The Manifesto in Politics

Those who formulate a new social philosophy rarely remain the masters of its fate. Once it has begun to exercise a serious influence it acquires a prestige value as a weapon which makes its later adherents look upon it as something to which they can give the special shape they desire for the special purposes they have in view. At that stage it is always in danger of becoming an orthodox dogma, any development of which is regarded as a heresy unless it becomes directly associated with some outstanding success in action. No better example of this exists perhaps, then the social philosophy enunciated by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans for the nascent Christian Churches. It is a body of doctrine difficult to reconcile with what we can gather of the teaching of Jesus Christ which has, in fact, little interest in social philosophy and has its centre of interest outside a world to the imminent end of which it looks forward. But St. Paul, who was a great statesman as well as a great theologian, was concerned to safeguard the future of his fellow-believers; and he set out for them a code of political behaviour which would minimise the danger of any conflict between the petty churches of his day and the mighty Roman empire, at least for the period in which the clamant hostility of those churches to Rome might well have jeopardised their survival. It is not until, under Constantine, they were accepted as the official religion, and the meek begin to inherit the earth, that new and bolder implications are found in the Pauline doctrine. It would be interesting to know what one who originally accepted the precepts of the Epistle to the Romans would have thought of St. Ambrose’s thunderous denunciation of Theodosius.

Anyone who considers the subsequent history of the Communist Manifesto, especially after Engels’ death, will recognise how, in much the same way as under the Pauline doctrine, warring sects among the socialists it helped so much to create took charge of its destiny. Neither Marx nor Engels, of course, ever surrendered their belief that violent revolution would accompany the victory of socialism in most national communities. But, after Bismarck repealed the anti-socialist laws in Germany and the Social Democratic Party there began, despite all opposition, to make both constant and remarkable gains, Engels began to set the art of revolution in an importantly different perspective. Nowhere is this seen so clearly as in the preface he wrote, dated 8 March 1895, to a new reprint of Marx’s Class Struggles in France. That new perspective, it may be suggested, is marked by four major principles. The first is the recognition that universal suffrage was not merely, as the disillusion after the failures of 1848 had persuaded so many workers, especially in the Latin countries, a deception; it becomes also a weapon of emancipation. “With this successful utilisation of universal suffrage,” he wrote, “an entirely new mode of proletarian struggle came into force, and this quickly developed further … the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the Workers’ Party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion.” “The irony of world history,” he remarked in a later passage, “turns everything upside-down. We, the ‘Revolutionaries,’ the ‘Rebels,’ we are thriving far better on legal methods, than on illegal methods and revolts. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They are despairingly with Odillon-Barrot: la legalité nous tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles, and rosy cheeks, and look like eternal life; and if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven into street fighting, in order to please them, then nothing else is finally left to them but themselves to break through this legality so faithful to them.”

This, then, is the first principle set out by Engels. Universal suffrage may be so successful an instrument of socialist progress that it only pays anti-socialist governments where recourse is had by socialists to rebellion; indeed, anti-socialist governments themselves may be driven into illegal action for fear of the results of constitutionalism. From this first principle, there follows a second which is mainly the result of technological change. “All the conditions on the insurgents’ side have grown worse,” he wrote. “An insurrection with which all sections of the people sympathise will hardly recur … The ‘people,’ therefore, will always appear divided, and, with this, a powerful lever, so extraordinarily effective in 1848, is lacking.” The new weapons, and the new technical organisation, not least the actual character of the organisation of towns, all make the barricades practically useless. The time for the extempore revolution is over. There may be street fighting in the future. But it can only be successful when “the masses themselves have already grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required.”

The third principle upon which Engels insists is that, properly organised, the growth of socialist strength among the masses drives the reactionary forces to unconstitutional action. That growth can only be checked “by revolt on the part of the parties of order, which cannot live without breaking the laws.” The threat to order thus comes from the Right. It is then in the difficulty that, like the socialists before 1848, the Right can only break the Constitution so long as it has the government, and, therefore, the state-power, the army, above all, in its hands. And Engels draws attention to the early history of Christianity to suggest that, once a great idea has permeated the masses, it will undermine the foundations of the state, will infect the army, and will only be impeded by persecution from reaching its goal.

