Chapter 33. The Social Democratic Interregnum

Despite the considerable public reputation Karl Marx acquired as the “red terrorist doctor” who guided the International during the Paris Commune, his most important writings and theories had only limited influence during his lifetime. By the time of his death in 1883 in London, Capital had been translated into only two languages—Russian and French—and Marxism as a credo was largely unknown except among small groups of radical intellectuals. Virtually ignored in England, it was popularized to a limited extent in France due to the efforts of the indefatigable Guesde. For the rest of the continent, Marxism was too exodc to gain wide acceptance. Italians, Spaniards, and Russians were more strongly influenced by anarchism, as were a sizable number of French syndicalists, who, around the turn of the century, formed the most militant and impressive working-class movement in Europe.

Apart from Guesde’s small Parti Ouvrier, founded in 1882, no Marxist party came into existence while Marx was alive. In 1875, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, Marx’s principal spokesmen in Germany, had muted the old man’s more radical ideas in order to create a unified German socialist party at Gotha—but to Marx’s fury, the new party’s program was so reformist that he and Engels seriously thought of denouncing it and had to be persuaded to limit themselves to criticizing it iniramurally. Indeed, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program was not published until a decade after his death and only at Engels’s insistence. Thus not even German workers, in whose political activities Marx took a strong interest, formed a Marxist party during his lifetime. Yet within a decade of his death, his works were widely translated and carefully studied, and in many parts of the Western world they had come to be viewed reverentially as an indispensable guide to creating a socialist society. In time, social democratic parties that expressly adhered to Marxism were formed, or were in the process of formation, in many European countries, among them Germany, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

As these parties emerged, a strong sentiment developed to link them together in another International, with conferences, congresses, and a secretariat to coordinate their international relations. Although international labor congresses of one kind or another had been held since the demise of the First International in 1872—mainly to coordinate a joint struggle for the eight-hour day—a Marxist-oriented Second International did not come into being until 1889. In that year two congresses were called in Paris on the centenary of Bastille Day, both of which were intent on creating a new International. One congress, overwhelmingly French, met at a hall in the Rue Lancry, under the auspices of a socialist tendency known as the Possibilists, inspired by Paul Brousse. Brousse, a former anarchist whose enthusiastic embrace of “propaganda by the deed” had made him a zealous supporter of terrorism, became in the 1870s a mild- mannered, even respectable advocate of municipal socialism, based on reforms and the pursuit of what was “possible”—hence the name that was given to his movement.

The other congress convened within walking distance of the first, at a hall in the Rue Petrelle. Although its participants were fewer in number, they were far more international in composition: they included men and women who were to become the major figures in international Marxism, such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein (who had not yet become a Revisionist), Carl Legien (the head of the German Free Unions), and Clara Zetkin, from Germany, Eleanor Marx-Aveling; Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, Charles Longuet, and Edouard Vaillant, from France; William Morris, from Britain; George Plekhanov, the “father” of Russian Marxism; and Victor Adler, whose formative role in Austrian social democracy was comparable to Bebel’s in Germany. It was from this gathering that the so-called Second International, greatly influenced by the Marxism of these delegates, was formed, with branches—consisting mainly of political parties—in all major countries where workers’ parties were legal.

What pardy induced the Second International to constitute itself as a formal organization was an appeal from the American labor movement to endorse a new proletarian “holiday,” to be commemorated on May 1, 1890, with the object of gaining the eight-hour working day. The Americans had called upon workers all over the world to simultaneously go on strike on behalf of the demand—and in the process to demonstrate proletarian strength, international solidarity, and militancy. (As we shall see, however, the “May Day” resolution that the congress passed was not exactly the one that its American proponents had advocated.) Thereafter the annual congresses that the International held passed resolutions not only for an eight-hour working day and the improvement of living conditions for the proletariat, but also for far more radical demands, such as the substitution of citizens’ militias for regular armies. It also made commitments to fight for universal suffrage and engage in parliamentary activity, resolutions that were markedly distinct from the demands of anarchists and syndicalists. Finally, at its Zurich Congress of 1893, the International formally adopted Marxism as its doctrine of choice, in the presence of a beaming Engels, who thus lived to see his name, together with Marx’s, enshrined as co-founders of the largest socialist movement in history, indeed one that, in the decades following his own death two years later, would achieve an influence comparable to that of a world religion.

It says something about the political mood of the time, however, that the congress in the Rue Petrelle was also very ecumenical. The International’s founding members included not only most of the world’s leading Marxists but also Peter Lavrov, a leading Russian Populist; Domela Nieuwenhuis, who was soon to become the most outstanding anarchist in the Netherlands; and Gustav Landauer, one of Germany’s most celebrated libertarian socialists. To the chagrin of the German social democrats, the congress also had a complement of highly demonstrative individualistic anarchists. Even after the International officially adopted Marxism in 1893, anarchists—principally the sizable number of French syndicalists with an expressly anarchist orientation—doggedly continued to reappear at International congresses. Only in 1896, at a stormy meeting of the congress in London, where the two opposing camps from the old First International resurfaced, were all anarchists expelled, whereupon they abandoned any attempt to reenter the International and turned variously to terrorism and to syndicalism as their strategies of choice.

BACKGROUND TO COMPROMISE

As early as the founding meeting in the Rue Petrelle, the Germans began to establish organizational and programmatic hegemony over the new International. Indeed, the sweep of Marxism over the world actually had its beginnings in Germany, where its popularity clearly stemmed from the failure of the German ruling classes to arrive at a modus vivendi with the industrial proletariat. Whatever power and appropriateness Marx’s ideas may have had on their own for mobilizing the industrial working class, they were given an enormous impetus by Bismarck’s manic fear of socialism and his attempt to suppress it As it turned out, the spread of socialist ideas had no better friend than the “Iron Chancellor,” whose unrelenting efforts to efface their influence over a span of twelve years—from 1878 to 1890—ultimately did more to invigorate the revolutionary tone of social democracy than its own most eloquent agitators and organizers.

Ironically, once the factory system took hold in central Europe, Germany might well have followed a social trajectory comparable to that of Britain, whose nobility and bourgeoisie had shrewdly coopted the industrial proletariat, eventually absorbing it into the emerging capitalist social order. In principle there was no reason why this could not also happen in Germany. The German workers were not particularly militant, let alone revolutionary like the French; nor did they suffer as bitterly as did British workers during the transition to an industrial economy. In the decades following the suppression of the Paris Commune, when the German industrial revolution got fully under way, Europe enjoyed a considerable degree of social peace. In fact, the passivity of the German workers can be traced to the revolutionary years of 1848–49, when German craftsmen—the working class of that day—allowed themselves, for the most part, to be led by middle-class liberals in their assault upon the despotic monarchies and duchies of central Europe. In contrast to their French brethren, the Germans produced no major independent working-class movement of their own, still less an uprising comparable to the June insurrection in Paris. Thus, German workers remained fairly tame well into the latter half of the nineteenth century; indeed, such working-class organizations that they formed were mainly educational and welfare associations, many of them influenced by Catholic and Protestant clerics.

The writings of socialists like Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weiding, and Karl Grun had far more influence among German exiles and journeymen abroad than they did at home, playing only a minor role among craftsmen in the German uprisings of 1848 and 1849. Radical artisanal organizations such as the Verbniderung (literally, “fraternization”) did surface during the revolution, particularly in Berlin and Leipzig, but most German workers followed in the tow of the liberals—notably, academics, professionals, and bureaucrats who had been recruited from the existing parliaments of various German sovereignties to form a short-lived pan-German national legislature. Meeting in Frankfurt, this Assembly, obsessed with legalisms and constitutional niceties, ineffectually squandered its opportunity to create a modern unified nation out of the innumerable quasi-feudal states, duchies, free cities, and bishoprics of the German-speaking world outside of Austria. In the end, the Assembly tried to bestow the role of all-German constitutional monarch on Frederick William IV of Prussia, who soon brushed the offer aside, after which the Assembly disappeared in the flood of reaction that followed the revolutions of the period.

The failure of the 1848–49 revolutions in the various German-speaking states, particularly in Prussia and Austria, left open the problem of forming a united German nation. Unification, when it did occur, was ultimately brought about not from below, by liberals and socialists, but from above, by the Prussian monarchy, under the stem guidance of Otto von Bismarck and his cohort of semifeudal reactionary militarists, the Junker landowners from east of the Elbe River. Indeed, for more than a quarter of a century, from 1862 to 1890, Bismarck presided over German affairs in a career that was little less than cyclonic. Having been elevated to the position of Prussian prime minister in 1862, he soon turned his well-trained Prussian armies on Austria in 1866, victoriously removing Vienna from the race for German hegemony and in the same year absorbed Hanover, Schleswig, and Holstein into the Prussian creation known as the North German Confederation. These annexations were followed, between 1868 and 1871, by the absorption of major southern German sovereignties such as Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, and Wurttemburg and, after the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace and Lorraine. In less than two decades, Bismarck had created a powerful German Empire, or Reich, under the Prussian emperor (or Kaiser) Wilhelm 1, while he himself became its first chancellor in 1871. That it was Bismarck and the militaristic and authoritarian Prussian Junkers who established and ruled the Reich—rather than the liberal democrats, who were hapless spectators to the militaristic unification—was tragic not only for Germany but for Europe as a whole.

