The Sources of Marxist Political Thought
Everyone starts somewhere
We host a reading group each Sunday at 3 PM EST. We are working through “Equal Human and Political Rights and Democratic Republicanism,” created by blog contributors. Below are the introductions to Sections Five and Six covering the influence of the French Revolution, utopian socialists, the Chartists, Friedrich Engels, the American Workingmen’s Parties, “The Egoism of Democratic Republican Rights,” and slavery on Marxist political thought.
Section Five
The study of Marxist politics begins with the sources from which Marx and Engels initially drew their inspiration. The main virtue of starting with the original sources is that the strategic goal of a democratic republic was present from the beginning. Marx and Engels neither invented the concept of a democratic republic nor critiqued or changed its form over their lifetimes, unlike their treatment of English economics and German philosophy. The democratic republic remained the political core of Marxism until the Russian Revolution. Marx and Engels defined a democratic republic as a universal and equal representation in a single national assembly. Their definition was based on the 1793 French Constitution (and Marx also took it from the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution).
Lenin’s The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism is a six-page summary of Marxist theory. Part Three on Marxist politics identifies utopian socialism and French revolutionary politics as the two parts that make up the political component. The best introduction to how Marx and Engels combined the anti-capitalist protests of the utopian socialists with the democratic class-war politics of Gracchus Babeuf and Paine that grew out of the French Revolution is provided by G. D. H. Cole. Chapter One of Cole gives a broad overview of the entire period. Chapter Two covers the French Revolution and Babeuf, as well as the first socialist ideas in England. Paine’s ideas are briefly covered in Chapter Two, but Sean Monahan’s articles provide a full picture of Paine’s enormous influence.
In Lenin Rediscovered, Lars T. Lih says that a “merger” between socialist intellectuals and the workers’ movement made the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) successful. However, the original merger formula was Engels’ theoretical merger in his own head of socialism with democracy. Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England that the democratic working-class Chartist movement would soon adopt socialist principles. Until it did, Engels believed it was the intellectual/ideological job of political socialists to merge socialist theory and policy with Chartism. Monahan’s article is a solid introduction to Chartism.
The final reading for this section is Engels’ The Principles of Communism, which ties up the essential elements of Marxism in a neat package and contains the straightforward statement in Principle 18 that the first priority of the revolution is to “establish a democratic constitution.“ However, after Engels calls for the establishment of a democratic constitution in England, France, and Germany, he goes on to say in Principle 25 that “in America, where a democratic constitution has already been established...” Engels was inconsistent here in not applying universal and equal suffrage to the U.S. as the measure of democracy. This inconsistency is still present in Marxist discussions about the nature of the U.S. political system. The inconsistency is also present in next week’s discussion of the American Workingmen’s Parties and Marx’s On the Jewish Question.
Section Six
The significance of Babeuf and Tom Paine for democratic and socialist theory is that both derived the need to subordinate private property rights to the common good from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Specifically, Article 4 of the Declaration states: “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights.” Babeuf and Paine came to see that equal rights for all must override the particular claim to private property if the ownership and concentration of property resulted in the domination of the many by the few.
Sean Monahan’s article explains how Thomas Skidmore extended Paine’s The Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice further in The Rights of Man to Property (1829). Marx read about Skidmore and the American Workingmen’s Parties in the summer of 1843, and their example played a crucial role in his transition from simple democratic republicanism to communism, views which he first outlined in On the Jewish Question. However, there are fundamental misconceptions about American “democracy” in Marx’s On the Jewish Question and Monahan’s article that must be corrected. The mistake is that the Workies, Monahan, and Marx all equate “democracy” with universal suffrage, not universal and equal suffrage, and therefore assume that the U.S. was already a democratic republic in 1830.
