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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The duel of Jaurès and Bebel made the Amsterdam Congress remembered by everyone present as the most stimulating of all the meetings of the Second International. Five hundred delegates attended, of whom about two hundred at any one time understood the language of the speaker. The platform was draped in red stamped with a gold monogram of the initials I.S.C., which, with the S twining around the I bore a startling resemblance to a well-known symbol of capitalism. Overhead a banner bore in Dutch the device on which everyone could still agree, Proletaariers van alle Landen, Vereinigt U! (Workers of the World, Unite!)

  Factions were multiple. Britain had four delegations: the ILP led by Keir Hardie, the Socialist-Democratic Federation by Hyndman, the Labour Representation Committee by Shackleton, and a Fabian group. France had three delegations and the United States two, with the inevitable De Leon casting his scorn on all. He disapproved of the “social and picnic” aspect of the Congress, of delegates rustling papers and conversing and walking about during speeches, visiting with foreign friends, introducing one to another, arriving and departing and slamming doors. He pronounced Jaurès an “unqualified nuisance in the Socialist movement,” Bebel its “evil genius,” Adler “absurd,” Vandervelde a “comedian,” Hyndman “too dull” to understand what was going on, the British trade unionists “disastrous,” Shackleton a “capitalist placeman,” and Jean Allemane a “flannel-mouthed blatherskite.” The only party which did not betray the working class by “revisionist flapdoodlism” was his own, whose attitude at all times was “sword drawn, scabbard thrown away.”

  Cooperation was the question to be settled, placed on the agenda by demand of Guesde. Bebel’s object was to impose the Dresden Resolution of the German party upon the International. It provided, he said, the correct guidance for Socialists at all times in all circumstances since it stated the fundamental antagonism between the proletarian and the capitalist state. He took occasion to cite the growing strength of the German party. Jaurès retorted that if Socialists were as strong as that in France, they would “make something happen.” Between the appearance of German strength and the reality of their influence, he said, launching upon a major offensive, there was a startling contrast. Why? Because “there is no revolutionary tradition among your workers. They never conquered universal suffrage on the barricades. They received it from above.” All the deputies in the Reichstag were powerless, for the Reichstag was itself powerless in any case. It was the very helplessness of the German Socialists which enabled them to take an uncompromising stand on doctrine. What weighed most heavily upon Europe now was not the bold attempt of French Socialists to play a part in their national life, “but the tragic impotence of German Social Democracy.” Passionately he defended his main thesis: that Socialists without abandoning principle must be the “marching wing” of democratic progress, even if necessary in liaison with bourgeois parties.

  “Certainly Germany is a reactionary, feudal, police state, the worst governed country in Europe” except for Turkey and Russia, Bebel replied, “but we scarcely need anyone from the outside to tell us how dismal our conditions are.” Jaurès’ policy, he said, would corrupt the proletariat. The Dresden Resolution was the only safe guide. Shrilly Rosa Luxemburg denounced Jaurès as “der grosse Verderber” (the great corrupter). When he stood up to reply, asking who would translate for him, she answered, “I will, if you like, Citizen Jaurès.” Looking around with a broad smile Jaurès said, “You see, Citizens, even in battle there is collaboration.”

  Refusing to give up the principle of class war, the majority voted for the Dresden Resolution against Jaurès, combining, as Vandervelde said, doctrinal enmity with personal sympathy. “We remembered the Dreyfus Affair” and the “magnificent ardor” of Jaurès’ great battle against the accumulated forces of reaction, but the majority could not nerve themselves to cut the umbilical cord to Marx. In a final effort to close the rifts of Revision, the Congress adopted a last resolution stating it to be “indispensable” to have only one Socialist party in each country henceforth. All who claimed the name of Socialist must work for unity in the interest of the working classes of the world, to whom they would be responsible for “the mortal consequences of a continuance of their divisions.”

