READ AND DISCUSS:

Chapter One of the Manifesto set out its main theoretical ideas. But Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, not just theoreticians. The point, as Marx put it elsewhere ², was not just ‘to interpret the world’ but ‘to change it’. So, the rest of the Manifesto set out to outline how best to put that theory into practice. How should the proletariat, and particularly its most “advanced and resolute section … which pushes forward all others”, organise to successfully change society?

Not ‘separate and apart’

When the Manifesto says that “Communists do not form a separate party”, self-evidently, they didn’t mean that Marxists shouldn’t organise themselves into a clear revolutionary party – after all, the Manifesto was being produced for such a formation, the Communist League.

No, Marx and Engels were stressing that Marxists must not operate in a sectarian manner, lecturing workers from the sidelines. Instead, they should work alongside those workers, not “separate and apart” from genuine mass parties of the working class - such as the Chartists who had mobilised a mass movement, organising millions of signatories to their petitions of demands.

1. What does the Manifesto emphasise that Communists should point out when they are intervening in movements of the working-class in a particular country?

2. What advantage does the Manifesto explain that the Communists have “over the great mass of the proletariat”?

A method applied by the Bolsheviks

As the most advanced section of their class, members of a revolutionary party trained in the ideas and methods of Marxism – like the Bolsheviks in Russia – have the advantage of “clearly understanding the line of march” compared to the working class as a whole. Instead of getting frustrated that workers’ consciousness is lagging behind events, or condemning workers for their ‘stupidity’ as middle-class intellectuals are prone to do,

In April 1917, Lenin famously explained that the Bolsheviks had to wait for their fellow workers to learn through experience, whilst ‘patiently explaining’ the revolutionary change that was required: “Our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time, we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience ²⁵”.

Marx and Engels’ tactical approach was further developed by the revolutionary parties who came together to form the Communist International after the Russian Revolution. Their Fourth Congress in 1922 agreed a Resolution on Tactics ²⁶ which included the following: “The united front tactic is an initiative for united struggle of the Communists with all workers who belong to other parties and groups, with all unaligned workers, to defend the most basic vital interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie. Every struggle for the most limited immediate demand is a source of revolutionary education, for it is the experiences of struggle that will convince working people of the inevitability of revolution and the significance of communism”.

3. How would you summarise the tactical advice put forward in the quotes above? Do you agree that this in line with what Marx and Engels were proposing in 1848?