The fourth principle follows from this. Revolutions are not won “by one mighty stroke,” nor can “the revolution of the minority be turned into the revolution of the majority,” without an intellectual maturity on the part of the masses; this itself is the proportionate outcome of economic conditions which are ripe for revolutionary transformation because they no longer permit expansion. This intellectual maturity is no longer a sudden achievement. “It has slowly to press forward,” Engels wrote, “from position to position in a hard, tenacious struggle.” Obviously when Engels wrote in this fashion he was seeking once and for all to rid socialism of its Blanquist elements, the tradition of conspiracy, the secret societies, the belief in a successful coup d’état effected by a revolutionary minority. He was warning the movement against the facile optimism of 1848 and its aftermath, the need to look forward “to a long struggle between the antagonistic elements concealed within the ‘people’ itself.” Only a “world crisis” makes possible a revolutionary opportunity; and it can be used successfully only if the masses are, with full and conscious understanding, behind the purposes of the revolution it is sought to achieve.

When Lenin wrote his famous State and Revolution in 1917 he built the main structure of its arguments on the lessons drawn by Marx and Engels over the generation following its failure. But it is important to realise that the term he gave to Marxist doctrine had already received a special colour from Russian conditions, and that much of his own outlook was the result of his own struggle, first, to get a majority in the Russian Social Democratic Party, and then to maintain that majority, both before and after the abortive revolution of 1905, in extraordinarily difficult conditions. He won the majority at the Conference of 1903. What, however, he won it for was a set of organisational and strategic ideas which were largely unconnected with philosophic speculation. That is clear from the fact that, by 1904, when Lenin had lost the support of Plekhanov, and his control over Iskra and the central Committee of the party, he gladly accepted the support of Bogdanov and his friends. That he disagreed with the main philosophic idea of Bogdanov we know from his correspondence; Plekhanov, indeed, sneered at him for doing so, and told him that just as Leninist strategy was a revision of Marxist strategy, so the philosophy of Bogdanov was a revision of Marxist philosophy. Bogdanov was an idealist of the Kantian school deeply interested in the turn that Mach was giving to metaphysical speculation. Very significantly, Lenin, until 1908, did not think these philosophic differences important. So far as he was concerned, Bogdanov’s interest in Mach and Avenarius was unimportant. “It is wholly incomprehensible to me,” he said at the Third Bolshevik Conference of 1905, “what these men, for whom I haven’t the slightest sympathy, have to do with the social revolution. They write on individual and social experience, or something of the sort, but really they have no ideas on the democratic dictatorship.”

What is significant in this is that, from 1904 to 1907, though Lenin disagreed with the metaphysics of Bogdanov, he was untroubled by it because they agreed on revolutionary strategy. When over the elections to the Third Duma they disagreed on revolutionary strategy Lenin set out with all his relentless determination to attack Bogdanov and all his supporters. It is interesting that, while he was writing his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he was, at the same time, assuring Maxim Gorki, who was then much influenced both by Bogdanov and the “fideism” of Lunacharski, of his “most unerring judgment in artistic creation, and that, when you create such views, both out of your artistic experience and out of philosophy, even if this philosophy is an idealistic one, you may come to conclusions which may be of enormous value to the workers’ party.” Yet that did not prevent him in July 1909 from using the editorial conference of Proletarie, without any notice given, to expel Bogdanov and his supporters from the Bolshevik “faction,” and to outlaw their doctrines. This action, of course, overruled, quite unconstitutionally, the decisions taken by the London Congress of 1907 and set aside the Bolshevik centre which had been elected there. It was expulsion, Lenin explained, from the faction and not from the Social Democratic Party. “A party,” he told the editorial conference, “can include a wide range of opinions, the extremes of which may even be diametrically opposed to each other.” But, within three years, Lenin was arguing that only the Bolsheviks of his own faction represented the needs of a Marxist party, and the October Revolution made Lenin’s Bolshevik group the owners of the state-power. No official blessing was then given to the wide and flexible outlook upon the Workers’ Party of which Lenin had written to Gorki, and of which he had spoken in the editorial conference; then, clearly, he had regarded his own Bolshevik faction not as a separate party, but as, in the sense of the Communist Manifesto, essentially the vanguard of the party and intimately linked to it. The virtual canonisation of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in subsequent years, made every branch of thought one in which an official state-orthodoxy could be imposed with the authority of Lenin; and denial of that orthodoxy would enable the man guilty of deviation not merely to be an intellectual heretic, but almost everything else from hypocrite to a traitor to the revolutionary cause. No one, I think, can understand the vitriolic character of communist polemic since 1917 who does not realise that its effective origin is a book written by Lenin less because of any sense that metaphysical differences were necessarily differences on the plane of party-action, but because, when he wrote it, he was at all costs concerned to defeat and to discredit Bogdanov lest his own views of party strategy ceased to dominate the Bolshevik faction.

