Exit Oskar the pink (1999)

From the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March the man the Sun once called the most dangerous man in Europe resigned as Germany's Finance Minister. The Sun—or rather Rupert Murdoch as a capitalist himself—didn't like him because they thought he had plans to increase direct taxes on profits in Britain up to the same level as in Germany.

Oskar Lafontaine was chairman of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which returned to power in October after years in opposition. Politicians who are out of office for long periods often loose their grip on capitalist reality—that governments must nurture profits and provide an environment in which they can flourish since they are what makes capitalism go round—and imagine that governments can work wonders simply by political will.

Sometimes, when returned to power after years in the wilderness, they try to put this mistaken idea into practice. The classic example was the French leftwing government, with Communist Party participation, that came into office when Mitterrand was first elected President in 1981. They really believed that they could "relaunch the economy" by "increasing popular consumption" and so they brought in measures to increase the minimum wage (which in France affects all wages since they are tied to it) and social benefits.

The result wasn't long in coming. Instead of economic growth being relaunched, inflation increased, leading to three devaluations of the franc in as many years. Within a year the new government adapted its policies to capitalist reality; they clawed back the reforms they had introduced and imposed austerity as a means of shifting the balance back from consumption to profits. They had learned the hard way that you cannot run capitalism in the interests of the excluded majority.

Since, with Kohl winning election after election, the SPD had been out of power for fifteen years, the big question after their September 1998 election victory was: would they make the same mistake as the first Mitterrand government, especially as they were in coalition with the Greens who also had ideas which if seriously pursued would threaten profits?

Oskar Lafontaine had written a book in which he proposed, as a way of getting Germany out of the current crisis, that wages and salaries should go up in line with productivity. He repeated this in newspaper articles and interviews after the SPD election victory. Since this would result in wages and salaries going up faster than they had been, it was equivalent to the policy pursued by the 1981 French government. And the thinking behind it was the same: if wage and salary earners had more to spend this would create more markets, so stimulating the economy to grow again.

In the event this turned out to be just another electoral promise but it earned Lafontaine the reputation of being "Red Oskar". Red used to signify revolutionary and has always been the fetish colour of Socialists. But there was nothing revolutionary about Lafontaine's ideas. He was merely putting forward the orthodox Keynesian nostrum that in a period of economic stagnation you should increase spending. Of course by the end of the 1970s Keynesianism had proved to be an utter failure on this point, as Marxists had foreseen years previously. But it is a measure of the very narrow margin of manoeuvre of reformists these days that even milk-and-water Keynesian reformism is denounced as "revolutionary" and "red".

Although, as Finance Minister, Lafontaine never tried to implement his idea of tying wages and salaries to productivity he did introduce some new direct taxes on profits and he kept on calling on the European Central Bank to reduce interest rates. He believed that this would help Germany out of the crisis (even though in Japan interest rates are less than 1 percent and they're still in the economic doldrums). For a Finance Minister to repeatedly call for a lowering of the interest rate was seen as out of order or even counterproductive. The ECB, which fixes the minimum short-term lending rate for the whole of Euroland, had to refuse such calls just to prove it did not give in to political pressure.

It was this that was the immediate cause of Lafontaine's downfall. The interest rate reduction which he and the rest of the German government wanted was being held up by his political interference making it difficult for the Bank to do this. So pressure was bought to bear and he left politics to spend more time with his family. Yet another reformist politician bit the dust. Good, or rather good as long as it helps workers in Germany and elsewhere realise that reformism is a dead-end.

Adam Buick

Rosa Luxemburg's Writings (1973)

Book Review from the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rosa Luxemburg. Selected Political Writings ed. and introduced by Robert Looker. Cape. £1.50.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870 in Russian Poland but later moved to Germany. Very early on she made a name for herself in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an opponent of Bernstein's Revisionism. Her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution was an attack on the view that capitalism could be gradually transformed into Socialism by social reforms, trade-union pressure, co-ops, etc.

But she never argued that a socialist party should not advocate reforms at all. In fact she agreed with the SPD's tactic on reforms: that the working class should be encouraged to struggle for them or against specific capitalist measures in order to prepare itself for the eventual capture of political power for Socialism (see some of the articles published here in the section "Defending the Tactic"). When, in the decade or so up to 1914, she came to realise how reformism in the SPD was not confined just to Bernstein and the Revisionists but also permeated the thinking of the whole leadership, she blamed its concentrating on getting reforms through Parliament. She did not blame advocating reforms as such and in fact her answer to the danger of reformism was to involve the mass of the workers themselves instead of just a few MP's in the reform struggle by means of the "mass strike". This was a tactic she had picked up from the Russian revolution of 1905 (which she had participated in to a certain extent, most of Poland then being part of Russia).

