Socialism 101
Page 8
In 1846 Lassalle met Countess Sophie Hatzfeldt, who was trying to both divorce her husband and regain control of her fortune and her children. Over the course of eight years Lassalle filed thirty-five separate lawsuits in various courts on her behalf. After finally obtaining the divorce in 1854, the countess settled a pension on Lassalle, making him financially independent.
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In March 1848, when revolution broke out in the German states, Lassalle was in jail in Düsseldorf as a result of his efforts in the Hatzfeldt case. Düsseldorf was an important center of the revolutionary struggle in the industrialized Rhineland. As soon as Lassalle was released from jail, he threw himself into the cause. He was not involved for long. The Düsseldorf authorities arrested him in November for an inflammatory speech urging the local military to revolt. He spent six months in jail.
Lassalle Founds a Political Party
Lassalle became a working-class leader almost by accident. From 1848 to 1857 Lassalle lived in Düsseldorf. During this period he corresponded regularly with Marx, continued his legal battle on behalf of the countess, and wrote on philosophical topics that hovered on the edge of socialism. He came to the conclusion that the battle for democracy had to be fought by the workers through working-class organizations.
In 1859 Lassalle left Düsseldorf for Berlin, where he worked as a political journalist and gave an occasional lecture at one of the educational societies. In 1862 he gave two addresses that fired the imagination of his listeners.
Lassalle soon got the chance to speak to a larger audience. Following a visit by German workers to the London International Exhibition of 1862, the educational societies of Berlin and Leipzig called a general congress of German workers. The program committee asked Lassalle to explain his views on the labor problem. They were especially interested in what he had to say about the ideas of Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch regarding cooperative credit unions.
The committee got more than they were expecting. Lassalle responded with an “Open Letter of Reply,” in which he declared that universal suffrage was the only means to improve the material situation of the working class. He believed that cooperative credit associations or consumer cooperatives would accomplish little because David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” inevitably shaped the workers’ place in a capitalist society.
Subsistence Level
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According to Ricardo, the free market will always keep laborers’ wages at a subsistence level. Wages will rise and fall in relationship to the cost of food, but capital will never pay more than a cost of living increase because a real wage increase comes directly out of profits.
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Lassalle argued that workers would be better off establishing producers’ cooperatives than consumer cooperatives. Instead of banding together to buy goods at a wholesale cost, workers should become their own employers through producers’ cooperatives, thereby taking a first step toward abolishing the profit system, and ultimately ending the iron law of wages. If workers wanted to make a real change in society, they should create not only small workshops but also modern factories using capital advanced by the state. None of those changes could occur until workers lobbied for the first, most important, change. Before the state could become an instrument of reform, the working class must have the vote.
Lassalle’s audience received the “Open Letter” as a call to action. Almost without effort on his part, the first working-class political organization, the General German Workers’ Association, was founded in May 1863, with Lassalle as its president.
THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY (SPD)
Several years after Lassalle’s death, August Bebel (1840–1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) formed a second working-class political party in Germany, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Bebel was the son of a noncommissioned officer in the Prussian army. He was orphaned early in life and grew up in poverty. After traveling for several years as a journeyman woodworker, he settled in Leipzig, where he became involved in the local workers’ educational society.
Liebknecht was an old-style radical who took refuge in London after the Revolutions of 1848. In London he joined the Communist League, where he worked closely with Marx and Engels and supported himself as a correspondent for the Augsburg Gazette. In 1862, when the Prussian government offered a general amnesty to those who had been involved in the Revolutions of 1848, he returned to Berlin. Fresh from the fount of Marxist wisdom in London, Liebknecht quickly developed a following among the radical element of working-class Berlin. Just as quickly Bismarck had him thrown back out of Prussia. This time he went only as far as Leipzig, where he joined Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Association and met August Bebel.
In 1867 Liebknecht and Bebel were both elected to the constituent assembly for the newly formed North German Confederation. Although both were dedicated Marxists, they held their seats as part of the German People’s Party, which was primarily made up of middle-class radicals.
The North German Confederation
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The North German Confederation, a union of German states north of the Main River, was formed in 1867 with Berlin as its capital, King Wilhelm I as its president, and Bismarck as its chancellor. In 1871 the North German Confederation became the German Reich.
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Bebel and Liebknecht soon came to the conclusion that they would command more respect on the legislative floor if they represented a Marxist organization comparable to the General German Workers’ Association. They followed Lassalle’s example and turned to the workers’ education societies. Bebel had previously served as the chairman of the Leipzig Workers’ Educational Association. In 1868 he was elected president of the Federation of Workingmen’s Associations. Under his presidency the federation passed a resolution committing the federation to the program of the First International. The following year Bebel and Liebknecht issued an invitation to a German Social Democratic Workers’ Congress in Eisenach, out of which the German Social Democratic Party was formed, with Bebel as its chairman.