I have set out this history because it illustrates so remarkably what happens when the large and flexible outlook of the Communist Manifesto is applied in a narrow and dogmatically rigid way. Lenin’s application of Marxism to Russia has naturally had immense influence because it was the instrument of success in the October Revolution. But that influence has also had its evil and dangerous side because it has led Communists, both inside and outside Russia, to insist that the whole Leninist interpretation of Marxism, metaphysical, ethical, logical, scientific, psychological, political, economic and strategic, is the only possible way of understanding the world, and that no one outside the Communist Party can really understand either science or society. Granted the way in which the Communist Party of Soviet Russia is organised, this has come to mean that the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party—the Politbureau—is, in fact, the guardian of universal truth. Anyone accordingly who dissents from its views is rejecting universal truth and is an enemy of the only socialism that matters, which is itself, of course, that of the Russian Communist Party. This would mean that outside the Communist Party, no one can claim to be a socialist unless he accepts the line which, at any given time, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party announce as the correct one to be followed.

This has had certain results, the tragic character of which it is difficult to overestimate. For since the leaders of Russian Communism have naturally been above all concerned to safeguard the October Revolution and to consolidate its results, their directions to other parties, both during the life-time of the Third International and since its dissolution, have been set in those terms. This has led Communists outside Russia to follow in a docile way the directions of Moscow without any attempt at the independent assessment of their value and validity, when they are applied to concrete situations outside Russia, where neither the historic conditions inherited there nor the actual situations confronted, make the policy recommended by Russia either practical or desirable.

Lenin himself had as early as 1921 to warn Communist parties outside Russia against what he called “the infantile malady of Left Wing Communism”—a malady which, in its essence, consisted of an effort on the part of nascent Communist parties to repeat in their birth-pangs all the mistakes against which he himself had been fighting for almost a generation before 1917. But the more unhappy results were deeper. The working-class movement was divided in most of the major countries between Communists and Social Democrats. Their hatred for one another became far more important to each than their antagonism to the common capitalist enemy. Communists formed separate political parties, even separate trade unions. They became so insistent that social democracy was a method of safeguarding capitalism against the workers that there was a period when they followed Moscow in proclaiming that social democrats were, in fact, social fascists. Almost down to the very advent of Hitler to power, they were ready to believe that his government was the necessary prelude to victory; they would be the residuary legatees of his inevitably rapid overthrow. When the grave error of this policy was perceived, they at once became the ardent advocates of the united front and saw no reason in the world why men whom the day before, as it were, they had been denouncing as “lacqueys of capitalism,” or “betrayers of the working class,” should not at once agree to admit them to the ranks of a party they had consistently announced they intended to destroy. When the “United Front” did not succeed, and Hitler, who seemed to have considerable support among capitalists in all countries, grew ever more dangerous, above all as a crusader against Soviet Russia, they accepted from Moscow the idea of the “Popular Front,” in which Communists would join with any party, no matter what its outlook, so long as it was hostile to Fascism in all its forms. When, roughly by the time of Munich, it was clear that the main capitalist powers had no objection to the expansion of Hitler and Mussolini, provided that their own “vital interests” were not touched—interests which they did not regard as including the integrity of Soviet Russia—the rulers of Russia, without knowledge of Communist parties abroad, proceeded to make a treaty of friendship with Hitlerite Germany which was actually signed by Ribbentrop in Moscow one week before the outbreak of the second World War.

