I’m reminded today of an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, in which I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution.
In response to that post, philosopher Tibor Machan then pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:
“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]
Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]
(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])
Here is a series of bloodthirsty quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Trotsky. And more — intentionally mixing theoreticians and activists — from Hobsbawn, Guzmán, Guevara, Heilbroner, and Baader-Meinhof.
Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, second edition. Edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 643.
[2] Tibor Machan, Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2006), p. 156.
[3] “Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA.”
[4] And just to be clear: “Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?”
Hello Stephen Hicks, I see that you are open to having your mind changed. So about your claim that communism is 50% realised in the USA, this is easily refutable. The ten planks of the Communist Manifesto were demands for the 1848 bourgeois revolutions, and are therefore not communistic per se. I can cough this in detailed historical context, but the quickest refutation is citing the 1848 Demands of the German Communist Party, which were more or less the same (although numbering 17 demands rather than 10). The demand to centralise credit into the hands of the state is explained so:
“This measure will make it possible to regulate credit in the interests of the whole people and will thus undermine the dominance of the large financiers. By gradually replacing gold and silver by paper money, it will cheapen the indispensable instrument of bourgeois trade, the universal means of exchange, and will allow the gold and silver to have an outward effect. Ultimately, this measure is necessary to link the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the revolution.”
So then, this demand is intended to facilitate bourgeois/capitalist trade, which proves it is not a communist demand; and it was supposed to get the conservative bourgeoisie on the side of the revolution; it follows then that this is the bourgeois revolution, not a communist revolution.
Therefore, the 10 planks of communism are in fact not 10 planks of communism, but outdated demands for the 1848 bourgeois/capitalist revolutions.
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