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Universal Suffrage, the Vanguard Party and Mobilization in Marxism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Pierre Birnbaum
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THERE ARE ONLY A FEW PASSAGES IN MARX AND ENGELS dealing with the relation they established between party, class and elections. After showing that the proletariat formed a well-defined class by virtue of its place in the relations of production, Marx and Engels emphasized that the workers had been able to overcome their isolation in order to organize themselves. To cease being simply a mass, atomized by competition, they formed an association to strengthen their ‘union’ and make possible their mobilization. Profiting from the use of the means of communication, the workers became conscious of their common interests: ‘the result was the organization of the proletariat into a class and then into a political party’. It was the whole class that transformed itsef into a political party: no division took place. Rejecting the Blanquist conceptions of elitist parties, Marx and Engels added that ‘all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’.

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Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1985 , pp. 53 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1985

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References

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2 Yet this is still the interpretation given in Dangeville, Roger, Introduction à Marx et Engels. Le parti de classe, Paris, Maspéro, vol. 1, 1973, p. 25 Google Scholar.

3 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, op. cit., p. 230.

4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in McLellan, op. cit., p. 317. See also Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 214. In this passage, Marx shows that ‘in the struggle the mass constitutes itself as a class for itself. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle’.

5 Engels, ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’, The Civil War in France, in Preface to the English edition of 1888.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in McLellan, op. cit., p. 544.

9 Lenin, V. I., ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’ in Against Revisionism, Moscow, 1966, p. 391 Google Scholar.

10 Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 547.

11 Ibid., p. 547.

12 Karl Marx, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in McLellan, op. cit., p. 72. See also: Simon, Hyppolite, ‘Marx, l’Etat et la liberté’, in Esprit, 11, 1977, p. 11 Google Scholar.

13 F. Engels, Introduction to Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Works, London, Wishart, p. 65 Google Scholar. Marx, in turn, recognised the immense role of universal suffrage when he stressed that the bourgeoisie felt obliged to abolish it, as they feared that it would lead to their own destruction (in The Class Struggle in France, op. cit., pp. 292–3).

14 Bernstein, Edouard, Les Présupposés du socialisme, Paris, Le Seuil, 1874, p. 176 Google Scholar. See Colletti, L., ‘Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International’ in Colletti, L., From Rousseau to Lenin, London, NLB, 1972 Google Scholar.

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27 Ibid., p. 192.

28 For Jaurs ‘What a triumph [it was] for socialism that the Republic could only be saved by an appeal to the party of the proletariat.’ Quoted by H. Goldberg, Jean Jaurs, op. cit., p. 293.

29 Quoted by C. Willard, op. cit., p. 457.

30 See Lindenberg, D. and Mayer, P.‐A., Lucien Herr, le socialisme et son destin, Paris, 1877, pp. 113, 134, 168 ff.Google Scholar

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38 See Larsen, Reider, Theories of Revolution. From Marx to the First Russian Revolution, Stockholm, Almqvist and Wiksell, 1970 Google Scholar. This author analyses very well the relations between Leninism and Blanquism.

39 J.‐P. Sartre. See, for example, ‘On a raison de se revolter’, Situation, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 47.

40 Quoted in Anweiler, Oskar, Les Soviets en Russie, Paris, 1972, p. 273 Google Scholar. It is interesting to stress that in his Theses on the Constituent Assembly, Lenin justified the dissolution of the Assembly by the bad application of proportional representation (the party of the socialist revolutionaries only having split after the elections and before the Assembly was convoked).

41 K. Kautsky, La dictature du prolétariat, p. 235 f.

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43 Ibid. Like Max, Rosa Luxemburg expected much from the spontaneous action of the masses, linked to the consciousness of the actors and independent of a vanguard party. In this sense, she opposed Lenin. See Grve de masses, parti et syndicats, cf. ftnte 49, op. cit., pp. 49 and 67. Lenin, on the contrary, maintained that ‘the people has the right and the duty to settle such questions not by the vote, but by force’ (quoted by Anweiler, op. cit., p. 236). Similarly, for Trotsky, power was to be seized by force; this could not be done through a vote. On Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin see Kirchheimer, Otto, Politics, Law and Social Change, New York, Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 29–32 Google Scholar.

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51 Quoted by Bricanier, S., Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, Paris, EDI, 1977, p. 136.Google Scholar

52 Adler, M., Démocratie et conseils ouvriers, Paris, Maspéro, 1967, p. 99 Google Scholar.