A Rebel’s Guide to Marx. By Mike Gonzalez. Bookmarks. 2006. 60pp. £2
While factually correct on the details of Marx’s life, this SWP booklet suffers (as you would expect) from a significant distortion of Marx’s views.
Marx is made out to be a proto-SWPer, obsessed with “building the party”. In actual fact, while Marx did use the word “party”, before the 1870s it was not in the sense of an organised vanguard, but rather as those, whether organised or not, who wanted communism (or socialism, the same thing), more what we would today call a current of opinion than its subsequent sense of party as an organisation.
Marx did, during the period of Germany’s aborted bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, favour communists organising themselves as a distinct group to try to push the bourgeois revolution to its limits and beyond. But, once this period was over, he argued for this communist organisation to be disbanded.
Later, when he was active in the International Working Men’s Association from 1864-1872, he advocated the working class organising into a distinct political party. By then “party” had begun to take on its modern meaning and Marx was associated with an organisation in Germany called the “Social Democratic Workers Party” (SDAP) which, after merging with another group, became in 1875 the “German Socialist Workers Party” (SADP). (It later changed its name to Social Democratic Party of Germany – SPD – which still exists today, as a reformist party.) Marx referred to it simply as the workers’ party.
So, Marx’s conception of party was that of an open, democratically-organised mass party, not a vanguard of self-appointed professional revolutionaries.
Adam Buick
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