Beginning with Monahan’s oversight, when we first read his article on the Workies, we thought it was great because it showed that Marx did not spin his theory of politics and the state out of his own head through a philosophical critique of Hegel. Instead, he studied a great deal of history and political theory first, especially accounts of American society and politics, including the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, and drew on that information to criticize Hegel’s state theory and construct his own. However, Monahan adopts in this article without comment or correction the mistaken standpoint of the Workies and Marx that the U.S. was already a genuinely democratic republic in the 1830s and ‘40s because it had achieved universal (white male) suffrage. This mistake led Marx to conclude in On the Jewish Question that the democratic republic creates egoistic individuals who use the communal democratic structure of the state only to further their own selfish ends. Marx concluded from this that only the abolition of private property could overcome egoism. Still, he didn’t say how this was to be done other than by the “citizens” of a democratic republic finally recognizing their true “species-being” and “social powers.”
In assuming that the U.S. was already a democratic republic, Marx excluded the possibility that the democratic republic was still the primary strategic political goal in the U.S. just as it was in Europe — a misconception he at least tacitly recognized in 1854 when he and Joseph Wedemeyer of the Communist League switched their primary political focus from forming a workers’ party in the U.S. to joining the struggle against slavery. Unfortunately, some contemporary Marxists still labor under the misconception the U.S. is a democracy of some kind.
An associated consequence of Marx’s misunderstanding of the American political system is that he attributed the egoism and competition permeating American social life to the individualism expressed in the Rights of Man and Citizen, splitting that individualism into an egoistic half of civil and property rights and a communal half of citizen political rights. This bifurcation of the Rights of Man and Citizen into egoistic and communal halves was a major conceptual blunder on Marx’s part. The Rights of Man and Citizen in their entirety were an expression of egalitarian moral individualism, not egoistic individualism. As the Cole reading from last week made clear, the individual civil and property rights claims in the Rights of Man and Citizen were not selfish claims at odds with a communal public good. Instead, they were directed at the injustices of the existing monarchical, aristocratic, and religious social order that had stolen the land and suppressed the freedoms of the majority for centuries. The political rights portion aimed to outline the rules by which the new post-monarchical democratic community would govern itself. Although Marx later better understood the U.S. political system and the democratic republic as a system requiring universal and equal suffrage, he never abandoned his mistaken and unfounded attribution of an essential egoism inherent in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
As Steven Lukes explains, natural rights theory is not concerned primarily with property rights, male rights, or freedom from state interference. Instead, it addresses every conceivable obstacle to each person’s equal right to develop their capabilities and participate in making their society’s laws, as women and slaves quickly claimed during the French Revolution. Even though Marx rejected the theory and language of rights, he adopted the moral content of equal rights to insist that the proletariat must fight all forms of oppression and assert that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
But, not all of Marx’s followers have been as committed to his universalism. Lenin in particular took on this back-sliding. It was easy for Lenin to see this connection in Marxism because the pre-Marxist democratic revolutionary movement in Russia, which included his executed brother, was also based on the revolutionary democratic principles of the French Revolution. We need to emphasize our commitment to equal rights to articulate our principles fully and explain why genuine Marxists oppose oppression of any kind, not just economic, such as that currently being prosecuted by the Supreme Court and right-wing politicians against racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. The Right believes in a hierarchy of the strong dominating and exploiting the weak. We believe in equal freedom for all. The stubborn insistence of many Marxists over the years that ethics, rights, and appeals to justice are alien to scientific socialism and the class struggle leads to conceptual and political paradoxes. Only an accurate understanding of the content of universal rights and democratic republican political theory can resolve these paradoxes.
Section Five primary readings: Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism; G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, Vol. I, 1789-1850 (1953), Chapter 1, pp. 1-10, Chapter 2, pp. 11-22, 23-25, 32-33; Sean Monahan, Reading Paine from the Left and Remembering the Chartists; The Rights of Man and Citizen; French Constitution of 1793; The Manifesto of the Equals; Selection from Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England; The People's Charter; Engels, The Principles of Communism
Section Six primary readings: Sean Monahan, The American Workingmen’s Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx’s Democratic Communism; Marx, On The Jewish Question, p. 151, 151-3, 162-4, top of 168; Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776; Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; Steven Lukes, selection from Marxism and Morality, pp. 62-65.