Learning From History
During the last quarter of the 19th century across Europe and in the US, political parties formed under the banner of the Second International. These political parties all claimed to agree with the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels. Although these parties introduced Marxian ideas in a popular form to the working class they made several political errors which harmed both an understanding of Socialism and the necessary political means for achieving common ownership and democratic control over the means of production and distribution by all of society.
The principal error made by these “Social Democrat” organisations was in their political programme. The “Socialist” object of the programme was often incoherent and lent itself towards meaning the nationalisation of industry and agriculture rather than the abolition of the wages system and the establishment of production and distribution for social use.
Nevertheless the object of the Erfurt Programme of 1891 for example, adopted by the German Social Democratic Party and copied by other similar parties, had as its “inevitable goal” the aim of transforming “…the production of wares into socialistic production…” (quoted from The Communist Manifesto – and the Last One Hundred Years, (Socialist Party of Great Britain p.23 1948).
However, an equally serious political error made by the social democratic parties was the list of immediate demands or palliatives appended to the “Socialist” object. The Erfurt programme had ten demands including the establishment of a “People’s Army”, “the Secularisation of Schools” and “free medical treatment”.
Two negative consequences of the list of demands immediately presented themselves.
First, it was impossible to tell if someone who had joined one of the Social Democratic parties had been attracted to the political object of the Party or to one or all of the palliatives. And second, the various reforms could lay themselves open to being appropriated by other political parties to take working class support away from Social Democracy.
Both consequences were experienced by the German Social Democratic Party associated with Frederick Engels until his death in 1895 at the age of seventy four.
Bismarck and “State Socialism”
During the middle to late 19th century Germany, like Britain progressively extended the parliamentary franchise until the great majority of the electorate were members of the working class, and political parties were formed in Germany roughly comparable to the Tory, Liberal and Labour parties in Britain.
The German imperial constitution was declared in April 1871 and Bismarck was appointed imperial chancellor. Although the Reichstag, the imperial Parliament, was convened by universal, equal, direct and secret elections, the Chancellor of the Reich was not responsible to Parliament but to the Emperor. Next to the Emperor, the imperial Parliament was the second most important institution; however, its political influence was limited to the area of legislation. It exerted only a minor influence over the formation of governments and government policy.
The exercise of political power in the name of the Emperor was undertaken by the conservative Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck had at first been backed by the German “Liberal” Parties, but German capitalism was entering an expansionist phase, seeking foreign markets and a colonial empire, and Bismarck, reluctantly it is said, had to fall in line with its imperialist adventurism.
Bismarck had no liking for Socialism. When after a period of reorganisation the German Social Democratic Party obtained half a million votes in the Reichstag in 1877, Bismarck became alarmed. So, in 1878 he began a campaign against the Social Democratic Party with the express object of crushing the whole movement.
Following two attempts on the life of the Kaiser by self-styled “Socialists” who were disowned by the German Social Democratic Party, Bismarck enacted “anti-Socialist laws” in 1878 which imposed drastic restrictions on political propaganda and other activities of the SDP but not on elections to the Reichstag.
A law against the Socialists went through the Reichstag. Socialist papers were suppressed, many clubs broken up and meetings stopped, and some of the leaders of the Party banished. Nevertheless, it was still possible for Social Democrats to take part in political activity and to stand for the Reichstag, even if its meetings had to be licensed in advance.
Engels commented on Bismarck’s “anti-Socialist Laws” in The Labour Standard (1881):
And what has Bismarck attained with all his coercion? Just as much as Mr. Forster in Ireland. The Social-Democratic party is in as blooming a condition, and possesses as firm an organisation, as the Irish Land League. A few days ago there were elections for the Town Council of Mannheim.
The working-class party nominated sixteen candidates, and carried them all by a majority of nearly three to one. Again, Bebel, member of the German Parliament for Dresden, stood for the representation of the Leipzig district in the Saxon Parliament. Bebel is himself a working man (a turner), and one of the best, if not the best speaker in Germany. To frustrate his being elected, the Government expelled all his committee.
And he concluded:
What was the result? That even with a limited suffrage, Bebel was carried by a strong majority. Thus, Bismarck’s coercion avails him nothing; on the contrary, it exasperates the people. Those to whom all legal means of asserting themselves are cut off, will one fine morning take to illegal ones, and no one can blame them. How often have Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster proclaimed that doctrine? And how do they act now in Ireland? (Marxist.org/archive/works/1881/07/23a)
The restrictive laws were successfully evaded by the Social Democratic Party and proved quite ineffective as was shown by the rapid and continuous increase in the number of their members elected to the Reichstag; from 12 in 1881 to 110 in 1912.
But suppressing the Social Democratic Party was only half of Bismarck’s strategy; the other half was stealing their programme, including extensive nationalisation and social reforms.
Bismarck championed government-sponsored social insurance including “sickness insurance” to win working class voters away from the SDP. It was not a socialist programme although it was misleadingly referred to by the SDP as “State Socialism”.
The reform package was an anti-socialist program. Bismarck pushed the reforms through as legislation and enlarged the programme over the years, overriding opposition from his own conservative allies and from the SDP who knew the program was aimed at weakening them by competing successfully against their own list of reform demands.