What is nothing less than fantastic is the intellectual gyrations performed by Communist parties in Western Europe in the period between the beginning of hostilities on 1 September 1939, and the German attack on Soviet Russia on 22 June 1941. They had been so long instructed that Hitler was the enemy of the working class everywhere, the supreme expression of capitalist reaction, that, for the first month of the war, they drew the natural inference that, as the vanguard of the working-class forces, they must take the lead in crusading for his overthrow. Their leaders, therefore, urged on the Communist rank and file the folly, as one of them put it, of merely “mouthing revolutionary phrases”; the urgent thing was to fight with all their strength against the “noxious beast.” But they had forgotten the Russo-German pact, and the anxiety of the Soviet leaders not to be involved in what would certainly be a destructive, and might possibly be a fatal conflict. From 7 October 1939, therefore, their whole policy changed. What had been preached as an anti-fascist crusade became a typical “imperialist” war such as was characteristic of capitalist states. It must be ended as soon as possible; there was every reason to come to terms with Hitler. For nearly two years in Great Britain, the Communist Party conducted an anti-war agitation, which included denunciation of the Labour Party as “warmongers” for entering Mr. Churchill’s cabinet, an insistence that the responsibility for the war lay on the shoulders of Great Britain which was guilty of aggression against Hitlerite Germany, the encouragement of sabotage in the armament factories, and the use of the manifold disasters suffered by Great Britain after the fall of France, to insist that the prolongation of the war would destroy the working class. Then came the German attack on Russia; and, over night, the war was transformed from an imperialist war into a crusade for freedom. There was no limit to the intensity of the national effort which the Churchill government was entitled to exact, and there could be no question of peace until Hitlerite Germany had been broken in pieces. No one has ever questioned the devotion and heroism of Communist parties everywhere, above all in the countries occupied by the Fascist enemy, once Russia had entered the war. What is startling is the contrast between this and their willingness to come to terms with Hitler before his attack on Russia. Nothing in the nature of Nazism changed between 23 August 1939 and 22 June 1941, except Hitler’s decision to overrun the West before, instead of after, he overran the East. Had their peace move been successful, they would have immensely strengthened his position for the next attack. But they were incapable of any independent judgment upon the problem. They acted as the Russian leaders ordered them to act, without even an attempt at making a concrete analysis of the historical situation before them. They forgot altogether the significant aphorism of the Chinese Communist leader, Mao-Tse Tung; “it is no use,” he said, “preaching socialism unless you have a country to practice it in.”

To this there must be added the grave issues created by the ethical behaviour of Communist parties outside Russia after 1917. The passion for conspiracy, the need for deception, the ruthlessness, the centralised and autocratic commands, the contempt for fair play, the willingness to use lying and treachery to discredit an opponent or to secure some desired end, complete dishonesty in the presentation of facts, the habit of regarding temporary success as justifying any measure, the hysterical invective by which they wrought to destroy the character of anyone who disagreed with them; these, in the context of an idolisation of leaders who might, the day after, be mercilessly attacked as the incarnation of evil, have been the normal behaviour of Communists all over the world. Men of extraordinary gifts ceased to have either a mind or a character of their own; they placed these in the keeping of their particular party, which, in its turn, placed them with its own mind and conscience in the keeping of Moscow, until they became automata responsive only to the orders of their leaders and accepted those orders, especially at critical moments, with a mechanical devotion which justified every shift and turn in Communist policy as the expression of infallible insight. While they were thus acting, almost in the full light of the day, they were demanding their right to be admitted into working-class organisations to which they promised complete fidelity even while it was everywhere known that their only reason for seeking that admission was their desire either to dominate or destroy the particular organisation concerned, and to make it as servilely dependent upon their leaders as they were themselves.

It would be painful, and it is probably unnecessary, to document this indictment. Some of this behaviour is explained by the fact that it was the conduct of men only just emerging from long and evil tyranny; some of it was due to the intensity of the persecution to which they were subjected by reactionary opponents, especially in South-Eastern Europe, or, as under the White terror, in Hungary. Nor can it be denied that part of it is due to the grave mistakes made by Social Democratic parties; there is little that is pardonable, for example, in those alliances concluded by Ebert and Scheidemann in the first days of the Weimar Republic by which they ultimately prepared the way for the success of counter-revolution. Nor it is possible to forgive the cowardly and conscious betrayal of the British Labour Party by Ramsay McDonald and a group of his colleagues in 1931. The point of this indictment is that the spirit of the Communist Movement since the Russian Revolution has been in a grave degree a denial of the spirit of the Manifesto, and of the development of that spirit in the writings of Marx and Engels after the profound experience of 1848.

