In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series-War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:The Birth of the Comintern (1919)

War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:
The Birth of the Comintern (1919)

by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998

This class series will attempt to take to heart comrade Lenin's injunction in "Left-Wing" Communism: rather than simply hailing soviet power and the October Revolution, the real point is to study the experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assimilate the lessons and international significance of October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed that our capacity to understand the world— and he was referring to class society in particular—is in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the lessons of the October Revolution and the Communist International have for us Marxists a very deep validity. They mark the high point of the workers movement, to be contrasted with the current valley in which we today find ourselves situated. This class will consider the First Congress of the Third International which took place in March 1919, in the midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution was fighting for its very life.

The story of the First Congress is mainly the story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary international following the ignominious collapse of the socialist Second International on 4 August of 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the capitalist system.

Younger comrades in particular have real difficulty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the time and on the proletariat. From the end of the Franco-Prussian war [1870-1871] until the onset of the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the imperialist combatants who embarked on the First World War assumed it would be very short. The British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to be a short war.

The war dragged on for over four years. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the various contending imperialists, a war to see who would get how much loot and how much booty. To quote General Sherman: "war is hell." But, if war is
hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque brutality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It was a war in which the proletariat and even the scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaughtered in enormous numbers. For example, the Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a shadow of its former self. Likewise the war decimated the sons of the British ruling class.

To give you an example of the brutality of the situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the German line projecting into the Entente lines in Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British general in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geometrical regularity of his front. Over the space of three or four days he lost something like 600,000 men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter the sanguinary stalemate.

At the beginning of the war there was only one significant republic in continental Europe and that was France. By the end of this war, the face of Europe had changed. Three empires—tsarist Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollern empire of Germany—disappeared from the political map to be replaced by various republics. So it was a very big change. I highly recommend to comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Depart.

The ignominious capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during the first imperialist war marks the point at which the struggle for the Third International began and it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bolsheviks. To understand the Third International and Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial¬ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third International's predecessor, the Second International, about its origins and history and its collapse.

Going back over that history one is struck by an observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the Communist International to clarify and settle a whole series of political and organizational questions that had bedeviled the movement—questions ranging from the counterposition between direct trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real sense, Cannon's observation concerning the American socialists is more generally applicable to the Second International as a whole. That is, if you go back and you examine the history of the Second International, one gets a sense of participants who, in some sense, were sleepwalking.

It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and conditions of work (such as the national question, trade-union struggle, legality versus illegality, work in parliament, Soviets, the 1905 mass strikes culminating in the Moscow insurrection), to really forge a new type of party that in its experiences had learned lessons that were valid for the entire workers movement in the imperialist epoch. And Bolshevism, it should be understood, was not born all at once but started as another party in the Second International and, indeed, a party which modeled itself after the preeminent party of the Second International, that is to say the German SPD.

Lenin makes the point that the Second International and the parties which constituted it were very much products of the pre-imperialist epoch, a period of protracted, organic capitalist growth and, as indicated, of peace among the major European powers. If the First International laid the foundation for an international organization of workers, for the preparation of the revolutionary attack on capital, the Second International was an organization, as Lenin remarked, whose growth proceeded in breadth at the cost of a temporary drop in revolutionary consciousness and a strengthening of opportunism in the party.

The SPD and Parliamentarism

The German Social Democracy itself underwent considerable change over these years. In February of 1881, in the period when the Social Democrats in Germany were outlawed by the Anti-Socialist Laws, Karl Kautsky wrote:
"The Social Democratic workers' party has always emphasized that it is a revolutionary party in a sense that it recognizes that it is impossible to resolve the social questions within the existing society.... Even today, we would prefer, if it were possible, to realize the social revolution through the peaceful road.... But if we still harbour this hope today, we have nonetheless ceased to emphasize it, for every one of us knows that it is a Utopia. The most perceptive of our comrades have never believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they have teamed from history that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.... Today we all know that the popular socialist state can be erected only through a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to uphold consciousness of this among ever broader layers of the people." —quoted in Massimo Salvador!, Karl Kautsky and
the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, p. 20 (Verso,
1979)

This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism through Engels' work Anti-Duhring. It was the work which actually won key cadre of the Social Democracy to Marxism. Kautsky was to go on to become the editor of Die Neue Zeit, which was the theoretical paper of Social Democracy (and parenthetically, I would point out, he edited it longer than Norden edited WV) and became the preeminent German propagandist for Marxism for the whole period. In fact, he was known as the pope of Marxism and for a long time he was looked up to by Lenin and others as the embodiment of orthodox Marxism. Yet running through the orthodox Marxism of Kautsky was a strong parliamentarist thread which grew organically out of the conditions that the German party experienced.

As a consequence of the German Anti-Socialist Laws the SPD was outlawed from 1874 to 1886. Despite its illegality during this period, the Social Democracy managed to get about 9.1 percent of the votes in parliament. With the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the legalization of the party, the party began to grow. Notwithstanding some fits and starts the party began to experience a steady accretion of electoral support, both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers. This led the SPDers to think that German Social Democracy would simply grow organically. Some older comrades may remember that many years ago a comrade plotted three or four years of our growth and from that graph projected that by now we would probably have a billion members. Empirical reality rapidly shattered her illusion, but in the case of the SPD in that period, experience tended to confirm a steady pattern of growth.

A few scant years after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Kautsky was putting forward a very different line from that of 1881. Very much influenced by Darwin and German biologists such as Haeckel, he postulated that socialism would be the natural evolutionary outcome of capitalism—that the working class would grow to be a larger and larger proportion of the populace, that through the votes of these workers, SPD representation would ineluctably grow in parliament and that inevitably Social Democracy would triumph. Kautsky, along with Bernstein, penned the Erfurt Program, a program that all comrades should take the time to read. It is the classic example of the minimum-maximum program of Social Democracy.

The Erfurt Program is also noteworthy for what it does not contain—it consciously avoided the whole issue of the state. Kautsky wrote the theoretical part of Erfurt and Bernstein the practical. By the way, in 1899, Lenin described the Erfurt Program as a Marxist document. But later, reconsidering it in The State and Revolution, and based on his experiences in the intervening period, he came to view it very differently.
Kautsky wrote a commentary on the Erfurt Program and in it he developed his central themes. One of them was the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government in great states—for all classes—and, therefore, for the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie and, secondly, for the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as the fundamental, strategic avenue to power for the labor movement.

Kautsky posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of state power and the conquest of a majority in parliament, between the defense of the technical importance of parliament and the impossibility of a Paris Commune-type state. He thought that the Social Democracy, its political and social struggles and use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constituted the very content of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As early as 1892 Kautsky writes:

"In a great modern state, [the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, can] acquire influence in the administration of the state only through the vehicle of an elected parliament. Direct legislation, at least in a great modern state, cannot render parliament superfluous, [but can only represent a ramification of the administration. Hence the general thesis:] it is absolutely impossible to entrust the entire legislation of the state to it [direct legislation], and it is equally impossible to control or direct the state administration through it. So long as the great modern state exists..."

And notice there is no class character to this state:

"...the central point of political activity will always remain in its parliament. [Now:] the most consistent expression of parliament is the parliamentary republic."
—quoted in Massimo Salvador], ibid, pp. 35-36

And, therefore, the conquest of parliament was indispensable for Social Democracy. This was to be a signpost of German Social Democracy thenceforth, through the whole period up to the first imperialist war.
Now Wilhelm Liebknecht aptly termed the Kaiserine parliament a "fig leaf for absolutism." Germany at this time presented a strange combination of parliamentarism, with rather nominal powers, fronting for absolutist despotism ruling on behalf of German capital. This was reflected in the laws regarding suffrage. On a national level there was direct male suffrage. On the provincial level suffrage rights varied a lot, ranging from places like Prussia, which had a notorious three-class franchise system based on how much direct tax you paid, to some of the southern German states, which eventually had more or less direct suffrage, but were very short on proletarians and had large peasant populations.

It was clear that the German Social Democracy would have to contend on a parliamentary level if it were to be a political party in Germany, and it did so. During the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws, because the parliamentary fraction was granted immunity, it was relatively untouchable, and played a key role in leading the party. This early experience later played its part in reinforcing a tendency to fetishize parliament despite the fact that the Reichstag was impotent and could not compel the imperial government to answer to it. And on the provincial level it was downright bizarre to have parliamentary illusions, for example, if you look at the restricted suffrage in Prussia.

In the Prussian elections in 1913, the SPD got over 775,000 votes, some 28.3 percent of the total. But it only won ten seats in the Prussian parliament. In contrast the Deutsche Volkspartei, which received 6.7 percent of the votes, won 38 seats. The Free Conservative Party, with 2 percent, won 54 seats. The National Liberal Party, with 13 percent, won 73 seats. The Catholic Center Party, with 16 percent, won 103 seats and the German Conservative Party, with 14 percent, won 147 seats. How is this possible? The people who paid the top third in income tax got a third of the seats, etc. That was about 2 or 3 percent of the population. So, there is a certain level at which one's credulity is strained at the evident latching on very early to parliamentary cretinism.

The SPD and the State

Secondly, the SPD was clearly awed by the power of the German state and army. One gets the impression that the experience of the Anti-Socialist Laws resulted in an attitude of "Never again!" The party lived in real fear that it could be outlawed by a stroke of the Kaiser's pen. As the party accrued influence and organizational mass there was a corresponding reluctance to risk this organic growth by displeasing the powers that be. This sentiment went hand-in-hand with the conception of the SPD as the party of the whole class.

When, in 1875, the Marxian wing fused with the Lassalleans, the fusion was codified in the Gotha Program (basically a Lassallean program). When Marx penned his Critique of the Gotha Programmed, that critique was suppressed in Germany. It was suppressed by Rebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, because they were afraid it would provoke a split with the Lassalleans.
Likewise, when the Erfurt Program was penned, Engels wrote a very sharp criticism of it; you can read about it in The State and Revolution. Engels thought it was a very fine program, but the failure of the program to address the key issue of state power fundamentally compromised it. Engels opined that while it might be difficult to raise the demand for a democratic republic, that failure opened the door to politically disarming the party when it had to confront big revolutionary events. Engels' criticisms were suppressed to maintain unity with the opportunists and out of fear that their publication might expose the party to reprisals from the Kaiser's government.

During the life of the Second International, which was founded in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, 14 July 1889, the German Social Democrats were very hesitant to call any sort of May Day actions because they feared a strike in Germany on May Day would bring the government down on them. So, there was a very peculiar development of a sense of German exceptionalism, a feeling that things were going along swimmingly, the SPD was gaining in parliament, the organization was burgeoning. The mindset was that the party must at all costs avoid a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie that could spell disaster. Tactical prudence was beginning to evolve into reformist adaptation.
Kautsky and others of the German Social Democrats were always concerned about a general strike because they thought it would be a one-shot proposition in the Kaiser's Germany. It would immediately lead to total confrontation with the bourgeoisie and either the proletariat would triumph or it would be smashed. And, since inevitably the SPD was gaining influence in parliament and expanding its press, trade-union organizations, and sporting groups and hundreds of other associations were growing, why wreck the inevitable march of progress toward socialism?

I have spent some time on the SPD's reformist adaptations because I would like to contrast it with the experience of the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik experience was needless to say very different.