In the same year that Bismarck embarked on his career, a determined workers’ movement finally began to emerge in Germany, soon to be led by a brilliant young Jewish lawyer, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle, invited to address a German artisans’ organization in Berlin on April 12, 1862, delivered a peroration, later published as the “Workers’ Program,” that was pardy rooted in Marx’s ideas and that drew its inspiration from the Communist Manifesto. Not only had Lassalle read Marx’s available writings, he had known Marx fairly well from the 1840s onward. Later, as the young lawyer began to gain considerable prestige among the German workers, he visited Marx in London, and the two men maintained an ongoing correspondence. To all appearances, in fact, Lassalle seemed to regard Marx as his theoretical mentor and tried to find German publishers for his work.

Moreover, Lassalle’s career as a labor leader was truly meteoric. In the mere two years that passed between his emergence as a workers’ leader and his death in a duel over a love affair in 1864, his activities gained him a legendary status in the history of social democracy. During that short time span he toured Germany, stirring up the latent sentiment for a working-class party that would function independendy of the liberals in parliamentary politics. Idolized by thousands of workers, his fervent, often theatrical oratory, his organizational talents (which he exercised quite highhandedly), and his manifesto direcdy inspired thousands of German workers to create their own organizations and, under his guidance, to gather at an ad hoc workers’ congress in Frankfurt in May 1863, where they agreed to establish the General German Workers Association (Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein, or ADAV). Thus, within a single year, Lassalle found himself at the head of the largest—and for a brief time, the only—working-class party in Germany, as a result of which he left a profound imprint upon the German workers’ movement for decades after his death.

But his close personal ties to Marx notwithstanding, Lassalle was not in fact a Marxist. Indeed, he and Marx embodied two distinct, even opposing tendencies in the German working-class movements. Where Marx was a revolutionary and a socialist, Lassalle was basically a reformist, parliamentarian, and cooperativisL These differences in political orientation were rooted in profound differences in philosophy and sodal theory. Where Marx’s large body of economic writings were nothing if not sodal, Lassalle’s sparse economic theories were rooted far more in pseudo-biological facts—especially in Malthus’s theories of population. Lassalle more or less believed that population numbers direcdy influenced the availability of the means of subsistence, and he agreed with Ricardo’s scxalled “iron law of wages,” according to which workers’ wages fluctuated around the barest subsistence level necessary to sustain life. If population increased more rapidly than food supply, an overabundance of workers available for exploitation would ensue and wages would decline. This wage decline would then reduce the number of available workers, causing a renewed demand for labor that would increase wages once again. Although these oscillations would recur indefinitely, workers’ wages would remain as low as possible, altered only by changes in the availability of labor. To Marx, this “iron law of wages” was entirely spedous: he attributed the decline in working-class living standards primarily to capitalist competition and the capitalist imperative to increase profits. The “iron law” served only to conceal the real role of capitalist sodal relations by subsuming them to pseudo- biological factors.

The main source of conflicting tendencies that would persist in German social democracy for decades, however, was the profound political differences that existed between the two men. According to Lassalle, the only way that workers could avoid the impact of the “iron law of wages” was to gain control of the state for themselves and establish a government that would foster producers’ cooperatives under workers’ control. Such a state would provide capital and credit to a network of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, which hopefully would eventually replace the capitalist economy.

In fairness, it should be noted that Lassalle contrasted his state-subsidized cooperatives to voluntary private attempts to establish them. Voluntary endeavors, he believed, were too limited to produce more than isolated enterprises, with litde effect upon capitalism as a whole. He even regarded trade unions as too limited in scope to provide a basis for recreating society along cooperative lines. By contrast, Marx held that unions were important for attaining better working conditions and as living schools for instilling class consciousness in the proletariat. As for Lassalle’s emphasis on state-subsidized producers’ cooperatives, Marx saw it as a naive archaism redolent of Louis Blanc’s social workshops.

Nor did Marx agree with Lassalle’s expectation that the working class could use the state on its own behalf. As we have seen, Marx viewed the state as a historical phenomenon rooted in class rule and, his own statist socialism notwithstanding, he generally rejected the notion that the bourgeois state apparatus could be an instrument for any class but the bourgeoisie. Lassalle, by contrast, contended that the state could be used by workers to enhance their interests and even transform society along cooperativist lines. This belief stemmed from his reverential, even quasi-mystical view of the state, largely rooted in the tradition of German philosophical idealism, as a national expression of the German Volk and hence as a neutral force that could serve the interest of the people as well as their rulers. In the context of conflicting class interests, Lassalle’s acceptance of the state served to foster reformist tendencies within the German labor movement, while his tendency to think in terms of a German Volksgeist was essentially reactionary in its implications.

Moreover, Lassalle shared Bismarck’s view that German national unification should be guided by Prussia. Marx, who eamesdy believed in the need for German national unification, deeply distrusted the Iron Chancellor’s attempts to achieve national hegemony, especially with the backing of Prussian militarists. Indeed, Lassalle so detested the liberals, who represented the interests of capitalism, that he came perilously close to making common cause with the Prussian Junkers who, for their own reasons, affected to be antibourgeois, with the result that Lassalle’s behavior was often highly unprincipled and included private negotiations with Bismarck against German liberals.

How would the workers create a state that would foster worker-controlled cooperatives? Lassalle’s strategy, as we have seen, was mainly electoral and reformist. Lassalleans contended that workers should establish their own party and fight above all for universal adult male suffrage, in order be able to elect their own candidates to the legislative bodies of the existing state. This essentially reformist parliamentary strategy contrasted dramatically with Marx’s revolutionary view that the workers had to take power, if necessary by insurrection, smash the old state machinery, and replace it with a new worker-controlled state apparatus. According to Marx, such a workers’ state would exist only long enough to subdue bourgeois opposition, nationalize property, and plan production to meet human needs, after which it would fade away for want of any other function to perform. To use the famous aphorism of the time: the administration of men would be replaced by the administration of things. Apart from the exceptions Marx made regarding the United States, England, and perhaps Holland, there is no reason to believe that he gave up on these strategic goals, the many ambiguities in his writings notwithstanding.

Lassalle’s ADAV did not long remain the only or even the principal workers’ party in Germany. On May 17, 1863, a hundred and ten delegates from workers’ educadonal associations in forty-five cities throughout Germany convened at Frankfurt to form the Union of German Workers’ Leagues (Verband Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or VDAV) with a view toward coordinating their efforts along political lines. By contrast to the Lassallean ADAV, which was highly centralized and managed, as many workers complained, along dictatorial lines, the Verband was more of a federation than a party, allowing its constituent groups to enjoy considerable local autonomy. In fact VDAV groups were not necessarily socialist and, if they so wished, were free to ally themselves politically with progressive bourgeois parues.

Initially, the Verband’s goals were diffuse. But the socialists within the VDAV steadily radicalized its goals, and at the two congresses that followed its founding (1867 and 1868), it tightened its structure, began to function as a political party, and very significandy, joined the First International, which meant that the Verband was expected to demand social ownership of the means of production. As its leader, the Verband elected a young wood-tumer from Leipzig, the twenty-seven-year-old August Bebel, who would go on to become the most dynamic and influential figure in German socialism after Lassalle died.

In fact, Bebel had been won over to Marxism by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and between them the two men were to do for German socialism what Guesde did to foster Marxism in France. Following in Marx’s footsteps, the Verband, in contrast to the ADAV, rejected state aid in any form as well as the formation of cooperatives. Instead the organization called for the formation of trade unions, which placed it squarely in the emerging tendency of proletarian socialism, rather than artisanal socialism. In 1869 at Eisenach, the Verband merged with the Saxon People’s Party, originally a populist party composed predominandy of workers, to form an explicidy workers’ socialist party, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, or SDAP).

Owing to Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s convictions, the SDAP was undoubtedly the first working-class organization in Germany to be led by avowed Marxists, although its program still resembled the relatively ecumenical manifestos that Marx had written for the First International rather than the expressly revolutionary views he had been advancing in the pamphlets and books published under his own imprimatur. But if the SDAP was not formally Marxist, it was the first German party, since the old Communist League, with which Marx and Engels had a direct association and on which they exercised a major influence.

The relationship between the SDAP and the ADAV was anything but cordial. So bitter was the rivaliy between the two workers’ parties and so acrimonious the relations between their leaders that any prospect of collaboration seemed completely foreclosed. It was not only its more radical positions—its strong internationalism and its bitter hostility to the Prussian government—that distinguished the SDAP from the reformistic ADAV. In 1870, for example, from his seat in the Reichstag of the North German Confederation, Liebknecht abstained from voting for war credits to support the Franco-Prussian War. (His reason for abstaining was that he refused to abet the imperialism of Louis Napoleon as well as Bismarck, which earned him two years of imprisonment for high treason.) Indeed, once the treaty terms were announced, he adamantly opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. By contrast, the ADAV accommodatingly went along with Bismarck and gave the war its full support—an act that the SDAP regarded as a betrayal of proletarian internationalism.

The Paris Commune, however, unnerved the Iron Chancellor, who now began to denounce and harass all socialist organizations in Germany. Both socialist parties were confronted by a state that meant to suppress them if it could, and it was only by overcoming their bitter rivalry and joining forces that they could hope to mount an effective resistance to the increasingly repressive imperial regime. Between May 22 and 27, 1875, in the Thuringian town of Gotha, the ADAV (or Lassalleans, as they were generally known) and the SDAP (Bebel and Liebknecht’s Eisenachers) finally convened to form a united Social Democratic Party of Germany, initially under the name of Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistiche Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, or SAPD). Attended by 130 delegates, this Gotha Congress represented 25,000 members, of whom sixty percent were Lassalleans and the remainder Eisenachers.

