Dawn of the International
Socialist Revolution
Stefan Engel was born in 1954. As a trained mechanic he worked in several large factories. He is a free publicist today. He has been politically active since 1968 and has exercised leading functions in the Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement in Germany since 1975. More and more he has also taken on tasks in the coordination of the international revolutionary and working-class movement. His most important theoretical contributions are contained, inter alia, in the books, The Struggle Over the Mode of Thinking in the Working-Class Movement and Class Struggle and the Struggle for the Liberation of Women. The book, Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution, follows up on the topic of his best-known book to date, Twilight of the Gods – Götterdämmerung over the “New World Order.”
Editorial Team Revolutionärer Weg
headed by Stefan Engel
Schmalhorststr. 1b, D-45899 Gelsenkirchen, Germany
Morgenröte der internationalen sozialistischen Revolution
(Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution)
First published in German in March 2011 in the series
Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 32–34, 2011
© Verlag Neuer Weg
Mediengruppe Neuer Weg GmbH
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verlag@neuerweg.de, www.neuerweg.de
© Cover photo: gettyimages.de
Overall production: Mediengruppe Neuer Weg GmbH
In March 2003, the book Twilight of the Gods – Götterdämmerung over the “New World Order” appeared. It contains a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the reorganization of international production which has asserted itself in the capitalist world economy since the beginning of the 1990s.
This change in the economic base of capitalism brought the basic contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist character of appropriation to a point where a new phase in the development of imperialism was ushered in.
The capitalist mode of production now has mainly international character and is subject to the diktat of solely ruling international finance capital, which is made up approximately of the 500 biggest international supermonopolies and rests on the power of the strongest imperialist countries. The internationalization of social production gave tremendous impetus to the development of the productive forces. The material preconditions for a society without exploitation of man by man have improved even further on a worldwide scale. At the same time, this development calls into question all traditional social relations on a scale that far eclipses the economic, political and social effects connected with the development of imperialism at the start of the twentieth century. The universal basic contradiction of our era between capitalism and socialism presses more and more towards a solution.
The economic role of the nation-states increasingly is being taken over by the cartel of solely ruling international finance capital, the leading imperialist states and the international organizations dominated by them. However, the nation-states remain indispensable to the capitalist system as tools of power and rule for the supermonopolies resident there in order to suppress the proletarian class struggle in these states; and indispensable in the competition on the world markets and in the struggle for world domination.
The internationalized revolutionary forces of production rebel against the capitalist relations of production organized on the basis of the nation-states. This was never clearer than during the crisis management practiced by the ruling circles on the occasion of the world economic and financial crisis that broke out in autumn 2008: only the international cooperation of all major imperialist powers – at a G20 meeting specifically arranged for that purpose – could effectively realize this crisis management, at least temporarily. Thus the sharp contradictions and tremendous effects could be dampened which this world economic and financial crisis, the deepest since at least the Second World War, brought forth. However, the price paid for this was that the underlying problems were not resolved, but aggravated, and deferred to some future time.
The economic constraints of international competition increasingly have undermined the state-monopoly structures, in particular the social rights and gains granted and fought for since the Second World War. With that, the ability of the capitalist system to tie the masses to itself also is diminishing. In tendency, the bourgeois state apparatuses lose the ability to act which they had acquired in the bourgeois democracy, for decades the prevailing form of rule of the dictatorship of the monopolies.
Under the demagogic battle cry of the “fight against terrorism,” in all imperialist countries the tendency towards internal reaction and external aggression increases enormously. More and more, this reveals that bourgeois democracy is a farce and that the essence of bourgeois class society and its state is the dictatorship of the monopolies.
In the book Twilight of the Gods – Götterdämmerung over the “New World Order,” we proved that the reorganization of international production has ushered in a new historical period of transformation from capitalism to socialism. It can only mature in the interaction of the objective and subjective factors of the class struggle. Despite all its contradictoriness, the development of an international trend to the left appears to be the most important, the determining manifestation in the growth of the class consciousness of the working class and the broad masses since the turn of the millennium. There are obvious and increasing signs that the relative calm in the class struggle which has persisted for decades irrevocably is dissolving.
