Curriculum and Foundational Readings

MUG Cadre School Curriculum

Preface to the Third Edition

When this book was first compiled, Marxist Unity was a group of seven people who had been working together at Cosmonaut for three years, but had only just begun to formalize our political views by making a coordinated intervention at the DSA 2021 convention. We have since held two courses, where prospective members and facilitators studied it together. It was therefore necessary to update it based on these experiences, both on the technical level of the layout and, more importantly, the editorial level of content.

The astute reader will notice significant changes between the table of contents in the first and third editions. To make it more readable, we tried to focus less on primary sources, which need to always be placed in their historical context to be understood, and replaced some with the best contemporary secondary sources. We divided the first week’s reading into two in order to lighten the load, and we added a section from Neil Harding’s groundbreaking study of Lenin which, in the 1970s, set the stage for the critique of the “text-book interpretation”. Besides the last two sections, the most significant change was taking out the section entitled ‘Democratic Revolution to the End’, which included Marx & Engels’ famous 1850 Address, Lenin’s Two Tactics, and a few other articles. It was too much of a detour to unpack the specific issues of the peasantry in the 1905 Revolution, and felt eclectic to connect it to the “Address”. However, the issues of permanent revolution, its relation to the Bolshevik strategy of hegemony, and what that means to us from the vantage point of the 21st century are important and messy theoretical issues that do need to be unpacked and understood by Marxists.

Sections VIII and IX were also significant revisions. In the first and second editions, the last section, “The Social Republic”, was the curriculum’s shortest and sweetest. We decided to expand it to include Marx’s most important political work, his commentary on the Paris Commune from Civil War in France, as well as a commentary on Lenin’s State and Revolution. The final section is a new addition. It is focused on grounding the preceding sections in US history, as well as pointing towards the strategic objective for our time and place.

Despite Section IX’s US focus, it should be clear that MUG rejects putting forward an analysis based entirely on the current conjuncture. Part of our hypothesis is that in a broad sense, there are only a few strategic choices available to the working class, and all of them now have significant historic case studies. The mistake of privileging the conjuncture obscures the tendencies of capitalism and the bourgeois state within the longue duree of history, and thus obscures the tasks of the rising class: in our case the proletariat.

We hope that this edition of the curriculum, one that is more collaborative and hopefully easier to read, will be more closely approaching its finalized form, and come to be seen as a definitive statement on our tendency’s views.

March 2023

Preface to the First Edition

For the most part, the list of materials included in this reader is not the usual one found in a Marxist educational curriculum. It is not intended as an exhaustive introduction to Marxism (we’re already assuming a basic level of familiarity), nor as a complete roadmap for a Marxist intervention in the contemporary United States. Thus it must necessarily exclude topics that are also essential to the formation and victory of the working class in taking state power; on questions of political economy, the relationship of socialism to black liberation, how Marxists should respond to the threat of the far-right, what strategy socialists should take in the trade union and tenant movements, etc. All of these questions and more need to be thoroughly investigated by Marxist Unity Group and DSA as a whole as we further develop our politics together.

Our view is that the main challenge for socialists in the United States is the lack of a Marxist party. That is why our reader emphasizes key texts from the period when the first socialist parties were forming into mass organs of working class struggle. These texts are all from influential European Marxists from between 1871 and 1910, with the exception of Lenin’s Left Wing Communism (1920) and secondary sources reflecting on and analyzing that period. In these four decades between the Paris Commune and World War I, Marxism seemed to spread through the Continental working class as rapidly as Napoleon’s armies had a few generations prior. It was also in this era that the revolutionary theoretical work of Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) was successfully transformed into a mass political practice in a newly united Germany by their closest comrades Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913). This strategy was further elaborated for a mass proletarian audience by Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) and his greatest pupil: a certain Russian lawyer with an acerbic pen, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).

At the beginning of this conjuncture, socialists in Europe were divided into small competing sects and reeling from a long series of defeats. These demoralizing retreats included the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, the dissolution of the First International, the Spanish Bourbon Restoration that ended the sexenico democratico, and the lording over Europe by aristocratic reactionaries like Metternich, Napoleon III, and Bismarck–not unlike the contemporary far left’s sectarian irrelevancy following the Soviet collapse and the global counterrevolutionary plague of neoliberalism. By the end of that conjuncture however, the sects had united to build Marxist parties deeply ingrained in the working class with their own democratic civil societies. They elected benches of revolutionary parliamentarians who were answerable to the rank and file and committed to international proletarian solidarity over patriotic national unity, and revolutionary democratic-republicanism over narrow reformist and economist laborism. Or at least this was the ideal presented on the surface in the resolutions and congresses of the Second International (see Mike Taber, Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912, Haymarket, 2021). It was the first period of successful and mass party-building by Marxists, and it was only on the foundations of these parties that the question of taking power was even conceivable in Europe during the revolutionary period of 1917-21. The imperative of revolutionary, democratic, and mass party-building is the first reason we chose these texts.

