50 Years Ago: German Social Democratic Party is not Socialist (1969)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

For years we have pointed out that the Social Democratic Party of Germany—now called the “Majority Socialists’’—was not a Socialist Party. Its persistent support of the capitalist parties at elections, coupled with its advocacy of capitalist reforms, marked it off as merely a reform party similar to the Labour Party in this country, though it carried a Socialist name. And there was another important fact concerned with its growth.

The capitalist class in Germany has always been somewhat nervous of the working class there, having, as Engels points out, something to learn from the English capitalist class in this respect. This nervousness was shown in various repressive measures culminating in Bismark’s Anti-socialist laws. Repressive measures for the working-class, however, also hit the small capitalists and traders in their operations. These latter, who usually form an active part of the Liberal Party, found the main body of their organisation too timid to fight over these measures, and saw them slink behind the more determined Junker section when there were any signs of trouble ahead. Mr. Small Capitalist had to look for another organisation that was really prepared for the Liberal reforms, and it was at hand in the shape of the Social Democratic Party. Since the days of its famous “Gotha Programme", so trenchantly denounced by Marx, it had always fought for those reforms, and had even challenged Bismark’s rulings. So the small capitalists joined this organisation in large numbers till the total votes ran into millions.

It is as clear as noon-day that those votes were neither Socialist nor intended to help forward the cause of Socialism. The "acid test" came with the war. Then, as with the Labour Party and the Hyndman section here, the German Social Democratic Party supported this capitalist war on their side.

(From an article by Jack Fitzgerald on the German Elections, Socialist Standard February 1919).

Forerunner of Common Market (1962)

From the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The continental politicians, business men and lawyers who have spent years discussing, negotiating and drafting the Treaty of Rome and its accompanying agreements for the establishment of the European Economic Community must often have been reminded of a half century of work on the German Customs Union (Zollverein) that reached its culmination in 1871 in Bismark's German Empire. What happened then in Germany may not, at first sight, appear to bear comparison with the formation of a European Common Market by six separate governments, but the earlier event was in fact an even more complicated business.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century what was later to become a united Germany consisted of 289 separate states, each with its own government and frontiers, as well as 61 cities which were almost self-governing. These states were separated from each other by toll charges and tariffs, by different coinages, weights and measures and different legal systems, not to mention the frequently almost impassable roads.

In the conflict between the rulers of Prussia and Austria as to which was to dominate central Europe, the Customs Union was to prove a powerful weapon in the hands of Prussia though at the outset its possibilities were so little realized that the Prussian government actually had Austrian approval. It started in 1819 as a Free Trade area for Prussia's own scattered territories, behind a Customs barrier. As Prussia completely surrounded some of the smaller states and controlled the main trade routes into Central Germany, it was possible for the Prussian authorities to impose heavy transit charges on goods crossing Prussian territory and to put pressure on other states to induce them to join the Union.

It was not until the eighteen thirties that the Union expanded among the more important of the other German states with the accession of Bavaria, Wurtenberg, Saxony, Baden and the city of Frankfurt. An attempt by Hanover (under the British Crown until 1837) to form a rival union of North German states was a failure and the question of admitting Austria produced some of the kind of difficulties that now arise for the British Government through its links with the Commonwealth countries. Austria at that time controlled Hungary, Lombardy and Venice as well as being influential in the policies of the other governments in what is now Italy. The issue was whether Austria should enter the Customs Union bringing Hungary and Italy along too, and whether the latter were to be excluded from what purported to be a Union of German Peoples. In the long run it was settled by military means with the crushing defeat of the Austrian Army in the "seven weeks war” at Sadowa in 1866. From then onwards Austria was no longer in a position to challenge or hinder the achievement of German unity under Prussian leadership.

What the Customs Union gained for German capitalism was that after the eighteen thirties the major part of Germany formed an economic entity. Communications were improved, an identical system of weights, measures and currency introduced, and prices fell and became uniform. At first the trading and economic changes brought no corresponding political changes, and as the Encyclopaedia Britannica has it: “it was not until later that Bismark was able to utilize the Union for the furtherance of his schemes for National unity."

Among the internal industries that thrived behind the tariff protection of the Customs Union were German wine production, sugar beet growing and processing, and tobacco growing, with the corresponding decline of imports from abroad and loss of trade in what had been the ports of entry. There had been no question of Britain and France being allowed to join the German Customs Union, which was of course intended to operate as a protection for home industries against cheap imports from those two countries among others.

H. de B. Gibbins in his Economic and Industrial Progress of the Century had this to say about the British and French reactions to the Customs Union:

  One effect of it was seen at once in the imposition of severely protective duties on all foreign manufacturers, though the raw materials for home manufactures were wisely admitted free. The result was that England and France did not regard the Zollverein with much favour. . . .

One of the tasks the Prussian ruling class had to carry out in Germany was to break down very strong local "patriotisms” of the' multiplicity of German states, and replace them with an all-German patriotism.