In the international production systems an international industrial proletariat has emerged; it is growing at a rapid pace and changing the structure of the working class worldwide. It is testing its strength in the developing struggles, is beginning to become aware of the necessity of international solidarity, is searching for a societal alternative and is becoming receptive to a socialist perspective. The dawn of a new upsurge of the struggle for socialism is breaking.
The Marxist-Leninist analysis of the development of imperialism in the book Twilight of the Gods – Götterdämmerung over the “New World Order” could only be the first step to adjust ourselves to the new reality. More important are the theoretical and practical conclusions which must be drawn for the further development of proletarian strategy and tactics.
New phenomena and fundamental changes in the development of society always go hand in hand with a competition among bourgeois social theories to explain and justify them. A flood of new variants of metaphysical-idealist theories swamps the book markets, television channels and Internet portals, trying to save what can be saved of the bourgeois big lies, or creating new fictions of a stopgap nature. Particularly the apologists of bourgeois economics distinguish themselves in this field with their theories about capitalism still being the “best of all systems.”
The more they lose their power to persuade the masses, the more scope the media give to petty-bourgeois opportunist “critics of globalization” of various shades. More or less successfully these critics attempt to balance on the razor’s edge: showing themselves to be quite well-informed, on the one hand they manage to expose the unquestionable destructive effects of the reorganization of international production and distribution, while on the other hand they contrive the most absurd reformist and revisionist proposals for the rescue of the imperialist world system in order to avoid drawing the only logical, revolutionary conclusion.
The reorganization of international production is not an avoidable “neoliberal outgrowth” of the imperialist world system, as the petty-bourgeois globalization critics and opportunists maintain, but its law-governed consequence, which Marx and Lenin already forecast. The realization of this inevitably will manifest itself in the raising of the proletarian class consciousness of the working class, and sooner or later will unfold the class struggle against the dominating conditions to a most extreme degree and bring it to its historical solution.
The internationalization of the productive forces must inevitably result in the internationalization of the class struggle and spur it on. Unmistakable signs that this process already is in full swing can be observed everywhere in the world: the crossborder revolutionary ferment in Latin America after the turn of the millennium; the movement of democratic uprisings in Arab countries at the beginning of 2011; the workers’ strikes and protests in Europe encompassing corporations and industrial sectors and leaping across national frontiers; the increasingly obvious assimilation of the content and form of international mass struggles for the defense of social rights; the worldwide protest against the imperialist aggression of the United States and Great Britain against Iraq in 2003; the internationally coordinated preparation and holding of the World Women’s Conference in Venezuela in 2011, and not least of all the worldwide protest against those responsible for the global environmental catastrophe.
The internationalization of the class struggle and its furtherance by revolutionary organizations surely does not mean that the class struggle on the national scale no longer plays an essential role. Rather, global interaction of national and international class struggles unfolds which inspire and strengthen each other.
The imperialist world system will fall. In a complex, contradictory world revolutionary process it will have to make way step by step for the united socialist states of the world if humanity does not want to sink into capitalist barbarism. However, today nobody can predict the periods of time in which this process will take place and the sacrifices which this historical transformation of the class societies will demand. But the line of development at the beginning of the twenty-first century is clear: the main tendency in the world is the preparation of the international socialist revolution!
Marxist-Leninist strategy and tactics must deliver a comprehensive concrete analysis of the new social developments, of the international class struggle and the way it is reflected in the consciousness and in the struggles of the working class and the broad masses against exploitation and oppression by solely ruling international finance capital and the imperialist world system. In particular, this analysis must pertain to the development of the new elements of and essential changes in the international class struggle which have become visible since the reorganization of international production and will continue to develop in the future.
