The London Congress of the International had confirmed once again that the object of member parties was to 'transform the capitalist system of ownership and production into Socialism'. It had also decided the controversial question of how the struggle for this aim should be conducted. The overwhelming majority of the parties had rejected Anarchism and Syndicalism. They had acknowledged the necessity of political action and of the struggle for political power to which social democracy was committed. The parties were now confronted with the question of which tactics to pursue in the struggle for agreed aims. Basically, the problem was whether capitalism could be overthrown only by a revolutionary struggle for power culminating in the overthrow of the ruling class, or whether it could be transformed in an evolutionary manner through the growing influence of the working class within the existing social and political framework.
The controversy between the revolutionary and evolutionary schools of Socialism had agitated the working-class movement of nearly all countries from the very beginning. An event in France suddenly brought matters to a crisis within the International. On 29 June 1899, a Socialist, Alexandre Millerand, had been invited to join a bourgeois government and became the first Socialist to serve under normal conditions in a European cabinet.[1] This event marked a break in the traditions of European Socialism from the time of Marx, and called in question the prevailing theory of proletarian class struggle as interpreted by most parties.
The Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, which Millerand joined, was radical-republican, and had come to power in the course of a crisis which shook the French Republic to its depths. The 'Dreyfus Affair'—the campaign to rehabilitate a Jewish captain on the General Staff who had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in 1895 on a false charge of espionage—touched off a tremendous barrage of monarchist and anti-semitic propaganda by the church, the royalist Press and the army, traditionally the deadly enemies of the Republic. Socialists and Radicals had formed a united front in the Chamber against the common danger, and the various Socialist parties into which the French Labour movement had split came together to form an action committee, or 'Vigilance Committee', as it was called in the old Jacobin tradition. Already in 1883 the Socialists had joined forces with the Radicals in an election campaign and had, thanks to the alliance, increased their seats in the Chamber from twelve to forty-nine. They had also, in alliance with the Radicals, won considerable successes in the local elections of 1896.
In May 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, elections were about to be held for a new Chamber. Once again the Socialists and Radicals formed an electoral alliance, and it triumphed. The victory of the republican forces was complete. But the bourgeois left won only a tiny majority in the new parliament. A government of the left could be formed only with the help of the Socialists. René Waldeck-Rousseau, who had been asked to form a government, accordingly asked Millerand to join his cabinet as Minister for Trade and Industry.
Alexandre Millerand (1859–1943), a lawyer with a great reputation among the working class, had been elected to Parliament in 1885 and, like Jaurès, had slowly evolved from radicalism to Socialism. Within the Socialist movement he uncompromisingly supported the evolutionary wing. At a banquet in Saint-Mandé, held to celebrate a victory in the local elections of 1896 and attended by Guesde, Jaurès, Vaillant and other leaders of the diverse trends in French Socialism, Millerand proposed a programme—the famous 'Saint-Mandé Programme'—which he hoped would provide a basis for re-uniting the badly divided movement. Every section of the movement was agreed, he insisted, on replacing the capitalist system by Socialism, but capitalism could hardly be overthrown by revolutionary action in one fell swoop. The abolition of capitalism could be only a gradual process, he explained, through the piecemeal nationalization and municipalization of large industry, the continuous expansion in the economic and social activities of public organizations and a never-ending process of social reform. The instrument for supplanting capitalism, therefore, could never be revolutionary violence but only democracy embodied in the French Republic. Socialists must undertake, he suggested, to win a majority of the people for Socialism, meanwhile seeking joint action with all the progressive elements in society in the struggle for social reform and the nationalization of monopolies.[2]
Millerand, like Jaurès, Viviani, Briand and other Socialist deputies, was a member of the group known as the 'Independent Socialists'. But he joined the government in his individual capacity, without any mandate from his group and without even having consulted either the parliamentary group or the 'Vigilance Committee'. He tried to justify his somewhat surprising decision by pointing to the danger which threatened the Republic. Its preservation in the face of the threat to its existence from the clerical right was, he maintained, at that moment of supreme importance for the working class. And he claimed to be loyal to the Saint-Mandé Programme, promising to work for its objectives from inside the government.
The Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry depended on an alliance of Radicals, the recently formed group of Radical-Socialists and the Parliamentary Socialists themselves. Its slogan was 'No enemies on the left', hence Waldeck-Rousseau's invitation to Millerand to join his government. At the same time, however, he invited General Gallifet, who was responsible for the slaughter of the Communards in 1871, to become Minister of War, as a man who seemed capable of breaking any revolt by the largely monarchist general staff, and to reform the army, which had degenerated into an instrument of reaction.
The surprising news that Millerand had joined the government was greeted with indignation by the whole of the French right, with satisfaction by the followers of Brousse and the Independent Socialists, and with consternation by the Guesdists, Blanquists and Syndicalists. To the Guesdists and Blanquists, Millerand's participation in a bourgeois government was a blatant betrayal of the principles of the proletarian class struggle, a betrayal made even more heinous by the presence of Gallifet in the same government. They issued a manifesto repudiating all responsibility for Millerand's action and called a congress to pronounce formally on his behaviour in the name of the French working class. All Labour organizations which acknowledged the class struggle and the principles of international Socialism were invited to the congress, which met in December 1899, with some 800 delegates, representing 1,400 political organizations, trade unions and co-operative societies.
The congress, however, reached no clear decision. It adopted two resolutions. The first, carried by 818 votes against 634, declared that the participation of Socialists in a bourgeois government was incompatible with the principles of the proletarian class struggle. The second, however, carried by 1,140 votes to 240, said that the Socialist party could consider taking part in such a government under 'exceptional conditions'. It went on to stress that, since the capitalist class must be deprived of its political power before it could be economically dispossessed, the conquest of political power by the workers remained of supreme importance.
The conditions under which Millerand had joined the government were indeed 'exceptional', and the Ministry of Waldeck-Rousseau had in fact repelled the clerical-monarchist attack on the Republic, and implemented a substantial programme of labour-protection laws and social reforms which had been drafted by Millerand. But, as a member of a bourgeois government, Millerand was also held responsible for actions of which he disapproved but which he could not prevent—actions which he was even compelled formally to support in order to save the government from being overthrown by the clerical-monarchist right. Socialists were confronted with a Treaty of Alliance between the French Republic and Tsarist Russia, which had been initiated under the previous government, and had the embarrassment of seeing Millerand, as Minister of Trade, accompany the Tsar, who represented the extreme of brutal reaction, on a tour of the Paris World Exhibition, which ended with the solemn award of a Russian decoration to the hapless Millerand. They even had to witness the spectacle of a Socialist demonstration which accompanied the delegates to the International's Paris Congress to the Walls of the Federals in commemoration of the Commune, broken up by police and soldiers on the orders of a government containing a Socialist Minister.
The intolerable contradiction in which the Socialists now found themselves was shown by the events at Chalon in June 1900. The workers had come out on strike, the government had sent troops into the strikebound area and a bloody clash ensued. The Socialists protested in the Chamber. The Right, seeing an opportunity of overthrowing a government which it detested, proposed a vote of no confidence. In order to save the government, the Independent Socialists, led by Jaurès, voted against the motion, while the Guesdists supported it. This accentuated the conflict between the revolutionary and reformist wings of the movement. By the autumn of 1901 the bitter controversy had resulted in a realignment of the two groups. The revolutionary Socialists—Guesdists, Blanquists and the lef wing among the followers of Allemane—united to form the new Parti Socialiste de France; while the reformists—Broussists, Independents and the right wing of the Allemanists—set up the Parti Socialiste Français.[3]
The excitement over the 'Millerand Affair' spread from France to the Socialist movement of all countries, and, in particular, to Germany. There the smouldering conflict between the revolutionary and reformist wings broke out into the open during the party conference at Hanover in October 1899. The item on the agenda under which the debate took place was entitled 'the attack on the basic views of the party', and the man under indictment for the 'attack' was not Millerand but Eduard Bernstein. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, in a letter to Victor Adler, had denounced Millerand's entry into the government as a 'great tactical error', suggested that the party should maintain 'the strictest neutrality' in the conflict inside the French Socialist movement.[4] The Bernstein debate at the Hanover Party Conference proved to be a turning-point in the history of German Social Democracy, and had a profound effect on the Socialist Parties of other countries, especially in France.
