From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement
The mystification of the First World War as a defensive war was accompanied by a misunderstanding of political forms, i.e., the illusion that the struggle for a democratic national shell was already a struggle against the imperialist content of German power, as if a democracy could exist outside of or above classes.
Arrigo Cervetto, in The Political Shell, spoke of “the illusion of the primacy of politics”. At the same time, however, he emphasised the dialectic between structure and superstructure: “The basic view that political power relations depend on economic relations enables the revolutionary movement to overcome the obstacle of self-delusion; on the other hand, this view remains only a general idea if it does not inspire a restless and specific analysis of the situation, and if it does not demand an attitude consequent upon this analysis”. Marxism analyses political forms “because it is not just a science”, but is “the science of class action, it is the science of the proletarian revolution”. The analysis of political forms, Cervetto summed up, was “indispensable to tactics and necessary to strategy, and it is useful, although not indispensable, to the science which analyses the long-term laws of motion”.
For a Marxist analysis of the degeneration of the SPD, it is therefore “indispensable” and “necessary” to consider the specific political forms of Germany’s imperialist maturation.
Domestic politics and imperialism
In his book La Social-Démocratie Allemande 1830-1996. De la Révolution au Réformisme, the French historian Jacques-Pierre Gougeon observes: “Before 1914, especially before the Moroccan crisis of 1911, the German Social Democrats, in their debates, gave a lesser role to foreign policy, so convinced were they that this was the simple prolongation of an internal situation that they had never ceased to denounce”.
This delay could only be exacerbated by the tendency to practicalism, which we have seen wielded by opportunism against Marxist theory. If awareness of international events is the privileged terrain of strategy already in 1864 Marx had urged the working classes to “master themselves the mysteries of international politics” the lack of reflection on foreign policy can be considered an aspect of the theoretical degeneration of Social Democracy. The party increasingly withdrew into the internal parliamentary battle, following the demands of the bureaucracy and the counting of votes, instead of raising its eyes to the world, to international relations between classes and between States.
Social Democracy had completed a decisive part of its political apprenticeship under Bismarck, first with the wars of German unification and later under the “Anti-Socialist Laws”. Gougeon’s thesis suggests that the SPD was led to conceive of foreign policy choices as a direct consequence of the internal political form of Wilhelm II’s Germany, which its organisation and cadres had been forged to oppose.
Karl Kautsky’s thesis that imperialism is not a stage of capitalist development, but a policy, can find sustenance in this tradition. Kautsky pointed to the British elections of 1906, where the liberist line had prevailed against Joseph Chamberlain’s “imperial preference”, as proof that imperialism is a political choice which can be defeated at the ballot box.
The opposition to Prussianism
In its aversion to Prussianism, and to the political and social backwardness of which it is an expression, the SPD is part of a democratic-revolutionary tradition that has an illustrious precedent in Heinrich Heine. In the 1851 preface to the book Französische Zustände, the German poet describes Prussia and its emperor as follows: “I watched with anxiety this Prussian eagle, [...] all the more observant of his claws. I did not trust this Prussian, this tall and canting, white-gaitered hero with a big belly, a broad mouth, and corporal’s cane, which he first dipped in holy water ere he laid on it. I disliked this philosophic Christian military despotism, this conglomerate of white beer, lies, and sand. Repulsive, deeply repulsive to me was this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical Prussia, this Tartuffe among states”.
As late as 1910, the conservative deputy Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau provocatively evoked at the Reichstag what he called “an ancient Prussian tradition”: “The King of Prussia and German Emperor must be able at any time to say to a lieutenant: take ten men and close the Reichstag!”
For the opportunist majority of the SPD, these conditions of backwardness of the Prussian political shell were an argument in favour of reformism, in the direction of a bourgeois workers’ party. However, theoretical insufficiency in the face of the strategically unprecedented situation of Germany’s imperialist maturation led even Rosa Luxemburg, a staunch opponent of opportunism who held firmly revolutionary positions, to oppose the imperialist war with the democratic “national program” of a “Great German Republic”, as she wrote in the pamphlet The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, published in 1916 under the pseudonym “Junius”.
