The Daily Worker Newspaper, September 27, 1924, Page 11

—————— Marx---Engels---Lenin = _ By T. J. O'Flaherty Workingmen’s Association was thatcountry show a determination to ARX, ENGELS, LENIN,—Three names that will go down in his- tory, the names of giants who forged the weapons with which the working class could emancipate itself and taught the proletariat how to use the weapons. Marx and Engels lived during the period while the bour- geoise was still performing its histor- ical task of preparing society for the birth of a new social order. Lenin was more furtunate or rather the workers were fortunate in that the greatest leader that the revolutionary working class movement ever pro- duced had matured as a scientific rev- olutionary mechanic at a time when the capitalist system had passed the zenith of its power and was as world historical system starting on the decline. 5 : Karl Marx, the inspiration of the First International. or the Interna. tional Workingmen's Association, the father of modern scientific socialism, was no mere analyist of the mechan- ism of the bourgeois system of produc- tion and distribution. He was first and foremost a revolutionist, and if Lenin had accomplished nothing else, but the rescue of Marx from the clutches of the social reformers who would make of him a harmless ob- server of social phenomena, he would have deserved well of the working class movement. But Lenin did more than that. He not alone rescued Marx from the Kautskys and the other agents of the Capitalist class but he proceeded to translate Marxism into action. Lenin was- the founder of the first proletarian state. The name of Marx is honored by millions of workers the worid over. It is equally hated by the bourgeoisie tho the name of Lenin now more than shares honors with that of Marx in this respect. The proletarian class Struggle existed before Marx's day, but Marx was the first to bring the revolutionary movement down from the clouds of utopia and place it on a solid scientific footing. Hitherto the workers had dreams of salvation but they were not sure that the system of exploitation would be abolished. Marx put the movement for the emancipation of the workers on a theoretical basis and showed that thru the continuous development of perfection of technique capitalism would reach the point where it could no longer function and must neces- sarily give way to the new order, so- cialism. But Marx never failed to in- sist that the new system of produc- tion could only be established by the struggle of the proletariat against the capitalists, who strive to uphold the present social order. The theoretical formulation of the class struggle and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production thru surplus value gave the working class a new and powerful weapon. They were no longer in doubt as to the final result of the struggle. Marx gave them the goal and the weapons with which to bring about their own emancipation. “Workers of all Coun- tries Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to gain.” This was the slogan raised for the first time that cut across national boundaries and joined the class con- scious workers of all countries where the labor movement had planted its feet, into an army pledged to carry on the struggle against capitalism un- til the robber system was overthrown. Marx completely swept away the old theory that socialism would be brot about thru the agency of intel- ligent and benevolent people. He showed that its coming did not rest on the shifting sands of justice and morality, but on the efforts of the class whose interests demand a change in the system of production, from social production and private ownership to social production and social ownership, _ Karl Marx like Lenin was not sat- isfed to give a theoretical basis to the revolutionary movement; he also built an organization to give the organization. Lenin was accused of being an incurable dogmatist and an inveterate factionalist. The same ac: cusation was time and again hurled against Marx by those who could not understand the scientific mind of the founder of modern socialism or could not tolerate his insistence on the un- compromising struggle against capi- talism. Marx's life, since he first entered the revolutionary movement was a constant battle against the capitalist enemy on the outside and against the anarchists, and social reformers who were liberally. represented in the First International. Anarchists, like Baku- nin who ostensibly hated the bour- geoisie, hoped to bring about the relig- ious, political and philosophic emanci- pation of humanity thru a bourgeois League for Peace and Freedom. An- other anarchist, Proudhon, hela to the theory that war is imposstble because humanity does not want war. The Franco-Prussian war broke out in the following year. The Marx: group in the International held that “great wars are waged not alone in the inter- ests of dynasties but aiso in the inter- ests of the great powers and trade, and are conducted for the advantage of the ruling class.” Running thru Marx's writings like a red thread is the insistence on the class strggle and that the emancipa- tion of the workers must be the task make a real bid for power. That Marx did not mention the dic- tatorship of the proletariat merely in passing as a certain school of alleged Marxians in America claim, but con- sidered it of paramount importance is shown by. the following statement con- tained in the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in No- vember 1847: “Tracing the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we followed up the more or less hidden civil war, within existing society to the point at which it is transformed into open revolution, and the prole- tariat establishes its rule by means of the violent overthrow of the capi- talist class . . We have already seen that the first step in the Work- ers’ Revolution is the transfiguration of the proletariat into the ruling class, the