The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Like a man beginning to doubt the Biblical story of Creation, Bernstein was assailed by the agonies of failing faith. He became moody and irritable and at one point even applied for a job in a bank in the Transvaal. Eleanor Marx wrote to Kautsky that Bernstein was in bad spirits and making enemies. But intellectual courage won. From 1896 to 1898 he submitted a series of articles on “Problems of Socialism” to the Neue Zeit which instantly provoked outcries and tirades. The German Socialist world was thrown into an orgy of controversy, heightened when Bernstein embodied his ideas in an address which he sent to the German party’s Congress at Stuttgart in October, 1898, and subsequently enlarged into a book, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (The Evolution of Socialism), published in March, 1899.

  It set forth the facts contrary to Marx: the middle class was not disappearing; the number of propertied persons was increasing, not decreasing. In Germany the working class was not sinking in progressive impoverishment but slowly making gains. Capital was not accumulating among a diminishing number of capitalists but was rather being diffused over a wider ownership through the medium of stocks and shares. Increased production was not all being consumed by capitalists but was spreading into increased consumption by the middle class and even, as they earned more, by the proletariat. In Germany the consumption of sugar, meat and beer was going up. The wider the spread of money, the less chance of any single economic crisis bringing about a final crash. If Socialists waited for that, Bernstein warned, they might wait indefinitely. In short, the grim twins, Verelendung and Zusammenbruch, were shadows.

  In place of the Marxian dialectic, Bernstein suggested a capitalist economy capable of indefinite expansion and ability to adjust itself so as to rule out the supposedly inevitable breakdown. In that case the existing order was here to stay. If breakdown and revolution were not, after all, inescapable, then the Socialist goal might be an ethical democratic society based on the support of all classes, rather than on the proletariat alone. If revolutionary aims were abandoned, Bernstein declared, carried away on a wave of optimism, the working class could win the support of the bourgeoisie for reforms within the existing order.

  The implication for “Millerandism” was clear. If capitalism and Socialism were not, after all, to be a stark choice of one or the other, if society was to continue with some of this and some of that, then there was no further point in Socialists excluding themselves from a role in government.

  Revision meant in effect abandonment of the class struggle. It was a stake plunged into the heart of Socialism. Bernstein did not shrink. The workers, he brazenly suggested, were not, as Marx assumed, a coherent, homogeneous “class,” conscious of themselves as “the proletariat” or likely to become so. They were divided between rural and urban, skilled and unskilled, factory and home, with different interests and different levels of earning power. Many were hostile or indifferent to Socialism and tended to share bourgeois morals and habits rather than sharing Socialist contempt for the bourgeois.

  If class was not, after all the primary loyalty of the worker, then it followed that his interests like those of any citizen were bound up with the national interests of his country. Here was the terrible horizon of Revision. Bernstein even banished the cruel edict of the Communist Manifesto: “the worker has no Fatherland.” When every workingman had the vote, he said, as in Germany, he acquired political rights and responsibilities and must therefore think in terms of the national interest.

  Revision tore Socialism apart. Bernstein’s open formulation of the case rallied adherents long troubled by their own doubts. Party leaders rushed to attack the heretic. He was accused of being “English.” Kautsky refuted every argument in a book, Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Program, which was intended to dispose of him but somehow did not. Dispute swelled and penetrated every meeting, newspaper and policy committee. Charged with ignoring the final goal of Socialism, Bernstein made the shocking reply, “I confess openly I have little interest in what is generally called ‘the final goal of Socialism.’ This goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement [for social progress] everything.” He decided to come home to defend himself in person. Friends interceded for him with the Government, and Chancellor von Bülow, calculating that he would be a disruptive influence, allowed the indictment against him to lapse. Returning in 1901, Bernstein was elected to the Reichstag in a by-election in 1902. He became the editor of a Revisionist journal and the oracle of a Revisionist faction which sprang up within the party and continued to grow.