It's an old saw that "you learn something new every day." But sometimes what you learn is important. Gary Steenson in his book "Not One Man! Not One Penny!" German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981] reveals a little-known fact:

"One very unusual aspect of the socialist congresses in Germany was the presence at most of them of police officials. These men had the right to interrupt speakers who ventured into forbidden territory, and they could even cancel a session altogether if the discussion got too extreme. But the congressional participants themselves usually knew the allowable limits, and after the end of the antisocialist law, the police officials did not often intervene. Their presence was, nonetheless, a source of embarrassment for the SPD and should have been for the authorities also."
-p. 125

This submission to cop censorship is absolutely breathtaking, and accommodation to it reveals the deep reformist rot that infected the SPD. It should be contrasted with the comportment of the Bolsheviks who took their responsibility to revolutionary Marxism seriously. Commenting on what can be said and what must be said, in 1917 Lenin wrote:

"At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than 'hint' at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such 'hints'. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky managed to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861, and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky." -Lenin, Collected Works [hereafter CW\ Vol. 23, p. 186

Clearly the SPD's many-years-long accommodation to police censorship played a significant role in its slide into social chauvinism when confronted by the revolutionary tasks imposed by the imperialist war.
The SPD's accommodation to bourgeois legality is all the more surprising given the very real repression the party experienced, particularly in its formative years. Liebknecht and Bebel, for example, opposed the Franco-Prussian war. For their efforts, they were thrown into prison for a couple of years. The party did face a situation of near illegality, even following the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Many, many people were arrested for crimes of lese majeste. SPDers were elected to parliament and when they got to Berlin found out their landlady had been told by the government not to rent them a place. Socialists were exiled, under old laws going back to 1850, to tiny provincial towns.

Kautsky summed up in 1888 what we have come to know as the social-democratic worldview when he wrote in A Social Democratic Catechism: "The Social Democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolutions...." The SPD's policy was one of revolutionary passivity, of waiting. Kautsky maintained that Social Democrats are not pacifists. The SPD would eventually prevail in parliament and if the bourgeoisie offers resist¬ance the Social Democratic workers would suppress them. But the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was for Kautsky really a question for future generations

The rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism go hand in hand. Early on, in the heavily peasant areas of south Germany, where the Social Democracy was weaker and where there were fewer proletarians, SPD representatives began to openly adapt to alien class pressures. These pressures reflected themselves nationally when, in 1895, Bebel and Liebknecht, over the vociferous objections of Kautsky, revised the Erfurt Program to "include a demand for democratization of all public institutions, to improve the situation in industry, agriculture and transport within the framework of the present social and state order."
Bernstein, who had lived for 20 years in exile in Britain, while there began to develop fundamental doubts on the possibility or necessity of proletarian revolution, doubts which he later systematized into a general revisionist assault on Marxism. Kautsky, since Bernstein was his good friend, temporized on launching a struggle against this revisionism.

However, eventually the battle was joined, with Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov weighing in very heavily against Bernstein (who was not handled in the party with kid gloves). Nonetheless, Bernstein and Kautsky both feared a split in the party. Kautsky hoped to ideologically defeat revisionism without a split, arguing that revisionism could be isolated and would cease to be dangerous. This generally was the approach of the Second International in the whole period leading up to the war.
I should mention, by the way, that Kautsky's deep but latent reformist streak found expression in the Second Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1890 when the issue of Millerandism came up. The French socialist politician Millerand had recently accepted a cabinet post in a bourgeois government. Kautsky led the charge against Millerand stating that it was absolutely impermissible to be a minister in a bourgeois government...except under "special circumstances." And the special circumstances were, for example, in the event of a war, where, say, the tsar invaded Germany. Only then, according to Kautsky, would a Social Democrat be compelled to join a government of the enemy class; only unity in defense of the nation made permissible that which in times of peace was impermissible!

Impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution

The 1905 Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on Germany, the class struggle in Germany, on the Social Democracy and on the trade unions. On the left of the party, Rosa Luxemburg saw 1905 through the lens of her experiences in Warsaw, where she went to participate in the revolution. For Luxemburg, the main lesson of the revolution was the efficacy of the mass strike as the road to revolution. She saw the mass strike as the chief instrument for realizing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Through intervention in these struggles the socialists would win authority and lead the workers to victory. The assault on the capitalist power would not be through parliament, but through a series of convulsive strikes that would clean the party of revisionism and lead to the fall of capital. But while Luxemburg invested the mass strike and spontaneous action by the proletariat with great revolutionary import, she failed to grasp the significance of the Soviets and as well of the real rehearsal for October, the culmination of 1905, which was the Moscow insurrection.

Germany in 1905 experienced massive turmoil. There were thousands and thousands of strikes. There were numerous lockouts by employers. There were militant workers' demonstrations and street fighting between the workers and the police.

Under the impact of both Luxemburg and the events in 1905 in Germany and Russia, Kautsky was driven to the left. He certainly was among the most perceptive of the commentators on what was going on in 1905 in Russia from the outside. Both Lenin and Trotsky claimed Kautsky's analysis supported their views. Kautsky did, indeed, refer to what was going on in Russia as permanent revolution and stated that the unfolding of the revolutionary struggles in Russia turned out to be very different from what he had previously thought. Thus he wrote:

"The [Russian] liberals, can scream all they want about the need for a strong government and regard the growing chaos in Russia with anguished concern; but the revolutionary proletariat has every reason to greet it with the most fervent hopes. This 'chaos' is nothing other than permanent revolution. In the present circumstances it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat completes its own maturation most rapidly, develops its intellectual, moral, and economic strength most completely, imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them. Even though this dominance of the proletariat can only be transitory in a country as economically backward as Russia, it leaves effects that cannot be reversed, and the greater the dominance, the longer they will last.... Permanent revolution is thus exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs."
—quoted in Massimo Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102

Here he is speaking of permanent revolution in the sense of Marx's "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League."
In January of 1906, Kautsky, basing himself on the experience of the Moscow insurrection, declared that it was now necessary to re-examine Engels' famous preface to Marx's Class Struggle in France, the text of which the German Social Democracy had so often used to justify its own legalism. The reformists had fixated on an observation by Engels that the epoch of barricades and street fighting was definitely over. But Kautsky said that the battle of Moscow, where a small group of insurgents managed to hold out for two weeks against superior forces, indicated that victorious armed struggle by the insurgents was possible because of the mass strike wave, of which he said too little was known in Engels' time. It was precisely the strike wave and struggles around it that had undermined the discipline of the army and those lessons were applicable, not only in Russia, but possibly throughout Europe.

Thus Kautsky swung quite far to the left. But he was still very nervous about a mass strike in Germany, which he thought could only be a one-shot affair—all or nothing. For its part, the German ruling class was also drawing its own class lessons from the events in Russia. The Kaiser thought that it might well be necessary to send an expeditionary force into Russia to rescue his fellow monarch, the tsar, and, as a corollary to that, the Kaiser certainly was planning to suppress the German Social Democracy.

The turmoil surrounding 1905 frightened many of Germany's SPD trade-union leaders. In the main they had a very clear position: "No mass strikes! Nothing out of the ordinary!" These bureaucrats feared that the street demonstrations and turmoil were pulling in unorganized workers who had low consciousness and would threaten the organized and above all orderly German trade-union movement. In May of 1905 in Cologne, the trade unions came out on record against the mass strike.

The stage was thus set for an open division between the party and its affiliated trade unions. At the Jena Congress, the party, under the impact of what was going on in Russia, adopted the mass strike as a political weapon in defense of suffrage rights and the right of association in particular. The mass strike was presented as a means of extending suffrage in places like Prussia and of defending the right of a Social Democratic party to exist and organize in the trade unions. This mass strike resolution carried overwhelmingly, by 287 to 14 votes.

One of those voting against the resolution was a man named Carl Legien who just happened to be the leader of the SPD's trade-union federation. He importuned the party leadership and on 16 February 1906, at a secret meeting of the party and trade unions, the party capitulated to the trade unions.

Basically, the trade unions said to the party: if there are to be mass strikes and the party can't prevent them, it is the party and not the trade unions who should lead them. The trade unions promised to sup¬
port the party to the extent they could, but the party was to bear the brunt not only of the responsibility for leading mass strikes, but also of paying for them.

The very next year in September of 1906, Bebel at the Mannheim Congress declared that without the support of the unions, mass strikes are unthinkable and Legien said "Ja! They are unthinkable!"

At Mannheim the party endorsed the deal cooked up at the earlier secret conference. Bebel, who wielded immense authority in the German movement, pushed the proposal through by a vote of 386 to 5. Among those voting for it were Kitschy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Following the events of 1905 there was a rise in German imperial ambitions. The German bourgeoisie reacted to 1905 with a great wave of chauvinist propaganda and in the 1907 elections the German Social Democracy got a really cold, wet rag smacked in its face. These were the so-called Hottentots elections and they were the first elections in which imperialist patriotism played a big role. In 1907, many of the petty bourgeois who had previously voted for the Social Democrats, didn't.

The percentage of the SPD votes didn't drop-very much in absolute numbers. It went from 31.7 to 29, but the number of SPD representatives in the Reichstag dropped from 81 to 43. At the time there were numerous political parties in Germany and thus provisions for runoffs if no party obtained a majority of the vote. The Social Democracy willy-nilly had been counting on a large number of petty-bourgeois votes.

In contesting for election in Germany, routinely the SPD had made blocs with the liberals. Where a Social Democrat didn't get in the runoff, SPDers were told to vote for the bourgeois progressive, and an appeal was made to the progressive voters to vote SPD if a socialist was in a runoff. Of course, Social Democrats, being disciplined, got many progressives elected. But following 1905, the progressives' bourgeois base would have nothing to do with these anti-patriotic reds and this bloc didn't work out so well from that standpoint.

The Social Democracy and Imperialist War

Turmoil growing out of events in Russia and the swell in imperialist and patriotic propaganda really drove the party leadership into frenzy. Thus the stage was set for erosion of the historic position of the SPD encapsulated in the slogan of Wilhelm Liebknecht of "not one man, not one penny."

Bebel started talking about being for national defense if Russia invaded Germany and, believe me, the Russian question was as big a bugaboo in Germany in this period as it was in America in the Cold War period. Bebel made a speech in the Reichstag explaining when he would be a defensist, at the same time sugar-coating it with a denunciation of Prussian discipline, mistreatment of soldiers and financial burdens. He was followed by a SPDer by the name of Noske, who contested the accusation that Social Democracy was anti-national or anti-patriotic. Noske said that there is no accusation more unjustified than the claim that the SPD wanted to undermine the discipline of the army. Where in Germany except in the army is there greater discipline than in the Social Democratic Party and the modern trade unions?

"'As a Social Democrat I agree with the honorable Minister of War when he declares that German soldiers must have the best arms.' Finally, he [Kautsky] proclaimed that the Social Democrats would repel any aggression against their country 'with greater determination' than any bourgeois party, that the SPD wanted Germany to be 'armed as well as possible,' and that 'the entire German people' had an 'interest in the military institutions necessary for the defence' of the 'fatherland'."
The quote is from Massimo Salvadori's Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, p. 119 (1938). Salvadori comments: "There could have been no more public funeral for the anti-militarist propaganda preached by [Karl] Liebknecht."

