Date: Mon, 02 Jun 1997 19:40:37 -0700 From: Ben Seattle <icd-AT-communism.org> Subject: M-I: (POF-4) [1 of 2] The German Social-Democratic Party & the _Critical Mass_ Productions presents: __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ How to Build the Party of the Future __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ by Ben Seattle By continuing our political development and harnessing the the power of the coming revolution in communications -- we can help to lay the foundation for a communist "trend of trends" with the ability to eradicate sectarianism from our ranks, puncture the influence of reformism over a vast audience, capture the imagination of workers in their millions and mobilize our class to ignite a fire that cannot be extinguished. Comrades and friends, This is a brief survey. Some of you may be able to supply necessary correction to the history that I sketch out here. __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ Chapter 4 The German Social-Democratic Party and the Great Betrayal __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ __/ "The European war of 1914-15 is doubtlessly beginning to do some good by revealing to the advanced class of the civilized countries what a foul and festering abscess has developed within its parties, and what an unbearably putrid stench comes from some source." -- Lenin, May-June 1915 "The Collapse of the Second International" Most of us know (or should know) something of the history of the German Social-Democratic Party (the original communist party, advised and assisted by Marx and Engels) which, on August 4, 1914, solemnly declared "In the hour of danger we will not leave our fatherland unprotected" and voted for war credits--and thereby put its stamp of approval on the mutual slaughter of worker by worker known as the first World War. * * * The German Social-Democratic Party consisted of something like an alliance between different sections. Some of these sections were further from the conditions of the working class (and closer to a comfortable life-style) than others. When push came to shove (it always does) these sections betrayed (they always do). The problem was that the section which did not betray (which became the Spartacists) found that, without the other sections, it *lacked an apparatus* to communicate its views to the workers. The historic failure of the left in Germany was not that they carried on various forms of collaboration with a section which would eventually betray the workers--but that for too long they were *organizationally dependent* on this section. The German lefts failed to build an independent organization that could skillfully combine legal and illegal work and function in the face of repression. When the crisis hit (with the declaration of war in August 1914 and the largely spontaneous revolution at war's end in November 1918) the left was organizationally unprepared. When it counted, it seems that the Sparticists in Germany had no ruthlessly firm centralizing force (ie: unlike the Bolsheviks had built over the years) to guide the revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and crush the counter-revolution. Because of this error, the centers of revolution in each local area were one by one suppressed. For this error, the principal leaders of the left (Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Leibnecht and others) paid with their lives. ================================4a. communication and competition ================================ "When you inquire into the causes of the counter-revolutionary successes, you are met on every hand with the reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That who 'betrayed' the people, which reply may be very true or not, according to circumstances, but under no circumstances does it explain anything-- it does not even show how it came to pass that the 'people' allowed themselves to be thus betrayed." -- Karl Marx, "Revolution and Counter-Revolution" "A very great defect in revolutionary Marxism in Germany as a whole is its lack of a compact illegal organization that would systematically pursue its own line and educate the masses in the spirit of the new tasks; such an organization would also have to take a definite stand on opportunism and Kautskyism." -- Lenin, July 1916, "The Junius Pamphlet" Communication (between revolutionaries and workers) and the need for open competition (between the revolutionary and reformist trends for the support and allegiance of workers) are two themes that strike me as being of interest here. If, during the pre-war period, the left wing of the German Social-Democratic Party (SDAP) had built its own independent organization, with its own press organs and the ability to put out illegal literature in the face of repression, it would have been in a much stronger position to: a) educate the masses in the spirit of militant organization and b) expose the growing opportunism of the right-wing (mainly the trade union leaders and the more open reformists) and the center (Kautsky and much of the leadership) of the SDAP. I should point out here that creating such independent organization would not necessarily have been easy nor would it have guaranteed victory when the inevitable crisis hit. It is speculation to say that an entirely different turn of events might have taken place. Science does not permit us to know the answers to such questions. But such questions, about the past, are not the issue anyhow. The issue--is to apply these lessons today. In reviewing some of the obstacles faced by the revolutionary wing of this party, I am, somewhat artificially, dividing these obstacles into (1) government repression and (2) the actions of the reformists who came to dominate the party. As the collaboration of the reformists and the German military authorities developed, eventually there remained, as we shall see, less and less distinction between them. ========================================4b. Government censorship