The Guesdists and the Small Farmer: Early Erosion of French Marxism1)

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The Guesdists and the Small Farmer: Early Erosion of French Marxism1) CARL LAND AVER THE GUESDISTS AND THE SMALL FARMER: EARLY EROSION OF FRENCH MARXISM1) The internal conflicts of the socialist movement before 1914 grew out of the antagonism between orthodox Marxists and reformist Socialists, or were at least closely related to that antagonism, as for instance the conflict between the labor unions and the party leadership in Germany in 1905-6. This running battle of pre-war days, which set the scene for the splitting of the movement during the first World War, reached its most spectacular expression in Germany in Bebel's attack on the Revisionists at the Dresden party convention of 1903. But the conflict unfolded first in France, and it was in France rather than in Germany that the fundamental issues were posited most clearly. In 1882, nine years before Georg von Vollmar in his "Eldorado" addresses in Munich started the revolt of the German Revisionists and fourteen years before Eduard Bernstein in his "Evolutionary Socialism" published the first comprehensive exposition of Revisionist ideas, Paul Brousse broke with the Marxist leaders, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, whom he forced out of the Federation des travailleurs socialistes de France, thus transforming the latter into a Possibilist party, whereas the expelled Marxists formed the Parti ouvrier. Even the debates at Dresden - and subsequently at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam - developed from a French issue - namely, the acceptance of a position in a liberal cabinet by the French reformist, Alexandre Millerand. Although the struggles within the German and French socialist movements were so closely interrelated as to form two aspects of the same conflict, the rhythm was different in the two countries. Whereas in Germany, once the debate had started, it developed with increasing 1 In collecting the material for this article, I have been most effectively assisted by the staff of the International Institute of Social History. I should like to express my special gratitude to Mr. B. van Tijn who deciphered the Bonnier letters and had them transcribed for my use. I also wish to thank Professor Georg Eckert of the Pedagogical Academy of Braunschweig for having called my attention to sources of information on Charles Bonnier's life. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 01 Oct 2021 at 10:14:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001826 THE GUESDISTS AND THE SMALL FARMER 21 3 bitterness up to the clash at Dresden, and only abated afterwards when the Marxist orthodoxy was pushed into a center position by the emergence of an extreme Left wing under the influence of Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and Lenin, in France there was a temporary rapprochement of the two wings between the early 1890's and the end of the decade. In this period the socialists of all factions - Marxists, Possibilists, Blanquists, Allemanists (a splinter from the Possibilists leaning toward a sort of anarchism) and the new group of Independents under Jean Jaures and Alexandre Millerand, col- laborated closely in the Chamber, and the idea of organizational unification of French socialism was gaining ground. This develop- ment would have been impossible if the Marxist leaders had not shown a conciliatory spirit toward the other groups in strong contrast to their earlier and especially to their later attitude. In 1896, they even accepted in principle a unification program of an essentially reformist character, drafted by Millerand - the program of Saint-Mande. In all probability, the unification of French socialism would have occurred before 1900 if it had not been for the difference of opinions on the Dreyfus affair and especially for the Millerand crisis, which not only revived the conflict, but aggravated its bitterness to an intensity not reached before. The conciliatory attitude of the Marxists toward the moderates between 1893 and 1899 has been noticed by several writers on French socialist history. Georges Weill reports that Gabriel Deville, who at the time "... was still one of the faithful of Marxism, conceded in 1895 that previously he had overestimated the possible results of a victory through an act of force; he added that those who 'believe in the unchanging efficacy of the old revolutionary attitudes take an antiquated position'. Jules Guesde, of all party speakers the one most in the habit of using acrid words, concealed a similar moderation behind violent formulas." 1 Aaron Noland writes: "The retreat of the Guesdists from their early revolutionary ideology, a retreat rendered manifest by the conduct of the Guesdist Deputies, was a development of major importance in the history of the French Socialist movement. Why did the Guesdists, ostensibly exponents of orthodox Marxism in the eighties, definitely cease to be revolutionary Socialists in the nineties ?" In Noland's opinion, the decisive factor was the effort of the Guesdist deputies in the Chamber to obtain the enactment of social reform legislation. Although this effort was originally undertaken with an 1 Georges Weill, Histoire du mouvement social en France (1852-1924), Paris (Alcan) 1924, p. 308. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 01 Oct 2021 at 10:14:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001826 214 CARL LANDAUER eye to electoral success, it committed the party to work within the capitalist order and the institutional structure of political democracy and thus "modified the doctrine and objectives of the party." 1 Whatever may be the truth in this explanation by Noland, the conversion of the French Marxists to reformism was so fast and - although it did not prove very durable - was seemingly so complete as to make it hard to understand that the change of mind should have been produced merely by the experience of working for social improvement in general by legislative strategy. Indeed, there was a more specific motive for the Guesdists to modify their antagonism toward the evolutionary concept of socialism: Within the International, they found themselves separated from the Marxists of other countries- and especially from the German Marxists - by differences of opinion on the agrarian question, and on the other hand a similarity existed between the approach of the German Revisionists, especially Georg von Vollmar, and that of the Guesdists to the problems of agriculture. In the 1890's, France was still a prevailingly agricultural country, and the pace of its industrialization was less rapid than that of Germany. The German socialists could hope that the scarcity of their footholds in rural areas would not prove too much of a handicap in the end, since urbanization was progressing rapidly; but for the French socialists the acquisition of voting strength among the small farmers seemed vital. The Guesdists were very much alive to this fact, and in 1892 their congress at Marseilles adopted an agricultural program, mainly in the interest of agricultural laborers, sharecroppers and other tenant farmers. The party leadership gained the impression that this program had been favorably received by the farming population, and therefore had the party congress of Nantes in 1894 enact an even more far-reaching program of support for the small agriculturists. The details are unimportant today; the essential point was the tendency to preserve small-scale agriculture, in defiance of the Marxist theorem that the small farmer was just as much doomed as the small urban master craftsman.2 This deviation from the creed aroused the indignation of leading 1 Aaron Noland, The Founding of the French Socialist Party, Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 1956, p. 53. 2 The Marxist theorem was not formally abandoned, since the preamble to the program recognized that "the condition of agriculture characterized by parcellization of holdings is unavoidably doomed" and merely maintained that, "it is not up to the socialists to accelerate this development, since their task is not to seperate property from labor but to unite these two factors of production in the same persons." Douzieme Congres National du Parti Ouvrier Francais, tenua Nantes du 14 au 16 Septembre 1894, Lille (Imp. Ouvriere G. Delory) 1894, p. 19. The practical purpose of the proposed measures however, could only be to save small agricultural property from extinction. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 01 Oct 2021 at 10:14:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001826 THE GUESDISTS AND THE SMALL FARMER 2 I 5 Marxists within the International - all the more because similar tendencies appeared in the German party and in other national sections. Georg von Vollmar, the leader of the Bavarian wing of German Social Democracy, demanded a "positive kind of action through postulates which will protect farmers and agricultural laborers against capitalist exploitation here and now and at the same time open the way (anbahneti) to the advanced form of economic life of the future." * The advocates of a positive agricultural program both in Germany and France stressed the importance of an im- provement of farmers' conditions and thereby put the limelight on a question which the orthodox Marxists wished to avoid: how the party could advocate reforms under capitalism - and without such advocacy its electoral success would have been impossible - and still profess its belief in revolutionary dialectics. The French Parti ouvrier, in the preamble to its program of Nantes, had stated that it, "unlike the anarchists, in striving for a change in the social system, does not count on an intensification or extension of misery, but expects the liberation of labor and of all society from the organization and the common effort of the workers in the country as well as in the cities.
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