For working class culture: Rosa Luxemburg on Leo Tolstoy

From her stinging polemics to her appraisal of the positive aspects of Lassalle’s legacy, her uniquely lucid writing style always marks her articles out. This is in no small part due to her fascination with literature and the keen interest she took in literary developments both in Germany and elsewhere.
As this text makes quite clear, she was also of the opinion that the working class must storm the heights of culture if it is to form itself into a hegemonic class. It must equip itself not only with the weapons of a critical political economy and understanding of history independent of bourgeois ideology, but must also formulate its own cultural outlook. This indeed reflected one of the healthiest elements of the Second International’s approach, following Marx and Engels in viewing the working class as a force that can liberate itself not because of its strength at the point of production, but due to the its separation from the means of production and thus its need for collective and voluntary organisations in society at large which provide intimations of a future classless society. The role of the workers’ party, as August Bebel put it at the Gotha conference of 1875, was to be “revolutionary in every sphere of life, not just in politics”.
It is interesting that this article was printed in Die Neue Zeit. It was not only a journal of political polemic and discussion but one that had numerous contributions on art and culture, particularly those from the SPD’s main cultural critic, Franz Mehring. In contrast to the rather narrow outlook of today’s left, with an almost exclusive focus on this or that narrow trade union campaign or latest turn, the SPD took questions of culture extremely seriously, with debates on the role of naturalist literature and art within Marxism at the 1896 congress, which saw Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and Franz Mehring fight it out. This is kind of political culture of openness, seriousness and audacity that our class must aspire to – it is working class culture.

Tolstoy’s literary estate
From Die Neue Zeit (Stuttgart), 1912-13, Volume II, pp. 97-100
Tolstoy’s literary estate, which has been published in German in three volumes by Ladyschnikow in Berlin, encompasses (alongside several sketches and fragments) the great historical story Hadji Murat, which depicts Russia’s subjugation of the Caucasus around the middle of the nineteenth century; three stories, The devil, The forged coupon and Father Sergius; two dramas, The fruits of enlightenment as well as The living corpse; and finally two depictions of Russian village life during serfdom, An Idyll and Tichon and Malania. Apart from the last two novellas, which were written at the beginning of the 1860s, all the great works listed above were written in the last two decades of his life. The freshness, the radiance and the wealth of the intellectual creations of a man between 60 and 70 year would by themselves be astounding enough, if the works were at the same time not also the best explanation for the inexhaustible fruitfulness of Tolstoy’s genius.
Common bourgeois opinion tends to sharply distinguish between Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the moralist; the former is allowed a place amongst the greatest creators of world literature, the latter is banished to the Russian wilderness, a sinister and vulgar fellow with a “Slavic” tendency to pensiveness and other such nonsense, bemoaned as part romantic, part anarchist, and definitely as an enemy of art in general and his own art in particular. Ivan Turgenev made his well-known invocation to Tolstoy from this point of view, begging him for god’s sake to turn away from the moral-philosophical musing and to once again concentrate on his glorious, pure art, which was floundering because of his prophetic fads. This displays a complete lack of understanding of Tolstoy, because whoever does not understand his ideology is also closed off from his art, or at least from the real source thereof.
This is probably what makes Tolstoy a unique figure in world literature – there is complete identity between his own life and art. Literature is only an instrument with which he expresses his thoughts and his internal struggle. And because his inexhaustible work and harrowing struggle completely fulfilled this human being until his very last breath, Tolstoy became such a tremendous artist who produced a wellspring of art, inexhaustible in richness and in ever greater clarity and beauty.
Without a grand personality and grand worldview there can be no great art. Tolstoy sought the truth from the very first awakening of his conscious mind. Yet for him, seeking the truth is not a literary occupation that has nothing to do with his private life, as with the other “truth seekers” of modern literature. For him it is a personal life problem that fulfils all his conduct and all his feeling, completely dominating his way of life, his family life, his friendships and loving relationships, his working methods and also his art.
Neither is this search confined to the dwarf-like world-weariness of an “individual” who, trapped in a cage of petty-bourgeois existence, cannot act out his male or female ego - as in Ibsen or Bjornson. Tolstoy’s eternal search is aimed at such ways of living and existence, which would be in harmony with the ideals of morality. Yet his moral ideal is of a purely social nature: equality and solidarity of all members of society, based on a general obligation to work, which is what the heathen people of his works inexhaustibly strive for: Pierre Besuchow in War and Peace, Lewin in Anna Karenina, Prince Nechljudow in Resurrection as well as in Father Sergius and finally Saryznew in The Fruits of Enlightenment.
The history of Tolstoy’s art is the search for the solution of the contradiction between this ideal and the existing social relations. He never parted with this ideal until the hour of his death, as he did not want to compromise a hair’s width with the existing order. Yet at the same time he did not adopt the only path towards realizing this ideal, the world view of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle, because, as a genuine son of pre-capitalist Russia, he could not adopt this view. From there evolves the particular tragedy of his life and his death.
Torn from the soil of history, his ideal society floats in the air of the individual, moralistic “resurrection” of an ancient Christian colouring, or in the best case of a confused agrarian communism. In solving his problem, Tolstoy remained an utopian and a moralist all his life. But it is not the solution, not the social recipe, that makes art effective - but the problem itself, the depth and the sincerity of its depiction. Here, Tolstoy has accomplished the highest in thought process and internal struggle, and this made it possible for him to accomplish the highest in art. The same relentless honesty and thoroughness which led him to critically measure the whole of society on the basis of this ideal, also allowed him to artistically grasp life in its great construction and its correlations. Thus he became the untouchable epicist, who showed himself in his maturity in War and Peace and as an old man in Hadji Murat and in The forged coupon.
Tolstoy’s genius is of the original nature of an inexhaustible golden vein. Yet, the recent example of the Danish writer Jensen shows how little creative effect even the greatest artistic talent may have if it is without a compass of a great, serious worldview. His fine, colourful and ingenious grasp of the plot and his confident mastery of the technical methods of narration make him a born epicist of the highest order. And yet what else did he deliver in his Madame D’Ora or his Wheel than a tortured, gigantic distortion of modern society, a garishly coloured fairground booth with abnormalities, which half comes across as brash colportage and half as a spiteful mockery of the reader himself. He lacks a unified worldview, which he could group the details around. He lacks the holy seriousness, honesty and truthfulness with which Tolstoy approaches all things.
In his literary estate, all of Tolstoy’s characteristics are displayed to the full. He no longer makes even the slightest of compromises to the beauty of form, the reader’s sensationalism or his need for calm. He puts every padding aside and reaches the most disciplined self-control, the greatest honesty and the most succinct means of expression. His art is now so identical to the subject that it can hardly be noticed. And thus in his last works, Tolstoy has reached the peak of art, which becomes so natural to him that everything he touches blossoms, immediately takes shape and lives. In Father Sergius for example, he follows the life of an atoning man of the world; in The forged coupon a false banknote’s journey through different layers of Russian society - these are themes and ideas which, written in pure prose, would kill every weaker form of art and anything which is not so completely honest as this. With the most simple methods of unaffected storytelling, Tolstoy creates a terrific painting of human destinies of the highest artistic efficacy.
This very same depth, one could almost say unprecedented honesty, transforms both of his dramas into experiences of deep, harrowing effect - although they lack pretty much everything that is commonly expected of a theatre play in terms of “dramatic plot” and “solution”.
It is particularly interesting and informative to observe the yawning gap between these two creations of a great poet and the bourgeois audience during a performance. The Fruits of Enlightenment is nothing but Tolstoy’s own life drama. The struggle of a lonely titan, who is trying to escape the daily clutches of compromise, is for the bourgeois audience nothing but a moving “marriage tragedy”, a conflict between “motherly duties”, “husbandly duties” and other such tribulations of the German philistine’s bedroom.
There are some very harrowing scenes, such as that in front of the military commando, where a lad expresses his disgust with militarism by resolutely refusing to serve and as a result has to endure endless psychological torture. In another, we see the final attempt of the fighter for social equality to escape from his family and a tragic confrontation between him and his wife. In front of the German bourgeois audience - which has been corrupted by the widespread mendacity of contemporary theatre - all these deeply serious and honest words seem completely inappropriate, embarrassing, almost like an indecency.
There is no intellectual bond either between the audience and Tolstoy’s other drama, the Living corpse. The preened audience of the German theatre, which is probably rushing to the performance in order to see a gipsy choir or some gruesomely juicy “marriage troubles”, does not even suspect that is raining invisible slaps from the stage, where the upright, honourable society is depicted in its entire pitifulness, narrowness and cold egomania, whereas the only beings with human emotions and generous feelings are to be found amongst the so-called “lumpens”, the castaways and the depraved.
The corrupted bourgeois audience, made insensitive by [the suit of armour of] the triviality of its existence, only goes to the theatre to take its mind off things. It doesn’t even notice that it is they who are being referred to when the ragged hero of the drama - stuck in his last sanctuary, a dirty inn - explains his life story with a few simple sentences: “The man who is born into the circles from which I come from, has only three possibilities. Either he can take up office, earn money and add to the dirt in which we live - that was too repugnant for me, or maybe I didn’t understand it, but above all I found it repugnant. Or he can fight the dirt, but in order to do that he must be a hero, and I was never one of those. Or finally he could do a third thing: he can attempt to forget, become slovenly, drink and sing - that’s what I did, and this is how far it has got me”.
Those “who take up office, earn money and add to the dirt” enthusiastically applaud the miming actor, yet the intellectual empire of the poet remains sealed off to them, as does the intellectual life of the modern workers’ movement and the hero of the masses who “fights the dirt” and who will forever remain to them a book with seven seals.
This is why Tolstoy’s literary estate, both the stories and the dramas, needs to be seen by a working class audience - even more so than his earlier works. Of course, Tolstoy had no understanding of the modern working class movement, but it would be a terrible sign of the intellectual maturity of the enlightened proletariat if it in turn did not have any understanding of Tolstoy’s great art, which breathes the purest and most genuine air of socialism.
As the death enemy of the existing society, as the unflinching fighter for equality, solidarity and for the rights of those without property, as somebody who is incorruptibly exposing all hypocrisy and dishonesty in state, church and marriage, Tolstoy is - in his essence - intellectually thoroughly related to the proletariat, in spite of the utopian-moralising form of his work. His art belongs in front of a working class audience - but a revolutionarily, enlightened working class audience, which is able to raise itself above all prejudice and every belief in authority, and which also has the courage to internally free itself from all cowardly compromise. In fact, there can be no other better reading material for the education of working class youth than Tolstoy’s works.

SPD and the Swamp

This previously untranslated article, ‘After the Jena congress’, by Rosa Luxemburg is of particular interest. A cool analytical summation of the Jena congress of German Social Democracy in September 1913, it sounds a warning against the new alignment of the party’s centre and right against the left. In a sign of things to come, the Leipziger Volkszeitung - one of the many local SPD newspapers - refused publication1

What distinguishes our party’s last congress in Jena2 from previous congresses is not so much that theoretical or practical revisionism no longer took centre stage, but rather the emergence of two new problems - both born of new situations. As long as we had to waste most of our time and energy at congresses with Bernsteinite ‘misunderstandings’ on theories of immiseration and catastrophe or with South German budget approvers and participants in monarchist rallies - that is, more or less every congress from 1898 to 1910 - the results led merely to the defence of the old status quo of the party.

Of course, those conflicts were no coincidence, but rather a symptom of the powerful growth of the movement amongst the broad masses, leading a section of party comrades into doubts about the old revolutionary principles. Of course, those debates were also of great use and, in addition to this, were of absolute necessity if the party did not want to abandon its proletarian class-struggle character.

However, this periodic necessity of repeatedly defending the old theoretical clarity and solidity of principle created the impression that we were not going anywhere, which had a tiring and depressive effect on wide circles of the party. On top of this, for the mass of our comrades the theoretical disputes often appeared to be nothing more than empty academic discussions about splitting hairs.

It was different at this year’s congress. Two purely practical problems were up for discussion; problems which every informed worker, whether active politically or in a trade union, was able directly to approach and grasp; problems which were not thought up by a mad theoretician in his study, or which came about by a surprise revelation of infidelity by one of our south German parliamentarians. It was the change in the general conditions of our struggle that imposed on us in Jena both the debate on the mass strike and the debate on the question of taxation.3

Of course, on the question of the mass strike this year’s congress was only taking up an item that had already been up for discussion and voting in 1905 and 1906. Seemingly, the problem had already been solved through the acceptance of the mass strike in principle and, since nobody was considering the immediate proclamation of the mass strike in Germany, the discussion might seem pointless. At least, this is how the party executive and its theoreticians presented the matter - a pointless argument about words, and a damaging one at that, which reveals our current impotence to the enemy. This is how the spokesmen of the majority characterised the debate on the mass strike at the congress.

Yet nothing is better than this view in proving how much the resolution on the matter of the mass strike carried at Jena in 19054 has remained a dead letter - both for our practical and theoretical ‘authorities’. It also proves just how necessary a new debate was and how necessary it remains in order gradually to move this letter of law into the party’s living bloodstream.

The Jena resolution of 1905 had been passed under the immediate influence of the Russian Revolution and its victorious expansion. It came in a period of great struggles, revolutionary mood and a general advancement of the proletarian army in Europe. In the January of the same year, the German public was already deeply stirred by the giant struggle of the miners in the Ruhr.5 In Austria, the fight for general and equal suffrage, likewise under the influence of the Russian Revolution, made the greatest waves of all.6

Revolutionary determination and the belief in the power of the working class - a lively sentiment that back then penetrated the whole working class movement - provided the inspiration for the mass strike resolution at Jena. One only needs to read Bebel’s7 great speech at the congress in order to feel the strong, reverberating note of revolutionary determination, of the greatest revolutionary tradition, which permeated the discussions and the resolution itself: “There we have Russia, there we have the battle of June, and there we have the commune! With the spirits of these martyrs, should you not starve yourselves a few weeks to defend your highest human rights?”8 This was the glowing fire of the greatest idealism in which the first resolution on the mass strike was created.

It would, however, be a fateful error to imagine that this mood was shared by all circles of the workers’ movement later on, or even at the time itself. Let us not forget that a few months before the Jena congress, in May 1905, the trade union congress in Cologne had passed a resolution regarding the mass strike which was in direct contradiction to the Jena resolution. The mass strike was rejected on the grounds that it was a useless, and indeed harmful, weapon - not merely making propaganda for it, but even discussing it was forbidden, as it was seen as playing dangerously with fire!

Of course, this ban was not pronounced from the heart of the broad mass of the comrades in the unions - these comrades are, after all, identical to the mass of the party comrades who soon after cheered both the Jena resolution and Bebel’s speech across the whole of the country. But the Cologne trade union conference had clearly shown where the main opposition to the idea of the mass strike is to be found: in the bureaucratic conservatism of the leading union circles. The Jena party resolution was adopted explicitly against the leaders of the trade unions, and Bebel’s speech was for the most part a clear polemic against the rationale of the Cologne congress.

Yet the hostile position of the trade union leaders towards the mass strike did not disappear with this speech. Faced with the decisive position of the party and the revolutionary atmosphere in the country, it did not dare to come to the surface. That it still exists as a silent, passive resistance was shown with quite admirable clarity by the official representative of the general commission of the trade unions, comrade Bauer,9 in his talk on the issue at this year’s congress. It was also shown by comrade Scheidemann’s10 reference to the fact that ‘willingness to take action’ had been culled from the executive committee’s resolution on the mass strike - evidently on the behest of the other instrumental authority, the very same general commission of the trade unions.

The same point is continuously proven by statements of trade union leaders when they are reporting on the Jena congress at party meetings. The typical example was delivered at the general meeting in Bochum, in which Leimpeters and other happy people reduced their wisdom to the old formula that a ‘general strike is general nonsense’ and with this thought to have said everything necessary on the question.

