[Marxism] Socialists and/or communists?

[Joaquin Bustelo]

"Aaron Aarons" challenges the distinction that has existed in the radical
movement between "socialists" and "communists" and that I pointed to, as a
way of showing the ... simple-mindedness of insisting a candidate call him
or herself "socialist."

I said, among other things, "Marx and Engels were never comfortable with the
term 'socialist' and somewhat chagrined that it came to be identified with
their followers, as Engels made a point of stressing late in his life in the
introductions to the Communist Manifesto, if I remember right." 

To which a.a. replies: "I haven't been able to locate this."

I'll leave it to other to explain google and keyboards and the idea of
entering "search terms" into a "search engine" using a keyboard -- skills
comrade Aaron obviously lacks. I merely reproduce what it took me about 15
seconds to find on the Internet. It is from Engels's 1888 introduction to a
new English edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

"The history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern
working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread,
the most international production of all socialist literature, the common
platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.

"Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist
manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the
adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists
in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and
gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks
who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to
capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men
outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the "educated"
classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become
convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had
proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. 

"It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it
touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class
to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in
Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a
working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least,
"respectable"; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the
very beginning, was that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of
the working class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two
names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating
it."

<http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/manifesto/index.html>

*  *  *

That this is not a distinction without a difference, strictly speaking, is
shown, among other places, in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, where
he draws a sharp distinction between the LOWER phase of "communism" and the
higher. The former, of course, has been popularly, and somewhat vulgarly
rendered by many in the movement as "socialism" and the latter stage
full-fledged "communism," but that is not the terminology Marx chose when he
was addressing close and theoretically advanced comrades on the need for
razor-sharp scientific precision in the party programme, even when, in the
very same text, he proclaims that a single step of real MOVEMENT is worth
ten paper programs.

That the distinction Engels referred to in 1888 was still current two
decades later is shown by Lenin's INSISTENCE in 1917 that the Bolsheviks
DROP the labels social-democratic and socialist and instead call themselves
COMMUNISTS. That was a POLITICAL statement that built on the generalized
consciousness about a distinction between the two in some senses of the term
"socialist" and "communist," even if those usages were, perhaps, not then
the most current or common ones. 

The decades following Lenin's death both profoundly re-enforced the
communist/socialist divide and imposed on those terms a meaning so distant
and hostile to true socialism (as comrades who choose that designation) or
true communism (for the rest of us) that it creates a real political
problem.

a.a. is of the opinion that an identification of socialism and communism
with totalitarianism is a problem that peaked when I was a child a half
century ago, and now ought to be safely ignored. I would suggest that even
OUTSIDE the United States (i.e., outside the place where
bourgeois-imperialist ideology is strongest), this identification is still
so strong as to require all sorts of verbal gymnastics.

Thus, comrade president Hugo Chavez has invented the term "21st Century
socialism." What is that about? What is the CONTENT of saying "21st Century"
socialism, as distinct from --and even opposed to-- plain old "socialism"?
He is NEGATING that the socialism he aspires to is like the old socialism
people have heard about or read about in the Soviet Union. 

And for much of my political lifetime, I've often found it useful to be
consciously unscientific, and adapt, for pedagogical purposes, to
anti-communist prejudices and say things to the effect of I'm not a
communist like Stalin or Pol Pot, I'm a revolutionary or Marxist socialist
that wants DEMOCRATIC control by working people over the economy and other
things that affect our lives, rather than restricting democracy to choosing
for two minutes every four years which one of two millionaire-backed
candidates will get to rule us.

*  *  *

The starting point of my post was challenging Eli's contention that what
should be decisive for US is backing a candidate who doesn't think
"socialism" is an epithet. And my POINT was that the important thing isn't
whether we or the candidate understand that socialism isn't an epithet, but
whether the masses of people a campaign is trying to talk to have such
prejudices.

But A.A. says "The only people I run across who have the attitudes towards
'socialism' that Joaquin describes are anarchists."

OK, I plead guilty. I don't mostly hang with anarchists, but am surrounded
by regular people. And, yes, many of them have those prejudices. In fact, I
would say most of them, when you get into more than a superficial political
exchange, will in due course bring it out. And how could they NOT, after
what went down in Eastern Europe for more than half a century, and what is
still going down in China TODAY in the name of socialism and communism? 

Does AA really think that handed such an ideological opportunity on a gift
platter by the Stalinists, the bourgeoisie would be reticent to USE it? 

It IS TRUE as Aaron says that "The greatest anti-socialist and
anti-communist hysteria in the U.S. occurred at a time when Pol Pot was
studying technical subjects at a school in Paris." But that doesn't mean
there still isn't a GREAT DEAL of anticommunist prejudice in the US today.

