From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement
The depth of the contradictions within the German SPD, brought to a climax by the war, erupted in the Reichstag over the vote on war credits. Karl Liebknecht, who had reluctantly bowed to party discipline on August 4th, 1914, openly expressed his rift with the Executive during the subsequent vote on December 2nd when, acting alone, he rejected the war credits. On this occasion, the centrists, headed by Hugo Haase, maintained respect for party discipline.
A legal opposition
On February 3rd, 1915, exploiting this centrist trend (which also gripped many old radicals), the Executive decided to authorise a legal
internal opposition, thus allowing the deputies whose conscience rebelled against party discipline to absent themselves at the moment of the vote on war credits. This semblance of freedom of criticism conceded to the centrists was aimed at isolating Liebknecht, weakening his position of denunciation, according to which indiscipline was the only way to express one's opposition.
In the Reichstag session on March 20th, 1915, Otto Rühle joined Liebknecht in rejecting the war credits, while 30 centrist deputies, including Haase, Bernstein, and Ledebour, walked out before the vote.
On May 20th, Germany's main economic associations asked the Chancellor for peace to be made only after having ensured that the Reich would have those expansions of political, military-maritime, and economic power that would guarantee our greater force abroad
. On June 9th, in an open letter drawn up by Liebknecht, the representatives of the SPD left wing warned the party not to continue its policy of August 4th, 1914.
On June 19th, faced with the government's explicit annexationist aims backed by the party's Executive – but also with the aim of blocking the action of Liebknecht and the left – Bernstein, Haase and Kautsky published an appeal in the Leipziger Volkszeitung headed The Task of the Moment
, in which they opposed the annexations and the continual approval of the war credits on the part of the SPD. The Executive condemned this manifesto of the legal opposition, defining it as an organised attempt to weaken the unity of Germany's workers' organisations
. Because of this appeal, the Leipziger Volkszeitung was suspended from July 1st.
At the subsequent vote on war credits on December 29th, 1915, 22 Social Democratic deputies walked out but another twenty remained and voted in opposition. On January 1st, 1916, the comrades gathered around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht decided to call themselves the International Group
and to publish a bulletin under the heading Political Letters
, signed with the name Spartacus
. In dispute with the Executive, the preamble stated: Not unity, but clarity above all!
Rift in the reformist camp
The Executive responded on January 12th with the expulsion of Liebknecht from the parliamentary group; decided by 60 votes to 25, it was a clear threat to the other party rebels. Rühle declared solidarity with Liebknecht and abandoned the parliamentary group. Discontent grew within the party, especially in the areas where the opposition was more deeply entrenched: Greater Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, and Bremen.
On March 24th, the majority of the SPD parliamentary group approved the new war credits. At this point, Haase, whose profession as a lawyer brought him into daily contact with the reality of repression, spoke in the name of the minority: he refused to approve the budget, and in a heartfelt speech denounced the state of siege and opposed its renewal. The reaction was immediate: the SPD majority expelled the minority from the parliamentary faction, with 58 votes to 33.
The rancour emerges clearly from the War Diary of the revisionist Eduard David, who noted the acrimonious comments made against the mild centrist Haase: Scheidemann: depraved creature. Ebert: shameless boor. Barefaced rascal, and so on
. At the same time, David confessed to a feeling of liberation
: It's done! […] The moment has arrived to consolidate the centre and the right on the basis of an authentically reformist policy
. On March 25th, Haase, deeply troubled in spirit, resigned from his post as party chairman. Shortly before, Scheidemann had said to David we'll slap him [Haase] in the face and kick him out
. In his diary, David speaks of an icy farewell
.
The “Vorwärts heist”
The 33 expelled deputies, including Haase, Bernstein, Ledebour, Henke, Bock, Dittmann, Geyer, and Kunert, joined together to form a Social Democratic Working Group
in the Reichstag. Although there was still formally a single party, there were actually two parliamentary groups and three trends: social imperialist, reformist pacifists, and revolutionaries.
Although the pacifists and revolutionaries were both in the opposition, they revealed their differences. Liebknecht was far from getting on with the centrists, who refused to join in the rally he organised for May Day. In Bremen, Alfred Henke broke with the left-wing revolutionaries Johann Knief and Paul Frölich, who were getting ready to found the Arbeiterpolitik. The Spartacus Letters
did not spare attacks on the centrists. Nevertheless, the Executive's violent campaign to steal influence from the opposition favoured the rapprochement of these components.
In October, a conflict arose between the party leadership and the Berlin organisation regarding Vorwärts. The military authorities confiscated the newspaper, declaring it could be printed again only if the present editorial staff, which sympathised with the opposition, was replaced. The Executive therefore placed the newspaper under its own control, appointing Hermann Müller as editor and firing the editors who opposed this decision. The opposition denounced this coup de main as the Vorwärts heist
.