  The appeal of Revision was that it offered an end to Socialist isolation, opened the door to participation and also to ambition. It allowed Socialists to feel themselves part of their country, however contrary the feeling was to the command of the prophet. It recognized another reality: that imperceptibly, in a way Marx had not foreseen, a transfer of power between classes was in fact taking place, like water seeping through a dam.

  Revision had a fault which Viktor Adler noted. It was said of Adler that like Montaigne he should have adopted a pair of scales for his emblem and the motto “Que sais-je?” because he always looked for some evil in anything good and some good in anything evil. In a letter to Bernstein he wrote that he had brought into the open doubts which all Socialists felt at one time or another but that in the end Adler himself would side with the Revolutionaries because Revision carried the mortal danger that “Socialists would lose sight of Socialism.”

  In the French Socialist world, at the same time, the quarrels let loose by le cas Millerand were even more ferocious and divisive than those in Germany. Distressed though he had been at Millerand’s acceptance of office, Jaurès, when forced to take a stand, supported collaboration as against no collaboration at all. At the French party’s Congress in Paris in December, 1899, he denied that it would lead to personal corruption, as charged by the Marxists. Since, he argued, it was impossible to predict when the capitalist collapse would come, it was necessary to work for reforms while preparing the way. “We must not fight from a futile distance,” he said, “but from the heart of the citadel.” Enraged orations by his opponents filled the hall. “Tall, thin, desiccated, his eyes ablaze like black fire,” Guesde preached the purity of Marxism and was citing Liebknecht when one excited Ministerialist, as the supporters of Millerand were called, shouted, “Down with Liebknecht!” The shock that passed over the faces of the Guesdists, a delegate said later, was as if someone had shouted “Down with God!” in Notre Dame. After three days of intense fracas the proposition was put, “Yes or no, does the class struggle permit a Socialist to enter a bourgeois government?” The vote was for No but was immediately followed by another vote permitting Ministerialism under exceptional circumstances. With Jaurès pleading for unity the Congress managed to close under a patched-up formula in which underlying antagonisms were unresolved. Two parties thereafter emerged: Guesde, Vaillant and Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, formed the Socialist Party of France committed to “no compromise with any fraction of the bourgeoisie” and to the destruction of capitalism. Jaurès, Millerand, Briand and Viviani formed the French Socialist Party committed to a reform program for “immediate realization.”

  Throughout the world in every Socialist party headquarters and meeting hall where the red flag stood dustily in a corner, Revision and le cas Millerand widened old schisms. While doctrinaire Socialists clung to original principles, the Revisionists were discovering that Socialism, like politics, was the art of the possible. More divided than ever, the Second International assembled for its fifth Congress in Paris in September, 1900, in the midst of the Exposition. With the city full of visitors and the center of world attention, Socialist leaders were anxious to prevent an open rupture. Kautsky contrived a resolution which, while refusing to approve Millerand’s action, did not condemn it. Delegates called it the Kaoutchouc (india-rubber) Resolution because it was so elastic. Pounded in debate, slashed by the furious swordplay of De Leon, it occupied almost the entire time of the Congress. At one point a German d
elegate, Erhard Auer, let slip a regret that the opportunity for a cas Millerand was not likely to offer itself to German Socialists. Exposing a basic fact of life in his country, the remark caused an outburst of applause, hisses and outraged discussion in the corridors. Eventually, under the expert piloting of Jaurès, bent as ever on unity, the Kautsky Resolution was passed over the heads of an intransigent minority. Jaurès’ theme, as at his own Congress, was: “We are all good revolutionaries; let us make that clear and let us unite!” But the fact was something less than the wish.

  With the Boer War, the war in the Philippines and the Boxer Rebellion in progress, delegates found it easy to unite on a resolution put forward by Rosa Luxemburg stating that capitalism would collapse as a consequence, not of economic conditions, but of imperialist rivalries. Recommending Socialist parties to work against war by organizing and educating youth to carry on the class struggle, by voting against military and naval estimates and by anti-militarist protest meetings, the resolution was passed unanimously along with another denouncing the recent Hague Conference as a fraud.

  The only concrete accomplishment of the Congress was a decision to establish a permanent organization in the form of a Bureau in Brussels of which Vandervelde was named chairman and Camille Huysmans, another Belgian, secretary. It was to pass interim resolutions, prepare agenda for Congresses and hold emergency meetings, if necessary, to which member nations would each send two delegates. As the budget allocated to it was minuscule, the Bureau, as time went on, did not acquire great prestige or executive power, and except as a mail drop, served chiefly to emphasize that the sinews of internationalism were slender.

  Revision continued to cut deep inroads. Jaurès, while defending collaboration as a fact of political life, refused to accept Bernstein’s revision of theory. In the controversy between Bernstein and Kautsky, he told a Socialist Student Conference in 1900, “I am, on the whole, with Kautsky.” Bernstein was wrong, he said, about the proletarian and bourgeois classes merging at their edges. Between the class that possesses the means of production and the class that does not “there is a definite line of demarcation,” although of course there were intermediate shadings; and from these, Jaurès, once more the professor, launched himself happily on the wings of philosophic discourse. “One goes from white to black, from purple to red, from night to day by these imperceptible transitions which allowed Heraclitus to say that in day there is always some night and in night some day.… In fact, it is a characteristic of extremes that they are approached by intermediary nuances.…” Jaurès sailed on, holding his audience entranced until with a snap he came back to the issue. However “radically antagonistic” the classes, that did not mean there could be no contact or cooperation, and he closed with a final appeal for Socialist unity “amid loud applause, prolonged acclamations and cries of Vive Jaurès!”

  As one of the four vice-presidents of the Chamber after his re-election in 1902, Jaurès practiced cooperation daily, becoming virtual leader of the left bloc of the parties which supported the Government in its battles against the Army and the religious orders. Life was pushing him toward Revision. He attended garden parties at the British Embassy and a banquet in the Elysée Palace for the King and Queen of Italy in 1903. At the Bordeaux Congress of his party that year he argued that the State was not, as Guesde maintained, an impenetrable bloc to stand or be overthrown, but penetrable by reforms. As these were gained, one by one, the workers’ state would one day be discovered to have replaced the bourgeois state and “we shall be aware of having entered the zone of Socialism as navigators cross into the zone of a new hemisphere, though there is no rope stretched across the ocean to mark it.” But he acknowledged that the problem of reconciling collaboration with class struggle was “complicated.” In their party Congress at Dresden that year the Germans were finding it painfully so.

  The issue came to a head in the great “knee-breeches” debate. The Social-Democrats were fresh from an electoral victory in which they had polled over three million votes to win eighty-one seats in the Reichstag. To maintain rigid Marxian apartness under these circumstances, Bernstein argued, was senseless. He urged the party to assume the prerogatives of its strength, namely, to accept one of the vice-presidencies of the Reichstag which was its due. Since this required paying an official call upon the Kaiser in court costume, the problem provided matter for days of passionate dispute. Imagine Socialists dressed up in knee-breeches, stockings and buckled shoes! scolded Bebel. To make the Socialist party hoffähig (acceptable at court) was an insult to the entire working class. Bernstein suggested that the issue was less a question of what Socialists wore than of what they did in Parliament, but the debaters were too absorbed in the awful yet alluring prospect of knee-breeches to listen to him.

  The debate on Revision continued for three days with fifty speakers participating. Bernstein’s expulsion was demanded by a group led by Rosa Luxemburg, whose small, frail body contained an outsize passion for revolution. Born in Poland in 1870, the daughter of a Jewish timber merchant, she was not good-looking save for a pair of fine black eyes. She had a limp, a deformed shoulder, a powerful intellect and a strong, clear voice. Retaining always a slight Polish accent, she was a formidable orator whose eloquence so aroused an Inspector of Police, posted at one of her meetings, as to make him forget his official status and applaud loudly. Rosa sent him a note saying, “It is a pity that a man as sensible as you should be in the police but it would be a greater pity if the police should lose so human an example. Don’t applaud any more.”

