Editorial: Lessons from the German elections. (1930)

Editorial from the October 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Germany has just had a general election, the results of which call for some comment.

One of the most striking lessons of German politics since the war has been the steady fall in the voting for the German Social Democratic Party. In 1919 they had the vote of 45 per cent. of the electorate ; since then the vote has steadily declined until in this election they have secured only about 25 per cent. of the votes cast. Yet in 1919 German Social Democracy had control of Governmental power, and one of its leading members, Ebert, was German President until his death in 1925 !

What is the explanation of the fall in the Social Democratic vote? The answer is simple.

In the years before the war our “labour” opponents, who opposed our revolutionary attitude, brought forward the alleged progress of the movement in Germany as evidence to support their reformist policy, and pestered us with “the growth of the Socialist vote in Germany.” The war destroyed a good deal of this sand castle and made plain what little progress Socialism had actually made among the people who made up the German Social Democracy. The post-war years have made the position still more plain, and have gradually disillusioned and discouraged a large number of the blind followers of the one-time worshipped “leaders.”

The millions who voted “Socialist” in Germany were like the millions who voted “labour” in England—they did not understand or desire Socialism as they did not know what it involved. At the most what they wanted and expected was an amelioration of the worst of the evils that they suffered, and they relied on the promises of the German Social Democratic Party and the English Labour Party to obtain this result. But Socialism is the only means by which the workers’ position can be materially improved; while capitalism remains in existence it must necessarily go on producing the evils of capitalism. Therefore, as neither of the Parties had a Socialist electorate behind them, conditions have got worse instead of improving—to the disappointment of the electorate.

The failure of the Gorman Social Democratic Party to live up to its promises, although it has been easily the largest Party in Germany since the war, and also the fact that it has in various ways assisted the German capitalists in their exploitation of the workers, is the explanation of the disappointment and disgust of increasing numbers of its former supporters.

It will be noticed that the Communist vote is higher this election than in the last, but they have obtained a lower percentage of the votes cast this time than they did in 1924. They have temporarily gained owing to the political ignorance and hopelessness of part of the electorate. However, the life of a Communist Party is one of ups and downs—mainly downs of late years.

The Fascist Party (or German National Socialist Party, as it calls itself) represents in the main the groups of officers, small investors and small proprietors that have suffered economically during the post-war period, but its main actions are determined by German heavy industry, from which it draws a considerable part of its funds. It suits the large German capitalists to use this body as strike breakers and bogey men to keep down wages and frighten any drastic reforms out of the minds of the Social Democrats.

The irony of the situation is that the German Social Democrats are largely responsible for the existence of this body, as they directly and indirectly assisted in its formation. When in power in 1919, they welcomed the returning soldier back “to his own country,” but decreed that the private soldier should lay down his arms whilst the officers could retain theirs. The S.D.P. also assisted in the formation of armed bodies that were afterwards used against them.

The German Fascist Party came into being as the result of the dissolution of groups which originated from the “Orgesch,” a group formed in Bavaria by a state official named Escherich. The elements composing it were in the main the same then as now. Its aims were similar to those of the Italian Fascisti, to whom it gave, assistance in 1921-22.

Anyone who reads, in the “18th Brumaire,” Marx’s description of the “Society of December,” the hirelings of Napoleon III in the middle of the last century, will recognise the similarity in constitution and methods between it and the German and Italian Fascisti, and also how large capital uses such bodies for its own ends.

The German election was fought on the question of increased taxation to meet the growing unemployment problem. The issue was one that admirably suited the Fascists, who put forward airy phrases about better management of funds and the reduction of expenses ; and also endeavoured to play upon patriotic feeling aroused by the heaviness of the war indemnity.

As the German S.D.P. have not advocated anything beyond ordinary capitalist measures to meet Germany’s difficulties, their answer to the opposition is weak, and they suffer from the swing of the pendulum.

The leaders of German Social Democracy who took over power with quaking knees after the war were afraid to stand or fall by their former protestations. Now, after devoting themselves during these years to the salvation of German capitalism, they are losing support among the workers. Some of their members, such as Noske, have acquired reputations for blood-thirstiness and treachery to the working-class that will be remembered and will help the German workers to realise that they must rely upon their own knowledge and their own efforts to free themselves from capitalist bondage, and cast off the outworn and slavish idea of leadership.

Looking Back and Looking Forward (1940)

From the June 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the midst of the present titanic struggle in France and Belgium it appears to the majority of people that the past and the future are alike matters that can be left alone. Every energy, every thought, must, they say, be concentrated on the present; and with the impatience of those who are in the fight they are resentful that anyone should be concerned with past causes and future consequences. Socialists can appreciate the attitude of mind, for, we have felt similar impatience for years with the opponents of Socialism. For years the Socialist has had to put up with the apathy or wrongly directed zeal of the great majority. Before 1914, and right up to the outbreak of the present war, Socialists have been trying to get the workers of all countries to realise that, without a fundamentally different and better basis for the social system, there never would be or could be any safeguard against, poverty and war. But we who were on the job of showing the only way of escape were not listened to. We had to put up with the people who were “not interested in politics,” or who thought they knew of short cuts or easier roads, or who privately said they agreed with the S.P.G.B. but publicly put a different case because of the alleged ignorance and hopelessness of the working class.

We remember the Communists and their many Labour Party admirers who suddenly discovered, 20 years ago, that dictatorship—and its likely accompaniment, civil war—were the golden road to Socialism. In face of scornful taunts that we were out of date we replied that Socialism and democracy are indissolubly linked together, and that those who preached dictatorship would inevitably provoke reactionary terrorism. The Bolshevists cannot escape their major responsibility for the rise of Fascism.

We remember, too, the blind guides who thought they saw Socialism sweeping Europe because of the Labour and Labour-Coalition Governments set up in many countries after the war. We were told that “Over a large part of Europe definitely Socialist administrations are actually in office, and the principles of Socialism are avowedly accepted as the basis of social and economic reconstruction.” (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in Preface to “A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain,” Fabian Society, 1920.)

The answer to this illusion was plain to see even in the journals which fostered it. The Daily Herald in 1919 had sent a correspondent, Madeline Doty, to study conditions in “Socialist” Germany. She interviewed, among others, a well-known German woman Socialist, a close friend of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, and said to her: “The world talks of a Socialist Republic in Germany.” This was her answer: “It is a lie. There isn’t an atom of Socialism. The Monarchy has gone, a Republic has come; but it is a capitalist Republic, a capitalist Republic that is more deadly and relentless than the Monarchy.” (Daily Herald, July 30th, 1919).

We remember again the legion of Labour Party supporters, including men now in the Cabinet, who preached pacifism, disarmament and appeasement; who, in face of our insistence that it was a dangerous illusion founded on a complete misreading of the world we live in, declared that if only German capitalism were treated generously there would be prosperity, stability and international reconciliation. The S.P.G.B. maintained unceasingly that neither greater armaments nor disarmament, neither punitive peace terms nor a policy of loans and concessions and a League of Nations, would alter essentially the basic forces driving to conflict. The S.P.G.B. continued to preach its only “ism,” Socialism, never on any occasion lending support to sentimental illusion and dangerous dreaming, and all the time we had to put up with the scoffing of the open enemies and misguided would-be friends of Socialism.