  A problem that had not yet been their main concern made a tentative appearance at Amsterdam. With the echo of the Russo-Japanese War in their ears, delegates discussed working-class responsibility to society in the event of another war and the feasibility of a general strike. German Marxist ardor cooled at the very word. To talk general strike was one thing; to get the unions to act on it quite another. So far as the German trade unions were concerned, the “political mass strike,” as they called it, was anathema. If the Fatherland were attacked, said Bebel, old as he was, he with every other Social-Democrat would shoulder a rifle and fight to defend his country. Looking very grave, Jaurès said to Vandervelde on their way out, “I think, my friend, I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.”

  On his return home, as a loyal Socialist in obedience to the Amsterdam decision, he moved back toward a rapprochement with Guesde, reuniting the two parties in the following year as the Socialist Party, French Section of the Workers’ International, commonly called, from its French initials, the SFIO. It declared itself to be “not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution” and verbally repudiated collaboration. Although this was a defeat for his position, Jaurès did not make a fetish of words. He let doctrine follow action and could the more easily concede formula to Guesde since he himself was the real leader of the union. Cooperation for him was not an end in itself but an avenue of action.

  For some it proved indeed the corrupter in a political sense. In 1906, the same year in which the ILP entered the House of Commons and John Burns the Cabinet, French Socialists polled 880,000 votes and won fifty-four seats in the Chamber. Briand, who had been active in the matter of disestablishing the religious schools, was offered the post of Minister of Education. He accepted and in the ensuing bitterness left the party. A few months later Viviani followed him into office as Minister of Labour. Together with Millerand, who now called himself an Independent Socialist, they held a succession of offices from now on, with Briand reaching the premiership within three years and Viviani five years later. Carrying cooperation to its logical extreme, they became, as Ambassador Izvolsky said, “reasonable through the exercise of power.”

  In 1905 the great Marxist event, Revolution, suddenly took place—in the wrong way in the wrong country. Russia had not reached the highly industralized stage which Marx had predicated as necessary for collapse. The rising was not the work of a self-conscious disciplined proletariat but simply of exasperated human beings. No one was surprised that it failed, but the most extraordinary aspect of its passage was that it left Socialism virtually untouched.

  All over the world people were horrified by the Cossacks’ shooting down of workers on their march to the Winter Palace with their petition to the Czar. When news of the “fiendish massacre” was heard at a Trade Union Congress in Liverpool, the immediate reaction was to raise a fund of £1,000 for the families of the murdered men. When the Russian workers’ protest became a general strike in October, forcing the regime in its fright to grant a Constitution, the event created a profound impression as a triumph of the working class. Workers in Europe held mass meetings, cheered and waved red flags. “Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live Socialism!” shouted Italian peasants fifteen hundred miles from St. Petersburg. But no spark from the Russian fire ignited a general conflagration. The long-awaited spontaneous uprising had occurred, but no Western working class was prepared to overthrow capitalism. Only the Austrian Socialists alertly used the example to bring to a climax their campaign for universal suffrage.

  Seizing the opportunity to work on the fright inspired in the rulers by Russian events, Viktor Adler in Vienna proclaimed a general strike for November 28. He worked on the preparations for a month in advance. One party member in
a factory where the workers were not Socialists could not bring them to join; no one would talk about the Revolution or the proposed strike or “touch a political subject with a ten-foot pole.” The demonstration, however, was a success. In Vienna, the Mariahilferstrasse was black with thousands of marchers packed so tightly that it took an hour to cover the half mile to the Ringstrasse, where the parade was joined by even greater crowds from other districts of the city. The tramp of the masses, the clenched fists, the red flags, raised again the terrible vision of Mme Hennebau in Germinal. The Austrian regime, frightened by the demonstrations, yielded the promise of manhood suffrage, which went into effect in 1907, virtually the only positive result of the Russian rising.