As every leftist knows, there was a deep rot at the center of the Second International, as its various national sections started to drop their revolutionary principles against their own national ruling classes one-by-one in the “Spirit of 1914” when war was declared. This was a world-historic tragedy, but it was by no means an inevitability, as the usual Marxist just-so story goes. Marxists inherited this narrative from the history as presented by the Comintern in the period of 1920-21, when proletarian revolution was on the immediate agenda and the remnants of the Second International were scabbing against the world’s first workers’ regime. The Soviet regime was locked in an international struggle for life or death and it thus overemphasized its break with the “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International. Lenin himself acknowledged his grounding in Second International politics. In Lenin’s words: “When and where did I call the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky opportunism? When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in International Social-Democracy not identical with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky?” (Two Tactics, Chapter 8).

A full accounting of the relationship between the Second and Third Internationals or between Kautsky and Lenin is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, the just-so story inherited by the contemporary Left is an ahistorical caricature. For a comprehensive review, see Ben Lewis’s introduction to Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Haymarket, 2020). However, the matter of Lenin’s critique of Kautsky in one of the most widely read pamphlets on the Left–State and Revolution, should be addressed. In his 1920 polemic Left Wing Communism, Lenin, referring to Kautsky “when he was still a Marxist and not a renegade,” wrote on the very first page: “How well Kautsky wrote eighteen years ago!” In 1917’s State and Revolution however, he accuses Kautsky (in his pre-renegade period) of never having sufficiently grasped Marx’s revolutionary theory of the state, contrasting what Kautsky didn’t say in his polemics with Bernstein’s revisionism with what Marx wrote on the Paris Commune in Civil War in France. In fact, according to Lars Lih, State and Revolution is the only place that Lenin substantively criticized Kautsky “when he was still a Marxist.”

However, writing in Swiss exile without access to his library’s complete works of Kautsky, Lenin had apparently forgotten a pamphlet Kautsky had written which directly addresses the Commune and represents Marx’s theory of the state. Kautsky’s Social Democracy and Republic in France was a scathing polemic against the French socialist Alexandre Millerand and his supporters. Millerand had set off a controversy in international Social Democracy when he joined the bourgeois coalition cabinet in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s government of “Republican Defense” against the far right, alongside General de Gallifet who was known as “the Commune’s executioner.” It is remarkable that Kautsky’s pamphlet was only published in English in October 2020 (by Ben Lewis in his above-mentioned book), as it is a major political work of the preeminent Marxist thinker between Engels and Lenin. It is particularly relevant to our context, as it articulates the “orthodox Marxist” (or “revolutionary Social Democratic”) strategy in the context of a so-called “high inclusion democracy,” rather than the “low-inclusion” regimes of Finland or Germany or autocracies like the Russian Empire.

The second reason for the choice of these texts is their common emphasis on the centrality of democratic revolutionary political struggle. Since the crystallization of Comintern orthodoxy, Marxists—in both Stalinist and Trotskyist forms, as well as other non-Leninist offshoots—have inherited an economism that underplays the relevance of revolutionary political democracy. This has led to both left-wing and right-wing errors: the former made in the assumption that the struggle for political democracy is merely the task of the bourgeois revolution, the latter in ignoring the struggle against the bourgeois rule-of-law and the specific political form of the class-state, only working towards democratic reform within a legalist constitutional-loyalist schema. Rather than conceding the term ‘democracy’ to the bourgeois liberal-constitutional state, Marx held a two-tier schema of revolution: first, the conquest of political power by the proletariat to form a democratic republic (in other words a dictatorship of the proletariat), second for the transition from the democratic regime of the working class towards communism: the abolition of all classes, etc. In the 1847 document “Principles of Communism,” an alternate draft to the Manifesto, Engels puts it well:

What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat…Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

In his critique of the Erfurt Program, Engels again is clear: “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.” The final section of this reader is devoted to Marx’s conception of the democratic republic, which is consistent with the programmatic demands documented in section II.

The readings address the question of the organization of the party in sections I, on the merger formula, II, on the minimum-maximum program, section IV, on the party of a new type, and section VII on ‘fraction politics’. However, due to the length of the reader already, we have foregone adding a section on democratic centralism: an important but massively bastardized concept usually only understood as the militarized party model that was necessarily adapted by the Communist Party under the conditions of civil war. In fact, democratic centralism had a rich history in Marxism prior to the ban on factions with which it is usually associated today. Democratic centralism is particularly relevant in DSA after the Bowman affair, and it would be good to do a supplemental reading series on the topic in the future. Section VII, which focuses on "fraction politics," does explore democratic centralism indirectly, without getting into its deeper history, by looking at Lenin’s electoral strategy for Russian Social Democrats in the Duma, as well as the ‘intransigent’ Marxist oppositional political strategy of SPD legislators in the German Reichstag.