What probably made possible the establishment of the SAPD was the enormous ideological concessions that the Eisenachers (led by Liebknecht in the negotiations) made to the Lassalleans. For the Eisenachers, the program of the new party—known as the Gotha Program—marked a definite retreat for the Eisenachers. As Gary P. Steenson tells it:

Judged by its program, the new party was a victory for the ADAV, and this was certainly the evaluation of Marx and Engels, who were sitting in England. In fact, the two “old ones,” as they were called in party circles, had tried to forestall the program by sending severe criticisms of the draft to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, and others in the SDAP with whom they had some influence. Ever jealous of their old nemesis Lassalle, and of what they considered their special relationship with the German workers’ movement, Marx and Engels denounced the new program as confused, state-socialistic, and too great a concession for the unity even they considered necessary. Although Marx’s criticism is now more famous ... , Engels too sent detailed commentary to Bebel and Liebknecht. Attacking the notion of “one reactionary mass,” the iron law of wages (with its implicit anti-trade unionism), the concept of a free people’s state, and many other aspects of the program, Engels predicted that unity on this basis would not last a year.[587]

Actually, it was hardly jealousy that induced Marx and Engels to reject the new program. The Gotha Program, which Marx trenchandy critiqued in a lengthy letter to a few of his leading supporters, contained major formulations that were so reformist, as we have seen, that he and Engels seriously considered publicly dissodadng themselves from the documenL Aside from relatively minor errors, Marx found statements that were opaque at best and intolerable at worst. The program committed the members of the new party to “strive” for their “emancipation ... within the framework of the present-day national state”—a demand that Marx regarded as totally inconsistent with the worldwide unity of the working class. He might have added that the program’s emphasis on the “present-day” bourgeois state as the arena of working-class “emancipation” explicidy acknowledged the legitimacy of the existing state as a decisive realm of struggle and impliddy rejected the need for revolution. Additionally, the program contained a reference to a “free state,” as though the state were ever anything but an instrument of class rule (even by the working class), whose ultimate abolition would necessarily follow from the abolition of class society. Finally, to cite its most compromising features, the program described the “solution of the social question” as “the establishment of producers’ cooperatives with state aid under the democratic control of the working people,” a completely Lassallean, indeed a Blanc-esque assertion of an artisanal socialism, which allowed that the state could be a source of cooperative networks under “democratic” control.

Marx’s critique of the program was withering; but more important, the few pages that constitute the brilliant Critique of the Gotha Program form a landmark document in the theoretical underpinnings of Marxian communism.[588] Little did Marx know, ironically, that some of the most objectionable formulations in the Gotha Program had been written by Liebknecht to please the Lassalleans, but the Eisenachers generally sloughed off Marx’s criticism with the prediction that they would not seriously affect the workings and policies of the new party.

Engels’s prediction that the unified party would not last the year proved wrong. Liebknecht and Bebel assured the “old ones” that time would ultimately bring the new party over to a Marxist point of view, particularly in view of the more democratic organization that the SAPD had by comparison with the ADAV. Whether Marx’s views could have prevailed over Lassalle’s is hard to judge: in the SAPD (and in the later SPD, as the party finally came to be known in 1891), the Lassallean approach reflected in the Gotha Program persisted— certainly in the party’s behavior if not its program, albeit not only because of Lassalle’s legacy.

In the year following the founding congress, Marx’s early supporters in the SAPD never decisively confronted the reformist oudook that dominated the program, pardy because the antisocialist law of 1878, initiated by Bismarck, made party unity at all costs a vital necessity. In effect, for the social democrats, the antisocialist law was a mixed blessing: although it exposed them to over a decade of repression, it also kept them from confronting the latent conflict that simmered within their party from the day of its founding.

REFORM OR REVOLUTION

The political edifice of the new Reich was designed to prevent an independent working class or any serious democratic movement from gaining substantial power in Germany. But the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Europe was a particularly balmy era of general social and political reform, and neither the German Kaiser nor Bismarck wanted the Reich to be viewed as a czarist-style tyranny or an archaic despotism. Hence, with the establishment of the empire in 1871, the Prussian-run government gave the newly united German Reich the superficial trappings of a constitutional monarchy.

For the Reich as a whole, Bismarck established a lower legislative house, the Reichstag, based on universal adult male suffrage. In theory, this pan-German body, with deputies from 397 electoral districts, was supposed to represent the will of all male citizens, regardless of property or status—although subject, to be sure, to the paternal oversight of the monarch. In practice, however, the Reichstag was virtually powerless, a fig leaf for autocracy, as the social democrats called it. Except for military and foreign policy questions, which fell entirely within the purview of the chancellor and the monarch, the Reichstag was free to debate all political issues. But it could not pass laws on its own initiative, and the main authority it had was confined to accepting or rejecting the national budget—which, of course, was drawn up entirely by the chancellor and his ministers. Even in this capacity, moreover, the Reichstag’s wishes could simply be ignored by the Kaiser, who retained the authority to handle all military expenditures at his own discretion.

The real power in the empire was shared among the Bundesrat (Federal Council), an upper house composed entirely of ministers from the formerly independent German states; the chancellor, who was appointed by the Kaiser and was answerable exclusively to him rather than to any legislative body; the ubiquitous and thoroughly domesticated bureaucracy; the Prussian army, the strongest and the most socially entrenched military machine in Europe; and the Kaiser himself who, when he so chose, could exercise complete personal power over the government With such a structure and so-called constitution, the empire could hardly be mistaken for even the most limited of constitutional monarchies. Its constitution, far from emanating from the people, was in fact a dispensation of the monarchy. Using the authority of the pliant Bundesrat, the Kaiser could disband the Reichstag at his will, appoint or remove the chancellor, and ultimately dictate whatever policy he chose to make, including decisions on war and peace, whether the Reichstag approved or not.

The existence of the Bundesrat preserved the arguable image of the Bismarcltian empire as a federation of states, each with its own legislative dieL The federation was not entirely mythical—these old states did retain some powers of their own, resting partly on law and pardy on tradition. Some states, particularly in southern Germany, had a relatively tolerant political atmosphere and occasionally allowed socialists to gain seats in the state legislature. In the Reichstag, the now-united SAPD began to get large numbers of votes in national elections, increasing from 352,000 in 1874 to 493,000 in 1877, while its Reichstag deputies increased from nine to twelve. Moreover, local socialist newspapers proliferated with unnerving rapidity, from twenty-three in 1876 to forty-one only a year later. Shordy after the formation of the SAPD in 1875, the Lassalleans and Eisenachers combined their two newspapers to establish Vorwarts (Forward), which became the party’s official national organ

In 1878 the Iron Chancellor finally succeeded in making the SAPD illegal. Ever fearful of a class war in Germany, Bismarck was eager to nip the growing party in the bud; indeed, as he put it in his own words, “the Social Democrats produced, more than foreign countries, a danger for war for monarchy and state, and ... they should be viewed by the government in terms of a military and power problem, not a legal problem.”[589] But before he could oudaw the social democrats, Bismarck needed an excuse, and in 1878 he found just such a pretext when two unsuccessful attempts were made to assassinate the Kaiser, each within a month of the other. Although the assassins were not socialists, on October 21, 1878, having generated a furious “red scare,” Bismarck induced the imperial Reichstag to pass the antisocialist law, or “Law Against the Publicly Dangerous Endeavors of Social Democracy,” which empowered local police authorities in German states to dissolve all organizations, meetings, periodicals, public activities, and festive events that were even slighdy tinted with socialist colors. Taverns that were suspected of being frequented by socialist workers could be and were closed down. The property and assets of suppressed organizations and periodicals were freely confiscated, and ordinary participants in any of the proscribed activities were subject to fines of 500 marks or three months’ imprisonment Leaders or initiators of these activities, in turn, could be jailed for as long as a year, obliging many of them, including ordinary workers, to take flight to Switzerland, England, and the United States.

The same prohibitions against overdy political socialist organizations were extended to all other working-class associations that could be regarded as sympathetic to the socialists, including the Free Unions, which were generally socialistic. Even nonpolitical associations were prohibited, such as cultural, calisthenic, and literary groups. The prohibition was so patendy discriminatory against the working classes that it infuriated many workers who were neither members of the SAPD nor even necessarily sympathetic to it Oddly, however, the anusodalist laws, harsh as they were for their day, did not deprive the SAPD of its voice within the chambers of the Reichstag. Socialists could run for office, provided they presented themselves to the electorate as individual candidates rather than as representatives of the banned party, and the party itself, for a time, was able to funcdon as a vote-getting machine by reconstituting many of its national, regional, and municipal committees as mere electoral organizations. The party’s national Vorstand or Executive Committee continued to exist, for example, by calling itself the electoral commission of the Hamburg area. Many party organizations of lesser importance followed suit—at least until Bismarck finally hounded them out of the public arena and drove them underground.

Thus, while the SAPD was forbidden to have headquarters, hold meetings, or own an official press, its candidates and spokespersons could wage individual electoral campaigns and reach a wide public through printing establishments that seemed to be privately owned but that were actually owned or controlled by party members and party sympathizers. Significandy, electoral campaigns became one of the main—if not the leading—means by which the party could maintain any kind of public existence, however surreptitiously, which gready pushed it toward parliamentarism, despite the fact that its revolutionary rhetoric was heightened in tone and form by the overdy repressive behavior of the bourgeois state.

