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Vol. 82/No. 16 April 23, 2018
(In Review)
Marx, Engels, fighting workers converge, form communist party
The Young Karl Marx, 2017 film, directed by Raoul Peck.
BY NADINE CARR
The development of the first revolutionary international workers
association, the Communist League, and The Communist Manifesto, the
program it adopted in 1847, are a rich treasure for study by workers
today. Unfortunately, and contrary to what a review in the Nov. 27
Militant said, the movie “The Young Karl Marx” doesn’t tell the true
story of what happened.
For anyone watching the film, and anyone interested in advancing the
organization and self-confidence of the working class, I strongly
recommend reading “On the History of the Communist League,” an 1885
article by Frederick Engels.
The film covers the period from 1843 to the beginning of 1848. We see
the start of what became the lifelong political collaboration of Marx
and Engels, both then young revolutionaries in their 20s. It gives a
glimpse of the conditions and struggles of the working class in the
English textile mills; of the artisans who were part of the
proletariat-in-becoming throughout western Europe; of the battle of the
peasants in Germany. It depicts what seem to be debates Marx and Engels
had with opponents, such as the Young Hegelians and Pierre Proudhon, as
they worked to clarify their revolutionary outlook. But the film doesn’t
reflect the real politics they’re developing and debating.
And on the crucial question of the formation of the Communist League,
the film is a total distortion. A key scene shows Marx and Engels
meeting for the first time with three seemingly distrustful leaders of
the League of the Just in February 1846, with the aim of pushing them
aside and taking over the organization. These leaders of the League, who
aren’t identified, are portrayed as narrow-minded, clueless workers, and
Marx and Engels as scheming connivers.
‘First revolutionary proletarians’
In “On the History of the Communist League,” Engels describes how the
League of the Just evolved from its founding in 1836 as a secret society
of German political refugees, first in Paris and later in London and
elsewhere, into a revolutionary working-class party. Far from being
bumbling fools, its leaders were workers and artisans such as Karl
Schapper, Heinrich Bauer and Joseph Moll — all of whom had spent years
organizing to fight capitalism and its effects on the lives of their
class. They had faced jail and deportation, been wounded in battle, and
had dealt with police and provocateurs.
“I came to know all three of them in London in 1843,” Engels wrote.
“They were the first revolutionary proletarians whom I met, and however
far apart our views were at that time in details — for I still owned, as
against their narrow-minded egalitarian communism, a goodly dose of just
as narrow-minded philosophical arrogance — I shall never forget the deep
impression that these three real men made upon me, who was then still
only wanting to become a man.”
Marx got to know leaders of the League of the Just in Paris around the
same time. He and Engels “published a series of pamphlets” criticizing
the hodgepodge of radical political nostrums “which formed the secret
doctrine of the ‘League’ at that time,” Marx wrote in 1860. “In its
place we proposed the scientific study of the economic structure of
bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical foundation.
Furthermore, we argued in popular form that it was not a matter of
putting some utopian system into effect, but of conscious participation
in the historical process revolutionizing society before our very eyes.”
Marx and Engels also joined other emigres to found a German Workers
Educational Association in Brussels. They maintained contact with the
revolutionary-minded section of the English Chartist labor movement,
with the French Social Democrats, the League and others looking to
advance the interests of the working class.
Through their own experiences, the worker-leaders of the League in
London became increasingly convinced that the positions of Marx and
Engels were correct, that they needed to break free of the old
conspiratorial organizational forms. “In the spring of 1847 Moll …
invited us repeatedly, in the name of his comrades, to join the League,”
Engels wrote. “Should we join, we would be given an opportunity of
expounding our critical Communism before a congress of the League in a
manifesto, which would then be published as the manifesto of the League.”
They accepted. The political and organizational questions involved were
debated at length over two congresses, in the summer and winter of 1847.
The group renamed itself the Communist League, and set out to build a
public propaganda organization.
The film ignores how Marx and Engels were won to these workers and their
organization at the same time as its leaders were won to their
revolutionary program and outlook. And the working class is depicted as
objects — a suffering class — not as actors capable of transforming
human history.
The movie refers to Engels’ 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class
in England. But it doesn’t even hint that the book includes a
substantial description of the development and activity of the English
trade unions and the Chartists that evolved into an independent
working-class political movement. The young Engels and Marx were
attracted above all to the proletariat as a fighting class.
The film ends with brief notes stating that revolutionary struggles
broke out across Europe in 1848, “the international workers’ movements
arose from these ruins,” The Communist Manifesto remains in print, and
“Marx would keep writing his key work, Capital, until his death.”
Viewers wouldn’t have a clue that Marx, Engels and many other cadres of
the Communist League remained active, lifelong party builders, seeking
ways to organize the working class into effective labor and political
action. When downturns in the class struggle led to dissolution of the
Communist League in 1852 — following the defeat of the revolutionary
wave in 1848 — they would grab the opportunity in new upsurges to
rebuild. They founded the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864
as the class struggle deepened again.
If you want to know who Marx and Engels were, the program they fought
for, how they immersed themselves in the working-class movement, and how
their ideas and activities are relevant for our struggles today, get in
touch with the Socialist Workers Party and join us to read and discuss
what they wrote — and to act to put it in practice.
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