And Aaron is totally and entirely off the wall when he says that "I doubt
that many people at that time, a few years after WW II, thought of Hitler as
a Socialist. I think Joaquin is reading too much right-wing propaganda, or
hanging out with a bunch of right-wingers."

This was a central of not THE central theme of bourgeois-imperialist
ideology immediately following WWII -- the struggle against
"totalitarianism," and that fascism and communism were essentially
manifestations of the same phenomenon. This was especially important in
helping people to forget that in World War II it was IN FACT "the
Communists" who defeated German fascism, and that the real reason for the
Anglo-American imperialist invasion of France in 1944 wasn't to defeat the
Germans, but to snatch for the OTHER imperialists as much of the fruits of
the Red Army's heroic and victorious struggle against German imperialism as
possible.

*  *  *

But all this is besides the main points I wanted to make, which are simply
that it is idiotic to insist on using terms many in your audience will
misunderstand.

But if you are going to be a sectarian ultraleft jerk opposing Nader because
he doesn't use those words, and insist on a chest-thumping real macho
stance, then for God's sake, use the REAL term, the robustly red Communist,
not the mealy-mouthed weasel pink "socialist" which can mean no more than
Sweden or a national health service like they have in Britain, France, and
just about every other civilized bourgeois imperialist country.

Joaquin

PS: AA writes, about the revolutions of 1848, and my description of Marx and
Engels's role in them, which was to take to the field of battle as
DEMOCRATS: "Yes, I read their famous work from that time, 'The Democratic
Manifesto!' Unfortunately, I can't locate a copy."

What pisses me off about the attitude AA displays here is the likely
miseducation of the comrades who have had less of an opportunity to study
the history of our movement, and the push to reproduce the same abysmal
level of ignorance and foolishness that AA evidences, and most of all
victimizing the younger comrades by contaminating them with such smart-aleck
and quite American attitudes.

For AA's edification, he can consult Engels's excellent article on Blood-Red
Revolutionary Marxist Communist tactics, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung."

There he will find Engels's description of the state of affairs as the
revolution broke out in Germany in 1848:

	"The German workers had above all to win those rights which were
indispensable to their independent organization as a class party: freedom of
the press, association and assembly -- rights which the bourgeoisie, in the
interest of its own rule, ought to have fought for, but which it itself now
disputed in its fear of the workers. The few hundred separate League members
vanished in the enormous mass that had been suddenly hurled into the
movement. Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political
stage as the extreme democratic party.

	"Thus, when we founded a large newspaper in Germany, our banner was
determined as a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy, but
that of a democracy which everywhere emphasized in every point the specific
proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its
banner If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to take up the
movement, adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually
proletarian side and to push it further then there was nothing left for us
to do but to preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a
tiny sect instead of a great party of action. But we had already been spoilt
for the role of preachers in the wilderness; we had studied the Utopians too
well for that, nor was it for that we had drafted our programme."

[As is clear from the context in which this appears, the "programme" Engels
refers to is the Manifesto of the Communist Party.]

<http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/MNRZ84.html>

MOREOVER, let me add for comrade Aaron's further enlightenment, what is
alluded to in the quote from Engels I present above, but narrated quite
straighforwardly in other parts of this piece, as well as in other Engels
articles, like "On the History of the Communist League." Which is that,
having won the Communist League (née "League of the Just") to Marxist
positions, and with the ink on the first edition of the Communist Manifesto
still drying, WHEN THE REVOLUTION BROKE OUT, Marx, Engels and their friends
DISSOLVED the Communist League, in other words, advocated and carried out
its LIQUIDATION intro the broader movement. 

And this was, at the time, and ESPECIALLY for its day, a very SUBSTANTIAL
organization, with HUNDREDS of members and DOZENS of "communities" (as they
called their branches) WITHIN Germany, a country whose working class
numbered, at MOST, a very few million, as well as a substantial presence
among German émigrés and the beginning of a base among the most conscious
workers of other nationalities in Western Europe. 

And Marx and Engels said NO, the road IS NOT to "build" the Communist League
but to integrate the communists into the actual organizational forms being
thrown up by masses of working people as they awaken to political life.

This wasn't because M&E didn't "get" that the working class needed ITS OWN
party, but because they DID understand that, but they understood that such a
party COULD NOT BE "BUILT" by the voluntaristic efforts of a few hundred
(equivalent to many thousands in the U.S., perhaps even tens of thousands,
given the size of Germany's population and proletariat) but could only
EMERGE from the actual movement and experiences of the workers themselves. 

And that the organizational FORM of the Communist league, which until
yesterday was by far and away THE BEST, on this NEW morning had been turned
into an albatross tied around the necks of communists which would doom them
to irrelevance, because it would present them to the broader movement in a
form (Communism) that the broader movement could not yet possibly
understand.

Joaquín