The party had begun to polarize into an incipient center, a left wing and a very insidious right wing. Karl Liebknecht had become the bete noire not only of the right wing but also of some of the center of the party with the publication of his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, and for his efforts to organize an anti-militarist youth organization. In fact, Liebknecht's book earned him almost two years in prison—apropos the point about the reality of life in the Kaiser's Germany.

By the way, one must say that aside from Die Neue Zeit, which received a lot of criticism because it contained articles having nothing to do with Germany, German Social Democracy was very provincial in its views. It tended to concern itself mainly with domestic issues.

By 1910, the German Social Democracy panicked before the bourgeoisie's patriotic propaganda offensive. Some SPDers began to entertain the proposition that since they had always been for an income tax, the SPD should therefore support the direct tax, even though the purpose of the direct tax was to raise money for the war budget. The party pulled back from that position, but by 1912, when the party was really in a panic about regaining what it had lost in the elections, operationally it had moved very, very far to the right.

When the issue of the direct tax came up again in 1913 the Kautsky center gave critical support to the social-chauvinists on this issue. Rosa Luxemburg said that if Kautsky urged his followers to vote the direct tax, in a year they would be voting war credits. She was absolutely prophetic in that. When war came on 4 August 1914, the German party, which was the biggest party of the international, capitulated and voted war credits, betraying socialism. Nearly all parties of the Second International from the various belligerent countries followed suit with the honorable exceptions of the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs and, ultimately, a few Germans.

The Second International, to which the SPD was affiliated, was not an international in the Leninist sense. The war revealed it to be an international in little but name, more akin to a bunch of socialist pen pals.

That political rot which precipitated out on 4 August 1914 did not fall from the sky but grew, organically if you will, within the SPD. And there were premonitions of the problems which manifested themselves at earlier Second International congresses.

Thus, the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 actually debated whether there could be a socialist colonial policy. There was a commission in which the majority called for exactly that. That proposal by that commission was only narrowly defeated, by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. It was a near thing. Commenting on it, Lenin said that vote had tremendous significance. First, socialist opportunism, which capitulated before bourgeois charm, had unmasked itself plainly, and, secondly, there became manifest a negative feature of the European labor movement, which is capable of causing great harm to the proletariat.

Half of the SPD delegation at Stuttgart was made up of trade unionists and maintained the position of trade-union independence. And, then, of course, the war question also came up. If you read the Stuttgart resolution on the war, and the subsequent ones culminating in the Basel Manifesto, they all speak about how, to combat war amongst the capitalist powers, the proletariat should use whatever means are at its disposal when necessary.

Lenin objected to the slogan of a mass strike against war. How the proletariat is to conduct the struggle against war depends upon the particular conditions it confronts. Answering a war, he says, depends on the character of the crisis which a war provokes—the choice of means of struggle is made on the basis of these conditions. But the Germans really wanted any reference to any strike action against war deleted, because they opposed anything that would commit them, even on paper, to such a course.

Lenin in contrast stressed that the key thing about the resolution on war and peace was that the struggle must consist in substituting not merely peace for war, but socialism for capitalism. "It is not a matter of preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie." And he, Rosa Luxemburg and, I believe, Martov blocked to amend a resolution by Bebel (which was a very orthodox resolution) because it was possible to read the orthodox postulates of Bebel through opportunist glasses. So Lenin and Luxemburg amended the resolution to say that militarism was the chief weapon of class suppression, to say that agitation among the youth was necessary and indicated, and, third, that the task of the Social Democrats was not only struggle against the outbreak of war, or for an early termination of war which had already broken out, but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, it found Lenin in Galicia. He couldn't believe the SPD had voted for war credits, thinking it must be police propaganda.

After he managed to make his way back to Switzerland, Lenin's course was set. He and his comrades embarked on an implacable struggle for a new revolutionary international to replace the Second International, now fatally compromised by social chauvinism. The central issue was that the world war was an imperialist war, and that the answer to this war was not "peace," or "no annexations," or "the right of self determination of all nations," but, in fact, to turn this imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie, for socialism.
The war disrupted the Second International for a while, but shortly various national parties, each aligned with its own bourgeoisie, held "antiwar" congresses. First the Entente "socialists," then the central powers "socialists" met. This was followed by the Copenhagen Congress of neutral "socialists." The Bolsheviks at first were not inclined to participate in the Copenhagen Congress because of its demands: peace, no annexations, courts of arbitration and disarmament. But on reconsideration, the Bolsheviks attended Copenhagen to raise five points: socialists out of bourgeois cabinets, no vote for war credits, fraternization of troops, for civil war against the imperialist war, and for illegal organizations that organize for revolutionary propaganda and actions among the proletariat in the struggle for the Third International.

Forging the Third International

It was in the struggle against the social chauvinists and centrists that the Bolsheviks finally hammered out the key points of their international and political and organizational program. To do so it was necessary to swim against a raging stream of social chauvinism. Zinoviev says:
"It was in a manifesto on the arrested Bolshevik Duma fraction that we first advanced the slogan of turning the imperialist war into civil war. At that time, in the camp of the Second International, we were regarded literally as lepers. When we stated that this war had to be turned into a civil war, a war against the bourgeoisie, they seriously began to suggest that we were not quite right in the head."

The first international conference that pulled together socialists from various belligerent countries was, in fact, an international women's conference organized in Switzerland by Clara Zetkin. The Bolsheviks intervened and were voted down. That conference was followed by an international youth conference which also voted down the Bolshevik proposals.

It was only at the Zimmerwald Conference that the Bolsheviks were able to come forward as a weak minority—but a minority which was to become the nucleus of a new Communist Third International. At that conference Ledebour (who was one of the German center) confronted Lenin: "Civil war to end the imperialist war? Well, Lenin, go to Russia and try it there. It's pretty easy to say this in Switzerland." In the Second International all these centrists and chauvinist wiseacres proclaimed that all the Russian workers supported the war and that no one supported the Bolsheviks. During the period of 1915-1916 the Bolsheviks remained an insignificant minority. It was only in 1916 that they began to reestablish real and significant links in Russia.

Lenin was absolutely implacable in hammering on the issue of the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary task it demanded. His key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chance of revolution were the centrists, with their flowery conceits and illusions.

Take Kautsky, for example. Kautsky had not been a member of the German parliamentary fraction, but he was such a doyen of the party that he was invited to the meeting where they voted war credits. Kautsky had planned to suggest abstention, but when it became clear there was going to be no abstention, he said, fine, let's vote for the war credits and state that our condition is no annexations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg said, that's a good resolution. Let's just take this part out about no annexations. And that was what happened.
Liebknecht originally went along, as a disciplined member of the party, with the vote, but broke immediately thereafter. Once the war began in earnest Kautsky argued it was a war of defense for Germany. In an incredible exercise in muddle-headed obfuscation he argued it was, as well, a war of defense for the French, the Belgians and the British. After all, Social Democrats are not anti-national and can't present themselves to the nation as anti-national. His conclusion—the International is really a peacetime organization! After the war, everyone would get back together! So, to justify his support to voting for war credits, he supported the votes of all Social Democrats for "self-defense."

As the war progressed it became more hideous. And the fighting lasted far longer than anyone had imagined. Social tensions began to rise and the bourgeoisie and the centrists began to get nervous. By 1917 a turn occurred. The war had run its course. Germany had grabbed a fair chunk of territory. None of the combatants had the capacity to squeeze much more blood or sweat out of the proletariat. The Germans were beginning to think they had a chance to split Russia off from Britain and France and do a separate deal.

Kautsky began to worry about the news from the front—that everybody in the trenches supports Liebknecht. Liebknecht had made a famous speech against the war. For his troubles he had been drafted into the army out of parliament and then imprisoned. Luxemburg was arrested soon after Liebknecht. The centrists began to calculate that they were losing their influence. Thus, Kautsky and company began to redouble their offensive for "peace" and broke off from the official Social Democracy to form an independent party.

Lenin's struggle against the war meant not simply struggle against the centrists outside the party, but inside as well. Some Bolsheviks, exemplified by Bukharin's Bogy group, were seduced by the siren peace songs of the centrists. Bukharin and his co-thinkers also had a position against the right of self-determination for nations during the war, because, according to them, the imperialist war had rendered all such questions irrelevant. Lenin characterized this position as a caricature of imperialist economism.

It is very interesting to consider Trotsky's role in the struggle against the social chauvinists. He of course had a solidly internationalist position of opposition to the war. But until quite late in the war Trotsky rather quixotically conciliated various centrists. At times he sought out political blocs with the Mensheviks and for a brief period even hoped to obtain Kautsky's collaboration in the struggle against the war. For these reasons Lenin subjected him to some very harsh criticisms.

Forging the Bolshevik Party

The programmatic intransigence of Lenin laid the foundation for the struggle for October. In this regard let's examine the period of the Bolshevik Party from 1912 to 1914, and contrast it to the evolution of the German Social Democracy. There are three key periods of struggle in the development of Bolshevism: 1895 to 1903 against economism, from 1903 to 1908 against the Mensheviks, and from 1908 to 1914 against the liquidators. The liquidators were the Mensheviks of various stripes and origins who wanted a legal labor party in Russia. Given the conditions in Russia, Lenin made the point that such a party could not be a Marxist revolutionary party.

Certainly Lenin's experience with the German Social Democracy in the Second International in this period was not exactly positive. The SPD-dominated International tried a number of times to foist unity on the Russian Marxists and it was fairly clear from the get-go that Kautsky in particular, like most of the SPD leadership, viewed Lenin as an incurable sectarian enrage.

The Germans were really pro-Martov; they wanted to enforce unity. The last effort at unity was in 1913-14, when the International demanded that all the Russian Marxists get into one room in front of a commission of the International and take steps to unite into one big party. And, by the way, the German Social Democracy also had its fingers on the purse strings of a lot of the money that the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had.
I really enjoyed reading about this conference. Lenin chose Inessa Armand as the Bolshevik representative. Armand was a very elegant and cosmopolitan woman, who spoke several languages, was intelligent, politically hard, and diplomatic. Following Lenin's instructions she told the conference that the Bolsheviks were in favor of unity, however, that unity had conditions attached to it.

"1. All-party resolutions of December 1908 and January 1910 on liquidationism are confirmed in a very resolute and unreserved manner precisely in their application to liquidationism. It is recognized that anyone who writes (especially in the legal press) against 'commending the illegal press' deserves condemnation and cannot be tolerated in the ranks of the illegal party. Only one who sincerely and with all his strength helps the development of the illegal press, of illegal proclamations and so forth, can become a member of the illegal party."
It goes on:

"3. It is recognized that the entry of any group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party into a bloc or union with another party is absolutely not permissible and incompatible with party membership." —Ganken and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World
War, pp. 120-121 (Stanford University Press,
1940)

Bundism is to be condemned; it is incompatible with membership; national and cultural autonomy, this again, contradicts the party program; and the failure to recognize the resolutions of the party on that is incompatible with party membership. When Inessa Armand presented these conditions, her presentation was considered the worst of manners from the standpoint of all these Second International Social Democrats. How could the Bolsheviks act like this?