and repression ======================================== "Not only in wartime but positively in any acute political situation, to say nothing of periods of revolutionary mass action of any kind, the governments of even the _freest_ bourgeois countries will threaten to dissolve the legal organizations, seize the funds, arrest the leaders, and threaten other 'practical consequences' of the same kind." -- Lenin ("The Collapse of the Second International") The German government steadily harrassed and censored the SDAP in the entire period of its existence prior to the war. The SDAP was formed (more or less) in the period from 1863 to 1875. (It was the founding Gotha Congress of 1875 which prompted Marx to write the famous "Critique of the Gotha Program" where he summarized a communist economy as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!".) Prussian law forbid the formation of regionwide and state wide organizations and the German party developed a quasi-legal system of "Vertrauenesmann" (ie: a system of trusted contacts) to connect the local bodies. The anti-socialist law (1878-1890) was introduced by Bismark which outlawed the party, trade unions and the legal socialist press. Electoral activity was the only activity the law permitted. By September 1879 the SDAP had set up an illegal paper "Sozialdemocrat" that was printed in Switzerland and smuggled into Germany. Despite relatively heavy repression, the SDAP increased its vote in the Reichstag elections from half a million in 1877 to 1.4 million by 1890 and became the largest political party in the country. By 1895, the party had 75 papers, 39 of which were dailies and some of which had circulations over 100,000. After the period of the anti-socialist law, there were still heavy restrictions on what could be said in the legal press. The Erfurt Congress of 1891, for example, could not legally include in its program the demand for a republic in Germany. Youth groups, which sprang up spontaneously around the party in 1904-1906, were illegal in most of Germany and by 1908 were illegal in all of it. In 1907, Karl Leibnecht was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for his pamphlet "Militarism and Anti-Militarism". By the time of the first World War military censorship of all publications prevailed and meetings to discuss anti-war politics were suppressed. By 1916 the revolutionary wing of the party had finally organized itself independently and was known as the Spartacists. But without an organization experienced in fighting repression, they did not have an easy time of it. In 1916 Liebnecht is arrested for "treasonous" statements in his May Day speech. Shortly thereafter Luxemburg, Mehring, Dunker and countless other radicals are arrested under military orders of preventive detention. After the November 1918 revolution broke out, the reformist wing of the party (which by now had finally manuevered itself into ruling the country--as puppets of the military authorities) collaborated in the assassinations of the imprisoned Luxemburg and Liebnecht. [4.1] ===============================================4c. Censorship of revolutionaries by reformists =============================================== "In the long run such a policy can only lead one's own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis, automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed?" -- Engels to Kautsky, June 29, 1891 (quoted by Lenin in "State and Revolution") It should be noted that from the beginning the German Social-Democratic Party was something of a mixed bag. Opportunist views had always circulated thru it. Revolutionary views were often opposed or suppressed. Marx and Engels both criticized the program of the founding conference at Gotha. Marx wrote his letter to Bracke (ie: the famous "Critique of the Gotha Program") on May 5, 1875. This letter was not published until 1891. The letter of Engels to Babel in March 1875 was published thirty-six years later, in 1911. Engels wrote "Anti-Duhring" as a series of articles between September 1876 and July 1878 in order to oppose the rising influence of the reformist Duhring. One supporter of Duhring, Most, put forward a resolution at the Congress of 1877 aimed at prohibiting the publication of these articles in the party's central paper, "Vorwarts", on the grounds that, supposedly "they do not interest the majority of the readers". Another, Wahlteich, wrote that Engels' articles had caused great damage to the party and added: "let the professors engage in polemics if they care to do so, but the Vorwarts is not the place in which to conduct them". The prestige of Marx and Engels, however, was such that the articles appeared with only a slight delay. Following the end of the anti-socialist law (1878-1890) there were manifestations of struggle in the party between reformist and revolutionary views. Engels, near the end of his life, played a role here in denouncing the opportunist and reformist views which would eventually come to dominate the party. In his June 29, 1891 letter to Kautsky (quoted immediately above) Engels warned of the opportunism springing from "fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law". This letter was suppressed for ten years and only published in 1901. Bernstein provided a theoretical voice for all the reformist trends in the party beginning around 1896. There was a period of struggle against this and Berstein's reformist theories were condemned by the Dresden Congress in 1903. But the reformists views, while "officially" rejected, continued to guide the actions and practice of the reformist wing of the party, centered around the trade unions and the Reichstag deputies. The rot continued to deepen. The Russian revolution of January 1905 had a big influence in Germany. A strike of miners in the Ruhr basin broke out and rapidly spread out of the control of union leaders to the whole mining region. The strike involved both organized and unorganized workers and raised not