For they were, first of all, opposed to any separate Communist Party; they appreciated always the heavy price of splitting the working-class movement. They recognised the necessity of a flexible application of their basic principles; at no time did they seek mechanically to impose a dogmatic view of their meaning upon the other socialist parties of the world. There is no evidence to suggest that they supposed that the passage of the state-power from a bourgeois to a working-class party would mean the creation of a rigid dictatorship which established a taut orthodoxy not less upon its own members, than upon other citizens, and regarded criticism of that orthodoxy as the supreme treason; still less is there evidence that they would have argued either that one cannot serve the cause of socialism without being a dialectical materialist, or to argue seriously that, because members of the Communist Party are dialectical materialists, they alone can hope to understand the process of science and nature and society. Both of them were fierce controversialists, accustomed to giving and taking hard blows; but they never pretended to the kind of infallibility so absolute that it is entitled to establish what is virtually an inquisition to enforce their dogmas.

The Manifesto and Marxism

So far as socialism is concerned, the essence of the Marxist view turns upon the acceptance of two vital principles. The first is that, as Marx said, “the mode of production in material life conditions the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.” The second principle is that so long as the instruments of production are privately owned the class which owns them uses the state-power as a coercive weapon by which to maintain its ownership. These principles, of course, are built upon certain philosophic presuppositions of which a realistic theory of knowledge is one; for, since the historical materialist believes that modes of production give birth to social relations independent of the will or consciousness of individual men, he cannot accept any metaphysical view of the world which is based on a subjective theory of knowledge. But no one would have been more emphatic than Marx and Engels, first, that the degree to which the mode of production conditions relations outside the economic field is an empirical matter upon which there may be valid difference in judgment. Nor can one believe for a moment that either Marx or Engels would have argued that even in its widest sense their social philosophy necessitated the acceptance of, say, Einstein’s view of the physical nature of the universe. Anyone who remembers Marx’s devotion to Shakespeare and Balzac will realise how far he was from demanding the subjection of the artist’s insight to the “line” of the party at any given moment. Indeed the letter from Lenin to Gorki, which I have quoted here, shows that he shared Marx’s views, as indeed, he seems to have applied it in music also, if his attitude to Balzac may be taken as a general index to his outlook.

If the Communist answers this argument by saying that just as there have been immense developments in the natural sciences since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, so, clearly, there have been great developments in the social sciences, and that their interpretation of these developments has supreme validity, one is entitled to know the rational justification for this claim. As soon as this is seriously examined, it becomes clear that it is, in its essential elements, a wider expression of the extensions of Marx’s theory given to it by Lenin in his effort to apply it to the special conditions of Russia. That effort was remarkably successful, and the victory of the October Revolution gave to Leninism a prestige which, intelligibly enough, outshone that of any rival view, the more so as everywhere else the attempt at revolution failed; and the chief exponents of alternative Marxist interpretations fought vainly, over large parts of the European Continent, against exactly those breaches of legality by the Right which Engels in 1895 predicted would be the way in which reactionary capitalism would seek to maintain its hold on power. It is difficult not to believe that experience; the ground for this lies in the vital decision Lenin took when, in founding the Third International and making admission to it, as the famous “Twenty-One Points” put to the Independent Labour Party of Great Britain made clear, he divided the working-class movement into two sections. These have remained in most matters, if not in theory, at least in practice, incompatible. He thus sought to force the pace of events in Europe in the conviction that the time was ripe for that revolution which was to save Russia from its enemies.

In the light of these events, it is significant to remember that, just as Engels in 1895 was convinced that the German Socialist Movement had a special part to play in initiating the Revolution, so, more than a generation before, Alexander Herzen, in that exile during which his heart was always in his own country, believed that Russia had a special destiny in the Revolution. At first he had thought that America had a mission of the same kind, though this faded away rapidly. What became clear to him was an inability to “believe that the destinies of humanity and its future are fixed and nailed in Western Europe. If Europe does not succeed in recovering herself by a social transformation, other countries will transform themselves.” His mind turned to Russia, “full of vigour, and also full of barbarism.” Social Revolution might be an idea born of Western European experience, but he thought that it might be adapted. “I think,” he wrote, in a remarkable passage, “that there is a certain basis of truth in the fear which the Russian government is beginning to have of communism: for communism is Russian autocracy turned upside down.”