In fact, the reality on the ground in Russia was that there was one Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that mattered, and it was the illegal party of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. By the time that the international was trying to engineer unity among the Russian factions the Bolsheviks had about 80 percent of the active proletariat, in terms of their support, and correspondingly in press circulation.
The influence of the Bolsheviks amongst the Russian proletariat was initially undercut by the outbreak of the war, and indeed the war sharply undercut a rising tide of worker militancy in a number of countries, including Germany and Britain. One of the subsidiary reasons why the various bourgeoisies were not averse to embarking on imperialist war was that they thought it would quench class struggle at home.

The road of development of Bolshevism spans nearly a decade and a half. The fundamental point of this talk is that the October Revolution would not have been possible without the program and the tactics elaborated by the Bolsheviks in the struggle for the Third International and against imperialist war. For it was on the rock of the war that Menshevism, tying itself to the bourgeoisie, broke its neck. Because of the war, once the revolution broke out in Russia there was no room for a formulation akin to the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." In fact, the task that had been set in motion by the outbreak of World War I was that of civil war of the proletariat for socialist revolution.

Lenin's key three works of this period, Imperialism, The State and Revolution, and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, were polemics against the center, internationally, in Social Democracy. In the heat of battle, in Russia and across Europe, when the founding of the Third International took place, it was not easy to get delegates to Moscow, and most of those who turned up were people who either were lucky and made it through or happened to already be there. The delegates to the First Congress were thus necessarily a somewhat eclectic collection of parties and individuals. But it was an historic affirmation of the years of previous struggle and above all of the actual creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat embodied in Soviets. The key resolution at that Congress was, indeed, an upholding of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky spent the last 20 years of his life as an embittered, anti-Soviet Social Democrat, an apostle of bourgeois democracy, blaming all ills, including German fascism, on Bolshevism. Lenin, for his part, recognized the real issue which the Third International had to turn its attention to and that was the spreading of the October Revolution to other places. I wanted to quote something that he wrote in October of 1918, which I think kind of gives a measure of him as a revolutionist. If you look in the volume that has The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, there is, earlier on, a very short piece by the same name and in it Lenin notes:

"Europe's greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like -the Scheidemanns, Renaudels, Henderson’s, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.

"Of course* a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
"That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries." -CW, Vol. 28, p. 113
It was that task that the founding of the Third International took up.
The German delegation of the newly fledged Communist Party arrived in Moscow with a mandate (adopted before the Spartacus uprising) to oppose the launching of a Third International, because the German Communists could not yet break themselves from the conception of the party of the whole class. They still were mesmerized by the possibility of some sort of unity with various centrists and thought the formation of a new international premature. The German delegation was actually talked out of this position while in Moscow.

That was crucial. It had been a long and difficult struggle, but the banner of international proletarian revolution, besmirched by Social Democracy in 1914, was planted at this founding conference. Its key programmatic element, the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviet power, was asserted. The struggle to forge new revolutionary parties was launched.

The new parties which adhered to the banner of October reflected a generational split. It was the young workers who had gone through the war who were to become the base of the new International. It was the older workers who tended to stay behind with the Social Democracy. Certainly our tasks today have obvious parallels. The sine qua non is to build parties of a Bolshevik type, to forge an international, and to contest for proletarian power and that really is the only road to new October Revolutions, which is what this class is all about.

Summary following discussion
Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.

*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-“The People’s Will Is Greater Than The Man’s Technology”-"Avatar”

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Avatar".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

Film Review

Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron (director of “Titanic”), 2009

What is not to like here, for an old political leftie, right? A summary of the plot tells the tale, and incidentally explains part of the headline above. Greedy, apparently, American imperialists (they speak English and are loaded up to the gills with the latest technology so it has to be Americans, right?) having wreaked havoc and exhausted the Earth’s resources are now, as the film starts, in the process of doing the same to other faraway planets. For what purpose? To get that next important natural resource to monopolize and sell on the international, make that interplanetary, market. The target resource at this time is on Pandora (in honor of her nasty box, I presume) right in the heart of the “rain forest” and, more importantly, right at the spiritual center of the “primitive communist” campsite of the indigenous hunter-gatherer inhabitants of that planet. The imperialists are willing, to a point, to negotiate with these inhabitants but come hell or high water they are going to get the “gold”, so the bulldozers are on the march. Oh, yes, and in case of necessity they have their own private Blackwater-style mercenary operation to “enforce the peace”, the peace of the graveyard.

Enter our transformative (literally) avatar hero, a combat-hardened, war-injury paralyzed, ex-Marine used initially to get information about the “enemy” in case they get uppity about the impeding destruction of their sacred grounds. He is slated to, through the genius of modern technology, become one of the “natives”. The long and short of this process is that while our avatar learns the “native” culture from a “girl inhabitant”, in a salute to the best trans-planetary multiculturalism and a tip of the hat to earthly political correctness, he turns traitor once he knows what the old ways mean to this native, and gets wind of the ultimately evil intentions of the imperialists.

Well, as is to be expected in an action movie-all hell breaks loose as the imperialist demonstrate their mastery, led by a battle-tested Marine officer, with an overkill display of “shock and awe” on one of the important religious sites. This is now getting to sound very familiar, right? But here is where the “people’s will is greater than the man’s technology” comes in. Taking a page from the Vietnam War period (and from the time when that slogan had currency, reflecting Western admiration for the Vietnamese, their courage and creativity in the face of massive American firepower) the now renegade ex-Marine and what is left of the indigenous peoples decide to “fight back”, guerilla-style, using their primitive forms of weaponry and knowledge of the terrain. Naturally, the underdog wins. Although as with the case of the Vietnamese the struggle could have been much easier had they had massive amounts of modern weaponry to “fight back” with. There is no inherent virtue in fighting heavily-armored enemies with sticks and stones. But here is the best part, for an old political leftie, at least. After the final battle the imperialists, in a scene reminiscent of the last days of the American Embassy in Vietnam, are marched, guarded by the now well- armed indigenous inhabitants, through the airport to a waiting plane to be shipped back to earth. And all of this in 3-D. Wow!

But can all of that political stuff. This movie is really just an old- fashioned “boy meets girl” story that Hollywood has been cranking out since the dawn of film. It just so happens that the indigenous person who “finds” the avatar is a girl, a rather sprightly girl at that, with a mind of her own and a certain surface contempt for earthling ways, or maybe ex-Marines. Moreover, she is assigned to teach our avatar the native ways, up close and personal. And the long and short of this story is that they fall in love, a seemingly chaste love that will conquer all Pandora’s enemies. And it does. I once read in a survey of Western literature that there were about ten basic story lines that had evolved throughout the whole existence of that literature. If there is any truth to that cut it in half to get the number of basic story lines from the film industry. “Boy meets girl” is still a top drawer though. Hey, and they won too!

*Playwright's Corner- From The Pen Of Jean Genet-"The Balcony"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the French playwright Jean Genet's play, "The Balcony".

Book Review

The Balcony, Jean Genet, 1957

Recently, in reviewing the text for the plays “The Maids” and “The Blacks’ by French writer and playwright, Jean Genet, I wrote the following first two paragraphs that apply to an appreciation of the play under review, “The Balcony”, as well:

“There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the “real” revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his somewhat autobiographical “Our Lady Of The Flowers” details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen “street” milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits.

That kindred “street” smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same societal intersection in America, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life’s seamy side. His play ,“The Maids”, was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed).”

As I have mentioned elsewhere once I “discover” a writer I tend to read through everything else that he or she has written to see if there is anymore gold in store. That is the case here with “The Balcony” . If “The Maids’ centers on the sexual fantasy and the social distortions that the class struggle accentuates, and “The Blacks” delves deeply into the “masks” worn to survive in the class and racial struggle, then “The Balcony” underscores the centrality of the real and illusionary in Genet’s work. Here he tackles theme of revolution and counter-revolution as seen and felt through the characters who inhabit a brothel, clients and customers alike. That struggle, real enough in our world, is what drives the plot here. This is not, however, some quirky Marxist interpretation of revolutionary struggle, win or lose. It is not Leon Trotsky’s theory of revolutionary tensions between the old and new societies and degeneration of the latter but it is a nice theatrical, stripped down look at those interpretations. If the play is acted and directed correctly it is well worth seeing. In the meantime read the text.

*The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee-Free Lynn Stewart And Her Co-Workers- Lynn Stewart Must Not Die In Jail!

Click on the headline to link to the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website.

March Is Women's History Month.

Markin comment:

On a day when I am honoring the great revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, the "Rose of the Revolution", it seems very, very appropriate to enter a post from the Lynn Stewart Defense Committee Website. Both women have worked the same side of the street- for the poor, for the working people, for women, for the downtrodden. I will repeat here what has become something of a constant refrain-and will continue so until Lynn Stewart and her co-workers are free. Lynn Stewart must not die in jail!

*All Out On March 4th To Defend Public Education- A Guest Commentary From The Committee At U/Mass-Boston

Click on the title to link to a "Boston Indymedia" posting from the "U/Mass Boston Committee To Have Fun" (nice name) about their efforts to defend public education with activities on March 4th, 2010.

Markin comment:

You know where I will be on March 4th. Harvard and Boston University are closer (and not public)to where I live but the old Harbor Campus at U/Mass across town is where defense of public education will be on the march in March. Read the article for a list of their very supportable demands.

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- Old Left "Culture Wars"-Lillian Hellman vs.Mary McCarthy-Ouch!

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Lillian Hellman.

March Is Women's History Month

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1980-81 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.


Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy:

What Becomes a Legend Most?

Two such literary legends as Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squabbling over who's a liar and who's a slanderer, with over a million bucks at stake, certainly isn't very becoming. But these really aren't two bitter old ladies locked in senile death-battle over whose cat killed the canary. Although New York intelligentsia clique fights are often best left to Woody Allen ("I hear Dissent and Commentary are fusing—they're calling it Dysentery," he said in Annie Hall), this case did provoke a few thoughts.

Two self-serving myths of American liberalism are in collision here, with roots going back to the '30s when so many literati had heady affairs with communism. The current fracas was kicked off by Mary McCarthy's caustic comment on the Dick Cavett show last January that "Lillian Hellman...is terribly overrated, a bad writer and dishonest writer... every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." So liberal darling/ feminist heroine Hellman, author of Scoundrel Time and the memoir which became the popular movie Julia, promptly sued McCarthy et al. for $1.7 million, claiming "mental anguish" and "injury in her profession."

But it isn't really the money, or literary reputation, that Hellman and McCarthy are fighting over—the real question is whose legend will prevail. Hellman's defenders cite her defense of "simple decency" before the infamous 1952 HUAC trials. Many of McCarthy's partisans, on the other hand, recall her image as a righteously indignant seeker-for-truth, attacking Stal¬in's brutal repression and exposing the cheery "men of good will" Popular Front lies fellow travelers like Hellman spouted. Of course it is to Hellman's credit that she refused to fink to HUAC—unlike Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and so many others—and to McCarthy's that she recognized the Moscow Trials for the vicious frame-up they were. Yet the truth is rather more complicated, and even though a lot of blood's flowed under the bridge since the '30s and '40s, it's obvious the old wars haven't been forgotten (and why not; after all, for many their brush with communism was the most vivid, important part of their lives). As we pointed out in a Workers Vanguard (18 June 1976) review of Scoundrel Time: "Hellman's memoir...confirms the general warning appropriate to the confessional genre: look out for what is omitted— although [Hellman] explains her stand before HUAC by 'these simple rules of human decency,' life was not so simple, she was not so simple, and it was all political."

