proved the MANIFESTO's conception and allowed Marx to make further concretizations of his Humanist philosophy. To explore this we focus on the year 1850, when it became clear that the revolution's defeat was not just a brief lull before a new revolutionary storm. Marx, in any case, never took defeat as his ground; rather, his gaze was to the future.


That was not the lesson taken by most tendencies, since the June revolution was defeated, with the massacre of over 3,000 workers, initiating a "retrograde process." The defeat was commonly thought to mark the limits of the possible. For some, overthrow of the form of government was the limit; for others, the defeat proved the futility of revolution altogether.


In contrast, Marx's articles on "1848 to 1849," later called "Class Struggles in France," projected that even a proletarian revolution that spreads from France to England "finds here not its end but its organizational beginning, is no short-lived revolution. The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the people who are able to cope with a new world."


Within days of writing this, Marx, with Engels, wrote another document centering on the philosophy of revolution in permanence, working it out as strategy and tactics. The March 1850 Address to the CL was also a summation of the two years of revolution, but, unlike "1848 to 1849," it was an underground, directly organizational document.


Here Marx takes a critical look at how his organization had participated in the revolutions, making organizational-political conclusions for three moments, before, during, and after the next revolutionary struggle. All are worked out IN VIEW OF the before, during, AND AFTER of not only the next revolutionary struggle but the one anticipated after it, the proletarian revolution, with both seen as steps, neither of them final, in the continuous revolutionary movement not merely to proletarian rule but to the new, classless society.


What is elaborated for all three moments is the need for independent organization of the workers' party all the way to establishing armed revolutionary workers' governments as a dual power. The workers "must do the utmost for their final victory by making it clear to themselves what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the independent organization of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence."


The proof that revolution in permanence wasn't just a phrase was, as Raya Dunayevskaya put it in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, "that in the constant search for revolutionary allies the vision of the revolutions to come was in no way changed." That is, Marx continued to project the vision of revolution as negation of the negation in continuous transition to a classless society, and concretized it for new situations. He continued to search for new allies (beginning with the rural proletariat and then the peasantry), new pathways, new theoretical bases for a total revolutionary uprooting and "foundation of a new" society.


In the period after the defeats of the revolutions, Europe was awash with retrogressive tendencies. They were not conscious of, but recoiled instinctively from, the difficult discipline of Marx's concept of organization as being responsible to the historical movement, to which the self-determination of the idea is as integral as is the spontaneity of the masses in revolution.


Those who did not reject revolution altogether either sought to halt it at the first step, or looked for shortcuts to revolution through practice alone: state-sponsored schemes, stronger organization, greater determination of will, coup plots. How Marx dealt with such retrogression speaks to our age, when the failures of revolutions have become so ingrained in consciousness that ideologues believe they can make the idea of revolution unthinkable.


The pull to separate theory and practice was also manifested in a swarm of new organizations characterized by totally unprincipled combination. One was called the Central Committee of European Democracy. Its manifesto argued that the revolutions had failed because the organization of revolutionary power was weakened by the many divergent theoretical systems, to which they counterposed "the people in motion, it is the instinct of the masses...it is action....The hand-clasp of a worker in one of these historic moments which inaugurate an epoch will teach us more about the organization of the future than could be taught today by the cold and unfeeling travail of the intellect...."


In their "Review: May to October," Marx and Engels hit back against those who stop at first negation:


"In their view indeed revolution consists merely in the overthrow of the existing government; once this aim has been achieved, ' has been won. Movement, development and struggle then cease, and...there begins the golden age of the European republic and of slumber declared in permanence. These gentlemen also abhor thinking, unfeeling thinking, just as they do development and struggle....The people shall have no thought for the morrow and must strike all ideas from its mind; come the great day of decision, and it will be electrified by mere contact, and the riddle of the future will be solved by a miracle."


Previously there had been differences within the Communist League, but now the objective atmosphere of political retrogression forced them out into the open. Pulled by the practical idea, the faction led by August Willie and Karl Scaper caused a split. Determined to have revolution immediately, yet absent the proletariat's self-activity, they would substitute their own activity, seize power, and institute communism by force. In order to seize power, they would join with whatever "revolutionary" movement seemed to be going on, even though it was the self-limiting movement of the democratic petty bourgeoisie.


The explanation for this retrogression is found in Hegel's Third Attitude to Objectivity, which, Dunayevskaya writes in PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, "would always recur when, in the process of battling contradiction, the Subject becomes impatient with the seemingly endless stages of negation it must suffer through, and therefore, instead, slides backward into Intuition."


Marx did not slide backward, because what he was driven by was not the pull of the practical idea but organizational responsibility for the Idea of Freedom, his vision of revolution in permanence. Willie claimed (Marx later wrote) that "the schisms were caused solely by personal disagreements." Marx "laid bare the differences of principle which lay behind the clash of personalities."


It was Marx, therefore, who was able to keep deepening the ground for revolution for the next 30 years in both theory and practice, precisely because he was not separating the two. However, Marx's opponents split the League and behaved so recklessly as to make it easier for the Prussian police to uncover and destroy what was left.


The COMMUNIST MANIFESTO was not Marx's last word. Nor did his concept of organization stop developing when the Communist League dissolved in 1852. But the crises of our age's revolutionary movements demand a new look at that concept, as Marx articulated it in the MANIFESTO and practiced it in the League years--if, that is, we keep in view the realities of our day, as well as what we know of Marx as a whole.

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