The final bankruptcy of the SPD was exposed in Luxemburg's eyes by its notorious vote for war credits for the German government on 4 August 1914. Luxemburg began to call for a new Socialist International and eventually helped to form a new party, the Spartacus League. She herself was a determined opponent of the War and went to jail for her anti-war activities. Some of her best writings date from this period, especially the classic socialist statement against the First World War, The Junius Pamphlet (also called The Crisis of Social Democracy). Some of the articles selected here, especially "Rebuilding the International" and "Either Or", could have come from any of the SOCIALIST STANDARD  of 1915 and 1916. Indeed the first one could quite literally have done since most of it was reprinted, with a slight reservation, in our issue of September 1915.

In November 1918 the Kaiser and his government were overthrown and political power passed into the hands of pro-war Social Democrats. They pursued the policy of establishing a bourgeois, democratic state in Germany, establishing stable capitalist rule through Parliament. The Spartacus League, including Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, urged the workers to oppose this and to set up rival workers' and soldiers' councils as the first step on the long road to the capture of political power for Socialism. For the Spartacus League (unlike the Bolsheviks) did not believe in a minority seizure of power. As its 1918 pamphlet What Does The Spartakusbund Want? put it:

The Spartacus League will never assume government in any way other than through the clear unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass in all Germany, never in any other way than on the strength of the masses' conscious agreement with the views, aims and methods of the struggle of the Spartacus League.

Or, as Rosa Luxemburg herself put it:

Without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no Socialism.

Even so, some of the members of the Spartacus League were over-enthusiastic and—despite warnings from Luxemburg—were provoked in January 1919 into an armed uprising in Berlin. Loyally she went along with them. It cost her her life. On 15 January soldiers responsible to the Social Democratic Minister Noske smashed her head in.

This book selects some of her previously untranslated articles, though it omits any of those where she discusses nationalism and exposes "the right to self-determination" as a fraud. Could this be because the translator is associated with "International Socialism" and would therefore find her views on this embarrassing?

Adam Buick

Rosa Luxemburg (1987)

Film Review from the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

For someone like myself who rates Rosa Luxemburg among the great socialist theorists, to go and see a film about her life was to take a risk. The risk was that the director would attempt to present a glossy, Hollywood version of the "life of a great woman", devoid of political content - the fate of Reds, the film version of the book, Ten Days That Shook The World, about an American's experiences during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

But Margarethe von Trotta's film, Rosa Luxemburg, is a sensitive portrayal that succeeds in bringing together the personal and the political, giving some insight into Luxemburg's politics as well as the woman herself. Most importantly the film doesn't trivialise her politics; they are at all times centre-stage even when we witness the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) New Year celebrations at the turn of the century and are presented with Karl Kautsky wearing a false nose. The optimism of the socialists at that party, that the 20th century would see the dawning of a new socialist era, was short-lived. It was crushed by the insanity of the first world war and the defeat within the international socialist movement of the ideas of democratic socialism by reformists on the one hand and vanguardists on the other. In many ways we are, today, still trying to overcome the legacy of that defeat.

Those unfamiliar with the debate that took place within the SPD, between revolutionary socialists like Luxemburg and the revisionists, led by Bernstein, who were willing to compromise socialism for short-term political power achieved on the basis of a reformist programme, are unlikely to have learnt very much from the film. The theoretical issues are sketched in with broad brush-strokes and very little detail. Instead it focuses on the effects of the first world war which led to those who called themselves socialists urging (in Luxemburg's words) "workers of the world to unite in peace and slit each other's throats in war". While many SPD members supported Germany's war effort, Luxemburg continued to speak out against nationalism and a war fought to protect the interests of the capitalist class which entailed the futile massacre of workers by workers. She endured one of nine terms as a political prisoner for her pains.