From this derive the new possibilities, tasks and resources of the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement. The main thing is to purposefully reveal behind the devastating destructive forces of imperialism the material preparation of socialism on an international scale, as is especially expressed in the development of the revolutionary productive forces, in the internationalization of capitalist production, and in the struggles and the new forms of organization of the working class and the broad masses. This material preparation of socialism and the general crisis-proneness of the imperialist world system are the opposing objective foundations of a new upswing of the struggle for socialism on the international stage.
Characteristic is the inexorable drive of capitalist production to integrate millions of individual production processes and hundreds of millions of producers into the worldwide production systems. With a dialectical-materialist mode of thinking humanity will be able to manage the global processes of the tremendously growing, increasingly complex production and reproduction of human life so that they benefit all humanity in socialism/communism and make a new level of the sustainable unity of humankind and nature possible.
In contrast, bourgeois science and world outlook are sinking into a deep crisis because their subjugation to maximum profit, to the struggle for the control of the world markets and the maintenance of imperialism virtually put them in chains. On the other hand, in interaction with the working-class and people’s movements a socially critical scientific current is developing. Important progressive discoveries only are made by struggling against departmental rivalry and the instrumentalization of research for the expansion of capital and by applying dialectics and materialism.
In order to make an accurate analysis of society’s development, one must free oneself from the pathetic yammering of the opportunists and modern revisionists, who are still paralyzed by the decline and fall of the social-imperialist Soviet Union and the system of the supposed “real socialism” it led. The total bankruptcy of the Soviet Union was such a shock for them because they never recognized the changed, bourgeois-reactionary class character of the Soviet Union since Khrushchev and the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. Governed by their pettybourgeois revisionist mode of thinking, they stubbornly denied the restoration of capitalism in the former socialist countries and the reactionary essence of Soviet social-imperialism. As long as they fail to overcome this mode of thinking self-critically, they will be incapable of drawing useful conclusions for the progress of the proletarian class struggle from this historical turning point.
The reformists, too, got into a deep defensive and depression. With few exceptions, all social-democratic parties in Europe tumbled into serious party crises in the past years. The Leftreformist and neorevisionist parties that came into being as a product of these crises – like the party “Die Linke” (The Left) in Germany – also prove incapable of comprehending the essence of the social developments and drawing revolutionary conclusions. In their opinion, the so-called globalization started the advance of “wolfish capitalism” and “neoliberalism” – a regrettable development, but one that can be remedied within the framework of the capitalist social order. The illusion of a return to the supposedly “social state,” the hopes in a renaissance of the “social market economy” and the dream of “social justice” in capitalism are the only answers they can think of to the questions of our time.
Of course, subsequent to the Second World War imperialism changed its concrete methods of exploitation and oppression. The emergence of the socialist camp for a third of humanity and the smashing of the old colonial system by armed liberation movements put it under tremendous pressure. To effectively erode the socialist consciousness of the working class at least in the imperialist metropolises, the ruling monopolies (not only in West Germany) considered it necessary to grant social reforms (for the most part without a struggle) and so to speed the spread of a petty-bourgeois reformist mode of thinking in the working-class movement. There can be no doubt that by promoting petty-bourgeois life circumstances and family relations well into the ranks of the working class, and by developing an entire system of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking, those in rule indeed succeeded in achieving a relative calm in the class struggle which persisted for decades.
Since the reorganization of international production, which has brought an enormous intensification of international competition, these “social frills” appear to international finance capital only as useless ballast giving it a worse starting position in the battle to dominate the world markets. And so they attack the social achievements. But by doing that they destroy an essential material foundation of the credibility of their “social state.”
In the past years they developed a sophisticated system of deception and manipulation through the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking as main method of their bourgeois-democratic form of rule. The petty-bourgeois reformist mode of thinking penetrated deeply into the international working-class movement after the Second World War, effectively eroded the class consciousness and impeded the development of the class struggle over a long period.