Although the antisocialist laws were applied with varying degrees of intensity over the twelve years of their existence, the persecution suffered by social democrats was nevertheless very real and costly. The government tried and/or imprisoned all the party’s leaders it could find—more than 1,500 people were arrested in all, some of whom served lengthy sentences. By mid-1879, it had closed down 414 periodicals for their known or suspected socialist sympathies, obliging the party press to move to Switzerland, and in its efforts to build an underground network within Germany, the party faced continual losses in leaders and resources. Even more effective were the government’s assaults upon the Free Unions, which necessarily had to function more openly than the party in order to reach nonsocialist as well as socialist workers, a task that made them very vulnerable to government repression, with a resulting, even precipitous, drop in their numbers.

Yet even as Bismarck was trying to extirpate the SAPD, he was also attempting, between 1881 and 1884, to buy off the working class by establishing state-run social insurance programs, covering health, old age, and accidents. Although many Lassalleans in the party’s Reichstag delegates were inclined to vote in favor of these bills, presumably in order to help the lot of the workers and gain their votes, the left within the party saw these reforms as an attempt by the Chancellor to lure the workers’ sympathies away from socialism and toward the Reich. After internal disputes, the great majority of social democratic deputies, as a matter of principle, finally did vote against the Chancellor’s reforms and refused to enter into complicity with a capitalist, indeed reactionary state that was trying to crush an avowedly anticapitalist workers’ party.

In time, of course, the antisocialist law proved to be a boomerang. Its obvious class bias only served to increase socialist influence among a broad spectrum of workers, many of whom knew very litde about socialism, and to cement the SAPD’s ties with nonparty labor organizations, which were often equally uninformed about socialist ideas but in time became very influential in party affairs. Thus in the Reichstag elections of 1884, after six years of repression, the socialists won more than half a million votes, and in 1890, shordy before the antisocialist law was permitted to lapse, their electoral tally soared to a stunning 1.4 million, larger than any other Reichstag party and ten percent of the electorate. Bismarck, in effect, by trying to suppress the socialists, created a growing and angry constituency for them among the general voting public as well as in radical organizations, which in time would flood the party and mobilize constituencies for candidates who were hardly committed to the socialist principles that its leaders avowed.

Finally, in 1890, Bismarck was obliged to resign his position—not least because of temperamental differences with the new, headstrong young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was eager to rid himself of the arrogant and patronizing Chancellor. Nor was the new Kaiser eager to antagonize a large number of his subjects who were voting for, if not joining, a party and a union movement that the government had banned. Accordingly, in the same year that Bismarck left office, Wilhelm lifted the ban and restored the party’s legal status. In the long run, the antisotialist law, far from weakening social democracy, gave it an aura of heroic glamour, and a tradition of having suffered persecution that made it an object of reverence to its members and extended its influence enormously not only in Germany but also abroad.

Moreover, even as the party attracted many ordinary Germans—middle class as well as proletarian—who were more sympathetic to its plight and to its call for reforms than to its core social ideas, the antisocialist law, by revealing the dass nature of the German state, also increased the influence of the more revolutionary tendencies in the party, namely the Marxists. By 1890 many German social democratic workers not only regarded the state as an undisguised enemy but had veered further to the left because of continual government harassment of their trade unions. Thus, the antisocialist law served to give the party a revolutionary veneer that, unknown to its more radical leaders and worker militants, concealed the presence of many members and electoral supporters who were basically reformist in their ideas and behavior. This tension between reformist behavior and radical veneer, which had existed in the party since the adoption of the Gotha Program, was the source of the seemingly inexplicable ambiguities and contradictory behavior of the party up to the outbreak of the First World War.

In the meantime, at its 1891 Congress in Erfurt, in Thuringia, the party changed its name for the last time, to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD), as well as its program. The passages in the Gotha Program to which Marx and Engels had so strongly objected were discarded, and an entirely new document, pithy and entirely committed to Marx’s ideas, was adopted. Framed by Karl Kautsky, with whom Engels had personally collaborated in preparing Marx’s posthumous Theories of Surplus Value, it freely borrowed its analysis and phraseology from The Communist Manifesto and Capital, often with litde modification of Marx’s sweeping prose style.

The opening passages of the Erfurt Program virtually repeat, in the same ringing language, Marx’s lines on capitalist accumulation (see Chapter 32) that close with the demand, “The expropriators are expropriated.”

Ever greater grows the number of proletarians, ever more enormous the army of surplus workers, ever sharper the opposition between exploiters and exploited, ever bitterer the class war between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which divides modem society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of all industrial countries.[590]

The language is strident and combative. There is no mention of Lassallean cooperatives or state support, still less any notion that the state can stand above society as a neutral arbiter of social differences. In its historical demands, the program is sweepingly revolutionary:

Only the transformation of capitalistic private ownership of the means of production—the soil, mines, raw materials, tools, machines, and means of transport—into social ownership and the transformation of production of goods for sale into socialistic production managed for and through society, can bring it about that the great industry and the steadily growing productive capacity of social labor shall for the hitherto exploited classes be changed from a source of misery and oppression to a source of the highest welfare and of all-around harmonious perfection.[591]

This radical tone was maintained in the party’s programmatic literature and in party pronouncements by Liebknecht (albeit somewhat equivocally) up to his death in 1900 and by Bebel who, at the turn of the century, became the real leader of the party’s organization. Kautsky, as the party’s principal theoretician (and editor of its main theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, or New Time), played the role of the guardian of Marxist orthodoxy up to the First World War. All three of these men, to be sure, repeatedly vacillated in their political views and, as we will see, engineered reformist compromises with the existing social order. Nonetheless, for several decades they advanced a stirring Marxian rhetoric, of a kind that did not vary greatly from the speech that Bebel gave before the Reichstag shordy after the fall of the Paris Commune:

You should be firmly convinced that the whole European proletariat and everyone else who has still within him a feeling for freedom and independence looks to Paris. And though Paris is suppressed at the moment, 1 would like to remind you that the battle in Paris is merely a small skirmish of outposts, that the decisive events are still to come, and that within a few decades the batde cry of the Paris proletariat—“War on the palaces, peace for the huts, down with misery and idleness”—will be the battle cry of the whole European proletariat.[592]

This kind of rhetoric had persisted throughout the “oudaw period,” and even Eduard Bernstein, who later appealed for a reformist orientation within the party, initially echoed Bebel’s words, opposing any tendency within the SPD to accommodate itself to the status quo.

But the party’s enormous successes at the polls, even during the period of its illegality, suggested that an underlying conservatism still existed among large sectors of the party and especially the trade union membership. Bebel’s words had been appropriately heroic for the 1870s and the “oudaw period.” But once the party became a fully legal organization with an immense following (often poorly educated in socialist ideas) and possessed of considerable material holdings, as befit a major parliamentary organization, the behavior of the party became less confrontational and more liberal. During the 1890s in southern Germany, where Bismarck’s repressive measures had been less severe, social democratic deputies to the state legislatures were already making opportunistic compromises with their liberal colleagues and trying to tone down the revolutionary rhetoric of the national party leaders.

Among the social democratic Reichstag deputies, too, an explicit right wing began to appear, which was willing to accede to Bismarckian policies when they seemed to benefit its working-class electorate, even during conditions of illegality—as we have seen, when Bismarck was making his social insurance reforms. It surfaced even more markedly, during the mid-1880s, over the question of government subsidies for the ship-building industry. Where the Left opposed the subsidies as an attempt to further German imperialism by extending shipping routes to colonial countries, especially Africa, the new right- wing social democratic deputies viewed them as a source of jobs for German workers, arguing for their support within the parliamentary caucus. By the 1890s, the party was becoming excessively successful, by promoting cosmetic reforms entirely within the framework of the Reich—reforms that properly should have been the concerns mainly of liberals and progressives. It is fair to say that by championing the material well-being of its working-class voters without challenging the social order, the Social Democratic Party in Germany was becoming more democratic than socialist and more reformist than revolutionary.

This rightward shift—including an attempt by moderate social democratic deputies to muzzle the radical rhetoric of one of the party’s newspapers, the Sozialdemokrat—can be expected to emerge in any ostensibly revolutionary movement whose demands for reform coincide with those of liberals on specific issues. With the SPD, this overlapping of interests was unavoidable, given the party’s huge and often socially mixed constituency. But the party could also have chosen to use reformist issues to heighten the importance of its revolutionary socialist vision. As early as 1850, in their “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Marx and Engels had suggested that a revolutionary working-class party like the League should advance reformist demands by continually escalating them into revolutionary ones. Accordingly, they wrote that if the bourgeois democrats wanted the state to regulate aspects of the economy, the League should demand its outright nationalization; if the bourgeois democrats called upon the state to purchase railroads, the League should demand that the state confiscate the railroads outright. The League, they argued, “must drive the proposals of the democrats, who in any case will not act in a revolutionary but reformist manner, to the extreme and transform them into direct attacks upon private property.”[593]

This policy of escalating reformist demands into increasingly revolutionary ones was completely lost on the new officialdom that the SPD was spawning in the Reichstag and the state legislatures. A pragmatic political leadership, expressly disdainful of theory and principles, it preferred to consider the merits of reforms in their own right, often precisely as the government presented them. Instead of challenging their authenticity or revealing their limitations—let alone expanding them into more radical demands—more and more social democratic deputies tended to vote yea or nay with little critical perspective.

