During the revolutionary period that followed The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’ articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung continually appealed to action from below by the populace. In this connection Engels wrote at one point: “In Germany there are no longer any ‘subjects,’ ever since the people became so free as to emancipate themselves on the barricades.”58 At the beginning of another article, praising the resistance of the Poles to Prussian conquest, he relates a touching anecdote about a practical philanthropist, picked up from a biography of the priest Joseph Bonavita Blank. The holy man was frequented by birds that hovered on and about him; and the people wondered mightily to see this new St. Francis. No wonder: he had cut off the lower half of their beaks, so that they could get food only from his own charitable hands.
Engels comments on his parable:
The birds, says the biographer, loved him as their benefactor.
And the shackled, mangled, branded Poles refuse to love their Prussian benefactors!59 The experience of the revolution was one of the reasons why Marx was sensitized to the necessity of breaking the German people from the habit of obedience to authority from above:
For the German working class the most necessary thing of all is that it should cease conducting its agitation by kind permission of the higher authorities. A race so schooled in bureaucracy must go through a complete course of “self-help.”60 Around the same time he embodied the same idea in a letter, which we have already quoted in the preceding chapter: “Here [in Germany] where the worker’s life is regulated from childhood on by bureaucracy and he himself believes in the authorities, he must be taught before all else to walk by himself.”61
The Octroyal Principle
Of course, this applied not only to the Germans. It was ever present to Marx’s mind when he discussed the phenomenon of the state-sponsored “revolution from above” in connection with Bonapartism. In pre-Bismarck Prussia, there were the Stein-Hardenberg reforms-from-above, designed to rally support against Napoleon; in Russia there was the tsar’s emancipation of the serfs. Marx commented (in English):
In both countries the social daring reform was fettered and limited in character because it was octroyed from the throne and not (instead of being) conquered by the people.62 “Octroyed” is a rare word in English, but deserves to be more widely used. Its connotation—more than merely “grant” or “concede”—is precisely the handing down of changes from above, as against their conquest from below. (In fact, “octroyal socialism” is a fine coinage for the opposite of the Marxist principle of self-emancipation.)
In his book on the 1848 revolution in France, Marx recurs to a characteristic metaphor of the theater (as in “theater of war”): in this case, not the contrast between “above” and “below,” but rather between the active participants on the stage of history and the passive onlookers of the pit or the wings. On the first stage of the revolution:
Instead of only a few factions of the bourgeoisie, all classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the orbit of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls and the gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage!63 On the peasantry who were momentarily set into motion—to give Bonaparte his election victory of December 10, 1848:
For a moment active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no longer be forced back into the inactive and spineless role of the chorus.64 This metaphor illuminates Marx’s concept of the revolution from below as self-emancipation. Less figuratively, in another passage, Marx mentions indicia of the proletariat’s immaturity:
As soon as it was risen up, a class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated finds the content and the material for its revolutionary activity directly in its own situation: foes to be laid low, measures dictated by the needs of the straggle to be taken; the consequences of its own deeds drive it on…. The French working class had not attained this level; it was still incapable of accomplishing its own revolution.65 The proletariat was as yet incapable of carrying through a rising from below, under the self-impulsion of its own class drives.
After Bonaparte had consolidated his power, Engels remarked that he hoped the old scoundrel was not assassinated. For in that case the Bonapartist clique would merely make a deal with the Orleanist monarchy and go right on:
Before the workers’ districts could think about it, Morny would have made his palace-revolution, and although a revolution from below would be thereby postponed only briefly, yet its basis would be a different one.66 In the First International
If the principle of self-emancipation had to be spelled out more formally in 1864, it was because of the problem Marx faced in drawing up the program of the new International so as to gain the agreement of a wide variety of political views. What programmatic statement could delimit the organization as a class movement of the proletariat, yet avoid lining up with any of the various ideological tendencies within that class (or outside it)? The very concept of a class program which was not a sect program—not the program of a Marxist sect either—was itself a basic Marxist concept; but for this the movement was ready. “The Preamble to the Rules” was Marx’s solution, beginning with the clause on self-emancipation which we have already quoted.
The principle was so deceptively simple that naturally academic historians of socialism never got the point until years afterwards. Thus the eminent Belgian historian Emile de Laveleye (one of those who, Engels rightly remarked, spread nothing but “lies and legends” about the history of the International67) wrote in Le Socialisme Contemporain in 1881:
The International also affirmed that “the emancipation of the laborers must be the work of the laborers themselves.” This idea seemed an application of the principle of “self-help”; it enlisted for the new association, even in France, the sympathies of many distinguished men who little suspected how it was to be interpreted later on. This affords a new proof of the fact frequently observed, that revolutionary movements always go on increasing in violence. The originators of the movement…are replaced by the more fanatical, who, in their turn, are pushed aside, until the final abyss is reached to which wild revolutionary logic inevitably leads.68 In other words, the confusion was than, and is now, wholly DELIBERATE. |
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