We are, of course, now asked to face the charge that we, too, failed in our effort to get the workers to realise the true nature of the situation confronting them. True, we failed in our task. The workers were not ready. They had too many and too persuasive leaders preaching the comfortable doctrine of the short and easy way to Socialism, against which we were almost powerless. But with our unanswerable case fortified by the experience of the past 20 years, and the present tragic outcome, what should we do ? Give up the struggle ? Stop pointing out the truth ? Plainly, No. The world needs the Socialist message more urgently than ever before. Let us rather determine that, to the best of our ability, old false doctrines in a new disguise shall not again be allowed to take root. Let us recognise with Sir William Beveridge there is need of a new idea; that “in view of the failure of the peace settlement of 1919, and of the despondency created by it in many minds, there is need of some new idea for the next peace. …” (Speech to Manchester Reform Club, reported in Manchester Guardian, January 31st, 1940.) Let us, however, determine that that demand for a new idea in the workers’ minds shall not be met, as Sir W. Beveridge proposes, with the sterile idea of Federal Union, but with the one fruitful conception for the human race, the idea of Socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Road to Power. An exposure of the Social Democrats. (1925)

From the July 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

An exposure of the Social Democrats in Germany and their allies.

In the June “Labour Monthly,” Mr. M. Philips Price, writing under the title “The Great Retreat,” gives a useful account of the position of the German working class since 1918, dealing in particular with the impotence of the Social Democratic Party and the treachery of its leaders. He quotes from a recent book, “Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik” (From Empire to Republic) by Richard Mueller, a Social Democrat who, in 1919 was chairman of the Berlin Workers’ Council. Mueller states (Vol. II., page 112) that when his council after the armistice drew up plans for the immediate workers’ control of industry in Berlin, the “Social Democratic Trade Union leaders protested ; they had already signed an agreement with the employers which was neither known to us nor to the public.” This agreement, it appears, bound the Trade Unions not to demand “any kind of workers’ control over the employers or insight into their financial transactions, in return for which the workers should get the eight-hour day.” (Price.) The ensuing years have shown, as might be expected, that even the eight-hour day was not to be safe when it suited the employers to attack it.

To excuse their refusal to attack the employers, at so opportune a moment, these leaders argued that if such an attack were made the allies would at once stop the supply of food for the starving. This was officially denied by the American Government, and the “Temps” (November 16th, 1918) declared that “The conditions which President Wilson put for the supply of food to Germany did not come from him, but were suggested to him by the German Chancellor himself.” (The Chancellor was the Social Democrat Ebert.) Again, the capitalist paper the “Frankfurter Zeitung” announced, “In actual fact, M. Clemenceau is quite indifferent to what form of government there is in Germany, whether it is Capitalistic or Socialistic, if Liebknecht is crowned Kaiser in Prussia or Prince Henry is elected President of the Republic in Kiel.”

What really happened was that “Vorwaerts” (Social Democrat Official Organ) got someone to telegraph to it from Holland that “the food which has been obtained abroad for Germany is being held back by the American Government because it is not certain if Germany can guarantee that she will have a free constitution . . .”

Ebert, when asking the U.S.A. for food for Germany, worded his telegram “provided that public order prevails there.” (Vol. II., page 118.)

This treachery was engineered, of course, to please the employing class, and to dissuade the workers from listening to the minority, who urged an attack on their class enemies.

The disclosure of these actions is useful, chiefly because it emphasises what we have always taught, that the workers can never afford to place uncontrolled power in the hands of leaders, no matter what their record and views may be. It is, however, no less essential to view these actions against the background provided by the general conditions and our knowledge of the rank and file. We must avoid the groundless assumption that different leadership could have altered the result materially.

The Socialist knows that there must be a majority of the working class understanding and determined on achieving Socialism before the real tasks of the socialistic revolution can even be begun. Given such a majority in possession of the machinery of government, with the powers and in the position of a ruling class, nothing but a possible capitalist revolt can stand between the workers and their object. Such a revolt would, in the nature of things, be foredoomed to failure, and need cause anxiety only to those who may be misguided enough to resist the forces of the State when the workers control those forces. We do not seek a majority out of any merely sentimental attachment to the idea of democracy. We need a majority because our aim is Socialism, and Socialism is democratic or it is nothing at all; only self-deception allows the belief that Capitalism is any the less Capitalism because in Russia it is administered by a Communist bureaucracy. Indeed, we do not have to look so far ahead to see the uselessness of minority action. Vain hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, there are not in existence any means by the use of which a minority can seize and keep the powers of government in modern democracies. Those who govern us on behalf of the Capitalist class do so with the active support or passive consent of the great majority of the workers. To oust them the minority which aspires to power would need to overwhelm not just the Capitalist few, but the mass of the workers as well. Merely to state this is to expose it for a wild and dangerous dream.

And, if further argument be necessary, what one minority could do, another minority could and would endeavour to undo. The knowledge of the numerical weakness of the revolutionary forces would naturally encourage the defeated Capitalists to a new trial of strength. Prolonged civil war may sound fine to young Communists, but Socialism does not from choice select such difficult beginnings.

The German Communists have signally failed to achieve anything tangible and lasting. Anxious for quick results and impatient of educational work to win the support of the workers, they have relied alternately on intrigue with Capitalist parties and on futile violence. They played with extreme nationalism and urged the workers to defend the interests of German Capitalists in the Ruhr against the French and British. They are now reaping their reward.

In the May, 1924, elections they polled over 12 per cent. of the votes cast; in December, 9 per cent.; in March, 1925, 7 per cent. ; and in April, 6.4 per cent. The Communist “short cut” does not lead to Socialism.

But while the Communist Party is no longer the danger that it was, those who believe that salvation for the workers lies along the road which is followed by the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party, are more numerous than ever. The Communist does not appreciate the nature or the magnitude of the task of overthrowing Capitalism, and wants to set enthusiasm and pea-shooters against the organised might of the State. The Labour Party aims at organising a majority of the electorate, but does not seek the overthrow of Capitalism at all. It is a party not of Socialism but of reform; not of knowledge but of discontent. It lacks a definite and primary object on which to enforce unity among its self-centred and often hostile elements. Only on one issue is general unanimity possible; that is the search for some ground on which the exploited and the exploiters can live amicably together. Believing such amity to be possible it rejects the Socialist solution of the abolition of private ownership in the means of life. The Labour Party view is that expressed by Mr. Clynes (“Daily Herald,” April 3, 1925) :

  “If all classes can preserve the spirit that carried us through five years of terrible war, we can go forward in a spirit of co-operation and goodwill which will benefit the whole community.”

We believe on the contrary that the Capitalist class alone have an interest in promoting such co-operation. We want for society the property now owned by the employers, and we do not anticipate that they will yield it up with goodwill. We recall not with pride but with regret, the years when the workers of each nation willingly hated and fought the enemies of their respective sections of the ruling class. We urge not co-operation but the acceptance of the truth of our peacetime and wartime slogan “The enemy of the working class is the master class.”

And because the Labour Parties are not fighting for any fundamental change their method of organising is quite unlike that which is required to win Socialism. The Labour Parties command millions of votes and the support of thousands of active and devoted workers. They have highly-organised and richly-financed political machines for winning elections, and a press of growing power with which they endeavour to mould opinion. The Socialist Party lacks these things because its aim is Socialism, and there are as yet too few Socialists to make such widespread organisation possible. But of what use to the working class are these millions of votes cast for Labour candidates and these electoral victories leading as they do merely to “colossal” parliamentary battles about taxes on silk stockings and such trivialities? Germany developed such a party well nigh to perfection and next to Germany, England. And what is there to show for it all?