Hellman was a well-known Stalinist fellow traveler, as McCarthy remembers full well. Hellman joined the Stalinists in cheering on their bloody Popular Front policies in the Spanish Civil War, while McCarthy supported the POUMists being butchered on Stalin's orders. Hellman's "simple decency" didn't extend to the victims of the 1936 Moscow Trials frame-up, nor to the Trotskyist leaders sent to prison in 1943 under the U.S. Smith Act, nor to artists like the Russian composer Shostakovich, muzzled and harassed by the bureaucra¬cy while she burbled on about the progressive culture of the USSR. No wonder McCarthy today still can't stand Hellman, wrapped up in her Blackglama mink and utterly snobbish self-congratulations as just another well-bred white Southern lady steeped in "old-fashioned American traditions."

Of course Mary McCarthy did her bit for the Cold War, abandoning her earlier Trotskyist sympathies. During the '50s she opposed the anti-Communist witchhunts only because they gave real anti-Communism a bad name with their "red-neck anti-intellectual boorish methods," and attacked "the Communist's concealment of his ideas and motives" in a speech to the notoriously Cold War, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, to her credit McCarthy did break with the Cold War crowd relatively early during the Vietnam War, and wrote a good book exposing U.S. imperialism's crimes in Vietnam—and attacking those '50s organizations she had addressed. Polemicizing against Diana Trilling in her book Hanoi, McCarthy wrote:

"I reject Mrs. Trilling's call to order.... And if as a result of my ill-considered actions, world Communism comes to power, it will be too late then, I shall be told to be sorry. Never mind. Some sort of life will continue, as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavski, Daniel have discovered, and I would rather be on their letterhead, if they will allow me, than on that of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in its days of glory, as Mrs. Trilling will recall, was eager to exercise its right of protest on such initiatives as the issue of a U.S. visa to Graham Greene and was actually divided within its ranks on the question of whether Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend or enemy of domestic liberty."

It's too bad Hellman and McCarthy have chosen to battle it out on the rather obscure terrain of purely personal "morality," since both know where plenty of bodies are buried. But they seem to have settled for enshrinement in a panoply of petty-bourgeois legends of liberalism. As Trotskyists we have long pointed out that such legendary "personal morality" does not stand outside class politics. This case proves it doesn't even stand above vicious squabbles over money. Nor can we help noting that Hellman hasn't forgotten at least one of the grand old Stalinist traditions—she's still seeking revenge against her enemies through the capitalist state.

* From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy

Click on the headline to link to a "Clara Zetkin Internet Archive" article, dated November 19, 1914, "The Duty Of Working Women In War-Time."

March Is Women's History Month

Markin comment:

The following is a two-part article from the Spring and Summer 1975 issues of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

Foundations Of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy-Part 1:1875-1900

"The beginnings of the class-conscious organized proletarian women's movement in Germany are indissolubly bound up with the coming into being and maturing of the socialist conception of society in the proletariat, with the process of its being welded together as a class, politically and socially represented by a class party which is ideologically and organizationally sound. The beginnings of the women's movement are a part, and in fact a very characteristic part of this entire path of development, giving an index to its increasing depth. The first efforts to gather proletarian women on the ground of the proletarian class struggle take place especially in close connection with the rising trade union movement. They are consequently social-democratic in essence, for in contrast to other countries, as in Great Britain, the trade unions were summoned into life by political parties."

—Clara Zetkin, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (1928)


Between 1875 when it was founded and its historic betrayal over support to the imperialist war in 1914, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) became the recognized theoretical'and organizational leadership of the world proletarian movement. During those years it succeeded in fusing the Marxist theoretical approach to the woman question with the strategy and tactics which continue to this day to serve as models for communist work among women. Far from occurring spontaneously, this fusion was the product of some 40 years of arduous struggle by and within the German party in the course of its pioneering work among women.

Debates on the woman question were intricately tied to industrial/political developments in Germany (and thus all of Europe), as well as to the many-sided factional struggle which festered within the German party as early as the 1890's.
Germany's industrial boom in the second half of the 19th century, which coincided with its national consolidation under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck, brought whole new layers of the population—including women—into industrial production for the first time and placed the woman question in the forefront of the young socialist movement. These were the years when both the SPD and the Free Trade Unions (which were allied with the socialists, as opposed to the company unions and non-socialist unions) developed into mass organizations.

Bismarck attempted to disguise his fundamentally reactionary and repressive regime with a few fragments of democratic reform and social welfare legislation. But the Reichstag, aptly dubbed by Wilhelm Liebknecht "a fig leaf for absolutism," possessed no political power. The so-called "universal" suffrage which Bismarck enacted excluded broad sections of the proletariat, including, of course, women. Laws of Association severely restricted the operation of political parties (and were particularly enforced against radical parties); women and youth were forbidden to join any political parties or, until 1890, any trade unions. The labor movement was thus required from its inception to participate in a struggle for political democracy as a precondition for its very existence. This fact put the Social Democracy in the leadership of the greater part of the union movement in the early years.

In 1878, only three years after the founding of the SPD at Gotha, Bismarck enacted the Exceptional or Anti-Socialist Laws, which illegalized the organization, forcing it underground, while allowing individual socialists to run for office and sit in the Reichstag. During the 12 years that the laws were in effect, 1,500 persons were imprisoned and 900 deported. This period of clandestine operation proved to be one of great expansion for the socialist parties (as well as for the trade unions). Electoral support for the SPD grew from a half million votes in 1877 (nine percent of the total vote) to one and a half million in 1890 (20 percent of the total), despite Bismarck's attempts to upstage the Social Democrats with wide-reaching social security reforms during the 1880's. But the organizational preconditions for the degeneration of the SPD were laid in this period when its only public manifestations were the Reichstag fraction, function¬ing almost autonomously from the party leadership, and the trade unions.

The Anti-Socialist Laws were especially repressive toward women. For instance, when, inthemid-1880's, clubs for the "self-education of women" were estab¬lished by women close to the SPD (the first "special work among women"), an extraordinary decree was passed outlawing such groups. However, the political victimization of the entire workers movement was sufficiently severe to foster a close political working relationship between the men and women within it, born of shared oppression and shared aspirations.

The early battles over the rights of German working women were fought out not in the feminist movement, which limited itself to bourgeois demands, but in the embryonic socialist parties and trade unions. Working-class women were therefore traditionally
bound up in the struggle of the working class as a whole against capitalist oppression.
Questions posed by the growth of the female proletariat, such as those dealing with protective labor legislation for women, the role of the family in society and women's suffrage, had been hotly debated within the German socialist movement since the 1860's, particularly between the Marxian and the Lassallean wings, which fused in 1875 to form the SPD.

Ferdinand Lassalle's "socialism" was a society based on state producer cooperatives which were to be achieved by the introduction of democracy (i.e., universal suffrage) and a unified Germany under the Prussian sword. Clara Zetkin made a fundamental criticism of the Lassalleans in her book, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands, which exposes, at least partially, the reason for their inability to come to a correct position on the woman question. Commenting on the "iron law of wages" theory mechanically upheld by the Lassalleans, she said:

"Marx recognized it neither as 'iron' nor as a law. It was more a stumbling block for the Lassalleans than an asset. Lassalle had attempted to prove by means of it that the continuing rise in the income of the prole¬tariat above and beyond the absolute minimum for survival was impossible under the wage system. Occasional adherents of Lassalle may have maintained, following this, that wage-earning by women did not signify a continuing improvement in the position of the proletarian family, but rather merely the competition over the 'wage fund' by labor power that was in itself cheap for the capitalist. The position of women could only be improved through the improvement of workers, that is, through abolition of the wage system. This assertion is based on a correctly felt but incorrectly proven historical truth: that, as the liberation of the proletariat is possible only through the abolition of the capitalist productive relation, so too the emancipation of women is possible only through doing away wit!' private property. However from this truth it is still a long way to the fundamental exclusion of women from all political and economic movements."

At its Sixth General Meeting in 1867 the Lassallean General German Workers Association adopted the position that:

"The employment of women in the workshops of modern industry is one of the most scandalous abuses of our time. Scandalous, because it does not improve the material situation of the working class but makes it worse, and because the destruction of the family in particular reduces the working class population to a wretched state in which even the last remnants of its ideal possessions are taken from it. This gives us all the more reason to reject the current efforts to increase even further the market for female labour. Only the abolition of the rule of capital can ensure the remedy, through which positive organic institutions will abolish the wage-relationship and give every work¬er the full proceeds of his labour."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation of Women—The Rise and Decline of the Women's Movement in German Social Democracy 1863-1933

At the same time, the Lassalleans raised ademand for wages for housework and, flowing from this, issued a call for male workers to strike to keep women out of industry in order to keep men's wages up, in the hope that this would economically strengthen the family and thus encourage women to marry instead of going to work.
The Marxians themselves did not have a clear view of the woman question at each historical moment. Marx correctly analyzed the necessity of female labor for the capitalists:

"In so far as machinery does away with the need for any considerable expenditure of muscular power, it becomes a means for the utilization of workers with comparatively little strength, and those whose bodily growth is immature but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first word in the capitalist utilisation of machinery! This mighty substitute for work and workers speedily transformed itself into a means for in¬creasing the number of wage workers by enlisting all the members of the working-class family, without distinction of sex or age, to them under the direct sway of capital. Forced labour for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of free labour in the domestic circle, carried on for the family itself, and within moderate limits."

-Marx, Capital, Vol. I

Furthermore, he had commented in the Communist Manifesto on the "nauseating" "bourgeois phrase-making" about the "intimate relations between parents and children," and had derided the hoax of bourgeois marriage and the family, saying: "Just as in grammar two negatives make an affirmative, so we may say that in the marriage mart two prostitutions make a virtue" (The Holy Family). Nevertheless, the embryonic German section of the Marxist International Workers Association (First International) published the following in a discussion document of 1866:

"The rightful work of women and mothers is in the home and family, caring for, supervising, and providing the first education for the children, which, it is true, presupposed that the women and children themselves receive an adequate training. Alongside the solemn duties of the man and father in public life and the family, the woman and mother should stand for the cosiness and poetry of domestic life, bring grace and beauty to social relations and be an ennobling influence in the increase of humanity's en¬joyment of life."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation of Women

The desire of socialists to protect women from the real brutality of the factory and confine them to the "cosiness and poetry" of the home is understandable. During this period of rapid industrial expansion in Germany, working conditions, particularly for unorganized women and children, were abominable. And while parents worked, proletarian children were left to raise themselves on the streets. High infant mortality, crowded city housing, disease and starvation were the hallmarks of emergent capitalism. Furthermore, the influx of women, who normally received lower wages than men for the same work, presented a clear and immediate threat to the workers movement. Therefore, although the integration of women into industry was later to become an unquestioned position in the Marxist-Leninist program, its correctness appeared less than obvious at the time.

Marx had argued in Capital that:

"However terrible, however repulsive, the break-up of the old family system within the organism of capitalist society may seem; none the less, large-scale industry, by assigning to women and young persons and children of both sexes, a decisive role in the socially organised process of production, and a role which has to be fulfilled outside the home, is building the new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes."

