What Is The Merger Theory?

A revolution is impossible without the merger of socialist ideas with the most advanced section of the working class. A mass movement of workers without socialist ideas can be contained by the capitalist system, while a socialist movement made up of atomised individuals, disconnected from the working class, is powerless and ends up shouting from the sidelines. To overcome this problem socialist thinkers of the past argued for a “merger” to take place. In 1845, in his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Frederick Engels wrote:

“Hence it is evident that the working-men’s movement is divided into two sections, the Chartists and the Socialists. The Chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. The Socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. The union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. Then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of England. Meanwhile, political and social development will proceed, and will foster this new party, this new departure of Chartism.”

The Chartists demanded the extension of the right to vote to include the working class. They called for six reforms including: a vote for every man over the age of twenty one, secret ballots, payment of MPs so workers could afford to stand for election, the removal of the property qualification and annual elections. 

This was a mass movement of workers themselves and they gathered over one million signatures in 1839 and three million signatures on their petition campaign of 1842. These petitions were rejected by parliament.  There had been a failed Chartist uprising in Newport in 1839 but by 1848, in the wake of a workers’ revolution in Paris, the Chartists had six million sign their petition. 

Despite rallies numbering tens of thousands their planned march of parliament of 1848 ended with the Chartists mobilising only 25,000 on Kennington Common on April 10th, 1848. The British state had more than 170,000 citizens sworn in as special constables to assist the police. They were provided with batons and white arm bands, and they included Gladstone, founder of the police Sir Robert Peel and Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the future Emperor Napoleon III of France. 

The Chartist movement declined after 1848. Most British socialists at the time Engels wrote were “utopian socialists” like Robert Owen, a capitalist factory owner who believed giving workers more free time and education was more productive. He hoped to introduce socialism by appealing to the better nature of the British ruling class. He made a mistake. They didn’t have a better nature. 

The mass movement of “genuine proletarians” failed because it didn’t have socialist politics, gathering petitions to beg an indifferent ruling class for the right to vote. The socialists, on the other hand, were mostly “bourgeois” and incapable of connecting socialist ideas to the day to day needs of the working class. The separation of working class and socialist ideas weakened both. The working class fought with the effects of the system but not with the causes. The socialists articulated their ideas in such an abstract and utopian form they remained nothing but external moralists - they made a call for a better world with no real social force mobilised behind it. As Engels wrote: “To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.” When Karl Marx sat down with Engels to write the “Communist Manifesto” they returned to the relationship between socialist ideas and the working class. 

They wrote that Communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.” The Communists were “distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”

They continued: “The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

The Communists were part of the working class. They were “that section which pushes forward all others”. But the forward section, having socialist politics, had “the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” 

Socialism had to be one with the advanced workers but also be more than just the immediate consciousness found among the workers at any given moment - it had to have the advantage of being able to show the “line of march” ahead. The merger wasn’t on the basis of the everyday consciousness of the working class. That would lead to tailing ruling class ideas, as Marx and Engels wrote in “The German Ideology”:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

The class that owned the factories, offices and machinery also controlled the media. Their ideas would always be the dominant ideas in any society and all others would be subject to the influence of those ideas. Therefore the merger wasn’t about socialists merging with the working class on the basis of whatever workers happened to be occupied with on any given day. Neither was it about merely expressing the ideas most prevalent in any given social movement. That was tailism. The Communists had to represent the movement as a whole - that meant as an international movement but also a movement with a future goal. That goal had to be brought into synthesis with the day to day movements of workers. 

That’s what the Chartists had failed to do. It wasn’t enough for socialists to merely echo the best Chartist demands but to fight as part of the Chartist movement while arguing with other workers about the nature of the capitalist system and winning them to a revolutionary perspective. This was essential to avoid two clear pitfalls - one was the danger of sectarianism, merely criticising the movement from the outside. The other was opportunism, merely tailing the demands raised by the movement itself. 

