[This is Chapter 26 from Murphey's book Socialist Thought.]

 

26

ARGUMENT OVER METHODS

From its inception, the modern socialist movement has been fragmented over a great many issues.   Socialists have argued among themselves on virtually all doctrinal and tactical points.  Principal among these have been: the argument over the ultimate social, economic and political model they want; the types of alliances needed to attain their goals; precisely who is to provide leadership, both during the period of transition and for governing afterwards; and what methods, violent, passively resistant or parliamentary, are to be used to effect change.

In this chapter I will focus on the disagreement over methods of change.

The vehemence of the argument within socialist thought about methods is apparent throughout socialist literature.  Trotsky, for example, wrote of "the deep-rooted opposition of the two tendencies, the social-revolutionary and the democratic-reformist."¹   Adolph Sturmthal has referred to "the incredible divisions of the non-Communist Left" in Italy in the early 1970s.²   Leslie Derfler tells about "the great battle (that was) fought out in the first decade in the life of the Second International" over whether anarchists were to be excluded and "their chief weapon, the general strike," repudiated.³   The Dolbeares told about the New Left groups in the United States in the early 1970 that "they disagree sharply as to the timing, nature of alliances required, and method of accomplishing the upheaval."⁴  And here the Dolbeares were talking simply about the groups that favored violence; even those groups were at odds over how to do it.

The point is made by some commentators that the methods chosen will tend to relate relativistically to the particular society in which the socialist finds himself.  The Dolbeares observe that "almost no ideologies have absolute commitments to employ or not to employ physical violence . . . (T)he use of violence must be understood in context, as a tactic . . . .” 

Thus Kirkup refers to a speech by Marx in 1872 in which Marx "could not deny that there were countries, like America, England . . . where the workmen could attain their goal by peaceful means; but in most European countries force must be the lever of revolution."⁵   Kirkup says that "it was a principle of Marx to prefer peaceful methods where peaceful methods are permitted, but resort to force must be made when necessary."

This relativity received practical expression in 1976 at the conference of the European Communist Parties.  It was agreed, says Margot Heinemann, that "each Party works out its own path to socialism in accordance with the conditions in its own country."⁶

The relativity no doubt explains some of the diversity in methods.  I can't avoid concluding, though, that the remainder is due to personal factors within each socialist: these may include his temperament, the intensity of his alienation with his resulting hierarchy of values, and whether he has absorbed any of the compassion and liberal spirit that is our heritage from the Enlightenment.   Drastic violence, especially against advanced and liberal civilization, involves incredible personal hubris.

 

For peaceful change.  I  hardly need to illustrate the passages in socialist thought that have advocated peaceful change to a socialist society, since they are very numerous.  This is the course followed by democratic socialism. 

Fried and Sanders say that Ferdinand Lassalle "may be considered the father of modern reform socialism.  The political program that he framed in the 1860s and that the Marxists subsequently buried was resurrected under the name of revisionism at the turn of the century.”⁷   The leader of this later “revisionist” school was Eduard Bernstein.  Fried and Sanders tell us that Bernstein concluded that "Socialism would arise through pragmatic reform, not with a catastrophe resulting in proletariat dictatorship."

During the quarter of a century that preceded World War I, Karl Kautsky and others developed an “'orthodox’ interpretation of Marxism," according to Lichtheim, in which "socialism was to be attained by way of democracy."⁸   Later in the present chapter I will describe the phases of Marx's intellectual life, since they stimulate differing conclusions about method.

 

For peaceful change, but indulgent toward violence.   There is not always a clear line between those who favor peaceful change and those who do not.   From time to time there is hypocrisy on the part of the advocates of peaceful methods.  This is not surprising, of course.

Referring to the Social Democrats in Germany in the 1890s, Kirkup said that "while expressing a preference for peaceful methods, they still regard as probable a great crisis or catastrophe by which they will gain political power."  If we read between the lines, we can see that this involved quite a lot of flirtation with, and at the very least veiled threats of, violence.