GERMAN SOCIALISTS FACE BACKLASH
The violence of the Paris Commune of 1871 caused a backlash against socialism throughout Europe, especially in the new German Reich, where there were two well-established political parties professing socialistic and democratic principles. Fear of socialism on the part of the ruling classes was made worse in 1873, when Europe was hit with another severe economic depression, brought on in part by the financial consequences of the Franco-Prussian War. Once again businesses failed, domestic prices and wages fell, and unemployment rose. Fearful of a repetition of 1848, the police and the courts began to crack down on socialist organizations.
The Crash of 1873
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The Long Depression began with the fall of the Viennese Stock Exchange on May 9, 1873. The crash set off a period of economic stagnation that continued for two decades. Despite slowed growth and rising unemployment, many members of the working classes actually enjoyed an increased standard of living during this period as a result of a steady fall in the cost of food and manufactured goods.
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By 1875 the combination of increasing government persecution and the financial strain of unemployed members had made survival hard for both of Germany’s socialist parties. Despite differences in organization and policy, the two organizations agreed to merge. Their leaders met in Gotha, where they created a charter for the new organization, known as the Gotha Program. The new organization, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), was the largest of the pre-1914 Marxist parties. By 1912 the SPD was the largest single party represented in the Reichstag, the German parliament, holding 110 out of 397 seats.
Marx bitterly denounced the merger in his Critique of the Gotha Program, published posthumously by Engels in 1891. He complained that Lassalle had “conceived the workers’ movement from the narrowest national standpoint,” concentrating on converting Germany to socialism. Marx believed that socialism must be an international movement i
f it were to succeed. Worse, from Marx’s perspective, Lassalle and his followers sought to gain control of the state through elections in the hope of transforming capitalism through the establishment of workers’ collectives. Marx believed that the only path to socialism was through revolution.
Evolution or Revolution?
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The question of whether the proletariat should bring about the socialist state through evolutionary reforms or violent revolution was one of the most debated in socialist circles until the Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the final split between the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party.
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BISMARCK’S ANTI-SOCIALIST LAWS
In 1878 Bismarck forced the passage of an anti-socialist law through the Reichstag. Socialist organizations, educational programs, and publications were banned, and arrest warrants were issued for individual socialist leaders.
Bebel told his fellow representatives in the Reichstag that passage of the bill would change nothing: “Your lances will be shattered in this struggle like glass on granite.” In the long run he was right. When the law expired in 1890, the SPD won 20 percent of the popular vote, making Bebel the most prominent opponent of the government.
In the short run the SPD went underground, camouflaged by local clubs of various sorts. Contact between the clubs was maintained through a magazine, The Social Democrat. Published in Switzerland, thousands of copies were smuggled into Germany each week, each one forming the nucleus for a circle of readers that temporarily replaced the normal party organization.
THE ERFURT PROGRAM
In 1891 the SPD adopted a new charter, the Erfurt Program. The Gotha Program was a compromise between the overlapping ideologies of the two original parties. The Erfurt Program displayed signs of a more fundamental tension between revisionism and Marxist orthodoxy that had developed within the party.
Karl Kautsky, a defender of Marxist orthodoxy, drafted the first, theoretical, section of the program. In it, he stressed the division of society into two hostile camps and painted a grim picture of a future in which a few large-scale capitalist enterprises expand their control over the economic system.
Eduard Bernstein, a leading theoretician of social democratic revisionism, drafted the second, practical, portion of the program, which consisted of a series of reforms that could be obtained only by working within the system, including that perennial favorite, universal manhood suffrage, secularized schools, compensation for elected officials, and more liberal labor laws.
The official position was that the Erfurt Program was both reformist and revolutionary, combining immediate benefits for the proletariat with the long-term goal of overthrowing capitalism.
BERNSTEIN AND MARXIST REVISIONISM
A Heretic Lifts His Head
Social democracy found its theorist in Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932). Called “the father of revisionism,” Bernstein built on Lassalle’s ideas to produce what would become the basic ideology of social democracy.
“Revisionism” and Orthodoxy
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After the Bolshevik Revolution communists began to use the term revisionism to attack what they saw as deviations from the Soviet norm. For instance, Josip Broz Tito’s policies in communist Yugoslavia were condemned as “modern revisionism” by the Soviets. (Ironically, Communist China used the same term against Soviet Russia.)