With the acceptance of the mass strike in principle in 1905, the question was thus dealt with to such a limited extent that today we are facing the same principled resistance that we did eight years ago. And nobody should have known this better than our executive committee. In producing the failed resolution in cooperation with the trade union leaders, they should have been able to see at close range just how much the Jena resolution has remained a dead letter to them.

However, even in party circles the zest of 1905 had markedly evaporated. For he who only looks at the surface and only appreciates tangible success, the defeat of the Russian Revolution had brought about a deep depression. The defeat of the miners’ movement in the Ruhr region had equally discouraging effects. On top of this, in 1907, our party suffered its first electoral defeat for decades.11 Together, all these conditions led to an ebb in general confidence and fighting spirit, something that is from time to time unavoidable in the living historic pulse of the workers’ movement.

Only since 1910, under the pressure of the course of imperialism, has class pugnacity gradually been growing again, and a return to fiercer methods of struggle been noticeable. The debates on the insufficiency of our party’s activity against the advance of imperialism defined our congress in 1911.12

And it was essentially not merely, and definitely not primarily, the result of the Prussian state parliament elections,13 but rather the effect of the immense military bill14 and the recognition of the general intensification of the situation which so forcefully put the matter of the mass strike on the party’s agenda in the last few months.

Objective conditions now worked towards once again giving the resolution adopted eight years ago living force and increasing strength. Now, conditions prevailed which were gradually instilling the decision taken eight years ago by 400 party members into the minds of millions.

This year’s conference was called to signal this shift in the situation and this heightening of contradictions in the face of imperialism and to call out to the masses: Equip yourself with the sharpest weapons, for only from your inner intellectual and political maturity can - when necessary - the decisiveness of action and the certainty of victory be born.

Yet it was precisely here that the transformation of our own ‘authorities’ manifested itself. Instead of purposefully expressing the party’s will, as Bebel and the Jena conference of 1905 had done, the current executive, unnerved by the unions’ resistance, saw its mission in giving in to the union authorities, in bringing about a common resolution stripped of everything that would encourage practical determination, and in cohering an entire front in the debate - not against the unruly trade union leaders, but against party comrades who were pushing forwards.

Both in his speech and his summing up, comrade Scheidemann adopted a completely opposite position to that of Bebel in 1905. Whereas Bebel spoke sharply and with bitter mockery against the fear of publicly discussing the mass strike and against the bloody spectres which were being painted as the consequences of the mass strike, Scheidemann summoned up all of his oratory skills to oppose the discussion of the mass strike, playing with politics and painting bloody spectres on the wall!

In one word: if Bebel’s approach in 1905 was an advance of the party in order to force the unions to the left, then the party executive’s strategy in 1913 consisted in allowing itself to be forced to the right by the union authorities and to serve them as a battering ram against the party’s left wing.

Now, if the party debates had forced a clear and direct rejection of the mass strike from the representatives of the general commission, and if they subsequently forced the party executive, by way of Scheidemann in his closing speech, finally to veer from this standpoint and to stress more strongly the will to action, then this exposure of the situation in front of the whole party was an inestimable success.

That the debate on the mass strike took place at the congress in spite of all the resistance; that as a result it will be taken up again in all party meetings; that the masses are dealing with the question; that they have experienced what they have to expect from their leaders on both sides; that they had the opportunity to see how necessary it is to get things going through their own political pressure if the party’s methods of struggle are to advance - these are all unquestionable achievements of the party minority, which from its point of view has been successful, despite its resolution15 being rejected by the majority.

Because of recent imperialist developments, the question of taxation, just like the question of the mass strike, has become a current issue for the party. After all, what has been expressed by this ‘new era’ of the property tax in Germany? Nothing more than the fact that in its advance, German militarism has even abandoned its convoluted indirect taxation system and now demands that the bourgeoisie is partially drawn in to cover its costs.

Thus, taxation of property, which has long been a reality in England, appeared before our parliamentarians as a totally new fact and initially caused quite a lot of confusion amongst them. It is likely to be the perception of most comrades that the party congress did not dispose of this confusion, but rather that this confusion was made into the common property of the party both in the way the question was discussed and the subsequent motion that it adopted.

Indeed, hardly any serious theoretical and practical matter has been treated in such a completely inadequate manner at a German party congress as the question of taxation. It has been on the agenda for four years - sufficient time, it would seem, to prepare a thorough discussion of the material. Yet it was precisely in this field that the scientific review of the party appointed to deal with such issues, Die Neue Zeit, failed. Instead of introducing the discussion, Die Neue Zeit did not even publish any arguments from the quills of the editors themselves - editors who had already entered the debates with a very pronounced position at the Leipzig conference,16 albeit one which is the opposite of their current one.

Left high and dry from this side, the party was dependent on the daily press with all its insufficiencies in large and complicated problems. In party meetings the question was barely discussed at all. Furthermore, one of the speakers published his theses and resolutions less than a month before the congress, and the other one did not publish his at all. This is how the party congress came into the position of deciding on a new, highly important and complex question and to determine the party’s tactics for the coming period, without being in the slightest factually prepared for this responsible role. And just to compound the insufficiency of this situation, everything at the party congress was geared towards allowing one side to speak at great length, whilst the other side was hardly allowed to speak at all.

That a decision made under such unprecedented conditions bears all the signs of ‘tentativeness’ and a ‘botch job’ is not surprising. Wurm’s17 resolution did not decide the question of taxation for the party, but for the first time curtailed it. Amongst other things, we need complete and systematic work in the press in order to disentangle what was frilly and unclear, and to shed light on what was improvised and left unanswered by the majority, especially by comrade Wurm, in the field of tactics around taxation at the party congress. Furthermore, we need a systematic discussion of the question of taxation in party meetings in order to make the mass of the comrades aware of the complicated economic and political context of the problem, so that they can become aware of all the fatal and unforeseeable consequences of our tactics, to which Wurm’s botched resolution will necessarily lead.

If on the question of the mass strike a concession was made to the conservative resistance of the union leaders by adopting the executive’s resolution,18 then the adoption of Wurm’s resolution and the endorsement of the tactics of the majority faction represent a much more significant concession to parliamentary opportunism - to the Südekums, the Davids and the Noskes.19

Now elevated to the point of a principle, the ‘lesser evil’ slogan (in the sense that the abandonment of the principled rejection of militarism is the ‘lesser evil’); the acceptance in principle of approving credits for military purposes, ‘if the military bill has already successfully been decided upon’ - all this opens the door to the very same revisionist tactics which the overwhelming majority of the party had, until now, brusquely defeated, year after year.

Yet Wurm’s cleverly contrived formula, that we approve military funds once it can be demonstrated that they can be represented as the sole means of avoiding the placing of a burden on the people through more adverse taxes, is a carte blanche for all budget approvals, as, of course, no budget can be perceived which could not be portrayed as the ‘prevention’ of another, more adverse one.

It is enough to keep these consequences in mind in order to see that the revision of the casual work done on the question of taxation in Jena is an urgent task for one of our next party congresses, and one to which systematic preparation both in the press and in party meetings must be dedicated.

And yet, in looking at the decisions on the mass strike and the question of taxation, it would, in our opinion, be an error to draw the conclusion that the Jena congress highlights a hefty shift to the right, with the revisionist wing gaining a two-thirds majority. Such a rapid growth of the right wing, which up until the last party congress represented a mere third of the party, would be an inconceivable phenomenon, and indeed it has not happened at all.

On the question of taxation, at least half of the victorious majority did not commit conscious revisionism - it was the lack of understanding about the true consequences and the true character of the decision reached which influenced a great number of the delegates. And on the question of the mass strike, it was clear that the party executive was obliged to do its utmost to the very last moment to pull together a majority for its resolution.

Accordingly, we have no reason to assume that the usual revisionist third of party congresses, as represented by the conscious and consistent spokesmen of opportunism, has somehow increased at this party congress. Those who formed the majority alongside the revisionist third were the indecisive and vacillating layer of the centre. Back in Dresden, following the well-known description of the convention of the great French Revolution, Bebel referred to these forces as the “swamp”:

“It is forever the same old struggle - the left here, the right there, and between them the swamp. These are the elements who never know what they want, or rather, never say what they want. They are the ‘wise guys’ who always ask: what’s going on here, what’s happening there? They always feel where the majority is, and then go with them.

“We have these types in our party too. In these proceedings, a whole number of them has come into the light of day. We have to denounce these comrades. [Heckle from the audience: ‘Denounce?’] Yes! Denounce them, I say, so that the comrades know what semi-people they are. At least I can struggle with the man who defends his position openly - I know where I am with him. Either he wins or I do, but the lazy elements who always suppress themselves and go out of the way of every clear decision, and always say that we are all united and are all brothers - these elements are the worst of all! These are the ones I combat the most.”20

The role of this “swamp” is - in spite of the indecisiveness of the opinions of each of its members - quite a decisive one in every political body, and not least in our party. During the whole of the last period of the struggle against revisionism, the swamp supported the left wing of the party and together with it formed a compact majority against revisionism and brought about one sensational defeat of revisionism after the other.

What motivated it to do so was the seemingly conservative factor, which it considered necessary to defend. After all, ‘the old tried and tested tactics’ had to be protected in the face of revisionist innovations. And what sanctified this defensive struggle in the eyes of the centre elements was that the highest and most respected authorities stood at the head of this struggle. The party executive, the scientific central organ of the party, such well-known names as [Paul] Singer, [Wilhelm] Liebknecht, Bebel, [Karl] Kautsky,21 fought it out in the front row. That the traditional and established elements found themselves on this side provided the calming guarantee that the swamp needed.

Yet the imperialist period, the sharpened relations of the last years, confronts us with a new situation and new tasks. The necessity of imbuing the party in all its massive broadness with a greater mobility, quick-wittedness and aggressiveness; of mobilising the masses and the party majority to use its victories in crucial questions and to throw its full weight onto the scales of history - all this requires more than the desperate adherence to ‘tried and tested tactics’. Namely, it necessitates the understanding that this old and proven revolutionary tactic now needs new forms of mass action and that these tactics also have to be upheld in new situations: for example, when it comes to the introduction of the property tax for German militarism.

This is where the “swamp” first fails. As a conservative element, it now resists the forward thrust of the left in exactly the same way that, until now, it resisted the backward drag of the right. Yet through this it transforms itself from a protective barrier of the party against opportunism into a dangerous element of stagnation, in whose tepid waters the very same opportunism which has until now been suppressed can sprout like a weed.

It is not merely the decision on the question of taxation that shows, at a closer look, how the victorious swamp unconsciously organised a triumph for the very same parliamentary opportunism against which it had been fighting at dozens of party conferences. The whole nature of struggle against the left; the whole manner of arguing, while systematically distorting the other side’s arguments; and the persistent ‘misunderstandings’ on the apparent underestimation of legwork, underestimation of parliamentarism and cooperatives, putschist tendencies and other nice products of their imagination - this whole apparatus is truly taken from the revisionist wing’s arsenal of weaponry. In the fight against the left, the swamp is now making use of literally the same arguments that the right has been hurling at it for years.

And the thing that finally determines the swamp’s attitude is that the ‘authorities’ are turning on the left. The party executive, having fought under Bebel’s leadership against the right for years, now accepts the right’s support in order to defend conservatism against the left.

Finally, since 1910, the scientific review Die Neue Zeit has also gone through this change alongside the party executive. Amongst its circle of friends, the popular expression of the ‘Marxist centre’ has recently been used. More precisely, this supposed ‘Marxist centre’ is the theoretical expression for the current political function of the swamp.

Propped up by the swamp and in alliance with the right, the party executive and the party majority have gained victories on the crucial questions at the Jena congress. And Kautsky, crowing over the victory of the ‘old tried and tested tactics’ in Jena, has forgotten to reflect on this strange situation, where the likes of Südekum, David, Noske and Richard Fischer22 are on his side - people against whom he had defended those tactics for over a decade!

This new constellation is no coincidence: it is the logical development of the shifts in the external and internal conditions of our party life, and we would do well to look out for the continuation of this constellation maybe for a couple of years, if external events do not suddenly accelerate the course of developments.

However unpleasant the situation may seem to some comrades, there is not the slightest reason for pessimism and despondency. This period must, just like every other historically conditioned period, be endured.23 On the contrary, the more clearly we look into things, the more energetically, vigorously and merrily we can continue our struggle.

The next task that emerges from the Jena congress is systematic action against the “swamp” - that is, against the intellectual conservatism in the party. Here too, the only effective way to do this is through the mobilisation of the broad mass of the comrades, the shaking up of opinion by carrying the discussion on the questions of the mass strike and taxation (with all tactical differences) into party meetings, union meetings and into the press.

Every day, the course of events itself is leading with historic necessity towards increasingly vindicating the tactical endeavours of the left, and if this development itself leads to the overpowering of the elements of stagnation in the party, then the minority of the Jena congress can look towards the future with good spirits. That the Jena congress has brought about clarity on the reciprocal power relationship in the party, and led for the first time to a self-contained left opposed to the bloc of the swamp and the right, is a pleasant beginning to further development which can only be welcome.
Notes

1. Comintern’s magazine Die Internationale printed ‘After the Jena congress’ for the first time in 1927. This translation will also appear in a forthcoming special edition of Revolutionary History (www.revolutionary-history.co.uk) dedicated to Rosa’s life and work. The Weekly Worker is grateful to Einde O’Callaghan of the Marxist Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) for transcribing the original German text and to Paul Flewers of RH for his editorial work.
2. The congress of the German Social Democratic Party that took place in Jena from September 14-20 1913.
3. The retarded development of industry and the strength of the peasantry in southern Germany were amongst the factors that encouraged Social Democratic leaders in that region to adopt a considerably more moderate political approach than the party did in the remainder of the country. For the question of taxation, see note 14 below.
4. The Jena congress in 1905 decided to defend the general right to vote and to assembly, possibly through the mass strike, which was restricted to use for this purpose.
5. From January 17-19 1905, approximately 215,000 Ruhr miners were on strike demanding an eight-hour day, higher wages and safety provisions. The strike was called off without its demands being met.
6. A mass strike for universal suffrage rocked Austria-Hungary. In January 1907, the Austrian government presented a bill to parliament introducing the general right to vote.
7. August Bebel (1840-1913) played a key role in the formation and subsequent leadership of German Social Democracy. He had died just prior to the writing of this article.
8. Protocol of the proceedings of the SPD’s congress held at Jena during September 17-23 1905 (Berlin 1905, p305).
9. Gustav Bauer (1870-1944) chaired the general commission of the German trade unions during 1908-18. He was chancellor of Germany in 1919-20.
10. Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) was leader the SPD succeeding Bebel. An ardent supporter of Germany in World War I, he became chancellor in 1919.
11. The campaign led by chancellor Bernhard von Bülow for the Reichstag elections of January 25 1907 was characterised by the chauvinistic mobilisation of reaction against all opposition forces, particularly against Social Democracy, and for the continuation of the colonial war against the Hereros in South West Africa. Although the SPD gained the highest number of votes, due to a combination of constituency gerrymandering and bourgeois alliances it won only 43 seats, whereas in 1903 it had 81.
12. At the SPD congress of September 10-16 1911 in Jena, the ‘wait and see’ politics of the party executive in relation to the Morocco crisis was at the centre of the debates. In the spring of 1911, French imperialism had attempted to extend its rule to the whole of Morocco and Germany had used this to justify its decision to send warships to Agadir. Britain’s intervention in favour of France forced a retreat and a compromise was reached between France and Germany.
13. Because of the undemocratic, three-tier voting system used in the Prussian state parliament elections of June 3 1913, the SPD’s 775,171 votes (28.38%) resulted in only 10 seats. On the other hand, the 402,988 votes for the Conservatives were translated into 147 seats.
14. The military bill of March 1913 brought the greatest increases in armaments spending in German history. The SPD parliamentary fraction, despite opposition from 37 comrades, voted in favour on the grounds that some of the costs were to be covered by a wealth tax. Through this act, the maxim of ‘Not a man nor a penny for this system!’ was abandoned.
15. See ‘Motion on the political mass strike resolution’, R Luxemburg Collected works Vol 3, pp328-29.
16. A reference to the SPD congress held in Leipzig from September 12-18 1909.
17. Emanuel Wurm (1857-1920) was a journalist, and worked with Karl Kautsky on Die Neue Zeit. He subsequently joined the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).
18. See ‘The party executive’s resolution on the mass strike’, R Luxemburg Collected works Vol 3, pp323-24.
19. All leading SPD rightwingers. Albert Südekum (1871-1944) was editor of its paper Vorwärts and minister of finance in Prussia from 1918-20. Eduard David (1863-1930) was minister of the interior in 1919. Gustav Noske (1868-1946) was a trade union official and, as minister of defence during 1919-20, he permitted the emergence of rightwing paramilitary forces, such as that responsible for the murder of Luxemburg in January 1919.
20. Protocol of the proceedings of the SPD’s congress, held at Dresden, September 13-20 1903 (Berlin 1903, p319).
21. Paul Singer was with Bebel the co-chairman of the SPD. Karl Kautsky (1856-1938) was at this point the editor of Die Neue Zeit and the most prominent SPD theoretician. It can be seen from this article that Luxemburg is including Kautsky in the “swamp”.
22. Richard Fischer (1855-1926) was a longstanding leading official in the SPD.
23. In the original durchfressen: literally 'eaten through'.