In Chile, Salvador Allende spoke eloquently about a peaceful transition to socialism.  But then he threatened violence and dictatorship if there were any counterrevolutionary "violence done to the decisions of the people."   In making this threat, he took a broad view of what would constitute counterrevolutionary “violence”: “violence in any of its forms, whether physical, economic, social or political."  This gave him a virtually unlimited pretext for repression.⁹

The Dolbeares have spoken very candidly about the interplay between "nonviolence" and violence.  In the context of Martin Luther King's mass demonstrations, they write that "one of the advantages of nonviolence as a direct action technique was the way in which it played on the prospect of provoking violence."

The same duality appears in the World Marxist Review when it is pointed out that the Soviet-sponsored "peace movement" does not rule out support for the Communist "wars of national liberation" throughout the Third World.¹⁰  

 

For violent change.   The advocacy of violent revolution has been a prominent part of socialist thought both on the Far Left and the Far Right.  This is illustrated by the irony that Communists and Nazis fought pitched battles over who was to occupy the meeting halls from which they had both dispossessed the bourgeoisie.

Bakunin was one of the earliest to favor violence.  "The party of destruction, styling themselves autonomists and led by Bakunin," Kirkup says, "had a bloodier history."

It was Louis Blanqui who contributed the idea of "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."¹¹    Later socialists refer to “Blanquist terrorist tactics.”¹²

Fried and Sanders say that "in the 1880s and ’90s no statesman in Europe and America was safe from attack."  Anarchists became "propagandists of the deed," seeing terror as the way to bring attention to their cause. 

There has been a long-standing dispute within the camp of those who support violence.  The Leninist tradition, which has been persisted in by the Soviet Union, has been to desire violence only as part of a disciplined, well-prepared revolutionary movement.  This has been at odds with the various terrorist factions all over the world that have used violence dramatically but without the acts being a subordinate part of a comprehensively planned revolution.

In his book in 1973, Edward Taborsky wrote that "Soviet strategists view with jaundiced eyes, at least in the present situation prevailing in the Third World, the various acts of individual and group terrorism perpetrated today in many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America . . . (These) are considered as typical phenomena of irresponsible adventurism."¹³   Such opposition was consistent with the Soviet Union's international strategy of "peaceful coexistence," but Taborsky rightly points out that the Soviet Union did not preclude "wars of national liberation" in the Third World.

Daniel Bell writes that "the question of how to discipline this chiliastic zeal and hold it in readiness has always been the basic problem of radical strategy.”¹⁴   It is inevitably a problem even with the hardcore of committed revolutionaries; it is even more difficult with regard to the mass support that a revolution hopes to engender.

In his autobiography, Leon Trotsky told about the disagreement over these things prior to the Russian Revolution: "Arguments about the use of terrorist methods began.  After individual vacillations, the Marxist section of the exiled went on record against terrorism.  The chemistry of high explosives cannot take the place of mass action, we said.  Individuals may be destroyed in a heroic struggle, but that will not rouse the working class to action . . . This is where the line was drawn between the Social-Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionists.”¹⁵ 

The advocates of violence have also been divided over the intricacies of tactics.  Tactical issues have been debated endlessly within socialist writing.   A great deal of Taborsky's book Communist Penetration of the Third World is devoted, for example, to a discussion of the split among Soviet, Chinese and Castroite Communists over how best to conduct revolution in the Third World.  He wrote that "the Chinese communist ideologists tend to view the Third World's peasantry rather than its industrial proletariat as the main and most decisive force."  He reported how in the 1960s the Chinese opposed the Soviet's "peaceful coexistence" strategy.  The Soviets have warned against launching revolution prematurely, while the Chinese have been "bent on pushing for revolutions at all cost," criticizing "Soviet procrastination."  The Soviets have been willing to enter into United Fronts with non-Communist groups, but the Chinese have tended more rigorously than the Soviets to insist that such a front be led from the beginning by Communists.  Within national-liberation movements, the Chinese have wanted to seize the leadership from "the vacillating bourgeois nationalists."   Even though Castro has received vast amounts of aid from the Soviet Union, Taborsky tells us that Castro's strategy in Latin America of "armed struggle and guerrilla operations" has been more in line with Chinese preferences.  Nevertheless, Castro has been something of a loose cannon, not dependably under the wing, either, of the Chinese.

Arguments over tactical scenarios have been present in countless other situations, and are by no means limited to the examples I have just given.  In part it is a rift over who is to lead, and not simply over what means will most expeditiously accomplish agreed-upon ends.