They boast of the reforms, old age pensions, insurance schemes which have been initiated or at least amended through the influence they are able to exercise on the various governments; yet in spite of all, the condition of the workers gets worse year by year, and was getting worse for a decade before the war. This is true of Germany, England and America and of “our” colonies. It is the worsening conditions imposed by Capitalism which make reforms necessary to the Capitalists, and it is the vague discontent bred of worsening conditions which builds up these huge Labour Parties. The reforms are not the effect of the growing power of the Labour Parties. As George Washington learned by hard experience, “Influence is not Power.” The entry of Labour Leaders into Capitalist Cabinets and to their social functions merely shows how easily the non-Socialist rank and file are deceived by the gift of the shadow of power by those who keep tight hold on the substance.

Advising the ruling class what to do to stave off revolutionary discontent is not winning power for the working class. When Capitalism had its time of crisis the leaders and the machinery of the Labour Parties of the warring nations were openly employed to help the master class wage their war. This was the end in England, Germany, France, and in fact In every country the workers of which had followed the same unsound policy. Many have now realised the disastrous failure but have quite misunderstood the underlying causes.

Philips Price is one of these. He knows well the black record of the Social Democrats during the war. He knows how fully they deserved the epithet “the Kaiser’s Socialists,” and he must see that their policy after the armistice could not become suddenly and completely different from that which they had pursued before. But what he fails to see is that long years before the war the ground was being prepared and the harvest could be no other than it was and is. For him as for most of those who criticise the Social Democrats, 1914 was the year when what he calls “the pillar of the old International, the party of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht” threw over its Socialism and betrayed the workers of Germany. Thus he writes, for instance, that “an aristocracy has risen up during the last ten years in the party” (italics mine). This simply is not true. To the Socialist Party of Great Britain the internal rottenness and anti-Socialist outlook of the German S.D.P. were apparent long before the war, and consistently with our knowledge, we declined to share the current foolish confidence in the Second International. Neither it nor its affiliated societies were Socialist; how then could it or they take up a Socialist attitude to the war? Years of war were needed to teach this simple lesson to the founders of the Third International.

Yet as long ago as 1896 Bertrand Russell was able to see what was to prove the fatal defect of the S.D.P., although at the time he seems to have anticipated that the weakness would be overcome. In his “German Social Democracy” (1896, Longmans, page 131), he wrote as follows :—

  ” . . the élite of the Party acquire a dominion over their less intelligent and less definite companions; these are often very vague as to what Social Democracy is, and may even retain a liking for the military or a disbelief in Communism, totally inconsistent with the Party Programme.”

Russell quoted Paul Göhre, whose conclusions on the outlook of the party membership coincided with what he himself observed.

He goes on (page 132) :—

  “The final alms of the Party, in particular, appear for the most part rather unpopular, so great a change as the abolition of private property was unintelligible to the average working man. The opposition to militarism, too . . was not shared, if Gohre may be believed, by any but the official members.”

He concludes :

  “As, however, the official members alone are clear as to the aims to be pursued, and alone decide the choice of candidates, their views alone are represented in Parliament . . . the views of the rank and file, however different from those which find expression in party literature, do not seem to me to have any great political importance.”

Events have shown Bertrand Russell’s hope to be ill-founded. The views and lack of views of the rank and file proved to be all-important. Not being Socialists they were as easily led into war as they had been led before the war. Sheep do not at the cry of danger suddenly become lions. It would be absurd to expect those who looked with favour on peace-time militarism to turn against it when their own leaders ranted about the danger to the “Fatherland.”

Naturally too, years of wartime propaganda left the Social Democrats, war-weary though they were, still less ready to take a Socialist course of action. Philips Price charges the leaders with giving a wrong lead in 1919, but what else could he expect? Were the members who supported the German Capitalists in the war the kind of body to carry on a fight against the Capitalists and for Socialism immediately the war ended?

The party did not even command a majority in Germany. In 1919, they polled 45 per cent. of the votes, but that 45 per cent. did not represent Socialist convictions. It was a combination of all kinds of discontent, natural in a war-weary and defeated country, and it rapidly disappeared as the immediate and pressing causes receded. Lack of success soon turned uninstructed enthusiasm into apathy and even hostility, leading eventually to a revival of patriotism.

By 1920 the vote of the S.D.P. had fallen to 42 per cent. ; and by 1924 to 20 per cent. Although it rose again this year it reached only 30 per cent., and the issue of recent elections has never been Socialism or anything which plainly challenged the position or privilege of the ruling class.

All the efforts of all the years of S.D.P. activity have led up to the Presidential election of May, 1925, when S.D.P. members had to vote for one avowed Capitalist in order to defeat another avowed Capitalist candidate. They had not even the gratification of selling out to the winning opponent of the working class.

In the meantime our own Labour Party, superior to the lessons of past or contemporary history, gaily treads the same path to the same slaughter.

Edgar Hardcastle

Right Again. (1918)

From the December 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little while since President Wilson, in this the mouth-piece of the Allies, was screaming for the German people to arise and overthrow their rulers. There would be no negotiation with the Hohenzollerns, he declared ; the Kaiser and his gang would have to go. Every available means was exploited in order to induce the working class of Germany to solve the difficulties of the Allies by plunging into revolution.

We said, however, at the time, that should the workers of the Central Empires take their cue from Mr. Wilson and attempt to take into their own hands control of public affairs, the armies of the Allies would be used to crush down the rising and restore security to capitalist interests.

What has happened ? After the signing of the Armistice a wave of revolution appeared to threaten 
the existence of German capitalism. Immediately the American President announced that no food
 would be sent to Germany unless the people were quiet. So we were not far out, nor did we have to 
wait long for events to prove the correctness of our statement. If the Allied Armies are not called on
to restore capitalist domination in Germany it will only be because the capitalists of the world have
found sufficient the more cunning scheme of starving into submission the revolutionaries who have served their purpose.

Jacko.

Rosa Luxemburg, political democracy and mass action (2019)

SPGB Pamphlet

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered a hundred years ago this month, had been a socialist member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) until it supported the German government in the First World War, sharing its basic positions. She advocated that the working class should win control of political power with a view to replacing capitalism with a society based on the common ownership of the means of production by the whole of society, with production directly for use. She held that the exercise of political power to bring this change should take place within the framework of political democracy, and that even under capitalism political democracy was the best framework for the development of the working class and socialist movements; in fact, a consistent theme of her political views was that the ‘proletariat’ (the working class) had to take up the torch for democracy abandoned by the once-progressive ‘bourgeoisie’.

Reforms

She also accepted that, in addition to the ‘maximum’ programme of socialism, a socialist party should also have, as did the SPD and parties in other countries modelled on it, a programme of social and political reforms to be achieved under capitalism. In her famous pamphlet Reform or Revolution (1898) her opposition was not to reforms as such nor to campaigning for them, but to reformism as the doctrine that capitalism could be gradually transformed into socialism by a series of social reform measures enacted by parliament. This was the view of the ‘Revisionists’ within the SPD and was the target of her pamphlet.

Elsewhere she explained the official SPD (and her) attitude towards parliamentary action:

  ‘The parliamentary struggle, however, the counterpart of the trade-union struggle, is equally with it, a fight conducted exclusively on the basis of the bourgeois social order. It is by its very nature, political reform work, as that of the trade-unions is economic reform work. It represents political work for the present, as trade-unions represent economic work for the present.’ (The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, chapter VIII).