Anyone who examines the writings of Marx and Engels from the moment that they moved from an acceptance of “true socialism” to their realisation of what historical materialism implied will recognise that they contain the framework of a method which, by its very nature, excludes certain conceptions from both the theory and the practice of Marxism. It excludes the idea of a revolution made in the fashion of Blanqui; that was insisted upon by Lenin himself. It excluded also that idea of a “spontaneous” rising of the masses, which the class-conscious socialist party was then to lead to final victory, which Rosa Luxembourg advocated so ardently. For the inevitable result of any revolution so made would be the necessity of centralising power in the hands of the experienced élite, and this would obviously lead to the domination of the mmature masses by that élite on the morrow of the seizure of power. That was why Engels insisted that “the great thing is to get the working class to move as a class,” and argued that German Socialists in the United States committed “a grievous error” when they tried to impose their own dogmas upon the American movement, That was in 1886; and only a year later he was pointing out that the very breadth Marx gave to the general rules of the First International was the reason of its influence. “I think that all our practice has shown,” he then wrote, “that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages, without giving up or hiding our own distinct position, and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German-Americans choose a different line, they will commit a great mistake.”

Lenin confronted a quite special situation. Russia had a very small bourgeoisie, an urban working class immensely weaker than its massive peasantry, a long tradition, also, of evil tyranny and of popular ignorance. None of those conditions was present in the Western democracies. If, after the Bolsheviks had seized power, they had sought to govern by democratic methods, even after they had repelled foreign intervention, and repressed civil war, their attempt to build up socialism in a single country would have been overwhelmed by peasant opposition mainly concerned with individual possession of the land. It was only by giving to the state-power the character of a dictatorship in the sense defined by Herzen, when he described communism as “Tsarism turned upside down,” that they were able to impose socialism on Russia. For the dictatorship enabled them to force their country, though at an immense price, to the verge of that industrial maturity without which socialism is impossible. Organisationally, it was one of the most outstanding feats of history. But only the fanatic can deny—what Lenin himself said1—that it was bound to result in the “bureaucratic deformation” of the state-power. It seems to me dishonest, indeed, to deny that Russian political institutions may be regarded as maintaining the possibility of democratisation, but, unless words cease to have any real meaning, democratisation has not yet seriously begun.

The revolution of which Lenin was the supreme architect was made by methods evolved by him, no doubt upon a Marxist foundation, to fit the special conditions of Russia. Its central principle adapted Marxism to those conditions by making the dictatorship of the proletariat more akin to the Jacobin idea of a Committee of Public Safety than to any content either Marx or Engels gave to that term. When they spoke of “smashing the machinery of the state,” they did not mean that a state of siege must take its place; they meant that victorious socialists must cut out those features of bourgeois democracy which were incompatible with socialist democracy—the army as a special caste, for example, a bureaucracy and a judiciary hostile both by tradition and class-composition to the fulfilment of socialist purposes. This was clearly seen, as early as September, 1918, by Rosa Luxembourg. “Without general elections,” she wrote,2 “freedom of the press, freedom of the assembly, and freedom of speech, life in every public institution slows down, and becomes a caricature of itself, and bureaucracy emerges as the one deciding factor … Public life gradually dies, and a few score party leaders, with inexhaustible energy and limitless idealism, direct and rule. Amongst them the leadership is, in reality, in the hands of a dozen men of first-class brains, even though, from time to time an élite of the working class is called together in Congress to applaud the speeches of their leaders, and to vote unanimously for the resolutions they put forward.”

That is a prophetic description of the relationships which emerged between the party and the working class when Lenin’s theory of proletarian dictatorship was applied to Soviet Russia. Whatever may have been either its validity or its necessity in Russian conditions, or even under conditions which approximated to those of Russia, it was void of the substance of proletarian dictatorship as Marx and Engels conceived it. And when Lenin’s theory has been applied on the international plane, its outcome has invariably been passionate internecine conflict, with a struggle for power in each national party; this has led to splits and schisms, with the same type of angry accusations of betrayal and immoral behaviour which Lenin, with tragic results, brought against the leaders of the Second International after the outbreak of the first World War in 1914. To think in these terms is not to think in Marxian terms. “When you enquire into the causes of the counterrevolutionary successes,” wrote Engels, with the approval of Marx, “there you are met on every hand with the ready reply that it was Mr. This, or Citizen That, who ‘betrayed’ the people. Which reply may be very true or not, according to circumstances; but under no circumstances does it explain anything, or even show how it came to pass that the ‘people’ allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And what a poor chance a political party stands whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a knowledge of the solitary fact that Citizen So-and-So is not to be trusted.”