After the war Luxemburg continued to speak out against senseless violence when she opposed attempts to get socialism through insurrection. She recognised that just as it is impossible to have socialism in one city, in this case Berlin, it is also impossible for there to be socialism without there being a majority of socialists to make it work. So for sincere and committed socialists to engage in bloody street-fighting in the name of socialist revolution was not only futile but likely to produce a reaction. In Rosa Luxemburg's case the reaction came in the form of a knock on the head by a soldier's butt, a bullet at close range and the unceremonious dumping of her body off a bridge into a river.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this is the fact that it portrays Luxemburg not as a superwoman or heroine but as a woman who, despite her sharp intellect and skills as a political writer and speaker, is also only too human. Often beset with doubts and fears, she had also to come to terms with the contradictions and sacrifices that her political commitment entailed for her personal and emotional life. She was a woman who was devoted to the cause of socialism and yet could still be loving and jealous by turns; a loyal friend to other women in the socialist movement like Clara Zetkin and Luise Kautsky; a woman who, despite her ability to hold the attention of the crowds who attended the meetings she addressed, confessed to feeling happier communing with nature than making political speeches; a woman, who despite everything chose politics when her lover. Leo Jogiches, told her that she had to choose between being a mother and a revolutionary.

Although this film doesn't try to make Rosa Luxemburg into a heroine, it nevertheless shows her to have been an extraordinary woman. My fears about going to see it were totally ill-founded. It is a film both moving and inspiring.

Janie Percy-Smith

The Socialist Party and the Second International (Part 2) (1968)

From the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month we described the early attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to the Second International when we saw ourselves as part of the intransigent wing of international social democracy.

There was a good deal of discussion on the question of the International by the delegates to the Socialist Party's first annual conference in 1905. T.A. Jackson pointed out that the British delegation had been the largest of all at the Amsterdam Congress and that it was "composed of persons opposed to the principles of this Party." For all that, Fitzgerald argued that the Socialist Party "should keep steadily fighting at the Congress for the principle that only Socialist parties should be admitted to the Congresses. When this had been done for two or three Congresses many of the other parties would adopt this view" (!) This, of course, was nothing more than wishful thinking. Parties like the SPD were not likely to adopt policies which, if applied rigorously, would have excluded themselves from the International. The only chance of their taking this step would have been for them to first adopt a Socialist programme—but this would have meant somehow overcoming the objections of the vast majority of their members and supporters, who were committed to capitalism almost to a man.

In the end the Conference instructed the executive committee to draw up a series of resolutions embodying the following points:

1. That only Socialist organisations recognising the class was in theory and practice should be represented at International Socialist Congresses.
2. That disputes between the carious parties in each country as to the genuine Socialist nature of their organisations should be settled by the Congress itself.
3. That the Socialist Party should endeavour to raise these questions on the floor of the Congress.

The executive committee carried out its orders and a statement along these lines was sent to the International Bureau in July 1905. Particularly interesting was its explanation, for the benefit of the Bureau, of just what features distinguish a Socialist party.

Socialist bodies (must) accept the essential principles of Socialism: socialisation of the means of production and distribution; union and international action of workers; Socialist conquest of public powers by the proletariat organised as a class party, recognising and proclaiming the class war, running all candidates upon this basis, and adopting an attitude of hostility, under all circumstances to all individual members and sections of the Capitalist Party.  

The next few months saw a number of clashes between the Socialist Party and several leaders of social-democratic parties abroad. The first was in October 1905 when Paul Brousse and a group of municipal councillors from Paris, all members of the French "Socialist" Party, were entertained by the Liberal-controlled London County Council during a visit to Britain. A protest telegram was sent to the National Congress of the French party and this was backed up by a letter in which the general secretary explained that this "interchange of capitalist municipal courtesies" would be utilised by the Liberal party to obtain the votes of the British working class at the approaching general election. In fact, this election sparked off a much bigger row when, after the Liberals had been returned, Bebel of the SPD sent a telegram to Reynold's News saying that he "welcomed the result of the elections". The executive committee's first reaction was to give Bebel the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was being misrepresented. After the general secretary had written to him, however, he replied that he had been correctly reported and that "by the way of explanation I wish to state that concerning 'progress internally' (a phrase which had appeared in Reynold's) I have above all in mind possible progress in the amelioration of the working class position."