Der Naturalismus und die Sozialdemokratie: Natürliche Verbündete oder von vornherein zum Scheitern verurteilt?

*Old essay on the relationship between naturalism and German Social Democracy - I would probably write it slightly differently today, but still quite interesting to look back at*

Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts entstand eine flüchtige doch einzigartige Beziehung zwischen der neuen europäischen kulturellen Bewegung des Naturalismus und der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Viele Dichter und Denker wollten eine neue Form der Kunst herbeibringen, die das Publikum und die Gesellschaft im Allgemeinen auf das alltägliche Elend des Kaiserreichs aufmerksam machen wollten. Dieses Aufwerfen der ‚sozialen Frage’ brachte die Intellektuellen der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung immer näher, und obwohl einige der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD) fern blieben, wurden andere zu bekannten Figuren und Aktivisten der SPD.
So galten, zumindest aus populärer Sicht, der Naturalismus und der Sozialismus als natürliche, sich beide ergänzende Verbündete. Innerhalb von beiden Bewegungen war dieses Verhältnis jedoch nicht so eindeutig, und eine gewisse Skepsis war auf beiden Seiten zu finden. Tatsächlich kam es in weniger Zeit zu Meinungsunterschieden, veröffentlichten Auseinandersetzungen, und sogar offenem Streit in der ‚Revolte der Jungen’ und dem Friedrichshager Streit. 1896, beim Parteitag der SPD, fand eine lange „Naturalismus-Debatte“ statt, die effektiv die zwei Bewegungen spaltete. Folglich nabelte sich die naturalistische Bewegung auch ab und flüchtete sich vor der Arbeiterbewegung – entweder „nach vorne“ in den Vitalismus (und teilweise in eine nationalistische Kriegsbegeisterung) oder „nach hinten“ zum Rückzug ins Idyllische und religiös-Mystische.

Es ist schon viel über das vielschichtige und unklare Verhältnis zwischen der deutschen Sozialdemokratie und dem Naturalismus geschrieben worden, denn diese Frage ist von höchster Bedeutung - nicht nur im sozio-politischen sondern auch im literaturwissenschaftlichen Sinne. Es erhebt sich die Frage, was aus diesem komplizierten und zwiespältigen Verhältnis zu entnehmen sei. Ist die Tatsache, dass die beiden Bewegungen auseinander geraten sind, auf die damalige politische Lage, nämlich die Aufhebung des Sozialistengesetztes und deren Auswirkung zurückzuführen? Oder liegt es eher an einem aufkeimenden „verknöcherten“ und „deterministischen“ Verständnis des Marxismus in der SPD, die kulturelle Fragen vermied, um sich auf parlamentarische und gewerkschaftliche Fragen zu konzentrieren? Oder übersieht eine solche Analyse die innere Widersprüchlichkeit des Naturalismus selbst, die schon am Anfang des Naturalismus auf eine solche Neigung zu „individualistischen Konzepten“ hinwies?
Durch die Analyse dieser Entwicklungen wird ein Einblick sowohl in die Dynamik des Sozialismus als auch in die des Naturalismus ermöglicht. Zwangsläufig wird so auf die umstrittene Frage der Beziehung zwischen gesellschafts-politischen und künstlerischen Entwicklungen eingegangen.
Hier wird die Frage aufgeworfen, inwiefern das flüchtige Verhältnis zwischen dem Naturalismus und der Sozialdemokratie zwangsläufig so war, oder ob das Verhältnis unter anderen Umständen hätte anders sein können.
Es kann behauptet werden, dass die Beziehung zwischen der „Intelligenz“ und der Arbeiterbewegung seit Marx und Engels selbst eine komplizierte sei. Beide Denker entstammten schließlich dem kritisch denkenden Bürgertum, und wiesen sogar daraufhin, dass die Theoretiker der Arbeiterbewegung meistens dieser Klasse angehören würden, wenn nur aufgrund ihrer Freizeit und Ausbildung im Vergleich zu den, um ihre Existenz kämpfenden, Arbeitern. Tatsächlich war die anfängliche Reaktion der Sozialdemokraten auf das zunehmende Interesse der Akademiker an der sozialen Frage sehr hoch. Die Sozialdemokraten waren daran interessiert, kritische Denker zum Sozialismus zu gewinnen, was nicht nur für Annäherungsreden und Vorträge an den Universitäten sondern auch die Veröffentlichung bestimmter Publikationen wie des „Sozialistischer Akademiker“ sorgte.
Es war jedoch eine zwiespältige Einstellung der „Intelligenz“ gegenüber der Revolution zu betrachten und viele dieser „kleinbürgerlichen Intellektuellen“ konnten sich, trotz ihren Sympathien mit den Armen, der marxistischen Revolutionstheorie nicht anschließen, denn sie verstanden diese Theorie als „eigenes Todesurteil.“ Diese Empfindung, wenngleich ein Missverständnis des marxschen Begriffs von „Revolution“, war aber auch schon bei Heinrich Heine zu finden, der „von einer unaussprechlichen Traurigkeit ergriffen“ war, als er an „den Untergang“ dachte, „mit dem das siegreiche Proletariat meine Verse bedroht“, obwohl „eben dieser Kommunismus“ auf seine Seele einen Reiz ausübte, dem er sich nicht entziehen konnte.
Es könnte auch betont werden, dass viele Naturalisten auf Grund ihres Mitleids, und nicht auf Grund ihrer sozialistischen Überzeugung, über das Elend der Armen geschrieben haben. Wie es in einem Gedicht von Karl Henckell lautet: „Aus Mitgefühl sang ich mein Lied der Not“ Das findet auch bei Michael Georg Conrad Ausdruck, wenn er „das Unwetter“ der kommenden Revolution als ein „unvermeidliches Übel“ und eine „natürliche Notwendigkeit“ beschreibt, die erst Zustande kommt, „sobald der große Teil der Buerger verarmt ist“ – diese Einstellung führt er sogar auf Marx zurück.
Insofern sind solche zwiespältige Einstellungen seitens der Intelligenz hinsichtlich der proletarischen Revolution als ein Trend aufzuweisen, der sich auch auf das Verhältnis zwischen dem Naturalismus und der Sozialdemokratie auswirkte. Die Sozialdemokraten wollten jedoch eben aus diesen Gründen versuchen, die Intellektuellen und Dichter zum Sozialismus zu gewinnen und sie von der Notwendigkeit der Revolution überzeugen. So lässt sich betonen, dass es trotz der Klassenunterschiede der beiden Bewegungen, zu einer langfristigeren Vereinigung hätte kommen können.
Wichtig in dieser Hinsicht ist die Aufhebung des Sozialistengesetzes im Jahre 1890. Einerseits führte es dazu, dass die Sozialdemokratie „selektiver“ im Umgang mit ihren Freunden, Anhängern und Sympathisanten sein konnte und deswegen nicht mehr auf „kleinbürgerlichen“ Elementen in der ‚Subkultur’ angewiesen war. Andererseits könnte man der Auffassung sein, dass das „Mitgefühl“ der Naturalisten (und des liberalen Bürgertums im Allgemeinen) nicht nur auf die Massen gerichtet war, sondern auch auf die Sozialdemokratie selbst, die durch das Sozialistengesetz teils brutal verfolgt wurde. So gesehen ist es nicht gerade zufällig, dass beide Bewegungen wirklich erst ab 1890 auseinander gingen.

Es wäre jedoch falsch, von einem homogenen Naturalismus zu reden. Die naturalistische Bewegung war durch Vielfältigkeit gekennzeichnet und in ihr existierten sowohl Subjektivität, Objektivität, Optimismus und Pessimismus, Kollektivismus und Individualismus nebeneinander. In mannigfaltigen Programmen, Manifesten und theoretischen Schriften wie „Revolution der Literatur“ von Bleibtreu oder „Die Kunst – Ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze“ von Holz, wurden diese unterschiedlichen Stellungnahmen zum „Naturalismus“ veröffentlicht. Es gilt dennoch zu sagen, dass sich Schriftsteller wie die Brüder Hart, Bölsche und Hauptmann darüber einigten, dass es eine „Revolution“ in der Literatur geben sollte, die die „Wahrheit“ anzustreben und die Halbwahrheiten und Oberflächlichkeit des Bürgertums zu entlarven hat, um eine Literatur anzubieten, die jedermann leicht eingängig ist. Die Vielfältigkeit innerhalb dieser Kunstinterpretation galt aber auch für die verschiedenen politischen Standpunkte der Naturalisten – die von einer kritischen Beurteilung bis zur völligen Übereinstimmung reichten.
Die Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den Naturalisten und den Sozialdemokraten sind jedoch deutlich zu erkennen. Obwohl viele naturalistische Schriftsteller aus den bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Klassen stammten, fanden sie eine Art Zuflucht in der Arbeiterbewegung und ihre Literatur war „nicht von der Entstehung der Arbeiterbewegung zu trennen.“ Einige Publikationen oder Aufführungen wurden von der Partei selbst finanziert, oder wurden in der Arbeiterpresse veröffentlicht. Das Phänomen des Laientheaters und der „Freie Bühne“ stand der SPD auch sehr nah. Diese sozialdemokratische Subkultur war also von höchster Bedeutung für die Naturalisten.
Beide Bewegungen betonten auch das Primat der Natur, die Marx als die Quelle alles menschlichen Reichtums bezeichnete. Liebknecht brachte dies auch beim Parteitag der SPD 1896 zum Ausdruck: „Wir sind uns alle einig, dass die Kunst natürlich zu sein, die Natur zur Grundlage, zum Ausgangspunkt und zum Ziel haben muss.“
Während die Sozialdemokraten eher die fortgehend dialektische Wechselbeziehung der Natur und so die Veränderlichkeit hervorhoben, wollten die Naturalisten der Natur bestimmten, festen „Gesetzen“ zuordnen. Folglich wurde der Dichter einem Wissenschaftler gleichgesetzt – der sich nicht nur der Regeln und Gesetze der Natur bewusst ist, sondern auch mit diesen Gesetzen experimentiert, um etwas tief greifendes, bewegendes oder poetisches herzustellen. Um „das Schöne“ wirklich festzustellen und aufzuzeigen, habe die Ästhetik „Hand in Hand mit der Naturwissenschaft zu gehen.“ Diese gesetzmäßige Ästhetik fand ihren höchsten Ausdruck in der Holzchen Theorie und seiner mathematischen Formel: Kunst = Natur – ‚x’ (wo‚x’ die Unzulänglichkeit des Materials und die Subjektivität des Künstlers sei ).
Dieser Unterschied war vielleicht der größte zwischen der Weltanschauung beider Bewegungen, und liefert einen Hinweis dafür, warum einige naturalistische Denker wie Conrad („stets siegt der Stärkere, lautet das Naturgesetz“ ) zum Sozialdarwinismus neigten und wie sogar Denker wie Hauptmann eine Begeisterung für den ersten Weltkrieg äußerten.
Auch sind beim Naturalismus erhebliche idealistische Züge zu konstatieren, die auch stark von Positivisten, wie dem Franzosen August Comte , beeinflusst sind – nämlich die Idee, dass nur das „empirische Gegebene“ und „wissenschaftlich Gesicherte“ Gültigkeit haben sollte, im Versuch, Gesetze für das soziale Leben zu entdecken. Ein anderer starker Einfluss auf den Naturalismus hatten auch die Ideen des „Prophet[en] Darwins“ Ernst Haeckel – der das menschliche Verhalten in den Naturwissenschaften suchte.
Das wirft die Frage auf, inwiefern beide Bewegungen aufgrund der Widersprüche innerhalb vom Naturalismus selbst auseinander geraten sind. Der Widerspruch zwischen einer positivistisch-empirischen und einer romantisch-naturphilosophischen Naturauffassung ist nicht zu leugnen und vielleicht geriet der Naturalismus, auf Grund seiner innerlichen Widersprüchen und seines kleinbürgerlich geprägten Individualismus, in den Vitalismus oder in die quasi-mystische Verehrung der naturalistischen Bewegung. In der Tat waren vitalistische Züge schon bei Hauptmann zu finden – verkörpert in seiner Darstellung von Rose Bernds’ erotischer Vitalität im Vergleich zu Frau Flamme.
Bei einer solchen Einstellung wird jedoch der Einfluss sozial-politischer Faktoren auf die Entwicklung der Kunst gering geschätzt. Es ist nicht zu übersehen, dass der Naturalismus viele, sich gegenüberstehende Ideen und Konzepte enthielt, doch es ist davon auszugehen, dass eine offenere Einstellung der Sozialdemokraten dem Naturalismus gegenüber vielleicht dazu geführt hätte, dass der Naturalismus sozialkritisch und sozial engagiert geblieben wäre. Es ist vielleicht kein Wunder, dass sich einige Naturalisten wie John Henry Mackay mit der Politik des Anarchismus verbündeten, wenn sie von Sozialdemokraten wie Engels als „reiner Verderb“ gesehen wurden, wenn sie nicht „völlig auf den proletarischen Standpunkt“ standen.
Diese Bemerkungen von Engels wiesen jedoch vielleicht darauf hin, dass das Streben der Naturalisten nach einer getreuen „Wiedergabe der Wirklichkeit“ eigentlich nicht vereinbar mit dem marxistischen Streben nach ‚Wirklichkeit’ und Wahrheit war. In der Tat war der Naturalismus nicht einzigartig in dem Sinne, dass er die wahre gesellschaftliche Realität zeigen wollte, sondern wie er versucht hat, diese darzustellen.
Der marxistische Kunsttheoretiker Georg Lukacs vertritt sogar der Auffassung, dass der ‚bürgerliche Realismus’ die bessere Darstellung der Wirklichkeit anbieten würde, denn er gab die Erscheinung der Wirklichkeit nicht nur wie ein Abbild wieder, sondern entlarvte auch ihr Wesen und schilderte spezifische ästhetische Momente als Bestandteile einer welthistorischen Totalität.
Paul Lafarge war auch der Auffassung, dass der Blick der Naturalisten, trotz ihrem lobenswerten Streben danach, die Not der Arbeiterklasse zu beschreiben, was „Jargon und Dialekt, Stammeln, Stottern“ und sogar „Rülpsen“ mit einbezog, „ausschließlich auf der Außenseite der Dinge gehaftet“ bleibe. Lafarge vertritt diese Auffassung, weil der Naturalismus dazu neige, keinen Ausweg aus dieser Not heraus oder keine Lösungen für die Massen aufzuzeigen. In der Tat tendiert der Naturalismus zu einer fast Büchernischen Auffassung des Menschen als „produktives Endglied einer langen biologischen Entwicklungskette“ , als Teil einer beinahe systemhaften „organischen Natur.“ In dieser Hinsicht ist es einzusehen, wieso die Sozialisten dem Naturalismus einen gewissen Determinismus vorwarfen.
Obwohl es offensichtlich theoretische Unterschiede darüber gab, wie man am Besten die Not der Arbeiterklasse darstellen konnte, scheint es jedoch kontraproduktiv, darauf zu bestehen, dass sozialdemokratische Kunst durch Dialektik und Klassenkampf gekennzeichnet werden muss. Man könnte sogar behaupten, dass ein politisches Drama wie Vor Sonnenaufgang schon im Titel (wenn nicht auf marxistische Art und Weise) auf eine kommende soziale Umwälzung hindeutet. Selbst wenn das Drama anders interpretiert, scheint Vor Sonnenaufgang Gefühle von Solidarität zu erwecken für die Probleme von Helena. Und Hauptmanns Entlarvung der Realität für viele Familien in Deutschland muss unbedingt dafür gesorgt haben, dass viele sich sozial-politisch engagiert haben.
Tatsächlich kommt Lukacs später zu diesem Schluss und misst den Dramen Hauptmanns eine große ästhetische Bedeutung zu, aufgrund ihrer „meisterhaften Dialoge“ zwischen Charakteren und Figuren, in die man sich „völlig hineinfühlen könnte.“
Dieses „Hineinfühlen“ mag zwar nicht auf dem „proletarischen Standpunkt“ beruhen, hätte jedoch trotzdem von großer Bedeutung für die Sozialdemokraten sein sollen. Beispielsweise war das Theater dem Naturalismus sehr wichtig und Dramen wie Vor Sonnenaufgang oder Die Weber würde einem breitem Publikum vorgeführt. Wäre es zu keiner Spaltung gekommen, hätten die Sozialdemokraten solche Angelegenheiten benutzen können, nicht nur große Denker wie Hauptmann, sondern auch das breite Publikum zu sich zu locken. Allerdings hatten die Gesetzgeber einen „Horror“ vor dem Theater und davor, dass „durch das Theater eine Masse in Bewegung gesetzt werden könnte, und mehrere Stücke wie Erich Hartlebens Hannah Jagert wurden verboten.
Auf Grund der oben angeführten Argumente lässt sich sehen, dass die Sozialdemokraten hätten auf eine positivere Art und Weise mit den Naturalisten umgehen können, und dass ihre Herangehensweise auf eine begrenzte und konservatives Verständnis des Marxismus zurückzuführen war. Eine erfolgreiche revolutionäre Umwälzung der bestehenden Sozialverhältnisse setzt voraus, dass die überwiegende Mehrheit der Gesellschaft dazu imstande ist, die herrschende Klasse zu sein. Das heißt nicht nur sozialdemokratische Abgeordnete wählen und Streiks organisieren, sondern auch kulturelle Fragen beherrschen und eine eigene, neue und revolutionäre Kunstform und Verständnis zu erreichen.
Eine offensichtliche Stärke der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, im Vergleich zu anderen Bewegungen in Europa, war ihre Organisation und Wurzeln in der Klasse mit selbstverwalteten Bibliotheken und Kneipen, aber durch ihre Konzentration auf Parlament und Gewerkschaftsfragen verlor die SPD tatsächlich an Einfluss. Insofern ist es durchaus berechtigt von Wynne, wenn er angesichts dieser Taktik der SPD die Integration der Arbeiter in die bürgerliche Kultur betont. Ebenso gilt Mahals Feststellung, dass die Sozialdemokraten eine „Versimpelung des Zusammenhangs von Literatur und Politik hervorgebracht haben.
Ein Ausgangspunkt der marxistischen Ästhetik ist, dass die Kultur sich in einer komplizierten und wechselseitigen Beziehung zwischen sowohl gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen als auch Spannungen innerhalb dieser Kultur selbst entwickelt. In ihrem Umgang mit dem Naturalismus, besonders nach der Aufhebung des Sozialistengesetzes und der damit verbundenen Versammlungsfreiheit, hat sich die Sozialdemokratie ganz sektiererisch gegenüber dem Naturalismus und der Kunst im Allgemeinen verhalten, verkörpert in Liebknechts Idee, dass „das kämpfende Deutschland“ „keine Zeit zum Dichten“ habe. Es lässt sich nicht beschreiten, dass die Sozialdemokratie und der Naturalismus zwei ganz verschiedene Bewegungen waren – nicht nur was ihre Klassenbasis, sondern auch was ihre Ideologie betraf. Insofern sind sie nicht als „natürliche Verbündete“ zu betrachten. Im Nachhinein lässt sich jedoch betonen, dass eine freundliche, kritische, distanzierte Einstellung der Sozialdemokratie dem Naturalismus gegenüber, sich positiv auf die progressivsten Aspekte des Naturalismus ausgewirkt hätten, und dazu geführt hat, dass die offensichtlichen Widersprüchen des kulturellen „Zwischenaktes“
zwischen Positivismus, Naturwissenschaft, Romantik und Mystik hätten auf eine andere Art und Weise überwunden werden können – zugunsten der SPD. Das gilt auch für das eher verkehrte Verständnis der Revolution unter einigen Naturalisten und ihre Überzeugung, dass Individualität und Freiheit durch Revolution verdrängt würde. Das hätte auch dafür gesorgt, dass viele intelligente und sozial engagierte ‚Mitläufer’ ihre Ideen unter der Arbeiterklasse hätten verbreiten können und dass die Meistengagierten, wie Wille und Bölsche, in der Partei geblieben wären. Es ist nicht zu leugnen, dass dieser taktische Fehler, ebenso wie viele der strategischen Fehler der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, auf das Aufkommen eines „verknöcherten“ Marxismus zurückzuführen sei, der sich fast ausschließlich mit gewerkschaftlichen und parlamentarischen Fragen beschäftigte. Durch kompromisslose Kritik von Kunstformen und Künstlern die der Arbeiterbewegung nah stehen können Verbündete gewonnen werden, und was noch wichtiger ist, die Arbeiter können die besten Aspekte der bisherigen Kultur übernehmen, und wie Bebel es beim Gotha-Parteitag formulierte, „nicht nur auf politischem und wirtschaftlichen Gebiet revolutionär sein“ , sondern in allen Sphären der Gesellschaft.