  German Social-Democrats, too, arranged demonstrations for reform of the electoral system in Prussia, which was organized according to the tax roll. The great number of small taxpayers at the base who paid the same total amount as the fewer middle third and as the very few rich at the top were not permitted to elect more than one-third of the local representatives. The Socialists always elected their full third of the municipal councils, but even when they had the votes, could never win control. Nor, confirming Jaurès’ taunt, could they win it on the barricades. Against the steel of the Prussian government, their demonstrations won no improvements.

  One effect of the Russian revolution was to lose the Socialists votes. In the German election of 1907 middle-class voters represented by the Progressive party, which previously, when it came to a choice, had supported the Social-Democrats in preference to the reactionary parties, voted for the Conservative candidate. They were influenced too by heavy propaganda of the Navy and Pan-German Leagues, who wanted the election to register an overwhelming mandate for nationalism and imperialism. In the “Hottentot Election,” as it was called from the current war in Germany’s African colonies, the Socialists for the first time since 1890 lost seats.

  Leon Trotsky, despairing at the repression under which the Russian revolution now seemed “hopelessly and permanently trampled,” was struck by the lack of interest among the European Socialists. Meeting Kautsky in 1907, a small, delicate man with clear blue eyes and snow-white hair and beard who looked like “a very kind grandpapa” though only fifty-three, he found him “hostile to the transfer of revolutionary methods to German soil.” On paper, revolution had a lovely glow; the reality in the streets was less welcome. The abortive experience in Russia revealed that the Western working class on the whole wanted no part of it. As a result, Revision was encouraged and Revision signified the further from class, the nearer to nationalism.

  Industrial war did not slacken. Labour after 1905 listened increasingly to the Syndicalist teaching of direct action. Its source and influence was strongest in France, where Anarchists had long vigorously denounced the parliamentary method as a sham which diverted the labour movement from revolutionary aims to political issues and favored the leadership of intellectuals. In Syndicalist eyes the Socialist politicians, as members of a national parliament, became essentially part of the bourgeois world, taking on its codes and losing touch with the working class. Syndicalists insisted class war was economic, not political, and should be waged by strike, not debate. With the increasing infiltration of the Anarchists, the trade-union movement adopted revolutionary Syndicalism and direct action as its official doctrine at the CGT Congress of 1906. Direct action against employers consisted of the strike, the slowdown, boycott and sabotage; against the State it included propaganda, mass demonstration, resistance to militarism and to patriotism, a delusion fostered by the capitalists to perpetuate their power. Every gain by the workers was to be considered as strengthening them for the final battle and for the supreme last act of the class war—the general strike, the “revolution of folded arms” which, paralyzing the bourgeois world, would emancipate the working class and win control of the means of production.

  In Italy where suppression of the labour movement by police and troops had long been brutal and the gulf of mutual hatred and fear between the classes was deep, the general strike was twice attempted under Syndicalist leadership, in 1904 and 1906, at a cost of savage strife and workers’ lives. In France the defeat of one strike after another during the years of Clemenceau’s Radical Government from 1906 to 1909 revealed the gap between Syndicalist preaching of the general strike and the actual power of the workers. Labour in France was still largely agricultural and a large share of industry was conducted in small non-union enterprises. CGT membership was not a major proportion of all industrial labour and, reflecting the old antagonism between Anarchists and Socialists, was more frequently at odds with the party than united in mutual support.

