Gary P Steenson, "Not
One Man! Not One Penny!” German
Social Democracy, 1863-1914
Karl
Kautsky
Karl
Kautsky (1854-1938) was the most important of the many hundreds of people who
tried their hands at theory for German social democracy. From the early 1880s
until after the end of the First World War, Kautsky devoted virtually all of his
time and energy to making Marxism the viable doctrine of a
growing working-class movement. To a great extent his success in this
endeavor ensured a continued concern with Marx's work as something other than
simply a fascinating intellectual exercise. Along with Engels, Kautsky was the
chief popularizer of Marxism, and it was his tie with the SPD, more than his
creativity and brilliant interpretation, that made his efforts successful.
Entire generations of SPD intellectuals learned their Marxism from Kautsky, as
did scores of the most prominent figures in the history of Marxism, including
Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg.
Kautsky,
who was born in Prague, came to the German movement from Vienna, where he had
grown up. As a young man he was strongly attracted to socialism because of its
romantic appeal as a defender of the downtrodden and its scientific appeal as
the most rational and historically necessary system of social-economic
organization. The strongest intellectual influences of his early years were the
major so-called natural philosophers - Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Buchner, and
Charles Darwin - who were popularizing the natural-scientific, positivist
outlook that dominated the intellectual atmosphere of the second half of the
nineteenth century in Europe.
Although
he received a formal university education and had originally planned to become a
university or secondary-level teacher, Kautsky's growing attachment to socialism
soon pulled him toward devoting full time to this cause. But the socialist party
in Austria at that time, the mid- to late 1870s, was far too weak to satisfy his
vigorous and eclectic interests. From the very beginning of his career as a
socialist, he was far more concerned with intellectual activities than he was
with politics and organization. The meager socialist press of the Dual Monarchy
could not support him, so he began publishing articles in the newspapers of the
more prominent German movement. Here his work attracted sufficient attention to
cause Karl Hochberg, who already employed Bernstein as a private secretary, to
offer to subsidize him in the pursuit of socialist scholarship. In January 1880
Kautsky arrived in Zurich to begin his nearly half century of devotion to German
socialism
During
the decade of the eighties, Kautsky developed from a romantic natural-scientific
socialist into a consistent Marxist strongly influenced by Engels. In unison
with Bernstein, he carefully studied the major tracts of Marxism, especially Capital
and Anti-Duhring, and gradually
began to write his own political and historical pieces in which Marxian
categories and language played a central role. He also established a close
personal relationship with Engels, and for three years
(1885-1888) he lived in London, where he had almost daily contact with
Marx's closest friend and collaborator and used the marvelous resources , of the
British Museum library to further his studies. The founding in1883 of Die
Neue Zeit gave him a steady income, but more importantly it gave him a
nearly perfect forum from which to propagate Marxism.
In
1887 Kautsky published his first major contribution to the popularization of
Marxism, The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, which was written in London
with regular and important assistance from Engels. The book was a lucid and
fairly comprehensive summary of the economic analysis contained in Marx's Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, Wage
Labor and Capital, Capital, and Poverty
of Philosophy . The major features of Economic
Doctrines were . careful and straightforward definitions of critical Marxian
terms (commodity, surplus value, socially necessary tabor, constant and variable
capital, etc.), a very brief review of the historical development of capitalism,
and a description of the process of capitalist production and the role of labor
in it. In this study Kautsky neither offered new statistical evidence nor
attempted any imaginative extension of Marx's work; it was a summarization and
simplification of Marx's sometimes turgid and complicated notions.
Economic
Doctrines
did more than any other single work to establish Kautsky's reputation as heir t)
Marx and Engels. Over the quarter of a century following its publication, it was
reprinted innumerable times in Germany. In a 1907 guide for socialist lecturers,
Eduard David, one of Kautsky's ideological opponents within the SPD, wrote of
it: "The reading of this book should always precede the study of Marx's
original.
For most people it may serve as a substitute for [the original]."
Within four years of its initial publication, the book was translated into
Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Czech, and it eventually appeared in
eighteen different languages, some in several different translations.
For a great many budding young socialists throughout the Western world in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kautsky's Economic Doctrines
was their first introduction to the thought of Karl Marx.
By
the time the party adopted its new program in 1891, studies like Economic
Doctrines and the polemical exchanges conducted in the pages of the Neue
Zeit had established Kautsky as one of the leading theoreticians of German
social democracy. His part in drafting the new program further enhanced his
reputation, but it was a work of his commissioned by the party executive to
explain and amplify the new program that elevated him to the stature of the
leading theoretician.
This book, called Das Erfurter
Programm (1892) in German but usually entitled The Class Struggle in
English translations, became his most famous and most translated work. It was
also the first major piece in which he presented his own version of Marxism
without tutoring from Engels. After eleven years of close guidance, however,
Kautsky espoused a brand of Marxism that did not differ from Engels in any
essential points.
Das
Erfurter Programm
had five sections. In the first three Kautsky summarized the material he had
presented in Economic Doctrines, defining terms and describing the process of
the development of capitalism. Section four was one of the very few times he
tried to offer some suggestions about the nature of post-capitalist society.
Like most Marxists, Kautsky hesitated to do this because social development is
so complex that specific predictions are difficult to make. He did, however,
speculate that wages would tend to equalize and that workers would gain
"the freedom from labor." The last section of Das
Erfurter Programm dealt with the nature of class relations under capitalism
and the tactics available to the workers.
Here Kautsky emphasized the need for economic organization and
participation in the political arena to advance the interests of the workers.
But he cautioned that the party should steadfastly remain independent,
maintaining its exclusively working-class character, and that no amount of
reform could delay the revolution that would inevitably come with the maturation
of capitalism and the industrial proletariat. These themes-the necessity of
preserving the purity of the party, the importance of participating as fully as
possible in the political process, and the inevitability of the eventual
revolution-were the hallmarks of Kautsky's political recommendations for the SPD.
For
the next twenty-odd years, Kautsky would continue to add to his reputation as
the world's leading Marxist with historical studies and contemporary political
and economic analyses. But the great bulk of his efforts were directed at
guiding the policies of the SPD in appropriate directions. The key to his
success in this task was his partnership with Bebel. The party leader generally
gave Kautsky his lead in political matters, while Kautsky's theory gave a sort
of intellectual validity to Bebel's positions. Although Bebel frequently used
Kautsky's writings to bludgeon political opponents, their relationship was
neither crude nor exploitative. Rather, the two men usually cooperated out of
shared interests and convictions, but they worked on different levels.