Literaturverzeichnis:
Bogdal, Klaus-Michael, Arbeiterbewegung und Literatur in: „Hanzers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur“ Band 6, hrsg. Von Edward Mc.Innes und Gerhard Plumpe, 1.Aufl. (Muenchen; Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, Wien1996)
Deutsche Arbeiterliteratur von den Anfaengen bis 1914 hrsg. von Bernd Witte, 1.Aufl.(Stuttgart: Reclam: 1977)
Die deutsche Literatur in Text und Darstellung, Band 12: Naturalismus, hrsg. von Walter Schmähling, 1.Auflage (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977)
Geschichte der deutschen Literatur hrsg. Von Bengt Algot Sørensen, 1.Auf.(Muenchen: Beck Verlag, 1997)
Hauptmann, Gerhard, Rose Bernd (Handout)
Hauptmann, Gerhard, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Handout)
Heine, Heinrich, Lutèce. Lettres sur la vie politique, artistique et sociale de la France in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, Band 13/1 s.167 [Gefunden 17.4.2007]
Lukacs, Georg: Einfuehrung in die aesthetischen Schriften von Marx und Engels (Handout vom Kurs „Modern German Thought“)
Mahal, Guenther, Naturalismus, 1. Aufl. (Muenchen: Willhelm Fink Verlag, 1975)
Rohe, Wolfgang, Literatur und Naturwissenschaft in: „Hanzers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur“ Band 6, hrsg. Von Edward Mc.Innes und Gerhard Plumpe, 1.Aufl. (Muenchen; Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, Wien1996)
Trommler, Frank, Sozialsitische Literatur in Deutschland,1.Aufl. (Stuttgart: Kroener Verlag, 1976)
Trotsky, Leon: „Literature and Revolution“ [Gefunden: 14.7.2004]
Theorie des Naturalismus hrsg. Von Theo Meyer, 1.Aufl.( Stuutgart; Reclam, 1973)
Wynne, Robert James, Naturalism and Socialism in Germany. The politics of art and the art of politics, 1880-1900, 1.Aufl.(University of California, San Diego: 1979).

Rosa Luxemburg - In her own words

Ninety years ago, on January 15 1919, one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg, was killed by the Freikorps - a freelance paramilitary outfit formed by rightwing officers after the defeat of Germany in World War I. They acted with the full encouragement of the coalition government headed by Fredrich Ebert and Gustav Noske (both members of the Social Democratic Party). There were thousands of other such victims, not least Karl Liebknecht. A trail of blood that led all the way to Hitler.

Possessing theoretical, literary and political talents which no one else in the newly formed Communist Party of Germans (KPD) equalled, her death was a massive loss, including to the international workers’ movement. The funeral procession, organised by the KPD and others, was one of the biggest workers’ demonstrations ever seen in German history, with hundreds of thousands following her coffin. Even today thousands turn out for the annual commemoration in honour of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

Yet, as with any important historical figure, her legacy has been distorted and her views misrepresented to justify various opportunist projects. Thus the reformist Die Linke effectively controls the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) and nowadays heads the memorial marches in Berlin. This despite advocating politics that in reality are not that far removed from those of the 1919 Social Democratic Party.

Luxemburg was, to use the words of Lenin, “an eagle” of Marxism who soared above the political collapse and theoretical degeneration of the Second International and did all in her power to uphold the integrity of Marxism. As Trotsky put it, she “had mastered the Marxist method like the organs of her body. One could say that Marxism ran in her bloodstream”.

Our series of articles covers a wide range of themes and questions revealing various elements of Luxemburg’s Marxism. We begin with two appraisals of Ferdinand Lassalle’s life by Luxemburg. They provide an interesting insight into this complex man who laid the foundations of the SDP.

Next will come a scornful polemic against the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, Georgi Plekhanov, a report of the 1913 SPD congress (which was refused publication in the party press) and finally reflections on Leo Tolstoy - one of her favourite writers and someone she would always recommend to comrades, friends and even her prison guards. In each of her articles, Rosa’s writing is infused with a rare passion that brings each and every word to life, whether she is discussing the particulars of the German tax question or how the masses moved onto the historical stage.

It is a historical tragedy that many of the writings of this great Marxist are not available in English. Indeed, this reflects a general problem: much of classical Marxism’s achievements - including whole books as well as theoretical articles, journalism and polemics - have suffered the same fate. Thinkers exerting a strong influence on Lenin and Trotsky such as Karl Kautsky, Alexander Parvus, and many others beside, cannot be fully read in English. This might go some way to explaining the widespread and deep-rooted ignorance about their ideas. Yet if Marxism is to be cleansed of all the ideological garbage it has accumulated after a century of defeat, then making such works available for critical study is crucial.

In this respect, the short series of articles we are publishing is a contribution towards what needs to be done. Much credit must go to Ted Crawford of the Marxist Internet Archive (www.marxists.org), who spends so much of his time and effort facilitating the translation and transcription of such material. We are very grateful to him for pointing out some of the untranslated works. All of our texts will appear on the MIA site, as will others I am working on by Luxemburg and other important Marxists.
Lassalle and the revolution
This March 1904 article was written for a volume commemorating Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64). He founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863, the first German workers’ party. This organisation merged with the Social Democratic Workers Party headed by Karl Liebknecht and August Bebel in 1875, later becoming the Social Democratic Party

Lassalle’s immediate relationship with the March [1848] revolution has remained a mere fragmentary, almost fleeting, one.

This is partly because of his still relatively young age, but above all because of the peculiar concatenation of circumstances in his life which - for almost a decade - chained him to the individual fate of a woman badly abused by the dominant feudal powers and which have made his energy to the service of the revolution highly disputed in this period.1 Not until the November crisis of 1848 was Lassalle able to play an exemplary part in the revolutionary struggles of the Rhineland. Immediately, however, he was snared by the Prussian judiciary, which only released him when the revolution was over.

But Lassalle’s historical connection with the March revolution does not end with his direct agitation during the ‘great year’: it was not even the main thing about it. Rather, it was the fact that Lassalle put into practice the most important historical consequence of the March revolution by finally releasing the German working class from the political conscription of the bourgeoisie and organising it into an independent class party.

As is well known, the specific manner in which Lassalle carried out this immortal task has been met with sharp and often well deserved criticism from Marx. “He made big mistakes,” wrote Marx to Schweitzer in 1868. “He allowed himself to be influenced too much by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made the minor starting point, his opposition to the dwarf-like Schulze-Delitzsch, the central point of his agitation - state aid versus self-help. The ‘state’ was, therefore, transformed into the Prussian state. He was thus forced to make concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clerics.”2

Yet Lassalle’s great deed - accomplished both in spite of and through these mistakes - is not reduced, but actually grows in significance with the historical perspective from which we observe it. That Lassalle understood how to see through the inner misery of bourgeois liberalism and to expose this ruthlessly and almost brutally in front of the working class - especially at a time when this liberalism was still, after all, daring to engage in something akin to a struggle with the crown and the Junker reaction - this service will in this sense be ever greater in the eyes of the historians and the politicians, for since then the bourgeoisie has achieved the miracle of sliding, year on year, further down beyond the depths where it stood even back then.

And if still today, until quite recently, if only sporadically and fleetingly, illusions in a new upswing, an Indian summer of bourgeois liberalism, the cooperation and common struggle of the proletariat were conceivable, the more groundbreaking Lassalle’s noble deed will become, as he did not hesitate for a second in showing the German proletariat the way to independent class politics through the rubble of liberalism stemming from the time of conflict - a liberalism that, of course, towers above the liberalism of today.

In his tactics of struggle, Lassalle certainly did make mistakes. Yet emphasising mistakes in a great life’s work is the trite pleasure of petty peddlars of historical research. Far more important in judging someone’s personality and the impact of their work is to ascertain the actual cause or the specific source from which both their errors and virtues resulted. In many cases, Lassalle transgressed in his tendency to ‘diplomacy’ or ‘ploys’, such as in his deals with Bismarck on the introduction from above of general suffrage or in his plans for cooperatives funded with state credit. In his political struggles with bourgeois society, as well as in his judicial struggles with the Prussian judiciary, he happily fought on the enemy’s territory, appearing to make concessions in his point of view. A sassy, noble acrobat, as Johann Phillip Becker wrote, he often dared to jump right to the edge of the abyss that separates a revolutionary tactic from collaboration with reaction.

But the cause that led him to these audacious leaps was not inner insecurity, an inner doubt of the strength and practicability of the revolutionary cause that he represented, but on the contrary an excess of confident belief in the unconquerable power of this cause. Lassalle sometimes went over to the ground of the opponent in the fight, not in order to relinquish something of his revolutionary goals, but, on the contrary, in the deluded belief that his strong personality would suffice to wrest away so much from his opponent for those revolutionary goals, that the ground beneath his opponent’s feet would cave in.

When, for example, Lassalle grafted his idea of cooperatives funded by state credit onto an idealistic, unhistorical fiction of the ‘state’, the great danger of this fiction was that in reality he merely idealised the wretched Prussian state. But what Lassalle wanted to impose on it in terms of the tasks and duties of the working class would not only have shaken the miserable shack that is the Prussian state, but the bourgeois state in general.

The wrong - one might say the opportunistic - aspect of the Lassallean tactic was that he aimed his demands at the wrong audience. Yet his demands did not as a result diminish and disintegrate in his hands: they grew more and more. And if he preferred to reduce the whole fight to a few militant slogans - on the general right to vote and the productive associations, for example - then it was not an excess of patience, which would have meant abandoning the sea of socialist demands for piecemeal bourgeois reforms, but his impatience, on the contrary, which drove him to concentrate all forces on one or a few particular points of attack in order to cut short the long historic process.

So the mistakes of Lassallean tactics are those of an aggressive attacker, not a ditherer. They are those of a daring revolutionary, not a fainthearted diplomat.