  Employers fought back violently with dismissals and lockouts against CGT efforts to organize new trades and were frequently abetted by the use of troops, which Clemenceau claimed were necessary to prevent violence against non-strikers. In the strikes by miners of the Nord in 1906, by dockers at Nantes and by vineyard workers of the Midi in 1907, by construction workers in 1908, troops were dispatched by the Government in each case with a resulting total of 20 killed and 667 wounded. Strikes by postal workers and teachers were stamped out by threat of permanent dismissal on the ground that civil servants had no right to organize or strike against the government. CGT officials who had organized them were arrested on charge of incitement to rebellion. Against the stubborn resistance of employers a maximum limit of an eleven-hour day had been enacted in 1900, and a Sunday rest law and old-age pensions in 1906, but against the strike wave in the Clemenceau years, the hard hand of the Government behind the employer reflected Clemenceau’s unsentimental dictum, “France is founded on property, property, property.” The state’s intervention nourished anger and disillusion. The Radical Government’s recourse to violence, said Jaurès in 1909, and “its failure to reform society have produced a public lassitude, a muffled grumbling, an undercurrent of discontent.…” In the same year, a similar discontent with the Liberal Government in England was creating the same climate of restiveness.

  In the United States the employers’ counter-offensive also gathered force, backed by court decisions which used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to outlaw picketing, boycott and strikes as restraint of trade. Like the hilltop signal fires of ancient times, Syndicalism sent its message across the Atlantic and it flared into existence in America with the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. Created by Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in strange alliance with De Leon, the IWW was, by European standards, an impossible combination of Syndicalism and Socialism. It preached the doctrine of direct action, while Debs, its hero, campaigned as Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

  American Socialism, like Russian, since it had no representatives in Congress and no role in government even at the municipal level, was protected from the temptations of collaboration. Debs by now had completely espoused the doctrine of class war to the end. Workers must be revolutionaries, not compromisers with the existing order. Their object was not merely to raise wages but to abolish the wage system. He saw Syndicalism as taking over the revolutionary spirit of original Socialism and as offering the means to achieve the promised goal through the trade-union methods in which he had grown up. In a letter to thirty trade-union leaders in December, 1904, he invited them to join in discussing “ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles.” At its opening convention in Chicago on June 27, 1905, attended by miners, lumbermen, railwaymen, brewery workers and other industrial unions and Socialist factions, the IWW declared itself to be “the Continental Congress of the working class” which would unite skilled and unskilled in one great industrial union to overthrow capitalism and establish a Socialist society. Declaring for the ultimate weapon of Syndicalism, its slogan was “One big Union and one big Strike.” According to Haywood—a one-eyed giant and “a bundle of primitive instincts”—the IWW would go down into the gutter to reach the “bums” and migr
atory workers and bring them up along with the whole mass of labour to a “decent plane of living.” Scorning collective bargaining, agreements and political effort, it would work through propaganda, boycott, sabotage and the strike. Government, politics, elections were the bunk; the country should be run by the unions.

  The IWW’s rejection of political action set off a series of schisms and secessions which flew like woodchips from an ax. Debs was violently attacked by some Socialist colleagues for splitting the labour movement. De Leon broke away in 1908 and continued from his diminished outpost to fight for pristine principle. For Debs the goal was everything and any method which led to it, political as well as direct action, acceptable. Despite the Syndicalist principles of the IWW he ran again for President as the candidate of the Socialist party in 1908. In meetings across the country Haywood and others raised money in pennies and nickels to rent a locomotive and sleeping car to carry Debs on his campaign. Passing locomotive engineers tooted their whistles as the Red Special with red banners streaming from its roof and rear platform went by. Debs had a way of making people believe in the attainability of Socialism. Without brass bands or loud-speakers, his voice, smile and outstretched arms were enough. He “actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man,” said a hard-bitten organizer who confessed himself pained when anyone else called him Comrade. “But when Debs says Comrade, it’s all right. He means it.” Families in wagons with red flags stuck in the whip sockets came for miles across the prairies to greet the Red Special at railroad stops. Torchlight parades in the towns, mass meetings, children with bouquets of red roses, created an illusion in which Debs himself began to believe. Socialists, he wrote to a friend, are “thick as grasshoppers out here” and the farmers “are revolutionary to the core and ripe and ready for action.” The “plutes” would get a shock when the votes were counted. But the total vote proved disappointing: 400,000, no more than in 1904.