Occasionally Kautsky opposed Bebel's positions, and occasionally he won, but
most of the time their partnership was mutually supportive and satisfying.
Between
1891 and 1914 four major episodes demonstrated Kautsky's influence and helped
define his interpretation of acceptable tactics for the SPD. In 1895, largely
because of pressure from the south Germans, the party took up the question of
whether or not it should try to appeal to the peasants and small farmers of the
nation for support; Kautsky played a central role in this discussion. From about
1897 to 1903 the major theoretical concern of the party was the debate over
Bernstein's revisionism; Kautsky entered the fray somewhat belatedly, but he
gradually developed a comprehensive critique. In 1905-1906 the SPD was rent by
disagreements on the issues of the mass strike, and Kautsky's position was very
revealing. Finally, in 1910 the old issue of budget support came up again, and
the aftermath of this debate saw the complete development of Kautsky's centrist
position between the reformists on the right and the radicals on the left.
Serious
concern for the peasantry among social democrats began shortly after the end of
the outlaw period when south German branches of the party realized that they had
very nearly reached the saturation point of their popular appeal if they could
not attract the votes of rural workers and small farmers. The issue was then
further stimulated when, for the first time in German history, a political
association of farmers, the Bund der
Landwirte, was formed. The ability of this group to rouse political
interests among small farmers and its severely anti-socialist stands-it was
essentially a front organization for the very conservative large landowners of
the East Elbe region of Prussia-served to force the issue on the SPD
Led
by Georg von Vollmar , the south German forces gained sufficient support to get
the 1894 Frankfurt party congress to pass a resolution calling for the adoption
of an agrarian policy to be grafted onto the Erfurt program. Two things about
the campaign particularly rankled Kautsky. One was the almost vituperatively
anti-theoretical posture of the major proponents of the agrarian program. Over
and over again these people scornfully rejected any theoretical objections to
including peasants and small farmers among party membership and to making
special programmatic concessions to try to win their votes. Quite naturally
Kautsky resented this attack on his special bailiwick. Kautsky also opposed the
suggestion that the exclusively worker character of the ; party should be
violated. This was contrary to what was for him the most important basic
political principle of any socialist party.
For
a time it seemed that perhaps Kautsky had chosen the wrong side on this issue
because Bebel sided with Vollmar and the south Germans.
Actually Bebel had never been entirely happy with the exclusively worker
party; he had tried to keep worker out of the name of both the SDAP and the SAPD
to avoid offending possible non-worker followers. But the issue did not come up
again in the intervening period, largely because of the radicalizing impact of
the anti socialist law. In 1894 Rebel was securely in control of the party, and
the number of issues on which he lost at parts congresses was very small.
In
the end, however, Bebel, not Kautsky, chose the wrong side this time. Even
though a major theoretical dispute on the agrarian question preceded the 1895
Breslau congress at which the new policy was voted on, the issue was not so much
one of facts and theories as it was an emotional one. At Breslau the agrarian
commission selected the previous year presented its report to the delegates, and
Kautsky offered a counter-resolution calling for the rejection of the
commission's proposal. Vollmar was unable to attend the congress, so Bebel
delivered the major attack on Kautsky's resolution, arguing primarily that even
if the agrarian program was ineffective, it did not cost the workers anything,
and it might win the party some new supporters.
Clara
Zetkin and Kautsky both gave strong speeches in favor of preserving the
proletarian purity of the party. Zetkin met with prolonged stormy applause when
she closed her presentation with a stirring call for the party to reject the
agrarian program and thereby "hold firmly to the revolutionary character of
our party." Kautsky conceded that the new program might win the SPD some
voters but added that such followers would only desert the party "at the
decisive moment." He concluded with an emotional appeal to revolutionary
solidarity: "We face great and difficult battles, and must train
comrades-in-arms who are resolved to share everything with us and to fight the
great fight to the end." Such entreaties got a sympathetic response from
the delegates, most of whom shared the prejudice of urban dwellers against what
Marx referred to in the Communist Manifesto as "the idiocy of rural
life." By a vote of 158 to 63, Kautsky's resolution passed.
The
revisionism controversy, which is dealt with in greater detail below, was for
Kautsky at least as much of a personal crisis as it was a theoretical problem.
Ever since the early eighties, he and Bernstein had been the closest of friends,
and they had conducted a heavy regular correspondence after Kautsky settled in
Germany; until 1901 Bernstein was unable to return to his homeland because of an
outstanding indictment for lese majesty. This personal relationship was, for
Kautsky at least, in large part based on what he thought was a shared commitment
to Marxism, which the two men had learned together. To have Bernstein fall away
from the fold was a traumatic emotional loss for Kautsky, which explains why he
delayed for nearly two years before taking a strong public stand against his
friend
Once
again the issues debated did not always reflect what was really going on in the
party. Basically Bernstein called on the SPD to abandon its revolutionary
rhetoric and begin to act like a reformist party that accepted the existing
system. His position was backed by an elaborate reworking of the basis of
Marxism in which a Kantian-derived ethic replaced the Hegelian-based dialectic
materialism of the original. In practical terms Bernstein emphasized that legal
activities were preferable to illegal ones, that the stronger the movement grew
the more its opponents would be forced into illegal acts, and that the major
task confronting the party vvas democratic and economic reform. He also urged
that non-proletarian elements be embraced by the SPD to strengthen further its
membership and votes.
Much
of Kautsky's part in the debate was devoted to refuting Bernstein's objections
to the fundamentals of Marxism-value theory, the dialectic, materialism, the
class struggle-in fact, virtually everything that made it different from various
forms of ethical socialism that were common in the nineteenth century . As to
Bernstein's more practical contentions, Kautsky found only one of them
objectionable. No one disputed that legal means were better than illegal ones,
Kautsky claimed, nor did anyone doubt that the continued growth of the SPD would
soon force its opposition into desperate, illegal acts. Above all else
democratic political and economic reforms were accepted by the entire party as
the most pressing immediate goals. What then, Kautsky asked, was Bernstein
proposing that should be resisted?
Kautsky
and other critics of Bernstein were on the firmest ground when they rejected his
call for the expansion of the party beyond the industrial working class. Despite
the growing number of reformists in the SPD-people who were inclined to accept
Bernstein's softer approach to politics and who argued that the official
rhetoric was sometimes too strong-this issue brought the overwhelming majority
of the party to reject revisionism. At the 1899 Hanover congress, Bernstein's
theory was rejected by a vote of 216 to 21 when the delegates specifically
denied that the SPD should become "a democratic-socialist reform
party." Four years later, after revisionism refused to die, the 1903
Dresden congress again rejected it, this time by a 288 to 11 tally.