The result of the petty-bourgeois intellectual mode of thinking was the systematic disorganization of the building of the new Marxist-Leninist party of the working class. It made the leaders dominated by it incapable of drawing creative conclusions from the restoration of capitalism and the revisionist degeneration of the old communist and working-class movement. This went so far that they were willing to pin the blame for their failure on Marxism-Leninism and liquidate the young Marxist-Leninist movement. They then made a name for themselves in petty-bourgeois ecological, petty-bourgeois democratic or petty-bourgeois pacifist movements, and some former circle chieftains from the “Marxist-Leninist” scene even managed to get hold of ministerial posts.
The proletarian mode of thinking could be driven back temporarily even in the working-class movement, but it could not be obliterated because it grows in a law-governed way out of capitalist class society and is traditionally deeply rooted in the working-class movement.
Today the system of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking largely restricts itself to demoralizing, disorienting and disorganizing the workers’ and people’s movements, since at the same time poverty is growing, armed conflicts are increasing, and the environment is subject to dramatic destruction. The system of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking concentrates more and more on spreading modern anticommunism as a bulwark against the development of socialist consciousness. However, it is utter self-deception when those in rule cherish the hope that this could lastingly deter the masses from fighting for the social alternative of socialism.
The general crisis-proneness of imperialism has developed in a universal way and constitutes imperialism’s characteristic mode of existence today. The chronic structural crisis on the basis of the reorganization of international production, the financial and economic crises that tend to break out at shorter intervals and with greater force, latent or open political crises, the general danger of war, the dramatically sharpening environmental crisis and the threatening climate catastrophe endangering humanity, the crisis of neocolonialism, the crisis of the bourgeois family system and, last but not least, the crisis of bourgeois science and world outlook are international phenomena today. They constitute the general material fundament for the emergence of a revolutionary world crisis, the objective and subjective condition for the maturing of the international socialist revolution.
The reformist and revisionist leaders do not raise fundamental objections to the capitalist system of exploitation of man by man, if only the capitalist evils were a bit relieved and some crumbs were left for their personal advantage. How can people with such a mode of thinking understand and affirm that a new world historical situation is emerging at present? A situation in which humanity cannot retreat, but must advance! A world historical development at the end of which there can only be the liberation from exploitation and oppression if the whole world is not to decline into barbarism.
In the process of the international division of labor and at the level of the international systems of production, in the past few decades an international industrial proletariat has developed. Today it is the force which can and must go into the lead of the international struggle against imperialism and for socialism. In its economic and political struggles it can only assert itself if it copes successfully with the mentality of petty-bourgeois rivalry and wages class struggles which increasingly adopt a cross-border character in content and form.
Ultrareactionary and protofascist parties and politicians, misleadingly termed “right-populist” by the bourgeois media, seek to corrupt the growing internationalist class consciousness with smear campaigns against migrants. The international working class must also expose this openly reactionary chauvinism, with its racism, social demagogy and hypocritical slogans against the “Establishment,” and resolutely resist fascistization. The international industrial proletariat alone is able to lead the entire working class beyond national borders to the international revolution and also to draw the broad masses fighting against their national bourgeoisies and states into this liberation struggle and give them orientation and perspective. The winning of the decisive influence on this international industrial proletariat is therefore the primary task, and increasingly also the joint task, of the Marxist-Leninists and all revolutionaries in the entire world.
There is no doubt that the international proletariat is still in the strategic defensive versus international finance capital, with the defensive already lasting for decades and demanding a great morale and staying power on the part of the revolutionaries. But the strategic offensive of imperialism has long since stalled. The working class in several capitalist countries already has ushered in its strategic counteroffensive. The democratic, anti-imperialist uprisings against intensified neocolonial exploitation and oppression in the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa are a signal: the masses do not want to resign to the rule of world imperialism. Their struggle to defend the national resources against neocolonial exploitation, their struggle against hunger and against destruction of the natural foundations of life, for overcoming the remnants of reactionary feudal and semifeudal structures in the countryside, for a new-democratic revolution on the road to socialism, is and remains a component part of the international proletarian revolution and at the same time its most important direct reserve.