This is the correct meaning of the word ‘parliamentarism’. It does not mean participating in elections and going into parliament but using parliament to get reforms under capitalism.

The Revisionists lost the vote but they won the war as the SPD came to concentrate more and more on parliamentary activity, prioritising increases in its representation in national and regional parliaments and pursuing social reforms, in some places through deals with the Liberal or Catholic parties. Luxemburg could see where this was leading. And where in fact it did eventually lead: to the SPD becoming a democratic social reform party, relegating its maximum programme of socialism to a distant future or to conference rhetoric. Naturally, she was opposed to this.

Her alternative was the ‘mass strike’, basically extra-parliamentary action, initially still to get reforms, what the anarchists call ‘direct action’. Her argument was that reforms obtained in this way would not lead to encouraging mere ‘parliamentarism’ but would prepare the working class for the mass action that the establishment of socialism would have to involve.

Knowing Marx’s insistence on the need for the working class to win control of political power so as to be in a position to change the basis of society from class to common ownership, she was at pains to distinguish her position from that of the anarchists. This was obvious enough anyway since the actual ‘mass strikes’ that she supported were aimed at obtaining or extending political democracy.

Mass strikes to get the vote

This was how she analysed the uprising in Russia in 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). She knew perfectly well that a socialist revolution was out of the question in Russia and that what was on the agenda was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ to establish a democratic republic with a parliament within which the working class could press for social reforms. As she wrote:

  ‘. . . the mass strike in Russia has been realised not as a means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism’ (chapter 1).

The events in Russia confirmed a view that she had already come to a few years earlier in relation to the campaign in Belgium for universal suffrage, as not just votes for everybody but equal votes for everybody, i.e., with no mechanism to make the votes of rich property-owners count more than those of workers.

Votes for every man had been obtained in Belgium as a result of a general strike in 1893 but with the rich having more than one vote. An attempt to make this more democratic in 1902 by abolishing plural votes had failed despite another general strike. Luxemburg argued that this failure was due to the leaders of the Belgian Workers Party concentrating on doing a deal with the Liberals in the Belgian parliament and calling off the strike to facilitate this. She argued that if the strike had been maintained the aim could have been achieved (see: LINK).

Precisely the same issue came up in Germany itself in 1909 in relation to the electoral system in Prussia. Prussia, the dominant state within the German empire and where its capital Berlin was situated, had a three-class electoral system which gave more weight to the votes of the rich. The SPD launched a campaign for all votes to count equally. Luxemburg fully supported this campaign but argued that mass strikes would be the best way to secure this.

Her position was a bit incoherent because she argued, on the one hand, that mass strikes could not be planned in advance and launched by a decree from on high but had to break out spontaneously from below, while, on the other, she was criticising the SPD leadership for not calling for one. Her position seems to have been that the SPD should accept and encourage the general idea of a mass strike as a weapon to obtain reforms and support such strikes when they broke out.

No Leninist

This position of support for ‘spontaneous’ mass action meant that her views were the exact opposite of Lenin’s. If she thought that the SDP bureaucracy should not seek to call strikes this would apply even more to Lenin’s much more centralised vanguard party. She had in fact criticised in 1904 Lenin’s views in his What is To Be Done? when they became known outside Russia:

  ‘If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin’s plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee’ (Her italics. See: LINK).

Her reaction to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 was to support the overthrow of the pro-war provisional government and the new government’s appeals for world revolution – but she was severely critical of some of the policies the Bolsheviks adopted, including the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (she said they should have called fresh elections to it) and minority dictatorship:

  ‘Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!). Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)’ (See LINK).

Spartacus League

As it happened, in both Russia and Germany autocratic rule was overthrown as a result of unplanned mass action. By then, following the slaughter of the First World War, Luxemburg had become convinced that socialism itself – the ‘maximum’ programme – was on the agenda and that the alternative was ‘socialism or barbarism.’ She was now a member of the Spartacus League, a party formed by anti-war ex-members of the SPD. Introducing its new programme, which she had drafted, to the party’s conference on 31 December 1918, she identified what had gone wrong with the SPD as the division of its programme into maximum and minimum parts and its concentration on parliamentary activity to achieve the latter:

  ‘Until the collapse of August 4, 1914, German Social Democracy took its stand upon the Erfurt Programme, by which the so-called immediate minimal aims were placed in the forefront, while socialism was no more than a distant guiding star, the ultimate goal. (….) Our programme is deliberately opposed to the standpoint of the Erfurt Programme; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate, so-called minimal demands formulated for the political and economic struggle from the socialist goal regarded as a maximal programme. In this deliberate opposition [to the Erfurt Programme] we liquidate the results of seventy years’ evolution and above all, the immediate results of the World War, in that we say: For us there is no minimal and no maximal programme; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realize today’ (LINK).

The programme itself is a 1918 version of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It reads very well and proclaimed:

  ‘Down with the wage system! That is the slogan of the hour! Instead of wage labour and class rule there must be collective labour. The means of production must cease to be the monopoly of a single class; they must become the common property of all. No more exploiters and exploited! Planned production and distribution of the product in the common interest. Abolition not only of the contemporary mode of production, mere exploitation and robbery, but equally of contemporary commerce, mere fraud’ (LINK).

The programme went into more detail about the form that the ‘mass action’ Luxemburg had always favoured (previously for political reform) would take, at least in the conditions in Germany at the time, when the aim was to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism: workers and soldiers councils which would challenge the capitalist state politically and employers economically. She personally, as in her speech, didn’t rule out contesting elections to the National Assembly and using it for ‘revolutionary purposes’ or as ‘a new school of education for the working class’, a position rejected by a majority of the League’s members. In any event, this wasn’t central to the revolution she believed was imminent.

Unfortunately, just as Marx and Engels had misjudged the situation in 1848 in expecting an ‘immediately following proletarian revolution’, so Luxemburg and the Spartacus League misjudged the situation in 1918. Only a relatively small number of workers supported the League’s programme, and their uprising in January 1919 was crushed. Luxemburg had considered it premature but had loyally gone along with the majority decision. It cost her her life.

We can only speculate as to what position she would have taken later had she not been murdered in 1919 but it is unlikely that she would have abandoned her life-long commitment to democracy or her view that socialism had to be established by the conscious mass action of workers themselves ‘from below’ rather than by the action ‘from above’ of a parliamentary or vanguardist party.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Rosa Luxemburg and the Collapse of Capitalism (2019)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago on 6th January began the hopeless Spartakist rising against the Social Democrat government of Germany. It led to the brutal murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, two well-known and courageous opponents of the first world slaughter. Luxemburg, as an opponent of both reformism and Bolshevism who understood the worldwide and democratic nature of socialism, had views on many subjects near to those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. However, there were certain basic differences between our views and hers. The following article discusses one of them: the collapse of capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on January 15, 1919. Her head was first smashed in with the butt of a soldier’s rifle and she was then dumped in the Landwehr Canal. With her death the uprising of the Spartakus Bund in Berlin collapsed—as it had been doomed to do all along. In fact, the real tragedy of this affair was not its brutality but the waste of it all. Why had Luxemburg allowed herself to become involved in such a useless adventure in the first place?

The only adequate explanation seems to lie in her conviction that capitalism had been driven to an impasse, that its internal contradictions had brought it to the point of breaking down. (….)