conquest of democracy. .. . The proletariat’ will use its political supremacy in order gradually to wrest the whole of capital gradually from the capitalist class, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the state, i. e. of the pro- letariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase as quickly as possible the total of productive forces.” This ‘is the dictatorship of the pro- letariat with a vengeance. One can almost imagine Lenin in he year 1917 taking down his Communist Manifesto. exactly seventy years to the month of the workers themselves, and not from the day these lines were penned FRATERNIZATION small: select groups of conspirators planned by the French revolutionist Blanqui, but by great masses. The Franco-Prussian war wrecked the First International as the late war smashed the second, its unworthy successor, and in order to get the wreckage out of the hands of the an- archists Marx shipped it to the United States where it was peacefully buried. Up to 1914 it was quite fashionable to profess adherence to the Marxian theory, but most of the theorists were busily engaged explaining Marx out of existence or as Lenin puts it in his Proletraian Revolution,” “turning Marx Proletarian Revolution.” “turning Marx into a hackneyed liberal.” Those who desire to pose as Marxists but at the same time wanted to make Marxism conform to bourgeois liberalism burned the midnight oil distorting the by Marx and Engels and putting the idea contained in this passage into operation. Yet we are told that Marx- ism could not be applied in an indus- trially backward country. The more one reads Marx, Engels and Lenin, the more one agrees with the truth in Comrade Robert Minor’s charge against the socialist party of America that it was a “huge machine for lying about socialism.” The same applies to the socialist parties of the world. The Marxian conception of the state is that it is a class instrument for suppressing other classes. Under capitalism, for the suppression of the proletariat. Under proletarian rule for the suppression of the bourgeoisie and to abolish all exploitation. The theory advanced by the social reform- ers that the state is an instrument for the reconciliation of classes is in- fantile. The capitalist class cannot afford to eliminate the working class even if it could; it depends on it to man the machinery of production. But the proletarian state’s function will. be to get rid of capitalism grad- ually and also of the capitalist class tion from Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” is pertinent and timely: “The lower middle class democrats, these sham socialists who have re- placed the class struggle by dreams of harmony between classes, have imag- ined even a transition to socialism, in a dream as it were—that is, not in the form of the overthrow of the su- premacy of the exploiting class, but in the form of the peaceful submission of the minority to the fully enlight- ened majority.” This attitude is as typi- cal of the Socialist Labor Party of America as it is of the shameless So- Cialist Party. It is naked opportun- ism. Frederick Engels, the bosom friend and co-worker of Marx is second only to his great contemporary as a socialist writer. His most popular books are “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” and “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.” These books rank with the Commun- ist Manifesto as socialist classics. En- gels with Marx formulated the theory of the materialist conception of his- tory, which rests on the basis “that the production of means to. support human life and next to production the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders, is dependent on what is produced, how it is produced and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and po- litical revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s .bet- ter insight into eternal truth and jus- Nice, but in changes in mod@s of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the Philosophy but in the economics of each particular OpOCR es While Engles arrived at the same formulation of this theory independ- ently of Marx he modestly gives all credit to his great co-worker, En- gels was one of tite three outstanding geniuses that the working class revolu- tionary movement produced. Marx and Engels gave the capitalist class no quarter during their lives and now that they are both turned into dust millions of workers are us- ing the weapons they forged during their existence to batter down the capitalist state and finish the task which history has assigned to them. Lenin, the founder of the first pro- letarian state, the builder of the Rus- sian Communist Party and the cre- ator of the Third (Communist) Inter- national, was the engineer of revolu- tion. ‘To him Marxism was a thing to be applied, not something to ad- mire at a distance. Karl Radek wrote in an article on “Lenin's Life and Work” published shortly after Lenin’s death: “The iron force of Len- in’s conviction found its sourse in the fact that he had thot out Marx’s cial tenets as no scholar of Marx had ever done‘ before, that these tenets had become part of his being, and that he applied them as no follower of the Father of Scientific Socialism has done.” Lenin, like Marx and Engels devoted his entire life to the task of emanci- pating the proletariat. Like his two great predecessors, he had the divine fire of revolution within him, which made all his writings’ burn with hatred for the ruling class. He saw his brother taken and executed for an attack on the Czarist persecutors of the people. Arrested, imprisoned, ex- iled, hunted from place to place, Lenin never weakened in his deter- mination, He prepared himself for leadership, was organizer and teacher and when the opportunity arose in 1917, he gauged the right moment to seize power and began the greatest experiment in human history. Marx and Engels founded scientific socialism. Lenin mainly concerned (Continued on Page 8.)