Despite all the differences in the class struggles in the various countries, the international proletariat in alliance with all the oppressed needs a common reference point: the international socialist revolution. The coordination and revolutionization of the class struggle must unite the progressive, democratic and revolutionary mass movements and organizations into an international force superior to the imperialist world system. The concrete economic, social and political conditions of each country must be considered in the respective proletarian strategy and tactics as much as the general connection with the international revolution. International proletarian strategy and tactics thus appears as an orchestra of different proletarian strategies and tactics of the revolutionary workers’ parties in the particular countries.
The basic precondition for the dialectical unity of international commonality and national particularity is the existence of autonomous Marxist-Leninist parties in the individual countries. They have learned from the revisionist degeneration of the old communist movement and drawn their conclusions. These parties must have ideological-political clarity in particular regarding the danger of liquidationism posed by the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking in the revolutionary workers’ and people’s movements; they must be tempered in the class struggle and be most closely linked with the working class and the broad masses.
In the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement a fundamental discussion has arisen as to whether it is right to recognize the international socialist revolution as common strategic goal and how the unification of proletarian strategy and tactics for preparing and carrying out the international revolution can be achieved.
To the dogmatists, revolution is but emulating well-tried concepts of revolution and insisting on them with great emotionalism – without regard for the differing concrete conditions from country to country, or for new manifestations and essential changes in the imperialist world system. When they inevitably suffer their defeats, not infrequently they hold Marxism-Leninism responsible, faint-heartedly renounce revolution, and turn into open liquidationists and defenders of imperialism. The many splits in the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement are merely the repulsive result of this tendency. Such dogmatists disregard and discredit the international revolution, which since Marx and Engels has been an essential reference point of any revolutionary strategy and tactics of the proletariat. With the reorganization of international production, now the social conditions for achieving the international revolution also have matured.
The revisionists in turn dare not raise the issue of revolution at all. They do not have enough strength to imagine that the gigantic power of international finance capital could ever be shaken by revolution again. So they content themselves with desperately resisting the policy of “neoliberalism,” currying favor with various forms of Left-reformism and getting lost in bourgeois parliamentarism, while retreating from the most important issue, the revolutionary struggle to overcome imperialism and fight for socialism – or, deeply alarmed, even warning against it.
The revolutionaries of the world must concern themselves with the laws of the international revolution and its preparation. The historical experience with the strategy and tactics of the international revolution, as worked out by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, brought into a historical discussion process and further developed and put into practice under the conditions of their time, must be critically and self-critically assessed.
The unification of the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement will make headway only to the extent it draws lessons from the problem of the mode of thinking in the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement.
Bringing about the superiority of the proletarian mode of thinking in struggle against the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking in the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement today has become the condition worldwide for successfully preparing the international revolution. This fundamental task must be accomplished in the various countries making allowance for the differences while observing the common universal essence.
A new upsurge of the struggle for socialism can take place only on the basis of a new quality of proletarian internationalism in the theory and practice of the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement. This will exert a new attraction on the masses, mainly on the working class and the youth. The Marxist-Leninists all over the world must jointly come to grips with the ideological, political and organizational issues of preparing the international revolution. The sure basis for this is the wholehearted advancement of the revolutionary class struggle and party-building in the individual countries.
Such a complex process naturally can be successfully undertaken and accomplished only through the inclusion of all relevant revolutionary organizations and parties, in an organized way, and on the basis of a proletarian, scientific mode of thinking and working.
With the book Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution the MLPD wants to make a theoretical contribution to this great task of the revolutionaries of the whole world. The book is the creative product of a collective made up of more than 130 persons and could only be the result of discussion and cooperation with the revolutionaries on a worldwide scale. Of course, it neither wants to nor is able to lay claim to formulating a general line for the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and working-class movement. The Marxist-Leninists in Germany alone bear responsibility for it; it is their guideline and can be taken as benchmark for judging them. But the book is intended to stimulate and contribute to the necessary process of intense theoretical discussion and practical cooperation in the international Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary and workingclass movement.