As in most other countries, controversy between reformist and revolutionary Socialists over tactics had preoccupied the German Labour movement, even during the twelve years when the party was legally suppressed under the Anti-Socialist Law. The fact that the party had been prohibited by the government, and the persecution to which it had been subjected, inevitably strengthened its revolutionary wing. The Anti-Socialist Law had revealed, in the crudest possible way, that the state was an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for the suppression of the workers. The seed of hatred which the state and ruling class had themselves planted sank deep roots in the mind of the working class.[5] The party's reply to the Anti-Socialist Law was the Erfurt Programme of 1891—a programme of revolutionary Socialism in the spirit of Marxism, in sharp contrast to the 'national' brand of Socialism represented by Lassalle and expressed in the Gotha Programme of 1875. The party's deep regard for Lassalle was by no means extinguished. His busts and portraits could be seen in working-class meeting-halls alongside those of Marx and Engels. He was still commemorated in working-class songs. But the Erfurt Programme rejected all identification of the workers with the nationalist state, which had been axiomatic for Lassalle. It asserted the doctrine of irreconcilable antagonism between the working class and the existing state machine; it stressed the international proletarian class struggle in uncompromising terms, and it was drawn up on the assumption of an imminent revolution which would sweep away the capitalist state and the bourgeois social order.
However, in the year of the Erfurt Programme, Georg von Vollmar (1850–1922), one of the movement's most respected figures (he came from a Bavarian nobleman's family, had once been a strict Catholic, and, converted to Socialism, had joined the party shortly before the Anti-Socialist Law was enacted), raised the standard of reformism. In the period of the Anti-Socialist Law he had been on the extreme left. In two sensational articles on the tactics of the party under conditions of illegality (they appeared in the Sozialdemokrat, the party's official organ, printed, for legal reasons, in Zurich and distributed secretly in Germany), he had declared that the party had no hopes of seeing the Anti-Socialist Law repealed by parliamentary action, and that it would be removed only by revolution. 'The separation of Social Democracy from the existing state and from the present social order,' he wrote, 'becomes continually more complete; the gulf between ourselves and our enemies grows constantly wider, more and more insurmountable.…Today, Socialism is no longer a matter of theory but simply a question of power, which cannot be solved in any parliamentary situation, but only on the streets and on the field of battle.' He demanded that the party should declare openly 'to our enemies.…Yes, we are a danger to the State because we intend to destroy you. We are certainly the enemies of your property, your values, your entire order.…We shall meet force with force.[6]
When, quite contrary to his expectations, the Anti-Socialist Law was removed by parliamentary action, Vollmar renounced the idea of revolutionary violence. While in no sense denying the possibility of political and social revolutions in conditions of crisis, he argued that in more normal conditions the state and bourgeois society could be transformed by a process of gradual evolution which the party should assist. It should win the peasants as allies and co-operate with the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie for social and political reforms. The fate of the Anti-Socialist Law proved that the middle class was far from being a solid reactionary mass. The law had been repealed because the centre party and one wing of the Liberals had opposed Bismarck's attempt to make it stronger. In order to increase its influence in Parliament, provincial governments and local councils, the party should be prepared to make electoral alliances with bourgeois parties. And in fact, at Vollmar's instigation, the party in 1898 made an electoral alliance with the Catholic Centre party in Bavaria and fought a joint campaign in 1904 to reform the provincial franchise.
Within the party, Vollmar was by no means isolated. But the reformists who rallied to him were opposed to the tactics of the revolutionary Socialists rather than to the principles of the Erfurt Programme. Bernstein, however, had gone much further, and started to call in question the basic concepts underlying the programme. He rejected not only the tactics of the revolutionaries but their fundamental theory. He went beyond empirical reformism to a revision of the entire Marxist outlook.
Bernstein's critique of Marxism provoked a storm among the German Social Democrats. Until the publication of his criticism in 1896, he had been regarded as one of the leaders of the party. As editor of the Sozialdemokrat he had, for an entire decade of repression under the Anti-Socialist Law, presented the party's views with great effectiveness—'a great service for which we all owe him a debt of gratitude', as Bebel conceded while supporting his indictment at the party congress, 'a man who, up to now, has justly been regarded as one of our leading Marxist theoreticians'.[7] Bernstein had been the confidant and friend of Friedrich Engels, who nominated him, together with Bebel, as his literary executor. He had, said Liebknecht, 'up to then been famous as a guardian of our principles'. Now he was denounced as an apostate in innumerable articles in the party Press. Liebknecht calls his critique of Marxism 'a solemn denial of Socialist principles' and Bebel wrote, in a letter to Bernstein, 'For me the decisive fact is that you are no longer in the camp of Social Democracy.' Kautsky, one of Bernstein's friends from his youth, broke off relations with him, and Bebel considered his expulsion from the party.[8]
Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) had become the international symbol of opposition to the current of revolutionary Socialism, the founder of the Revisionist school. He was not, however, very happy about the role he had come to occupy, a role he had not sought and for which he was temperamentally unsuited. He was impelled on the course he took not by ambition but by sheer intellectual honesty. He was hardly cut out for the role of leader, being much more of an intellectual than a politician. He had amassed his considerable learning entirely by his own efforts. Coming from a petit bourgeois Jewish family, he grew up in Berlin under conditions of great poverty.[9] His father was a plumber who later became an engine-driver. But there were fifteen children, and the father's income was hardly enough to save his family from privation. A university education for Eduard, the seventh child, was therefore out of the question. It took a great deal of sacrifice on the part of his family to keep him at grammar school until he was sixteen. Then he had to earn his living. He was apprenticed to a bank and later worked for the Rothschilds. The Paris Commune made him a Socialist. He joined the party and became friendly with Bebel, Liebknecht, Auer and other leading members, who recommended his appointment as secretary to the writer, Karl Höchberg, editor of the Socialist journal, Die Zukunft.
The paper appeared in Lucerne in Switzerland, to which Bernstein had moved in 1878. Three years later, the party made him editor of the Sozialdemokrat, which was published in Zurich. The German police had issued a warrant for his arrest, and, under pressure from Bismarck, Bernstein and his colleagues were expelled from the country by order of the Swiss Federal government. He removed the paper with him to London. After the lapsing of the Anti-Socialist Law the paper ceased publication, since the party could now publish its own journal legally in Germany. It established in Berlin a central organ with the title, Vorwärts. Bernstein, with the warrant against him still outstanding, remained in London as the British correspondent of Vorwärts, and also contributed to the Neue Zeit, which was edited by Karl Kautsky. During his period of exile he wrote an important study of the Socialist trends in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the first of a great number of works on history and Socialist theory.[10]
Bernstein insisted that he had not so much abandoned Marxism, as his critics asserted, as subjected some of its hypotheses to critical testing. Far from disparaging Marx, to whom he felt indebted throughout his life, he tried merely, as he told Bebel, 'to make Marxism conform to reality' and to 'develop' the doctrine further.[11] His criticism was directed primarily against the theory of revolution, which Marx had expounded as part of his philosophy of history and had subsequently elaborated in his analysis of capitalism's laws of development. In Marx's view, capitalism, as it developed, transformed ever greater numbers of people into proletarians, pushed the proletariat into ever-increasing poverty, while at the same time, through its own inherent contradictions, gave rise to repeated and increasingly severe crises which would intensify the class struggle to the point of revolution—revolution, like the eventual triumph of Socialism, being inevitable and resulting equally from the operation of an 'iron law of history'. This theory, which Marx had first outlined in the Communist Manifesto, provided the basis for the Erfurt Programme of 1891.[12]
But had the development of capitalism, in the following half-century, confirmed Marx's theories? This was the question which Bernstein posed. He showed that Marx's prediction about the impoverishment of the working class had been falsified by the continuing rise in their standard of living, and that his theory of the inevitable collapse of capitalism was apparently falsified by its continuing expansion and strength. He showed that capitalism had given rise to a new middle class, and displayed an increasing complexity in its social structure, in contrast to Marx's assumption of the polarization of society around two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.[13] From these tendencies, Bernstein drew the conclusion that economic and social development tended to modify class conflicts. In fact, he insisted, there was no sign of a revolutionary situation or an early collapse of bourgeois society. Therefore it would be a mistake to persist in preaching a doctrine of revolution and to base the party's tactics on an assumption of imminent catastrophe.[14]
Moreover, Bernstein claimed that the revolutionary aims and language which the party used were in conflict with its actual policy of struggle for social reform, labour legislation and democratic rights. What was worse, the revolutionary ideology alienated whole strata of the middle class and peasantry which the party could win as allies in its fight for social and political reform. The party's influence, he wrote, 'would be far greater than it is today, if Social Democracy could find the courage to free itself from outmoded phraseology and strive to appear as what in fact it is now, a Democratic Socialist party of reform'.[15]
Bernstein developed his criticism a good deal further. He questioned the Marxist theory of Socialism as an imminent 'economic necessity', a theory from which Socialists derived their confidence in inevitable victory. Bernstein, however, conceived Socialism as rather an aim for which the idealism of the worker would lead him to strive, a legitimate moral and cultural objective but in no sense an objective historical necessity. Moreover, Socialism was merely the ultimate aim. Much more important was the movement towards this aim, the Socialist transformation of bourgeois society through democratic political reform, by means of which capitalism would develop, in stages, towards Socialism. Bernstein wrote: 'What is generally referred to as the ultimate aim of Socialism means nothing to me; it is the movement itself which means everything.'[16] With these criticisms Bernstein, as his enemies pointed out in their indictment, had parted company with the basic tenets of German Social Democracy and attacked the very core of its doctrine.
