Hi,
Im currently taking a rigorous course and I don't get the history of German socialism or European socialism for that matter.
From my knowledge, the CM was written for the 1848 Revolutions but Communist parties didn't appear until much later.
What formed were unions and Social Democratic parties, why is that? I have a few notes on how Friedrich Engels thought Revolution was pointless and dangerous in Prussian Germany. This also leads into Bernstein's evolutionary socialism.
Basically, my question is why socialist parties weren't "extreme" and "anti-democratic" in the late 1800s? Most parties like the German SPD seemed firmly committed to parliamentary and democratic reform through elections and consensus despite being fully Marxist. I thought Marxism entailed a class struggle and violent revolution like all previous class relations?
In many ways it is fair to say that the rise and decline of the socialist movement defined the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, its enormous influence has also meant that we come to the issue with a number of anachronistic ideas and prejudices. To understand Marx's influence on the socialist movement, requires, as Geoff Eley has written, "suspending the endless debates about Marxism as a whole."^1 We can't approach the history from a presentist perspective — that is to say, we can't understand the history if we project our modern connotations backwards in time.
Firstly, we must understand what is meant by the term 'communist party.' It is untrue that explicitly communist political organizations did not exist at the time of the 1848 revolutions. Marx was one of the founders of the Brussels-based Communist Correspondence Committee in 1846, which merged with the London-based League of the Just to form the Communist League in 1847.^2 It was on behalf of this organization that Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. At the same time, however, the modern understanding of a political party as a specific, mass-based organization did not really exist. Rather, many radical socialists and communists were organized in secret societies and conspiratorial cells that sought to ignite revolution by insurrectionary acts that would hopefully rouse the masses to action. The exemplary figure of this early tendency was Auguste Blanqui, although the origins of this tradition may be found as far back as Gracchus Babeuf and the 'Conspiracy of Equals.'^3 While Marx had by 1848 already rejected 'Blanquism,' the Communist League was still essentially a secret society, although it tried to extend some roots into the German working-class emigré community in London. Marx and Engels were thus not necessarily referring to a 'party' in the modern sense of the term; rather, they used the term in a broad manner, referring to a political tendency. This can be seen in some of Marx's other writings from the period: for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote that
During the June days [in the French revolution of 1848] all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism.^4
We also have to discard our received notions about the connotations of "socialism" and "communism" respectively. There was a remarkable degree of fluidity around the terms used to describe various working-class radicalisms. While Engels explained later that during 1848 they felt the term 'socialist' was too associated with middle-class reform movements, Marx and Engels also called themselves socialists on occasion, especially 'scientific socialists.'^5 Socialism, social democracy, communism, and anarchism were all sometimes used interchangeably by the radicals of the period. Some of Marx's followers in Germany founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (sometimes called the "Eisenachers" due to their origins in Eisenach) in 1869, which merged with the General German Workers' Association (who were followers of Ferdinand Lassalle) in 1875 to found the Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD.^6 After the publication of Engels' pamphlet Anti-Dühring in 1877, Marxist (or at least Marx-ish) ideas began to take hold in the broader socialist movement, and by the 1880s Karl Kautsky had effectively "made Marxism into the social democratic movement's official creed."^7 When we bring in our modern understanding of 'social democracy' as something opposed to Marxism, it is difficult to understand that by the late 19th century most social democratic unions and parties were Marxist (sort of).
This brings us to our second issue: what is the relation between Marx, Marxism, and "extremism"? Although the Communist League was to an extent still influenced by conspiratorial modes of organizing, Marx and Engels broke with Blanquism fairly early on and eventually broke with the League itself.^8 Consequently, they supported "a new type of working-class politics, the independent mass party of labor."^9 Marx was also an important leader of the International Working Men's Association (often simply called the International), which sought to connect working-class organizations across the continent. In an 1872 speech to the International, Marx noted that
that there are countries — such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland — where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means
while adding that
in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.^10
This must, however, be put into context. In an 1871 interview with the New York World, Marx noted he was not "sanguine" on the issue, and expressed his belief that if a working-class party gained a majority it would cause a "new slaveowners' war."^11 This is also the case with Engels' famous Introduction to the Class Struggles in France. In it he declared that "rebellion in the old style,"^12 with 1848 as its model, was made obsolete by developments in military technology; further, he extolled the SPD's use of electoral campaigning and legal activism. At the same time, however, he noted the possibility of a breach of constitutionality by the government "freeing" the hands of the SPD. He certainly did not reject the barricades outright:
Does that mean that in the future the street fight will play no further role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavorable for civil fights, far more favorable for the military. A future street fight can therefore only be victorious when this unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors. Accordingly, it will occur more seldom in the beginning of a great revolution than in its further progress, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces. These, however, may then well prefer, as in the whole Great French Revolution on September 4 and October 31, 1870, in Paris, the open attack to the passive barricade tactics.
These, along with their remarks that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,"^13 made it clear that they did not reject insurrectionary violence. Engels especially, however, provided the blessings for a strategy in which the social democratic movement would avoid initiating revolutionary violence while the movement built up its strength and numbers (which they believed would continually swell as more and more people became proletarian).^14 Karl Kautsky summarized this strategy aptly when he declared that
The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party.^15
This strategic outlook was the ideological cover under which both radicals and moderates could work within a single movement.
So, that explains the emergence of the social democratic movement and its lack of 'extremism' in your question. What is left is why there were suddenly all these parties explicitly calling themselves 'communist' again at the end of World War I. The strategy outlined above allowed for a broad coalition of socialists by deferring rather than outright rejecting revolution. However, in many ways this merely displaced rather than eliminated the tension between moderates and radicals, and these tensions subsequently led to the schism of the workers' movement in the wake of World War I.
EDIT: I'll continue with part two in the morning when I have time. I have to say this ended up being way longer than I thought it would be...