Stefan Engel
March 2011
Strategy and Tactics
of the International Socialist
Revolution
Dawn of the International Socialist Revolution
The terms of strategy and tactics originate from military science. Class struggle is a civil war between classes confronting each other in an irreconcilable way. In so far, it is, from the onset, close to the science of war. (Willi Dickhut1, Strategy and Tactics in the Class Struggle, p. 14)
The strategy follows primarily the scientifically investigated law-governed course of the class struggle. The actual progress of the class struggle, however, is more or less strongly determined by factors that lie outside its law-governed course and cannot be foreseen. Willi Dickhut wrote about this connection:
This means that we must investigate events, processes, developments in nature and society as to their necessity, their law-governed connections. On this basis we must prepare analyses and work out a strategic and tactical line for the proletarian class struggle. We will not be able to make allowance for the contingencies in the external connections, because we cannot foresee them. As guide to conscious action, the political line of a revolutionary party can proceed only from the necessary, not from the contingent, from the essential and not from the inessential, that is to say, from the law-governed development of society. That is the dialectical method. (The Dialectical Method in the Working-Class Movement, pp. 66–67)
The great dialectician among the military scientists, Carl von Clausewitz, drew this conclusion in his work On War:
War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events. (p. 117)
This is all the more valid because today’s class struggle has increasingly taken on an international character and the factors that can neither be predicted nor influenced have multiplied.
The dialectics of the law-governed and the contingent course of the class struggle require that the probable concrete course is predicted and included in the proletarian strategy. To achieve this it is necessary to evaluate the historical experiences and to take the concrete developments into account.
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels based their strategy on a logical analysis of the general laws of the class struggle and always connected it with a historical analysis of the actual development of the revolutionary movements of their time. Through a critical and self-critical examination of their views they modified the proletarian strategy in correspondence with the requirements of practice. In their process of cognition they realized a steadfast loyalty to principles in regard to basic questions of the class struggle, combined with high flexibility and maneuverability in proletarian tactics. Only the unity of logical and historical analysis and synthesis establishes the fundament for the proletarian strategy and tactics.
As early as in the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1847/1848, Marx and Engels pointed out that, in its universal essence, the class struggle of the proletariat has international character. In form, however, it maintains national character, with production organized on the basis of the nation-state. Accordingly, it is stated in the Manifesto:
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. (“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 1, p. 118)
Marx and Engels explained that the content and general character of the class struggle are international because of the universal development of intercourse and the productive forces of capitalism. They understood by this the lively interaction of all producers with all others in the multifarious social production process, which, as a tendency, breaks down all local and national narrow-mindedness and brings all human beings and nations into worldwide interdependence.
Large-scale industry universalised competition…, established means of communication and the modern world market…. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 81)
Capitalism developed as an international social system and gave birth to the proletariat all over the world, resulting in the fundamental character of the proletarian revolution as “a revolution, which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world, which is as universal as capital-rule and wagesslavery.” (Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” Marx and Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 1, p. 501)
This cognition is universally valid for the entire period of capitalism even though the universality of the productive forces and of the class struggle had to go through different stages of development. Accordingly, as history progressed, the strategy of the proletarian revolution also had to take on different forms.
In the phase of capitalism of free competition, until the end of the nineteenth century approximately, the capitalist social system emerged only in a few countries in Europe and America and asserted itself against feudalism. Against this backdrop a victorious revolution was only conceivable for Marx and Engels as a relatively simultaneous revolution in these advanced countries. In 1847, Engels replied as follows to the question if the revolution could take place in a single country:
By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has coordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range. (Principles of Communism, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm; emphasis added)
This means that Marx and Engels assumed a coherent and lasting world-revolutionary process until the worldwide victory of the proletariat. They characterized the world revolution as a complex process of different revolutionary struggles and movements for national and social liberation, of bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions. Thus the interconnection of these revolutions sooner or later had to lead to the liberation of the working class in all countries involved. After the working class took power it would then proceed to communism in a common and simultaneous act:
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously…. (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 57)
With the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 a series of uprisings began all over Europe reaching as far as the Russian border. In June the first great battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie over power took place in Paris. These historical events impressively confirmed the law revealed by Marx and Engels that capitalism, because of its economic structure and development, necessarily leads to the international proletarian revolution.