The great controversy between Marxists and Revisionists at the Hanover Party Congress ended with a solemn reaffirmation of the party's traditional beliefs, as was inevitable in the circumstances. Marxism had sunk deeper roots in German Social Democracy than in any other country. For the German Social Democrats it was not merely a social and economic theory to which they subscribed, but a body of faith, carrying with it the promise of a new epoch in human history and the vision of a glorious future. Under the banner of Marxism, German Social Democracy had successfully survived the harsh persecutions of the Anti-Socialist Law and had emerged from the period of repression with supporters already running into millions. It seemed therefore ridiculous, at this juncture, to abandon Marxism merely because, here and there, the prophet might prove fallible. Even if Bernstein's critique of the Marxist theory of surplus value had been justified, it could hardly shake the grandiose, novel and exciting picture of the world which emerged from Marx's writings. Who, in any case, apart from a handful of economic specialists, could really assess critically this highly complex analysis of the mechanism by which capital exploited labour? When a man like Victor Adler could admit in a letter to Kautsky: 'I understand nothing of the history of surplus value and, frankly, I don't give a damn,'[17] how much could it mean to the rank and file of the movement? They would agree with William Morris who, when he was asked at a meeting to explain his attitude to Marx and the theory of surplus value, answered with disarming honesty:
Truth to say, my friends, I have tried to understand Marx's theory, but political economy is not my line, and much of it appears to me to be dreary rubbish. But I am, I hope, a socialist none the less. It is enough political economy for me to know that the idle class is rich and the working class is poor, and that the rich are rich because they rob the poor. That I know because I see it with my eyes. I need read no books to convince me of it. And it does not matter a rap, it seems to me, whether the robbery is accomplished by what is termed surplus value, or by means of serfdom or open brigandage. The whole system is monstrous and intolerable. …
It was much the same with regard to the interpretation of Marx's theory of impoverishment—the controversy as to how far the working class suffered absolute or relative impoverishment which was sparked off by Bernstein's criticism. It seemed irrelevant since, whatever the theorists might say, the division of capitalist society into property-owners and propertyless, into capitalists and workers, was undeniable, whatever might be happening to the indeterminate strata. Moreover, was it really very plausible to claim, with Bernstein, that this division could be bridged through a peaceful process of social and political reform, or that existing society would merge peacefully into the classless society for which Socialists were striving?
Long before Bernstein, the theory that capitalist society would 'grow into' Socialism had been expounded by French, Italian and British Socialists—Malon, Brousse, Millerand and Jaurès in France, Turati in Italy and the Fabians in England. But they were Reformists rather than Revisionists. Jaurès, the leading French Reformist, had occasionally expressed outright criticisms of Marx, but he often tried to defend his Reformist views in terms of Marxist concepts, as when he wrote that 'reforms are not mere palliatives if their tendency is towards facilitating 'revolutionary development', as Marx aptly expressed it. 'Such reforms as those, by undermining the old order, strengthen the forces which will create the new society.' Like the Fabians and the great majority of English Socialists, Jaurès did not see the triumph of Socialism in terms of outright political revolution. Revolution, he said, is a desperate expedient and is used by the forces of history only as a last resort. 'The working class will come to power,' he explained, 'not through a sudden upsurge resulting from political agitation, but by methodical and legal organization under democratic conditions, and by making use of the general right to vote. Our society will gradually develop towards Communism, not through the collapse of capitalism, but by a gradual and inexorable growth of the power of the workers.'[18] What the achievement of Socialism required, therefore, was 'to win over a majority by legitimate means'.[19]
In countries such as Britain and France which enjoyed some form of parliamentary democracy, there was a constitutional basis for theories of evolutionary socialism, as Engels pointed out in an essay on the draft of the Erfurt Programme in 1891.
One can envisage [he wrote] that the old society could peacefully grow into the new one in countries where the representatives of the people concentrate all power in themselves, where one can do, constitutionally, whatever one pleases, so long as the majority of the people give their support—in democratic republics such as France and America, or in monarchies like England where the dynasty is powerless against the will of the people. But in Germany [he added], where the Government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag and other representative bodies for all practical purposes powerless, to proclaim anything like this in Germany would be to remove the fig leaf from absolutism and use it to conceal one's own nakedness.[20]
This was, in essence, the Marxist case against the Revisionists at the Hanover Party Congress. Bismarck had given the German state a constitution which entrenched the political supremacy of the King of Prussia, the aristocratic landowners and the industrial magnates. Germany was not a parliamentary democracy, and the executive power was in the hands, not of a government responsible to the Reichstag, but of an emperor, and more particularly, in the hands of an emperor who was steeped in feudal-absolutist conceptions of government.[21] He regarded the Reichstag as an abomination, and he always considered, as did the landed aristocracy and the army officers, the possibility of abolishing elections to the Reichstag by means of a coup d'état.
It seemed hardly conceivable, therefore, that William II, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, the army and the wealthy bourgeoisie would voluntarily surrender, under working-class pressure, the 'three-class system' of electing the Prussian Parliament, which was such a powerful bulwark of semi-absolutism, against the rising movement of Social Democracy.[22] On the contrary, it seemed only too likely that they would use every means in their power to prevent any transition to a parliamentary democracy. In 1914, the Conservative historian, Hans Delbrück, tried to explain to the Social Democrats that 'as far as the human mind can see' there could be no serious possibility of Germany's 'sliding down into a parliamentary democracy'. Power, he explained, rested on strength, and, specifically, on the army, and it was inconceivable that the Prussian Officers' Corps, bound by lifelong tradition to the king, would ever submit to a parliamentary form of government.[23] Only the 'most crushing defeat' in battle, a Sedan on the German side, he wrote, could break the army's resistance. And, in fact, it was broken only when the German army experienced its Sedan at the end of the First World War.
Thus Bernstein was hardly being very realistic in expecting the middle class of the Kaiser's Germany to co-operate with the workers in breaking the Junkers' power—that middle class which, as Liebknecht reminded the Revisionists in the debate, 'could win its own civil liberties from the Junkers neither at the end of the Middle Ages, nor at the end of the eighteenth century, nor again in 1848', and which had capitulated so spinelessly before Bismarck in the constitutional crisis of the 1860s.[24] The vast majority of the German middle class had come to terms, quite satisfactorily, with the existing system. They felt perfectly safe under the German military monarchy, and were in no way disposed to unite with the working class to dismantle the dams which held the Socialist flood—the 'three-class' electoral system and the royal prerogative.[25]
Bernstein had argued that, since Marx's theory of mass pauperization was wrong, the theory that class conflicts would necessarily grow more intense which was derived from it, and the related theory of the catastrophic overthrow of capitalism, must also be false. But he did not take into account the possibility of a social catastrophe arising not out of the struggle between capital and labour, but from a world conflict of rival imperialist powers or, internally, as Bebel insisted, from an attempt by the ruling class to deprive the workers of the hard-earned democratic rights by denying them political equality.
