One Capitalist always kills many … Along with the constantly diminishing number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolise all advantages, … grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation, but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production … Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist husk. Thus they burst asunder. The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Once this happened, the gateway to the new Jerusalem would open to a socialist and, eventually, communist society, where there would be no more exploitation of one class by another. This did not mean that all were equal, an idea that Marx dismissed as utopian — it would be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
With hindsight, few would argue with his claim that capitalism is a fundamentally precarious economic system. If it has survived all challenges, it is certainly not because of its inherent strength. We should bear in mind, too, that the system we have today has little resemblance to the one Marx had analysed in Capital. It is his belief in the revolutionary nature of the workers’ movement that did not eventuate. The workforce in the English-speaking world — Britain, North America, Australia, and New Zealand — where industrialisation was most advanced by the second half of the nineteenth century, showed little inclination to work towards the overthrow of the capitalist system. This was in part because, bad as conditions were for the majority of workers, they did not become impoverished to the extent Marx had envisaged. Workers could vote for parliamentary candidates who promised to look after their needs. The formation of unions strengthened their cause, and their own political parties sprang up. By the turn of the century, in some Australian states and in New Zealand, for example, Labour parties had already gained office. All of this led to slow, gradual improvements.
Developments in the English-speaking world did not go unnoticed in Germany. The Gotha program had made a nominal commitment to Marxist principles, but the policies pursued by the SAP were reformist and not bent on confrontation. However, when the full weight of Imperial Germany’s ruling establishment descended upon the Social-Democratic labour movement after the introduction of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, the new Erfurt program, introduced in 1891, made a far stronger commitment to Marxist ideals. In line with Marx’s demand for a ‘dialectic unity of theory and practice’, the party’s chief theoretician at the time, Karl Kautsky, drew up a theoretical and a practical part. Emphasis was firmly on theory, which committed the SPD to work towards a proletarian revolution. The practical part reiterated pragmatic, everyday policies to improve the living and working conditions of the workforce.
Yet the ink on the Erfurt program had scarcely dried when the theoretical part was severely questioned. The most outspoken of the critics was Eduard Bernstein, a journalist and a leading member of the party who, living in London during the 1890s, entertained close contacts with the British labour movement.
Bernstein questioned Marx’s predictions of the impeding collapse of capitalism. To him, the growth of cartels and trusts did not mean that capitalism was becoming exclusively a system of a few large-concern owners; nor did he agree that the members of the lower middle class were being proletarianised. Hence, he thought, the claim that the rich at the top were getting fewer and fewer and the exploited at the bottom more numerous was incorrect. He questioned the assumption that there was a system of rigid division between classes, and the notion of class struggle altogether. He did not see evidence that the proletariat was being forced into ever-increasing misery, but argued rather that the living standards of the working class were rising. Thus Bernstein concluded that the capitalist system would not collapse in revolution, that a violent overthrow of the prevailing system was in fact unlikely to occur, and that social changes should be gained by evolutionary and not revolutionary means. The strengthening of workers’ parties and their unions, and the formation of consumer co-operatives and other kinds of mutual enterprises, would lead to a system of what he called ‘municipal socialism’. This was more likely to bring real improvement than was revolutionary rhetoric.
The arguments of the ‘revisionists’, as Bernstein and like-minded Social Democrats were soon to be called, caused a heated and increasingly bitter debate in party periodicals and newspapers, and at annual conventions. The left wing of the party strongly attacked Bernstein’s arguments. The comment by Rosa Luxemburg, who was establishing herself as one of the most prominent and outspoken members of the socialist left, that the work of the unions was the ‘labour of Sisyphus’, particularly angered the majority of party and union officials. The left did not see the growth of cartels as a stabilising economic factor, but as a sign that capitalism was nearing its final stage, in which vast properties were controlled by a few. Nor did a few years of economic growth, accompanied by a modest improvement in living conditions for the workers, mean that major convulsions of the capitalist system were necessarily a thing of the past.
The left wing of the SPD was also concerned about the party’s coy stand on the ever-increasing militarisation, nationally and internationally. The Social-Imperialists (social democrats supporting Germany’s policies of imperial expansion) were a minority before the war, but the domestic policy of the party leadership to avoid rocking the boat as much as possible caused growing concern. In the early twentieth century, there was a heated debate in the Socialist International about what action the proletariat should take in the event that war broke out. It was the German party leadership, in particular, that thwarted any attempt to commit national parties to the principle of international worker solidarity above the right of national self-determination.
Having suffered a major defeat in the so-called ‘Hottentot election’ of 1907, Social Democrat leader August Bebel gave a profoundly patriotic speech highlighting his party’s sense of duty and its commitment to the German state. A number of other socialists re-iterated his stance, impressing some of their opponents. The National Liberal deputy Graf Du-Molin Eckhardt, for example, commented that in the last sitting of the Reichstag he had ‘detected more German strength and national courage in the ironic laughter of the embittered Social Democrats than in the hollow phrases uttered by all speakers from the establishment parties’. 21
The SPD deputies’ reaction after the 1907 election was understandable: having refused to vote for further funds to enable the German government to continue its war of annihilation against the Herrero people in South-West Africa, the SPD was viciously targeted by the establishment for failing to support the fatherland. Their seats in parliament were reduced from 81 to 43.
