Doug Enaa Greene: The rise of Marxism in France

Doug Enaa Greene describes The rise of Marxism in France.

Engels recognized the danger of a Boulangist dictatorship as spelling the end not only to the socialist movement in France, but the Third Republic itself. For him, the question was not just how to analyze Boulangism, but how to fight it.

Engels was enraged at the passivity of the POF, writing of the general's ties to royalists and that his threat of war would be used to kill off the workers' movement. Engels warned the socialists not to let their hatred of the radicals and the Republic blind them to the threat of dictatorship.

You will get him all the same, the good Boulanger whom you crave, and the Socialists will be his first victims. For a First Consul has got to be impartial and, for every time he lets the blood of the Stock Exchange, he will place another curb on the proletariat, if only to even things out.[39]

Engels told the workers that the defense of democracy was vital, so vital in fact, that its defense could not be left to the bourgeoisie. Rather the preservation of democratic freedoms needed to be led by the socialists, utilizing revolutionary means.

However, Engels' castigated Lafargue's tailing of Boulanger, warning that it was not the job of socialists to just go along with the tide, even if it appeared momentarily popular, stating that such a course was bankrupt. Rather, socialists needed to take a long-term view and not just follow whatever was popular:

But if we are not to go against the popular current of momentary tomfoolery, what in the name of the devil is our business?[40]

MWhat Engels stressed to Lafargue and Guesde was that the options before them were not simply between the Opportunists and Boulanger, but that there was a third option of independent political action by the working class. He urged the socialists to put up their own candidates, opposed to those of both camps. When the Marxists put up their own candidate in Paris in 1889, Engels hailed it as “at least one step in the right direction by proclaiming the necessity of an independent socialist candidature.”[41] As Engels, reminded Lafargue, “For the past twenty years we have been advocating the formation of a Party that was distinct from and opposed to all bourgeois parties.”[42]

What Engels advocated to the POF, was not renouncing the fight against Boulanger or seeing it as just another inter-bourgeois affair, but that the working class needed to protect democratic freedoms with their own revolutionary means, as opposed to relying on the good graces of the ruling class or the ballot box. And in order to defeat reaction, the working class needs their own flag in the field — an independent political party with its own revolutionary agenda.

Emphasis Mine

Engels' critique of the POF (French Workers' Party) proved to right as later events revealed:

By the early 1890s, the POF had its first electoral breakthroughs, winning control of several municipal governments and electing Guesde and Lafargue to the Chamber of Deputies. The socialists seemed poised for greater gains in wake of the Panama Corruption scandal, which exposed the underlying bourgeois nature of the Third Republic. However, the POF suffered a serious setback by remaining aloof from the Dreyfus Affair. Guesde believed that the Dreyfus Affair, similar to the Boulanger Crisis, was a feud between two bourgeois factions in which workers had no stake. This time, their neutrality backfired as it became clear that reactionaries, conservatives and royalists were threatening to overthrow the Republic itself. Reformist socialists, such as the great orator Jean Jaures, thus stepped into the breach and rallied to the defense the Republic. Many Guesdists abandoned the movement's neutrality in order to collaborate with bourgeois republicans and reformists in a pact of “Republican Defense“ to defeat reaction.

Emphasis Mine

As revolutionaries, we can stand aloof from the democratic struggle. Politics is in both the mass movements and the electoral process.