Eventually, the contradictions between the party’s rhetorical adherence to Marxism and its growing opportunistic pragmatism came out in the open in a theoretical debate, which raged furiously from about 1898 to 1904, between Eduard Bernstein’s Revisionism and the upholders of the Erfurt Program’s revolutionism. Bernstein had been an orthodox Marxist until the early 1890s, and up to his death in 1932, he insisted that he remained one and had never challenged the core social insights of Marx. During the twelve years of the antisocialist law he had spent in London, exiled by a prison sentence, he had lived almost reverentially in Engels’s shadow. At the same time he had quiedy been imbibing the gradualist doctrines of the British Fabians, a small number of prominent intellectuals who had rejected revolution as impractical, indeed as undesirable, because capitalism seemed to open immeasurable prospects for reform and ultimately a peaceful road to socialism.

Yet it would be naive to assume that Fabian doctrines alone turned Bernstein from a Marxian revolutionary into a social democratic reformist. The last quarter of the nineteenth century as a whole was a time of considerable social improvement Far from fulfilling Marx’s predictions in Capital that the capitalist economy would drive the working class to destitution and produce growing economic crises, workers in the 1890s visibly enjoyed a relatively high degree of economic prosperity. The period, if anything, was marked by considerable social stability and a strong belief in the certainty of unimpeded progress. Working within the existing state structure, it seemed, might be a far better strategy for attaining a socialist society than waging a cosdy, precarious, and bloody armed revolt. It was precisely this evolutionary strategy that Bernstein began to advance in a letter to the SPD in October 1898: instead of trying to make a revolution to attain a socialist society, socialists should work to make incremental gains that would lead to a slow and peaceful transition to socialism.

Bernstein, to be sure, was not the first German social democrat to challenge Marx’s revolutionary doctrines. As early as 1891, in opposition to the adoption of the Erfurt Program, Georg von Vollmar of Munich had voiced the belief that socialism could be attained through a slow organic evolution of society, and like many Bavarian and other south German members (who had never surrendered this view), he urged the party to adopt reformist measures that were tabooed by orthodox Marxism. His arguments had fallen on deaf ears, especially in Prussia, which harbored the most left-wing theorists and workers in the party. Owing primarily to his distinguished position in the party and his more sophisticated critique of Marxism, Bernstein had managed to turn his Revisionist doctrines (as they were called) into a vocal and growing tendency, which, in fact, often gave a theoretical patina to practices that differed litde from those of the pragmatists in the party and the unions and the leading trade unionists.

What is very significant about Bernstein’s Revisionism, moreover, is that it opened up a long-standing debate over reform versus revolution not only in German social democracy but among socialist pardes abroad. All the party’s big guns, such as Kautsky and Bebel, and especially its brilliant theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, denounced Bernstein, and some even tried to drive him out the party itself. Bebel clearly recognized that Bernstein’s views, which were first expressed at the Stuttgart Congress of the SPD in 1898, were by no means the aberration of a single man: they spoke to a wider segment of the party than his opponents’ leaders were willing to acknowledge. Accordingly, with Bebel’s aid, Bernstein remained in the party and even became a Reichstag deputy, revealing that changes were occurring not only in Bebel’s mind but in those of leading theorists who sdll publicly professed to oppose Bernstein’s views. Although the Revisionists always remained a minority at the party congresses up to the outbreak of the First World War, they had a much larger following than the votes they gained at SPD congresses would seem to indicate, and they even managed to attain a very important standing in world socialism.

This silent following included an important sector within the party—the trade union leadership, who were socialists in name only. In 1889, with the founding of the Second International, the union leadership had been infuriated by the call for a worldwide general strike on May 1. In order to avoid a work stoppage, they demanded that the German party be given the leeway to call its May Day meetings during an evening or on a weekend, rather than strike on May 1. Significandy, Bebel and his supporters in the party acceded to their wishes, thereby reducing the symbolic significance of the day from an expression of social protest to a tame, celebratory festival. Indeed, in later years it was union delegates to congresses of the Second International who turned the German social democratic delegation into a conservative force that generally opposed militant responses to major problems confronting the working class, including radical antiwar resolutions. Repeatedly, the union leadership played a major role in collusion with party moderates in bridling the social democratic youth movement, which supported the radicals in the party on democratic issues and against militarism.

Otherwise, the union leaders, for the most part, remained aloof from party debates on Revisionism—not because they opposed Bernstein but because of their indifference to theoretical issues. The intraparty debates between the Revisionists and the orthodox Marxists generally provided the trade unions with intellectual justification for their cautious behavior, if and when they needed theoretical support; reformist party candidates, in turn, drew upon these debates to gain ideological justification for their policies in Germany’s various legislative bodies. By degrees, despite the majority votes that the orthodox Marxists gained against Bernstein at party congresses, it became evident that a chronic malaise afflicted European socialism—one that was to turn into an illness, fatal to social democracy, in 1914.

THE GROWING ACCOMMODATION

The most serious portent of the conservative shift—one that challenged the capacity of social democracy to act as a revolutionary movement—did not occur in the realm of theory. Rather, it was the result of a stormy and innovative revolution, of a kind that Europe had not seen since the days of the Paris Commune.

In 1905, after the czar’s misbegotten war against Japan ended in defeat for Russia, the Russian working dass rose in an uprising that sent tremors around the world. Although the Russian workers engaged in considerable street fighting in the cities, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, their primary weapon in destabilizing Europe’s most hated autocracy was the general strike— or “mass strike,” as it was called by the Germans. In wielding this quintessentially syndicalist weapon, the workers demonstrated for all to see that they could completely paralyze the country’s major industrial centers— and create a revolutionary situation unequaled by any upsurge for more than a generation.

No sooner did news of the 1905 Revolution come to light, than a furious debate opened within the German Sodal Democratic Party about the merits and demerits of general strikes—particularly those waged not merely for economic but above all for political ends—indeed, as a means for overthrowing capitalism. The most radical proponents of the “mass strike” were relatively young social democrats in the party and the Second International—Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht (Wilhelm’s son), and Clara Zetkin, among others—as well as distinguished elders such as Franz Mehring and, more equivocally, Karl Kautsky.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 brought the SPD—indeed, the entire Second International—face to face with its revolutionary conscience and traditions. The “mass strike” dispute now replaced the Revisionism debate—or more precisely, gave it concrete meaning. Like Revisionism, the Revolution challenged the very image of the Social Democratic Party as a revolutionary force, by focusing attention on the increasing apathy of the German working class toward revolution. The issue of the “mass strike” was not simply a theoretical question among a few intellectually minded leftist leaders. Rather, it forced members of the unions and their leaders to reconsider the role that unions as such would play in overthrowing capitalism. Blundy put: how would the unions respond if the party called a general strike to achieve political ends rather than merdy economic goals?

Marx, as we have seen, had always regarded unions as mere schools for educating workers in socialist, especially Marxian politics. He invariably gave priority to working-class political parties as the more sophisticated and able organizations of the labor movement Before the 1905 Revolution, Marxist theorists in Germany could reasonably support this view without fear of contradiction, thereby focusing the party’s attention on electoral contests and parliamentary acrobatics. Strikes for economic ends had been left to the unions to decide upon and finance, an emphasis that allowed bureaucrats in the Free Unions to occupy themselves with pragmatic problems of day-to-day organization and labor relations while they disdainfully let the theorists duel with each other over fine points of Marxian theory.

But in 1905 the problem of the general strike, by raising an issue that bore direcdy on the role of trade unions in revolutionary action, could not be ignored. It invaded the very recesses of the union bureaucracy by requiring that the role of unions in a revolutionary situation be defined. As Steenson observes, “Probably no other issue in the history of the German working-class movement prior to the outbreak of world war in 1914 had such a far-reaching impact on internal relationships [in the SPD] as did the mass-strike debate of 1905–1906.”[594] Predictably, the union leaders categorically opposed the right of the SPD to commit them to any mass action that confronted the social order, let alone the mass strike. So touchy was the union leadership on this issue that a Free Trade Union Congress at Cologne in May 1905 not only denounced the use of the general strike but blatandy forbade the union press and locals even to discuss it.

For their part, the party radicals saw the mass strike not only as a revolutionary weapon in its own right but as a way to revive a combative, revolutionary spirit in an increasingly sedate and parliamentary party. In response to the trade unions, they published a defense of the general strike written by the Dutch socialist Henriette Roland-Holst, with a preface by Karl Kautsky, as well as their own literature, including Rosa Luxemburg’s 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike. Bebel, for his part, straddling the unions and the radicals, opposed the general strike as more than a purely pragmatic and reformistic tactic, but he allowed for its use under restricted circumstances—a formula that satisfied neither camp in the party.

Inasmuch as the general strike had been a weapon of choice among Bakuninist anarchists, who had resolved to use the measure as a revolutionary weapon at their Geneva Congress of 1873, and in France was the revolutionary strategy par excellence advocated by the syndicalist CGT, local SPD branches throughout Germany began to invite anarchists to their meetings, primarily to educate them on the subject. In fact, the idea of the mass strike was far more appealing to the rank-and-file members than it was to the union leaders. Thus even after the Russian Revolution of 1905 went down in defeat, the notion of mass strikes lived on vigorously at SPD meetings and conferences. “The debate thus launched was long and acrimonious,” Steenson concludes, “and despite the best efforts of the party and trade-union leaders, the issue would continue to cause problems right up to 1914.”[595]

The crude measures used by SPD and union leaders to dampen any radical, let alone revolutionary sentiments among their followers is little short of appalling. In 1906, to neutralize any support for the mass strike, Bebel, whose revolutionary ardor was dwindling as rapidly as he was aging, and Carl Legien, the social democratic chieftain of the Free Unions, conspired behind the backs of their respective memberships to draw up a secret agreement on the financial responsibility for strikes. Strikes that were called for political reasons were to be the financial responsibility of the party alone, while strikes for economic goals were to be funded by the unions. Inasmuch as general strikes were expected to be political in nature, they obviously fell within the purview of the SPD, and to add insult to injury, the agreement stipulated that political general strikes were to be firmly discouraged by the party’s Central Committee.