The concrete prognosis that the revolutionary period would last until the victory of the proletariat proved to be erroneous, however. But this error was historically conditioned. Marx and Engels could only draw upon the experiences of the preceding bourgeois-democratic revolution, which had taken place from 1789 until 1830 and was fought out right to the end especially in France. Marx and Engels moreover were confronted with the problem that information at that time about the concrete economic development of capitalism was available only with great delay.
In his last work, the “Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” Engels examined their original concepts critically and self-critically in 1895:
there could be no doubt for us, under the circumstances then obtaining, that the great decisive combat had commenced, that it would have to be fought out in a single, long and vicissitudinous period of revolution, but that it could only end in the final victory of the proletariat.…
But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time to have been an illusion.… It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, and has caused big industry to take real root in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank – all on a capitalist basis, which in the year 1848, therefore, still had great capacity for expansion. But it is just this industrial revolution which has everywhere produced clarity in class relations, has removed a number of intermediate forms handed down from the period of manufacture and in Eastern Europe even from guild handicraft, has created a genuine bourgeoisie and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat and has pushed them into the foreground of social development. However, owing to this, the struggle between these two great classes, a struggle which, apart from England, existed in 1848 only in Paris and, at the most, in a few big industrial centres, has spread over the whole of Europe and reached an intensity still inconceivable in 1848. (Marx and Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 1, pp. 189, 190, 191–192; emphasis added)
In 1848, capitalism was economically not yet ripe to be eliminated once and for all. Above all, the emergence of a genuine bourgeoisie and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat outside of England had not sufficiently progressed. The revolutionary movement could not yet be politically mature for the international revolution on this material basis. It still had to free itself from prerevolutionary, traditional and utopian remnants. In this process a number of subjective experiences – of victories and failures – had to be digested theoretically, which could only be done by revolutionary parties of the working class.
1 1904–1992, worker, Marxist-Leninist, resistance fighter against Hitlerite fascism, cofounder of the MLPD and, for many years, head of the party’s theoretical organ, Revolutionärer Weg.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism entered a new, higher stage: imperialism. The outbreak of the First World War was accompanied by the increasing complexity and extreme intensification of all fundamental contradictions of capitalist society. This required the further development of the theoretical foundations of the revolutionary working-class movement.
At a time when the opportunists were dreaming of reconciling the contradictions, materialist dialectics, the “basic theoretical foundation” of Marxism (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 39), had to be defended against eclecticism and sophistry and applied to the essential changes in the capitalist development. In his dialectical analysis of imperialism, Lenin discovered the law of uneven economic and political development as “an absolute law of capitalism” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 342). “Hence,” writes Lenin, “the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone” (ibid.).
The successful October Revolution in Russia was essentially based on the application of this insight. It signified a further development of the strategy of Marx and Engels in regard to the international revolution.
How was it possible that the era of proletarian revolutions began exactly in backward Russia, a country whose population was almost 80 percent peasants? Stalin remarked about the circumstances of the “comparative ease” with which the overthrow of the bourgeoisie took place:
The October Revolution began in a period of desperate struggle between the two principal imperialist groups, the Anglo-French and the Austro-German; at a time when, engaged in mortal struggle between themselves, these two groups had neither the time nor the means to devote serious attention to the struggle against the October Revolution. (“The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” Stalin, Works, Vol. 6, p. 374)
All fundamental contradictions of that period came together in Russia, which therefore was the weakest link in the imperialist world system. The gigantic czarist empire united capitalist imperialism and pre-capitalist relations of production. With the development of capitalism the class of wageworkers had emerged, which, though still relatively small, became the decisive force of the Russian revolution under the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks.