The Red Flag: A History of Communism (13 page)

The Germans’ hegemony in the international socialist movement was clear even as it paid obeisance to the French revolutionary tradition. On 14 July 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the Second International held its inaugural meeting in the Rue Petrelle, Paris. Its initial prospects did not look good. A group of moderate socialists – the French ‘Possibilists’ – held a rival congress at the same time, and there were rumours that they were plotting to accost naïve foreign delegates at the railway station and lure them away from the Social Democrats. But these fears proved groundless. The Rue Petrelle Congress was an enormous success: 391 delegates attended from twenty countries, including the USA.
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British representatives included the poet and Romantic medieval nostalgist William Morris, and the Independent
Labour Party MP Keir Hardie.
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The French delegation was the largest, as was to be expected given the location. The foreign delegates could visit the newly built monument to industrial modernity and the French Revolution – the Eiffel Tower, and for a time Paris indeed seemed to be the centre of the progressive world. But the most cohesive and dominant group at the Congress was the German SPD. The Second International, which met every two to four years, was by no means a rigid, doctrinaire organization, but it did demonstrate the dominance of the Marxist tradition, and of the elder-brother party, the SPD.

Engels could take much of the credit for this success. On Marx’s death, few countries had popular Marxist workers’ parties. Engels was determined to remedy this weakness and establish Marxism as a powerful political force, unlike Marx, who took little interest in Marxist political organization. Engels’ easy-going nature, sociability and patience proved to be good assets, and he acted as a mentor to European socialist politicians, engaging in lengthy correspondence and writing hundreds of letters of advice and criticism from his base in London. Marxists throughout Europe, in turn, treated him as the voice of orthodoxy. But Engels did not only use letters to bind his virtual community of Marxists together; he also sent Christmas puddings, cooked in his own kitchen, to favoured revolutionaries every December. They even reached distant Russia – Petr Lavrov, the non-Marxist ‘Populist’ socialist, was a regular recipient of this annual internationalist gift.
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If Engels founded the Marxist ‘church’, then the first ‘pope’ of socialism, as he was called at the time, was Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was born in Prague to a theatrical family, and his mother was a well-known writer of Romantic socialist novels. However, he was not as ‘bohemian’ as one might have expected, and he was commonly regarded as a pedant.
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Engels found him a pleasant drinking companion, but commented that he was ‘thoroughly cocky’ with a superficial and unserious approach to politics, made worse by the fact that he wrote a great deal for money. Kautsky was indeed an autodidact. Yet his wide interests, and his willingness to pronounce confidently on a range of subjects, were ideal qualities for the task which Kautsky set himself: creating and popularizing a single, coherent, ‘orthodox’ Marxist worldview, based on the Modernist version of Marxism. Discussion of Kautsky has often been couched in religious terms: he was the socialist ‘pope’, his commentary on the Erfurt programme,
The Class Struggle
, was the ‘catechism of
Social Democracy’, and his version of Marxism was the ‘orthodoxy’. However, Kautsky’s own intellectual interests lay in science, in particular in Darwinism, and he sought to build on Engels’ modern, ‘scientific’ Marxism.

He certainly proved highly effective in defending the Modernist Marxism of Engels against its opponents, and propagating it in the parties of the Second International. He even had success in Russia, where one might expect an oppressive regime to have produced a more Radical Marxism, and Georgii Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, broadly followed the Kautskian line. For Kautsky, using a scholastically fine distinction, the SPD was a ‘revolutionary’ but not a ‘revolution-making’ party. Marxists were not to participate in bourgeois governments and were to keep their place outside the political establishment. They had to believe that ultimately the capitalist system would be destroyed in a revolution, by which Kautsky meant a conscious seizure of power by the proletariat, but this would not necessarily involve violence. At the same time, however, Marxists were to press for reforms to help the working class, including the expansion of liberal democratic rights, and the organization of parliamentary campaigns. These two positions were rather awkwardly conjoined in a policy of ‘revolutionary waiting’. The revolution would only take place when economic conditions were right, and until then the Social Democrats had to wait. But even after the revolution removed the German Reich, the party’s goal would be the perfection of parliamentary democracy, not a Paris Commune-style state.

Although the German SPD never joined a government, in practice it became increasingly willing to work for reform within the existing system. Even though Social Democrats continued to be subject to petty harassment in many areas – in Prussia in 1911 police even banned the use of the colour red on the first letters of banners in demonstrations – they increasingly acted as a reformist party within the system, controlling local governments and proposing legislation in the Reichstag to improve working conditions.
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This reformist effort was particularly effective from the 1890s, as the party and the unions enjoyed more success. The internal organization of the party became highly complex, and full-time party officials tended to be politically cautious. Kautsky himself complained about the ossification of the party in 1905: the party executive was ‘a collegium of old men’ who had become ‘absorbed in
bureaucracy and parliamentarism’.
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But the Germans were not the only ones who proved susceptible to the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie. In more liberal countries, such as France, it was even more difficult to maintain a principled distance from bourgeois politics, and the head of the Social Democratic SFIO, Jean Jaurès, was willing to collaborate with the Third Republic over some issues;
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in Italy, too, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) cooperated with Giolitti’s Liberal government for a time, although much of the party objected.
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Kautsky’s Modernist orthodoxy was therefore difficult to sustain, and it came under increasing attack from a reformist ‘right’ within the party, which agitated for the abandonment of the revolution completely, and from a Radical left which believed that Social Democracy was undergoing a debilitating process of
embourgeoisement
. From the 1890s, even as Marxism appeared to be at the height of its power in Western Europe, it was increasingly divided, both amongst the party elite and the mass membership. Whilst war and the Bolshevik revolution ultimately destroyed the unity which Engels and Kautsky had forged in the 1880s and 1890s, the conflicts had become evident long before then, and the balancing act between right and left became very difficult to maintain.
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The first major challenge to Kautskian orthodoxy came from the reformists. In 1899 Alexandre Millerand became the first socialist to become a minister in a liberal government – that of the French Prime Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. Although he achieved significant social reforms, his decision to serve in the government ultimately split the Socialist party into reformists, under Jean Jaurès, and hardliners under Jules Guesde. At the same time, in Germany, Kautskian orthodoxy was being challenged in a more fundamental way by a major figure in the SPD, Eduard Bernstein.