So far, I have been talking only about violence per se.  It is important to realize that there have also been many "direct action" techniques advocated by socialists, including some that are revolutionary in their potential.  Perhaps the leading technique of this sort has been the "General Strike."  According to Lichtheim, the idea of strike action to gain social objectives arose with the Knights of Labor in the United States in the 1880s, and he says the idea was then taken up by the French.  The International Workers of the World, nicknamed "the Wobblies," favored "One Big Union" in the United States.  This union would "eventually seize control of industry," Philip Foner tells us.¹⁶   The "General Strike" was variously defined by those who favored it:   Haywood considered it "the stoppage of all work and the destruction of the capitalists through a peaceful paralysis of industry."   Foner says that Ben Williams, however, "insisted that it was not a strike at all, simply a 'general lockout of the employing class' leaving the workers in possession of the machinery of distribution and production."

Other direct action techniques have included sabotage, boycotts, mass marches and picketing, and expropriation without compensation.  "One forceful method explicitly advocated by the Wobblies -- indeed, the tactic with which they are most indelibly associated --," Foner says, "was sabotage."

It is significant that the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset spoke of the modern totalitarian regimes as an institutional embodiment of the "direct action" propensities of the "mass man" of the twentieth century.  This suggests that militant socialist factions before a revolution, and a totalitarian regime afterwards, are using a deeply-rooted social tendency.  The "direct action" psychology, Ortega said, is a form of primitivism in the midst of advanced civilization.

Many of the proponents of violence have sanctified it with a mystique that makes it appear something other than an existentially empty nihilism.   Feuer says, for example, that Engels "wrote eloquently of the therapy of violence."¹⁷   Hitler made force a religious imperative, speaking of "the living consciousness of the duty to fight for the existence of our people as a "whole by sacrificing the life of the individual.”¹⁸   Mussolini wrote that "in some contingencies violence has a deep moral significance . . .  It was necessary to make our way by violence, by sacrifice, by blood . . . We began our period of rescue and resurrection.   Dead there were -- but on the horizon all eyes saw the dawn of Italian rebirth.”¹⁹   We have already seen how anarchists romanticized "the propaganda of the deed."

In many cases the violence does not end with the take-over of power; the ensuing regime has often continued using internal violence.  Stalin, Mao and Hitler all used techniques of mass terror.  Lichtheim says that there will never be a final accounting of Stalin's crimes, "but 20 million dead seems a reasonable estimate, if one includes the millions of Ukranian peasants deliberately left to starve in 1932-33 ‘to teach them a lesson.’”  About Mao, Lloyd Shearer writes that “various sources estimate that anywhere from 10 to 60 million Chinese lost their lives in China's transformation.  To achieve his goal, Mao had to annihilate the capitalist class, the intellectuals, the upper classes . . . .”^2O   Hitler's Holocaust is well known.  [Note in 2001: I have mentioned in a prior note that since writing these words I have become aware that there is quite a serious body of scholarship that does not deny that many atrocities were committed against the Jews by the Nazis, but that questions whether there was a actual policy of extermination, whether there actually were gas chambers, and whether the six million figure is not grossly exaggerated.   Despite the taboo on discussing it – and its even being illegal to mention it in several countries – this is a subject that deserves a much more honest scholarship than “mainstream opinion” has been willing to give it.]

Wlodzimierz Brus writes that in Eastern Europe there has been since 1956 a "replacement of mass preventive terror by what may be called selective terror, or the application of the due process of  law in cases which are not regarded as involving a political challenge to the existing order.”²¹   This is in keeping with what George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi have told us.

 

The phases within Marxism.   Karl Marx's literary activity spanned several decades before his death in 1883.  While he absorbed a great deal from earlier authors, his own writing was so varied that he became a basic source for a wide spectrum of later socialist thought.  The exegesis of Marx's writing has been as feverish an activity in the twentieth century as was the exegesis of Aristotle and Augustine's among the Scholastics.