In every period there are people - and there are also such people today - who only believe in the possibility and the timeliness of a revolution when it has already happened. Such people grasp world history not by observing its face, so to speak, but its behind. Lassalle belonged to that great generation, at the top of which Karl Marx shone, in which belief in the revolution was alive in all its power. Not merely in the sense that in the 1850s Lassalle, like Marx and Engels, still confidently expected the return of the March revolutionary wave in Europe, but above all in the sense that he lived in the rock-solid conviction of the validity and inevitability of the proletarian revolution.

He constantly listened to the ‘the march of worker-battalions’ in the historical storming of the bourgeois order of society, right in the middle of the everyday struggle and the guerrilla war with the Prussian judiciary and police. And he knew perfectly well that the only adequate guarantee of the victorious course of this struggle lay in the proletarian mass itself. Even if he did not arrive at this conclusion by way of historical materialist research, as Marx did, but rather by way of philosophic-idealistic speculation, he provided the German working class, in complete harmony with Marx’s teaching, with one of its most important signposts in their class struggle when he, in contrasting parliamentary reformism to revolutionary mass action, said: “A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws and so forth … Spoken more realistically, in the last instance revolutions can only be made with the masses and their passionate devotion” (my emphasis - RL).3

In a few months, on August 31, to be precise, 40 years will have passed since Lassalle’s death. He and his life’s work, judged for so long in a varied and sometimes contradictory manner, are now available for the German working class in full and exhaustive clarity - and indeed both in mortal and immortal forms - in Bernstein’s commentary and in Mehring’s works.

Had his sudden death not taken him away after such a short and bright life, it is doubtful whether Lassalle would be have been able to orient himself in today’s movement and claim his position as a leading and powerful spirit in this completely changed environment. “Events”, he wrote shortly before his death, “will develop very slowly, I fear, and my glowing soul takes no pleasure in these children’s illnesses and chronic tasks.”4 Yet history has hardly ever suffered from a more disgusting infantile illness than the current period of bourgeois-feudal parliamentarianism, which the modern proletariat in Germany and all capitalist countries is damned to wade through and penetrate if it is to overcome it. Lassalle’s personality was simply not made for this period of the struggle.

But the contemporary proletarian mass movement needs that “glowing soul”, which shone in Lassalle and still breathes in each of his written words, all the more today. That soul, in Lassalle’s words, will alone be able to “clench the whole power into a fist”, and, at the crucial moment, overcome bourgeois society and achieve victory.
Notes

1. This refers to Sophie Gräfin von Hartzfeld, who sought to divorce her cheating husband. Lassalle met her at the age of 20 and took up her case in 36 court cases between 1846 and 1854.
2. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_10_13.htm
3. F Mehring (ed) Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle Vol 4, Stuttgart 1902.
4. E Bernstein (ed) Lassalles Reden und Schriften Vol 1, Berlin 1892, p179.
Lassalle’s legacy
First published in the SPD women’s magazine Die Gleichheit (Equality) No18, 1913, pp275-77

“Hutten’s error was merely that of all prophetic natures: namely to view and desire at once a shining ideal, which humanity can only achieve step by step and bit by bit after centuries of struggle.”

With these words, David Friedrich Strauss closes his novel Hutten. And what applies to Hutten also applies to Lassalle in the same degree. Of course, centuries do not come into consideration in the speedy development of contemporary capitalist development. But what Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation needed many decades to come about. Yet it is precisely this optical illusion - which all prophetic natures succumb to, and causes them like giants from the top of their mountain to imagine the far away horizons to be within their grasp - we must thank for the bold deed from which German social democracy emerged.

The emergence of an independent class party of the proletariat was an historical necessity, stemming from the capitalist economic system and the political nature of the bourgeois class state. German social democracy would have arisen with or without Lassalle, just as the class struggle of the international proletariat would have become the predominant factor of recent history with or without Marx and Engels. Yet the fact that the German proletarian class party already appeared at the gates with such radiance and splendour 50 years ago, more than two decades before all other countries, and acted as a role model for them, is thanks to Lassalle’s life work and his maxim: ‘I dared!’

Class struggle has been the driving force at the core of world history ever since private property separated human society into exploiters and exploited. The modern proletariat’s struggle is merely the last in the series of class struggles running like a red thread through written history. And yet the last 50 years offers something that world history had not seen before: for the first time the spectacle of the great mass of the exploited emerging in an organised and purposeful struggle for the liberation of their class. All previous revolutions were those of minorities in the interest of minorities. And, as the first movements of the proletariat in England and France initiated modern class struggle, the masses would step onto the stage only for a few moments and then melt away in the revolutionary downturn and become absorbed in bourgeois society over and over again.

Brought into existence by Lassalle, German social democracy was the first historic attempt to create a permanent organisation of the masses, the majority of the people, for class struggle. Thanks to Lassalle’s political action and thanks to Marx’s theory, German social democracy has radiantly solved this new task. Its 50-year history has proved that on the basis of proletarian class interests it is possible to unite the ultimate goal of revolution with patient day-to-day struggle, to unite scientific theory with the most sober praxis, to unite tight and disciplined organisation with the mass character of the movement, to unite insight into historic necessity with conscious, dynamic will. The present-day size and power of social democracy is the fruit of this unity.

The history of social democracy hitherto can be quickly summarised as the utilisation of bourgeois parliamentarianism for the enlightenment and centralisation of the proletariat into its class party. On this track, from which it never allowed itself to be lured either by brutal emergency laws or demagogic cunning, our party has advanced decade after decade to become by far the strongest political party in the German empire and the strongest workers’ party in the world. In this sense, the last 50 years have seen the implementation of Lassalle’s action programme, which was concentrated on two closely linked aims: the creation of a class organisation of the workers, independent of the liberal bourgeoisie; and the achievement of universal suffrage, in order to put it to the service of the workers.

The construction of this organisation and the systematic utilisation of universal suffrage - this was more or less Lassalle’s legacy, and the lifeblood of social democracy over the last 50 years.

This programme has just about been pushed to its limits, where, according to the law of the historical dialectic, quantity must transform into quality, where the unstoppable growth of social democracy, on the ground of and in the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism, must eventually transcend this.

Germany’s capitalist development, like that of the entire world economy, has now reached a point where the conditions in which Lassalle accomplished his great task appear as a clumsy child. Whereas back then in Europe, the framework of bourgeois national states was still being fashioned to suit the unrestricted rule of capital, today the last non-capitalist lands are being swallowed up by the imperialist monster, and capital is crowning its world dominance with a chain of bloody expansionist wars.

From its birth onwards, bourgeois parliamentarianism on the European continent was ridden with impotence through fear of the red spectre of the revolutionary proletariat. Today, it is being crushed by the iron hooves of rampantly galloping imperialism; it becomes a hollow shell, degraded to an impotent appendage of militarism.

In 50 years of exemplary work, social democracy has pretty much taken everything it could from the now stony soil in terms of material profit for the working class and class enlightenment. The most recent, biggest electoral victory of our party1 has now made it clear to all that a 110-person-strong social democratic faction in the era of imperialist delirium and parliamentary impotence, far from achieving more in terms of agitation and social reforms than a faction the quarter of its size in the past, will achieve less.

And the hopeless foundering of the hub of Germany’s internal political development today - voting rights in Prussia - has destroyed all prospects of parliamentary reform through mere pressure of electoral action.

Both in Prussia and in the empire, social democracy in its entire force is rendered powerless as it comes up against the barrier which Lassalle already foresaw in 1851: “A legislative assembly never has overthrown and never will overthrow the existing order. All that [such an] assembly has ever done and ever been able to do is proclaim the existing order outside, sanction the already completed overthrow of society and elaborate on its individual consequences, laws, etc. Yet such an assembly will always be impotent to overthrow the society which it itself represents.”2

We, however, have arrived at a level of development where the most pressing and imperative defensive demand of the proletariat - the right to vote in Prussia and the people’s militia in the empire - signify an actual overthrow of existing Prussian-German class relations. If the working class wants to pursue its life interests in parliament today, then it has to carry out this actual overthrow “outside”. If it wants to make parliamentarianism fertile again, then it has to lead the masses themselves onto the political stage through non-parliamentary action.

The last decade - with the mass strike resolution in Jena under the influence of the Russian Revolution and the campaign of street demonstrations in the struggle for the right to vote in Prussia three years ago - clearly shows that the transition from purely parliamentary to unstoppable mass action will force its way through - even if the consciousness of the party in Germany, as elsewhere, only follows this path unevenly, encountering many setbacks.

The 50th anniversary of German social democracy represents a proud, victorious completion of Lassalle’s political testament. Yet simultaneously it is also a warning to the socialist proletariat to become fully conscious that nothing would be more contrary to Lassalle’s spirit than following its well-worn routine at its usual steady pace and stubbornly clinging to a tactical programme which has already been overtaken by the course of history.

Lassalle’s great creative work consisted in recognising the correct task of the proletariat at the right historical hour and daring to fulfil this with bold action. What is today the just continuation of Lassalle’s work? Not clinging to Lassalle’s political programme, but rather recognising the new great tasks of the contemporary situation and boldly tackling them at the right moment. Then, in the spirit of Lassalle, it can also say of itself: ‘I dared!’
Notes

1. F Mehring (ed) Der Literarische Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle Vol 4, Stuttgart 1902, p38.
2. The resolution passed at the SPD conference from September 17-23 1905 in Jena characterised the most extensive use of the mass withdrawal of labour as one of the most effective working class methods of struggle, but nevertheless restricted the use of the political mass strike to a considerable extent to defending the right to vote to the Reichstag and freedom of assembly.

Democracy and 'Stageism'

Here is my (belated response) to a comrade from Permanent Revolution, again one that started on Facebook...!


Christina,


Thanks for your response and apologies for the delay in replying. You know the circumstances. I am basically going to go through what you say line by line and throw in some comments.



”Hi Billy. Revolutionaries support struggles to defend and extend bourgeois democracy”.


This sentence, whilst formally true, shows where you are going wrong in this question. You see the rule of the bourgeoisie as being accompanied with a certain level of formal or necessary democracy for their rule (a sham of course as you point out). The phrase “bourgeois democracy” is an utterly misleading misnomer which communists should strive to expose. Democracy is the rule of the people, for the people, by the people. As such it is a political form which serves the interests of the majority in society. The bourgeoisie has never, and will never, make up a majority. The limited democracy that it has allowed throughout its history in power is simply what it thinks it is necessary to allow in order to stay comfortably in power. What they can get away with.


You continue:


“What Ben fails to point out is that Trotsky prefaced all this with the goal a workers’ state to take power from the bourgeoisie, a form of democracy that is qualitatively different from bourgeois democracy”.


Bourgeois democracy is qualitatively different to workers’ rule or the dictatorship of the proletariat because in my opinion the bourgeoisie is not an inherently democratic class – every thing we take for granted is a result of struggle (ie the fact that MPs are paid a wage was a Chartist demand back in the 1850s!)


“We acknowledge the need to fight for democratic demands, whilst not fetishing bourgeois democratic forms. Equally the struggle for bourgeois democratic demands will not always be at the top of our agenda in countries with formal democracy. The fight for democratic demands is only one part of the revolutionary transitional programme, and has to be part of the struggle to render all instances of class resistance political by, wherever possible, pushing for the creations of embyronic organisations of working class power. Only then can we hope to create the basis by which the working class will transcend bourgeois democracy and impose the democracy of the majority, not the sham democracy we have today”.


Nobody is fetishising “bourgeois democratic forms”, just as Trotsky is not when he calls for a single executive and legislative assembly, or when Marx and Engels called for the one and indivisible republic. As I said above – the bourgeoisie does not rule by democracy. It is not an inherently democratic class but rules through rule of law constitutionalism.


The “formal” or “sham” democracy we enjoy in Britain as opposed to Iran, for example, is not because of the classes in power (the bourgeoisie rule in both of course) but a product of struggle, victory and defeat. Yes, you push for organs of working class power, but central to this is a programme for the state and the questions it throws up. You can have a whole republic of councils/soviets, but without a political party with a programme for state power supported by the majority of society then they will dissolve (Germany 1918 being a good example of that).


It is good you call for the abolition of the House of Lords, but what about annual parliaments, the abolition of MI5/MI6, the abolition of the monarchy, the arming of the people (Stuart, Bill J, Mark F and I had a good argument at the May 68 event about how it was supposedly ‘ultra-left’ to call for the arming of the people) – that is the programme for the republic, the dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ power, whatever you want to call it. We raise these demands in the here and now, and indeed some of them might be reforms we win (with a big communist party and MPs in particular). What is controversial about any of this?

”Ben, the Erfurt Programme was written in a different epoch, before the political implications of imperialism were made clear, and crucially before the Russian Revolution. The class struggle moves on, the programme develops accordingly”.


Tina, I agree that times have moved on since 1891. Google anything I have written an said on this (or search for the debate between Mike Mac and Mark H last year) and it will become clear that I do not wish to take the Erfurt programme written for Germany in 1891 and transpose it onto Britain in 2009. There are two reasons for this:


The Erfurt programme itself was insufficient (cf Engels’ critique of the Erfurt programme, which castigates Liebknecht, Bernstein et al precisely for their vacillation on the question of calling for the ‘democratic republic’, amongst others)
We obviously live in different historical times. Not least, the working class is now the majority class worldwide. These new times, alongside the experience of the working class movement in the 20th century (not least Stalinism and Social Democracy) find expression in the CPGB’s minimum programme – ie it has a lot more to it than the Erfurt programme, it is a lot longer with a lot more demands.


What I am basically arguing is that we need a minimum programme for the smashing of the state apparatus and bureaucracy, which necessarily takes democracy seriously and has at its core democratic demands for the workers’ movement to unite around and form itself into a class strong enough to be the ruling class. It is this method of the minimum-maximum programme, first set out by Marx and carried on by those like Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg etc which I am defending, not what Kautsky did to the minimum programme by gutting it of its content and turning the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the existing military-bureaucratic state apparatus.


Some Trots will then however object: ah yes, but Lenin embraced the transitional method in 1917, the Bolsheviks dumped the min-max approach realising it was no longer applicable (ie the “political implications of imperialism were made clear” as you argue), Luxemburg’s Spartacist programme broke with it too etc. All nonsense, of course, as Lars Lih makes quite clear in his study of the Bolsheviks and in the interview I did with him. There is no direct line between min-max and 1914, which you sort of imply by arguing that the min-max approach was not fully conscious of the political implications of imperialism. The ‘direct line’ argument is ahistorical and not rooted in the historical experience of the Bolsheviks, nor indeed German Social Democracy (the latter being somewhat forgivable given that the left has neglected to translate much of the theoretical output of the SPD).


And just on the question of changing period and the need to change the programme. Let us remember the full title of the programme in which Trotsky develops the method you defend and counterpose to my alleged Menshevism/Stalinism/Stageism: “The transitional programme: the death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the fourth international”. Let us also not forget that your organisation PR has the view that capitalism and the laws which guide it are not even in decline (a view I hold) let alone in their death agony! Given that capitalism is in a period of unprecedented expansion due to access to the former ‘degenerate workers’ states’, does this not have consequences for the programme given that we are not in a period of workers rushing to arm themselves?


“Workers democracy is based on the self-organisation of the working class, organised in workplaces and communities, the soviet form of power”.


Well yes, but as I have pointed out, the “soviet form of power” is not necessarily the form assumed by working class power. The Paris Commune was not the same thing as the rule of soviets. Engels referred to it both as “the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “democratic republic”.


“The problem with the CPGB’s concept of “extreme democracy”, is that it is posed as the extreme end of a sort of continuum of democracy. There is no qualitative break with bourgeois democracy.”


Again, this is not true. Not merely because I think you are wrong to talk of “bourgeois democracy” in the way you do (see above) but also because this accusation is simply not true. If you think I am making this up, let me quote Mike Macnair in response to a similar question posed by David Broder. Broder says: “it is not clear whether the democratic republic is meant to be the product of the revolution, or whether it is a taking-over of the existing state bureaucracy.” (ie a non-qualitative break in your terms). Mike responds:


“In fact, it should be clear that the actual creation of the democratic republic would be, amount to, the smashing-up of the existing bureaucratic-coercive state. Here I follow Engels in describing the Paris Commune as a “democratic republic”. But, as with the minimum programme in general, individual democratic-republican demands could be won under capitalism - and, if won, would strengthen the position of the working class in future class struggles.”