When Karl Marx was asked to write a party programme for French socialists this method of linking the day to day to the final goal was evident. This approach was vital for the merger of socialist politics and advanced workers to take place. Marx wrote a short preamble for the 1880 programme that outlined the development of capitalism and the need for a working class revolution. He then listed some popular or “minimum” demands that would be a basis for day to day campaigning. 

When French socialists like Jules Guesde rejected the minimum section of the programme Marx was furious, declaring that “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.” These ultra left fools wanted to shout about revolution from the sidelines. They were retreating from the merger by making socialism an abstraction, divorced from the material interests of working class people. 

Marx instead had proposed a list of day to day battles like the reduction of the working day as a starting point for agitation that would then open the best fighters in the working class up to the ideas of the socialists. Guesde didn’t want to illustrate the “line of march” and wanted to point to the end of a path without being seen to take the first step on that path. 

Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” had taken aim at the opposite mistake - that of opportunism. By leaving any clear description of the final goal, of a workers’ state, out of their programme German Social Democrats were guilty of failing to fight for the merger. German socialist Karl Kautsky had explained in 1908 that: “Socialism is not the product of an ethic outside of time and space or all class distinctions; it is basically nothing but the science of society from the point of view of the proletariat… Socialist theory is by no means the fruitless gimmickry of some parlor scholars, but a very practical thing for the struggling proletariat. Its main weapon is the concentration of its totality in vast, independent organizations, free from all bourgeois influences.”

He explained how trade union struggle alone, even involving masses of workers, wasn’t enough to break with capitalism: “Since the trade union only represents the interests of its members, it does not easily stand in opposition to the entire bourgeois world, but initially only to the capitalists of its profession.”

Without socialist politics workers could become mired in defence of their own jobs even if that meant acting against other workers: “Where they are filled with socialist thinking, they become the most militant parts of the proletariat, the protagonists of its entirety. Where the organized workers lack this thinking, they become all too easily aristocrats.” 

He argued that “the unorganized workers are incapable of any struggle, any ascent, without the help of the organized ones.” That’s not entirely true as class combativity and consciousness can leap forward in times of crisis with the workers who are furthest removed from the control of the union bureaucracy taking actions that would meet with disapproval from above. But such spontaneous outbursts of class creativity couldn’t win without organisation and without clear socialist politics. 

Kautsky then explained how the Chartist movement was weakened by the absence of any socialist programme: “This is clearly testified to by the first labour party in England, Chartism, born in 1835. This movement contained very far-reaching and far-sighted elements, but in its entirety it did not pursue a specific socialist programme, but only individual, practical, easily attainable goals.”

“Individual, practical” goals were always to be the starting point of class struggle. But that was only step one. The Chartist movement was a social movement of the working class and middle class, it wasn’t a class party: “This first had the disadvantage that the party did not become an unadulterated class party. The general right to vote was also of interest to the petty bourgeoisie. To some it might seem an advantage for the petty bourgeoisie to join the workers’ party as such. But this only makes it more numerous, not stronger. The proletariat has its own interests and its own methods of struggle, which differ from those of all other classes.”

The result of having a mixed class composition was that the movement was torn by internal debates. In order to succeed the working class would need its own party and fight in social movements led by that party. Kautsky called for the merger: “Everywhere today the conditions are already given for the necessary unification of workers’ movement and socialism. They were missing in the first decades of the nineteenth century.” 

The first socialists were bourgeois and therefore “the suffering proletarian is viewed favorably, the fighting one is viewed harshly… The begging proletariat enjoys their sympathies, the demanding one drives them to outrage and wild enmity… Thus, they often came to turn against the workers’ movement, proving, for example, how useless the unions were by simply trying to raise wages rather than fight the wage system itself, the root of all evil.”

The bourgeois socialists were actually turning away from the real struggles of the working class and disguised their class prejudices by talking about the system in an abstract way, for example by condemning all union struggles as pointless unless they took on capitalism. They were trying to justify their class detachment from the day to day struggles of the working class, hiding behind utopian, abstract and theoretical condemnations of capitalism. They didn’t fight to merge socialist ideas with the working class or to connect the day to day struggles of workers to the need to overthrow capitalism. 

This point is worth thinking about. Whenever the left is made up of non-working class activists they will use moralism and abstract anti-capitalist politics to protect the non-working class composition of their left bubbles. They would fight to destroy any link between the day to day needs of the working class and the ultimate goal of revolution. This would be a recurring theme if defences of the merger theory - that both ultra leftism and opportunism were attempts by non-working class elements on the left to maintain control and prevent the merger. 

Kautsky wrote that the working class began to throw up its own intellectuals but the first “proletarian socialists who were most far-reaching were those who followed Chartism or the French Revolution.” But their ideas were still hazy and unclear: “The conquest of state power early became the means for the proletarian socialists to gain the strength to carry out socialism. But given the weakness and immaturity of the proletariat, they knew of no other way to conquer state power than the coup d’état of a number of conspirators to unleash the revolution. Blanqui is best known among the representatives of this thought in France.”

There was also the anti-political socialism of thinkers like Proudhon. Therefore, Kautsky wrote: “The workers’ movement and socialism, and all attempts to bring the two into a closer relationship, formed a chaos of the most diverse currents in the decade in which Marx and Engels formed their point of view and method… It was only Marx who undertook a completely independent study of the capitalist mode of production, who showed how much deeper and clearer it can be when viewed from the proletarian point of view, rather than from the bourgeois point of view. For the proletarian standpoint stands outside and above it, not in it. Only he who regards capitalism as a temporary form makes it possible to fully grasp its particular historical peculiarity.”

Kautsky could sometimes use mechanical formulations but he clearly outlined the need for a merger to take place. Lenin took up this thread in his “What Is To Be Done?” not just as a theoretical point but as a practical necessity for the Russian socialist movement. In November 1900 Lenin had argued: “Social-Democracy is the combination of the working-class movement and socialism. Its task is not to serve the working-class movement passively at each of its separate stages, but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aim and its political tasks, and to safeguard its political and ideological independence”.

This Russian socialist movement had its origins in intellectuals like Plekhanov. But the disorganisation and theoretical eclecticism of the intellectuals was becoming a barrier to the development of a working class party that could take on the tyrannical Tsarist state. Lenin was arguing passionately for a merger to take place: “The conclusion to be drawn is obvious: we lack organisation. The masses of the workers were roused and ready to follow the socialist leaders; but the ‘general staff’ failed to organise a strong nucleus able to distribute properly all the available forces of class-conscious workers… It must combine within itself the socialist knowledge and revolutionary experience acquired from many decades of activity by the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia with the knowledge of working-class life and conditions and the ability to agitate among the masses and lead them which is characteristic of the advanced workers.” 

Lenin explained how Marx and Engels weren’t workers: “The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the capitalist intelligentsia.” But their theories could only advance in combination with the workers’ movement. The merger made the theory more concrete and the workers’ movement more conscious of its aims. There was a constant feedback loop, workers would rise, Marxism would summarize the lessons of each struggle and then pass them on so that the next phase of struggle could start at a higher level, with clarified aims. Lenin explained that Marxism had evolved in Russia in the same way:

“In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Marxism arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.” But they desperately needed to enact the merger: “Hence, we had the spontaneous awakening of the working masses, their awakening to conscious life and conscious struggle, and a revolutionary youth, armed with Marxist theory and straining towards the workers. Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.”

The infamous formulation “from without” Lenin uses has been much criticised but in the context of the merger theory his argument makes perfect sense. It was not enough to have intellectuals and students “armed with Marxist theory” or a “spontaneous awakening of the working masses” - instead, the advanced workers needed to be brought socialist ideas and won over to the fight against capitalism as a whole. As Lenin clarified in a letter from the same year: “In order to take the lead in whatever goes on in the workers’ midst, it is necessary to be able to have access to all quarters, to know very many workers… The committee should, therefore, include… all the principal leaders of the working-class movement from among the workers themselves.”