A week before death she was writing: “The masses are ready to support any revolutionary action, to go through fire and water for Socialism.” This, of course, was patent nonsense. The working-class in Germany had no clear idea of what Socialism was or how it could be achieved. Not only was there no chance of overthrowing capitalism, but even the limited aim of unseating the government was hopeless. ( …) Luxemburg, then, had mistaken the economic dislocation following Germany’s defeat for the ‘collapse’ of the capitalist system and, since to her the choice seemed one of a desperate gamble for Socialism or else “crashing down to a common doom’, she staked her life on the former.

(from article by J.C., Socialist Standard, January 1969)

What is the Use of Parliament? (1929)

From the January 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lessons of the German Naval Revolt.

Those who have learned by experience and observation that the big political parties, Liberal, Labour and Conservative alike, offer no hope of improved conditions for the workers, often conclude that the failure of these Parliamentary parties is evidence of the uselessness of Parliament and the danger of Parliamentary methods. This is a wrong conclusion. It is not Parliament as a piece of political machinery which has failed; it is the three political parties which have failed. They have failed even to attempt to use Parliament for the purpose of establishing Socialism. No single M.P. of any party in this country has ever been elected to Parliament as a Socialist, for the simple reason that there is no single constituency in which a majority of the workers want Socialism. We say that when the workers are Socialists and are organised in the Socialist Party, they will use their votes to obtain control of Parliament because this will give control of all the machinery of administration and control of the armed forces. While the Capitalist class have control of Parliament and the Army, Navy, Air Force, etc., their position is secure and we are helpless.

Some of our critics question this view. They say that it is unnecessary and useless to obtain control of Parliament. Unnecessary because the workers can themselves gain military dominance by force of arms and by winning over the existing armed forces; and useless because control of Parliament does not give power over the armed forces. The possibility of the working class organising their own military force has often and recently been dealt with in these columns. It is an illusion and a dangerous illusion.

Our attitude on the second question, the power of Parliament, is worth some elaboration. In the modern Capitalist democracies the State has come to control a vast, intricate and continually growing machinery of administration. Not only does it control legislation—the making of laws—but also their administration by hundreds of thousands of civil servants and local government officials, and their enforcement by the courts, the police and, in the last resort, by the armed forces. Every phase of modern life, the ownership and transfer of property, the production of wealth, transport, building, commercial and financial operations, education, hospitals, sanitation, public health, all these activities are carried on under regulations prescribed by the Government and, in the final analysis, under conditions which they determine. The life of modern Capitalist society is organised round Parliament as its centre of power. Parliamentary control carries with it the power, more or less directly and speedily, to promote or suspend activity in any and every branch of social life. By organisation and by use, the electorate—now the vast majority of the adult population—look to Parliament as the depository of the organised power of society, and by law, by organisation and use, the employees, civil and military, of the central and local authorities derive their authority from the Government which, in turn, is dependent on a Parliamentary majority.

Each individual in this great civil and military machine goes on doing his particular job under the authority of the official or officer above him in the scale. Legally, neither a civil servant nor a soldier can plead in defence of an illegal action that he was obeying the orders of his superior, but within the framework of the law each man realises that his position and security are guaranteed so long, and only so long, as he acts with such superior authority. Should occasions arise when instant obedience is required to an order the legality of which is in doubt, the man concerned can only use his own judgment as to whether or not the final authority, the Government, will back him up in the course he chooses. This is simple when the general attitude and intentions of the Government are well known. Each individual is a part of the machine and everything is done to cultivate immediate response to decisions of the central authority. This is why the soldier will normally face almost certain death rather than the penalty, possibly less severe but absolutely certain, which will follow if he takes the very difficult step of acting on his own initiative in defiance of orders.

By its very nature, however, this elaborate machine weakens and fails if there is an obvious weakening or disunity at the centre of things. If a Government fails to act decisively in an emergency, or, having taken a decision, reverses it, or allows subordinate military or civil authorities, or even some of its own members, to act on their own responsibility in defiance of its decisions, if any of these things happen the individuals who make up the Army, and less urgently the civil servants, are put in a state of confusion or are faced with the difficult problem of having to choose between rival authorities, with the possibility of backing the weaker of the two. In the case of a subordinate civil or military official defying the supreme authority, the decision of the soldier or civil servant is not in doubt. He backs the .supreme authority. Where it is the Government itself which is divided or paralysed, his natural course is to take no decision at all if it can be avoided. Hence the failure of authority and decision at the top immediately affects the morale and effectiveness of the whole machine.

It is to obtain this enormous advantage given by possession of the central directing machinery, and the authority resulting from control of Parliament, that Socialists seek to gain a Parliamentary majority.

A useful illustration of the importance of such control is given by the revolt in Germany in 1918, which resulted in a regrouping of the Capitalist governing circles, and the dropping of the Kaiser and. the Monarchy, figureheads which had outgrown their usefulness.

In 1918 it had for a year been increasingly obvious to more and more persons influential in German political and industrial life, that the Allies must win the war. There was as much, and probably much more, war-weariness among the civilian and the fighting population than in the chief Allied countries, but in Germany, as here, the practice of keeping the Government and Parliament in touch with public opinion by means of elections and more or less free speech and a free press, had ceased to operate in the ordinary peace-time fashion. Capitalist opinion on the War was more divided than at any time since 1914, and those who favoured peace at almost any price were able to bring their views to bear directly on the Government. Acute differences of opinion among prominent politicians were openly expressed and debated. The new Government, under the Chancellorship of Prince Max of Baden, had for some time in the autumn of 1918 been negotiating for an armistice.

More than a year earlier, in the summer of 1917, there had been determined efforts to stir up the German sailors to mutiny, and there were, in fact, outbreaks on various ships. At that time, however, the German Government was still fairly representative of the mass of the population, and still united on the determined prosecution of the War. In consequence, the revolt failed to spread and was easily stamped out.

By October, 1918, the situation had vastly changed. Prince Max personally had favoured the opening of negotiations a year before, and his appointment as Chancellor signified the growing influence of the Capitalist interests whose views on the question of peace had the backing of a majority of the population. (At the ‘elections shortly afterwards the German Labour Party alone secured nearly 50 per cent, of votes. and there were other parties as well which had dropped their earlier enthusiasm for the War.) Thus Germany had a Government still carrying on the War, but with members some of whom were known to be lukewarm in their enthusiasm for it. In these circumstances the German admirals, including Von Scheer, the “Victor ’’ of Jutland, who was now Chief of the Admiralty Staff at Berlin, drew up plans for a great naval action by the whole German Fleet. (See obituary notices and articles on Von Scheer in “Manchester Guardian,’’ “Daily News’’ and “Daily Express,’’ November 27th, 1928; “Manchester Guardian,’’ October 30th, 1928; and for a general account see “Die Tragodie der altem deutschen marine,’’ by E. Alboldt, Berlin.) The officers were willing and eager, but many of the crew, as in 1917, were dissatisfied and tired of the War. The order was given on October 29th for the Fleet to put to sea on the following day, and in spite of the desperate nature of this last attempt to smash the Allied naval supremacy, the order would have been obeyed, like innumerable other desperate war-time orders, if the decision had had behind it the unimpaired weight of the supreme authority, the German Government. It became known, however, that the German naval authorities, both the admirals afloat and the naval staff, had acted without the .knowledge and consent of Prince Max and the Government. The minority of active revolutionary and anti-war propagandists among the crew thus had, and seized, a decisive argument which they had lacked in 1917. The thousands of sailors who would passively go to almost certain death on the order of the Government because it was in accordance with political habit and training to do so, would not raise a finger on the unauthorised command of their superior officers or the supreme naval staff. The order was withdrawn on October 31st, but the authority of the whole naval disciplinary system was broken. The news spread, and opposition to the War and to the Kaiser and politicians who still favoured war was openly expressed among the soldiers and the civilian population. Within a fortnight the Armistice had been arranged. The Kaiser abdicated, and new elections in due course gave full power to a Coalition Government including the German Labour Party united and possessing authority which Prince Max's Government lacked. The new Coalition was strong enough to take in hand the crushing of the small minority of Socialists and to reform the German Constitution on the lines desired by the Capitalist interests which had risen to the top in place of those which had been dominant in 1914.