Conference of the opposition
On January 7th, 1917, at the peak of the Turnip Winter
of hunger and famine, and on the initiative of the Social Democratic Working Group
, the representatives of the two components of the opposition met in Berlin to discuss the tactics of their deputies in the Reichstag. 157 party members, including 19 deputies and 24 representatives of the International Group
, took part in the conference. The Executive's actions against the opposition were condemned by a majority of 111 votes. The local organisations were called upon to tighten the network of contacts between them. A resolution presented by the Spartacist Ernst Meyer, who proposed suspending the payment of the party dues to the Executive, did not gain a majority for fear of precipitating a split. This was an ingenuous precaution, because it was the Executive, at this point, which took the initiative: on January 16th, it stated that the opposition had, itself, placed itself outside the party
by organising that factionist
conference. The purging of the saboteurs
then began in a great hurry.
On January 12th, at the Rome Conference, the Entente powers replied to the request of American President Woodrow Wilson to lay their peace conditions on the table: the central empires were to evacuate the occupied territories, hand back Alsace-Lorraine to France and Poland to Russia, and restore the independence of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro. On January 15th, Eduard David commented in his diary: Effect of the Entente's reply! The policy of the party majority has now been brilliantly justified and solidly founded
.
Friedrich Stampfer – who on November 9th, 1916, after the heist
, had become editor-in-chief of Vorwärts – wrote an article on January 15th headed World Crisis and Party Crisis
in which he sided with the schism. David commented: At last!
. A few days later, on the 18th, he considered: That's fine. […] The logic of events has prevailed
.
The schism
On February 1st, 1917, Germany unleashed an all-out submarine war, already decided upon by the Kaiser on January 9th, while the American intervention was looming. The consultations between the SPD, the chancellery, and the military leadership were constant. On February 23rd, the SPD majority approved the eighth request for war credits. By then, war expenditure amounted to 3 billion Deutschmarks per month. On March 8th, the bourgeois-democratic revolution broke out in Russia.
Meanwhile, the expulsion of the opposition from the party apparatuses was continuing; where the Executive's supporters were in the majority in the governing bodies, the minorities were expelled; where, on the contrary, the opposition held the reins, as in Berlin, Leipzig, Bremen, and Brunswick, the Executive excluded the local organisation en bloc and installed another from scratch.
By then, the split was already in the making. On April 6th, the day the United States entered the war, a conference of the Social Democratic opposition was held in Gotha, during which the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) was founded. In The German Revolution, 1917-1923 [2004], Pierre Broué wrote: In this way, the SPD split during the crucial year of the War, against the declared will of practically all the leaders of the opposition. It was neither a matter of a few leaders splitting off, nor of the secession of some local organisations. The Party was divided from top to bottom. Some 170,000 members stayed with the old firm, while the new party claimed 120,000. Amongst the latter were the best-known leaders of every pre-war tendency, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, Haase and Ledebour, Kautsky and Hilferding, and even Bernstein
.
In the new party, the Spartacists – despite pressure from the Bolsheviks, who were pushing for the left-wing radicals in Bremen, Radek, and Julian Borchardt of the Lichtstrahlen – hesitated until the last moment to break with the centrists, fearing that they would be isolated from the masses without the cover of a legal party.
The problem of “centrism”
In Arrigo Cervetto's work, the notion of centrism
is used in a broad sense, also considering a paracentrist
– i.e., internationalist and revolutionary – variant. This includes those notably European currents of Marxism which, following the failure of the Second International and the SPD's betrayal, hesitated or were reluctant to back the Bolsheviks' position of revolutionary autonomy with respect to centrism. A crucial aspect stressed by Cervetto is that autonomous class organisation must be developed in counterrevolutionary periods: according to Lenin, this organisation is in fact the premise of the revolutionary process, and not its result as Rosa Luxemburg argued. In the catastrophe of war, when the chickens come home to roost, it is too late for clarification, as the German example demonstrates.
The Spartacus group and Rosa Luxemburg expressed a centrist tendency when, after August 4th, they opposed the split of the SPD, and ended up being subjected to it. Subsequently, they would also hesitate to break with the USPD's centrist eclecticism. In a footnote, Cervetto writes that, in fact, Luxemburgism is the left wing of centrism
[Opere, Vol. 13].
As early as March 1916, faced with the creation of the Social Democratic Working Group
, the Spartacists had specified: The watchword is neither schism, nor unity, nor new party, nor old party, but the re-conquest of the Party from the bottom up by means of the rebellion of the masses who must take their organisations and instruments into their own hands
. Yet again, the propensity to support grassroots initiative, and diffidence towards the Bolshevik party model, were at the root of this centrism and the decision not to abandon mass organisations, no matter how degenerate.