Of
course these votes, like the rejection of an agrarian policy, did not mean an
end to the forces of reformism in the party. Bernstein may not have been able to
convince the SPD to change its theory, but the party's practice continued to be
more like what he favored than not. The apparent paradox here can be explained
if we understand the function of theory within the social-democratic movement.
For the most part theory was not looked upon as a specific guide to action, but
as an expression of the deeply felt sense of solidarity of the membership. The
very same socialists who favored the party's backing of minor reforms and had a
strong attachment to things German, often including even the state, could
unabashedly support theoretical statements that emphasized the uniqueness of
socialist workers, rejected the state in principle, and foretold the coming of
revolution. This sense of solidarity was quite real and widely shared, and it
held the party together.
Eventually
Kautsky developed a more comprehensive view of what revisionism was. Pointing to
the right-wing socialists of France led by Jean Jaures and to the new
progressive party that was gradually replacing the Liberals in England, he
concluded that all of Europe was undergoing a "renaissance of bourgeois
radicalism." He regarded revisionism as the theoretical expression of this
renaissance, which he felt was a "historically necessary
manifestation" of maturing capitalism. As their status declined, bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois radicals could no longer find comfort in the great liberal
and conservative parties, but neither had they yet descended into the
proletariat. Thus they found themselves in a theoretically untenable position,
which they hoped to rectify by converting socialist parties according to their
own confused image. Both privately and publicly Kautsky urged Bernstein to show
the courage of his convictions by breaking with the SPD to form a new
left-bourgeois oppositional party.
During
the course of the revisionism controversy, Kautsky came to comment on nearly
every aspect of Marxian theory, which allowed him to clarify many matters. For
instance, Bernstein repeatedly criticized Kautsky's brand of Marxism because it
supposedly included a collapse theory, that is, the notion that the transition
from capitalism to socialism would be the result of a massive business crisis in
the former.
Bernstein objected to the rigid determinism of this view while also
contending that capitalism had already proved itself capable of surviving deep
crisis, thus demonstrating its endurance.
Kautsky
staunchly denied that he, Marx, or Engels had ever made such a fatalistic
suggestion. While not rejecting the notion of recurrent crisis in capitalism, he
argued that to tie the transition from capitalism to socialism simply to the
economic collapse of the former was a very one-sided view, because "the
class struggle remains unmentioned in this description." Despite the
historical necessity of recurrent capitalist crisis, he maintained, a second
critical part of the transition to socialism was the maturation of the
proletariat as a viable political force. The desired change would not come
automatically; the proletariat had to engage vigorously in the class struggle in
order to seize power.
Two
books came out of Kautsky's part in the revisionism debate: the very polemical Bernstein
and the Social-Democratic Program: An Anti-Critique (1899) and The
Social Revolution (1902), The latter was his most comprehensive discussion
up to that time of the path from capitalism to socialism, and in it he
forcefully reiterated his orthodox line. The Social Revolution was one of his
most successful books, selling thousands of copies and going through multiple
printings very quickly. The response to it encouraged him to believe that
progress was being made against the reformists and revisionists, although he had
few illusions about the number of committed Marxists in the party.
By
the eve of the party's great debate over the mass strike, Kautsky stood firmly
at the head of the radical wing, regularly admonished by the south German
reformists and the trade unionists, but with the solid support of Bebel, and
therefore the party leadership. With Bernstein's move to revisionism, Kautsky
was the undisputed master of social democratic theory in Germany, and because of
the SPD's status in the international socialist movement, he was also the most
important Marxist in the world. But the ten or so years before the war were to
see an erosion of his place in the party, as a more consistent, though largely
powerless, left wing emerged after 1905-1906, and as the reformist forces gained
even more influence in the leadership. Faced with these changes, he developed
his position as a centrist, fighting a two-front battle in theoretical disputes.
Bebel's death in 1913 severely undermined Kautsky's influence in the party,
while his opposition to the war eventually brought an end to his affiliation
with the SPD.
This
erosion was not immediately apparent because Kautsky continued to command the
support of most of the party leaders and because even among his intra-party
opponents, his prestige still carried a great deal of weight. But in the
mass-strike debate he was somewhat reluctantly forced into a position of
defending Rosa Luxemburg and the emerging left wing in their stand against the
trade unions. When both Kautsky and Luxemburg were outmanoeuvred at the 1906
Mannheim congress, the fate of the extreme left seemed to be sealed. In the
aftermath of this dispute, Kautsky too had a brief falling out with the party
executive. In 1909 his study The Road to Power was published by the official party press. When
the first edition of five thousand copies sold out in a few weeks' time, the
executive refused to authorize a second edition because of what it considered
the exaggerated radicalism of the book.
In
The Road to Power Kautsky emphasized
three things. First, he argued forcefully that the ruling clique of Germany
could not much longer tolerate the continued growth of the SPD and the trade
unions. Very soon, he contended, the state was going to be forced to take some
very harsh steps, and when that time came, the party had to be prepared to take
advantage of the situation. Second, he mounted his most persuasive campaign ever
in favor of theoretical guidance of practical political action. Whereas the
reformists claimed that the minor concessions the party was winning demonstrated
the possibility of peacefully growing into socialism, in reality such party
victories simply increased class tensions because they clarified party lines.
Those who emphasized this "positive work" needed theory to show them
the reality that was concealed by appearances. Finally, Kautsky argued that no
matter how much they grew, party and trade-union organizations could never hope
to include anything more than an elite. Since the remainder of the population
was "only revolutionary as a possibility,
not a reality," only effective socialist propaganda, i.e., theory,
could convert the possibility into reality.
Trade-union
leaders and most of the party bureaucracy quite naturally considered The
Road to Power a fundamental attack on their positions. Clearly Kautsky was
attempting to reassert the superior position of the intellectuals in the party
over those who conducted day-to-day affairs. Thus challenged, the functionaries
responded by refusing to approve a second edition of the book. Kautsky briefly
threatened to leave Germany altogether if he did not receive better treatment.
He also used the available appeals channel of the party by taking his case to
the control commission, where his close friend Clara Zetkin used her influence
to persuade the executive to relent. The
Road to Power was reprinted, and second and third editions of five thousand
copies each quickly sold out.
Kautsky's
problems with the party leadership w-ere short-lived, however, as two events in
1910 brought him back into good graces. The first was his final personal split
with Luxemburg, a break that had been gradually developing for several years.