On receiving this the executive committee passed a resolution with the ominous wording "That action be taken regarding A. Bebel  . . . " Nonetheless, measured against the Socialist Party's normal handling of this sort of dispute, Bebel was treated very gently. Although an "emphatic protest" was sent to the SPD leader and the German party's daily, Vorwaerts, the editorial in the Socialist Standard (April 1906) suggested that "our comrade Bebel" has "allowed himself to be betrayed into an act calculated, because it lent the countenance of approval to what was merely a capitalist victory, to defeat the purpose of Socialist propaganda . . . " This was a rather charitable explanation when it is recalled that Reynold's sent Bebel a pre-paid telegram form inviting him to write whatever comments on the elction he chose. Bebel's reply to the Socialist Party's criticism was characteristic. He made matters worse by attempting to justify his talk of progress with a reference to the "entrance of representatives of the Socialist Party into Parliament". By this he meant that a few members of the Labour Representation Committee (the Labour Party's forerunner) had been elected. He also fell back on the bluff and boast technique which the frock-coated leaders of the SPD always used when their arguments ran out: "Let no one ascribe to me what, in consideration of my past career, nobody dare impute." (6)

Shortly afterwards Lafargue was taken to task for an article he had written in the SDF's Justice along the lines that Socialists throughout the world recognised that the election of the Labour MPs was a "victory of International Socialism". The Socialist Party's reply was something of a classic and still bears repeating sixty two years later.

We cannot agree that the election of the nominees of the Labour Representation Committee were working class victories. We have shown them to have been achieved partly in alliance with capitalist Liberalism, and wholly by a class-unconscious vote. Does our comrade believe that because Trade Unions stimulated into political activity by certain legal decisions having the effect of endangering the financial reserves of their organisations, have entered into a loose association for the purpose of recovering a position they had thought themselves secure in, that, therefore, they have established themselves upon a definite class basis in opposition to the political expressions of capitalist interests? Why, every indication gives a flat denial to the supposition . . . it is idle and mischievous to endeavour, as both Bebel and Lafargue have done, to invest the movement with an importance that may only be correctly applied to an enlightened proletarian organisation on well defined class lines.(7)

The boot was on the other foot when, the following year, Neumann analysed the results of the German elections in the March 1907 Socialist Standard. While social-democrats throughout Europe were rejoicing at the quarter of a million extra votes which the SPD had secured, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was pointing out that this was no indication of a spread of Socialist ideas among the workers in Germany. Neumann emphasised that the reformist rubbish in the SPD's programme would have induced countless supporters of capitalism to vote for social-democratic candidates. Therefore "the German Socialist Party have pursued and are still pursuing a policy taht has resulted in conveying a false impression as to the real extent of class-consciousness among the German proletariat." Yet there was still a conciliatory tone in all this: 

Let us hope that the criticism given in a fair, comrade-like spirit, will be of some assistance in bringing the oldest section of the international labour movement to the reconsideration of their tactics and their adopting in the near future a position of 'no compromise', and of hostility to capitalism every time and all the time.

The Socialist Standard was also hopelessly exaggerated in its estimates of the number of Socialists in the  SPD. As well as referring to "the pleasant fact that a small but steadily growing faction of the German Party has for some years put forward a tremendous effort to induce the Party to abandon its policy of reform and compromise", it was suggested that "there is every reason to believe that in at least the twelve constituencies where the Socialist vote was in 1903 between 52 to 58 per cent of the electorate, and where at the recent elections there has been throughout an increase of 2 to 3 per cent, that there are many who thoroughly understand the working-class position." All the same, the trend was for a definite hardening of attitude and there was a good indication of how far this had gone when, a few months later, Bebel was again attacked in the column of this journal. He had given an interview to a French reporter in which he had argued that, as long as the danger of war existed, every country must have armed forces to defend itself against invasion. Watts' reply in the Socialist Standard(8) appeared under a headline of "German Party Leader as a Jingo"; this time there was no references to "our comrade"!

Once again there was a lengthy discussion on the International at the third annual conference of the Socialist Party in 1907. This mainly centred on whether delegates should be sent to the 1908 International Congress in Stuttgart. Some members argued strongly for representatives at the Congress. Fitzgerald was one of these and his point was that in this way we could gain information about parties in other countries similar to ourselves. Neumann went further, suggesting that "if we could get in contact with these others we could organise the nucleus of an International Congress that would that would be Socialist". But a majority of the delegates were doubtful that anything useful could be achieved in light of our previous experience and Killick probably spoke for most when he argues that if men like Ferri, Michels, Guesde and Lafargue really were thinking along our lines then they, being stronger, would have taken the initiative. Bearing in mind what eventually became of the "left wing" of the social-democratic movement, this showed a good deal of insight. At any rate the Conference decided not to send delegates to Stuttgart but recommended the executive committee to "use their best endeavours to get in touch with those abroad who occupy our position".
(to be concluded)

John Crump

NOTES

6. Vorwaerts—15/3/1906. Socialist Standard—April 1906.

7. Socialist Standard. May 1906

8. Socialist Standard. June 1907.