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KARL MARXS THEORY OF REVOLUTION

KARL MARXS THEORY OF REVOLUTION

by Hal Draper

VOLUME IV CRITIQUE OF OTHER SOCIALISMS

Hal Draper died on January 26, 1990. The manuscript for this volume had already been received by Monthly Review Press. The Special Note C, Bibliography, and Index were not included; they were supplied by Ernest Haberkern of the Center for Socialist History, who relied on extensive notes left by Hal Draper.

Copyright 1990 by The Center for Socialist History
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(Revised for vol.4)
Draper, Hal.

Karl Marxs theory of revolution.
Includes bibliographies and indexes.
CONTENTS: 1. State and bureaucracy. 2v.
v.2. The politics of social classes.[etc.]
v.4. Critique of other socialisms.

1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 2. Revolutions and socialism.
I. Title.
JC233.M299D7 321.09 76-40467
ISBN 0-85345-387-X (v.1)
ISBN 0-85345-439-6 (v.2)
ISBN 0-85345-674-7 (v.3: pbk.)
ISBN 0-85345-798-0 (v.4: pbk.)

Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001

www.monthlyreview.org

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
to the student and worker revolutionaries
of China
who fought for workers power
through workers democracy from below
in the bravest popular upheaval ever seen,
against the bureaucratic-collectivist ruling regime
that calls itself Communist,
and who temporarily yielded
before the monstrous massacre of June 4, 1989
executed by the bureaucratic-military dictatorship,
assassins of the people.
The association of this counterrevolutionary tyranny
with the name of Karl Marx
is the biggest Big Lie in history,
systematically falsified by both
the Stalinist world of bureaucratic-collectivism
and the decaying world of capitalism,
and by the apologists of both exploitive systems.

H.D.
June 5, 1989

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The present volume, KMTR 4, is devoted to an important part of any exposition of Marxs views, namely, his criticism of alternative ideas and movements: socialist views and theories put forward by others during his active years. The real content of any line of thought is clarified not only through what it says it is but what it says it is not: what it differentiates itself from; what it denies or rejects; what it counterposes itself to and how it criticizes it; and also what it accepts from others contributions. In fact, all thinkers have to start from this point; the subject they broach is not a tabula rasa; their own thinking has to go through an apprenticeship.

As a matter of fact, a good deal of attention has already been paid to this approach in the preceding three volumes. The present volume would have a long chapter on Marxs views about Blanqui and Blanquism, were it not that KMTR 3 has already devoted more than one chapter to this subject. There is another very important ism missing from the present volume: reformism, along with a long list of associated isms, such as gradualism, parliamentarism, opportunism, and several others. All of these terms are aspects of a single subject, often summarized as the issue of reform versus revolution, or sometimes the road to power. Marxs views both positive and negative, that is, both as positively expounded and as counter-posed to reformist views, will be the subject of the first half of KMTR 5, the volume which will end this enterprise.

Of the isms that are treated in the following chapters, several have already come up for partial discussion in the preceding volumes, in connection with other subjects. For example, anarchism in general or Bakunin in particular has been discussed in relation to the peasantry, to dictatorship, and to other topics. Needed now is a general analysis.

Each chapter, devoted as it is to a particular socialist tendency, should not be considered an attempt to sum up the state of historical knowledge about that tendency. My subject is not the tendency itself but the views of Marx and Engels on it. For example, there is a great deal about utopian ; my task was viewed as more limited.

The beginning of , below, points out that some of the isms taken up in this volume tend to interpenetrate; in practice they seldom live entirely detached from each other. In particular, the common practice of affixing the label state-socialist on some figure is seldom justified (as is explained below in the case of Louis Blanc, for example). The more useful task is to define a state-socialist element in a viewpoint. In general, the subject of each chapter is not a hard-edged theory or school but rather a more or less pervasive element in socialist thinking.

One element of confusion in socialist history is illustrated by the lack of any agreed-on term for a non-state-socialist, with the result that terms get invented to label the confusion itself. For example: libertarian socialism. Since questions get raised about such fuzzy isms, we may take this one as an example of several that are not separately considered here.

Libertarian goes far back as simply the adjectival form of liberty; and the checkered career of that much-battered word goes far to explain what happens when a blur of thought is turned into an ism. Some of this history is irrelevant to us: for example, libertarian(ism) once referred to a philosophic doctrine about the freedom of the will. By at least 1830, in English, it was in general use to label any advocacy of liberty. The Oxford English Dictionary illustrates this usage (between 1830 and 1906) with five cases, none of which is concerned with any shockingly extreme view of liberty. More to the point: the term was eventually expropriated by that school of thought which lives ideologically on various declensions of the word libertythe anarchists.

An anarchist paper named Le Libertaire was published by French migrs in New York as early as 18581861, but its terminology did not take hold. In 1895 a leader of the French anarchists, Sbastien Faure, founded a journal with the same name, and announced that libertaire was a convenient synonym for anarchist. He did not explain why a fuzzy word was more convenient than one that already had a known ideological content; but he did not have to, for everyone could understand that libertarian was preferable because it was more beguiling and less communicative. By defining liberty in terms of anarchism, it made it unnecessary to prove the identity by argument.

In a later stage of the term, libertarian(ism) was taken over by some other political currents. One tendency was that of left-wing social-democrats who wanted to distinguish themselves from the democratic socialism vaunted by the European Social-Democracy that ignominiously collapsed in the 1930s. It was now too ambiguous for leftist radicals to call themselves democratic socialists in order to differentiate themselves from the Stalinists. The term libertarian socialist came into some use to fill the need, but only sporadically. Later, libertarian was seized on by an American extension of the so-called bourgeois anarchism that goes back to Josiah Warren. In its degenerate contemporary form it was adopted by a right-wing extrusion from the Republican Party to describe a quasi-anarchist program: the program of minimizing government interference with the profit system (free enterprise) while the power of capital remains unchecked.

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