It took time, but long before the end of the nineteenth century, German patriotism could compete in stupidity and fervour with anything the other empires and republics could boast. Nowadays we hear supporters of the European Common Market who argue that getting into a group of countries, since it means giving up some of the independence of each country, is a step towards internationalism. The argument is fallacious because in a capitalist world the only difference between the isolated country and the group of countries is that the later is industrially and militarily more powerful—it does not diminish the international antagonisms. Association with the European Common Market is no more a step towards internationalism than is association with the British Commonwealth or membership of United Nations.

It is to the point to recall that when the German Customs Union was absorbing economically the separate German states as a prelude to unifying them politically, there were people who fancied they could see that, too, as a step towards international brotherhood. Gustav Schmoller, the German professor of political science wrote his book, The Mercantile System round the theme that “ historical progress has consisted mainly in the establishment of ever larger and larger communities as the controllers of economic policy in place of small.” It was illustrated chiefly from Prussian history. Writing in 1884 when Europe was already conscious of growing European tensions over trade and colonies and the consequent threat of war, Schmoller was nevertheless able to deceive himself about the part played by the formation of the larger economic group he wrote about. He admitted that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the conduct of the separate nations had been "characterised by a selfish national commercial policy of a harsh and rude kind," and pointed to the way England had reached commercial supremacy by 1800 “by means of its tariff and naval wars, frequently with extraordinary violence," but he could imagine that capitalism had later changed and that “the struggle . . .  had a tendency, with the progress of civilisation, to assume a higher character and to abandon its coarsest and most brutal weapons.”

Schmoller thought he could see the capitalist jungle being tamed or civilised by the formation of leagues of states, by alliances for customs and trade questions, and by the growth of international law which was bringing into existence “ the moral and legal community of all civilised states.”

How wrong he was; but no more blind to the realities of capitalism than are most of those who now argue for and against the European Common Market.

Edgar Hardcastle

The British Labour Movement (1936)

Pamphlet Review from the February 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Labour Movement. By Frederick Engels. (Published by Martin Lawrence, Ltd. 1s.)

The above booklet contains eleven articles written by Engels and published in the Labour Standard during 1881. This journal was an attempt of the London Trades Council to provide a working-class organ in this country. The people in control of the paper were not, however, Socialists, but tended to support Gladstone, the Liberal. Hence it is not surprising that soon Engels’ contributions to the Labour Standard caused concern to these champions of the working class, and he was requested to tone down his writings. This Engels refused to do. As a result, he ceased to contribute articles to the Labour Standard.

The first four articles deal with the wages system and the trade unions. Engels shows how, under capitalism, there is a class struggle between the working class and capitalist class, between those “people deprived of all property in the means of production, owners of nothing but their own working power ” and “the monopolisers of the whole of the means of production, land, raw materials, machinery” (p. 12).

Engels shows how the trade unions have helped their members to maintain their standard of life in this struggle, but it is pointed out that, despite their fight of sixty years against capital, the trade unions have been unable to raise the working class above the situation of wage slaves (p. 12), and that any advantage gained by the workers through their unions is brought to nothing by the crises which occur periodically. Then, the fight has to be undertaken again. In this never-ending struggle with the capitalist class, the workers are at a disadvantage. First, the army of unemployed help to keep down wages: workers compete for jobs, and this enables the capitalist class to enforce lower wages. Again, if the employer and his workpeople do not agree over wages, and there is a strike, the former have the advantage, for they “can afford to wait, and live on their capital. The workman cannot. He has but wages to live upon, and must therefore take work when, where, and at what terms he can get it.. . . He is fearfully handicapped by hunger ” (p. 10).

In face of this, Engels’ advice to the working class is clear. It cannot hope for an end to its misery and striving under capitalism. It must abolish capitalism and establish Socialism; it must “become the owner of all the means of work—land, raw material, machinery, etc.—and, thereby, owner of the whole of the produce of its own labour.” To do this, the workers must organise politically, because “a struggle between two great classes of society necessarily becomes a political struggle," and they must win political power “to become enabled to change existing laws in conformity with their own interests and requirements."

Of the other articles, “Social Classes—Necessary and Superfluous" calls for special mention. This article contains the reply to those who do not study Socialism, because, as they say, we cannot do without capitalists. Here Engels shows what has been the historical mission of the capitalist class, to develop the means of production to the point they have reached to-day, i.e., so that they are capable of producing goods in abundance. But as the means of production are developed, the capitalist becomes unnecessary—a parasite, drawing profits without doing any kind of work. In the early days of capitalism, he worked with his employees, he supervised their work. Now, the formation of large companies has put an end to this state of affairs. Paid employees run industry from top to bottom. “The capitalist owners of these immense establishments have no other function left with regard to them, but to cash the half-yearly dividend warrants" (p. 44).

