In a message dated 4/12/2010 5:53:09 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, _editor_revdem@ indiatimes. com_ (_mailto:editor_ (mailto:editor) _ _rev...@indiatime_ (mailto:rev...@indiatime) s.com) writes: Speech by Mátyás Rákosi, General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party at the Meeting of the Central Committee, 17 May 1946 Date: 05/17/1946 Source: Archives of the Institute for Political History (AIPH), Budapest, 274. f. 2/34 Description: Speech by Mátyás Rákosi, General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party at the Meeting of the Central Committee, 17 May 1946. “When we arranged the third International, I remember the trouble we went to show that we wanted a centralized, strong International with executive powers, similar to how Marx imagined the International in 1864, and not just the sorting office and so on that the second International became before the First World War. And this was the catastrophe of the third International. Because instead of every country looking separately for the conditions for revolution, and not trying the impossible task of centralizing and directing the whole movement, it directed it from the center. The result was that the parties gave up independent politics, continually looked in the direction of the center, and waited for its instructions. This view led the comrades to announce the discontinuation of the third International. And afterwards, now that the International has been discontinued, the parties are coming forth one after the other to say how the existence of the International limited their progress, e.g. most recently we heard from our Yugoslav comrades how much such a central institution held them back, which, unaware of local conditions, sometimes demanded quite the opposite of what they needed. So such an International can no longer be established. On the contrary, the International should be such that it does not hinder the progress of individual parties, that it provides a means for individual parties to execute the tasks leading to the liberation of the proletariat, bearing local circumstances in mind. I should immediately say that as far as this is concerned, the new International cannot be compared to the previous ones. This will not be an organizing body; its task will be to compose, to help in making objections, to communicate the good or bad experiences of one country's communist party to that of another country, that they should learn from their neighbors' experiences and losses. This will undoubtedly be very useful, as not just us, but communist parties the world over are beginning to feel that without the exchange of experiences and objections they cannot produce adequate plans on international questions.” Comment 64 years after Rakosi speech for the formation of a new Communist International, one “unrepentant Marxist” and moderator of Marxism List echo’s the same sentiment in a lengthy six part series on the Four Communists Internationals. (quote) “In this, the third installment of a series of articles on attempts to build workers or socialist internationals, I am going to discuss the Comintern but within a narrow historical and geographical framework, namely the German revolution of the early 1920s. It will be my goal, as it was in an article written about 10 years ago titled The Comintern and German Communism, to debunk the notion of a wise and efficacious Comintern. As opposed to mainstream Trotskyist opinion, I do not view the Comintern prior to Stalin’s rise to power as a model to emulate. Looking back in particular at the role of Lenin and Trotsky, not to speak of outright rascals like Karl Radek and Bela Kun, the only conclusion that sensible people can be left with is that the German Communist Party would have been much better off if the Comintern had simply left it alone." (end quote) A Marxist unraveling of any social process involves a couple of things, namely approach and method. Although approach and method of inquiry becomes a uniform outlook for Marxists, the young comrades familiarizing themselves with Marx method are to understand that it is obligatory to always place things in their environment and context. Before attempting to capture the dialectic of the self movement of a thing, anything, the environment which is acting upon the context of class struggle, organization and the individual has to be described because it is the environment and its intimate interactive connection with living processes that sets the condition for development, change and the leap from one qualitative stage to the next. What is fundamental in the environment that everyone loves to call “the class struggle” is the material power of productive forces and their ceaseless changes. By productive forces is meant “means of production” + human beings. “Means of production” are in turn “productive forces ” minus human beings. Of all productive forces on earth, the human mind is the most revolutionary. The human mind however functions in an environment and context. If one is to make heads or tails of the Third Communist International, as the Soviet Legacy or the First International and the powerful gravity center subordinating Communist detachments to the central authority, one must accept their obligatory commitment to explain or describe the environment and context in which this powerful gravitation pull operated. In order to grab hold of the history of the Communist Internationals one must start at the beginning of their development and the environment that birthed them. This beginning is approached with the Marxist method and within the framework of Marx general law of the science of society. We begin at the beginning with the understanding that the spontaneous, objective development of the means of production creates the social context - environment, for people to consciously choose how to create their history. Further, qualitative change in the means of production, say the industrial revolution, and the long period of its quantitative growth and expansion causes quantitative changes in the social organization of labor and forms of the working class movement. Such change in American history is witnessed in the emergence of trade unions in 1827, their growth, collapse and renewed growth. I this process we see the beginning of shift from highly skilled craft workers of the late 1800’s - (and their fight for craft unionism), to the development of mass production industries; the fight for industrial unionism and then the rise and fall of the industrial