Edgar Hardcastle

Germany, November 1918 (1998)

From the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German revolution of 80 years ago was the only ever nation-wide workers' revolt in an advanced capitalist society. It overthrew the Kaiser but not capitalism. It didn't and couldn't have done this as there was no majority for socialism amongst the workers.

Last Autumn saw the spectacle of Trotskyists and other assorted Leninists remembering the 80th Anniversary of the Russian revolution with great enthusiasm. The Trotskyist "Marxist" Party held a meeting for the occasion round my way. When asked by myself at a stall promoting the revolution meeting (with some very pretty looking flyers, it must be said) what exactly their platform was, their reply was "well, you know the Russian revolution?". I indicated that I was aware of its existence. "Well, we, er, well, we think it was a good thing". Great, nice platform, well thought out, mate. Likewise our local SWP enthusiast exhorted me to come to their big meeting on the Russian revolution and "see Tony Cliff before he dies", which struck me as insufficient incentive to attend what would doubtless have been a very tedious evening.

All of this inevitably led me into numerous dog-fights with these sort of people, about quite why the Russian revolution isn't the best thing that's ever happened, including one very nasty and terrifying encounter with a bloody-thirsty professional revolutionary from the SWP head office ("The Cheka were necessary, to stop counter-revolutionaries," she said, and I contemplated suicide, despairing over the condition of a human race that produced such a "socialist"). Inevitably, whenever I elucidated the crimes of the Bolsheviks, pointed out the many failings of the revolution, demonstrated how even Nice and Shiny Mr Lenin perpetrated the sorts of crimes they normally said only started with that Evil Mr Stalin, they had one last line of defence: "The Russian Revolution turned rotten because of invasion by umpteen foreign countries, and the failure of the German Revolution."

The point about invasion largely makes a mockery of their whole support for the victorious revolution, if in fact it wasn't victorious, and so can be dismissed. But their second point is worth a closer look. It is true that Lenin was probably predicating the success of his revolution upon a successful socialist revolution in Germany as well and hoping that it would spread world-wide from there. Fine and dandy, but all this changes Lenin from instead of being a dangerous man who thought he could lead the world to socialism, to a dangerous gambler who thought he could lead the world to socialism. Further, the proponents of such a thesis seem remarkably capable of over-looking the obvious conclusion to which this line of defence points—that Russia was really the side-show, an historical footnote, to the only ever attempted workers' revolution in an advanced capitalist state; and that all their celebrations of Russia and desire to follow its model are flawed, because Germany is the real case history that bears examination.

At the time of the first world war, Germany was the second biggest industrial economy in the world. This was despite having a full third of the population still living as feudal peasantry, and still retaining a quasi-feudal government under an autocratic hereditary ruler. It also had one of the largest workers' movements in Europe (despite socialism having been a criminalised creed for many years in Germany). The Social-Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD) had over a million members and some 4½ million voters, along with numerous papers, affiliated social groups, etc.

The SPD still talked of—and reckoned itself as—being a radical socialist party, though over the years running up to the war it drifted further and further towards outright reformism, partly because it had become so institutionalised. Running its own papers and allied with unions, it was very much a part of the fabric of society. Despite this, a small section of revolutionary socialists remained within the SPD, typified by Rosa Luxemburg, and who numbered some three to four thousand.

The true colours of the SPD were shown during the war, when nearly all of its members in the Reichstag openly backed the war, and the party spread propaganda to the effect that the war was necessary to stop the threat of tyranny from Russia. This slowly led to a split in the SPD, three ways, with the eventual formation of the Independent Social-Democratic Party (USPD) within the parliamentary party and then more slowly within the membership itself. The "far-left" contingent formed themselves into the Spartakusbund (Spartacist League) with Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as prominent members. However, they remained within the official ranks of the USPD.

By September 1918 it was clear that Germany had already lost the war. The most the ruling class could expect was to preserve their state more or less intact. They were desperate to avert a repetition of events in Russia and the massive upheaval there. The powerful generals in the army proposed a way of saving the German state by liberalising it and bringing some of the more obliging elements of the SPD into the government. These latter accepted and joined a government under Prince Max von Baden as Chancellor.

Workers' Councils

Under this regime events deteriorated. Long suffering workers began to vent their frustration at the grind and penury they faced after four years of draconian war-time restrictions. More and more workers and disenchanted soldiers and sailors began to strike and mutiny. By late October insurrection was spreading, as workers throughout the country rose up against the government. Beginning in the northern port of Kiel workers' councils began to be formed all across the country. By 5 November, Hamburg (one of the biggest cities in the country) became subject to control by a workers' council. By the 8th so had many of the great cities of Germany, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and even Berlin.

The outcome of the uprising was that the leader of the SPD, Erbert, took power, and his colleague Scheidemann unilaterally declared Germany a republic, in a bid to appease the rebels by ending the rule of the German aristocracy. The Kaiser went into exile. Whilst this part of the revolt was successful, it in fact merely finished the job begun by the revolutions of 1848, in establishing a fully bourgeois republic in Germany.

Very few of the German working class were revolutionary socialists. The vast majority of workers supported the SPD as a matter of course, including its general programme of the reform of capitalism. On the other hand, the revolutionary workers were tiny in number. When in February 1919 the Spartakusbund renounced its links with the USPD and formed a German Communist Party (KPD) it recognised this problem: "Socialism cannot be created by decrees; nor can it be established by any government. Socialism must be created by the masses themselves, by every proletarian". Their problem was that not enough proletarians wanted socialism. The November uprisings had been a reaction to hardship and tyranny, not a coherent wish to establish socialism. Contrary to what the SWP's Chris Harman writes in his book The Lost Revolution, in which he patronisingly claims that the workers were "confused" by the splits within the "socialist movement", what most workers wanted was for the SPD to end their hardship. The Spartacists recognised that the mass support needed to establish socialism was lacking and that socialism was not on the agenda at that time, and so they resolved to oppose the calling of a constituent assembly which they felt would help consolidate the German state and instead to try and make socialists within the workers' councils.

Some hot-headed elements of the German left (in the USPD and another group called the Socialist Shop-Stewards) were not satisfied with this reality, and 5 January 1919 mounted the misnamed Spartacist uprising ("Spartacist" within SPD circles had become was a catch-all for anyone vaguely disagreeing with the leadership, much as "Trot" has become in the modern Labour Party—the Spartacists, including Rosa Luxemburg, actually opposed an uprising, realising as they did that mass support for socialism just wasn't there). These elements led the workers of Berlin in a putsch to try and seize power, with the hope of it spreading nation-wide. It failed. Lacking any plan the workers who had followed the glorious revolutionaries stood around waiting to be told what to do, and when they were told it was a mish-mash of confused orders and muddle. On 11 January 1919 the SPD government sent in the troops, the notorious Freikorps, which very effectively crushed the abortive putsch. By 17 January both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered by Freikorps troops, and Berlin was under government control once more.