Christina continues:


“Hence, during the political crisis in France in 2002 when the fascist Le Pen got through to the second round of the presidential elections in a run off with Chirac, the CPGB’s slogan on the back page of their paper was “For a 6th Republic”, which implies continuity with the current Fifth Republic. “Extreme” democracy in action, no doubt”.


This is probably a typo on your behalf (and they often occur when writing in a Facebook comment box!). How does calling for the 6th republic in anyway imply continuity with 5th? If we wanted continuity with the 5th we would say “for the 5th republic plus x” not “down with the 5th republic and for a 6th republic based on some of the demands (and more) that Trotsky outlines in 1934”. There is no continuity there.


“For Trotsky the fight for a “more generous democracy”, particularly in the context of attacks from undemocratic forces would “facilitate the struggle for workers power”. This is the essence of revolutionary politics that Ben ignores.”


I am sorry Tina. Whereas your points above are of substance and raise questions that need to be discussed, this is just rhetoric and posturing completely devoid of substance or political meat. In fact, it reminds me slightly of the way in which Bill J and Dave E responded to Mike’s book. The point is that if the left is to go anywhere from its current sorry state, you need to actually engage with what we are saying, not just recoil in horror when you see the word Kautsky etc.


I quote Trotsky verbatim here because I think he sums up exactly what my position would have been both in 34 in the struggle against Bonapartist reaction AND in 1968 against De Gaulle’s bonapartism (look what he got away with!) as something which the working class should have fought for to strengthen its power, driven the revolution forward (make it permanent if you will) and place the working class in a much better position for them to “facilitate the struggle for workers’ power”. I am not “ignoring” anything there at all Tina, I am quoting Trotsky verbatim about “facilitating power” and you accuse me of being ignorant to how Trotsky’s position was about “workers’ power” which is slightly strange….


Hope this helps clear some things up.


Ben

Rediscovering Lenin: Interview with Lars T Lih

Lars T Lih is an acclaimed scholar living in Canada. I spoke to him about his book, Lenin rediscovered: ‘What is to be done?’ in context (2006) and some of the questions it raises for the left in understanding its own history and tradition

One of the themes of Lenin rediscovered was Lenin’s closeness to Karl Kautsky. I argued that What is to be done? (WITBD) did not represent any sort of break with the Kautsky outlook. Naturally, this point has been challenged, in particular by the Socialist Workers Party’s John Molyneux and Chris Harman. They respond something as follows: ‘yes, it’s true, Lenin himself was not at this time (1902) aware that he differed in fundamental ways from Kautsky. Only in 1914 did the scales fall from Lenin’s eyes. At this point, he realised how fundamentally his outlook differed from Kautskyism and from Second International Marxism in general.’

No doubt my critics are justified in challenging me on this point, since my book did not take the story past 1904. Nevertheless, it has always been my view that Lenin saw Kautsky after 1914 as a renegade, that is, someone who renounces their earlier correct outlook. In order to settle this question with data in my hand, I undertook to collect all the references by Lenin after the outbreak of war in 1914 to “Kautsky when he was a Marxist” (a phrase often used by Lenin). There are a great many of these references, and they settle the question once and for all. Lenin did not renounce Kautsky’s pre-war writings - in fact, he made clear his continuing high admiration for them. His denunciation of kautskianstvo was aimed at Kautsky’s conduct after the outbreak of war, when (according to Lenin) he used revolutionary-sounding phrases to cover up a de facto alliance with opportunism.

Once we get this stumbling block out of the way - that is, the notion that somehow Lenin disowned his earlier approval of Kautsky’s writing - we can start investigating the full extent of Lenin’s relations with Kautsky. And this proves to be such a fascinating story that I am thinking of devoting an entire book to the subject. The nature of the relationship changed over the years, so I will look briefly at each decade in Lenin’s career.

In the first decade (1894-1904), Kautsky is most important for Lenin as the spokesman for the basic outlook of international social democracy. This is the aspect that is examined in Lenin rediscovered. Perhaps most basic here is the merger formula: “Social democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement.” This formula served both as a definition of the mission of social democracy and as a template for a history of the origins of Marx-based social democracy. And here arises a misunderstanding that is reflected in your questions, one that I wish I had dealt with more effectively.

At times, Kautsky is paraphrased as asserting that “socialism is a science”. But if you look closer at the actual text, you will see that Kautsky is referring to “modern socialism”, a common label in this period for ‘scientific socialism’: that is, Marxism. This is the socialism that is a science and, as such, was born in the heads of members of the bourgeois intelligentsia: to wit, Marx and Engels. Kautsky does not argue that socialism in general is a science - in fact, the merit of Marx and Engels is that they made it one.

Socialism in general has many points of origin, including with many workers. Kautsky wrote about the origins of social democracy often enough, so that there is no doubt about his views. Unfortunately, most people deduce his views solely from the passage cited by Lenin in WITBD - a passage in which Kautsky is mainly interested in making a separate, if related, point (to wit, there is no direct or automatic correlation between the level of capitalist development and the level of socialist awareness among the workers). From this arises the common criticism: Kautsky (and by extension Lenin) overlooks the interaction between theory and practice, Kautsky sees the origin of socialism in entire isolation from the class struggle, etc.

In reality, no criticism of Kautsky’s actual historical views is less accurate than this one. When Kautsky himself unpacks his formula in his historical accounts of the European socialist movement - and there are more than a few of such accounts - he stresses the interaction between the various social components that coalesced in Marxist social democracy. In fact, Marx is almost presented as someone who merely synthesised the many theories and approaches swirling around in his day. Also, Kautsky himself strongly emphasises that even if a worker movement rejects Marx, they sooner or later will accept the need for socialism and will take power to put it into effect. I cannot delve deeper into this topic now, so I’ll just refer to pages 82-87 in Lenin rediscovered, where I summarise one such discussion by Kautsky.

Another misunderstanding arises from Lenin’s polemics against Martov after the 2nd Congress off the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Lenin said that Martov’s definition of a party member showed that he didn’t understand the distinction between party and class. From this there has arisen the idea that Kautsky did not understand this distinction. In reality, neither Martov nor even less Kautsky had any trouble distinguishing party and class. This is a non-issue.

There is a view that the split in 1903 “led Lenin to a clean break with Kautsky and the ‘German model’”. I disagree with this, but, more to the point, Lenin disagreed with it. Let me make a larger contrast. Commentators on Lenin seemed compelled to find ruptures, turning points, clean breaks and so on, although, of course, there is no agreement about what these were. On the other hand, when Lenin discussed his own views, he almost always stressed their continuity and the apostasy of those opposed to him. They were the ones making clean or messy breaks, not he.

Lenin’s second decade, 1904-14, was the one in which Bolshevism as such was developed. Although Kautsky sided with the Mensheviks at the very beginning of the party split (not for ideological reasons, but because he thought Lenin was personally responsible for the split), it soon became clear that, when it came to the issues that really divided the two factions - the different readings of the class forces in Russia - Kautsky sided entirely with the Bolsheviks. So much so that Kautsky became a sort of honorary Bolshevik. If you want to get an idea of Kautsky’s role during this period, read Lenin’s generous and (more to the point) accurate description at the beginning of the section on Kautsky in State and revolution.

Kautsky continued to be important for Lenin in his third decade (1914-24). By the way, Kautsky was regarded as part of the radical wing of the party at least until 1910, when he and Rosa Luxemburg fell out. At that time, Lenin sided with Kautsky (and I don’t think he ever changed his mind about who was right in 1910). As against Luxemburg, Kautsky said that the socialist party should not act as if a revolutionary situation existed when it didn’t, but that a revolutionary situation was sure to come very soon. From Lenin’s point of view, the very revolutionary situation that Kautsky had predicted did in fact come to pass in 1914. He was therefore infuriated with Kautsky when the latter did not act as he had promised. But again, this anger was a sign of Lenin’s loyalty to what had once been the shared outlook of the two men. As I put it once, Lenin hated Kautsky because he loved Kautsky’s books.

After 1914, Lenin identified Kautsky with “the centre”, but this was a description of Kautsky’s wartime position between the “social chauvinists” and revolutionary leftists such as himself. In general, the word ‘centre’ when applied to socialist politics at this time obscures more than it illuminates.

But Kautsky’s positive influence on Lenin does not end even in 1914. Indeed, there were still many twists and turns to come in this story, and I have not worked them all out yet. So I will conclude with a brief observation about 1917. In one sense, it is true that Lenin and the Bolsheviks shifted their tactics and focus all the time from 1903 to 1917, but this should not let us overlook the underlying unity. The Bolshevik analysis of the situation in Russia was a fairly stable and coherent one: in the upcoming revolution for political freedom, the proletariat should become the leading force by wresting influence over the peasantry away from the liberal bourgeoisie. (As earlier mentioned, Kautsky fully agreed and gave a classic exposition of this tactic in his article, ‘Prospects and driving forces of the revolution’, which is available in English.) The Bolsheviks certainly did not abandon this perspective in 1917, even though they added other goals. In fact, the outcome of the revolution and the civil war can be taken as a massive vindication of this tactic.

In 1914, Lenin did not change his outlook, but he did shift his main focus from Russia to Europe as a whole, and therefore from democratic revolution to socialist revolution. At this time, he thought of these two revolutions as linked, but separate: “The task of the proletariat in Russia is to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia to the end [do kontsa], in order to ignite the socialist revolution in Europe” (October 1915 - VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, pp401-4).

Finally, in 1917 Lenin added another goal: “steps toward socialism” in Russia itself, without waiting for the international revolution. (I believe that Kautsky played a role even here, but I know this will be controversial, so I’ll wait until I can put across the evidence more completely.) Thus by 1917 Lenin’s outlook had three major strata: “old Bolshevism”, left Zimmerwald and “steps toward socialism”.

These strata are reflected in the principal points of his 1917 platform: land to the peasants (from pre-war Bolshevism), democratic peace and/or revolutionary war (from wartime left Zimmerwald) and state regulation of the collapsing economy (from the new note of “steps toward socialism”). So, at this point in my thinking, I tend to see Lenin as adding on new perspectives rather than fundamentally changing his older ones. That is to say, he didn’t junk the minimum-maximum distinction, but he simply argued that, under the circumstances prevailing in Russia, they could be accomplished in tandem. Lenin’s work of late 1918, Renegade Kautsky and the proletarian revolution, argues in this way. Note particularly the passage in which he says that, even if it turns out Russia was not ready for socialist transformation, the proletariat was justified in taking power to complete the democratic revolution (VI Lenin CW Vol 28, p304).

Other candidates have been put forward for the role of the catalyst in Lenin’s thinking in the years 1914-17 - Trotsky, Hegel, Bukharin among others. I put my money on the candidate with whom Lenin was explicitly engaged, the candidate whose views he repeatedly endorsed: namely, Karl Kautsky.

One final point. The SPD model certainly did not become irrelevant even during the revolution or after the Bolsheviks took power. One central feature of the Soviet state is taken directly from SPD practice: namely, the permanent campaign of agitation and propaganda. Now that the party controlled the state, it could carry out even vaster campaigns and could eliminate the competition, creating what I call “state monopoly campaignism”. A classic study of the SPD is The alternative culture by Vernon Lidtke. The book describes how the SPD used everything from an extensive party press to choral singing societies in order to inculcate the proper socialist outlook. In many ways, the Soviet Union is the SPD writ large, and Lidtke’s title could be used for a study of the Soviet era.
Bread

I came to the writing of Lenin rediscovered by a somewhat circuitous route. My first book, based on my PhD thesis, was Bread and authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (1990). This study examined the enormous impact of bread shortages on the policies and politics of all governments during this ‘time of troubles’: the tsarist government, the provisional government and the Bolsheviks.

I came to the conclusion that Bolshevik food-supply policies resulted much more from honest attempts to cope with the crisis than from ideological delusion. This got me interested in the whole subject of so-called war communism, when (according to many writers of all ideological persuasions) the Bolsheviks were supposed to have gone right off the rails and conned themselves into thinking that the ruined Russia of 1920 was a socialist paradise. I devoted a number of articles to refuting this myth and showing that the Bolsheviks were not clinically insane, but fully understood that the devastation of the civil war had set back socialist transformation.

These scattered articles have not had the impact I would have liked (although I’m glad to see that you mention ‘The mystery of the ABC’, my article about The ABC of communism, a fundamental Bolshevik textbook published in 1919), and I hope to make the case in book form some time soon.

In any event, this research got me interested in the Bolshevik outlook in general. At this point, I was not interested in Lenin per se, but Bolshevism in general. What I call the textbook interpretation of What is to be done? was therefore merely an obstacle on my way to giving an accurate portrayal of the Bolshevik outlook after the revolution. My first thought was: I’ll have to put a paragraph into my account warning the reader against misconceptions arising from WITBD. Then I thought, well, the issues are complicated, I’d better devote a chapter to the topic.

Probably I would have stayed at that level without the prodding of Sebastian Budgen from the journal Historical Materialism. He originally asked for a new translation, but I felt a translation would not be useful without a full commentary. In order to write the commentary, I felt obliged to read everything mentioned by Lenin in his book. I began to discover that, despite WITBD’s notoriety, there is actually very little out there that could be called genuine historical analysis of the book. And so the whole thing ballooned, since the story I was getting from my material was so fundamentally different from the story about Lenin found in the textbooks.

At this point, I would like to express my great appreciation of the people at Historical Materialism, especially Sebastian Budgen, of Brill (publishers of the hardback), and of Haymarket Press (publishers of the paperback). In today’s economic and academic climate, it took courage to support a semi-mad scholar who was intent on writing a fundamental work, length no object. The new paperback edition makes the book somewhat more affordable for individual purchase, and furthermore, it has a snazzy, colourful cover. For readers wondering about purchasing the book, let me say that its length is partly due to the fact that it locates Lenin within a much wider panorama of what one reviewer (Anna Krylova) called “Eurorussian social democracy”.

Let me briefly mention four basic themes of the book. First, I describe Lenin as a “Russian Erfurtian”. “Erfurtianism” is my own coinage, but I think that any informed observer before World War I would have found it instantly intelligible. It is a complex concept that combines the aims of the Erfurt programme adopted by the German party in 1892, the authoritative commentary on those aims by Kautsky and a rather idealised ‘SPD model’. Just as important is the fact that Lenin was a Russian Erfurtian, who, along with many members of his generation, took on the arduous task of applying Erfurtian precepts to Russian realities.

This leads to my second big theme: the role of what I now call the konspiratsiia underground. As explained in the book, konspiratsiia is the set of empirical rules for avoiding arrest while maintaining contact with wider worker groups. As opposed to the traditional conspiratorial underground - one that wants to stay as secretive and closed-off as possible - a konspiratsiia underground attempts to spin as many threads as possible that will connect it to wider groups. WITBD celebrates and advocates the konspiratsiia underground, but Lenin certainly did not invent it. It arose as a result of a decade-long empirical search for possible ways of importing the Erfurtian model of a mass agitational party to the repressive realities of tsarist Russia.

Coming now to Lenin himself, my main aim is to change the question. The proper way to grasp Lenin’s individual outlook is not to obsess about abstract generalities concerning ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness’, but rather to examine his concrete views about the actions of the Russian working class during the years 1895-1905. When this is done, the traditional textbook interpretation that talks about Lenin’s ‘worry about workers’ falls away of itself and Lenin’s romantic optimism about the working class becomes glaringly obvious. Why did Lenin strive for an organised, centralised, efficiently structured party that was staffed with people who knew their business? Because he had given up on the masses and was looking for a substitute? Just the opposite: Lenin wanted all these things because he thought he saw the masses on the move.