-Marx,' Capital, Vol. I

It was this materialist analysis, which saw beyond immediate conditions and recognized that wage labor opened the door to the only real possibility of fundamental social change through the wielding of industrial power, which enabled Marxists over a period of time to develop a correct revolutionary perspective, whereas the positions of the Lassalleans remained grounded in the bourgeois prejudices of the day.

Protective Labor Legislation

The question of protective labor legislation for women in many ways paralleled the dispute on the integration of women into industry. Here again, the facts were that conditions of work among women were inferior even to those of men at the time. Women, who possessed few skills and little education and who had been schooled in docility since infancy, were susceptible to the worst exploitation. Thus there developed a widespread demand for special protective labor laws for women workers—a demand which was quite radical in that it was a direct challenge to the employers' right to determine the conditions of work.

At the Eisenach Conference of 1869 the question of protective laws was discussed in the newly founded Social Democratic Labor Party, the first organized Marxist group in Germany. Led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, in opposition to a Lassallean tendency within the party, a successful struggle was waged for the restriction of female labor and the prohibition of child labor. While this still did not represent a revolutionary stand on the subject, it nonetheless recognized that the drawing of women into the labor force was progressive—the question for socialists after this time was how to do it.

At the unification of the Lassalleans and the Eisenachers at Gotha in 1875, a program was adopted representing a compromise which generally favored the theories of the Lassalleans over the Marxians, but which was closer to the Marxist position in favor of protective legislation on child and female labor. This remained the official position of the SPD until its legalization with the expiration of the oppressive Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890.

At the Halle Party Conference of that year, the leaders of the party's work among women—Emma Ihrer, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin—put forth a position rejecting special privileges for women while demanding protection for all workers. But this position, which correctly resolved the question of protec¬tive labor legislation for women, Was rejected by the party.

Women's Suffrage

The suffrage issue was particularly important for the socialist movement in Germany because of the arbitrary and class-oppressive suffrage laws which remained in force until 1918. Even as late as 1908, when the SPD won six seats in the Prussian Diet for the first time, the six socialist deputies were elected with 600,000 votes while 418,000votes gained the Conservatives 212 seats!

But even on the suffrage issue, there were years of dispute before the position of clear and unequivocal support for women's suffrage emerged. The Lassalleans had held a position in favor of equal and direct suffrage for men from the age of twenty. At the Eisenach Conference in 1869, the Marxist proposal of voting rights for "all citizens" was defeated.

At the Gotha unification conference six years later, Bebel and Liebknecht fought vigorously for equal suffrage:

"Admittedly, opponents of female suffrage often maintain that women have no political education. But there are plenty of men in the same position, and by this reasoning they ought not to be allowed to vote either. The 'herd of voters' which has figured, at all the elections.did not consist of women. A party which has inscribed 'equality' on its banner flies in the face of its own words if it denies political rights to half the human race."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation.
of Women

Liebknecht's amendment was voted down, but a proposal for "general equal and direct suffrage with secret and obligatory voting for all citizens over twenty years of age" was incorporated into the program. This formulation neatly skirted the issue of whether or not women were part of the citizenry. Finally in 1891 the positive and unambiguous support of the SPD for women's suffrage was proclaimed in the Erfurt Program, which included a demand for "universal, equal and direct suffrage, with secret ballot, for all citizens of the Reich over twenty years of age with-our distinction as to sex." It further demanded:

"... the abolition of all laws which discriminate against women as compared with men in the public or private legal sphere, free educational materials, and free care for those girls and boys who, because of their abilities are considered suitable for further education."

—Quoted in Thonnessen, The Emancipation
of Women

After 15 years of struggle, the party had finally taken a strong stand in favor of women's emancipation, but the Erfurt Program in which it appeared also encapsulated the growing political rifts which already had begun to divide the party. The revolutionary-sounding theoretical section of the pro¬gram was barely reflected in the essentially reformist programmatic section. As became clear later, the right wing of the party viewed the suffrage issue merely as an aid to its parliamentary aspirations. Women's suffrage, which was for revolutionists a means of educating the whole class for revolutionary struggles, was for the revisionists simply another vote-getting gimmick within the bourgeois order.

Clara Zetkin

An outstanding milestone in the clarification of the SPD's position on work among women was Clara Zetkin's pamphlet, The Question of Women Workers and Women at the Present Time (1889), which synthesized the key components of the Marxist position on this widely disputed question. The positions which she set forth—above all her insistence that the socialist women's movement could not exist outside the socialist workers movement as a whole—were later adopted by the Third International in 1919-22 and remain fundamentally the positions of Marxists today.

Zetkin's pamphlet—which argued that "women must remain in industry despite all narrow-minded caterwauling; in fact the circle of their industrial activity must become broader and more secure daily"—was grounded in the writings not only of Marx, but also in the Marxist position on the woman question set forth in August Bebel's Women and Socialism (1878) and Frederick Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). She demonstrated how industrialization was already forcing capitalism to take over some of the functions of the family (education, for instance), but she insisted that only socialism could guarantee the possibility of the socialization of all essential family functions and thus lay the basis for the liberation of women.

Against those who objected that female labor should be abolished because it was harmful to women, Zetkin argued that the expulsion of women from industry was a reactionary proposal which would result in their relegation to their previous position of powerlessness and that the destructive effects of labor on women would be overcome only through its socialization, i.e., through socialist revolution. Toward that end, she maintained, the industrialization and education of women as part of the organized working class was essential:

"The organization and enlightenment of working women, the struggle to attain their economic and political equal rights is not only desirable for the socialist movement. It is and will become more and more a life-and-death question for it, the more the further development of industry forces men out of production, the more the huge army of the female proletariat swells. A socialist movement that is carried out not only by the male proletariat but by the millions of industrial women workers as well, is bound to be victorious, to lead to the political and economic liberation of the whole working class twice as fast."

—Clara Zetkin, The Question of Women Workers and Women at the Present Time

In 1891, the year of the Erfurt Conference, Zetkin and Emma Ihrer became the editors of a special SPD newspaper addressed specifically to the question of women's emancipation. It was called Die Gleicheit (Equality). The editors wrote that Die Gleicheit would:

"...fight with all energy and sharpness for the full social liberation of the world of proletarian women, because this is possible only in a socialist society. For only in such a society, along with the disappearance of the property and economic relations presently dominant, will the social contradiction disappear between those who own property and those who do not, between man and woman, between intellectual and physical labor. The elimination of these contradictions can however only come through class struggle: the liberation of the proletariat can only be the work of the proletariat itself. If the proletarian woman wants to be free, she must join forces with the common so¬cialist movement.... But the characteristic standpoint, the standpoint of the class struggle, must be sharply and unambiguously emphasized in an organ for the interests of proletarian women. And this must be done all the more sharply, the more the bourgeois women's righters make it their business, by the use of general humanitarian phrases and petty concessions to women workers' demands for reform, to throw up obstructions in the world of proletarian women and to seek to draw them away from the class struggle. But the schooling of proletarian women precisely for the class struggle will also in the future continue to be the foremost task of Die Gleichheit."

—Thonnessen, Die Frauenemanzipation

The following ten years were enormously successful for the SPD and for its work among women, in particular, but its functioning was overshadowed by the growing political differentiation within the party which was to lead, in 1914, to an open split. Thus the party's intervention into the mass movement through the medium of Die Gleicheit, although congruent with the theoretical position of the party, contradicted the main momentum of the party leaders under Karl Kautsky, who sought to appease the purely parliamentary and trade-unionist appetites of their constituency. For a shift was taking place toward ever more confidence in the possibility of effecting fundamental social change through parliamentary activity. Since the party's base rested mainly on the northern industrial proletariat and its trade-union leadership, there was strong pressure for concessions to pure trade unionism. Furthermore, during this period, membership in the trade unions was quickly outdistancing that of the SPD. In accordance with the "two pillars" theory (that the trade unions deal with economic issues and the party handles "political" questions), the trade unions adopted a politically "neutral" stand. It was only in the next decade that this illusory compromise broke down as the trade-union leaderships demonstrated their fundamentally reformist intentions. The party leadership under Kautsky, forced to choose, capitulated.

The central leadership of the work among women, notably Zetkin, fought the rightward drift of the party majority. Throughout this period, and in fact until 1916 when Zetkin was finally removed from editorship, Die Gleicheit was continually attacked by the right wing for being too theoretical, too inaccessible, not "popular" enough. Attempts were made to liquidate the paper and print instead a Sunday supplement dealing with women, written to be "understandable to all." Zetkin, Zietz, Ihrer and others in the left wing argued that the paper was not intended to be a family newspaper, but an instrument for the theoretical instruction of revolutionists; that it was a form of special work among politically conscious women primarily directed at female members and sympathizers of the SPD. Year after year, the leftists blocked these attempts to "simplify" (depoliticize) the newspaper, and managed to resist liquidation until 1916, two years after the decisive political betrayal by the party majority.

It is notable that the growing revisionist currents within the party were considerably weaker among readers and supporters of Die Gleicheit. When the Socialist Caucus of the SPD voted tor war credits in 1914, Die Gleicheit went into open opposition. It was a measure of the systematic political education that had been carried on and the intransigent leadership of the party's work among women that most of the experienced comrades involved in this work did not side with the reformist SPD majority. From this point until Zetkin's final removal as editor,Die Gleichheit was known as the international women's publication opposing the imperialist war. It served as one of the few voices of the antiwar left wing of the Second International and—through ties with left-wing socialists in Russia, Austria, England, Belgium, the U.S. and elsewhere—became a political lifeline for many women who later found their way into the Third International.

The second part of this article, dealing with the period 1900-14 and focusing on the establishment of a women's section of the party, the struggle against feminist currents within the party and the widening rift which finally split the party in 1914, will appear in the next issue of Women and Revolution.

Foundations of Communist
Work Among Women:

The German Social Democracy
Part 2: 1900-1917

"The collapse of the Second International is the collapse of socialist opportunism. The latter has grown as a product of the preceding 'peaceful' period in the development of the labour movement. That period taught the working class to utilise such important means of struggle as parliamentarianism and all legal opportunities, create mass economic and political organisations, a widespread labour press, etc.; on the other hand, the period engendered a tendency to repudiate the class struggle and to preach a class truce, repudiate the socialist revolution, repudiate the very principle of illegal organisations, recognise bourgeois patriotism, etc. Certain strata of the working class.. .as well as petty-bourgeois sympathisers within the socialist parties, have proved the social mainstay of these tendencies, and channels of bourgeois influence over the proletariat."

—V.I. Lenin, Conference Resolutions, Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. groups abroad, February 1915

By the second half of the I890's, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), based on the powerful industrial trade unions, had become a real social force capable of leading whole sections of the German proletariat and had thus gained preeminence in the world socialist movement. This growing social weight was a strong motive force behind both the reformist and revolutionary wings of the party; the left envisioned as a real possibility the party's leading the proletariat in socialist revolution, while the right sought increasingly simply to maintain its powerful bargaining position within capitalist society.

A study of this history sheds light on the woman question partly because of the ground-breaking theoretical and practical work done by the SPD in the pre-war period. But, just as importantly, the history demonstrates, in life, that a genuine solution to the oppression of women is inseparable from a revolutionary world view and that the struggle for women's liberation must be linked to a truly revolutionary party.

It was no accident that those, like Zetkin, who fought unswervingly for special, high-level, agitational and propagandistic work among women, were among the leading radicals in the SPD who staunchly defended their revolutionary proletarian vision against all forms of narrowness and chauvinism, from trade unionism, parliamentarianism and nationalism to male chauvinism and feminism. Many of these comrades were among those who formed the Spartacist group in 1916 and the German Communist Party (KPD)in 1919, the organizations which carried forward revolutionary work among women.

The Foundations are Established

Following years of debate on the woman question, the 1896 Gotha Congress made major steps forward by passing a lengthy memorandum on the woman question and codifying the approach of the SPD to the organization of the female proletariat in an eight point program including demands for equality in suffrage, education and wages. The same congress passed resolutions affirming the need for special work among women and established the organiza¬tional rudiments for the work. This approach was reaffirmed at an international gathering the same year attended by about thirty socialist women from England, Germany, America, Holland, Belgium and Poland, which was held in conjunction with the International Congress of Socialist Workers and Trade Unions. The 1896 conferences underscored the essential counterposition of the bourgeois-feminist to the proletarian-socialist women's movement, proclaiming that the latter must be organized as part of the revolutionary proletarian movement because of the unbreakable connection between women's human and social position and the private ownership of property. These resolutions, embodying a revolutionary perspective, laid the basis for the work of the SPD on the woman question at the turn of the twentieth century and stood as models for the rest of the world socialist movement.

Special Organization for Women

The German party was particularly admired for its unique resolution of the organization question which reconciled the need for special work among women with the overriding importance of a unified proletarian party. It developed the conception of an internal division of labor in the party, consisting of a Woman's Commission or Bureau to oversee the work, combined with a separate organiza¬tion or "section" led and organized by the'party. Through special work directed at women, the section could extend the influence of the party to layers of proletarian women who might otherwise not join the movement. This form of organization had been developed after much discussion and was instituted only after much heated debate within the party. Because of the Laws of Association, which severely restricted the political activity of women and youth until 1908, separate socialist women's organizations, usually under the guise of "women's self-education societies," had been established; but leaders of this work insisted that special attention to work among women was necessary even in the absence of such oppressive legislation.

"If they [the women comrades] wanted to bring socialism to the mass of proletarian women, they had to take into account these women's political backwardness, their emotional peculiarities, their two-fold burden at home and in the factory, in short, all the special features of their existence, actions, feelings and thoughts. Accordingly, they had in part to adopt different ways and means in their work, and seek other points of contact, than the male comrades did in their educational and organizational work among the male proletariat."

—O. Baader, Report for the First International Conference of Socialist Women, Stuttgart, 1909

Later, members of the Russian Bolshevik tendency and socialist parties of other countries argued within their groups for special work on the German model consisting of a Women's Bureau, Committee or Commission to direct research, agitation and propaganda and produce special publications directed at women like the SPD newspaper Die Gleichheit.

"However, in all countries the vital victory in this argument .<>oes to the defenders of the German way of working —the fusion of the male and female halves of the working class in the party organisation, while retaining the separation and autonomy of agitation among the women of the working class."

—Kollantai, Women Workers Struggle for their Right*

The entire party organization was in the process of being strengthened and centralized during the late I890's and early I900's as the SPD became transformed from a small, illegal organization to a mass party. Partly as an expression of the growing preoccupation with electoral work, the loosely federated local groupings were urged to consolidate into regional organizations, generally contiguous with voting districts; however this was also a healthy attempt to construct a national party capable of united action. Representatives, known as Vertrauensmanner, had the task of linking the local groups to the Central Executive, and, as part of the organization of the female proletariat, provision was made in 1892 for specially elected female representatives in each area and a central representative to direct the work nationally and sit on the Central Executive. Because, in German, the word Vertrauensmann grammatically can refer only to a male representative, the party officially changed the word to Vertrauensperson.

Debate Over Bernstein's Revisionism

During this period of relative prosperity and social peace in Germany, debate in the party centered on Eduard Bernstein's revisionist theory of evolutionary socialism. Abandoning a materialist view, Bernstein regarded the democratic capitalist state not as an organ of class oppression to be overthrown but as an instrument to be mastered and utilized for the realization of socialism. According to this theory the need for the organization of the working class in particular disappeared, since members of all classes were deemed equally capable of developing their finer ethical instincts toward the achievement of socialism. In Bernstein's view, revolution was simply a disruption to flourishing, prosperous, democratic capitalism which, left undisturbed, could provide the proper environment for the development of man. Though Bernsteinism was voted down at the party congresses of 1899 and 1901, a tendency within the party continued to support his theoretical framework. Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht were in the vanguard of the fight against the revisionists, and they were joined at this point by the main party leadership, including even the members of the Reichstag fraction.

At the first of a series of bi-annual SPD women's conferences held in 1900, the revisionist minority again attempted to "popularize" Die Gleichheit and generally de-politicize the party's work among women, advocating emphasis on agitation around issues such as protection, the eight-hour day and social welfare legislation. These efforts were vigorously and successfully fought by Die Gleichheit editors and other leaders of the work among women, who advocated, not the exclusion of this type of agitational activity, but its combination with general political education and the continuation of Die Gleichheit as a highly political journal for the development of party cadre.

Since the party's efforts were totally mobilized for the 1903 Reichstag elections women, who were still denied suffrage, were specially organized for door-to-door and factory electioneering under the slogan "If we can't vote we can still stir." This work was viewed by the revisionist minority as the main task of the women's movement, especially after the resounding success achieved by the party in the elections that year. Eighty-one seats were gained with over three million voters, or 32 percent of the electorate, casting votes for the Social Democracy. The revisionist wing fought hard for a policy of reconciliation with the Liberal Party in the Reichstag but was opposed by the majority of the party, including the executive, at the party conference that year.

The Rift Widens

The impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the concurrent downturn in the economy brought strikes of unheard-of breadth, with half a million workers engaged in work stoppages during the year 1905 alone—more strikes than for the previous five years taken together and greater than the total for the I890's. In this context issues dividing the lefts from the revisionists, such as the use of the mass strike tactic, were debated as life-and-death questions. The trade unions, breaking with their former neutral stance,reacted openly against the spectre of "red revolution" and its advocates in the SPD, even to the point of urging those advocates to seek an outlet for their revolutionary energies in Russia! But still the anti-revisionists maintained a majority and the party passed a resolution at the 1905 congress at Jena declaring itself ready "under certain conditions" to resort to the use of general strike action. This conference was to be the last at which the anti-revisionist left wing included most of the party executive and was therefore able to win a majority on an important issue. One year later, the executive betrayed its own membership by concluding a secret pact with the trade-union leaders which not only denied any intention of fomenting a mass strike but further promised to try actively to prevent one to the best of its abilities.

Following a year of massive political strikes throughout Germany centering on suffrage reform, the executive pulled back in fear of the mass movement and maneuvered the passage of a motion at the 1906 Mannheim Congress which profoundly altered the relationship of the trade unions to the party. The resolution, declaring "parity" between the trade unions and the party on "matters of mutual interest," in fact gave the trade unions veto power over the party's actions and represented a decisive capitulation of the executive to the pressures of trade-union conservatism. As Luxemburg observed, the arrangement was reminiscent of that by which one spouse would seek to regulate life with the other: "On matters of question between us, when we agree, you will decide; when we disagree, I shall decide." Thus the tension between the party's leftist heritage and the pressures of trade unionism was officially resolved in favor of the trade unions, bringing the debate over reform or revolution back into the party— with a vengeance.

The Right Wing and the Woman Question

Not surprisingly, coincident with this rightward consolidation, debate on the woman question was renewed in the revisionist publication Sozialisiische Monatshefte.
Edmund Fischer, spokesman for the revisionists, innocently posed the question "... is it unnatural, socially unhealthy and harmful for women generally to work, a capitalist evil which will and must disappear with the abolition of capitalism?" In the guise of a new theoretical contribution, he answers: "The so-called emancipation of women goes
against the nature of women and of mankind as a whole. It is unnatural and hence impossible to achieve." Fischer,resurrecting the old, worn-out arguments from the I860's
as if the debate had never taken place, concluded: "Men's dependence on women must thus be at least as great as vice versa women's primary and highest aim in life, which is
deeply embedded in their nature as women, is: to be mothers, and to live for the care and raising of children, while as a rule only unmarried women want to have economic independence." This regressive, reactionary drivel was a clear reflection of the ascendency of the reformist, conciliationist right wing of the party and, although these positions were ruthlessly excoriated in the party press and particularly by Zetkin in the pages of Die Gleichheit, they served as the theoretical justification for the party's inevitable official reversal on the woman question which took place gradually in the years after the split.

Other conciliationist tendencies, connected with leaders who sided with Bernstein's revisionism or, later with Kautsky's center position, manifested themselves on the woman question. Luise Kautsky, for example, considered the matter of protection for women workers important primarily because the demand would act as "a battering ram for the protection of men."

Lily Braun, though a supporter of the revisionist wing, was the author of a fairly orthodox book, Die Frauenfrage (The Woman Question), published in 1901. Her rightward bent, however, went hand in hand with her actual approach to the work among women where she stressed collaboration with bourgeois women in the establishment of household cooperatives. A hostile relationship existed for years between her and Zetkin who, after 1906, refused to print her articles in Die Gleichheit.

The Battle Full Blown

But the right wing had little time for theoretical discussion on the woman question since the main battlefield, in its eyes, was the electoral arena where the party had recently achieved marvelous results. The left, in contrast, looked to the model of the Russian revolution and its reflections in the upswing of proletarian combativeness in Germany. For the left, the real success of the suffrage fight lay "not in the positive result but rather in the ever greater unification of the laboring masses, a unification which prepares the ultimate victory" (Zetkin quoted in Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism).

In the following years the factions debated methods of opposition to militarism and nationalism and the organization of the youth who, under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht, represented another intractable section of the party. Behind the right wing stood the trade-union leaderships who used as a club their manifest ability to win significant gains for (and thus lead large sections of) the working class. They played a decisive, conservative role not only in the mass strike debate and later in the party's abandonment of the anti-militarist struggle, but also in its suppression of the radical youth movement.

The Women's Work and the Radicals

The left maintained posts on the leading party bodies: Zetkin was a member of the powerful Control Commission; Luise Zietz was the representative of the women's organization on the executive and was the sole spokesman for the radical left in that important body; Karl Liebknecht was a member of the Reichstag fraction. Die Gleichheit was one of the major weapons of the left in these battles, as the radical grouping which later became the Spartacists crystallized within the heterogeneous anti-revisionist wing. The journal and the women's organization, firmly under the control of the radicals, were in the main responsible for the recruitment, education and development of female party cadres, and thus served as effective factional organizers. In fact, it was only the radical wing that devoted any energy to the special work among women although the importance of the work was still officially recognized by the SPD.
The years following the Mannheim "parity" resolution, 1905-1910, were politically stagnant for the proletarian movement as a whole, but for the women's movement they were years of dynamic growth. Female membership in the SPD grew from 4,000 in 1905 to almost 11,000 in 1907, although in these years official membership was still illegal for women and was therefore defined as participation in a study group or support group led by the SPD. After the modification of the laws in 1908 female membership spurted from around 25,500 to 82,700 in two years, while male membership almost doubled between 1905 and 1910. During the same period the circulation of Die Gleichheit rose from 23,000to 82,000 subscribers. These dramatic successes were due in good part to the rapid increase in the number of women in the workforce, providing a fruitful arena for the energetic work of the Woman's Section, which recruited through agitation around such questions as militarism and war, the growth of the military budget, rising food prices and suffrage, combined with revolutionary propaganda.