Bebel's reasoning was based on historical experience. In Germany the ruling class had always responded to the growth of Social Democracy with brute force. First, the Anti-Socialist Law had kept Socialism under restraint for twelve years, from 1878 to 1890. Next, in 1894, a new Anti-Socialist Law was proposed in the interests of 'the struggle against subversion'. Then, in 1897, the Parliament of Saxony abolished the equal franchise. Two years later, Major-General von Boguslawski, a leader of the Junkers and of the Prussian Officers' Corps, proposed a coup d'état to secure the deportation of the Social Democratic leaders and the abolition of the secret ballot in parliamentary elections. Finally, in 1898, a year before the Hanover Party Congress, the Emperor William proposed a new penal law which would make 'incitement to strike' a criminal offence. Social Democracy lived under a permanent and very real threat of forcible repression.[26]
In one election after another the Socialists continued to increase their vote, rising from nearly one and a half million in 1890 to more than two million in 1898. One day—and it seemed that it might be close at hand—they would secure a majority in the Reichstag; in which case it seemed only too likely that the government would then 'dissolve Parliament with one lieutenant and twelve men' and summarily abolish the democratically elected Reichstag. Bebel had reason to tell the party congress that: 'Since they are always threatening to resort to a coup d'état, and to abolish our existing rights, instead of extending them, I, as a thinking person, can only say: If this sort of thing goes on we have every reason to expect a catastrophe.' And he added: 'The evidence of history is for, not against, the theory of catastrophe.'[27]
A majority of the party was convinced that the German ruling class would not, in fact, permit the workers to use their constitutional rights to achieve power peacefully, without first resorting to a coup to destroy those rights and force the workers to fight for power.
I do not believe [wrote Karl Kautsky in 1904] that they will allow Social Democracy to develop indefinitely along legal lines.…The more it increases its political power, the more certain it is that its adversaries will overthrow the constitution, and replace it with a regime in which the workers are violently oppressed, their organizations broken up by force—a regime based on brute force which will require the most vigorous counter-measures.[28]
The party was convinced that some such catastrophe was inevitable and that it would culminate in revolution. Its members were also convinced that the workers would emerge victorious from the revolution, since they believed, with every fibre of their beings, that Socialism was a 'historical necessity'.
It is hard to see what the party would have gained if it had renounced this belief, abandoned its Marxism, disavowed the class struggle, repudiated revolution and followed Bernstein in declaring itself a 'party of Democratic Socialist reform'—a party for which 'the movement is everything, the aim nothing'. It is not even likely that, by thus compromising its ideology and tactics, it would have gained more in the way of social reform for the working class, and it would certainly have done nothing to extend democratic rights. Whatever language the party might choose to speak, Prussia would not have altered her electoral system, and Germany would not have turned herself into a parliamentary democracy on the British pattern. But, by abandoning the faith in its great historical mission which Marxism gave to the working class, the roots of enthusiasm, which were the source of so much vitality in the Social Democratic movement, would surely have withered. Moreover, such 'loss of faith' would undoubtedly have destroyed the unity of the party and weakened the working class to a disastrous extent.
The key to the attitude of the party's majority in its attack on Revisionism can be found in a remark by Liebknecht which was quoted by a speaker at the Hanover Congress. In a pamphlet criticizing Bernstein, Liebknecht had written: 'Islam was invincible as long as it believed in itself.…But the moment it began to compromise…it ceased to be a conquering force.' Liebknecht had gone on to say that Islam could not behave otherwise, since 'it was not the true, world-saving faith'. Socialism, however, was just that, 'and Socialism can neither conquer nor save the world if it ceases to believe in itself'.[29]
This faith was a real source of power for German Social Democracy. Even the Revisionists at the party congress voted—not doubt with mental reservations[30]—for the resolution which stated that the party 'now as ever' based itself on the class struggle, that the 'liberation of the working class can only be won by the working class itself' and that the 'conquest of political power' was 'seen as its historical task'. Consequently, there was no reason for the party 'to change either its principles, its basic demands, its tactics or its name'.
The Guesdists had naturally welcomed the decision of the Hanover Congress, since it was in line with their own attitude to the 'Millerand Affair'. The French Party Congress, which met at Ivry in the summer of 1900 immediately before the Congress of the International, stated, in the spirit of the Hanover resolutions, that the party was irreconcilably hostile to the class state and that, consequently, 'combined action with bourgeois parties' was permissible only in exceptional circumstances and for a limited period.
The controversy over the participation of Socialists in bourgeois governments, which had been precipitated by the 'Millerand Affair', was the subject of a debate at the Congress of the International which began in Paris about the end of September 1900. The item on the agenda was: 'The conquest of State power and the alliance with bourgeois parties.' Two resolutions, which had been considered by a commission, were submitted to Congress—a majority resolution, drafted by Kautsky and supported by Vandervelde, and one from the minority, drawn up by Ferri and Guesde.
Enrico Ferri, who spoke for the minority—a professor of criminal law, and the most eminent student of Cesare Lombroso, who founded the science of criminology—represented the revolutionary wing in the Italian Socialist party and was Turati's rival for the leadership. Filippo Turati had tried, from the day he created the 'Milan Socialist League', to win the Italian workers for the evolutionary conception of Socialism. He advocated an alliance with the Liberal bourgeois parties—the Republicans and the Radicals—in election campaigns as well as in campaigns for civil liberties and social reforms. Thanks to such alliances the reactionary Crispi ministry was defeated and the election of June 1900 resulted in a great victory for the left; under universal suffrage the party vote rose from 68,000 in 1897 to 175,000, increasing its parliamentary representation from fifteen to thirty-two. This success for Turati's tactics strengthened the reformist tendency in the party. Its congress, which took place a fortnight before the International assembled, had empowered the constituency organizations to conclude electoral pacts with the left bourgeois parties.
Kautsky's resolution followed the line adopted at the Guesdist congress on the question of electoral alliances with bourgeois parties. It was not opposed since, as Jaurès reminded the delegates, it only conformed to the tactics already employed by the French Socialists in the fight against the clericals and royalists, the Italian Socialists in the struggle against the reactionary cabinet of Crispi, the Belgian Socialists in the campaign for universal suffrage and the German Socialists against the lex Heinze, 'by which they ensured', according to Jaurès, 'that the land of Goethe did not become the land of Attila'.[31]
The argument arose, not over alliances with bourgeois parties, but over the participation of Socialists in bourgeois governments. The resolution supported by Ferri and Guesde rejected it unconditionally, while Kautsky said that it was 'permissible only as a temporary expedience, adopted in exceptional cases under the force of circumstances'. The national parties would have to decide in each particular case whether circumstances made such a dangerous experiment necessary. The question of whether such circumstances existed was one of tactics, not principle, and Congress had no jurisdiction over the tactics of member parties. The resolution was careful to add that 'this dangerous experiment' would be justified only if sanctioned by the party, and if the Socialist Minister obeyed his party's mandate while a member of the government.
In its main introduction, Kautsky's resolution said that in a modern democratic state the workers could not take power by a simple coup d'état. Power would come only 'as the culmination of a prolonged and complex task of political and economic organization on the part of the workers, together with its physical and moral regeneration, and the gradual increase in the seats held by the party in local councils and central parliaments'. But, since the conquest of political power was an altogether different process which could not 'take place bit by bit', the entry of a Socialist into a bourgeois ministry 'is not to be regarded as a normal way of beginning the conquest of political power'.
As it happened, the participation of Socialists in bourgeois governments, which took up so much of the congress's time in 1900, seemed, except for the French party, of largely academic interest. But it soon became relevant in Italy also, when the liberal Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, invited Filippo Turati to join his cabinet in 1903, and Leonido Bissolati in 1911. On both occasions, however, the Socialists concerned felt themselves committed by the decisions of the Paris Congress of the International, and when the Italian party decided against entering the government, Giolitti's invitation was turned down.
A few years later the problem appeared in Scandinavia as a result of the electoral successes of the Danish party in May 1913. The Socialists were now the strongest party in the country, and the king invited their chairman, Thorwald Stauning, to form a government. But the party decided at its congress in 1908 to follow the lead of the International and to refuse participation in a bourgeois government. Now, however, the Left—the Socialists, together with the Liberals and Radicals—found themselves in a majority in Parliament, and it became possible to change the electoral law of 1866 against which the Socialists had fought from the beginning. For this limited aim the Socialists were prepared to enter a government of the left, but the Liberals refused. The Left-Liberal ministry, formed under Theodor Zahle, now found itself dependent on the Socialists for its majority, and the party was able to force through its reforms while remaining outside the government.
In Sweden, the party decided, in the constitutional crisis of 1914, to join the government. Its congress in 1911 had, in accordance with the International's decision, approved participation in the government only in the case of an acute and exceptional crisis. In 1914 the king had dismissed the Liberal ministry and appointed a Conservative as Prime Minister, in the face of protests from the Liberal and Socialist majority. The party decided to join the government in order to defend the rights of Parliament against the royal prerogative.