The actual theoretical disagreement concerned the extent to which the party
should support illegal street demonstrations to back its demands for franchise
reform, especially in Prussia. Luxemburg favored such demonstrations, while
Kautsky thought them dangerous. When he refused to print an article by her on
the subject, Luxemburg's alienation was complete.
But
Kautsky's dispute with Luxemburg was interrupted when the socialist delegation
to the Baden Landtag approved the state budget in July 1910. This was a blatant
violation of party discipline, and Bebel immediately called upon Kautsky to
forget his quarrel with Luxemburg in order to concentrate on sharp criticism of
the Badenese. The conjunction of these events gave the party's chief
theoretician a perfect opportunity to articulate the centrist position he had
been developing at least since the mass-strike controversy began in 1905-1906.
In an August 1910 article entitled "Between Baden and Luxemburg," he
pointed out that on a map Marx's birthplace, Trier, lay between Luxemburg on the
left and Baden on the right. So too, he claimed, did the proper course for the
SPD lie between Luxemburg's left radicalism and the right, reformist
capitulation of the Baden party; fidelity to Marx would bring the party to
victory.
After
1910 Kautsky's mature view of the SPD and its place in pre-war Germany did not
change. Neither the increasingly vocal radicals nor the increasingly dominant
reformists had the answers as far as he was concerned. He characterized the SPD
as a "revolutionary, not a revolution-making" party, meaning that the
socialists should prepare for the revolution by participating in politics
sufficiently to heighten class conflict, but should not force confrontations by
putschist action in the streets. Rather than pursuing a policy of revolutionary
antagonism, he counseled a "strategy of attrition" in which the tried
and true methods of the past would continue to yield gains until tensions
reached a breaking point at some unspecifiable time in the future. Also,
hostility to the state and the proletarian purity of the party had to be
preserved, lest the workers be compromised. These tactics would yield a
socialist victory, Kautsky argued, because history was on the side of the
workers.
Unfortunately
for his own views, Kautsky was neither able to nor particularly interested in
countering intra-party developments that undermined the SPD's capacity to
maintain this position of wearing the enemy down. In part this was simply a
personal failing; he lacked the political sophistication to perceive the impact
of these developments. In part, too, he was trapped by his long commitment to
the movement; given the depth of his attachment to it, he was doomed to take it
as it came. But he also had a strong faith in the revolutionary potential of the
masses. He was convinced that when the time came, the party of the workers would
be forced to take the lead. When that time did finally come, however, his
beloved party had been split and almost fatally weakened by the Great War.
Eduard
Bernstein
Eduard
Bernstein (1850-1932) came to socialism from rather different origins than did
Kautsky. Bernstein was the seventh of fifteen children in a petty-bourgeois
Jewish family of Berlin; his father was once a plumber but later became a
railway engineer, a job that ensured a regular though modest income. Bernstein
was forced by material considerations to take up work before finishing the
Gymnasium, and at age sixteen he began a twelve-year career as a bank clerk. As
a young man he pursued his education on his own, dabbling in poetry and for a
time considering a career in the theater, either as an actor or a playwright.
However, the more mundane employment as a bank clerk was considerably safer, so
he stuck with it until he left Germany in 1878 to become Karl Hochberg's private
secretary
Like
so many other young Germans, Bernstein was first attracted to socialism during
the Franco- Prussian War. For him it was not just the military expansionism of
the war that was repellent; he was also apparently quite shocked by the
government's persecution of Bebel, Liebknecht, and other Eisenachers for their
opposition to the war.
Bernstein felt that the charges were clearly trumped up in order to still
opposition. Around the same time he and some friends had formed a discussion
group, and shortly after the prominent trade-union leader and socialist
Friedrich Fritzsche spoke to the group, Bernstein joined the Eisenachers at the
age of twenty-two.
At
the time he joined the party, the major theoretical contacts Bernstein had with
socialism were Lassalle's Herr Bastiat
Schulze von Delitzsch and Duhring's Critical
History of National Economy and Socialism. Within a year or so he also read
Marx's The Civil War in France and
Duhring's Course of National and Social
Economy. But in fact during these early years he devoted little time to
serious theoretical study, concentrating instead on public speeches and debates
that dealt with the more practical aspects of the movement. Not until after his
move to Zurich did he turn to theory, although this in no way retarded his rise
in the socialist ranks. Probably his devotion to and skill at agitation and
campaigning accounted for his early prominence. By the time the socialist unity
drive was culminating in 1875, he was sufficiently important to serve as an SDAP
delegate to the unity conference that preceded the Gotha congress.
After
unification Bernstein continued to be very active in the new party as an
agitator, campaigner, and member of the control commission. He also helped found
a new discussion club and a workers' night school in which he taught some
classes. While engaged in these activities, he first met Karl Hochberg. For a
short while Bernstein was rather strongly influenced by Duhring, even to the
point of establishing personal contacts, but two things brought this to an end.
First, in October 1878, he left Berlin for Zurich where he became Hochberg's
assistant. Second, in 1879 he studied Engels' Anti-Duhring, which turned him
against Duhring and toward Marx. Thus at about the time the party was forced
into exile by the anti-socialist law, Bernstein had already begun the course
toward Marxism which characterized much of the rest of the party's development
for the next twelve years.
Bernstein's
extensive experience with practical agitation coupled with his obvious
intelligence and writing ability made him uniquely qualified for his first major
position in German social democracy, the editorship of the exiled official
journal the Sozialdemokrat. Vollmar had edited the paper for its first years,
but when he insisted on leaving the job, some difficulties in finding a
replacement ensued. The major problem was that Marx and Engels from the
beginning had resented Hochberg's ties with the paper or any other aspect of the
party. When Bebel decided that Bernstein, Hochberg's closest associate, should
take over the Sozialdemokrat, it
seemed that Marx and Engels would objec
In
order to make peace with the old ones in London and to get them to give their
blessing to the new editor, Bernstein and Bebel made a trip to England in
December 1880. Although it was the first time either had met Marx or Engels, the
encounter was a major success. Not only was Bernstein given the seal of
approval, but very quickly Engels, at least, developed a good deal of admiration
and even respect for the younger man's work..
