The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 7 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The January 1919 uprising has gone down in history as the Spartacist uprising , but in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Frölich contests this definition: The truth is that there was no Spartacus uprising . As he explains, the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in fact counted on a gradual revolutionary process, and certainly not on immediate armed struggle on the streets of Berlin . Actually, indicates Frölich, the truth is that the January fighting was carefully prepared and cunningly launched by the leaders of the counter-revolution . Consciousness brought from without What therefore emerges is a party unable to hold back the masses in the face of provocation or to organise a conscious action or an orderly retreat. In this way, the Spartacist leaders themselves were swept along by the party b...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 1 Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party is a text for the strategy-party. The socio-economic and political-state recurrences of capitalist development are set out in it, in their contradictory dynamic which can be grasped by the revolutionary party. This text anticipates the notion of consciousness brought from without , which would become the heart of the Leninist conception of the party. The Manifesto is already a text of international strategy Arrigo Cervetto would write in his study on the ‘genetic’ formation of strategy in Marx and Engels. And Marx and Engels, together with the English Chartists and the groups of the German and French labour movements, would attempt to repeat the experience of the Communist League: to give them a strategy, precisely to give the Manifesto to an existing workers’ party . Their starting point was the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in overcoming and subvert...