This attitude, in fact, denies the whole essence of the idea for which the Communist Manifesto stands. The Manifesto did not propose the exchange of one dictatorship for another; it proposed the democratisation of power by putting the authority of the state into the hands of the working class. It assumes that the decline of capitalism has produced a working class mature enough to recognise that it must take its destiny into its own hands and begin the building of socialism. It does not believe that this effort can be successfully made until all the economic conditions of a particular capitalist society are ripe for it; over and over again Marx and Engels made it clear that they regarded any other view as irresponsible. Neither of them had any faith in Blanquist methods. Neither of them believed, for one moment, that, in the absence of the necessary economic conditions, some modern Committee of Public Safety, on the Jacobin model, could prematurely establish socialist relations of production by terror. Neither of them thought that the deliberate decomposition of democratic institutions would hasten the coming of socialism; on the contrary, as Engels so repeatedly said, their view was the very different one that the greater the progress of democratic institutions in a society, the more likely it was that the Right would turn from them to an eagerness for dictatorship. They regarded the destruction of democratic institutions as the supreme method a decaying capitalist reaction would employ in order to arrest the growth of that democratic class-consciousness in the workers which is the proof that the time is becoming ripe for the transition to socialism. That is why, in the famous preface to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx could insist that “no social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it, have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have been matured in the womb of the old society.”1 Nothing shows more clearly that this maturity is real than the degree to which democratic institutions can withstand the effort of reaction to destroy their power to release the “new and higher relations of production” of which Marx here is speaking.

No criticism of the Leninist interpretation of the Manifesto means for one moment that any democratic socialist believes that there is some royal highroad down which one may pass peacefully from capitalism to socialism. The words of Marx on the trial of the Communists at Cologne are a sufficient warning on this point. “You will have to pass,” he said in 1850, “through fifteen, twenty, perhaps fifty years, of civil and international wars, not merely in order to change conditions, but to change yourselves, and make yourselves fit to take over political power.” But he did not speak in this way out of a conviction that any revolution, any coup d’état was itself a way by which the workers could change themselves and make themselves fit to take over political power. There are few more arresting moments in the political career of Marx and Engels than the furious attack, so dramatically described by Annenkov, on Wilhelm Weitling, for his irresponsible advocacy of revolution under conditions which were unripe for its success—“The essence of his sarcastic reply,” wrote Annenkov, “was that it was deception pure and simple to make the people rise without showing it how solid was the basis of its action. To arouse fantastic hopes, Marx told him, … never leads to the emancipation of such poor devils, but to their destruction … all you do by such methods is to ruin the very cause to which you have put your hand.”

The reason why Marx and Engels were always clear that a fundamental change was unlikely to be peaceful, was given with clarity by the French historian, Mignet, in the introduction to the History of the French Revolution that he published in 1824. “When a reform has become necessary, and the moment for accomplishing it has arrived,” he wrote, “nothing can prevent it, everything furthers it. Happy were it for men could they then come to an understanding; would the rich resign their superfluity, and the poor content themselves with achieving what they really needed, historians would have no excesses, no calamities, to record; he would merely have to display the transition of humanity to a wiser, freer and happier condition. But the annals of nations have not as yet presented any instance of such prudent sacrifices; those who should have made them have refused to do so; those who have required them have forcibly compelled them; and good has been brought about, like evil, by the medium, and with all the violence of usurpation. As yet, there has been no sovereign but force.”

Mignet was not a socialist historian. Yet here, a quarter of a century before the Communist Manifesto, is one of the basic principles round which Marx and Engels built their social philosophy. Like them, Mignet recognised that at certain periods of history changes are necessary, and that if they are resisted they will impose themselves by violence. Like them also Mignet perceived that the changes which become necessary are independent of the views of those who are compelled to face them; and that it is rare indeed for those whom they affect adversely to offer them a welcome. Nevertheless, as he agreed, where such a situation has arrived violent revolution may bring with it good in its train. The usurpation of the power of a possessing class is, at such vital times, the source of well-being in society.