When the International held its congress in Paris in 1900, however, it had only the experience of Millerand's entry into the French government to consider. The resolution on electoral alliances with bourgeois parties was carried by acclamation. When Kautsky's resolution came to be decided, Costa announced his support, in the name of a majority of the Italian delegates. Jaurès also pledged support, in the name of the French Broussists and Independents, while Guesde and Vaillant voted against. The delegations of Russia, Poland and the United States also split their votes, and the resolution was finally carried by twenty-nine votes to nine. Irrespective of size, each national delegation had two votes, with Germany, Britain, Austria, Bohemia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Argentina in favour, and Bulgaria and Ireland against.
The Paris debate on the tactics to be pursued in the struggle for working-class power was only a prelude to the main battle between the revolutionary and reformist trends in the International. The decisive clash came at the Amsterdam Congress in August 1904. Once again, the initiative came from the Guesdists, who at their congress at Lille in September 1903 had called for a discussion on 'the international rules governing Socialist tactics' at Amsterdam and, specifically, to reach a decision on the resolution which had been adopted by the German Social Democrats at their Dresden Congress.
The German Social Democrats had held a congress at Dresden in August 1903, after winning spectacular successes at the elections in June of that year. They had secured over three million votes, a third of the total poll and an increase of 900,000 compared with 1898. With eighty-one delegates in the Reichstag the party now had to consider to what use it would put its greatly enhanced voting power. The party's Reformist wing, to which the trade unions after some hesitation had begun to adhere, decided that in the light of this experience the party should abandon its hostility to the existing state and use its new power to win social and political reforms by parliamentary means. Bernstein had returned to Germany in 1901 after the expiry of the warrant for his arrest, and after living in exile for twenty years. He had been elected to the Reichstag in the following year, and he now proposed that the party should strengthen its influence by demanding that one of its members should become vice-president of the Reichstag, to which it was fully entitled by its numerical strength.
The question of a Social Democratic vice-president, however, was linked with another question which touched the pride of party members. As representatives of the Reichstag, the president and vice-president were equally entitled to attend formal state functions, to some of which they would be officially invited by the Head of State. The Head of State, however, was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who did nothing to conceal his utter loathing and contempt for the Social Democrats, who spoke of them publicly as disaffected subjects deserving punishment and who was always threatening to have them fired on by his soldiers.[32] Bernstein's proposal, therefore, would commit the party to observing court etiquette and involve it in a public display of deference to this crowned Junker who acted as though Germany were his estate and the workers his farm-hands. Moreover, it would expose the party to the risk of public insult from this unpredictable, not to say unstable, autocrat.
Bernstein's proposal, which was supported by Vollmar and his group, was rejected with disgust at party meetings and in most of the party Press.[33] However, the fact that it could be put forward at all was an indication of the growing strength of revisionism in the party, and the whole issue was once again thrown open to debate at the Dresden Congress.
In the electoral successes the Revisionists saw a vindication of the Reformist philosophy which they were pressing on the party. It was the struggle for social and political reforms, they claimed, which had secured hundreds of thousands of new votes, and the more the party could concentrate on specific reforms, free from ideological restraints of Marxism, the more they would succeed in winning over a still greater part of the population.
In the debate, Bebel predicted that if the party were to devote itself exclusively to a struggle for reforms, it would be 'beating its head against a wall'. The Socialists, of course, had always fought tenaciously for even the smallest concession to the working class and also, whenever it seemed expedient, co-operated with a section of the bourgeoisie—notably in second ballots or, in the Reichstag, in voting on certain pieces of legislation. The essential contrast between Marxists and Revisionists was not over the need to struggle for reforms, which was undisputed, but over the spirit in which this was done. Over and above the tedious detail of day-to-day politics, Bebel insisted, the party must not lose sight of its ultimate aim, its historic mission which gave purpose and dignity to its existence. In this lay the essential difference between the Social Democrats and all other parties, and since the party pointed to the future, it embodied in itself the values of the future and in this spirit rallied ever-increasing numbers round its standard. It was unthinkable that the party should abandon its own roots or, to change the metaphor, abandon the path that was manifestly leading it to the heights.
The congress rejected Bernstein's proposal almost unanimously. By 288 votes to 11, it adopted a resolution condemning 'the revisionist attempt to change our policy, which has been gloriously vindicated in every trial, and to replace our struggle to conquer political power by vanquishing the enemy by a policy of acquiescence in the existing social order'. Such an approach, the resolution continued, would change the party from one working for speedy transformation of a bourgeois into a Socialist society, which was, therefore, 'in the best sense of the term, revolutionary', into one which limited itself to tepid reforms within the framework of capitalism. The resolution declared that the party repudiated all responsibility for political and economic conditions arising out of the capitalist mode of production, and hence rejected all methods designed to maintain the power of the existing ruling class. The resolution concluded by reaffirming what Kautsky had successfully put to the Paris Congress of the International, the party's refusal to 'participate in the government of a capitalist society'.[34]
It was this which the Guesdists submitted to the Amsterdam Congress of the International. The lines which the Dresden Congress had laid down for the German Social Democrats, the Guesdists wished to make binding for the international Socialist movement. But before their resolution could be submitted to the congress commission, Adler and Vandervelde had submitted a proposal of their own, which, while leaving intact the main content of the Dresden decisions, removed all phrases referring to the conflicts in the German party, in particular, to the condemnation of revisionism and reformism.
In the debate, which lasted for four days—three in committee and one in full congress[35]—no objection was made to the Dresden resolution, which was acceptable to all groups, including even the followers of Jaurès. Controversy arose from the attempt by the Guesdists to internationalize the tactics of the German party. This was strongly opposed by the delegates from Belgium, Switzerland, England and, more especially, from the Scandinavian countries—Branting for Sweden, Knudsen for Denmark, Krieger for Norway—since there the Socialists were temporarily allied, as we have seen, to the Left bourgeois parties in campaigns for universal suffrage or against Conservative government. The Guesdists, however, were concerned not with the problems of the Scandinavians, but with their own battle with the followers of Jaurès, who had supported bourgeois ministries since Millerand's entry into the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet.
Admittedly, by the time of the Amsterdam Congress, the 'Millerand Affair' had ceased to be relevant, since the Waldeck-Rousseau government had resigned in 1902 and there were no Socialists in the Combes ministry which had replaced it. Nevertheless, the Jaurès group remained the chief bulwark of the new government. Jaurès had originally supported Millerand to save the existence of the Republic when it was threatened by a clerical-Monarchist assault. But with the advent of the Combes ministry, the struggle entered a decisive phase. Originally destined for the priesthood, Émile Combes had become a teacher of theology and had actually taken the first stage of Holy Orders when he abandoned the church, became a doctor and led a movement which had for its main object the separation of church and state. He had been swept to power on a wave of anti-clericalism and formed his government with the intention of breaking finally the secular power of the church in France. In the tense struggle which ensued, the government relied on the votes of the Socialists in Parliament, and the Jaurès group was convinced that it should give the government its full support.
The struggle between church and state had split society in France for more than a century since the revolution of 1789. The church was fighting against the revolution and its values—against freedom of thought, freedom of teaching and democracy itself. In all the revolutions since 1789—in 1830, 1848 and 1871—the influence of the church had been under attack, and the Paris Commune had formally separated church and state. But in each period of counter-revolution the church had regained and even increased its strength.[36] It was, in fact, a formidable political force, the natural ally of the reactionary forces in society and a deadly enemy of the Republic. It was, moreover, an anti-national force, subordinate to the Papal government of Rome.
Republicans were united in opposing all aspects of clerical domination. They were especially concerned to put an end to the church's control over the schools which had been established by the Loi Falloux in 1850. This law was characteristic of the counter-revolutionary mentality, which saw the schools as breeding-grounds of radicalism; but under church control they had been transformed into hot-houses of anti-republicanism. A law passed by the Jules Ferry ministry in 1882, which introduced universal and compulsory education in France, had deprived the state primary schools of their religious character. But at the time of the Dreyfus Affair about two million of France's five million children of school age were being taught in Catholic schools. The royalist revolt against the Republic, which was sparked off by the Dreyfus crisis, supplied a reason for new laws against clerical domination. The church had provoked this move by ordering an army of priests, monks and nuns into action against the Republic.[37] In the elections of 1898 the clerical-Monarchist offensive had been repulsed and Waldeck-Rousseau had no hesitation in erecting new legal bulwarks against the church. The congregations—of which there were 3,216—were placed under supervision by a special law on associations, their very existence being subject to government consent, and no congregation had the right to run schools without special authority. Émile Combes, whose government had, as we have seen, the support of Jaurès, carried the fight against clericalism to new lengths. In July 1904 he introduced a law which deprived all congregations of the right to control schools and in the same month broke off relations between the French Republic and the Vatican. In November 1904 he submitted to the Chamber the draft of a law separating church and state, suspending the ecclesiastical budget and confiscating church property. The law was passed in a somewhat modified form by the Chamber in December 1905.
