[GM152] The Party’s Collective Work in the Periodic International Meeting

Continued from previous issue

The Civil War in Germany

We continued our presentation of the Introduction to the Study on Civil War in Germany by reading Chapter Two, focusing in particular on two paragraphs: Unification but Unresolved National Question in Germany and the German Proletariat. The first paragraph opens with a brief explanation of the importance of the national question in Marxist theory for the rise of the proletarian class struggle, before moving on to the specific case of Germany. Linked to the need to form a single internal market within which economic trade is free, the modern unitary state and capitalist mode of production emerged dialectically, each move predicating and necessitating the other. This relation usurps the decentralised feudal state. Naturally, then, capitalism cannot exist without its own apparatus, the state. This is the organ that expresses and protects the ruling classes—bourgeois—interests. However, the transition from the feudal state to the centralized nation state was also an objective for the proletariat in the initial phase. Therefore, from its earliest stages, the socialist movement and later the communist movement established the conditions, times, and places in which it was appropriate for the proletariat to give their full support to bourgeois revolutionary movements, national uprisings, and wars. The process of national reunification of German territory (which in the first half of the 19th century was still divided into a myriad of small states) was particularly complex. The intricate social composition was compounded by a deep political division in the country, resulting in a situation of severe fragmentation. Only in 1871, with the Franco-Prussian War, was unification achieved. Although this was a progressive phenomenon for Germany’s economic development, it still left the national question far from resolved. Now formally united under Prussian rule, Germany was still an amalgamation of reactionary states and principalities.

The second paragraph
opens by referring to the historical phase in which the proletariat, not yet a “class in itself,” fought for this primary objective. This began with the bourgeois revolutions (French, English, and German) and ended with the birth of the Party, its revolutionary doctrine and its historical program. In Germany in particular, this “ideological” process was at a higher level than elsewhere, which gave rise to a vigorous current of ideas that reflected current events and, at the same time, a particular intellectual vitality. The phase of organising the proletariat into a class and then into a party was followed by a phase in which the proletariat, with its now conscious vanguard, prepared to impose its own dictatorship: the Paris Commune. With the bloody repression of the Commune, the European bourgeoisies believed it had definitively buried the fighting proletariat. On the contrary, it was precisely from the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War that the proletariat began its most powerful rise. As Marx predicted, the Franco-Prussian War and the defeat of the Commune shifted the center of gravity of the labor movement from France to Germany. As Engels, whom we have quoted, so aptly described, the German proletariat was able to make the most of this opportunity.

The Australian Labour Movement

During the General Meeting in May, we continued our examination of the Australian Labour Movement. The transformation of capitalism from infancy in the mid 19th century to the full-blown crisis of the 1890s reveals how emerging antagonisms propelled workers toward collective resistance.

Between 1850 and 1870, Australia shed its pre-pubescent, penal-colony conditions: convict and indentured labour, the gold-rush influx, and primitive accumulation. This gave way to a nascent capitalist society dominated by British control. By 1860, disparate colonial economies coalesced under a surge of exported British capital, notably after the US civil war. In turn, this fueled an extraordinary rise in production between 1861 and 1889. Yet, this growth was anchored on wool exports rather than a sustainable domestic market. This locked the colonial capitalists into dependency and left domestic, colonial industry underdeveloped.

With the decline in gold production, attention shifted to agriculture and budding manufacturing in port cities. Immigrant labour, state-aided infrastructure (particularly railways which accounted for nearly 80% of state investment), and British finance capital underwrote rapid urbanisation. By 1891, two-thirds of the population lived in cities. Manufacturing grew at over 8% per year, yet remained subordinate to pastoral development. Industrial employment swelled, demanding an expanding proletariat to the harsh realities of capitalist exploitation.

The 1890s crash, triggered by speculative bubbles, falling wool demands, and the collapse of British loans, plunged the economy into depression. Production contracted sharply, unemployment soared, and employers reneged on worker concessions. In this contraction of overproduction and capital centralisation, labour recognised its class position. The first major period of strikes in the 1890s marked the emergence of the proletariat in a future open conflict with the bourgeoisie, bringing forth a need for its Party.