In fact, under the guise of dividing up responsibility for general strikes, the unions by this agreement effectively annulled the ability of the party to wage general strikes of any duration longer than a week or so. Possessed of only a quarter of the dues-paying membership of the unions, the SPD had far fewer financial resources, and since the party was precluded from calling upon the well-funded unions for assistance, even a large-scale political stnke of any length, still less a general strike, was now beyond its financial means. The agreement thus gave the union leaders, most of whom were bureaucratic moderates with political views far to the right of the party leaders, the means to exercise inordinate financial leverage on the party’s strike activities. Understandably, the SPD radicals were concerned that the union leadership would now be more prone to negotiate with employers than to engage in strike actions of any kind, not to speak of a general strike even for economic ends.

As alarming as this agreement was to the radicals, a similar agreement, also worked out by Bebel, went even further in according power to the trade unions at the expense of the party. For years the union leadership had resented its secondary role to the party leadership in matters concerning the policies of the social democratic movement as a whole. With the aid of rising party pragmatists such as Friedrich Ebert, Bebel now negotiated an agreement with the union leaders that would give parity to the party’s Executive Committee and the unions’ General Commission in all matters of policy—a virtual abdication of the political leadership to institutions that were supposed to function merely as the “schools” for social democracy.

Introduced to the SPD’s Mannheim Congress of 1906, the resolutions approving these agreements produced a furor in the party’s Left, led by Luxemburg and Kautsky, who appropriately regarded them as outright betrayals of basic Marxist principles. In response, Bebel engaged in verbal acrobatics that outdid his most sublime feats of logical manipulation. Simultaneously damning and praising all parties to the dispute, the old man eventually relegated the general strike for use as a strictly defensive weapon, despite its patendy revolutionary role in Russia. And the fact that he managed to win the overwhelming majority of the delegates to his posidon (323 to 62) revealed how far the SPD as well as its most important living founder had moved to the right, clearly placing narrow organizational considerations above once-sacrosanct principles. Like it or not, the German Social Democratic Party had ceased to be a revolutionary organization and in fact was permeated by reformist, even conservative sentiments.

The Mannheim Congress was a decisive event: it provided official confirmation that the union leadership was now dominant in party affairs. As Peter Gay observes:

The labor leaders had good cause for celebration [at Mannheim]; their great victory gave them far more than equality: in effect, it meant the surrender of the party to the unions. It prepared the way for the ascendancy of party bureaucrats who were not “theorists” and who “could get along” with the union leaders.... In short, it set the stage for the failure of the party in 1914 and for its breakup during the war.[596]

Needless to say, the new agreements marked a de facto rupture with what remained of Marxism within the party. The General Commission of the Free Unions, expressing its satisfaction at the vanquishing of revolutionary politics within the party, commented:

It is to be hoped that the frequent ructions during the Party and the trade unions between 1905 and 1906 will have a lasting good effect in that the complete cooperation, which now exists, will never again be endangered by theorists and writers who attach a greater value to mere revolutionary slogans than to practical work inside the labor movement.[597]

Moreover, the party’s preoccupation with parliamentarism was taking it ever farther away from anything Marx had envisioned. Instead of working to overthrow the bourgeois state, the SPD, with its intense focus on elections, had virtually become an engine for getting votes and increasing its Reichstag representation within the bourgeois state. Education along socialist lines was giving way to mobilization along pragmatic lines, with the result that the party devoted ever more of its attention to immediate, everyday reforms at the expense of fundamental change. The more ardul the SPD became in these realms, the more its membership and electorate increased and, with the growth of new pragmatic and opportunistic adherents, the more it came to resemble a bureaucratic machine for acquiring power under capitalism rather than a revolutionary organization to eliminate it.

THE “MASS PARTY”

By 1914, the German Social Democratic Party had around a million members, and its affairs were managed by more than 4,000 paid functionaries and 11,000 ordinary salaried employes. It supported innumerable periodicals— local, regional, and national—many of which were dailies, others weeklies, still others monthlies, with a collective circulation of a million and a half readers. The pleasures of being a social democrat are suggested by the multitude of different hobbies and vocadons to which the party’s periodicals appealed: cyclists could read the Arbeiter-Radfahrer (The Worker-Cyclist), the organ of the Worker-Cyclist Federation in Offenbach; choral groups could read the Deutsche Arbeiter-Sangerzeitung (The German Worker-Singers’ News), the organ of the German Worker-Singers’ Union. There were periodicals and organizations for gymnasts, temperance advocates, even stenographers and innkeepers. All of these papers were published in the thousands of copies, some exceeding 100,000. Social democratic societies, clubs, associations, and groups abounded everywhere to meet every personal need, taste, or proclivity. The official circulation of the party’s humor magazine, the Wahre Jakob, soared to nearly 400,000. So frequendy was it passed from hand to hand that its total readership is estimated to have been about 1.5 million devoted readers. Significandy, the party’s theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, founded by Kautsky, did not exceed 11,000 readers, although it was the most intellectually sophisticated Marxist periodical in the world. The official social democratic newspaper, the Vorwarts, had a peak circulation of 165,000—a high figure for the organ of a national Social Democratic Party, to be sure, but trivial by comparison with Wahre Jakob, which addressed the tastes of the ordinary SPD member in search of lighter fare.

Joining the SPD meant entering an all-encompassing subculture, with activities to account for almost all of one’s spare time. A member could attend his or her monthly local party meeting; a union meeting; lectures; local and district conferences; and the meetings of various cultural and professional associations devoted to ancillary activities from health to sports. There were festivals to enjoy, demonstrations in which to march—especially May Day parades, which were safely held on weekends, even if May 1 fell on a weekday—and protest meetings and electoral rallies to attend. Social democratic youths could go on hikes and encampments, and hold their own conferences, meetings, and rallies.

All of this made social democracy a veritable way of life for the ordinary worker. It fostered a commitment to the party that was not easily swayed by dissident ideas nor easily troubled by breaches of political integrity. One’s friends and even one’s family members were often social democrats, and one’s political rivals were the Catholic adherents of the Center Party—which had its own array of popular associations. The two groups could be distinguished from each other by their insignia, modes of dress, and even modes of expression as well as by their political opinions.

On the eve of the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party polled 34 percent of the votes for the Reichstag and gained 110 out of the 396 seats, thus making it the largest party in Germany. About 220 party members sat in state legislatures, more than 2,800 in city parliaments, and some 9,000 in rural town and village councils. Although social democratic deputies at all levels of government made themselves accessible to their constituents— especially during elections, when party members might be induced to campaign in their behalf—members of the Reichstag Fraktion (or caucus) in particular had become more and more removed from any lived contact with the membership. Consummately moderate in oudook, these deputies detested the “wild” radicals whose theories were aired in the party press and whose confrontational notions discredited them with Germany’s “better classes.” In time, some deputies even took issue with moderates within the party leadership itself who, in their eyes, were not quite moderate enough.

Indeed, far too many SPD Reichstag deputies (over twenty percent) were not only party members but leaders of the increasingly conservative trade unions. Their long climb through the trade-union apparatus to positions of state power and their deadening pragmatism made them disdainful of theories, principles, and, above all, seemingly impractical intellectuals. Placing a strong emphasis on realpolitik, they despised the idealism that had cemented the party during its “outlaw period,” and they disdained—sometimes with a bad conscience—party figures who still embodied the radical beliefs of their younger days. At the same time, like most parvenus, many of them harbored a covert admiration for the very nobility, the wealthy bourgeoisie, and even the military, which their program committed them to oppose.

The Reichstag Fraktion, in turn, became an independent power in its own right, literally standing apart from the party and party members and demanding political autonomy from the party’s institutions. They seemed to regard themselves as representatives not of the regular SPD voters alone but of all their constituents, including transitory supporters and the less politicized and radicalized ones. With the passage of time, the results of this devolution of party leadership and parliamentary deputation alike toward accommodation with the existing system were to prove ruinous, both to social democracy and to Germany.

Despite its enormous size and following, the German Social Democratic Party was by no means amorphous. Contrary to conventional myth, it was a highly centralized party whose congresses enforced strict discipline when necessary and had full authority to expel dissidents who they felt diverged sharply from the party’s doctrine. This discipline was especially enforced within the Reichstag Fraktion, where on any given issue the delegates were obliged to vote in favor of the policy adopted by the caucus’s majority, whether they personally agreed with it or not—and no matter how raucous and even bitter the debate within the caucus had been. In certain respects, this centralisdc structure set a precedent for Lenin’s views of how a socialist party should be structured in the face of opponents and in dmes of crisis. Although the party culture nurtured broad participation by members in its many social activities, the centralism and the discipline of the party structure served to restrict members’ involvement in making important decisions, as witness the leadership’s back-room concessions to the unions and the enormous power accrued by the party bureaucracy.