When after three months on the job Bernstein began to
doubt his capacity for the task, Engels encouraged him by writing:
"You have edited the paper skillfully from the very beginning; you have
given it the right tone and developed the necessary wit. In editing a newspaper,
erudition is not nearly so important as a quick understanding of matters in the
right spirit, and you have always done that." Under Bernstein's direction
the Sozialdemokrat became the handmaiden of Bebel's radical political
position and an important factor in the victory of the radicals over the
moderates in the outlaw years. As editor of the party's official organ,
Bernstein usually found himself in the center of intraparty struggles, and he
always sided with Bebel and the radicals. Backed by the regular counsel of
Engels, Bernstein orchestrated the exiled social democrats' assault on
Bismarck's social policies and took strong objection to the efforts of the
moderate members of the Reichstag Fraktion
to support the government's steamship subsidy bill in 1885. In March of that
year he precipitated a major confrontation when he refused to publish in the Sozialdemokrat
the following statement by the Fraktion:
"The paper does not determine the attitude of the parliamentary party; it
is the parliamentary party that must control the attitude of the paper "
Victory
in the steamship-subsidy-bill controversy meant that the Sozialdemokrat
was firmly controlled by the radicals after 1885. Along with Kautsky, Bernstein
had also developed into a consistent Marxist during the early eighties. Because
of his journalistic skills and editor's post, Bernstein did not continue to
develop his theory as intensely as Kautsky did, but his Marxism was not called
into question by anyone. After 1888, when Bismarck finally succeeded in
pressuring the Swiss into expelling many of the exiled German socialists,
Bernstein and the rest of the editorial staff of the paper moved to London.
There Bernstein's ties with Engels grew even closer. This relationship remained
very close after the end of the anti-socialist law, when the Sozialdemokrat
came to an end, as Bernstein was unable to return to Germany because of his
outstanding indictments for seditious editorial activities.
Having
left Germany in late 1878, Bernstein eventually spent twenty-two years in exile,
returning to Berlin in early 1901. During this time his only contacts with the
homeland were an extensive correspondence with leading party figures and
voracious reading of the German press. But twenty-two years is a very long time,
and while the facts of changing conditions in the country and the party could be
followed from afar, it was much more difficult to remain in touch with the
feelings and emotions of the movement. Particularly after the move to London,
Bernstein came more and more under the influence of non-German, especially
English, sources.
Gradually these influences began to alter his views about the course of
modern society and the proper politics of the working-class movement.
Once
Engels died in 1895, Bernstein was free to reveal publicly the changes wrought
in his theories without fear of provoking a corrosive split with an old and
respected friend. From 1896 to 1898, Kautsky's Neue
Zeit carried a series of articles entitled "Problems of Socialism"
in which Bernstein first announced his break with orthodox Marxism, and in 1899
a more systematic and convenient presentation was made in his most famous book, The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (Die
Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie),
which is usually translated into English under the title Evolutionary
Socialism.
Bernstein
hoped in these works to provide German social democracy with a comprehensive,
consistent theoretical justification for the practice he perceived it to have
been pursuing for years; he did not do so.
Although he met with a sympathetic response in many segments of the
party, his theories were repeatedly and resoundingly rejected as official
doctrine. Furthermore, there is very little evidence that the SPD ever had more
than one revisionist-Bernstein himself-in the years prior to World War I. The
fact of the matter was that those forces in the party most inclined to agree
with his practical conclusions, the south Germans and the trade unionists, were
not particularly interested in any
theory.
These people occasionally defended him from the attacks of radicals, and
many of them also read his works, although doing the former did not necessarily
imply having done the latter. But few of them accepted Bernstein's formulations
as definitive, and he always remained only one among many roughly equal leaders
of the right wing.
For
the purposes of this chapter, the distinction between reformism and revisionism
is an important one. Reformists were plentiful in the SPD, from the
radical-moderate splits of the early eighties through the debates over the
agrarian question in the mid-nineties to the divisive budget-support disputes
that occurred periodically. But even after 1899, reformists rarely if ever used
Bernstein's theories to support their demands. While they readily accepted him
as an ally, they did not use his writings as any special rationalization of
their actions. Bernstein was not to the reformists what Kautsky was to the
radicals.
Revisionism,
according to Bernstein, was the product of his growing conviction that several
of the specific economic predictions of orthodox Marxism were not being
realized. In particular he was convinced that the tendency toward
ever-increasing concentration under capitalism had only limited validity, that
capitalist crises were not becoming more frequent and deeper, that the middle
classes were not disappearing, and finally that the proletariat was not becoming
increasingly impoverished. These conclusions led him to reject many of the basic
philosophical tenets of Marxism, including the dialectic and historical
determinism, which in turn led him to certain political contentions that
differed from those officially accepted by the party. Specifically, he urged
that any notion of revolution be abandoned in favor of a concept of gradual,
reformist growth from capitalism to socialism, and that in pursuit of the latter
the party should modify its theory and practice to allow non-proletarian
elements to be incorporated on a significant scale
Some
of Bernstein's points were based on well-nigh irrefutable facts that proved
particularly troublesome for the defenders of orthodoxy to counter. For
instance, both the obvious prosperity and stability of capitalism for the two
decades before the First World War and the extent to which the vast majority of
the workers of the industrialized world shared in this prosperity stumped
orthodox Marxists for along time. Not until the various forms of the imperialism
critique began to appear-from Rudolf Hilferding in 1910, Rosa Luxemburg in 1913,
and Lenin in 1917- was a reasonably satisfying Marxian explanation offered.
Other
of his observations, however, were simply examples of Bernstein's eagerness to
see short-term developments as having long-term implications. The most prominent
example in this category was the ardor with which he and his sympathizers seized
on the results of the 1895 occupational census in Germany as proof that the
agrarian middle sector was increasing, not decreasing. The survey revealed that
between 1882 and 1895, the number of middle-sized agrarian holdings increased
both absolutely and relatively. This was used both to refute the orthodox theory
of concentration and to pressure the party into trying to win a following among
this group of farmers, A major debate ensued that lasted until the next
occupational census, 1907, revealed that what had seemed a trend twelve years
before was only a temporary aberration; in that year the number of middle-sized
farms showed a marked decline.
From
an intellectual perspective, the major problem of revisionism was its
shallowness. Bernstein was primarily an autodidact who was ill-equipped to
conduct a rigorous analysis of Marxism and even less able to provide a
philosophically satisfying alternative to the dialectic and historical
determinism as a basis for socialism. In the first case his contention that the
dialectic was only a peripheral element of Marx's thought totally missed the
mark, and in the second, his grasp of Kant was never sufficient to allow him to
develop a systematic ethical basis for his own theories. Bernstein's thought, as
expressed in his revisionist writings, was dominated by skepticism and a very
limited common sense outlook. While both of these qualities are perfectly
respectable and useful, together they do not often yield the sort of gratifying,
self-contained system that he hoped to provide.