Lenin criticised the illusion of the primacy of politics in The Junius Pamphlet: “The ‘Great German Republic’, had it existed in 1914-1916, would also have waged an imperialist war”. Junius, Lenin wrote, “suggests that the imperialist war should be ‘opposed’ with a national program. He urges the advanced class to turn its face to the past and not to the future! In France, in Germany, and in the whole of Europe it was a bourgeois-democratic revolution that, objectively, was the order of the day in 1793 and 1848. Corresponding to this objective historical situation was the ‘truly national’, i.e., the national bourgeois program of the then existing democracy”. But “at the present time, the objective situation in the biggest advanced states of Europe is different. Progress [...] can be made only in the direction of socialist society, only in the direction of the socialist revolution. From the standpoint of progress, from the standpoint of the progressive class, the imperialist bourgeois war, the war of highly developed capitalism, can, objectively, be opposed only with a war against the bourgeoisie, i.e., primarily civil war for power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie”, and “this may be followed only under certain special conditions by a war to defend the socialist state against bourgeois states”. The illusion that a democratisation of Germany could counterpose a “popular representation” to the imperialist war indicated the objective difficulty in understanding the change of era, even for the revolutionary camp, as well as reflecting the trust that Luxemburg had always placed in the spontaneity of the masses.
Anti-militarism
On the other hand, the opportunist camp claimed to justify its subjection to its own bourgeoisie even with “an apparently Marxist argument”, writes Paul Frölich I0 Jabre Krieg und Bürgerkrieg. “If imperialism was a necessary phase of capitalist development [...] then it was useless to oppose it”. Heinrich Cunow’s objectivism is an exemplary case of this argument which, subjugating itself to the existing state of things, would like to ignore its contradictions, setting aside the revolutionary dialectic.
Finally, anti-militarism was also an heir to this political tradition shaped by opposition to Prussianism, interpreted, however, in very different ways within the SPD. At the outbreak of the First World War, Frölich wrote, a rift opened up in the “old radical wing”; “The majority of party bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists, and so on, took the path of pacifism. Pacifism from two points of view: by largely adopting the arguments of the apostles of peace, attempts were made to convince bourgeois governments to adopt a pacifist policy; in parallel to the ambition to erase and overcome the antagonisms between the capitalist powers, pacifism between the classes began to be preached”. These were the positions of Bernstein and Kautsky. The abandonment of the class criterion translated into impotence at best, but more often into an instrument in the hands of opposing imperialisms.
The group around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, on the other hand, opposed the professional army of the Prussian State with Engels’ reflection on the people in arms. Frölich wrote that the left of the SPD saw Prussian militarism heading towards “a dead end”: “It was preparing a world war that would require [...] the mobilisation of all the forces of the people”.
So, Liebknecht’s anti-militarism was not the rejection of compulsory military service “as the anarchists supported”, but “the demolition of the imperialist, anti-proletarian, and counter-revolutionary spirit in the army; not for the destruction of weapons, but for their conquest”.
Engels’ strategy of disciplined and constant work within the army, however, would have required the SPD, with its organisational capacity, to maintain firm revolutionary positions and continue the battle, as the Bolsheviks would in Russia, within the ranks of the army, while the waves of war would take it upon themselves to brutally show the proletariat the vital need for internationalism. However, the capitulation of the SPD on August 4th, 1914, immediately foreclosed this possibility.
Chemnitz and Jena
The elections of January 1912 brought the SPD a historic result, with 4.25 million votes and 110 seats in the Reichstag.To the satisfaction of the revisionists, the ballot was preceded by agreements between the Social Democrats and the liberal parties, particularly the progressives, so as to not electorally compete in the second round of elections. However, as soon as the Reichstag reopened, this electoral alliance did not hold up in the face of the issue of rearmament. The reformist wing of the SPD, which expected a “parliamentarisation” of German political life against Prussian militarism, suffered a setback: the military bill was voted for by all bourgeois parties without exception, leaving the SPD isolated in the opposition. This episode strengthened the left wing of the party, which at the Chemnitz congress of September 1912 dominated by foreign policy issues, in particular by tensions in the Balkans imposed, by a large majority, a line of opposition to imperialism and chauvinism, and in favour of disarmament.
On August 13th, 1913, August Bebel died. At the subsequent congress in Jena, in September, opportunist tendencies regarding the war resurfaced, going back on the outcome of Chemnitz: the congress confirmed, with 336 votes against 140, the vote of the deputies in the Reichstag, with which they had accepted new taxes intended to cover military expenditure, on the pretext that they were direct taxes on income, property, and inheritance. Moreover, the majority of the party rejected a plan for a general strike against the war.
According to Jacques Droz [General History of Socialism], “It can be rightly written that the party crossed the Rubicon not during the parliamentary session of August 4th, 1914”, when it voted in favour of war credits, “but as early as September 1913”, with the two votes in Jena, which signalled the renunciation of revolutionary action against the war.
Lotta Comunista, October 2024