Crushed by the state

This was a pattern that was to be repeated in many parts of the country, as any struggles and gains by the workers were brutally crushed by military might. The workers discovered too late the danger of following leaders, and, much as the Bolsheviks crushed all independent working class activity in Russia to establish their dominance, so too did the SPD in Germany to preserve the German capitalist state. The workers discovered to their cost the impossibility of fighting against a co-ordinated and well-armed state, and if little blood was spilt in the initial revolt much was spilt when it was put down.

The workers of Germany persistently followed their old leaders, believing these would solve their problems for them, and even bring about socialism, and for a while they believed the lip-service the SPD government gave to "socialisation" of industry. In the end, however, they had to learn the hard way the folly of following leaders. The German revolution shows, not as Chris Harman believes, that if the KPD had had more discipline (read had it enacted the Leninist principle of "democratic-centralism" and obedience to the leadership) it might have controlled events more and thus been able to lead the workers to successful revolution (on Russian lines). It was that where the working class does not have the resolve to establish socialism, it will not, and trying to make socialists in the heat of an ongoing quasi-civil war is almost impossible. No amount of leadership but only a majority of socialist-minded workers could have made the revolution in Germany. The bloody defeat of the putsch and the uprisings showed how violence, especially by a minority, is suicidal against an existing organised state. History shows it is not the state that gets "smashed" but the revolutionaries and many innocent workers too.

Pik Smeet

A Belated Awakening. (1923)

From the August 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

An article in the New Statesman (23/6/23), entitled “The Temper of Germany," written by Robert Dell, is interesting from many points of view.

For years we endeavoured to convince our readers, by facts and logical deductions from facts, that the so-called German Socialist Party was built upon foundations of sand and was socialist in name only.

We were chided for our criticisms and referred to as “Simon Pures." The four million or so membership of the German Social Democratic Party was held up as an illustration of the value of compromise, and a reform rather than a revolutionary programme.

The outbreak of the big European War brought down this German house of cards. The large German party that was supposed to be sweeping rapidly on to victory turned jingo. The lack of socialist knowledge on the part of its membership, and the trickery of its leaders, was shown by the part it took on the side of the German capitalists against the commercial competitors of the latter. Instead of seeing his enemy in the capitalists of all nations the German worker took up the national attitude and abandoned the field of the class struggle. This attitude, of course, was not reserved for the German worker alone. A similar position was taken up by the workers in all the belligerent countries.

The attitude of the German Social Democratic Party is an object lesson to the workers of the futility of large numbers where sound principles are lacking; and the foolishness, from the point of view of the working-class movement, of submerging principles and entering, into compromises with the enemy in order to obtain a large following.

This lesson has not yet been taken to heart, as witness the formation of Communist Parties and the repeated manifestoes and conferences on “The United Front.” 

Robert Dell gave belated support to our years-old attitude towards the German S.D.P. when he wrote the following :—

   “This diagnosis of the temper of the German masses may seem strange in view of the fact that the German Socialist Party has not shown itself conspicuously internationalist. But it has to be remembered that the Socialist Party was the only effective Opposition before the war, and as such attracted to itself large numbers of people who in England would have been Liberals or even Moderate Conservatives. In 1918 the Majority Socialist leaders were not even in favour of a revolution. They accepted it because they were obliged to. Not much more than a fortnight before the revolution took place Scheidemann refused to agree even to the dethronement of William II. in favour of another member of his own family, although Erzberger was among the supporters of the proposal. Scheidemann would not abandon his Kaiser. After the defeat of the Kapp putsch the Socialists could have done anything they liked—they compromised with the defeated reactionaries. No party is more responsible for the present state of Germany than the Majority Socialists, and no individuals have as great a responsibility for it as Noske and Scheidcmann.”

When, in the past, we said as much of the German party as is contained in the above quotation, we were sneered at as visionaries. How the earth do move !

It is rather amusing to read the extract and then reflect on the fact that it appeared in a journal that supports the Labour Party —as the criticism fits the Labour Party so well. The same paper has also, in the main, supported the German Majority Socialists condemned by Dell !

Gilmac.

Letters from Prison (1936)

Book Review from the June 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter from Prison by Ernst Toller (Bodley Head 12s. 6d.)

Bodley Head has just issued a translation of Toller's "Letters from Prison.” The price (12s. 6d.) puts it outside private working-class reading, but it is well worth a determined effort to get it placed in the Public Library.

Anyone who saw Hinkemann produced at a theatre, unhampered by the personal prejudices of a Censor, who gaily approves the giggles of the highbrow sweet maiden at the adventures of Homer in “The Country Wife,” but severely frowns on the topic of actual castration resulting from the Great War, will recognise the merit of the writer as a dramatic artist and, what is more, one acutely sensitive to the tragedy inevitably attaching to Poverty. Drinking to its bitterest dregs the cup of humiliation, rope in hand, the curtain falls on one of the very few great tragic working-class figures in dramatic art.

Toller served five years in prison for the part he played in the abortive Kurt Eisner rising in Bavaria in 1919. Property, scared at even a remote possibility of challenge to its privileges, revealed as usual the imminent Beast concealed beneath the gaudy robes of Church and State. For a taste: A sergeant-major, ordered by his lieutenant to shoot 32 sailors then in gaol,' replied (on his own evidence, p. 341): “With the greatest pleasure.” A bishop exclaims (p. 69): “Hosannah! I welcome you, blessed flogging, rod of Love.” Lest there should be misunderstanding, it was not the Bishop who was flogged. Incidentally, our Soapy Sams manage these things better. The Hungarian bishop should sit at the feet of the Rev. J. R. C. Forrest, who suavely wraps up the same sentiment in “The exercise of force and punishment is a divinely given authority, without which the Church could not carry on” (Oxford Evangelical Conference, April 16th).

Interesting sidelights are thrown on current politics. "A member of the Communist Party was not allowed to talk with us of the Independent S.D. Party” (p. 160). He had received orders to be "very proud and stiff” to fellow "Reds” in gaol. An amusing account is given of the way in which he failed to live up to the rôle decreed for him. Who said "United Front”?

Five years of hell offers an explanation for sentimental passages whose excision would have strengthened the book. For instance, Toller puts on a pedestal the little woman (doing time for killing her child) who appeared at a window in a neighbouring block in the prison, “in order to make men happy for a few seconds” in the extreme limit of undress uniform. Motives are sometimes obscure in the sex line.

The worst part of the volume is a footling preface by the translator, Ellis Roberts, who introduces Toller as a “good left-wing Socialist.”

“Letters from Prison” is but one more justification of the policy of the S.P.G.B. expressed tersely in Clause 6 of our Declaration of Principles : "The working class must organise consciously for the conquest of the powers of Government.” We can only regret the awful waste, the pitiable suffering, the subsequent disheartening of the working class resulting from sporadic outbursts, doomed to failure.

Reginald

Workers' Councils: Solution or Delusion? (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been argued, in opposition to the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, that an analysis of working-class struggles shows that the setting up of Workers’ Councils is the way to success in the struggle for Socialism. The “evidence” cited in support of this idea is:

1. The unsatisfactory nature of all political parties (including the SPGB), and
2. The “success” of workers’ councils.

It is urged that revolutionary political parties merely re-iterate a series of abstractions and wait for the workers to eventually accept them, whereas taking part in workers’ struggles, for which Workers’ Councils are formed, educates workers through “day-to-day” experience. The notion is by no means a new one. It goes back to the formation of the Communist Party, the Communist International and the Russian Revolution in 1917.