For Jaurès, the Catholic church was 'the strongest arm of political reaction and social slavery', and the struggle against it was a fight for one of the greatest boons to humanity, freedom of thought. He also regarded the struggle as one to safeguard the foundations of the Republic; like Gambetta, the leader of bourgeois democracy, and like Blanqui, the leader of revolutionary Communism, Jaurès saw in anti-clericalism, as he told the congress, the prime task of democracy. It was for this reason that he had joined forces with the Combes government and had created a powerful new weapon in the shape of the paper, L'Humanité, which he founded in April 1904.
But the Combes administration, like its predecessor under Waldeck-Rousseau, was unquestionably bourgeois. Its parliamentary majority consisted of the 'Left bloc', an alliance of the Socialists under Jaurès with the Radical-Socialists and Radicals. Although the Jaurès group did not formally join the ministry, it became a de facto part of the government because of its consistent support in the Chamber. But this was quite incompatible with the Dresden resolution, which, as Bebel pointed out, rejected anything in the nature of a 'permanent alliance' with bourgeois parties. A number of speakers at the congress, such as Kautsky, Pablo Iglesias, Rosa Luxemburg, Daniel de Leon, Christian Rakovsky and particularly Jules Guesde, backed up their criticisms of the Jaurès group by referring to the Dresden decisions. But the main prosecution statement came from Bebel, with Jaurès summing up for the defence, a brilliant and, in fact, memorable duel, the echoes of which travelled far beyond the walls of the congress hall, a duel which entered into the life of the Socialist movement of all countries.[38]
Bebel began by making it clear that, if the Dresden resolution had become the subject of a debate at a congress of the International, this was in no way the wish or responsibility of the German party. But since it was down for discussion he had no hesitation in supporting it, because it embodied principles of value, not only for German Social Democracy, but for all Socialist parties. This was because the policies rejected by the Dresden resolution were not confined to Germany, but were international, and existed, said Bebel, in Italy, Austria, Belgium, Holland and, above all, in France. Therefore, the German party believed that the tactical line laid down in the Dresden resolution on relations with bourgeois parties and governments should be accepted by the Socialist party in France as well as in other countries. On the other hand, Jaurès painted an altogether different picture of the tactics of his group, justifying in terms of their political results what Bebel had disparaged on grounds of general principle. 'We succeed in saving,' he told his fellow delegates, 'the Republican constitution of France at a time when a reactionary coup d'état was expected at every hour.[39] We have preserved freedom of thought, checked clericalism, strengthened world peace, repelled chauvinism, nationalism and Caesarism.'
Bebel replied to this by asking whether the Republic which had been saved was worth all the sacrifices of the working class. 'Much as we envy you French your new Republic, we are not keen on having our heads bashed in for its sake,' he declared. Monarchy and bourgeois republic were merely two different forms of the class state, two different ways of exercising the class rule of the bourgeoisie. And Bebel gave many examples of conflicts between capital and labour in which the government of the French Republic, though depending for its existence on Socialist support, always intervened on the side of capital and always employed the armed power of the state against workers on strike. The only significant difference between a republic and a monarchy, he said, was that in the former the class struggle was waged more openly.
Jaurès, in his reply, pointed to some important differences between the republican and monarchist forms of class state, and, specifically, between the French Republic and the German military aristocracy. 'You live under an imperial and feudal regime,' he cried to Bebel, 'while we live in a republican democracy. All our public authorities derive their power from the national will and are responsible to it. Universal suffrage is the basis of our political system.'
Bebel did not deny this. Germany, he admitted, was 'predominantly a feudal, police-controlled country; with the exception of Russia and Turkey she has possibly the most reactionary form of government in Europe'. But if there was a real difference between the constitutions of Germany and France, Jaurès argued, might it not follow that the responsibility of the party differed in the two cases, and that a corresponding difference in tactics might be appropriate? 'In Germany the votes of Social Democratic deputies cannot affect the life of a ministry,' he pointed out. 'But in France the Socialists can sometimes decide whether a reactionary or a progressive bourgeois government exercises power. The question of co-operation between Socialist and bourgeois parties, and of support for bourgeois governments, has a quite different aspect in Germany when compared with France, a country in which it is perfectly possible for the workers to participate, directly or indirectly, in parliamentary power.'
In the speech in which he claimed international validity for the Dresden resolutions, Bebel had pointedly criticized some of the domestic policies of French Socialists. In reply, Jaurès claimed the right to subject the internal affairs of the German Social Democrats to the same kind of criticism. For the party, as such, he admitted to having considerable respect. It was a party, he said, 'which has given to international Socialism some of its greatest and most profound thinkers. It has also given us the example of a powerful and highly organized body which shrinks from no sacrifice and is unshakeable in the face of all attacks.' Turning to the German delegates he added, pointedly: 'You are indeed a great party. You are the future of Germany, one of the noblest and most glorious parties of civilized, thinking humanity.'
He went on to say, however, that the size and reputation of the party stood in frightening contrast to its lack of political effectiveness. 'If, in Europe and throughout the world, the questions of peace, of political freedom and of the possibility of Socialist advance are now trembling in the balance, this is not through the alleged compromises or the daring innovations of French Socialists who have allied themselves with other democratic forces to safeguard freedom, progress and world peace, but,' he declared (to what the Minutes described as a 'profound stir' in the body of the congress), 'because of the political weakness of German Social Democracy.' In the June elections, the party had won 3,000,000 votes; that was magnificent. But did it not only serve to underline the frightful contrast between the party's apparent power and its real ability to influence events, a contrast, Jaurès added, which seemed to increase with the growth in the party's electoral support?
Jaurès next raised the question of why the German working class was so incapable of influencing its social and political environment. His answer was that neither its own tradition nor the mechanics of the German constitution permitted the party to transform its tremendous voting power into political action. The German workers, he added, were lacking in revolutionary tradition. Their history showed many instances of devotion and self-sacrifice, but not a single example of successful revolutionary activity. There, universal suffrage had not been won on the barricades; it was a privilege granted from above. But while it was unthinkable to take democratic rights from those who had won them by their own efforts, and could easily win them back again, it was only too possible for the powers-that-be to take back what they had granted only by grace and favour. He went on to remind congress that the party had tamely permitted the curtailment of the franchise in 'your red kingdom, your Socialist kingdom of Saxony'.[40]
The other main source of political weakness in German Social Democracy, according to Jaurès, was the country's constitutional structure. 'Even if you had a majority in the Reichstag,' he told the German delegates, 'your country would be the only one in which you—the Socialists—would not be masters despite that majority, because your parliament is only half a parliament. It does not control the executive and hence has no political power. Its decisions are no more than requests, which the real powers in the State can brush aside whenever they feel inclined.'
Bebel's reply revealed the basic contrast in outlook between the Socialists of France and those of Germany. Jaurès had referred to the weakness of German Social Democracy despite its 3,000,000 votes. What did Jaurès expect us to do after our victory and our three million votes?' demanded Bebel. 'Should we have mobilized the three millions, marched them to the palace and deposed the king?' This raised a laugh, but hardly explained the reason for the political impotence of the great German party. Of course, Bebel continued, 'For us three millions are not enough. Let us get seven or eight million votes, and then we shall see. But I do not know what we are expected to do in face of a bourgeois majority of about eight million.[41] With these words Bebel implied that the strategy of the German Social Democrats was first to gain a majority in the Reichstag and then use it to abolish the 'three-class vote' in Prussia and autocracy in the country as a whole. But was the ruling class going to wait quietly until the Social Democrats won a majority in the Reichstag? Was it not rather more likely that before that happened they would take away the franchise from the working class?
This had been Jaurès' question, and Bebel's reply was: 'Then we shall take the necessary action', implying that the workers would resort to revolution. But in 1793, 1848 and 1870 the French workers had not waited to win a parliamentary majority, but had carried their freedom by revolutionary street fighting. In fact, however, the German Social Democrats (like all the other sections of the International except the Russians) had, from about the turn of the century, acted as a party of parliamentary democracy. They strove by democratic means to win political power through a parliamentary majority, and then use it to effect the 'social revolution' constitutionally and legally. It regarded itself as a revolutionary party because it genuinely intended to abolish the social and economic bases of capitalism and to establish, through Parliament, a Socialist order of society. It recognized the danger that a counter-attack by the ruling class would force it to defend itself by extra-parliamentary means. But the idea of seizing power in the state by violent revolution no longer formed part of its ideology.