Although the partisans of the varied interpretations will certainly quarrel over any such classification, it appears from what I have read that Marx's intellectual life can be divided roughly into three phases: 

1.  Ironically, the first phase remained undiscovered until long after the others were well known, so that in practical impact it becomes the last phase. In 1844, Marx wrote "philosophical and humanist essays" dealing primarily with the problem of "alienation" (in his meaning that refers to man's existential division from himself when he begins to define himself in terms of money or things).  These manuscripts were first published, according to Raya Dunayevskaya, "by the Marx-Engels Institute in Russia in 1927.”²²   They received little attention until "the West European rediscovery of Marx's 1844 Humanist Essays in the mid-1940s and early 1950s."   It was not until 1961 that they "reached a mass audience in the United States."  In that year, Erich Fromm included them in his book Marx's Concept of Man.

The Marxist concept of alienation is a subtle existential concept that has become of considerable importance to the "humanistic Marxism" that is so well represented, say, by the many authors who have contributed to the book Socialist Humanism, edited by Fromm.  The 1844 essays have also played a role in the academic revival of Marxism in American universities during the 1970s.

In Michael Harrington's classification of Marx's phases, this coincides, also, with an attitude that the young Marx held that was favorable to "democratic revolution."  This Marx was revolutionary, but "he saw the coming revolution," Harrington says, "as a gigantic popular explosion from below, as a democratic insurrection."²³   Harrington argues that the Communist Manifesto, despite the militancy of its name, represents this period: Marx and Engels "read it as committing them to a long-term alliance with bourgeois democracy, not as urging a Bolshevik-like leap from an unripe capitalism to a revolutionary socialism."   No one would assert that the Manifesto is friendly in tone toward the bourgeoisie, but Harrington's point is that it accepted the premise that the bourgeoisie would be around for a long time, while, in the natural course of the dialectic, the proletariat and its class consciousness grew within the society.  Harrington admits that the Manifesto is self-contradictory, however.

2. The second phase was, according to democratic and peaceful Marxists, a brief one.  "The two years between 1848 and 1850 were the period of Marx's anti-democratic temptation," Harrington says; "and this period is a classic source for the Bolshevik, and then the Stalinist, version of Marxism."   Harrington insists, however, that Marx "never did become a partisan of revolution from above, even in his angriest hours."  Leslie Derfler says that "Marx's revolutionary periods seem short-lived."   Needless to say, Lenin and his followers have disagreed with this down-playing of Marx's revolutionary side.

3. The third phase was the long period following 1850 that extended until the end of Marx's life in 1883.  Referring to the 1850s and 1860s, Harrington says that "Marx's perspective became even more democratic . . . (I)t increasingly envisioned the nonviolent and electoral conquest of power."

I have included a discussion of these phases to help the reader appreciate why there are varied types of Marxists.  The differing schools of Marxism see different things as important in his writing, understanding him in opposing ways.  The analogy to the history of Christianity is apparent.

 

NOTES

1. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), p. 225.

2. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.s), Failure of a Dream?  Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 652.

3. Leslie Derfler, Socialism Since Marx (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), pp. 56, 10.

4. Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1971), pp. 238, 10, 240.

5. Thomas Kirkup, History of Socialism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909),  pp. 19l, 312, 192.

6. Ralph Miliband and John Seville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1976 (London: The Merlin Press, 1976), p. 57.

7. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, Socialist Thought (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 377, 424, 344.

8. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 243, 218, 262.

9. Salvador Allende, Chile’s Road to Socialism (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 151.

10. World Marxist Review, May 1979, p. 130.

11. Fried and Sanders, Socialist Thought, p. 192.

12. Lasiett and Lipset, Failure Of a Dream?, p. 55.

13. Edward Taborsky, Communist Penetration of the Third World (New York: Robert Speller & Sons Publishers, Inc., 1973), pp. 416, 417, 419, 55, 68, 85, 144, 147.

14. Laslett and Lipset, Failure of a Dream?, p. 92.

15. Trotsky, My Life, p. 131.

16. Laslett and Lipset, Failure of a Dream?, pp. 270, 272, 268.

17. Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 83.

18. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Sentry Edition, 1943), p. 491.

19. Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1939), p. 119.

20. Article by Lloyd Shearer, "Traveling in China with James Schlesinger," Parade Magazine, October 24 , 1976.

21. Ralph Miliband and John Seville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1977 (London: The Merlin Press, 1977), p. 182.

22. Article by Raya Dunayevskaya, "Marx's Humanism Today," Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm (ed.) (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 82, 81, 70.

23. Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1970), pp. 53, 48, 43, 42.