When the first International Women's Conference was held in Stuttgart in 1907, the German form of organization was extended internationally with the establishment of an International Bureau of Socialist Women of All Countries and the recognition of Die Gleichheit as the official organ of the international women's movement. While most of the debate was over war and militarism, a heated discussion also took place on the question of suffrage, indicating that the political polarization of the SPD was also becoming manifest in social-democratic parties of other countries. The Austrian representatives advocated delaying a struggle for female suffrage until universal manhood suffrage had been achieved. The German comrades led the fight against this conservative position, which was defeated at the Women's Conference and also at the International Socialist Congress held at the same time. Lenin, who followed the discussion carefully, commented on debate and quoted from Luise Zietz's speech:

"'In principle we must demand all that we consider to be correct,' said Zietz, 'and only when our strength is inadequate for more, do we accept what we are able to get. That has always been the tactics of Social Democracy. The more modest our demands the more modest will the government be in its concessions ' This controversy between the Austrian and German women Social Democrats will enable the reader to see how severely the best Marxists treat the slightest deviation from the principles of consistent revolutionary tactics."

—V.I. Lenin, "The International Socialist Congress In Stuttgart," Collected Works, Volume 13

At the Stuttgart International Congress there were sharp lines of demarcation between the left, represented notably by Luxemburg and Lenin, and the right wing, led mainly by Bebel of the SPD. Through a process of a compromising amendment, a resolution on war, containing the following memorable points, was passed:

"...first, that militarism was the chief weapon of class oppression; second, the task of agitation among the youth was pointed out; and, third, it was emphasized that the task of the Social Democrats was not only to struggle against the outbreak of war or for an early termination of a war which had already broken out but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie."

—Lenin, Proletarii, No. 17, 2 November 1907

Enormous suffrage demonstrations once again rocked Germany in 1910 and were met with aggressive agitation by the SPD. As before, the upheaval posed most strikingly the question of whether the SPD would attempt to lead the mass movement beyond the suffrage issue through general strikes and possibly insurrection or would pull back. This was the breaking point of Karl Kautsky, formerly a left ally, albeit to the right of the future Spartacists. The political geography of the SPD was now further complicated by the emergence of a center tendency led by Kautsky.

Die Gleichheit raised strong objection in 1912 when the SPD leaders effected an underhanded, opportunist electoral bloc with a bourgeois party that blurred "the clear lines of the principal struggle." Such open criticism of the party leadership's activity also appeared in Luxemburg's Lelpziger Volkszeitung. But these dissonant voices were drowned by the enthusiasm generated in the wake of the successful 1912 elections which gained the SPD 112 Reichstag seats.

Directly following this wave of enthusiasm, the party went into a slump from which it did not emerge until after the split of the broad left wing. Demoralization swept over the party rapidly since the ranks had learned to understand success in terms of votes, Reichstag seats and trade-union bureaucratic support. Party membership had increased from about 400,000 in 1906 to almost one million in 1912 with 34.8 percent of the electorate supporting the party at the polls that year. The comrades were shocked when the executive reported that the party had grown by only 1.3 percent in the year 1912-1913. Furthermore, the growth that did occur was due largely to the work of the women's organization (10,000 of the 12,000 recruits that year were women) and thus also represented a numerical strengthening of the left wing. The party press also suffered in the downturn, losing 12,830 subscribers that year. The only official party newspaper to show a circulation increase was Die Gleichheit, which had attained a circulation of 112,000 by 1912. In 1913-1914 there were 23,000 new subscribers to the official press of which 13,000 were new subscribers to Die Gleichheit.

1913 marked the de facto end of a unified SPD; it was the last year a unified party congress was held; it was the year the broad left wing established its own newspaper, Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz.

But this by no means ended the hegemony of the SPD over the advanced proletarian layers of Germany. The SPD was a mass party with 4,000 paid functionaries and 11,000 salaried employees publishing over 4,000 periodicals. The confidence of the working masses in "their" party could be threatened only by a felt betrayal of historic import; the reformist grip of the SPD could have been challenged only by an organized force of demonstrated leadership capacity. The betrayal came with the first gunshots of World War I; the challenge was the building of the Communist Party of Germany, part of the new Third International.

The Historic Betrayal

The outbreak of the First World War internationalized the political divisions in the Second International by posing before the sections of all countries an identical problem of overriding importance: how will the social democrats respond to the call for military defense of "their own" countries?

The decision of the SPD Reichstag fraction—supported by the executive and opposed within the fraction by only Liebknecht and one other delegate—to vote for war credits on 4 August 1917, was therefore a decision which deeply affected the response of the world proletarian movement to the war. The International majority, betraying its own speeches and proclamations (such as that of the 1907 Stuttgart congress) chose the path of "national defense." A minority of the Second International, however, maintained a proletarian internationalist stance, though the pressures of world events soon revealed the fissures within this minority. It was, above all, Lenin and the Bolsheviks who fought to organize the radical, antiwar social democrats of all countries under the slogan "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!"

As the struggle developed, the centrists' positions were less and less appreciated, especially by Lenin, who wrote in 1914:

"At present I hate and scorn Kautsky more than anyone else. What vile, cheap, self-conceited hypocrisy; nothing has happened, he says, principles have not been violated, everyone has a right to defend his fatherland; internationalism, don't you see. consists in having the workers of all countries shoot at each other'in the name of the defense of the fatherland.'"

-Letter of Lenin to Shliapnikov, 27 October 1914

Socialist Women Oppose the War

The women's movement played an important role in the faction fight. A majority of Die Gleichheit readers in Germany and a large proportion of women from other sections of the social democracy were sympathetic to the antiwar left. With this in mind, the Bolshevik Central Committee, through the editorial board of the women's paper Rabotnitsa. proposed to Zetkin in November of 1914 the calling of an unofficial socialist women's conference with the purpose of "draw[ing] the working women into the struggle against every kind of civil peace and in favor of a war against war, a war closely connected with civil war and socialist revolution." In January Zetkin replied, favoring a conference but protesting:

"First of all, it will be difficult to draw a line between the Lefts and the Rights, among the women. Many of them do not know themselves on which side they are; others will hesitate to make a decision: whereas still others will definitely refuse to take part in a conference of 'Left' women only [original emphasis].

Zetkin, Secretary of the Women's International, did call the conference and, along the lines suggested by the Bolsheviks, invited only those groups known to be antiwar. The conference took place in Berne, Switzerland in'March 1915, three weeks after a conference of Bolshevik exile groups held in the same place.

Berne Women's Conference

It was at the Berne conference that the political differences among the antiwar social democrats became clarified, particularly the divergence between the "goody-goody pacifism of the English and Dutch" (as Krupskaya put it) and the revolutionary militancy of the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership. But even more striking was the intense battle that was led by Zetkin, recognized leader of the socialist women's movement, on one side, and Krupskaya, behind whom stood the authority of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, on the other side. Zetkin, assuming the role Kautsky played in the SPD dispute, acted as mediator between right and left and thus came under the heaviest fire of all.

"The English delegation, with an obvious feministic tinge, asserted that all women in England, even bourgeois women and suffragettes, were against the war and wished for peace."

—Report of the Berne conference by Olga Ravich, member of the Bolshevik delegation

Clearly it was impossible to "mediate" between this position and that of the Bolsheviks which called for class war! It was therefore Zetkin, acting as the compromiser, who assured the defeat of the Bolshevik positions at the conference while, as Krupskaya reports, "everyone criticized our [the Bolshevik delegation's] 'splitting' policy."
The Bolshevik resolution (written by Lenin who closely followed the proceedings from nearby) included a call for legal and illegal revolutionary activity by the masses, exposing the lies of the national chauvinists and an open break with the official social-democratic leaders. But the mainfesto which was adopted declared in part:

"In these difficult days the socialist women of Germany, England, France and Russia have assembled. Your miseries and your sufferings have touched their hearts. For the sake of the future of your loved ones they call upon you to act for peace. As the will of the socialist women is united across the battle fields, so you in all countries must close your ranks in order to sound the call: peace, peace!"

— Manifesto of the International Conference of Socialist Women, Berne, 1915

Naturally the Bolsheviks were disappointed with the outcome of the conference though, as the first truly international meeting of antiwar socialists to take place since the war's beginning, it was also recognized as an historic event. The Bolsheviks evaluated the conference as "only a timid, irresolute step, but life will push them ahead and will take what is due it." This proved to be prophetic.

The State and the SPD Move Against the Left

During the year 1916 most of the leaders of the left, including the 70-year-old Franz Mehring, were jailed on various charges. The same year, Liebknecht was expelled from the Reichstag fraction for breaking discipline by voting against war credits; Zietz was expelled from the executive; Zetkin was forced to resign her post as Die Gleichheit editor. The last was an enormous victory for the right wing which for years had tried to silence this powerful mouthpiece of the opposition. A letter was published in issue No. 16 which gloatingly related:

"In our area Die Gleichheit has lost almost all its subscribers. Our women don't want it at all. Even before the war, the articles were unpalatable for the great majority of women workers. We need a popular women's magazine."

Later the new style of the publication was defended in the
following manner:

"Generally speaking, the magazine was also eagerly read, but it became increasingly evident as time passed that the majority of women, especially the new ones streaming in, did not understand it, since the style of Die Gleichheit presupposed great intellectual experience on the part of the reader. Corhrade Zetkin, who is owed a great deal by the women's movement, wrote the magazine in a manner that did not do justice to the needs of the masses who had no intellectual or political background. Only a relatively small number of women comrades could entirely follow Comrade Zetkin's style and thought processes. U Itimately, however, a large number also came to disapprove of her political views. The result was a decline in women's interest in Die Gleichheit, and a simultaneous drop in the circulation of the magazine."

— Die Gleichheit No. 20, 1919

The "popularization" of Die Gleichheit did not go unnoticed by the Women's International movement. At the Informal Socialist Women's Conference at Stockholm in September 1917

"A strong protest was raised against the shameful suppression of Gleichheit, a blow against the Women's Socialist International. That this was not a Platonic protest could be seen from the fact that according to reports from various countries the women comrades have begun to raise money for a new Gleichheit.'"

-Official Report of the Sessions, 14-15 September

On New Year's Day 1916, the first national conference of the Spartacus group was held. Its program drew sharp lines between its policies and those of the official SPD.

"Not unity, but rather clarity on every point. No gentle tolerance —not even in the'opposition.' rather the sharpest criticism, an accounting down to the last penny. Through merciless disclosure and discussion of differences, to unanimity on principles and tactics, and therewith to capacity for action and to unity."

After the second congress of the lefts, the SPD expelled its entire left wing in January 1917. Having abandoned the struggle against capital, the social democracy also necessarily abandoned the struggle for the liberation of women and all the oppressed. It was left to the inheritors of revolutionary Marxism to carry forward the battle in the Third (Communist) International, 1919-1923. •