A broad study of the classical Marxist political strategy might not seem like the most immediately relevant political education guide to cohere a new tendency within DSA. It doesn’t provide us with an obvious answer to tactical questions like what DSA policy should be towards China, how we implement the rank and file strategy, whether or not Marxists should engage in so-called mutual aid, or how to relate to liberal NGO coalition partners in reform campaigns. Even so, it is our view that a rethinking of the whole history of the workers movement is necessary to achieve the great goal of working class self-emancipation. The texts in this reader provide a starting point. In DSA today, and indeed in the wider history of the US Left, a focus on rethinking the ideological inheritance of Marxism is seen as a distraction from "doing the work" of practical organizing. In order for us as Marxists to develop a solid political footing in the present and be fully confident of our path ahead, we must be critical of following popular trends of thought and ideological narratives not of our own making. Without more critical reflection and rethinking of the dominant narratives of Left history, the necessary spread of awareness and widespread reiteration of what need to be our movement's aims or "great goals" will not be victorious.

A particularly vulgar example of this thinking surfaced during the Bowman affair, when members of the liquidationist right argued that focusing on “internal matters,” like how to relate to a DSA Congressman who flagrantly broke our Zionism boycott, distracted us from the outward-facing organizing we should be doing. This was nothing more than a cynical attempt to shut down criticism of the dominant opportunist electoral strategy. However, we would argue it is precisely the lack of debate on the questions posed in this reader that makes these sorts of crises endemic on the Left, and forces us to reinvent the wheel strategically where many of the brilliant minds of Marxism have already intensely labored. While we may not have every tactical question figured out, we believe studying these texts together will give us a wider strategic outlook that can build a principled unity of Marxists towards the basis necessary for a real Communist Party.

P.M.

January 2022

If you would like a copy of the reader, contact MUG at marxistunitygroup@gmail.com

Section I: The Merger Formula

Lenin Rediscovered, Lars Lih, Chapter 1 (audiobook link)
Source: Haymarket Books (2008)

Section II: Economism and High Politics

Lenin’s Political Thought Vol. 1, Neil Harding, Chapter 7 (The Reaffirmation of Orthodoxy- Social-Democratic Consciousness and the Party) and preceding two pages
Source: Haymarket Books (2019)
What Is To Be Done?, Vladimir Lenin, Chapter 3
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
Political Agitation and the Class Point of View, Vladimir Lenin
Source: Marxist Internet Archive

Section III: The Classical Marxist Minimum-Maximum Program

Programme: Lessons of Erfurt, Mike Macnair
Source: Weekly Worker
The Program of the Party Ouvrier, Karl Marx and Jules Guesde
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
Engels’ critique of the draft Erfurt Program
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
The Erfurt Program
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
Wilhelm Liebknecht’s Speech to the Erfurt Congress
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
1903 Program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
1912 Program of the Socialist Party of America
Source: Sage American History

Section IV: Party of a New Type?

Revolutionary Strategy, Mike Macnair, Chapters 5 and 6 (audiobook link)
Source: November Publications (2010)
A Faction is Not a Party, Lars Lih
Source: Weekly Worker
The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”, Hal Draper
Source: Marxist Internet Archive

Section V: The Strategy of Patience

Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Vladimir Lenin, Chapters 5-10
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
Revolutionary Strategy, Mike Macnair, Chapters 2 and 3 (audiobook link)
Source: November Publications (2010)

Section VI: Anti-Coalitionism in Liberal Constitutional Regimes

The Book that Didn’t Bark, Lars Lih
Source: Weekly Worker
Excerpts from Republic & Social Democracy in France, Karl Kautsky, Chapters 2, 5-8
Source: Haymarket Books (2020)
Karl Kautsky and Republicanism, Ben Lewis’s introduction, pp. 32-37
Source: Haymarket Books (2020)

Section VII: Fraction Politics

Parliamentarism & Democracy, Karl Kautsky, Chapter 12
Source: Haymarket Books (2020)
Lenin’s preface and Wilhelm Liebknecht’s No Compromises–No Political Trading!
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
The Ballots, The Streets, or Both?, August Nimtz, Chapter 5 and Appendices A and B
Source: Haymarket Books (2019)

Section VIII: The Democratic Social Republic

Control the Bureaucrats, Mike Macnair
Source: Weekly Worker
Revolutionary Strategy, Mike Macnair, Chapter 9 (audiobook link)
Source: November Publishing (2010)
Civil War in France, Karl Marx, Chapter 6
Source: Marxist Internet Archive
Marx’s Social Republic, Bruno Leipold
Source: University of Oxford (2017)
Theory and Practice, Rosa Luxemburg, Chapter 1
Source: Marxist Internet Archive

Section IX: Fight the Constitution, Demand a New Republic

The American Workingmen’s Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx’s Democratic Communism, Sean F. Monahan
Source: Cambridge University (2021)
US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Sight, Daniel Lazare
Source: Cosmonaut Magazine
Fight the Constitution! Demand a New Republic!, Ben Grove (audio recording)
Source: Cosmonaut Magazine

Foundational Reading List

The following list does not represent a comprehensive curricula for an education in Marxism: it’s specifically geared towards our shared views on party-building and strategic orientation, and what makes those views unique as a political project within DSA. Thus it necessarily excludes important topics, such as political economy, black liberation, imperialism, etc. We look forward to building curriculum on these and other topics that will be usable in DSA chapters.