The debate had been conducted throughout, as reported by Vandervelde, 'in a spirit of principled discussion, far removed from any sign of petty personal animosities'. But one remark of Bebel's caused a furore among the French delegates. Stung by Jaurès's reminder that the German workers had not won their right to vote on the barricades but had received it as a gift from above, Bebel replied that the French workers had not established the Third Republic by their own efforts. 'You received your Republic,' he shouted to the French delegation, 'from your enemy, Bismarck, when, after Sedan, he dragged Napoleon III to the Wilhelmshohe.' The French were visibly shocked—could Bebel really have forgotten the struggles of the Paris Commune?
Before the vote on the resolution was taken, Anseele appealed to the delegates from countries where the party was still weak, such as Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain and Japan, to abstain from voting on a question which was of relevance only to parties with substantial responsibility. The resolution submitted by Adler and Vandervelde, which summarized, except for the explicit condemnation of Reformism, the main tactical principles laid down in the Dresden resolution, was lost, with twenty-one delegates voting each way. Anseele's appeal had no effect whatever. Those voting for the resolution, with two votes each, were Britain, Australia-Canada-South Africa, Belgium, Austria, Argentina, Denmark, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland, with one vote from France, Norway and Poland. Against were the two votes each from Germany, Bulgaria, Bohemia, Spain, U.S.A., Hungary, Italy, Japan and Russia, together with one vote from France, Norway and Poland.
The Dresden resolution was then carried by twenty-five votes to five, with five abstentions. For it were the two votes from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Japan and the U.S.A., plus one vote from Britain, France and Norway. Against were one vote from Britain, France and Norway, plus two votes from the British colonies. Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Switzerland, with two votes each, abstained entirely.
Jaurès had voted for the compromise Adler-Vandervelde resolution; he had lost and seen the triumph of his rival, Guesde. There remained the problem, vital for both groups, of re-establishing the unity of the movement in France. Congress had appealed, in a special resolution, and with France particularly in mind, for the healing of all splits where these had been allowed to occur. Pierre Renaudel, on behalf of the Jaurès group, and Vaillant, on behalf of the Guesdists and Blanquists, had enthusiastically agreed and pledged their support for reunification. A general congress of all the Socialist groups, meeting in Paris in April 1905, re-established a united party. It took the name of Parti Socialiste and added, on a suggestion from Alexander Bracke and in recognition of its origin, the sub-title Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (S.F.I.O.).
1. Louis Blanc, Millerand's sole predecessor, had joined a government formed as a result of a revolution—that of February 1848.
2. For the text of the 'Saint-Mandè Programme', see R. C. K. Ensor, Modern Socialism (London, 1904), pp. 48–55.
3. For this episode in the history of French Socialism, see A. Zévaès, Histoire du socialisme et du communisme en France (Paris, 1947).
4. Victor Adlers Briefwechsel mit August Bebel und Karl Kautsky, edited by Friedrich Adler (Vienna, 1954), p. 319.
5. Thirteen years after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, this hatred was still as fresh as ever in the mind of Bebel. In a speech to the Dresden Party Congress in 1903, he described the treatment meted out to the Social Democrats at the time. 'Blows simply rained down on us,' he said, 'and everything was broken up. One city after another, including the surrounding districts, was put into a state of siege. Hundreds and hundreds of our comrades became unemployed and we were driven from our homes like mangy dogs.…When I recall,' he continued, 'how we were made to report at the police station, had our measurements taken and were treated generally like criminals, photographed and then given three days to clear out—this was an experience I shall remember as long as I live.' And he went on to say: 'If the day came when I could say to those people, "Now I shall show you what you did to us then", I most certainly should'—Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages—Dresden, 1903 (Berlin, 1903), p. 217.
6. Sozialdemokrat, 12 August 1882, quoted by Eduard Bernstein, Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre (Berlin, 1928), p. 127. For an outline of the life of Vollmar, see R. Jansen, Georg von Vollmar. Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf, 1958).
7. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages—Hannover, 1899 (Berlin, 1899), p. 95.
8. Protokoll, op. cit., p. 192; Victor Adlers Briefwechsel, ch. V, 'Aus der Aefangszeit des Bernsteinschen Revisionismus'. For a discussion of Bernstein's expulsion from the party, see also the letters from Bebel and Kautsky, pp. 258 and 309; Bernstein's letter to Bebel, p. 258; and Adler's letters, pp. 292, 297–9.
9. For a sketch of Bernstein's life and an appreciation of his work, see Peter Gay, Das Dilemma des demokratischen Sozialismus (Nuremberg, 1954); and Bernstein's reminiscences in Sozialdemokratische Lehrjahre (Berlin, 1928) and Aus den Jahren meines Exils (Berlin, 1917).
10. Eduard Bernstein, Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution (Stuttgart, 1895). For a bibliography of Bernstein's writings, see Gay, op. cit., pp. 374–6.
11. Victor Adlers Briefwechsel, p. 260.
12. Marx considered the final conclusions resulting from his analysis in the following terms in Das Kapital (Moscow, 1954), vol. I, ch. 32: 'As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour…takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the imminent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this development, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develops, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process.…Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated' (pp. 762–3).
13. On the polarization of society around two classes, the Erfurt Programme stated: 'The number of proletarians is increasing all the time, the army of redundant workers is swelling, the difference between the exploiters and the exploited are becoming ever sharper, the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is growing more embittered; it divides modern society into two hostile camps, and it is the common hallmark of all industrial countries.'
14. Bebel had already attacked this view in 1882 in a discussion with Ignaz Auer. He wrote in a letter to Auer: 'The difference does not lie in whether a revolution will start in the next five years. One might discuss this, but it would hardly give rise to a split, and it would be foolish to make it into the cause of a split. The real difference lies rather in the entire conception of the movement as the movement of a class, which has and must have the great aim of transforming the world and can therefore accept no compromise with existing society. If the movement were to reject this standpoint, it would simply perish and subsequently revive in a new form, freed from its present leadership'—August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart, 1910–14), vol. III, p. 226.
15. Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart, 1904), p. 165. The first edition of the book appeared in 1899. Bernstein's critique of Marxism began with a series of articles, 'Probleme des Sozialismus', in Die Neue Zeit, 1896–8, which was reprinted in his Zur Geschichte der Theorie des Sozialismus (Berlin, 1901), pp. 167–286. For a reply to Bernstein, see Karl Kaustky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm (Stuttgart, 1899) and Rosa Luxemburg, Sozialreform oder Revolution? (Leipzig, 1908).
16. Bernstein, op. cit., p. 169.
17. Victor Adlers Briefwechsel, p. 296.
18. Jean Jaurès, Theorie und Praxis (Berlin, 1902).
19. J. Hampden Jackson, Jean Jaurès (London, 1943), pp. 68 and 70.
20. Friedrich Engels, 'Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfes 1891', in Die Neue Zeit, vol. XX, 1 (1901–2). Marx held also the view, expressed, for example, in his much-quoted speech in Amsterdam on 8 September 1872 after the end of the Hague Congress, that in some countries the working class might be able to achieve its aims by non-violent means. 'We have never asserted,' he said, 'that the roads to our goal are everywhere the same. We know that there must be taken into account the institutions, customs and traditions of the different countries, and we don't deny that there are countries—such as England, America and perhaps Holland—where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.' But he also recognized that in most of the countries of the European Continent 'force will be the lever of our revolution'. For the text of the speech, see Meyer, Der Emanzipationskampf des vierten Standes (1874), vol. I, pp. 159ff.
21. William II left the German people in no doubt about his attitude to the royal progressive. At Königsberg, in August 1910, he referred to the coronation of his grandfather, William I, in East Prussia, in the following terms: 'Here my grandfather placed the crown of Prussia on his head by his own right, and clearly pointed out that it had been given him solely by the grace of God, and not by parliaments, popular assemblies or decrees of the people, and that he considered himself to be the chosen instrument of heaven.' He went on to say: 'Considering myself to be the instrument of Him, without regard to any opinions or ideas, I proceed on my way. …'
22. The three-class system of election to the Prussian Parliament had been imposed by a coup d'état on 30 May 1849. Each class returned the same number of members, and in 1908 the votes were distributed as follows: first class, 293,402; second class, 1,065,240; third class, 6,324,079. In the Prussian parliamentary elections of 1908, the Conservatives won 418,000 votes, but secured 212 seats, while the Social Democrats, with 598,000 votes, won only 7 seats—Handbuch für sozialdemokratische Wähler (Berlin, 1911), p. 165.