Lenin was simply arguing that socialism had to become the ideology of the advanced workers if they were to organise in a party to lead all others in the overthrow of capitalism. Any idea that stood in the way of the merger was to be fought. What kind of ideas blocked the path to the merger? Firstly any argument that socialist ideas would develop “spontaneously” from day to day struggles. The minority of workers already won to socialism needed to bring their political arguments to other workers. Lenin’s rivals in the Russian socialist movement, who argued that strikes would automatically develop workers’ consciousness, were disarming the advanced workers and guaranteeing that the movement would remain a movement external to the working class. 

Secondly, Lenin spent his entire career taking on both ultra-left and opportunist ideas. As Kautsky had pointed out non-working class activists could remain external to the struggles of the working class but posture as more radical because they opposed the whole capitalist system. Opportunism left workers mired in everyday concerns, while ultra-leftism ignored the day to day class struggle to shout from the sidelines. Lenin returned to the argument against ultra-left posturing and defence of the merger theory in his booklet “Left Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder.” 

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 tens of thousands of workers, inspired by the revolution, wanted to fight for socialism. But few had any real understanding of Lenin’s decades-long application of Marxism to the field of strategy and tactics. 

The Bolshevik success was because they had support “from all thinking, honest, devoted and influential elements in it (the working class), capable of leading the backward strata or carrying the latter along with them.” They had merged with the most militant sections of the working class during the 1905 Revolution, had fought hard during the years of counter revolution using elections and every means available to hold a working class base and then had been the first to enter the fight in the growing class struggle of 1912 to 1914, which were only broken off by the World War. 

Lenin asked “how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and - if you wish - merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people - primarily with the proletariat.” 

The more socialist politics has merged with the working class the more “organic” is discipline. The party does not need to be artificially controlled. The workers then see from their own experience that the line the party illustrated before that experience was correct. Faith in the party grows on the basis of showing the coming “line of march” and then having that confirmed by life, by struggle. The merger wasn’t an excuse to tail the class, it required being ahead of events. 

Lenin’s criticism of external moralism, like Kautsky, was rooted in the external class basis of the ultra-lefts: “Little is known in other countries of the fact that Bolshevism took shape, developed and became steeled in the long years of struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter and, in all essential matters, does not measure up to the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle.” 

Despite Lenin’s ferocious attacks on the reformists leading the German Social Democratic Party he was an admirer of the mass merger they’d accomplished, writing: “History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy… came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory.” So much for those who claim Lenin’s vision of a vanguard party was narrow. In fact, Lenin wanted to achieve the merger of socialism with all the advanced workers and then have them lead a revolution. The vanguard party was to be a party containing the tens of thousands of advanced workers in any nation. Lenin wanted a party that was politically narrow but numerically broad.

In 1908, as counter revolution raged in Russia, Lenin understood that the merger was under threat on two sides. Ultra-left factions in the Bolsheviks wanted to boycott elections to the Tsarist Duma, a stunted reactionary parliament. Lenin knew that would break off their only connection with the workers. On the other side stood the Mensheviks who wanted to “liquidate” the illegal party and only build a broad labour movement. That threatened to remove socialist politics from the class, breaking the merger. Lenin called the ultra-lefts and opportunists “liquidators on the left and right”.

Lenin explained this history of the party in summary in “Left Wing Communism” to educate the revolutionary movement in the actual politics of the Bolsheviks. He argued strongly for broad work in all the major trade unions, accompanied by a serious approach to elections - but all of this broad work was subordinate to the task of promoting the revolution. He wrote: “We can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion.”

The merger theory was not a theory of simply fusing the left with whatever ideas workers happened to have at any given moment, nor was it about tailing social movements and calling that a “fusion”. It had to be about winning the advanced workers to an explicitly revolutionary perspective and training them to lead others. This is where the issue of a party programme came in. A party programme could help party activists build a bridge between today’s class struggle and the need for a future revolution. 