Workers in Germany supported Bismarck’s social reform programme, and so did employers and the military authorities requiring healthy soldiers for the growing military force necessary for a future land war in Europe. Worker productivity increased and the army got healthier recruits than those in other countries. Other capitalist countries followed Germany. Great Britain in 1911 was the last of the important European countries to do so.
Lloyd George visited Germany and studied the social reforms. As Prime Minister he overcame fierce resistance in the House of Lords to create the Britain’s version of social insurance to counter the rise of the Labour Party and to attract support from the Trade Unions.
Engels described Bismarck’s nationalization programme in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:
“But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen…that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort to be socialistic.
Concluding:
Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism…The royal Marine company, the Royal Porcelain manufacturers, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in William III’s reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels” (p. 70).
Engels’s Error of Judgement
Engels totally misread the success of the German SDP. In an article Socialism in Germany written towards the end of his life, Engels made an assessment of the likely progress of the SDP. He looked at the electoral success of the Party with its increased share of the vote from 101, 927 in 1871 to 1, 427, 278 in 1890 and projected a likely outcome of 4 million votes by 1900 “A pleasant “end of the century” for our bourgeoisie” (For the full article see Friedrich Engels, Socialism in Germany, trans. Irene Schmeid from Die Neue Zeit, vol. 10 1891/2, pp. 580 -89 in German Essays in the 19th Century ed. F Mecklenburg and M. Stassen, 1990 p. 30-42).
If Engels had lived on into the first two decades of the 20th century, he would have seen the continuation of the exponential growth of the SDP vote he had predicted in 1891. The SDP had, by 1912 secured 28% of the vote and were represented by 112 seats in the Reichstag. Indeed, the Social Democrats had grown into the largest political party in Germany. Party membership was around 1 million and the party press (Vorwarts) had 1.5 million subscribers. The trade unions had 2.5 million members, most of whom probably supported the Social Democrats.
Yet there was a fatal error in Engels’ reasoning. Engels’ error was to equate votes for the SDP with a rise in socialist class consciousness. This was not the case. The SDP attracted voters for trade union reasons and support for the social reforms, not the socialist object itself. In fact, Bernstein’s revisionism (see his book Evolutionary Socialism published in 1899) – with the backing of a large section of the trade union leaders within the Party as well as a section of the political leadership – won out. The circle around Kautsky was weak and ineffectual in preventing the direction the SDP was to eventually take; a reformist direction which was to end, via the 1914-18 war, in the collapse of the Weimer Republic and the rise to political power of Adolph Hitler.
The German SDP: Revisionism and Leadership
Bernstein lists most of the typical objections to Marx and Engels’s revolutionary Socialism; writing off the Socialist objective as “utopian”, claiming that Marx’s predictions had not come true; and dismissing Marx’s method as “Hegelian mysticism”.
Not that Kautsky’s political circle agreed with Marx’s revolutionary propositions. On the contrary, Kautsky repudiated Marx’s central political principle that the establishment of Socialism had to be the work of the working class themselves. Kautsky also rejected Marx’s belief that workers had the capacity to understand the case for Socialism.
Writing in Neue Zeit (1901), Kautsky thought, for example, that Socialist theory could only be injected into the class struggle “from the outside” by political theorists like himself and even then only into the minds of a few advanced workers.
This is what Kautsky wrote:
…The bearer of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia; modern socialism therefore originates from individual members of this layer, and it is communicated by them only to intellectually outstanding proletarians who then introduce it into the class struggle of the proletariat, where conditions allow. Socialist consciousness is thus something introduced into the proletarian class struggle, not something born “naturally” from it.
(For the entire Kautsky quotation see Franz Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, p. 118, Pluto, 1990).
The SPGB: Learning from Past Mistakes
Consequently, the Social Democratic Party was the recipient of non-Socialists votes and the creation of a largely non-Socialist membership incapable of thinking for themselves and practically and theoretically at the beck and call of a political leadership itself split into factions. And this is why, in 1914, a large proportion of the German SDP voted for war credits and a sizable percentage of the SDP joined the war along with those who had voted for the Party in the preceding years.
And the capitalist left – the various Trotskyist organizations, SWP, Socialist Party, Fifth International and so on still make the same mistake today. They have not learnt from history. Not only do they have a state capitalist object proposing varying degrees of nationalisation but they still have a list of immediate demands. And like the SDP leadership they do not believe workers are cut out to understand the case for Socialism. Instead, these political parasites feed off every working class discontent from protests against government cuts to stopping public services being outsourced to the private sector. And the policy has been an utter failure.
It was a mistake not made by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. For the SPGB the socialist quality of the organisation was more important than numbers; it set out a single Socialist Objective informed by a set of eight principles. From the start in 1904, the SPGB had no leaders and was able to draw on the soundness of its principles to oppose the First World War on grounds of class interest.
Not only did prospective members have to understand and agree to the Object and Declaration of Principles but before being allowed to join the SPGB, they had to leave behind them all ideological baggage including attachment to the cult of leadership, nationalism, religion and any belief that capitalism can be reformed, The Party may have remained small throughout the last hundred years or so and have to be reconstituted in 1991, but it outlived all those parties at the turn of the 20th century who believed you could have a simultaneous “socialist object” and reform programme. History has shown that you can’t.
(illustration: Sweat Shop by Boris Gordelick)