trade union movement. In Detroit we have a unique opportunity to witness and write about the ending of one stage of the social process and the beginning of another stage. The auto workers union peaked with over 1,530,870 members in 1969 and today there is less than 355,000 members of which less than 100,000 are auto workers. Why did this change take place? What is it in the economic, social and political environment driving such change? Comrades, if I stood before any group of workers at any local union meeting and reduced the UAW to the action of a Walter Reuther and his struggle against his internal opponents - (aided by the state and intelligence agencies), and then describes the activity of our union based solely on each president including the knucklehead Gettlefinger, as a credible narrative on our union, I would be run out of this town. I would have to talk about the auto industry itself, its environment, its internal organizations and the organizations of the workers into a specific kind of union. Therefore, our revolutionary history is the record of the quantitative development of the industrial means of production and the subjective human or political response in the form of the rising and dying away of various forms of revolutionary organization. Then the actions of individual flesh acting out and responding to this environment can make sense. With the post industrial revolution underway we are implying and speaking of minimally a different form of proletarian association. Not because I say so but because in our daily lives we are at the cutting edge of a change wave expressing a profound level of destruction of the old form of the trade union movement. I’m not sure if it is our fortune or fate, perhaps both, to be at ground zero of dramatic changes in the form of the working class movement. The modern, scientific communist movement began as manufacturing with its small, scattered workshops was replaced by industry with its concentration of thousands of workers in giant factories. The environment existed within a world still engulfed in feudal political, social and economic relations. This was the era of Marx. This development was expressed by the founding of the Communist League and the First Communist or Workingmen’s International founded in 1864. In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were called upon to write a manifesto for the League, which was called The Communist Manifesto. The Communist League then became for all practical purposes “The Communist Party.” Engels describes this period of the working class movement in his “On the History of the Communist League.” “With the sentence of the Cologne Communists in 1852, the curtain falls on the first period of the independent German workers’ movement. Today this period is almost forgotten. Yet it lasted from 1836 to 1852 and, with the spread of German workers abroad, the movement developed in almost all civilized countries. Nor is that all. The present-day international workers’ movement is in substance a direct continuation of the German workers’ movement of that time, which was the first international workers’ movement of all time, and which brought forth many of those who took the leading role in he International Working Men’s Association. And the theoretical principles that the Communist League had inscribed on its banner in the Communist Manifesto of 1847 constitute today the strongest international bond of the entire proletarian movement of both Europe and America.” The First International would be founded almost twenty years after the first program (Communist Manifesto) of the rising new class of proletarians had been shaped. Anyone that desires to make sense of the quantitative growth of the working class movement during that twenty year period can read all of the introductions to the various editions of the Communist Manifesto. In these introductions and prefaces Marx and Engels describe the growth in depth and breath of the proletarian movement. No where is the movement reduced to individuals within it. The world - (planet earth), in 1848 up to the dissolution of the First International as a knowable specific environment was fundamentally agricultural or caught up in the great revolutionary change wave from feudalism to industrial production, or moving within the evolutionary leap from agrarian to industrial social relations or from the society of landed property as primary form of wealth to industrial society with money-capital and commodities expressing the primary form of wealth. In 1848 the organization of the workers or trade unions were at a very low and elementary stage. One could not really speak of “workers organization” as proletarian in the same meaning of the word today. Engels describes the character of the movement in clear terms. (begin quote) “The members, in so far as they were workers at all, were almost exclusively artisans. Even in the big metropolises, the man who exploited them was usually only a small master. The exploitation of tailoring on a large scale, what is now called the manufacture of ready-made clothes, by the conversion of handicraft tailoring into a domestic industry working for a big capitalist, was at that time even in London only just making it appearance. On the one hand, the exploiters of these artisans was a small master; on the other hand, they all hoped ultimately to become small masters themselves. In addition, a mass of inherited guild notions still clung to the German artisan at that time. The greatest honor is due to them, in that they, who were themselves not yet full proletarians but only an appendage of the petty bourgeoisie, an appendage which was passing into the modern proletariat and which did not yet stand in direct opposition to the bourgeoisie, that is, to big capital — in that these artisans were capable of instinctively anticipating their future development and of constituting themselves, even if not yet with full consciousness, the party of the proletariat. But it was also inevitable that their old handicraft prejudices should be a stumbling block to them at every moment, whenever it was a question of criticizing existing society in detail, that is, of investigating economic facts. And I do not believe there was a single man in the whole League at that time who had ever read a book on political economy. But that mattered little; for the time being “equality”, “brotherhood” and “justice” helped them to surmount every theoretical obstacle.” (end quote) It is worth noting that the mass of humanity destined