The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  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.87 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.88 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’.89 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;90 in Italy, too, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) cooperated with Giolitti’s Liberal government for a time, although much of the party objected.91

  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.92

  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.’93

  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.’94

  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.95 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. R
evisionist 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.’96

  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.97 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.

  Syndicalists had a good deal of support in France, Italy and Spain. They even flourished in the United States, under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World – the ‘Wobblies’. In Germany they had very little influence, though their views were not too far from a group of radical Marxists in the SPD surrounding Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg, like the old Radical Marx, had faith in the revolutionary capabilities of the proletariat, and accused Kautsky and the SPD leadership of neglecting them in favour of reforms that merely buttressed the capitalist system. Eager for revolutionary politics, she travelled illegally to Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire) at the end of 1905 to take part in the revolution, and was arrested and imprisoned for several months. On her return to Germany, she urged that the SPD follow the Russian example and use mass strikes to mobilize the working class. Predictably, her ideas were opposed by Kautsky, who feared that mass action would threaten his sacrosanct party organization.

  However, it was foreign, not internal affairs that would ultimately destroy the unity of Marxism, as Marxists found that they had to respond to the increasing power of imperialism and nationalism. Marxists prided themselves on their internationalism, and their leaders were part of a transnational community. Wars abroad, empires and mass armies were anathema. They therefore tried to stress the overriding importance of domestic inequality between classes. Some also tried to adapt Marxism to explain a new international inequality: between Europe and the colonized world. Marxist theorists like Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg developed a new view of an ‘imperialist’ capitalism. If in the 1840s the main forces of history had been capital and labour, half a century later the nation state and empire had joined them. Aggressive monopoly capitalists, they argued, had forged an alliance with states, and together they waged wars to dominate the colonized world.

  Internationalists had some support from industrial workers who did not identify with the nation state. The international community of workers, united under the slogan ‘Workers of All Lands Unite’, seemed much more comfortable a home for many workers than an ‘imagined community’, as they saw it, created by aristocrats, liberal middle classes and generals.

  The International’s Stuttgart Congress of 1907 therefore denounced imperialism and nationalism. But orthodox internationalism came under pressure from revisionists – people like Bernstein and the British Labour Party’s Ramsay MacDonald. They saw the advantages of empire for jobs, and believed that support for imperialist foreign policies was a price that had to be paid if workers were to be integrated into the nation state; some also sympathized with imperialist claims that they were bringing civilization to the colonial world.

  But even orthodox Marxists found it difficult to resist the pressure to support the war effort as peace broke down in 1914, partly because many had implicitly nationalistic attitudes, and partly because they were afraid of the alternative.98 If they opposed the war, there was always the risk that trade unions and Marxist parties would be banned in the name of national security. Also, the French feared a German regime that might be repressive towards workers, whilst the Germans and Austrians feared the even more reactionary Russians; and whilst the French socialist party largely saw the war as a defensive one against German aggression, the German party saw it as resistance to Russian barbarism and autocracy. As the SPD leader Hugo Haase told a French socialist, ‘what the Prussian boot means to you the Russian knout means to us’.99

  When war came in August 1914 Marxist leaders were wholly unprepared. But it was no surprise that all socialist parties bar two decided to vote for war credits. Some leaders, including Kautsky, tried to stand against the nationalistic tide, but they soon sacrificed principle to pragmatism and the desire for unity. Victor Adler, the head of the Austrian party, summed up the dilemma of international Social Democracy:

  I know we must vote for it [war credits]. I just don’t know how I opened my mouth to say so. An incomprehensible German to have done anything else. An incomprehensible Social Democrat to have done it without being racked with pain, without a hard struggle with himself and with his feelings.100

  It looked as if the International, and Marx’s dream, was dead. Most Marxists in Europe had signed up to what they had previously denounced as ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘imperialism’. They were now part of a war effort in alliance with national elites.

  Having emerged from an amalgam of Romantic socialisms, Marxism became a movement of revolutionary radicalism, before evolving into a Modernist Marxism, which then increasingly yielded to a more Pragmatic, reformist socialism. But a new cycle was soon to begin, as the revolutionaries once again seized the initiative in the international Communist movement. Although it appeared that elites and capitalists were in the ascendant in 1914, they were to be virtually destroyed by war, their nationalism discredited. Only three years later it looked as if the majority of Marxist parties had made the wrong call and lost the moral high ground.

  The beneficiaries of this error were the parties within the International that had stood firm against the nationalist current: the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions), their allies, the small Serbian party, and the Italian socialists (PSI). Bernstein might have been right to insist, contra
Marx, that the German working classes did have a fatherland, but the situation in Russia was very different. There many ordinary people felt deeply alienated from the national project, and war was to strain relations between them and the state to breaking point. Marx had been mistaken to think that he could transfer the banner of revolution from Paris to Berlin. Berlin was merely a transit point on its journey eastwards: to St Petersburg.

  Bronze Horsemen

  I

  In November 1927, Soviet citizens were treated to a number of films made for the tenth anniversary of the October revolution. This was a golden era of film-making, and the Bolsheviks could call on several talented directors to tell the story of the revolution and explain its meaning, including the already famous Sergei Eisenstein. But it was Vsevolod Pudovkin’s End of St Petersburg that elicited the greatest acclaim among the party elite. Pudovkin’s film presented revolution as a resolutely modernizing force. It tells the story of 1917 through the life of a peasant – ‘the Lad’ – who is forced by poverty to move from the countryside to St Petersburg. In a classic Soviet ‘socialist realist’ plot-line, the Lad makes a journey from ignorance to political ‘consciousness’. He finds work by joining a group of strike-breakers. But he soon learns to despise the tsarist secret police, and sees how cruel the bosses are towards their workers. He turns against the regime, is briefly imprisoned, and is then released to fight the Germans; whilst in the army he becomes a Bolshevik, and ultimately joins the assault on the Winter Palace.1

  Pudovkin, then, insists that the peasant masses had become both modern and revolutionary. He also shows how the revolution took up the baton of modernization, dropped by the ancien régime, using the motif of the famous St Petersburg equestrian statue, the ‘Bronze Horseman’. Ever since Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem on the subject in 1833, this monument to Peter the Great – the ruler who founded St Petersburg as a European-style city in 1703 – had become a symbol of the tsars’ occasional harsh efforts to modernize Russia. Pudovkin followed Pushkin in presenting the Bronze Horseman as a symbol of the state’s brutality, as well as of its modernizing ambitions. During his scenes of the storming of the Winter Palace, he intercuts images of the Bronze Horseman with frames of the classical statues surmounting the Palace, as they are destroyed by the guns of the invading Bolsheviks. Pudovkin is suggesting that the Bolsheviks will end tsarist arrogance. But he makes it clear that they will not destroy the modernity brought by Peter. Soaring cranes replace the elegant classical statues, and an anonymous worker holds up his hand commandingly, evoking the Bronze Horseman’s masterful gesture. Pudovkin tells his audience that the revolution will continue the work of Peter. But the new bronze horsemen bringing modernity will be the workers, not their erstwhile lords.