Ironically,
Bernstein's insistence that his recommendations for alterations in the program
and practice of the SPD be based on a theoretical revision of Marxism
undoubtedly cost him a great number of potential supporters. There is little
question that the general thrust of his arguments, namely the
anti-revolutionary, gradual, and compromising aspects, was favored by a majority
of the party, But because he set the tone for the revisionism debates by
attacking the theory of the party, those within it who rejected theoretical
considerations out of hand were not interested in the quarrel. This is
strikingly true of the majority of the trade-union leaders, who, despite their
own very strong reformist tendencies, simply refused to take sides at all. For
the most part they limited themselves to expressions of regret that so much of
the party's time was being wasted in fruitless debates over meaningless (for
them) theo
Ultimately
neither the validity of the facts he chose to emphasize nor the inadequacies of
his theoretical formulations led the SPD to its decisive rejections of
Bernstein's revisionism; a party that could live comfortably with the weaknesses
of Kautsky's Marxism would not have been bothered by these failings. Rather, the
political conclusions he derived from his theoretical analysis undermined
Bernstein's appeal.
His
urgings to expand party membership to non-proletarian elements met with a
hostile reception. On this issue more than any other, the impact of his physical
separation from the movement in Germany was most apparent. After more than
twenty years in exile, Bernstein lacked identification with the emotions of the
socialist-workers w hen he formulated his revisionism, and even after his
return, he never regained the sympathy he had expressed so effectively as editor
of the Sozialdemokrat in the turbulent eighties.
The
reasons for the rejection of revisionism were obviously the same as the reasons
for the SPD clung to the old theories. First there was inertia; most German
socialists were content to leave things well enough alone, even if they had some
specific objections to the party program. Second, the extent to which the Erfurt
program captured the enduring spirit of the heroic years when the party had
struggled for survival against an extremely hostile state was a powerful
argument in its favor. Even though objective conditions may have altered
somewhat, the ruling powers of the Reich provided sufficient reinforcement to
perpetuate an emotional commitment to hard-line opposition.
Finally,
the coalition opposed to Bernstein was much too powerful for him to overcome
without much more solid and extensive support than he had. Not only was
revisionism attacked from within the party by the devoted Marxists, led by
Parvus (pseudonym of the Russian Alexander Helphand) and Rosa Luxemburg, but
foreigners outside of Germany also joined the assault, with Georgi Plekhanov,
the "father" of Russian Marxism, and the very widely respected leader
of the Austrian socialist party, Victor Adler, eventually joining the ranks.
However, the single most important opponent Bernstein had was not a theoretician
at all, but a socialist politician of the first rank, August Bebel. Bernstein
was genuinely puzzled by the vehemence of Bebel's opposition, since the party
leader seemed so reasonable when it came to practical political matters. But
Bebel played a central role in the critique of revisionism because his constant
goading kept Kautsky involved w hen the party theoretician would have liked to
let the matter drop.
Despite
persistent attacks and repeated official rejections, revisionism would not die.
This was because the SPD membership would neither accept it or let it go. Enough
intellectuals were attracted by the doctrine to ensure its survival, and enough
of its component parts had sufficient general appeal to endure. Bernstein not
only remained in the party; he also maintained his role as a leading figure, and
shortly after his return to Germany he was elected to the Reichstag, where he
became an influential member of the Fraktion.
Although an early supporter of the German war effort, Bernstein eventually
joined Kautsky in opposition, and the reunited old friends were among the
founders of the splinter party that was formed in 1917 to protest the old
party's nearly unqualified support for the war. In the aftermath of defeat and
abortive revolution, Bernstein returned to the fold, living to see the SPD
become much like what he had suggested it be at the turn of the century . He
died in December 1932, only six weeks before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of a
Germany that would pervert every value Bernstein had held dear
Historically,
revisionism might be said to have been ahead of itself. The contradictions that
characterized Wilhelmian Germany were not sufficiently worked out to allow the
SPD to adopt an openly reformist posture or to become a truly mass, people's
party. Nonetheless, Bernstein's theory did serve as a whetstone on which the
orthodox sharpened their own views. Kautsky in particular modified his
conception of the increasing oppression of the proletariat to include a strong
political element in response to the revisionist critique; he also wrote one of
his least successful books, Ethics and the
Materialist Conception of History (1906), in an effort to deal with
questions raised by Bernstein. But the earliest and sharpest response to him
came from the young Rosa Luxemburg, presaging the radical Marxism of which she
was to be the major figure in the years after 1905-1906.
Rosa
Luxemburg
Rosa
Luxemburg (1870-1919) was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of
the SPD and the Second International. She was the only woman in the pre-war
party to establish herself as a prominent figure without being tied specifically
to the women's movement; in a party that honored female equality more in
principle than in practice, this was a major achievement. In the Second
International she was the only woman to attain a stature similar to that of Jean
Jaures, Victor Adler, Emile Vandervelde, August Bebel, and Karl Kautsky. Rosa
Luxemburg is one of only two women, along with Marx's daughter Eleanor, who
currently commands significant interest among historians concerned with western
European Marxism and socialism.
In
the case of Luxemburg, this interest derives from her intellectual brilliance.
Hers was perhaps the best mind put to the service of Marxism during the years of
the Second International. She was a swift and decisive analyst of history and
contemporary affairs; she was a superb polemicist and debater; and she had
sufficient wit and self-detachment to make her an invaluable ally and a
formidable opponent. Although she had far more enemies than friends, both in the
SPD and outside it, everyone who came into contact with her was respectful of
her intellectual capacities, and many were awed by them.
Despite
these truly impressive qualities, Luxemburg cannot now be judged an influential
figure in terms of shaping policy or molding the character of German social
democracy or world socialism; the same traits that were her theoretical
strengths-incisiveness, harsh judgments, brutal attacks on opponents-were
personal and political weaknesses. She was an unusually intolerant person, who
judged friend and foe alike by very rigid standards, and she was rarely inclined
to tolerate weaknesses in or show generosity toward others.
Even
her closest allies and friends frequently found her exceptionally difficult to
get along with. Coupled with this was an almost pathological inability to
compromise her standards for the sake of political success.
All of these traits resulted in her nearly total isolation from lasting
institutional ties in a movement that was heavily based on such ties.
To
a certain extent then, Luxemburg's isolation and consequent failure to influence
substantially the development of the SPD derived from problems of character and
style. However, several other factors that had nothing to do with her real
failings reinforced this isolation.
First,
she was a woman, and though none of her opponents within the party would admit
it, this worked against her. Second, she was a foreigner, not a native-born
German, and even in a movement that espoused internationalism, it was hard for
Luxemburg's opponents to avoid pointing this out during their bitter polemical
exchanges. Finally, and of much less importance, she was of a Jewish family.