Taken as a whole, the history of the German Social Democratic Party and its unions from 1905 to 1914 is a gray story of moral decomposition amid stupendous economic growth, and of the primacy of quantity—in the form of members, Reichstag deputies, and financial resources (more than 20 million marks, an enormous sum in those days, were tied up in party business investments)—over quality, in the form of talent, revolutionary resoluteness, and theoretical insight By 1914, the party was largely a conservative organization, despite its radical rhetoric. Its rejection of the general strike, as well as its pragmatic agreements with the government on dubious legislation, which compromised the party’s principles, foreshadowed its collapse with the coming of the First World War.

Nonetheless, it is possible, indeed customary, to speak of a discemable Left, Right, and Center in the German Social Democratic Party during the years before the First World War. David W. Morgan, in his fascinating account, describes these three basic divisions. The Left, by remaining within the party instead of forming a new one, inadvertendy perpetuated the illusion that the SPD was in some way the inheritor of the Marxian legacy. It was led primarily by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin, as well as the aging and feeble Franz Mehring and a younger generation led by the litde-known Paul Levi, Wilhelm Pieck, and other future founders of the German Communist Party.[598] These leftists consistendy opposed the Revisionists’ attempts to ease social democrats into positions of power or even to use the existing state to create a socialist society. To be sure, they themselves did not reject parliamentarism as such; rather, they regarded election campaigns as educational endeavors and Reichstag deputies primarily as public educators, not as mere legislators. Nor did the leftists, unlike the Revisionists, accept any agreements with bourgeois parties in the Reichstag. They adamandy adhered to the party’s traditional precept of refusing to occupy ministerial positions in the government Again, following a traditional party precept the Left opposed any vote in support of the government’s budgets, as an indication of its noncooperation with the bourgeois state. In 1914 it would firmly oppose the war as imperialist, calling for international proletarian solidarity against all the contending governments and the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system.

As for the political temperature of the party membership—the ordinary rank- and-file members—by far the majority could be found in the broad Center, very often content with the social insurance and other benefits in the existing society that the party defended on their behalf. Most of the party executive, editors, and leading bureaucrats were also part of the Center, as were Friedrich Ebert, the most colorless, supremely bureaucratic embodiment of the party’s pragmatic malaise, and Carl Legien, the chieftain of the Free Unions, who in fact belonged to its right wing.

The most important leaders of the SPD’s Center, ironically, were some of the very men who presented themselves rhetorically as guardians of Marxist orthodoxy, namely Bebel up to his death in 1913, Hugo Haase who replaced him as party chairman, and Karl Kautsky. While the Center, in theory, accepted the basic party precepts upheld by the Left, in practice it dealt with them as naive and idealistic encumbrances. Like a congregation reciting the Decalogue, the Center mouthed the party’s basic precepts all the more to ignore them in daily life. As the SPD aged into growing respectability, it thus reinforced an ugly reification of language: even the most stolid of its bureaucrats and many of its members could rhetorically hail the struggle against war, invoke proletarian solidarity, and pay lip service to class conflict—only to follow an opportunistic direction in the face of a crisis, with lowered banners and sullied placards.

There is little doubt that this Center, giving due allowance to all its gradations, never accepted insurrection as a means to achieve a socialist society. Even in the 1890s, Wilhelm Liebknecht (he died in 1900 at the age of seventy- four) had mouthed phrases about the need to use force in dislodging capitalism, only to waver and make compromises with reformists to preserve party stability. Kautsky, ostensibly a bastion of Marxist orthodoxy, abhorred violence and civil war; his own ideas of a revolutionary strategy did not go beyond the need to gain an electoral majority in the Reichstag and confront the government with his highly centralistic version of socialism. Bebel, as we have seen, was the architect of the most significant compromise that the party made with its Marxian heritage. His popularity as a leader of the Center, however, remained undiminished. Perhaps most accurate is the comment that George Ledebour, a left-centrist Reichstag deputy, once made to the young Leon Trotsky; the SPD, he declared, consists of “twenty per cent radicals, thirty per cent opportunists—and the rest follow Bebel,” honoring radical rhetoric in the breach.[599]

Reformism sank such deep roots into the SPD that when a successful takeover of Germany by an armed proletariat actually became feasible, the party completely failed the revolutionary workers in its most basic commitments. The party leadership showed itself to be, at best, liberal democratic in orientation, seeking to change an empire into a republic by making a number of social reforms, and at worst, overdy counterrevolutionary, a prop for reaction cynically draped in a red flag, mouthing empty radical verbiage to confuse its followers.

The party’s ideological right wing, notably Bernstein’s Revisionists, needless to say, made no attempt to espouse revolutionary Marxian principles. It expressly viewed capitalism as a long-lived, stable social order that could not be overthrown by revolution and sought to jettison Marxist theories of growing economic immiseration (Verelendung) and impending class war. So numerous were the votes cast against Revisionist proposals at party and International congresses that the followers of Bernstein sometimes seemed to exist merely as a foil for the Left and the Center to attack. But despite their numerous defeats, Revisionists shared more common ground with the party membership than the party’s Marxian rhetoric allowed most observers of the SPD to perceive.

More disturbing—and dangerous—than the Revisionists themselves were outright, run-of-mill reformists such as the trade unionists and the members from the southern German states, who sat in the state legislatures, made shady deals with bourgeois parties, and voted for legislative reforms in virtual disregard of party precepts and Marxian theory. Indeed, more accurately than the Left and the Center, this Right reflected by its behavior the growing drift within the party away from appeals for social revolution and toward appeals for democratic reform.

The consistendy poor showing of the extreme Left can be pardy explained by the enormous economic and social benefits the German working class had gained by the turn of the century. Bismarck had shrewdly courted the proletariat with the most advanced social legislation in the world, and the SPD, by virtue of the additional reforms it gained, provided the German working class with a vested interest in the preservation of capitalism. Approximately eleven million German workers acquired retirement benefits and medical insurance; and eighteen million were insured against accidents—benefits that were virtually unknown to workers elsewhere in Europe. Almost every detail of workplace life, from maximum hours to the number of latrines in a shop, were regulated by governmental legislation. Bebel, who had a canny ability to understand the German proletariat and seemingly read its mind, acidly noted as he watched a parade of Prussian Guards in 1892, “Look at those fellows; eighty per cent of them are Berliners and Social Democrats but if there was trouble they would shoot me down at a word of command from above.”[600] In any case, as long as no major crisis compelled the German Social Democratic Party to finally cast off its radical rhetoric and show itself fully as a reformist party, nearly all its leading members could smugly pay tribute to Marxian ideas and radical party precepts. Although the SPD’s annual congresses had become an ongoing battleground for debates over everything from Revisionism to the role of the general strike, the party managed to maintain a facade of ideological unity up to 1913, when Bebel died after years of balancing the Left and Right without any major defections.

His death marked the end of an era and the overt collapse of the SPD’s revolutionary facade. Only a year later, in August 1914, the long-dreaded challenge came, when the Kaiser demanded that the Reichstag vote for war credits to support the army in the First World War. How would the SPD deputies vote? Would they remain true to their Marxian internationalism and reject the war as imperialist? Or would they succumb to nationalism and vote to support the war effort? The party was too heavily invested in its presses, offices, and properties, and too committed to reforming and thereby preserving the very society it was sworn to undo, to respond to the crisis of 1914 in a revolutionary manner. Its parliamentary Fraktion, despite bitter disagreements by a minority of deputies, voted as a bloc in favor of credits to finance the war.

The only surprising aspect of this vote was the incredulity expressed by many radicals both within and without the party when they heard of the SPD’s vote in the Reichstag in August 1914. Its capitulation could have been foreseen years earlier, especially after it gave in to the trade unions at Mannheim, and its own tepid behavior at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the International, where a sizable part of the SPD delegation hesitated to take an adamant stand against the Reich in the event of a war. The astonishment of the socialist Left is perhaps understandable only because the German Social Democratic Party was internationally regarded as the foundation, indeed the model party, of a Marxist International—indeed, “the party of Marx”—whose congresses brought together the most advanced revolutionaries of the period.

THE SPD AND THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

The German Social Democratic Party enjoyed enormous eminence among the delegates to the Second International and shaped the organization, structurally and politically, in its own image. As a result, the International became heir to many of the same conservative tendencies that beleaguered the German party.

The first indication that the SPD’s influence on the International would mark a drift to the right appeared as early as the founding congress on the Rue Petrelle in 1889. The issue, as we have seen, was May Day, the proletarian “holiday” intended to express international working-class solidarity and militancy. The militants at the congress wanted to pass a resolution supporting full participation in the protests, calling on workers’ organizations to join in strikes and demonstrations on May 1. By contrast, the Germans, as we have seen, were adamantly opposed to any work stoppage that might be suggestive of a general strike, even if only for a single day. May Day, according to the SPD, was to be a “holiday” or at most a weekend or evening display of working-class strength.