More serious was the performance of Bebel and other party leaders at the 1907 congress of the Socialist International held in Stuttgart. At the centre of the debate was the principle of international socialist solidarity. Many speakers warned that acceptance by the international workers’ movement of the right to national self-determination meant that the workers might properly be called upon to defend a nation’s independence. Commenting on August Bebel’s position on the need to defend the fatherland, Karl Kautsky made the cynical comment that ‘one day the German government could succeed in persuading the German proletariat that they had become the victim of aggression, the French government could do the same to the French people, which means that there could be a war in which French and German proletarians would with great enthusiasm murder each other and cut each other’s throats’. 22 Bebel replied that it would be a sorry business if men who had made politics their profession were not able to judge whether or not they were facing a war of aggression. Six years after Kautsky’s grim prediction, the majority of the SPD voted for the vast increases in military spending demanded by a regime that the party had once sworn not to support with a single penny.
Signs that the German labour movement was heading towa
rds a division were not confined to the party’s theoreticians or to intellectual debates, but were also evident among the SPD’s rank and file, and the workforce in Germany at large. Although huge industrial conglomerates had been formed by the beginning of the twentieth century — coal and steel empires, gigantic plants in the newer chemical and electrical industries — the majority of the German workforce was still employed in small-to-medium workshops, and factories in small-to-medium towns and cities. This meant that the industrial growth rate had not been too fast, and that large numbers of workers did not have to be recruited, accommodated, and incorporated into the workforce in the shortest possible time.
Houses for most workers were not slums. Some even owned their own small house, or rented a flat in a block with access to a square of garden to grow vegetables, and perhaps even a small shed for husbandry — important assets at a time when wages were never much above subsistence level. Unions aimed to gain gradual income rises, improve working conditions and working hours, and establish co-operative stores to provide cheaper goods — achievements far more significant than some distant workers’ paradise. The memory of the difficult years under the anti-socialist laws had not altogether faded: why risk a new wave of suppression? And another factor was emerging: with compulsory schooling, and with most German schoolteachers being ardent nationalists and imperialists, the message that Germany was being denied its proper place in the world was reaching schools in working-class districts as well. The daily propaganda in the conservative media of the day about Germany’s world mission had its effect on workers. Although they still received rough treatment from Imperial Germany’s economic, legal, and political establishment, the ‘fellows without a fatherland’ (vaterlandslose Gesellen), as Kaiser Wilhelm II had once labelled the SPD members, were starting to grow closer to the fatherland — a process that would have been even speedier had they not continued to receive rough treatment from the rest of society.
Karl Marx, however, did not have all his science wrong. In Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and other large cities, and many parts of the Rhenish-Westphalian region and centres in Thuringia and Saxony, industrialisation had advanced at such a rate that there was indeed proletarianisation. Housed in heartless tenement blocks (Mietskasernen), overcrowded and with poor or no sanitation, exploited by landlord and employer, and confronted with appalling working conditions, the workers here had nothing to lose but their chains, to quote another of Marx’s famous dictums. Among them were Poles and other migrant labourers from eastern and south-eastern Europe — and German workers, like most other Germans, tended to think of the Slavic East as backward. There was little respect for ethnic minorities. Hence the real division in Germany as the twentieth century progressed lay not between the Social-Democratic movement and the rest of society, but within the workforce and the party itself. This split was not apparent until war broke out, but the origins of the division within the German labour movement date to the beginnings of the twentieth century. It was to become a bitter division that had fatal consequences for the Weimar Republic, which continued into the Cold War era, and which still influences German politics today.
‘The spirit of 1870–71’
At the head of the kaiser’s great pride, the imperial navy, stood Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. The son of a judge and the son-in-law of a doctor, he came from the professional middle class and, like so many of his contemporaries, had joined the navy rather than the army, whose upper hierarchy was preserved for the nobility. Tirpitz achieved a meteoric rise, resulting in his appointment as secretary of the navy in 1897. In his new position he managed, by tireless lobbying and constant intriguing, to increase the size of the German battle-fleet from seven capital ships in 1898 to 43 by the outbreak of war. Kaiser Wilhelm’s ardent support for the construction of a powerful German navy greatly aided his cause. Tirpitz, a fanatical Social Darwinist, firmly believed in the superiority of German culture, and was convinced that the decisive battle for German world leadership had to be fought eventually against the decadent, materialist British empire. However, he attempted to conceal his intention not only from British leaders — without success — but also, because of the enormous costs of his program, from the Reichstag. He also concealed his plans from the army leaders, because his ambitions would rival their own plans and influence.