Anti-Semitism was rampant, even encouraged, in Imperial Germany, although
generally weak in the socialist-workers' movement. Nonetheless, her rather
tenuous connections with Judaism were occasionally another of the barbs hurled
at her by ideological enemies.
Luxemburg's
rise to the heights of the theoretical ranks of German social democracy was
meteoric. Born of assimilated, middle-class Jewish parents in 1871 in Zamosc,
Russian Poland, she received a German-oriented education in her early years, but
attended a Russian-speaking high school. Her facility in several
languages-Polish, German, Russian, and, later French-was to put her in good
stead in the international socialist movement. While in high school she became
politically involved with a rather primitive illegal socialist-populist
revolutionary group, for which she earned a threat of arrest in 1889.
Ostensibly to avoid imprisonment, but also because she sought the
university education that was rarely open to women in Russian Poland, Luxemburg
went into exile in Zurich in that same year.
Once
in Zurich she attended the university, studying mathematics, natural sciences,
and, in the faculty of law, social studies. She began in 1890 and finished in
1897 with a doctorate in law, having written a
dissertation entitled "The Industrial Development of Poland."
She also became active in the exiled Polish socialist community in Zurich,
establishing particularly close ties with Leo Jogiches. He was to become
Luxemburg's most intimate friend and closest political comrade for years. Her
involvement in Polish affairs, where she sided with those who downplayed the
need for Polish independence (SDKP, Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of
Poland, later SDKPiL, when "and Lithuania" was added) against the
Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which strongly advocated Polish independence, was
intense but unsatisfying.
Her
introduction to the much larger and more fruitful social democratic movement of
Germany derived from Luxemburg's expertise in Polish affairs. The party had a
special branch to deal with the thousands of Polish workers in its country, and
competition with the PPS for the allegiance of these people gave the SPD a
special need for highly informed polemicists who could effectively counter the
Polish party's propaganda. By 1897 Kautsky was relying heavily on Luxemburg as
the Neue Zeit's expert on Polish
questions. Much encouraged by this reception, she was more and more tempted by
the promise of Germany as a site from which to pursue her Marxism and the
struggles of the exiled Polish movement. A contrived marriage to a young German,
Gustav Lubeck, in the spring of 1897 (followed by a divorce five years later)
gave her entree into Germany, and she arrived in Berlin in late March 1898.
Immediately
after her arrival in Berlin, Luxemburg established her commitment to the cause
beyond a shadow of a doubt by volunteering to agitate among the Silesian Poles
for the 1898 Reichstag elections.
Although she had little success in winning votes, she did considerably
impress the party leadership, which in turn led to much broader contacts within
the SPD. This was what she had come to Germany for in the first place, to make a
career for herself as a propagator of Marxism.
What
she sought was not power, but influence in the realm of ideas, forums from which
to spread the theories she held to be correct and important. In addition to
Kautsky's Neue Zeit, she quickly
established close ties with the party's two leading left-wing papers, Bruno Schoenlank's
Leipziger Volkszeitung and Parvus' Sachsische
Arbeiterzeitung.
Parvus
was the first in the party to launch a full-scale attack on Bernstein, in an
article series in his paper that ran from late January until early March 1898.
Once Luxemburg had attracted his attention, he handed to her the stick with
which he had been beating Bernstein, and she made her mark in the party by
landing some telling blows on the revisionist renegade. By the time of the 1898
congress in October , hardly six months after her arrival in Germany, Luxemburg
had already established herself as a force to be dealt with, in theory at least.
So rapid was her rise to prominence that for a very brief time, from late
September to early November 1898, she was an editor of the Sachsische
Arbeiterzeitung, following Parvus' expulsion from Saxony for political
offenses. But the animosity she had roused in this brief time and her
unwillingness to compromise for the sake of harmony doomed this effort at
institutional affiliation to failure; three years later a similar episode as
co-editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung
ended almost as quickly and for the same reasons.
This
difficulty with maintaining official positions within the party's organizational
structure was one Luxemburg shared with nearly all the other prominent radicals
of the SPD, except Clara Zetkin, who served for a long time on the central
control commission. One reason for this lack of organizational ties was the
isolation radicals often felt when they held official positions. Usually a
radical would not have many likeminded colleagues on the various commissions and
editorial boards, and since collective authority was the rule, radicals usually
had difficulty pushing their policies through. This made them cautious about
accepting such positions. Another problem was the inherent tendency for such
work to trivialize tasks and viewpoints; petty administrative work destroys
daring and imagination. Third, as in most democratic bodies, the SPD and its
affiliated organizations were compelled to play to the middle and avoid the
controversial in order to maintain the broadest possible allegiances. By
definition this was antithetical to the goals of the radicals.
Above
all these more practical problems, however, stood the matter of the
psychological barriers to effective institutional participation by the radicals.
Rosa Luxemburg was an excellent example of a type that could not easily adjust
to the give-and-take requirements of political organization. Her tendency to
blame theoretical differences of opinion on the personal and moral failings of
her opponents and her bitter , frequently vicious attacks on these people made
it very difficult for her to mend fences later on. Furthermore, she was so
involved in the theoretical aspects of the movement that she often denigrated
practical compromises and moderation, even for the sake of tactics, as
unacceptable violations of principle. This commitment limited the influence of
all the SPD radicals because their extremism cut them off from the alliances and
cooperation necessary to give their positions substance.
As
long as the revisionist crisis persisted, Luxemburg's isolation was not
apparent, because on this issue she was backed by the party executive. Her Leipziger
Volkszeitung articles attacking Bernstein appeared in pamphlet form in 1899
with the title Social Reform or Revolution.
In it she denied that Bernstein was calling on the party to accept in theory
what it already was in practice. Anticipating Kautsky's later conclusions, she
contended rather that what was needed was for Bernstein to recognize finally
that in theory and practice he was not a socialist, but a petty-bourgeois
radical. She differed from Bernstein most fundamentally when she argued that the
reforms he favored so strongly as means of overcoming the necessity of
revolution would in fact make revolution more likely by clarifying class lines
in Germany.