Opponents of Fascism would do well to read Engels’ article, “Bismarck and the German Working-men's Party.” Here they will learn that Hitler’s methods were used as far back as 1880. Bismarck outlawed the Working-men’s Party, suppressed its fifty newspapers, seized its funds, broke up its societies and clubs and dissolved its meetings. Workers suspected of carrying on propaganda were kept in prison without trial. In one year (October 6th, 1879, to October, 1880) there were more than eleven thousand political prisoners. Still, these methods did not stamp out the ideas of the movement. We may add that Bismarck failed to keep the workers quiet because he did not abolish capitalism—a system of society which, thanks to its very nature, forces the workers to turn to Socialism as the way out of their poverty. Incidentally, Socialism alone will save the workers’ from the ever-recurring brutalities of capitalism, then called Bismarckism, now Hitlerism

Clifford Allen

Against the state (1992)

Book Review from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Volume IV: Critique of Other Socialisms by Hal Draper, Monthly Review Press

Marx and Engels gave few details about what they thought socialism would be like. However, they both wrote an enormous amount about what they thought socialism would not be like. Or rather, they provided a critique of "other socialisms"—hence the subtitle of this volume of Draper's exhaustive analysis of Marxian politics.

The "other socialisms" were Utopian Socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen gave useful criticisms of existing society and interesting ideas for a future society, but were naive about how this was to come about); Sentimental Socialism (not a school of socialism but a tendency to be found in various schools, substituting the power of love, humanity or morality for the class struggle); the Anarchism of Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin (criticised for the authoritarianism inherent in its anti-democratic nature); Reactionary Anticapitalisms (those who yearn for a pre-capitalist golden age, as in the writings of Thomas Carlyle); and Boulangism (after General Georges Boulanger in France, an arch-opportunist and a forerunner of "National Socialism").

Marx and Engels were also confronted with a "socialist" ideology which was patently anti-socialist—Bismarckian Socialism (or so-called "State Socialism"). In late nineteenth century Germany the Bismarck regime introduced nationalisation and social-welfare reforms; in part this was to undermine the growing support for the German SDP led by Lassalle, who proposed similar statist reforms (and criticised by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme). It is this Bismarckian, statist conception of "socialism" which—via Lenin in to Bolshevism and the Fabians into Labourism—has become world famous. The irony, however, is that this conception of socialism is largely anti-socialist in its origin.

Draper accepts that in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian Engels gave a "definite repudiation" of "the view that statification equals socialism, or that statification was progressive", but that doesn't stop him peddling the Trotskyist (that is to say, Bolshevik) nonsense about the need for a "workers' state". Engels, in the same place, is quite clear:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective capitalist. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more it actually becomes collective capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. But the capitalist relation is not done away with; it is rather brought to a head.

Lew Higgins

Bismarck's Communist Heirs (1972)

From the July 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the eighteen-seventies Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, went in for a big programme of nationalization, both because it suited the needs of the German ruling class and because he hoped thereby to win support among German workers who confused this state capitalism with Socialism. As Bismarck said to his Conservative supporters in the Reichstag, they "shouldn't be afraid of the word Socialism". Reformists all over the world walked into the trap and in Britain propaganda misrepresenting nationalization as Socialism was carried on by the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party. Only the Socialist Party of Great Britain, from its formation in 1904, urged the workers not to waste their efforts on something so useless to them and to the Socialist movement. The advocates of nationalization made all sorts of extravagant claims for it - higher wages, greater efficiency, lower prices, and that as the workers would feel that they were working "for the community" strikes would disappear.

Time has shown how right the S.P.G.B. was. No government, Liberal, Tory or Labour, has ever supported the policy of paying the workers in nationalized industries more than the general level of wages. When, under the Wilson Labour government, enquiries were made into the industries with large numbers of low-paid workers, central and local government workers and workers in the nationalized industries showed up no better than private industry and in some cases they came out very unfavourably. Strikes continued and in some years (1966 for example) the days lost through strikes in the nationalized industries were nearly as many as in the rest of industry put together.

Bismarck's policy was written about by Frederick Engels in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:

But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of nationalised industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating now and again into something of a flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic.

(Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; 

Moscow, 1970, page 70)

Engels went on to point out that state ownership "does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces . . . The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."

One of the people who fell for Bismarck's "spurious Socialism" was Lenin. In his The State and Revolution (1917) he had this to say:

A witty German Social Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the Postal Service an example of the Socialist economic system. This is very true.

(Central Books edition 1972 based on the 1969 edition published in Moscow. Page 47)

It was in this section of The State and Revolution that Lenin urged the Russian workers that what they needed was to apply the German Post Office model to Russian industry, but with all official, technicians etc. to be paid "a workman's wages". Like the British nationalized industries under Tory and Labour government all idea of avoiding the ordinary wide inequalities of pay has long since been abandoned in Russia.

Following Lenin's advocacy of "spurious Socialism", the British Communist Party has continued to mislead the workers by telling them to waste their efforts on securing an extension of state capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle