Marxism is Antileftism, Part 2

Reactionary and Bourgeois Socialism

The Communist Manifesto divides its withering critique of all existing socialism into three general headings: “reactionary socialism,” “conservative or bourgeois socialism,” and “critical-utopian socialism and communism.” Even as Marx and Engels explain the particular contexts and class motivations of each form, they reject them all for their shared impulse to escape historical process, whether through an attempt to prevent or reverse historical development or through a supposed transcendence of history altogether in the realization of absolute ideals.

Their first object of attack, “reactionary socialism,” is largely guilty of the former, in the “feudal socialism” of the French and English aristocrats whose impotent protest against the ascendant bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat it was creating only represented an “echo of the past . . . ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”¹ And as a fading class threatened with proletarianization by modern bourgeois society, the “petty-bourgeois” descendants of the “medieval burgesses and small peasant proprietors” also pursued a “reactionary and utopian” approach that aspired to restore the old society.²

“German, or ‘True,’ Socialism,” the final school Marx and Engels designate as “reactionary,” likewise sought to prevent the petty-bourgeois class from historical destruction at the hands of the rising bourgeoisie and revolutionary proletariat. Stripping the French socialism that inspired it of any class context in favor of an abstract humanism, German “True” socialism represented “not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”³

Having attained “the absolute, true socialism” in a philosophical consciousness detached from the real movement of history, true socialists “innocently take on trust the illusion,” as Marx and Engels observe in The German Ideology, that “it is a question of the ‘most reasonable’ social order and not the needs of a particular class and a particular time.” “No longer concerned with real human beings but with ‘Man,’” “true socialism,” as they criticize, “has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind. It turns as a result not to the proletarians” and class struggle but to the “petty bourgeoisie with its philanthropic illusions and to the ideologists of this very same petty bourgeoisie: the philosophers and their disciples.”⁴

This true socialism that “abandoned the real historical basis and returned to that of ideology” embodies the left’s enduring desire to transcend history in contemplative ideals. In The Retreat from Class, Ellen Meiksins Wood indeed argues that the postmodern iteration of leftism that took hold by the 1980s represented “a revival of ‘true’ socialism,” for like the German original, its “most distinctive feature” was “the autonomization of ideology and politics from any social basis, and more specifically from any class foundation.” This “new ‘true’ socialism (NTS), which prides itself on a rejection of Marxist ‘economism’ and ‘class-reductionism,’ has virtually excised class and class struggle from the socialist project.”⁵

Although Wood writes of this phenomenon as it was emerging in the ‘80s, the new true socialism she described is basically the intersectional left that remains today, one which conceives the struggle for socialism “as a plurality of ‘democratic’ struggles, bringing together a variety of resistances to many forms of inequality and oppression.”⁶ Marx and Engels’ critique of the original true socialists demonstrates that such a retreat from class into the immaterial realm of moral abstractions is nothing new, but as Wood emphasizes, “what is new about the NTS is that its exponents insist that they are working in the tradition either of Marxism, or of some sequel to it.”⁷ Whereas Marxist politics began as a critique of reactionary and utopian socialism’s concealment of class society, the left has ended up as the ideological eclipse of proletarian Marxism.

True socialism is not the only form appearing in the Manifesto’s catalogue that bears striking similarities to contemporary leftism. The premises of the final two categories detailed by Marx and Engels, “conservative, or bourgeois, socialism” and “critical-utopian socialism and communism,” also echo throughout the recent revival of “socialism” within the American left. Whereas the reactionary schools of socialism protested the extinction of their classes upon the emergence of bourgeois society, these latter forms of socialism represent the left-bourgeois response to that society once it has been established.

Like the plethora of Democrat-aligned civil society organizations devoted in the present to various left-wing causes, “bourgeois socialism” embodies, for Marx and Engels, the “part of the bourgeoisie” (i.e., the left) that “is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” Their description of the nineteenth-century bourgeois socialist coalition in fact doesn’t sound very different to the mish-mash of today’s activist left: “To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.”⁸

As this lineup indicates, the bourgeois class nature of this socialism impels it toward attempts to ameliorate the worst of the symptoms inevitably caused by capitalist society. Their role is not to support a revolution of the social relations that generate the various problems they oppose, but to manage the revolutionary potential of the proletariat with reforms designed to neutralize that class: “The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.” As Marx and Engels conclude, this socialism “is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class,” the paternalistic benefactor that will improve the lot of the proletariat if only it relinquish its revolutionary divisiveness, “remain within the bounds of existing society,” and “cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.” In other words, if only it ceases to exist as the proletariat.⁹

Like the democratic socialists of the present who swear that their bourgeois campaigns to abolish borders, prisons, and police under existing social relations serve proletarian interests, the nineteenth-century bourgeois socialists preached “Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class.” “This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism,” as Marx and Engels underline, for that socialism “attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech,” an empty symbol of socialist opposition that works to secure capitalist society, a politics “for the working class” that extinguishes the proletariat as a class.¹⁰

Bourgeois socialism’s reformist motivations keep it tethered inevitably to the left-bourgeois parties, which have historically pursued its “administrative reforms” premised on the continued existence of the bourgeois relations of production.¹¹ Yet while contemporary bourgeois socialists (DSA) devise convoluted rationales for clinging to the Democratic Party based on its New Deal legacy or the promise of reforming it from within, the political writings of Marx and Engels repudiate all such arguments. Delivered following the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions, their 1850 “Address to the Communist League,” the organization on whose behalf they published the Manifesto, is their sharpest admonishment against proletarian participation in left-bourgeois parties.

This text looks back to the “treacherous” role “the German liberal bourgeois played in 1848 against the people,” when taking possession of state power after the March movement of that year, they united with the feudal party “in order at once to force the workers, their allies in the struggle, back into their former oppressed position.” On this basis, Marx and Engels warn that future revolutionary working-class activity will likewise be undermined “by the democratic petty bourgeois, who at present take the same attitude in the opposition as the liberal bourgeois before 1848.”¹² They urge such proletarian movement, therefore, to maintain independence from the big-tent “democratic party” wherein the petty bourgeois “strive to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases predominate, and serve to conceal their special interests, and in which the definite demands of the proletariat must not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace.”¹³

It is difficult to read Marx and Engels’s attack on the social-democratic sloganeering coming from the democratic petty bourgeois of their time without being reminded of contemporary bourgeois socialism’s efforts to dissolve radical energies into an all-inclusive left opposed to the right, one that invariably achieves its peaceful unity within the Democratic Party. Just as the middle-class socialists of today advocate reforms like a higher minimum wage, “the democratic petty bourgeois,” as described by Marx and Engels, “only desire better wages and a more secure existence for the workers and hope to achieve this through partial employment by the state and through charity measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms and to sap their revolutionary vigour by making their position tolerable for the moment.” Yet they argue “these demands can in no wise suffice for the party of the proletariat,” for whom “the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.”¹⁴

It is when middle-class socialists face dwindling prospects that the proletariat appears to them as a vehicle to escape this fate: “when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party.”¹⁵ But this supposed unity “would turn out solely to their advantage and altogether to the disadvantage of the proletariat,” because under the thumb of the petty bourgeois opportunists, the working class would only “once more be reduced to an appendage of official bourgeois democracy.”

While contemporary bourgeois socialists endlessly prepare future breaks with the Democratic Party that will never come to pass, Marx and Engels insist that any union with left-bourgeois parties must “be most decisively rejected,” for if the proletariat is to ever exert its power, it must cease “stooping to serve as the applauding chorus of the bourgeois democrats,” who placate them with a reformist agenda designed to defeat them.¹⁶ Not only rejecting proletarian union with leftists in theory, they go so far as to demand that “the arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and ammunition must be carried out at once” in order “to be able energetically and threateningly to oppose this party” of petty bourgeois democrats, “whose treachery to the workers” is inevitable.¹⁷

Whereas the Marx and Engels of 1850 recommend armed proletarian opposition to the unity appeals of bourgeois democratic parties, the leftists of the present continue to bring forward similar lines of apology every election cycle, insisting the threat from the right really is exceptional this time, and would-be radicals must support the Democratic slate as “the lesser of two evils.” As if responding to the claims of a democratic socialist “reluctantly” whipping votes for Biden to “defeat fascism,” the “Address to the Communist League” repudiates the lesser of two evils argument with such resonance for the present that it must be quoted in full:

Even where there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be bribed by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory. The ultimate purpose of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.¹⁸

Regardless of the short-term implications of bourgeois elections, Marx and Engels underscore that class collaboration with left-bourgeois parties is the downfall of proletarian movements. Leftist opportunists implore the working class to lose themselves in the immediacy of the democratic party’s need to combat supposedly urgent threats coming from the right, “But they themselves must do the utmost for their final victory by making it clear to themselves what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeois into refraining from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat.”¹⁹ For Marx and Engels, the “lesser of two evils” simply lures the proletariat into submission to bourgeois democracy, an evil from which it will never escape through class collaboration.

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 507.

2. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 510.

3. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 511.

4. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 455-57.

5. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class (London: Verso, 1986), 1-2.

6. Wood, 4.

7. Wood, 7.

8. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 513.

9. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 513-14.

10. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 514.

11. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 514.

12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League, March 1850,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 279.

13. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 281.

14. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 280-81.

15. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 281.

16. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 280-81.

17. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 283.

18. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 284.

19. Marx and Engels, “Address,” 287.