platypus1917.org
I don't understand the point of this article. Yes, communists don't or certainly didn't form a party opposed to all working class interests in 1848. Yes, the social democratic parties would still have existed without marxism. Yes, Lenin and luxemburg (better to say radical left) were vying for the leadership of the social democratic parties.
But here a line in the manifesto is ignored
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
It seems contradictory yes. But in reality as the article notes, splits are healthy for the movement, so much so that they must, ultimately, lead to the supremacy of the communist party, even if taken in aspic, communists are not opposed (in certain conditions of historical development) to other working class parties. Or put another way, all reformist (social democratic, labourist) and anarchising tendancies (even stalino-bolshevik, third world social democracy) will, sooner or later, cross over to the enemy class as capital reaches even more elevated heights in its productive capacities and the clashes between the contending classes become ever more violent and reach a fever pitch, as we are able to see in contemporary warfare. Thus no longer proletarian parties stricto sensu. The inverse theory, that capitalism will progressively decline and collapse due to paralysis indeed would turn Lenin into something like a garden variety liberal.
After all, the sine-qua-non of bourgeois ideology is that it never claims to rule in the interest of the propertied classes, but in the interest of the people. Thus labour in the UK is a bourgeois workers party, and in essence this is a contradiction that it has had to resolve since the 1920s, to now where it has simply become a bourgeois party.
You must remember that unlike Britain and France, Germany had still not undergone its liberal revolution, and thus strategic alliances with the bourgeois class to displace the rule of the juncker aristocracy could have been necessary. Of course, things turned out quite differently after WW I. In this sense, it is a fatal error to disentangle a party's theoretical clarity from its ability to act in a situation conducive to it taking power.
instinct is always more valuable than the university and its incubation of political culture in that sense. first you do, then you understand. first you obey, then you ruthlessly question. first you act, then you think, and organise things in a systematic order.
There is, of course, a way to misread this schematically as a kind of cultic obedience (loved by English philistines perpetually stuck on basic mode of their car racing games no doubt) but its a more general statement about physical determination, and that our consciousness always lags behind the real movement of things. in some sense, we are always judging things historically, this is how it has to be. even a communist party in the formal sense isn't immune from degeneration, this is not theology! and in fact there can never be any automatic guarantees or mechanisms to be put in place against degeneration, precisely because we will understand the degeneration as or after it has happened, as we are able to handle and process the material.
But to say the party has degenerated due to factions (or their banning) lack of democratic representation, pluralism etc etc, these are disconcerting symptoms granted, but these can never be seen as causes in and of themselves, and in fact to see them as such is a renunciation of a thoroughgoing materialism.
