This is the second part in this series. Check out the first if you haven’t already!
What the Party Could Have Meant
Parties are about more than mere organization. Organization is obviously important, but the goal has to matter just as much if not more than the activity itself. Otherwise, the ghost of Bernstein confronts us again. The fact that his party, a party that came to value the movement over the goal, became the National Socialist party of fascist horror reveals a lot about what we can or cannot expect from political parties. But talk of ‘ends’ and ‘means’ is uselessly abstract without a firm understanding of the method to be used to discriminate worthy ends from counterproductive means and vice-versa. To call that method ‘Marxist’ may not help, either, as so many have claimed the mantle that it almost brings us right back around to the beginning of the question. But at least it’s a place to start. And even for something so complex, we have a concrete time and place to fix our search: the crisis of the Second International, otherwise known as World War I.
If we return to this slice of history, it is because this crisis represented the potential to resolve all of human history in the question of the organization of Marxist politics. This is a loaded phrase with a lot to unpack, but if we come to see it as true, then we can understand why Marxists for the rest of the 20th century laid such stress on the so-called organizational question.
Marx said that all of human history was the history of class struggle. The fact that he could write this attests to the culmination of bourgeois society. For before Marx stood Hegel, who declared himself the incarnation of the very peak of bourgeois philosophy. Hegel told us that the rational is real and the real is rational: history was a progressive evolution toward a perfect society governed by reason in which all human beings were free. But the industrial society borne of the practical flipside of Hegel’s philosophy, with its mass unemployment in particular, attested to the contradictory nature of that very freedom. The real, that is real life, no longer seems rational. And the rational, that is a society that is planned and organized by human beings fully conscious of how to change their reality, seems more naïve and remote than ever before. The revelation of this crisis came about in the upheaval of 1848-49, during which bourgeois liberalism exposed itself as fundamentally incapable of delivering on its revolutionary promises. As a result, the proletariat emerged onto the political scene and dared to raise its own banner, which was nothing but the original bourgeois impulse of 1789 advocated to its logical conclusions.
But importantly, between the time when the bourgeoisie effectively abdicated and the proletariat has yet to assume the revolutionary driver’s seat of history stands Bonapartism. This is what enabled Marx to say in the first place that all of history is the history of class struggle. Bonapartism is nothing but the state’s coming to hold society together in a situation in which it would fall apart very quickly otherwise. Industrialization within the context of bourgeois social relationships progressively erodes all other classes into but two, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This is one of capitalism’s finest achievements, as it clears away the confusing rubble of millennia of human history and reveals it all to have only been but a life-or-death struggle between those who appropriate and those who produce. At least, this is how history could be told if the producers were to win the struggle before them.
Bonapartism, despite the horrors of recent modern history, actually offers this opportunity to the proletariat. By concentrating the political levers controlling the mode of production into one state bureaucracy, it makes the proletariat’s job that much simpler. Instead of many regional governments to defeat there is now only one, the national government of each country. And instead of many competing workplaces to organize, now the only left standing are those integrated into the handful of vast transnational corporations that are characteristic of the Bonapartist era. Bonapartism makes proletarian politics possible. Indeed, if Bonapartism is nothing but the temporary, if finally unmasked, dictatorship of the capitalist class, a true proletarian politics would be nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat, hence the origin of this vexing term. Socialism would then follow this transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the true last stage of capitalism.
This is how the German Social Democratic Party, or SPD, which was the most powerful party of the Second International, understood its role in relation to this history. In other words, despite later accusations of betraying the working class, its Marxism was impeccable in its orthodoxy. The SPD, unlike any other socialist party of the time, truly commanded its ‘home’ country. It won the most votes in Germany's parliament many years in a row, eventually basically becoming the pre-war government. It organized nearly all the German trade unions. It had legions of professors, state bureaucrats, military officers, and even big industrialists who were all committed to its Marxist transformation of society. During the course of World War I, a war it voted to begin, it finally became the government once the Kaiser fled. It literally achieved that which generations of Marxists had always hoped. Since Marxist socialism was the only kind of 19th-century socialism left standing, the SPD truly channeled the entire history of proletarian politics into its assumption of governance. If the bourgeois revolution passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat over the course of the 19th century, then the SPD’s ascent to governing Germany (then probably the second-most significant industrial country, behind the United Kingdom) represented a new path forward for completing that original revolutionary project. The path to socialism may have begun in France in 1789, but by November 1918 it was looking like it would have to go right through the Germany of the SPD.
And yet this is the precise context in which Lenin proclaimed the ardent need to separate from the Second International, the SPD, and even the rest of his own party. Just when Marxism stood poised to make a seemingly peaceful transition from radical theory to governing reality, Lenin alone (and Luxemburg too late) recognized that something was amiss. Really, the next stage of the struggle had arrived.
Marxism had indeed become the state through the SPD. Yet that clearly wasn’t enough, as the SPD proceeded to massacre its own ex-comrades who dared rise up in the November Revolution in Germany. The SPD voted for a war it had theoretically opposed for decades, crushed workers who tried to move the revolution forward, and then ended up liquidating into the Nazi Party. How can we dare still call this party ‘Marxist?’
How Lenin made sense of this was to say that the time had arrived for the elevation of the class struggle. The dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t where the game ends. At that point, the proletariat simply replaces the capitalists in the role of preventing society from falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions. The goal is not to maintain society in this state but rather to take advantage of the opportunity to remake the social relationships that hold society back from realizing its economic potential. This is nothing but a classless society, but such a utopia can only become real by first going through the messiness of the proletariat’s dictatorship. But this dictatorship is nothing but a new phase of Bonapartism itself. It would represent the fullest concentration of private property and governance in that the state, acting for and through the class, would take possession over all of society. Then, in other words, the state itself would become the final obstacle keeping society from realizing its underlying potential. As Lukács wrote in his reflection on this period, History and Class Consciousness, once the proletariat becomes a class in itself, it then has to become a class for itself. It is not enough to become the state. The state has to be smashed, after all. But if the proletariat is the state, then what else is it smashing if not itself?
And therein lies the riddle that the SPD was structurally incapable of solving. It is not that its own Marxism failed it. Rather, its Marxism became the obstacle that had to be smashed, according to the method of Marxism itself. Just as Marx destroyed Hegel not by replacing him but rather by completing his philosophy on its own basis, given the new conditions of reality Hegel never experienced, so too did Lenin recognize a similar opportunity to do the same with Marxism. The world stood on the edge of a radically heightened and simplified, if much bloodier, look at its own history. If someone could figure out a way to organize an effective opposition to the Marxism of the SPD, an opposition so radically Marxist as to be willing to birth the society that would mean even the demise of that Marxism, then they could solve all previous human history. They could elevate human history to the next stage. History might even be able to begin, as Marx foretold.
This is the crux of the so-called organizational question. This is why the concept of the vanguard came to dominate the Marxism of the Third International. Hence the adoption of the word ‘communism’ as opposed to the ‘socialism’ that represented all that now had to be struggled against (for a concise, if activist, perspective on this change, see Gus Hall 1978, “The Communist Party, USA,” in Working Class USA: The Power and the Movement, New York: International Publishers, 1987). There was indeed a real opportunity here. Though in the end only a few countries of the global periphery succeeded in staging communist revolutions, the concept of the vanguard has persisted. It may still be that we are standing on the precipice of the next phase of capitalism but for the emergence of effective leadership.