If you started by articulating minimum demands, based on the vital and immediate needs of the working class, but stopped there you merely made the same mistake as the Chartists. You could build a movement that was working class in content but not in form, not in its ideas. On the other hand if you merely spouted maximum demands, shouting from the sidelines about revolution, then you were engaged in formalism and remained without a working class content. The merger theory demanded the marriage of socialist form with working class content. 

Today there are many ideas that stand in the way of the merger. From the moralism of identity politics, which fiercely guards the gateways to a middle class left preventing the “contaminated” workers from entry, to the everyday reformism of most socialist organisations. Take People Before Profit as an example. The best activists in that party are working hard to build a base in the working class estates. But that minimum demand based work is not connected to the need for a revolution in any way. At most there’s talk of running councils with a left alliance or the insinuation that change can be won by joining a government under capitalism. These are still minimum demands. 

Some in PBP offer “big picture politics” as a way to politicise this everyday work. But that’s just about tailing the global issue of the day and offering the arguments that each movement needs. Socialists should do that but it’s still not the clear articulation of maximum demands. The strength of PBP lies in that focus on united front work in local areas and in social movements, the weakness lies in there being absolutely no articulation of a final goal (other than left government!). Lenin would class this as opportunism. 

On the other hand many more groups on the left fall into the pit of ultra-left moralism and are disconnected from serious day to day work in workplaces and communities. They fester in small pools discussing Marx but offer no path from the struggles of the moment to the revolution they discuss in their reading groups. This is a dead end. The world is on fire and we need to get serious about our strategies and tactics. If the far right are insurrectionary and the left is tame we will lose. If we fail to connect with other workers, we will lose. The price we’ll pay is too high. 

The Red Network wants to get back to the class struggle strategies and tactics of Lenin, updating them for the 21st Century. We want to build a working class organisation in form and in content, in ideas and in composition. We had a Red member’s meeting last year where we discussed the merger theory and adopted the following “movement frameworks” to remind ourselves to always keep the merger theory in mind when organising, of course Marxism is a science and an art and getting this right requires the continual practice of being involved in social movements, but in those movements we fight for the following:

“We should use the following frameworks to approach every social movement:

1. The merger theory
2. Avoid sectarianism and avoid opportunism
3. Avoid tailism
4. Fight for leadership
5. Recruit the fighters

Explanation of terms:

1. The merger theory - Engels once wrote that many of the socialist groups in Britain in his time were tiny little moralistic sects while the Chartist movement - a truly working class mass movement demanding the vote for workers - had no socialist politics. Socialists without a working class base and mass movements of workers without socialism - weakened both. The key was to fight for the “merger” of socialist ideas with those workers who fight. If we apply this to any social movement, for example the palestine demos, we ask ourselves: how do we further the merger of socialist ideas with the working class through this movement? Even asking that question helps us to frame our interventions and orientation towards workers.
2. Sectarianism means standing on the sidelines and refusing to actually engage in mass politics. For example - we worked with Sinn Féin and the trade unions to build the mass water movement. It would have been sectarian to stand on the sidelines criticising other forces on the left without actually pulling them into struggle and showing by example their weakness. Opportunism is when you work with other forces on the left but fail to put forward your own socialist politics. In any united front movement we need to avoid standing on the sidelines, sectarianism, but also avoid watering down our own distinct positions within these mass movements. 
3. Tailism is when you just follow the line of other parties, unions, social groups or movements. You “tail” behind instead of fighting to be at the forefront and put forward socialist demands. Tailism is also evident when socialists refuse to recruit from social movements and think workers will join us automatically if we just fight. You have to argue hard for socialist politics but do so from a position of authority won in the heart of the fightback. 
4. Leadership matters. We want to work with other groups to bring their supporters onto the streets and take them from them. We fight for leadership of every social movement. If socialists take the lead then the movement will be healthier. 
5. Recruit the key fighters in every movement. Every movement is a temporary window of opportunity - it only stays open for a limited time. If we fail to recruit then when the movement falls we have missed the opportunity to grow. During large social movements you can recruit dozens instead of just ones and twos.