That is the theme of the Communist Manifesto. What it brought into social philosophy were four new and vital insights. It related, first, the need for inevitable change to the causes which made it inevitable. It linked that change, in the second place, to those divisions in the social order the antagonism between which has been the vital source of conflict between men. It explained, thirdly, why there was reason to suppose that the conflict between the dying capitalist way of life, and the emerging socialist way, would be the last stage in those conflicts, due to social divisions, and why, as they ended, there would begin a new and richer relation between man and man, since there would be, at long last, the final destruction of those fetters upon production which stood between humanity and its mastery of nature. Finally, the authors showed how men may become conscious of the historical position they occupy, and gather thereupon the knowledge that is necessary to take the next effective step upon the road of their long journey to freedom.

The Manifesto and the Labour Government

Few documents in the history of mankind have stood up so remarkably to the test of verification by the future as the Communist Manifesto. A century after its publication no one has been able seriously to controvert any of its major positions. All over the world the crises of capitalism have grown both more frequent and more profound. The fact that America has reached its last internal frontier has brought into being there precisely the same problems, if on a vaster scale, as in Europe, and the rising nationalisms of the Far East and the Pacific, while they hasten the decay of capitalism in the older industrial societies, quite obviously prelude their rise in the new. For, unmistakably, whether in Japan or China, whether in India or Indonesia, the central problem is the sheer misery of the masses; and our experience makes it clear that, within a capitalist framework, there is little likelihood of its effective mitigation. Nor is anyone likely to look at the prospect either in Latin America or in Africa and conclude that in either continent the business of government is carried on with the consent, or for the good, of the governed. Vice in both may pay to virtue the homage of occasional hypocrisy, but, in the intervals between those tributes, the squalor and vigour with which the many are exploited by the few, have changed less their character than the rhetoric under which they seek to conceal themselves.

But it is in Europe, above all, that the principles of the Communist Manifesto have found their fullest vindication by far. It is not only that even after two world wars fought in the name of democracy and freedom each of them has either perished altogether, or is in grave danger; it has been shown that, whereas in Great Britain and Scandinavia, deep historical traditions give to democracy and freedom an exceptional strength, the regard of the Right for their form is greater than their regard for their substance. The British Labour Party won a notable electoral victory at the close of the second World War. It has thus embarked upon the tremendous task of beginning to build the foundations of a socialist society in Great Britain in a period when, a large part of Europe having been devastated by war and the resources of the victorious powers, like Great Britain itself, drained almost to breaking-point, its task, both as a Socialist Party, and as a Government, is to ask for the continuance of great sacrifices from a people fatigued by the immense effort of war. To keep its authority, as Mr. Attlee himself has said, “the Labour programme must be carried out with the utmost vigour and resolution. To delay dealing with essentials would be fatal. To show irresolution or cowardice would be to invite defeat. A Labour Government should make it quite plain that it will suffer nothing to hinder it in carrying out the popular will. In all great enterprises it is the first steps that are difficult, and it is the way in which these are taken that makes the difference between success and failure.”

It is not, I think, merely patriotic emotion that makes British socialists feel that here, as nowhere else, the truth of their principles will be tested. It was in Great Britain that capitalist society first came to full maturity in the generation subsequent to the Napoleonic Wars. It was largely from the observation and analysis of that maturity that Marxism became the outstanding philosophic expression of socialist principles and methods; and it was largely from British socialist writers, and the early British socialist movement, alike on its political and on its trade union side, that Marx and Engels moved to the understanding that men make their history by their power, through their grasp of the forces which make it move, to give a conscious direction to that movement. Mr. Attlee has never been himself a Marxist; but there is not a word in the sentences of his that I have quoted which could not have been eagerly accepted by the authors of the Communist Manifesto; and they would, I think, have inferred from them that in the degree to which the first Labour Government with a majority puts the spirit of those phrases into operation, it would fulfil the great objectives for which it was formed. By unbreakable loyalty to its own principles it could lead its own people, even in the hour of crisis, to cast off its chains. A British working class that had achieved its own emancipation could build that working-class unity everywhere out of which the new world will finally be won.