only economic demands but a political demand that the Prussian state take responsibility for the conditions in the mines. The trade union leaders were unable to stop this strike so they resorted to the tactic of leading it and then calling it off. By this time there were sections of the party press which were denouncing this treachery. The Jena Congress of 1905 reorganized the party somewhat. By this time the party had left, right and center sections but the left section seems to have had had no *independent organization* within the party. Rather, the center of the party worked to keep the lefts captive to the illusion that the party *as a whole* had a capacity for revolutionary development. I will make a short note here. I am not terribly familiar with any of this history. I have gotten most of my information from Lenin's "State and Revolution" and a 1991 report from the Boston comrades of the defunct Marxist-Leninist Party. But I think it should be clear to readers today that, certainly by this point, the revolutionary wing of the German Social-Democratic Party should have been working to create their *own* organization, similar to the way the Bolsheviks in Russia had created their own independent organization. Unfortunately, this did not happen for another ten years, and then only in the midst of martial law and extremely difficult conditions. The revolutionary wing of the party was catching on to the irreconcilable nature of the struggle against the reformist wing (which wanted to build the party along lines that would leave it incapable of defying the restrictions of bourgeois legality). For example, Rosa Luxemburg (probably in 1906) wrote: "The plain truth is that August [Babel--the leader of the German party] and still more the others, have pledged themselves to ... parliamentarism, and whenever anything happens that transcends the limits of parliamentary action, they are hopeless--no, worse that hopeless, because they do their utmost to force the movement back into parliamentary channels." Rosa Luxemburg, about this time, wrote "Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions" which opposed the reformist wing of the party and their sabotage of the motion towards mass economic and political strikes. I have not read this work, but the report I have indicates that the organizational views it contained were quite weak. Liebnecht, at the Mannheim Congress in 1906, proposes sustained anti-militarist agitation among the youth but this is quashed by the party leadership. As we have seen, Liebnecht took this up on his own and was imprisoned for his efforts the following year. I think what this shows is that such work could not be successfully carried out: (a) by a party such as the German Social-Democratic Party (which appears to have been too far gone by then) (b) by a small group in the absense of an organization capable of skillfully carrying out illegal work. The relationship between the party leadership and the German military authorities is continuing to develop. Relationships such as this are everyday events in politics and often are carried out with no "paper trail". But, prior to Liebnecht's arrest, an exchange takes place during the Reichstag budget debates which partially illustrates this development: Two of the party delegates are trying to be as patriotic as anyone else. They say they would vote for the military budget under certain conditions and add that they oppose harsh military discipline because it impedes fighting efficiency. The war minister responds that this is a welcome stand but that if they really mean it==they should suppress the left press in the party that is putting out anti-militarist propaganda, especially Liebnecht, and suppress the youth movement that is carrying on propaganda that undermines the national defense. In this way the bourgeoisie points out to the party leadership what they must do. In 1908, in connection with new laws making youth groups illegal, the party leadership works hard to skillfully liquidate this phenomena. The party tells the youth groups that if they disband, that it will set up a central commission for agitation among youth manned by those over 18 and provide legal cover for their work. Some of the youth groups submitted to this and some did not, but it provides a good example of how the party was by now working to suppress independent political motion that was unacceptable to the bourgeosie. In February-April 1910, street demonstrations over lack of voting rights break out at the same time as massive strikes by miners and construction workers. Luxemburg submits an article to "Vorwarts" (the main party newspaper) saying that the party must work to support and develop this motion or it will peter out. Vorwarts refuses to print Luxemburg's article and also censors out references to discussion supporting a mass strike which is taking place at rallies and meetings. Finally, in December 1913, Luxemburg starts up a periodical outside of the party press, called "Socialist Notes". Not too long after this, in July-August, the war breaks out and martial law conditions prevail. The left, now known as the Sparticists, holds its first national conference on January 1, 1916 at Karl Leibnecht's home in Berlin. The Sparticists, in addition to independent work, remain in the German Social-Democratic Party (until they are expelled a year later) in order to: "cross-up and combat the policy of the majority in every way, to protect the masses from the imperialist policy pursued under the cloak of Social Democracy, and to use the party as a recruiting ground for the proletarian, anti-militarist class struggle". This, in my view, was the correct attitude. Unfortunately, by this time much of the leadership of the Sparticists was in prison. ________________________________________________________________ Continued in companion e-mail: "(POF-4) [2 of 2]" --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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