As a result of the effect of the Russian eruption a “Conference of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils” was held in 1918 at which people like Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden had proclaimed their support of workers’ councils. On July 31st 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed, based on the following resolution:

  For the Soviet (or Workers’ Council) system as a means whereby the working class shall achieve power . . . they declare the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a necessary means of combating counter-revolution. (Report, Foundation Conference, CPGB 1920).

In the same year the Second Congress of the Comintern had concerned itself with the German question, and the problems of getting Continental “Left-Wing” Social Democrats to form Communist Parties. But the main discussion, led by Zinovieff (in his capacity as President of the Comintern) was to convince and overwhelm the British delegates (Gallacher, Murphy, Ramsay, Jack Tanner, Dick Beech) of the necessity for a political party. For several weeks, one after another, from Lenin downwards (and Lenin had written about it in Left-Wing Communism) the Russians pounded and pummelled the poor British delegates with argument after argument, fact upon fact, to prove the indispensability of organizing a political party.

Those Comrades who take a stand against the necessity of a party sometimes consider themselves a Left opposition. It is not Left, but just the other way. The propaganda against a workers’ party is a capitalist trick. Don’t all good capitalists support their parties as soon as they grow up ?

squeaked Zinovieff at them. The Soviets (Workers’ Councils), he said, do not take the place of the party; they presuppose it.

I tell you the party has been our guiding star . . . the advanced Russian worker cherishes the party as something sacred. (Report of the Second Congress of the Communist International 1920).

Highly interesting was the comment of Jack Tanner, chairman of the Shop Stewards’ movement and later president of the Engineering Union:

  The main point of Zinovieff’s argument was the absolute necessity for a strong disciplined Communist Party and also that the Dictatorship of the Proletariate is synonymous with the dictatorship of the Party. He has not clearly proved his argument. What has taken place in Russia must not be set up as a model for all other countries. In England, we are sure, things will be quite different. (Report of the Second Congress, Comintern).

As editor of the Trade Union opposition paper Solidarity he was evidently well aware of the articles on Russia in the Socialist Standard. What Lenin and Zinovieff were arguing, therefore, was the imperative necessity of a political party to take political power.

What we have now however is the claim that “times have changed”, that a large number of workers are “white collar” hands, and that the numerous cases where Workers’ Councils have emerged in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland etc. show the necessity for enlarging these councils to include “everybody” on any and every qualification or pretext — Old Age Pensioners, Tenants, School-kids, Squatters. Once this happens of course it is no longer a Workers’ Council in the old sense of the Russian Soviet which claimed to be Proletarian Democracy by excluding “parasites”, the sole qualification for representation being what International Socialists still called “workplace delegation”. This could only be a loosely federated political party calling itself “Workers’ Council”, somewhat like the Labour Party with its nebulous “affiliated” membership (half of which is moonshine) advocating contradictory reforms, and a constant hotbed of internecine struggles between opposing sections or factions.

One delusion concerning political power had its origin in the abortive Spartacus “putsch” in Germany in 1918, and the curious myth that the German ruling class suspended or rebelled against Parliament by organizing the so-called “Freikorps.” Nothing is farther from the truth. The Spartacus episode was the Comintern’s most disastrous and irresponsible stunt — so bad that on learning the sorry facts the ECCI sent telegrams calling the revolt off, after a few hundred German workers had gone to their doom.

In fact the Freikorps was recruited, paid and ordered by the German Social-Democratic Government. Their political commander was Gustav Noske (Ebert’s “bloodhound”), and the first thing Ebert did was get the support of the Army Supreme Command. This was decisive; Ebert promised the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils elections for a Constituent Assembly (which never materialized). On January 11th Noske’s volunteers crushed the Spartacus putsch in the name of Parliament, the Constituent Assembly. The Weimar Republic was proclaimed. And what had this to do with Socialism? Nothing. The German workers were Social-Democrat-Liberals with a few Marxian phrases: reformists.

The criticism of parliamentary activity — that it discourages activity by delegating power and therefore encourages passivity — can apply equally to unions or Workers’ Councils. Without the consciousness of Socialist workers they are just as reactionary, leader-dominated, and ineffectual without political power. But above all, support for Workers’ Councils against Parliament means the dissolution of the Socialist Party, and in fact, the demise of Socialism. Its one-time members would be swimming aimlessly in a flood of Squatters, Claimants’ and Pensioners’ “demands" not knowing which to support first or most.

Why is the only form of organization which can take political power a political party ? Because only a party based on individual conscious voluntary membership, where every member knows the aim and understands it, can operate unitedly for it. The actual work of Parliamentary activity will build a Socialist membership in the localities which will dispel confusion by debating the mistaken views of reformers. This is no set of permanent abstractions The abstractions are applied to life by party activity. The establishment of Socialism is the work of the working class as social man, irrespective of trade or profession.

In every instance where neo-Communists have tried sporadic revolts for limited objectives with workers’ councils, it has ended in disaster. Socialism is the political interest of the whole working class, and only represented by a political party.

Horatio.

A German Tragedy (1975)

Book Review from the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leviné by Rosa Leviné-Mayer. (Saxon House, £2.50)

This is yet another biography by the wife of a well-known revolutionary. Mrs. Kusinen has written Before and After Stalin; Heinz Neumann’s wife has recounted by her harrowing experiences in Soviet labour camps; and now Mrs. Leviné has delved into the details of her comrade’s revolutionary career.

Eugen Leviné, a prominent member of the Spartacus Group of Liebknecht and Luxembourg, was sent to Munich to organize the Bavarian Soviet Republic. An extraordinary situation prevailed in Germany at the end of the first World War. On 9th November 1918 the Kaiser abdicated. Power was assumed by the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert.

The army transferred its loyalty to the new régime and General Gruber, speaking for the army, telephoned Ebert to say the armed forces were at his disposal “if he would fight Bolshevism and maintain army discipline”.

Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils had sprung up all over Germany and elected a Central Council dominated by the Social Democratic Party. Included as an Appendix to the book is Leviné’s own report on the first All-German Soviet Congress. His lengthy speech can be summarized in one extract. Recounting the failure of the “left” to get any motion passed, he said of the first point:

to declare Germany a United Socialist Republic is one to which the SPD is particularly opposed. They do not want a Socialist Republic.

(p. 194)

The Spartacus Revolt in Berlin and Hamburg was crushed but a group of intellectuals, poets, artists and anarchists managed to proclaim a Soviet Republic in Munich, which hung on for two months, headed by Ernst Toller the dramatist. Sensing collapse and defeat Toller’s group packed it in and Leviné, instructed by the Spartacus Group and assisted by the Russians, took over.

His régime was soon crushed by the army under Social Democratic orders. In its proclamation the SPD asserted:

The troops of Hoffman’s [the SPD Prime Minister] come not as enemies of the working class, not as White Guards, but as protectors of public safety and order. Comrade Hoffman is no reactionary but a radical champion of the socialist movement.

(P-194)

The Bavarian Soviet was ruthlessly suppressed by working men, Social Democrats. Leviné was sentenced to death and faced the firing squad on the first day of May. His last speech to his murderers in the court showed him to be a man of considerable perception and boundless party loyalty: he was aware that the policy of the Spartacists was wrong, but was unable to betray it.

Horatio.