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Like Bebel, Bernstein was born into a working-class family and had personal experience of poverty. His father was a railroad engineer who did not make enough to support his ten surviving children. His uncle was the editor of the Berlin People’s Times, a newspaper widely read in progressive working-class circles.
Bernstein attended the local school until he was sixteen, when he took an apprenticeship as a bank clerk. In 1872 he was introduced to socialist ideas by the highly publicized political trial of Bebel and Liebknecht, who were the only two members of the North German Reichstag who refused to vote for war bonds to fund the Franco-Prussian War. The leaders of the German Social Democratic Party used their defense as an opportunity to preach the socialist gospel and made at least one convert: Bernstein.
FROM SWITZERLAND TO LONDON
In 1878 Bernstein was one of the leaders indicted through Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. With a warrant issued for his arrest, he emigrated to Switzerland, where he became the editor of The Social Democrat. Expelled from Switzerland at Bismarck’s insistence in 1888, he moved to London, where he became Friedrich Engels’s right-hand man—chosen to produce the fourth volume of Capital from Marx’s badly organized notes and designated the literary executor for Engels’s estate.
While in London Bernstein also met the leaders of the newly formed Fabian Society, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Under the Webbs’ influence he came to realize that he no longer believed in many of Marx’s arguments.
The Fabian Society
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The London-based Fabian Society was founded in 1884 with the goal of establishing a democratic socialist state in Great Britain. The Fabians advocated a gradualist approach to social change, concentrating on education and participation in parliamentary politics. Members of the Fabian Society were instrumental in the formation of the British Labour Party.
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EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
In 1899, faced with a growing gap between the SPD’s official ideology of Marxist class struggle and the reality of its parliamentary participation, Bernstein published socialism’s most comprehensive theoretical critique of Marxist orthodoxy, Evolutionary Socialism. In it, Bernstein rejected two of the key elements of Marxist orthodoxy: historical materialism and class struggle. Instead of waiting for capitalism to collapse, he called on socialists to adapt the tools of parliamentary democracy and participation in government to achieve socialist ends. Instead of class struggle, he urged political cooperation between the working classes, the peasantry, and the dissatisfied members of the middle classes, all of whom suffered from the injustices of capitalism.
A Slow Progress
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Bernstein is famous for the comment that “what is termed the final goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything.” He meant that lasting social revolution comes through steady advances, “the ground gained piecemeal by hard, unremitting struggle, rather than through violent upheaval.”
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Bernstein ended with the conclusion that socialism was not the inevitable product of a revolt against capitalism. It was instead “something that ought to be.” The success of socialism didn’t depend on the continued and intensifying misery of the working classes but on eliminating that misery. The task for socialism was to develop suggestions for reform that would improve the living conditions of most people. And, as Lassalle had argued thirty-five years earlier, the first step was universal suffrage. With the vote, the working classes could create a socialist state by electing socialist representatives to a democratic government, making democracy both the means and the end.
SYNDICALISM AND TRADE UNIONS
Strike! Strike!
Social democrats weren’t the only socialists to reject Marxist orthodoxy. Standing at the intersection between trade unionism and anarchism, syndicalists believed that Marxism simply replaced capitalist factory owners with state bureaucrats. They also rejected social democracy’s efforts at working within the system. Caught between state oppression and the futility of politics, syndicalists believed that society could be transformed only through direct action by the working classes themselves, using trade unions and the general strike as their tools.
WHAT IS SYNDICALISM?
Syndicalism was a militant form of trade unionism that combined the ideas of Marx, Proudhon, and Bakunin with the technique of collective action by workers. Syndicalists advocated workers taking over the means of the production as a first step in abolishing the state. Both the state and the capitalist system would be replaced by a new social order, with the local trade union as its ba
sic unit of organization. The method generally favored for accomplishing this transformation was the general strike.
Syndicalists rejected social democracy’s policy of reform through parliamentary politics and Marxism’s reliance on a centralized state after the revolution. Political parties were incapable of producing fundamental change. The state was by its nature a tool of capitalist oppression.
Instead of reform or state socialism, syndicalists looked to revolution by the direct action of the workers. If the unions were not strong enough to risk a strike, their members would attack employers through boycotts and sabotage. The climax of direct action would be the general strike.
After the revolution a federation of trade unions and labor exchanges would replace the state.
Trade Union or Revolutionary Movement?
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The word syndicalism comes from the French term for labor union: syndicate (not to be confused with the English syndicate, which is something totally different). In France, where the movement was born, syndicalism means plain vanilla trade unionism. In France the union-based socialist movement is called revolutionary syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism.
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SYNDICALISM AND TRADE UNIONISM