to become the slaves of imperial capital were trapped in agrarian economic, social and political relations. Such is a brief general description of environment and context Marx and Engels grappled with. The productive capacity of the rising industrial countries developed very rapidly within a narrow national framework. One could think of America during the same period - from 1836 thru 1852 or the time of the first Communist League and then from the writing of the Communist Manifesto - 1848, up to the outbreak of the Civil War and into the 1890’s. So long as the national production of a few advanced industrial advanced countries was restricted to the national market, more than less, the struggle - contradiction between the capitalists and the workers, intensified with a brutal force year by year. When Marx writes of the world market in 1848, this should not be understood to means a world market similar to what exists today. During the era of Marx what existed was at best an outline for what would 150 years later become a truly global interactive market. The communist movement grew with strikes and uprisings by the workers within the boundary of various national markets. A hand full of followers of Marx and Engels fought to lead this activity and make the workers conscious of their striving for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The means of production rapidly went through several quantitative stages and the struggle between the classes subsided, more accurately shifted, as capitalists expanded their markets through conquering the economically backward areas of the world; bribing a layers of the rising industrial working class into political and military support of the system and pushing to wipe political feudalism from the face of the earth. Engels summation of the history of the Communist League is instruction - tutorial, on the Marxist approach and method of history treatment. A lengthy quote is necessary. (begin quote) “With the Cologne trial the first period of the German communist workers’ movement comes to an end. Immediately after the sentence we dissolved our League; a few months later the Willich-Schapper separate league was also laid to eternal rest. * A whole generation lies between then and now. At that time Germany was a country of handicraft and of domestic industry based on hand labor; now it is a big industrial country still undergoing continual industrial transformation. At that time one had to seek out one by one the workers who had an understanding of their position as workers and of their historico-economic antagonism to capital, because this antagonism itself was only just beginning to develop. Today the entire German proletariat has to be placed under exceptional laws, merely in order to slow down a little the process of its development to full consciousness of its position as an oppressed class. At that time the few persons whose minds had penetrated to the realization of the historical role of the proletariat had to forgather in secret, to assemble clandestinely in small communities of 3 to 20 persons. Today the German proletariat no longer needs any official organization, either public or secret. The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded class comrades suffices, without any rules, boards, resolutions or other tangible forms, to shake the whole German Empire to its foundations. Bismarck is the arbiter of Europe beyond the frontiers of Germany, but within them there grows daily more threatening the athletic figure of the German proletariat that Marx foresaw already in 1844, the giant for whom the cramped imperial edifice designed to fit the philistine is even now becoming inadequate and whose mighty stature and broad shoulder are growing until the moment comes when by merely rising from his seat he will shatter the whole structure of the imperial constitution into fragments. And still more. The international movement of the European and American proletariat has become so much strengthened that not merely its first narrow form — the secret League — but even its second, infinitely wider form — the open International Working Men’s Association — has become a fetter for it, and that the simple feeling of solidarity based on the understanding of the identity of class position suffices to create and to hold together one and the same great party of the proletariat among the workers of all countries and tongues. The doctrine which the League represented from 1847 to 1852, and which at that time could be treated by the wise philistines with a shrug of the shoulders as the hallucinations of utter madcaps, as the secret doctrine of a few scattered sectarians, has now innumerable adherents in all civilized countries of the world, among those condemned to the Siberian mines as much as among the gold diggers of California; and the founder of this doctrine, the most hated, most slandered man of his time, Karl Marx, was, when he died, the ever-sought- for and ever-willing counsellor of the proletariat of both the old and the new world. (end quote) . Under these changed conditions of the expansion of the market and the growth of productive forces, the First International and its “Communist Party” collapsed, as did the first Communist League, with help from our bourgeoisie. To the highly personalized vision of the middle class intellectual the demise of the First International is due to personal/political conflict operating without a back drop or material environment accelerating the always present splits within the First International. The First International collapsed - dissolved, because the conditions on which it was founded changed. A force of history cannot be collapsed or dismantled based on personality conflict and political differences no matter how sharp such differences might be. Human will and the actions of the individuals impart of history junctures a personality but always in a context. The First International was formed in correspondence to a specific environment. The environment and context is the state of development of the means of production, corresponding form of workers combinations - organizations, social consciousness of the workers and the activity of its class conscious sector. Change in form and kind of organization occurs when something fundamental to the society changes. When something fundamental in an environment begins changing , everything dependent upon that which is fundamental must in turn change or decay and become impotent.
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