File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 21


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]"




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