Bernstein’s heresy came as a shock to party elders, because he was close to Marx and Engels and was thought to be their natural successor. The son of a plumber turned railway engineer, he was brought up in poverty, but had been bright enough to attend the
Gymnasium
, and became a bank clerk. Yet despite this semi-proletarian background, his behaviour and tastes were conventionally bourgeois. His early politics developed at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, and were nationalistic, but from 1872 he became an adherent of a broadly Marxist line. After the promulgation of the anti-socialist laws, Bernstein left Germany for exile in Switzerland, where he edited the party journal
Der Sozialdemokrat
between 1880 and 1890. Deported from Switzerland in 1888 he left for London, where, unable to return to Germany for legal reasons, he was forced to stay until 1901.

It is probable that Bernstein’s views were changed by his enforced sojourn in England. Governments there were relatively responsive to working-class demands, the socialist movement was highly reformist, and it seemed difficult to believe that a crisis of capitalism was imminent. And from 1896 he plucked up courage to tackle orthodox Marxism head on in a number of articles for
Neue Zeit
. Marx, he claimed, had been too willing to accept revolutionary violence as the way to reach socialism. He was also wrong in predicting the crisis of capitalism and the increasing poverty of the proletariat. Neither, Bernstein argued with some justification, was happening; as he stated baldly: ‘Peasants do not sink; middle class does not disappear; crises do not grow ever larger; misery and serfdom do not increase.’
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Social Democrats, he insisted, could peacefully reform capitalism through parliament, and public ownership would gradually emerge from private property because it was more rational. As he famously declared, full Communism was less important than social reform: ‘What is generally called the ultimate goal of socialism is nothing to me; the movement is everything.’
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Just as Bernstein argued for workers to become full members of the ‘bourgeois’ nation state, so he appealed for Social Democrats to accept the nationalist and imperialist projects of those states.
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He rejected Marx’s view that the working man had no fatherland, and insisted that proletarians had to show loyalty to their nations. He was also prepared to accept empire, as long as it acted as a force of civilization.

Bernstein’s ideas were met with a torrent of criticism from the leading figures of the Second International. He was charged, justly, with destroying the identity of Marxism and transforming it into a form of left-wing liberalism. Yet ultimately his ‘revisionism’ had a good deal of support within the Social Democratic movement – whether from the French Jean Jaurès, the Swedish Hjalmar Branting, or the Italian Francesco Merlino. It also proved attractive to many ordinary socialist supporters, though there was enormous regional variation. In Italy, revisionism, together with orthodoxy, was more popular in the North than in the more repressive South, where a more revolutionary Marxism
flourished. Similarly, in Germany it was more common in the liberal South-West. Revisionist sentiments also seem to have been popular amongst ordinary German workers, and especially within the trade unions. As one explained, ‘There will always be rich and poor. We would not dream of altering that. But we want a better and just organization at the factory and in the state.’
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Despite this support, Bernstein and revisionism were denounced as heretical in a number of Social Democratic congresses. At the Amsterdam Congress of the International in 1904, Kautsky and the SPD attracted a majority for their motion opposing participation in bourgeois governments. Even so, substantial opposition to the anti-revisionist line was expressed, largely by parties in countries where liberal democracy was strong and socialists had a chance of power – in Britain, France, Scandinavia, Belgium and Switzerland. Representatives from parties in more authoritarian countries, in contrast, opposed revisionism. Amongst them were the representative from Japan, the Bulgarian and future Bolshevik Christian Rakovsky, and a young radical from Russia, Vladimir Lenin. They were joined by the brilliant polemicist Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Communist active in the German SPD.

The influence of these radicals presaged a new challenge to Kautsky’s orthodoxy from the authoritarian East. In January 1905 revolution broke out in Russia, which seemed to suggest that popular action could push history forward towards Communism and that Kautsky’s strategy of ‘revolutionary waiting’ was flawed. The Russian workers’ deployment of the weapon of the General Strike in October 1905 also encouraged a working-class radicalism in the West that had been brewing for some time.
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There is a good deal of evidence that many workers were becoming more radical in the decade before World War I. Trade-union membership swelled throughout Europe, and strikes became much more common in this period, especially between 1910 and 1914 as inflation eroded workers’ living standards. But this renewed labour militancy was in some ways the rebirth of the old artisanal radicalism amongst skilled factory workers. Technological change was mechanizing areas of production that had previously been dominated by skilled craftsmen. In the metal-working industry, for instance, the use of more effective lathes and mechanical drills allowed employers to replace more skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled labour. And these skilled, often literate workers were precisely those who were most likely to defend themselves.
Metal-workers were to become some of the most radical sections of the working class in the next few decades.

Initially, this militancy fuelled the syndicalist movement, which was in some ways an updating of Proudhon’s anarchism. Emerging in the French trade unions in the 1890s, syndicalists condemned Social Democrat parties for taking part in elections and parliaments, and called for direct working-class action in mass strikes and acts of sabotage. They also condemned Marxists’ love of organization and centralization.