  With Karl Liebknecht, son of Wilhelm, she represented the militant revolutionary left wing, centered in Leipzig, whose organ was the Leipziger Volkzeitung, edited by Franz Mehring. As the party increased in size and influence and its writers and advocates inevitably mixed in bourgeois circles, she led the resistance to growing respectability. For Revision, or “parliamentary and trade-union cretinism” as she called it, with its “comfortable theory of a peaceful passage from one economic order to another,” she had only burning contempt. She believed in the revolutionary instinct and creative revolutionary energy of the unorganized masses which were to erupt spontaneously when history required it. The task of the party, as she saw it, was to educate, guide and inspire the masses in anticipation of the historic crisis, not to soften the revolutionary impulse through reform.

  Between the Radicals and the Revisionists, the General Council of the party arbitrated, maintaining its balance without too much difficulty. As one of the leaders, Georg Ledebour, said, the party was 20 per cent radical, 30 per cent revisionist and the rest “will follow wherever Bebel goes.” Bebel arranged the usual compromise. Without expelling Bernstein, the Dresden Congress defeated his motion for cooperation and passed a resolution reaffirming the policy of class struggle “which we have triumphantly pursued hitherto,” and “decisively” rejecting any policy or tactics of “accommodation to the existing order.” Thus the largest Socialist bloc in Europe maintained fidelity to Marx on paper while the facts of Revision continued to flourish.

  Revisionists were not blind to the implications of abandoning the primacy of the class struggle. Nationalism was in the air and they felt its invigorating force. As Socialists they wanted to participate in national life, not to stay shut out, waiting for the promised collapse which never came. In the Socialist Monthly Bernstein used the English experience of imperialism and its relation to employment to argue that the fate of the working class was “indissolubly tied up” with the nation’s external affairs, that is, with its foreign markets. Labour’s interest, he said forthrightly, lay in a “Weltpolitik without war.”

  While the Germans disputed at Dresden, Revision cut a historic schism among the Russian Social-Democrats, who held their own party Congress of sixty members that year in London. No cas Millerand or even knee-breeches appeared on their horizon, nevertheless they split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over the issue of collaboration in the future. The former insisted on revolution and dictatorship of
the proletariat in one leap with no interim accommodation; the latter believed this could not be achieved until Russia had first passed through a bourgeois stage of parliamentary government during which Socialists would have to collaborate with the liberal parties.

  As a member of the Second International, the Russian party was perennially represented at international Congresses by its founder, Georgi Plekhanov, who had lived so long in exile that he had lost touch with affairs inside his own country. Apart from him, the other Russians in exile had little or no contact with the Socialists in whose countries they lived. Absorbed in their own fierce factional quarrel they held their own Congresses with little role in the International. Moving through London, Paris, Geneva and Munich, Plekhanov’s rival, Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction, relentlessly poured out his denunciations of “opportunism” and “social-chauvinism.” Now and then he visited the Bureau at Brussels, but no one, wrote Vandervelde, paid much attention to this “little man with the narrow eyes, rusty beard and monotone voice, forever explaining with exact and glacial politeness the traditional Marxist formulas.”

  Elsewhere the facts of political life were making a necessity of Revision whether the Marxists liked it or not. Industry was expanding, bringing with it a rise in trade-union membership which increased the lever of pressure in the hands of the working class. While the battle of capital and labour continued as fiercely as ever, the working class through the Socialist parties was enlarging its representation in every European Parliament. In Italy, where the peasants’ unions and agricultural cooperatives were strongly Socialist, the party increased from 26,000 votes and 6 seats in Parliament in 1892 to 175,000 votes and 32 seats in 1904. In France, Jaurès’ party, followed by the imprecations of Guesde and his followers, was performing a role in national life; and Jaurès himself was emerging as the real if not nominal leader of the Government’s majority in the Chamber. In the Socialist world he moved forward to challenge the domination of the great German monolith at the next Congress of the International, held in Amsterdam in August, 1904.