Finally, I argue that Lenin understood his own basic outlook and remained loyal to it. This turns out to be surprisingly controversial, as brought out in my earlier discussion of Kautsky.

I am very pleased with the reactions to the book. Most readers seem to be in sympathy with my basic aims, although I realise now that I could have put some things better and made some necessary points more forcefully. Historical Materialism asked a number of readers of my book for their thoughts, and in my response to these readers I took the opportunity to clear up some of these misunderstandings - and, as often when responding to criticism, I became more clear in my own mind about what I was trying to say. So my rather extensive response to these readers serves as a sort of appendix to Lenin rediscovered. I hope this discussion will be published soon (although right now I’m the one holding things up).

John Molyneux’s review of my book brings up many of the points I will be addressing in Historical Materialism. One such point, of course, is Kautsky’s relation to Lenin, since Molyneux still believes in the existence of a fundamental divide between Lenin and “Kautsky when he was a Marxist”. I am confident that the new evidence I am bringing forth will narrow our differences on this issue.

Another set of issues concerns Lenin’s later attitude toward his own book. One common scenario goes like this: Lenin ‘bent the stick’ too far when he wrote WITBD, exaggerating what was otherwise a valid point. He himself realised this in 1905 when faced with the revolutionary militancy of the workers. Unfortunately, many of his fellow Bolsheviks still followed the precepts of WITBD and opposed the presence of workers on local party committees. Lenin himself grew highly circumspect about WITBD and explicitly admitted he had bent the stick too far. He wasn’t exactly apologetic about it, though, since he felt that bending the stick was a necessary part of leadership.

I disagree with this scenario in every respect. For full details, see my forthcoming discussion in Historical Materialism. But here is the scenario that I think fits the facts. Lenin did not mean to say anything new or astounding in WITBD, but rather meant to state universally accepted axioms in order to show that his opponents failed to live up to them. At the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, he used the ‘bend the stick’ image in order to make the following point: he was responding in WITBD to one particular set of opponents and was not making a general or programmatic discussion. (Unfortunately, the English translation in the Collected works paraphrases Lenin’s image so that his actual use of ‘bend the stick’ is completely obscured.)

He did not then or later admit that he had bent the stick too far - this was a polemical distortion of his remarks by Menshevik opponents (including Trotsky). Polemics by Mensheviks and, I think, the cool reaction of his own Bolshevik allies convinced Lenin that he had indeed made his point clumsily and in a way that was open to misinterpretation. But he did not change his mind about the actual point he wanted to make. He saw the events of 1905 as a confirmation of his prognoses in WITBD and said so on a number of occasions. At no time were Bolsheviks hostile to putting workers on local committees.

After 1905, of course, the practical arguments of WITBD were completely dated. What would now be the point of making the case that a party newspaper would be a good way to set up as yet non-existent central party organs? In Lenin’s eyes, WITBD did not say anything theoretically new, and its formulation of old truths was admittedly clumsy. WITBD was a good book for its time, but its time had past. It applied some basic social democratic truths to a specific situation, but now the task was to apply these and other truths to more current problems. Such was the Bolshevik view of WITBD: neither embarrassment nor founding document.

Of course, like any other leader, any of Lenin’s remarks must be put in the context of the particular issues on the agenda at that time. But this does not mean he had a philosophy of bending the stick: that is, deliberate exaggeration in order to get his point across. Those who believe that Lenin had such a philosophy - for example, Tony Cliff - tend to picture Lenin as swinging from one extreme to the other, which is simply not the case.
My views

When I come before the public, I like to think I have something new, interesting and important to say. My political views are none of the above. I will say something about what I am trying to accomplish with my work.

As is evident from my publication list, my principal interest is in Russian history. I see Lenin first and foremost, not as a figure in Marxist theory, but as the founder of the Soviet state. I feel solidarity with a somewhat earlier generation that was fascinated with the origins, course and outcome of the Russian Revolution.

My special interest over the last decade or so has been the world view of Bolshevism as a whole. Accordingly, I have written what I like to think of as major articles about Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and just recently Zinoviev (in the new journal The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928). Unfortunately, these are scattered around in various journals and books. The nature of my subject has reinforced a long-time interest in the European left, and I have a long article-in-waiting about Marx’s trio of works on the class struggle in France that will be published when I get the time to polish it up. I am also very interested in the issue of whether Marx’s late writings represent any profound change in his outlook (I tend not to think so). This topic would take me full circle back to Russia.

Is my interest “purely academic”? If by this you mean, ‘Do I write to further my academic career?’, then the answer is no, since I haven’t got one. Academic historians are certainly a major audience for me, but so is any reader interested in the Russian Revolution. This includes not only those interested in continuing Lenin’s revolutionary politics, but also Russian readers who are trying to understand their own past (so far merely a target audience) and anyone else who would like an accurate insight into one of the great upheavals of history.

I think I serve all these constituencies better by committing fully to none and keeping my status as an independent researcher. I also enjoy my precarious role as one of the few links between the academic historians and activists on the left. I should add that I am in love with my subject and I am truly fascinated by the people that I study.

I like to think that my research does embody a political stance of sorts. First, objective truth through careful, unbiased and adventurous research is possible, and striving towards objective truth is an admirable thing. Second, we are better off if we see history as the result of the strivings of real persons, not demons or angels. That is my simple credo.

After all that, you might not think that I see any lessons to be drawn from my book for the contemporary left. But actually there are two points I would like to make. First, in surveying the past, left writers of today too often reduce the problem to one of simple doctrinal errors. Lenin is great, they say, because he rejected Kautsky’s confusion of party and class. This vastly over-simplifies the dilemmas facing the left (even overlooking the inaccuracies involved). Ah, if life were so easy that rejecting some rather feeble-minded doctrinal errors would set us on the right path! The fact is that pre-World War I generation of socialists agreed on basic things, but disagreed on how to apply them to reality - and they disagreed because of the huge pressures and inescapable dilemmas inherent in their situation. I wish I could say that the Third International simply solved the problems that brought down the Second International, but I cannot. Thus, more respect for all the socialists of that generation can eventually lead to more nuanced insight into our own dilemmas.

Second, I think that the socialist attitude toward political freedom needs serious attention. In my book, I stress the primordial importance of political freedom as a goal for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But this is only half the story. The main reason the Russian social democrats wanted political freedom was to be able to spread their own version of the truth. When they got into a position of ‘state monopoly campaignism’, their drive toward political freedom turned (dialectically?) into its opposite: lack of political freedom for their opponents now helped them spread their own version of the truth.

And this is not just some Asiatic deviation of the Russian Bolsheviks. On the contrary, European socialism as a whole was sceptical about the benefits of political freedom in bourgeois society and did not really see much need for political freedom in socialist society. And their scepticism was, of course, highly justified, then as it still is today. So the solution is not just to say, ‘Let’s recognise the importance of political freedom.’ The proper attitude to adopt is a complex and difficult issue. But from where I sit I cannot see any real grappling with the problem.

Thanks again for asking me these probing questions. I may have learned more in writing the answers than you in reading them.

For Mike Macnair’s 2006 review of the book, see Weekly Worker August 31 2006.

Red November 1918

Ninety years ago, the destiny of the world revolution lay in the hands of the German working class. Ben Klein describes the tumultuous events and draws some lessons for today

“Without the revolution in Germany, we are doomed.”1 Vladimir Ilych Lenin’s words of January 1918 underline how the world revolution, initiated and set into motion by Russia, relied on spreading the flame to Germany. Germany was the leading industrial power in continental Europe and its working class was highly organised with a deeply entrenched political consciousness.

Without the Germans acting, Lenin feared that the young Soviet republic would be condemned to isolation and inevitable defeat, surrounded as it was by a sea of hostile imperialist powers and subject to the overarching economic dictates of the world division of labour.

Little wonder then that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were so enthused when news arrived from Germany in September 1918. The kaiser’s empire was cracking under the weight of military defeat and mass discontent, while a deep-seated desire for radical change was manifesting itself in strikes and demonstrations: “The decisive hour is at hand.”2 Lenin looked to his German comrades around the Spartacist Group headed by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to follow the example set by Russia a year earlier.

The Russian masses were enthused too - at last there would be an end to their suffering and grinding poverty. The names of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were on every lip. Events in Germany were followed closely and every advance was celebrated. The gamble that the Bolsheviks took in October 1917 seemed to be paying off. The Austro-Hungarian empire was also collapsing under pressure from below and workers’ councils were spreading across Europe. Nothing less than the future course of humanity was at stake.

In hindsight we know that the German revolution was cruelly betrayed by the ‘socialists’, Soviet Russia was left high and dry and our class internationally drifted towards a whole series of defeats. We are still feeling the effects. A critical examination of the events of November 1918 will allow us to understand how and why the German working class was able to come within inches of taking state power, but also how, in the absence of a tried and tested revolutionary party, the rightwing Social Democrats were able to manoeuvre, confuse and save the day for capitalism.

Let us start by putting the revolutionary crisis of 1918 into context, so that we can grasp the social dynamics underpinning it.
The Prussian state and SPD

Karl Marx once quipped that the Prussian state was “nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with feudal admixture”.3 This situation could, of course, be traced back to the failure of the bourgeoisie to unite Germany in the 1848 revolution. Instead it was reactionary Prussia which remade Germany in 1871. That meant Prussian landowners - the Junker class, with the kaiser at its head - dominating the officer corps and the state bureaucracy of the united Germany, with the capitalist class expected to quietly get on with the business of making money as privileged subordinates.

The Reichstag, or parliament, elected by the highly undemocratic three-tier voting system, had no more than formal powers in being able to veto government bills. Not only did the kaiser choose the government himself: he could recall parliament at any time, and together with the Oberste Heeresleitung (supreme command), he controlled the Prussian-German army.

Yet growing within this contradictory framework was a force pointing to the future - the workers’ movement, centred on the Social Democracy Party, which constantly pushed against the boundaries of the old order. Three and a half decades of rapid capitalist development saw it grow into a state within a state. By 1912 it had become Germany’s biggest party with 110 Reichstag seats and over 28% of the popular vote. The SPD had around a million members, and a slick party apparatus producing almost a hundred daily newspapers and running numerous sports clubs, women’s associations, youth clubs, etc.

As Clara Zetkin put it, the SPD really was “a way of life”. It was a party in the true sense of the word - a genuine part of the working class - and was officially guided by Marxism. It was no sect: ie, it was not a Socialist Workers ‘Party’ or a Communist ‘Party’ of Britain. Nor was the SDP a Labour Party, as Socialist ‘Party’ leader Peter Taaffe seems to imply.4

Capitalist expansion had, however, also planted the seeds of revisionism and opportunism - a gulf opened up between theory and practice. Party trade union leaders and functionaries saw no further than higher wages and better conditions. Reichstag deputies aimed for minor reforms and parliamentary deals. High politics and the goal of socialism were increasingly relegated to Sunday speeches and party congresses. In other words the politics of the labour bureaucracy were gaining ground and found theoretical expression in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. Luxemburg polemically savaged him. But it was Karl Kautsky who spoke for the majority.

And here was another problem. Although Kautsky opposed Bernstein, he in effect was himself gutting Marxism of its revolutionary content. Kautsky talked about simply taking over the bureaucratic-coercive apparatus of the German state. Above all, however, he was resolutely committed to maintaining the unity of the SDP. That increasingly meant subordination in deed if not word to the labour bureaucracy and the SDP’s right wing.
The war

World War I, which caused the death of at least two million Germans, was to push both the SPD and the Prussian state to breaking point.

The true extent of the SPD’s transformation became painfully clear on August 4 1914, when its parliamentary fraction voted to approve the proposed war credits. This scab act, combined with a deal the trade union bureaucracy had made just a day earlier promising to avoid strikes and social unrest, cleared the way for the army to mobilise and cast the German working class into the mincing machine of war - “the insatiate Moloch into whose bloody jaws are thrown millions upon millions of fresh human sacrifices” (Karl Liebknecht).

Yet even Liebknecht submitted himself to bureaucratic discipline on that fateful day. But never again. Recognising his error, he was soon to join the Spartacist Group, along with Luxemburg, just a few days later in issuing an illegal anti-war statement. His punishment was to serve time both in prison and at the front.

However, the patriotic wave that had allowed union leaders to promise class peace was gradually replaced by a burgeoning anti-war sentiment. Shortages, repression and the horrific reality of the carnage altered perceptions. The longer the war continued, the more examples there were of workers taking action. Inspired by the events in Russia, strikes against bread rationing in April 1917 saw 300,000 munitions workers flood the streets. The Obleute, the movement of leftwing, pro-Bolshevik shop stewards, gained in strength. By now there were secret groups in the navy, such as the League of Soldiers and Sailors, organising meetings and strikes and looking for political leadership. Some were court-marshalled. Lenin heralded these actions as showing the underlying drive to revolution and the necessity of defeatism - “turning the imperialist war into a civil war”.

The developing revolutionary situation highlighted the contradictions within the German workers’ movement - particularly on the nature of the capitalist state. Future battle lines were becoming clear between the different factions of the workers’ movement - factions that until a year beforehand had been active in the same organisation. 1917 saw a huge split, with the formation of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) after the expulsion of leading SPD comrades for refusing to vote for further war credits.

As developments were later to underline though, the USPD was far from clear on the Russian Revolution, and it was precisely this question that distinguished its revolutionary elements from its centrists. Those around Luxemburg and Liebknecht viewed the revolution as the “vanguard of humanity and peace”, whilst others were convinced that it would end in “social and political discomposition, in chaos”5 (Kautsky, Bernstein, Hugo Haase).

The Prussian state was descending into chaos. The Allied counterattack of August 1918 hit hard, forcing the German army into retreat with inevitable consequences at home. The military apparatus was crumbling and quickly losing legitimacy. Army loyalty was more and more called into question. Many demanded its democratisation and the abolition of military privilege.

Anti-war agitation, particularly in Berlin and key industrial centres such as Bremen and Hamburg, made a big impact in terms of mass consciousness.

A revolutionary crisis was developing, but, as historian Pierre Broue notes, “Whilst Lenin spoke of the ‘eve of the world revolution’, the approaching tragedy in Germany was summed up … in the contrast between the readiness of the young workers to act and the impotence of leaders crushed by responsibilities, and convinced that the future of humanity could be settled in terms of subscriptions, local branches and speeches in parliamentary assemblies.”
‘Revolution from above’

By September 28 Germany’s inevitable defeat was obvious to the military leaders, the emperor and leading industrialists alike. They were now discussing how they could best bring the war to an end. The highly discredited general von Ludendorff was pressing for urgent action. He was quite clear: it was necessary to broaden the government to include the SPD in order to head off revolution. Military dictatorship was not an option in view of the disarray in the army, so if a situation along the lines of a “Russian October” were to be avoided what was demanded was, in the words of admiral von Hintze, a “revolution from above” - that is, a new government and an armistice.

The SPD was thrown into confusion. Initially hesitant, the leadership eventually decided to join the new administration, following acceptance of SPD demands that were far less than the minimum conditions outlined in the Erfurt programme of 1891 - failing which socialists would not even consider entering into government. They were bought off with the promise of an equal franchise in Prussia, and the restoration of the Belgian state, which would receive reparations.

It was on October 4 1918 that the SPD joined the coalition of Progressives, National Liberals and the Centre. These bourgeois parties held the key ministries - the foreign office, war ministry and ministry of the interior. Phillip Scheidemann and Gustav Bauer were the SPD representatives in the new government.

Yet resolving the crisis would take more than a few token reforms and adjustments. Although the chancellor was now accountable to the Reichstag, which could make key decisions on war and peace, Count Hertling was replaced by Prince Max von Baden! The Junkers still held sway, with echoes of Prince Lvov’s provisional government in Russia the previous year. Some of the key names in the new government were despised for the way they had dealt with working class resistance to the effects of the war. General von Linsingen’s name, for example, was synonymous with the prohibition of meetings, arrests and censorship.