Accordingly, when the Rue Petrelle congress passed a resolution supporting May Day, the SPD delegates added a rider that left it to the discretion of the individual national parties to determine what kind of specific action would take place. The SPD’s anemic rider was adopted, although it produced considerable resentment among the more militant organizations in the new International. That the German position could have been adopted at all demonstrated how shaky, as early as 1889, were the revolutionary commitments of the professed revolutionary movements of Europe—even in the matter of a symbolic one-day work stoppage. The resentment of the militants resurfaced during the International’s Congress at Zurich in 1893, when Victor Adler, challenging the SPD’s cautious behavior, carried a vote in favor of demonstrations on May 1, irrespective of whether it was a workday. The German delegation furiously opposed Adler’s resolution. Shortly afterwards, in Germany itself, the SPD turned the Adler resolution into a dead letter at its annual party congress at Cologne, where it openly rejected the use of the general strike except for very restricted goals. As it turned out, the inability of the Second International to commit itself to participation in an international day of proletarian solidarity augured the conservative drift that was soon to come.

Once the International adopted Marxism as its official ideology in 1893 and expelled the anarchists in 1896, its meetings became highly stylized, with well- ordered speeches, committees, and resolutions, and of course, the prescribed and highly decorative red banners of socialism. Form increasingly dominated substance, and loyalties were often based as much on the delegates’ feelings of awe for particular socialist leaders as on the content of their orations. After 1900 an International Socialist Bureau in Brussels functioned as a clearinghouse for reports and data on the labor movement, chaired by Emile Vandervelde, the stormy petrel of the Belgian Workers’ Party. It was as close to a permanent coordinating body as the Second International would ever create in its nearly three decades of active existence, and its powers were minimal, even meager, leaving all the associated parties to follow their own whims and desires, with little or no regard for one another’s behavior.

In all, the Second International held nine congresses between 1889 and 1912. Its resolutions at these congresses, to be sure, established certain standards of revolutionary political behavior—an emphasis on revolution over reform, the rejection in principle of entry into bourgeois governments, opposition to a European war and to militarism generally, and even support for the general arming of the people. But like the resolutions of the SPD, these standards defined revolutionary Marxian socialism only on paper and were often honored in the breach.

Not only did the International became a replica of the German Social Democratic Party in its rhetorical commitment to revolution and internationalism, but to a great extent it too was bedeviled by Revisionist tendencies, especially over the issue of the general strike. When the strike issue came up, the International essentially threw it back into the laps of the individual parties, which fatally removed it from the arena of worldwide proletarian action. But the general strike issue refused to disappear from the International’s agenda, any more than it could elude the agenda of the German party, especially after the 1905 Revolution in Russia. As in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades continually pushed, in the International, for the right to use the general strike as a revolutionary weapon rather than as a means to gain limited ends such as the eight-hour day or suffrage. Her efforts were entirely without avail—but the issue hovered over the International like a ghost, especially as a worldwide war approached.

In fact, the all-important question of how the International would respond to a world war produced a major division between Left and Right at several congresses. The Left should, in fact, have produced an open split, but it failed to do so because of a misplaced commitment to the fetish of organizational “unity.” At the 1907 Stuttgart Congress, following the passage of a tepid antiwar resolution introduced by Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg and the principal Russian delegates at the Congress, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Julius Martov, introduced a more militant amendment, which the delegates dutifully adopted. The International thus declared:

If a war threatens to break out, it is a duty of the working class in the countries affected ... to make every effort to prevent the war by all means which seem to them appropriate.... Should a war none the less break out, it is their duty to ... make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.[601]

This resolution was of crucial importance. It went beyond purely defensive action to prevent or oppose a war, such as a refusal to vote for war credits and engage in demonstrations. Indeed, it essentially called upon social democrats to use the conflict and its socially destabilizing effects to promote an outright proletarian insurrection against capitalism itself. But even this leftist resolution was diluted, as G.D.H. Cole points out:

Nothing was said about the general strike, or about insurrection—the Germans saw to that; but thanks to the Russian addition the prescription for action went a long way beyond the mere parliamentary protests which alone had been explicidy set forth in Bebel’s draft. The general strike was not ruled out—it was passed over in silence; and the same can be said of insurrection, which can indeed be regarded as implicit in the final resolution.[602]

Hence, on the war issue, the International committed itself to nothing—and as time was to show, it would do nothing when hostilities broke out, to its lasting disgrace.

No less haunting than the general strike issue was the failure of the International to decisively reject the entry of social democrats into bourgeois cabinets, a crisis that was precipitated by Alexandre Millerand a socialist member of the French Chamber of Deputies, who agreed to become a minister in Rene Waldeck-Rousseau’s government in 1899. Although Millerand was eventually expelled from the French Socialist Party, the International at its Fifth Congress in Paris in 1900 passed a resolution (prepared by Kautsky) against “entrism,” as it was called—but very noticeably, without condemning it entirely. The resolution, shepherded through the Congress byjean Jaures (who later became the indubitable leader of the French Socialists), was symptomatic of the inability of the Left revolutionaries to shake off the influence of governmental opportunists within the International. The equivocal resolution satisfied neither the Right nor the Left at the Congress: while the Left was appalled by any participation in the bourgeois state, French and south German reformists were piqued that any restriction at all was placed on their freedom to form governing coalitions with bourgeois parties.

To be sure, the International repeatedly and ritualistically condemned Bernstein’s Revisionism and thereby declared its nominal adherence to revolutionary socialism. But as in the case of the German SPD, such routine declarations carried less and less weight in practice. In nearly every European social democratic party, revolutionaries of the word were making parliamentary and political compromises that amounted to a de facto acceptance of Bernstein’s approach. Millerand’s entry into the French government was followed by that of Aristide Briand, who became minister of education in 1906; then by John Bums, the British labor leader, who simply abandoned socialism altogether and entered the Liberal ministry (ironically, resigning from it because of his opposition to the war in 1914). These were only the more notable and explicit defections to “Millerandism,” as the disease was called. Bernstein’s Revisionism reflected practices that were already adopted in nearly all the parties of the International well in advance of the outbreak of war in 1914. Indeed, many of the parties affiliated with the Second International eventually provided Europe, during and after the war years, with prominent bourgeois statesmen, some of whom became outright patriotic chauvinists.

As the first decade of the new century drew to its close, the International was faced with the grimmest practical test of all. The likelihood of war challenged it to take an antiwar position less tepid than the one it had adopted at Stuttgart. At its Copenhagen Congress in 1910, Keir Hardie, the British socialist, together with the French socialists and delegates of the British Labor Party, introduced an amendment to the antiwar resolution that recommended the use of a general strike in case of war. Although Hardie tried to limit the applicability of the general strike to workers engaged only in war industries and only in belligerent countries rather than the international working class as a whole, his resolution foundered on the objections of the right-wing tendencies within the International, which regarded the general strike as too provocative. Nor did the resolution proposed by Hardie (who was more of a pacifist than a revolutionist) satisfy the Left, which supported the general strike but also thought the resolution should state, as Luxemburg and Lenin’s did, that a war would almost certainly weaken capitalism and provide the opportunity for a proletarian insurrection. After much stormy debate, all mention of a general strike was eventually written out of the antiwar resolution, and the International went on with business as usual.

In the end, the Copenhagen Congress did what it all too often did: it left the question of antiwar activities to the discretion of its individual member parties. This repeated avoidance of the most pressing issue facing the world proletariat—by shifting its responsibility for opposing war to its constituent organizations—clearly revealed the International’s refusal to deal with a war crisis that concerned all of Europe: indeed, it abdicated its duty to act in the interests of the proletariat as a whole, crassly subverting the very internationalism on which its existence was predicated. In this respect, the Second International had committed suicide long before Europe’s armies were sent into a horrifying four-year bloodbath in August 1914. An emergency congress held at Basel in November 1912 to take up the war issue again produced nothing more than ruminations about the importance of preventing a then-raging Balkan conflict from turning into a continental war. Apart from pious platitudes about international working-class solidarity, the International still had no firm strategy in place should a general European war erupt.

The spirit of internationalism, however, was not entirely dead in European social democracy. Shordy before the outbreak of the war, Leon Jouhaux, the chief of the French syndicalist CGT, appealed to Carl Legien, the chief of the social democratic German Free Unions, to join him in calling for a general strike against the oncoming conflict. So deeply was German social democracy afflicted with the pathologies of nationalism and expediency that Legien responded only with an icy silence. Indeed, Legien’s silence in the face of Jouhaux’s plea was brutally eloquent: so corrupt was the German party that it indirecdy promoted the outbreak of war by freeing the Kaiser’s hands to send his armies plunging into Belgium.

In August 1914 the internationalist effusions of European social democracy became chaff in the wind, as social democrats in most countries voted in their legislatures or resolved in their parties to support the war effort of their respective countries. Shaped largely by the German social democrats, the Second International ignominiously dissolved; indeed, many of its leaders, with a rudeness bom of chauvinism, refused even to speak to their erstwhile colleagues in belligerent countries, who had suddenly been transformed by the war from comrades into enemies. “Western Marxism,” as its academic acolytes were to call it some seventy years later, proved completely bankrupt in the face of the first great crisis of the twentieth century. When the SPD decided to vote for war credits in August 1914, uniformed German socialists, with the blessing of their party, marched off to slaughter their Belgian and French comrades in the trenches of the Western Front. Even many leading anarchists, men of the stature of Peter Kropotkin, supported the Allied cause, to the consternation of their anti-statist comrades. The International disappeared without a whimper, leaving its carefully forged proclamations of class solidarity to the gnawing teeth of mice.

The forty-three-year period between the crushing of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War proved to be a tragic interregnum in the history of revolutionary movements. Yet despite the basic conservatism of the Second International, the spirit of revolt did not disappear completely. It resurfaced with furious intensity in Russia, where capitalism had only begun to intrude, ending the paralyzes that had been produced by European social democracy for nearly three decades.