The admiral’s assumption that sooner or later a Social Darwinist struggle for world domination would have to take place between the ageing, moribund, and essentially frivolous British civilisation and the spiritually superior German empire was shared by eminent history professors and theologians at German universities, who became outspoken exponents of Weltpolitik and its inevitable showdown with the United Kingdom:
Quite consciously they were going to change established rules of international relations because of a commitment to a peculiar German philosophy of history and politics and, one could add, theology of state. There was hardly a pastor or theologian who did not believe Germany’s God-given right to expand, by force if necessary, at the expense of the putatively inferior and moribund cultures of the other Great Powers, especially Britain’s, because it was demonstrably the will of Almighty God. 23
The idea that war was a kind of ‘biological necessity’, and that international politics amounted to a struggle between rival nations for supremacy and survival, was widely held in leading German military and political circles. The firm belief in German superiority was not directed towards Britain alone. Erich von Falkenhayn, the empire’s war minister, Kurt Riezler, advisor to Reich chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s, and Georg Alexander von Müller, the chief of the imperial navy cabinet, for example, all saw war as a means of preserving or asserting the German race against the Latins and Slavs. 24 Belief in the need of the German empire to expand was not confined to Social Darwinist disciples; voices in big business and industry also advocated the necessity for German economic hegemony (and, in its wake, political dominance) in Europe, a goal not likely to be achieved by peaceful penetration. However, the newer industries, the electrical and chemical conglomerates that had been witnessing a phenomenal rise in the pre-war years, shrank from the idea of major military conflict, as this would cause considerable harm to their flourishing trade. The chemical giants, in particular, that had outpaced all global rivals in the invention and manufacture of new pharmaceutical products, had nothing to gain from war. But as the excitement mounted, the leaders of German chemical companies could not escape the rekindling of the spirit of 1870–71. A short and decisively victorious war would cement the German empire’s rightful place in this world, and (incidentally) facilitate further large-scale economic expansion. A study of Germany’s chemical industries aptly summarises the situation:
Patriotism, the sense that German aspirations were being stifled by its European rivals, and the expectation that the glorious triumphs of Sedan in 1870 could be repeated, were as openly expressed in the Rhineland boardrooms and laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa and BASF as they were in the aristocratic salons of Potsdam, the bourgeois cafes of Berlin’s Unter den Linden, and the working-class beer Keller of Essen and Hamburg. 25
Heading for war
The German army had not grown as rapidly as the imperial navy. The army leadership was reluctant to expand, because this would have meant including middle-class rather than aristocratic officers, and working-class rather than peasant soldiers. Nevertheless the size of the army rose by almost one quarter from 480,000 to 588,000 between 1893 and 1905. By now, the Schlieffen Plan had become the preferred option in case of war, and it demanded a much larger army. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German army from 1891 to 1906, had designed a two-pronged strategy should Germany find itself simultaneously at war with both France and Russia. The plan stipulated that almost all of the German army would invade the south-eastern Netherlands and Belgium, and then thrust into France from the north, defeating the French forces and capturing Paris. In Schlieffen’s opinion, only a token force was needed to protect the border with t
he tsarist empire, because it was envisaged that Russia would not be able to conduct serious warfare for a number of years. Moreover, Russian mobilisation, it was believed, would take at least six weeks, by which time the capitulation of France would have ensured that an army at full strength would be able to achieve victory in the east as well.
The Schlieffen Plan was described by the German military, and later by apologists of the German action, as ‘preventive warfare’. This concept dates back to the Prussian King Frederick II (the so-called Great), who in 1756 had faced a coalition of continental Europe’s three main powers, France, the Habsburg empire, and tsarist Russia. In a preventive strike, he invaded the small German state of Saxony to launch an attack on the Austrian empire — the event that started the Seven Years War of the eighteenth century. In reality, the execution of the Schlieffen Plan would be an unquestionable act of offensive warfare. The elder Moltke, the German war hero who led the army to victory over France in 1870–71, had also planned for a possible war on two fronts. He would hold the German forces behind the frontiers. In the west, the German army would wait until the French invaded the disputed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and then attack. In the east, superiority of German road and rail communications lines meant that wherever the Russians attacked, German forces could move to await and crush them. If this did not cause a complete Russian collapse it would eventually drive the tsar to sue for peace.
Moltke’s plan was a defensive one. Schlieffen’s Plan, regarded by the military and political leadership as a certain recipe for victory, was not. By the time the plan was in place, the German military had made it clear that they had no interest in the two conferences at the Dutch capital, The Hague, aimed at preventing a repetition of the savagery that had featured in both the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the American Civil War. 26 The German empire was among the signatories of the Hague Convention IV ‘Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land’, which forbade pillage and the punishment of innocent civilians, including the taking of hostages and the use of human shields, as well as assault or bombardment ‘by whatever means’ of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings that were undefended. Convention IV further stipulated that armed corps had to be under responsible command and observe the laws of war, and that there must be no destruction of the property of municipalities or institutions of a religious, charitable, or educational character, nor of historic monuments and works of art and science.
A Perfidious Distortion of History Page 3