The basic problem as far as Luxemburg was concerned, the existence of
wage capitalism, was not touched by these reforms
Given
what is now generally accepted about the course of development of the SPD, it is
ironic that Luxemburg did not propose any change in party tactics during her
attack on Bernstein. She was content with the old practices because she felt
that as long as they were guided by correct theory, as long as theoreticians
could still explain what the practices of the party really meant, the
revolutionary consciousness of the masses would steadily mature. In fact, she
continued to agitate among the Polish workers in Germany during elections,
supporting even the candidacy of one of the most outspoken reformists of the
party, Max Schippel. One passage in Social
Reform or Revolution did, however, permanently alienate her from an
important part of the workers' movement. In her discussion of the reforms
pursued by the SPD and its allies, she referred to the activities of the trade
unions as a "labor of Sisyphus," hopeless efforts to achieve permanent
improvements in the lot of industrial workers as long as capitalism lasted. The
mutual hostility of Luxemburg and the trade unions never abated.
Realization
of the vast gulf that separated Luxemburg from virtually all the party
leadership and most of the rank and file was not to come until the mass-strike
debates of 1905-1906. when revolutionary activities broke out in Russia in 1905,
Luxemburg left Germany for Warsaw in order to participate firsthand. Her
experiences there with spontaneous mass action crystallized her views on the
role of the party in such away that her conceptions could no longer be twisted
to fit with the practice of the SPD. After 1905-1906 she developed a
far-reaching critique of the party and the trade unions, especially the latter,
as obstacles to the leadership role socialists should play in such situations.
In
what was perhaps her most sweeping and exciting work, Mass
Strike, Party, and Trade Unions (1906), Luxemburg presented her notion of
the potential, nature, and implications of mass strikes, and, in less detail,
the relationship between such activity and the party and trade unions. She
argued that mass strikes were part of the whole process of the ripening class
struggle, not something that was made or could be planned, but something that
grew spontaneously out of heightened class tensions. Moreover, she argued that
mass strikes were not particularly aimed at either political or economic goals,
but at both, at all grievances of the masses blended together. She concluded
that the point of increased organization, of the party and the trade unions, was
to prepare socialists to channel this spontaneous activity into productive
directions and to profit from such outbursts by proving themselves worthy of
leadership.
Quite
obviously this conception conflicted sharply with the predominant self-image of
both the SPD and the trade unions. As already discussed, the leaders of both
branches of the workers' movement in Wilhelmian Germany tended to see the steady
growth of their organizations as proof of the validity of their tactics.
Revolution, when they thought of it at all, was conceived of as a sort of
crumbling of capitalism under the mighty weight of workers' organizations. To
these people spontaneous action in the streets was anathema because it
threatened the solidarity of their organizations. To the extent that any theory
at all attracted them, Kautsky's "strategy of attrition" made much
more sense than Luxemburg's emphasis on the spontaneous creativity of mass
action
From
1906 on Luxemburg's major preoccupation was attempting to counter the relatively
passive policies of the SPD. Whenever possible she called for more vigorous
responses to political developments, especially when she detected the stirrings
of the masses. In 1909-1910 she hoped to stimulate the party to promote street
demonstrations to back demands for Prussian franchise reforms; in 1911 popular
protests over the second Moroccan crisis again aroused her to criticize the
party's passivity. But she never got very far , as the party executive and the
trade-union leadership closed ranks against her. Her slightest call for more
vigorous action was countered by a flood of criticism, and her influence over
the party declined proportionately.
The
major theoretical contributions of Luxemburg dealt with imperialism, especially
her 1913 study, The Accumulation of Capital. As Peter Nettl, her most thorough
biographer to date, correctly pointed out, this work has come to overshadow all
her other observations on imperialism. The fact of the matter was that in The
Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg set out only to analyze the basic
internal causes of capitalism's development to the imperialist stage; this she
did by concentrating on the problem of capitalist reproduction that Marx had
introduced in the third volume of Capital.
She concluded that capitalism continued to grow, and therefore exist, despite
the exhaustion of internal resources, as long as there were still pre capitalist
societies to exploit. In this way the process of primitive accumulation started
over again several times.
While
her study was bolstered by abundant figures and charts, she made no effort to
link an almost fastidious, though not necessarily correct, economic analysis to
any political conclusions. The politics and tactics, past, present, and future,
of German social democracy are not even mentioned in
The Accumulation of Capital. Thus the book that is usually considered her
most impressive theoretical achievement cannot be directly related to her
critique of the SPD or to her concept of creative mass action
This
is not to say that Luxemburg did not draw any political conclusions about
imperialism, but only that she never felt the necessity of underpinning these
conclusions with a new theory. In general she felt that capitalism with
imperialism was not much different from capitalism without imperialism, at least
in its political implications. She accepted imperialism as a higher stage of
capitalism, but not as anew and unique manifestation of it. For her the salient
point about imperialism was the extent to which class tensions were increased
under it. The greater militarism of imperialism, the frequent and often
disastrous foreign entanglements it engendered, and the hostile chauvinism of
its defenders simply fanned the flames of the class struggle, as far as she
could tell. Her major political conclusion was that the responsibilities of a
social-democratic party in an imperialist country were even more pressing than
those of a similar party in a capitalist country that had not yet reached the
imperialist stage.
Luxemburg's
place in the history of German social democracy and world socialism is based on
her argument for spontaneous mass action as a creative force in the process of
the maturation of proletarian revolutionary consciousness. It is at the same
time imaginative, daring, and attractive in its emphasis on overcoming sterile
theorizing, in its wedding of action and consciousness. But this cannot properly
be termed theory; rather, it was a hope that by mass action the
"swamp," as she called it, into which social democracy had fallen
would be flushed clean and made vibrant and active again. It was her willingness
to act on this view that gave legitimacy to her position; unlike others in the
SPD,
Rosa Luxemburg was neither an armchair revolutionary nor a firebrand who
expected others to carry out the real struggle in the streets.
Beyond
her involvement in the Russian Revolution of 1905-1906, Luxemburg proved her
commitment by dying a martyr in January 1919, killed by the counterrevolutionary
forces let loose by her former party comrades Gustav Noske and Friedrich Ebert.
At the time she was in the forefront of a vain and ill-conceived effort to push
the German revolution that had broken out the previous November further than it
would go. Just as Noske and Ebert were trapped by the concessions the SPD
majority had made to the status quo of Imperial Germany, so too was Rosa
Luxemburg trapped by her own search for the chimera of creative mass action she
thought had to be in Germany. To the end Luxemburg and her radical supporters
blamed the failure on socialist leadership without seriously questioning whether
or not the radical potential really existed. After the victory of the Bolsheviks
in Russia in 1917, the existence of this radical potential had become an article
of faith for the extreme left, notwithstanding tangible evidence to the
contrary.
From
Gary P Steenson, "Not One Man! Not One Penny!” German Social
Democracy, 1863-1914, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh (1981) ch6
“Theory and Intellectuals”, pp197-221