The Spartacists and the left wing of the USPD reacted to this development with a conference on October 7. they demanded the immediate release of political prisoners, an end to the state of siege, cancellation of compulsory labour, expropriation of the entire banking capital and all large and middle-sized estates, plus the establishment of a minimum wage. On October 16, a demonstration demanded the release of the still incarcerated Karl Liebknecht under the slogan “Down with the government, long live Liebknecht!”
Mutiny

Confidence was high. On November 1 the Obleute assembled to decide on the day of the insurrection and to begin preparations. A very close vote of 21-19 set the date for November 11. However, Liebknecht, now released, and Willhelm Pieck of the Spartacists disagreed with the decision, rightly insisting that more time was necessary to win mass working class support for the taking of power. However, things were moving so quickly that by November 11 the revolution was well underway - it had taken even the most advanced elements by surprise.

If war is the locomotive of revolution, then it was the mutinous German sailors who drove that locomotive. Discontented with the meagre food rations and their treatment by arrogant and overbearing military officers, they were less than keen to throw themselves into a last battle for German ‘honour’ when it was known an armistice was imminent. Thanks to the brave efforts of comrades illegally organising in the navy, the sailors were highly politically conscious and more than up to speed with developments on the German left.

Over 800 were imprisoned for mutiny after refusing orders to move against the British fleet off the coast of Flanders. There were mass demonstrations of sailors, even though assemblies were still banned. As one sailor recalled: “At five o’clock in the afternoon of November 3, approximately ten thousand marines and some thousand workers gathered, thereafter moved to the Waldwiese and freed men who were imprisoned there; a considerable number armed themselves”.6

The workers in Kiel called a general strike in solidarity. Strengthened by arriving squadrons, they quickly proceeded to seize power locally. So profound was the crisis in the Prussian state apparatus that next to no resistance was offered. Leadership and inspiration were needed to channel the spontaneous energy of a reinvigorated working class into a direct challenge for state power. Yet it was precisely this decisive factor that was missing.

The SPD now faced a dilemma. It was flatly opposed to the new mass movement and had already made this explicitly clear to its allies in the government. On November 4 the SPD executive committee announced that the kaiser’s abdication was under discussion, and called on its supporters in the working class “not to frustrate these negotiations through reckless intervention” and to reject the calls to action of an “irresponsible minority”.7 Reichstag deputy Gustav Noske, well known amongst the sailors in particular for his expertise in military affairs, was sent to Kiel to sort things out, together with the Liberal secretary of state, Conrad Haussmann, and Hugo Haase of the USPD.

Noske paid lip service to the workers’ demands and declared himself on their side, despite their calls for the abdication of the Hohenzollern.8 He was then elected as chair of the Kiel council. At that point, few doubted his intentions The soldiers greeted him enthusiastically: “Noske was trusted and given a free hand. People saw him as a socialist comrade and nobody thought at that time he would be prepared to order workers to be shot” - a reference to the counterrevolutionary slaughter he would later unleash on the German working class.

The ramifications of Kiel were felt right across the reich. Bavaria was the first state to become a republic, declared by USPD member Kurt Eisner following a demonstration on November 7. King Ludwig III abdicated and the process of sweeping away the power of numerous petty princes and fiefs began. By November 8, Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Magdeburg, Brunswick, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hanover, Nuremberg and Stuttgart had all fallen into the hands of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.

The contradictions latent within the state burst open and the revolution spread like wildfire. In Cologne, 45,000 soldiers swelled its ranks, almost without a shot being fired. The soldiers and now unemployed veterans in particular moved remarkably quickly: “Across the compact mass of the moving crowd big military lorries urged their way, full to overflowing with soldiers and sailors who waved red flags and uttered ferocious cries … These cars, crowded with young fellows in uniform or in mufti, carrying loaded rifles or little red flags, seemed to me characteristic. These young men constantly left their places to force officers or soldiers to tear off their badges of rank.”9
Berlin and the Kaiser

On November 9 the empire was finally brought to its knees. The revolution had infected Berlin. A meeting of the USPD the night before had planned a general strike and, although the Jägerbatallion was sent in by prince von Baden to suppress it, the soldiers could not bring themselves to move against the throng. Officers across the empire were complaining that their soldiers were no longer willing to accept orders.

Von Baden hoped that the empire could be salvaged if he personally appointed Friedrich Ebert, secretary general of the SPD, as chancellor. Ebert told him: “If the kaiser does not abdicate, then social revolution is unavoidable. But I do not want it; no, I hate it like sin.”

By midday on November 9 Ebert was chancellor. Meanwhile, leading SPD member Phillip Scheidemann had found out that Liebknecht was about to proclaim the socialist republic. He decided to act. Against Ebert’s wishes, Scheidemann declared the dawn of the republic and that von Baden had given his office over to “our friend Ebert”, who would “form a government which all socialist parties will belong to”.

Almost at the same time, Liebknecht was indeed proclaiming the socialist republic. The Obleute and their supporters, with the memory of Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s betrayals of August 1914 still in their minds, were clear that the revolution had to deepen and widen in order to sweep power from beneath Ebert’s feet. At 8pm around a hundred of them stormed and occupied parliament. Their plan was quite simple - tomorrow elections had to take place in every factory and every regiment in order to form a revolutionary government from the two workers’ parties.
Circus Busch and dual power

The SPD was unsure whether the workers’ councils would cooperate with the government declared by Scheidemann or would themselves become an alternative centre of power. It had to quell the mass movement and hijack the councils. Its next step would be to push for the USPD to join it in forming a provisional government.

Distrust between members of the USPD and the SPD ran deep, but the comrades knew each other’s politics inside out and the SPD was confident that there was a softer layer of USPD leaders who could be won over to stem the movement from below and prevent a descent into “Bolshevik chaos”. They were split on the question of the war, but many leading USPD members were later to rejoin the SPD - their politics had become increasingly indistinguishable from the Eberts and Scheidemanns. Ebert even implied, hypocritically, that he wanted Liebknecht on board - just hours earlier he had been absolutely committed to a parliamentary monarchy in coalition with the Liberals and the Progressives.

There was huge pressure on the USPD. Liebknecht insisted that government participation should be made contingent on all power being vested in the councils, following the signing of an armistice. This was rejected by the SPD leaders, who claimed that a “class dictatorship” of the workers would be undemocratic. The people could only decide on their government following properly organised elections - an impossibility, as they well knew. Their idea was to win time to strengthen their hand against the far left.

A second attempt at negotiations - this time without Liebknecht’s presence in the USPD delegation - proved far more fruitful. The USPD later accepted the invitation on condition that any bourgeois politicians would be mere “technical assistants” who would be directly recallable and accountable to the people. The other condition was that the constituent assembly should not meet until “the gains of the revolution had been consolidated”. This vague concession had counterrevolutionary implications.

Liebknecht was clear that he would not join the proposed government with Ebert, who had smuggled himself into the revolution to further his own reactionary aims. So the new government was set up without Liebknecht - it consisted of three representatives from each group: Ebert, Scheidemann and Otto Landsberg for the SPD; and Hugo Haase, Willhelm Dittmann and Emil Barth for the USPD.

But the SPD also had to deal with the Obleute proposal for elections to the Vollzugsrat, which was to act as an executive council of a revolutionary government. In order to be able to keep control, the SPD leadership mobilised in every factory and regiment it possibly could in order to get its supporters onto the Vollzugsrat. The 3,000-strong meeting on November 10 at Circus Busch in Berlin was dominated by SPD-loyal soldiers whose insistence on an unconditional “Unity!” made for a highly charged atmosphere. Numerous fist-fights broke out. At one point during his speech, Liebknecht actually feared that he might be shot. His prescient warning about how the revolution’s “enemies surround us” and condemnation of the “insidious” exploitation of the soldiers by those enemies certainly did not go down well with the majority of those present.

A proposal from Barth sought the election of an executive council which would have supreme legislative power, and to which the people’s commissars would be responsible. But it also sanctioned the SPD-USPD provisional government, unwittingly becoming a source of support for those who had been opposed to the revolution from the very start.

With the SPD enjoying the support of the majority of the meeting, the principle of parity between the two groups was only partly enforced: the SPD and USPD each had seven worker members elected, but the 14 soldiers on the Vollzugsrat were overwhelmingly supporters of or sympathetic to the SPD. The conference also confirmed the provisional government as the basis of the revolution.

Although initially unhappy with the Circus Busch result, Ebert was actually now in a stronger position. Setting up a cabinet with the USPD was crucial and control over the Vollzugsrat also allowed him to prevent the formation of a counterweight to the provisional government and its state apparatus. Moreover, although bourgeois politicians formally operated only as “technical advisors”, they essentially carried on with many of the functions of the old order.
Business as usual

The situation was highly contradictory. The SPD was schizophrenically portrayed as both the heir of the old regime and the head of a revolutionary cabinet approved by the popular will of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Yet SPD intentions were clear - the priority was not to arm the people, not to expropriate and socialise industry, but to use its influence within the remnants of the old order to prevent the workers from exercising control of the workplace, localities or media, while itself claiming to represent both the “community of labour” and “national interests”.

Right from the outset the SPD-USPD government sought to undermine the executive council. Whilst the latter had voted through a motion declaring that Germany was now a “socialist republic”, where power lay in the “workers’ and soldiers’ councils”, this was not even mentioned in the SPD-controlled press. When the executive sought to form red guards, Ebert and Barth worked with the military commander of Berlin, Otto Wels, in order to form a ‘republican defence force’ to defend the government, consisting of around 15,000 volunteers. There could be no question of arming the people. Unsurprisingly, funding for the republican defence force poured in from numerous bourgeois sources.10

Crucial was the deal struck between the officer corps and the SPD apparatus. General Groener - successor to Ludendorff as quartermaster general - later wrote: “The officer corps could only cooperate with a government which undertook the struggle against Bolshevism … Ebert had made his mind up on this … We made an alliance against Bolshevism … There existed no other party which had enough influence upon the masses to enable the re-establishment of a governmental power with the help of the army.”11

The Hohenzollern bureaucracy, most significantly at the level of the military apparatus, remained in place. For Rosa Luxemburg this meant “leaving the administrative organs of the state intact from top to bottom, in the hands of yesterday’s pillars of Hohenzollern absolutism and tomorrow’s tools of the counterrevolution”.12

A cabinet meeting on November 12 showed just how far things had gone. It confirmed that the officers’ power of command was to remain and military discipline was to be upheld. This made things uncomfortable for the USPD, which had gained so much support from soldiers and sailors precisely as a reaction to the military hierarchy’s bullying. But the SPD won the day by using the pretext of the Versailles treaty and the demand to retreat “in good order” to the east bank of the Rhine. It also introduced measures like the right to vote from the age of 20, an end to censorship and to the state of siege.

Meanwhile, the councils were thrown into a state of confusion. Largely products of spontaneity, their make-up had always differed across the country. Bremen and Hamburg, for example, were always extremely militant. They had abolished the local administration and taken over its affairs, in Bremen forming Red Guards to replace the standing army and police. In other areas like Cologne and Duisburg, the SPD was able to win the inclusion of bourgeois forces. Other councils were simply organisationally ineffective or even totally corrupt. The strength of the SPD lay in the fact that it was able to rely on political backwardness amongst the newly politicised and on connections with the old state. In addition since the Circus Busch the USPD was committed to parity between the two parties even when it was in a distinct majority.

Whereas radical councils like Dresden and Leipzig would produce programmes proclaiming working class power and calling for socialisation to begin immediately, they were the exception rather than the rule. Many of the councils simply left many functions like the police and judicial system in the hands of the old state machinery.

Luxemburg was quite clear that what had happened was not the equivalent of October 1917. The task of the working class was to consolidate its gains and prepare for further advances. “Above all”, she wrote, November 9 was a “political revolution”, reflecting to “a very small extent the victory of a new principle; it was little more than a collapse of the extant system of imperialism.”

November 15 saw an agreement between SPD trade union leader Carl Legien of the SPD and big capitalists Hugo Stinnes and Carl Friedrich von Siemens. It promised to end strikes, roll back the influence of the councils and stymie workers’ control of production. Although gestures were made by the new Council of People’s Commissars through the appointment of a commission to investigate which industries were suitable for socialisation, this more or less did nothing until April 1919.

The foreign policy pursued by the new government spoke volumes. Ever since the outbreak of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had made offers to help to overcome the scarcity of food in Germany. But the new government refused to accept Russian grain, despite the best diplomatic efforts of German-speaking Bolsheviks like Karl Radek. Then it issued a statement on the deal reached with US president Woodrow Wilson, which laid down that food supplies to address the desperate shortages would be considered “only on condition that public order in Germany is genuinely re-established and maintained and a just distribution of food supplies guaranteed”.

It was claimed that this had been enforced by Wilson himself. but the French daily Le Temps later revealed that this extra clause had been insisted upon by Ebert, not Wilson.13 The intention was clear. Instead of establishing the German working class as a key battalion in the international proletariat, the SPD aim was to join in the campaign to strangle the Russian Revolution. The government used the threat of starvation and appealed for national unity in the face of the Allies’ demands.

The counterrevolution was thus painted in ‘socialist’ colours. And it was of a national and international nature. While claiming that law and order was essential for a return to normality, the SPD was preparing to join forces with rightwing militias such as the Freikorps at home, while supporting direct military collusion with the Entente imperialist states to keep German troops in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and hold back the Russian Revolution. Supporting the ‘free press’, the SPD was complicit in the dissemination of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik propaganda. This, combined with the killing of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919 and the failed attempt to stabilise capitalism would eventually culminate in the counterrevolutionary horror of Hitler.
Revolutionary alternative

The success of the Russian Revolution confirmed the necessity of a deeply rooted revolutionary party. The German Spartacists, although operating independently and at least as a ‘proto-party’ formation since the launch of the International Group in January 1916, were not sufficiently demarcated from the USPD. The Spartacist publication Die Rote Fahne was established too late in the day.

Ninety years on from one of the greatest and most inspiring events in working class history, it is incumbent upon us to strive to understand why the German revolution was defeated. The foundation of the German Communist Party under the leadership of Luxemburg and Liebknecht did not take place until the end of 1918 and at the outbreak of crisis months earlier the Spartacists had only 50 comrades in Berlin. Their bravery, determination and enthusiasm ensured that their numbers grew quickly, but they were not an established political party like the Bolsheviks in Russia when crisis broke.

If there is one thing we can learn from the events of November 1918, it is that it is never too early to fight for a party openly committed to working class power. Delay can only serve to strengthen the labour bureaucracy and their acolytes - the future Eberts, Noskes, and Scheidemanns.
Notes

1. C Harman The lost revolution London 1982, p11.
2. Quoted in P Broue The German revolution Chicago 2006, p131.
3. J Riddell (ed) The German revolution and the debate on soviet power Atlanta 1986, p21.
4. The Socialist November 4. Taaffe claims the bureaucratisation, growth of revisionism and gradualism within the SPD is “something similar” to what has occurred in the Labour Party over the past few decades. A desperate attempt to excuse his group’s past auto-Labourism, and provide cover for the call to set up a Labour Party mark two. Bizarrely, he goes on to lambast the USPD for having a “halfway house political position, sometimes using very radical, ‘revolutionary’ phraseology”, and for being “passive in deeds, refusing to go the whole way in the struggle against capitalism”. In reality the USPD was way to the left of Taaffe and his Socialist Party.
5. Kautsky, one of the leading theoreticians of the centrist tendency, was virulently anti-Bolshevik. Quoted in P Broue The German revolution Chicago 2006, p101.
6. www.kurkuhl.de/english/index_en.html
7. J Riddell (ed) The German revolution and the debate on soviet power Atlanta 1986, p38.
8. www.kurkuhl.de/english/index_en.html
9. C Harman The lost revolution London 1982, p53.
10. P Broue The German revolution Chicago 2006, p177.
11. Ibid p169.
12. Rosa Luxemburg The beginning: www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/11/18b.htm
13. J Riddell (ed) The German revolution and the debate on soviet power Atlanta 1986, p66.