23. Hans Delbrück, Regierung und Volkswille (Berlin, 1914), pp. 136–41. The special role of the German Officers' Corps in the state, as a personal instrument of the monarch, was again stressed in the Reichstag (29 January 1910) by the War Minister, von Heeringen, when he said: 'That an officer occupies a completely different position is clear from the fact that an officer does not take his oath of allegiance to the constitution but solely to the supreme war-lord. …' (Handbuch, op. cit., p. 156). In a revealing examination of the role of the army, Hugo Preuss showed that it formed 'an extra-territorial enclave of the old order; it has its own system of State law, quite outside the civil code.…The boast of the Junkers that a lieutenant and twelve men would be quite sufficient to disperse the Reichstag, therefore, was considered very wicked, because it stated, crudely and briefly, exactly what the position was'—Hugo Preuss, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik (Jena, 1915), p. 65.
24. Protokoll, op. cit., p. 155. The Social Democrats attempted, in fact, to come to an agreement with the Liberals against the Junkers in the elections to the Prussian Parliament in 1903. They met with a refusal. 'It was quite impossible,' wrote Delbrück, 'to bring about any co-operation with the Liberals and the Socialists even in a single constituency; not only did the Liberals forgo the gains which such an alliance would have secured them, they even preferred to let the right-wing Conservatives take all the three seats of Brelau to an agreement with the Socialists which would have secured them one seat'—Hans Delbrück, 'Das Wahlergebnis', in Preussische Jahrbücher (October 1903), quoted in Susanne Miller, Das Problem der Freiheit im Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), p. 217. The book contains a well-documented analysis of the controversy between Revisionism and Marxism.
25. Even the liberal wing of the German bourgeoisie, which was politically closest to Social Democracy, believed the royal prerogative to be a necessary safeguard against Socialist legislation. In an article significantly entitled 'Das Allgemeine Wahlrecht ein königliches Recht' ('Universal Suffrage a Royal Prerogative'), in the Hessische Landeszeitung, XXIII, no. 25 (1907), Martin Rade defended the system of electing the Reichstag, but solely because 'it is only one link in our constitution'. 'Next above the Reichstag stands the Bundesrat [Federal Council],' he declared, 'and not even the smallest piece of legislation can become effective without the approval of the Chancellor, the Emperor and the Princes.…It is therefore laid down that, despite our system of universal suffrage, the trees cannot grow until they reach the heavens. And it is good that we have both bodies in our legislative system.' (Quoted in Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig, 1925), 2nd ed., p. 14.) For an analysis of the trends in German middle-class thought in the struggle for parliamentary democracy, see Arthur Rosenberg, Entstehung und Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), ch. 2.
26. When, during the international tension produced by the Moroccan crisis in 1905, the German government had to consider the possibility of war, William II wrote to the Imperial Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow on 31 December 1905: '… I cannot dispense with a single man at a moment when the Social Democracy preaches insurrection. We have first to shoot and behead the Socialists and to render them innocuous—if necessarily by a massacre—and then let's have war! But not before and not a tempo!' The letter was published by Berliner Tagblatt (14 October 1928), quoted in Karl Anders, Die ersten hundert Jahre (Hanover, 1963), p. 27.
27. Protokoll, op. cit., pp. 231–2.
28. Karl Kautsky, 'Allerhand Revolutionäres', in Die Neue Zeit, vol. XXIII (1904), reprinted in his book, Der Politische Massenstreik (Berlin, 1914), pp. 81 and 83.
29. Protokoll, op. cit., p. 149.
30. According to the advice Ignaz Auer, a respected old leader of the party, gave to Bernstein. 'My dear Ed. [Eduard],' he wrote in a letter to him, 'it would be a mistake to adopt by resolution what you suggest, or even to talk about it; the only possible thing is to do it'—quoted in Heinrich Herkner, Die Arbeiterfrage (Berlin, 1922), vol. II, p. 392.
31. Internationaler Sozialististen-Kongress zu Paris 1900 (Berlin, 1900), p. 20.
32. 'The Republicans are revolutionaries by nature, and are therefore treated as people who deserve shooting and hanging,' wrote Wilhelm II in a letter to Tsar Nicholas II at the end of 1895. 'For us Christian Kings and Emperors it has been allocated as a duty from on High to uphold the principles of Divine Grace'—quoted in Emil Ludwig, Wilhelm der Zweite (Berlin, 1926), pp. 175–6. In a speech to his troops on the anniversary of Sedan in 1895, he referred to the Social Democrats as 'a rabble, unworthy of the name of Germans', and called for a struggle 'against this treasonable rabble and to rid ourselves finally of these elements'. In a speech at the swearing-in of guards recruits on 23 November 1891, he said, after referring to the 'internal enemy': 'Lack of faith and demoralization are more often than ever raising their heads in the Fatherland, and it is possible that you will be called upon to shoot and bayonet your own relatives, brothers and even parents. …' (Handbuch, op. cit., p. 25).
33. After the great election victory of 1912, in which the party won 4,250,000 votes, or more than a third of all votes cast, the members decided, nevertheless, to make a claim for the parliamentary office, and nominated Philipp Scheidemann for the post of vice-president. He was elected, but refused a summons to Court and resigned a few weeks later.
34. For the debate and full text of the resolution, see Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages—Dresden, 1903 (Berlin, 1903).
35. For the discussion in the commission and in full Congress, see Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Amsterdam 1904 (Berlin, 1904).
36. Between the beginning of the Second Empire in 1851 and the year 1878, the number of nuns in France increased from 34,000 to 128,000, while the number of monks rose from 3,000 to 32,000. At the time of the Dreyfus crisis, France had 3,216 congregations with a total membership of about 200,000. The wealth of the religious orders amounted to 581 million gold francs—J. P. Bury, France, 1814–1940 (London, 1954), pp. 161, 199.
37. It was, apart from the Jesuits, the religious order of the Assumptionists in particular which fought in the forefront against the Republic. 'Through its political daily newspaper, La Croix, which served as a model for the papers of the same name published in most dioceses…it directed a violent campaign against the Freemasons, the Jews, and the republican government'—Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de la France contemporaine depuis la revolution jusqu'à la paix de 1919 (Paris, 1921), vol. VII, p. 216.
38. 'A brilliant display of political eloquence, which will remain permanently in the memories of all those privileged to witness it,' wrote Adler in his report of the congress to the Arbeiter-Zeitung. See Victor Adlers Aufsätze …, vol. VII, p. 41.
39. Subsequent research has confirmed Jaurès's claim that without the co-operation of the Socialists the Republic would not have been able to meet the threat of reaction. In August 1899, a conspiratorial group consisting of Monarchists, Bonapartists and followers of General Boulanger attempted a coup d'état. 'If, in 1899, the Socialists had not made possible the formation of a Left-coalition government, the Right would have formed its own coalition.…And if Waldeck-Rousseau and his friends had followed delaying tactics in view of the small size of their majority [in the Chamber] and had failed to arrest the August conspirators, purge the general staff and take energetic measures in the next few months to defend the Republic, the reactionaries would have remained strong enough to emerge successfully from the elections of 1902'—Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1931), ch. XI.
40. Saxony became known as a 'red kingdom' when the Social Democrats won twenty-two out of the twenty-three constituencies in the Reichstag elections of 1903. The equal franchise to the Parliament of Saxony had been abolished in March 1896 and replaced by a 'three-class vote' after the Prussian model. In the succeeding election the Social Democrats lost nearly half the seats they had won in the previous election under equal franchise.
41. Engels approved Bebel's tactics. In his Preface to Marx's The Class Struggle in France, which he wrote shortly before his death in 1895, he admiringly recounted the 'astonishing' successes of German Social Democracy in the elections to Parliament and predicted that the party would, by the end of the century, rally, in addition to the workers, the greater part of the lower middle class and the smaller farmers and thus become 'the decisive power in the country'. He regarded the 'main task' of the party to keep up incessantly the momentum in its growth 'until the day of the decision', that is to say, the day of the seizure of power in the state. There is only one threat to the continual increase of the Socialist army, he went on to explain: an armed clash between the working class and the ruling classes on the scale of the blood-letting of the workers in the struggle between the Paris Commune and Versailles. The ruling classes would like to challenge the workers to such a fight. But, he wrote, 'it would be madness to let ourselves be driven into street fighting'—Friedrich Engels, Preface to The Class Struggle in France (Berlin, 1951), pp. 17, 25.