Hook Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Understanding of Karl Marx
The struggle for the possession of Marx’s spiritual bequest had already begun in Marx’s own lifetime. Marx, himself, had called down a plague upon both the Marxists and anti-Marxists; but he watched with critical uneasiness the doctrinal deviations and false tactical moves of his adherents throughout the world and especially in Germany. As early as 1875, in a scathing criticism of the Gotha programme adopted by his followers on the occasion of their union with the party of Lassalle, he complained that they were giving their socialism a nationalistic twist and that they had become infected with a servile faith in the bourgeois state. [1] No criticism was ever more prophetic. Before the next quarter of a century had elapsed these tendencies had become full blown and had flowered into a doctrinal interpretation of Marxism according to which it was no longer a philosophy of social revolution, but a classless science of social development which countenanced open nationalistic and reformist practices.
If Marx’s method of social analysis is valid, then the key to this doctrinal development is to be sought not in the ideas of a few individual leaders, but in the social and economic development of Germany. To this we must now turn.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of Germany as an imperialist power of the first rank. With the conquest of foreign markets, opportunities for work increased – evidenced in the decline of emigration; prices on colonial raw material and consumption goods (rubber, tea, coffee, etc) which were unprotected by tariffs, fell; and both the money and real wages of the highly organised skilled workers – but not of the unskilled workers in heavy industry or of the agricultural labourers – rose. The enormous profits of foreign trade and the superior technical organisation of German industry enabled the state to maintain and extend the system of limited social insurance which had originally been adopted as safeguards against the revolutionary upsurge of the masses. [2] All this was not without its profound effects upon a working class efficiently schooled by state institutions in the traditions of a nationalist culture. The skilled workers who felt that they stood to gain by the extension of the imperialism of the mother country were precisely those who were the most influential in the socialist trade unions; and the trade unions, then as now, had the socialist party in tow. The ideology of the trade unions, which centred around the day to day struggle for a higher standard of living, seeped into the political party. Although the party congresses still paid pious allegiance to the formula of revolution, the practices of the organisation were exclusively devoted to a gradual social reform. The right-wing leaders stole a leaf from the scientific Marxists and urged that it was Utopian to oppose an imperialist expansion which followed with ‘iron necessity’ from economic laws discovered by Marx himself; the only sensible policy was to put forward a colonial programme which would relieve the pangs of economic penetration suffered by the natives. An enlightened, peaceful and civilised imperialism, accompanied by a liberal educational policy, would raise the cultural level of the indigenous population to a point from which it could appreciate the economic, social, scientific and, therefore, moral necessity of imperialist expansion.
With the growth of the party the domination of the trade unions in the interest of their immediate social politics increased. The trade unions were primarily interested in keeping their members at work. This was obviously bound up with the export of commodities. Exports demanded markets; markets a strong foreign policy. How, then, could the leaders of the trade unions reconcile their devotion to the immediate interests of the workers with a militant struggle against their own national imperialism? To be sure, they were aware that the lion’s share of the profits of imperialist expansion fell not to themselves but to their employers. But then there were the concessions – the crumbs of bounty which fell from the table of superfluity. Certainly, cried Schippel and other reformist leaders, it was better to work than to hunger. To fight was out of the question. But fight they had to! On one sad day in 1914, in remembrance of the crumbs of concessions, they goose-stepped into battle to fight in a war brought on by imperialism. [3]
The orientation of the German Social-Democracy towards practical immediate reform produced an important change in the social composition of the party. Numerous non-proletarian elements – petty-bourgeois shopkeepers, professionals and intellectuals – began to stream into the organisation. They did not stay in the rank and file, but, by virtue of their technical accomplishments and social connections, forged to the top of the party as functionaries, theoreticians and political representatives. Although the party membership still remained overwhelmingly proletarian, their strategic posts enabled them to wield an influence altogether disproportionate to their numbers. The growth of the trade unions, too, created an administrative apparatus whose standard of living was higher than that of the ordinary worker. The officials functioned so long in office that they lost contact with the actual raw experience of the industrial struggle and slowly acquired the narrow, self-centred ideology of the typical bureaucrat whose eternal archetype they always had before their eyes in the persons of the Prussian state officials. The persecution of the party and trade unions by their political opponents and the government often took the form of an economic and social boycott. This resulted in the rise of a not inconsiderable group of tradesmen and innkeepers [4] who catered to the needs of the movement and consequently developed special interests not always compatible with the party line or the welfare of the membership. An amusing but very eloquent manifestation of the power of such groups was the existence of ‘The Association of Socialist Tavern-Keepers’ who at one time supplied more than seven per cent of the party representation in the Reichstag. [5]
As the years went by the party took on more and more the character of a benevolent organisation with eschatological trimmings. The vested interests of the party bureaucracy in their posts were linked up with more material interests. By 1913 the German socialist party and trade unions owned in real property alone close to ninety million marks. This was, for them, substantial evidence that they were growing into socialism. When the decisive hour struck in 1914, they were in no mood to sacrifice all this.
Political events as well as the pressure of the socio-economic environment contributed to enforcing the interpretation of Marxism as an ‘objective science’ of social development with which only those blinded by illusion or self-interest could not agree. During the 1870s the censor kept a wary eye open for militant class-conscious phrases and analyses. During the 1880s, under Bismarck’s exception laws, the socialists played safe by choosing restrained and scientific language. (Engels’ prediction of European revolutionary disturbance for 1885 or thereabouts had failed to materialise.) During the 1990s, after the exception laws had been abolished, the growth of the socialist vote to three millions provoked the feeling among the German leaders that they were a party of opposition rather than ‘the party of revolution’. Their desire for social and intellectual respectability led them to stress the importance of systematic doctrine. Could a theory be dangerous which was grounded in real knowledge and expressed in heavy prose?
The practical and spiritual embourgeoisement of the German movement was not long in bearing theoretical fruit. The contradictions between Marx’s revolutionary standpoint, of which there was still some lingering memory, and the life activity of his ‘disciples’, compelled the latter to seek some way of reconciling the two which did not require too great a sacrifice of legality and security. Two ways suggested themselves to square the practice of social reform with the theory of Marxism. One of them was taken by the official party under the intellectual leadership of those who called themselves ‘orthodox’ Marxists; the other by Bernstein and others who were called ‘revisionist’ Marxists. Between these two a literary war broke out on an international scale.
1. ‘Doch das ganze Programm, trotz alles demokratischen Geklingels, ist durch and durch vom Untertanenglauben der Lassallischen Sekte an den Staat verpestet.’ (Posthumously printed, Neue Zeit, Volume IX, 1891, p 574) [‘But the whole programme, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state...’, Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA]
2. So effective was the system of state insurance that the president of the Reichesversicherungsamtes looking back upon its results was able to write: ‘The approval of the war credit by the Social-Democratic Party represents the most beautiful success of German social reform.’ (P. Kaufmann, Was dankt das kämpfende Deutschland seiner sozialen Fürsorge (1918), p. 11)
3. For an interesting and well-documented analysis of the causes of the social patriotism of the German working class, cf. Mausa Zarchi, Die oekonomische Kausalität des Sozialpatriotismus (Strasbourg 1928).
4. In Germany each political party has its own inns – Lokale – which serve as the centres of political and social life.
5. Robert Michels’ Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenz des Gruppenlebens (revised second edition, Leipzig 1925), contains a great deal of relevant material on this aspect of German Social-Democracy, which does not justify, however, the theoretical conclusions he draws therefrom. [An English translation of first edition, Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York 1915), is available at here. – MIA]
Last updated: 20 February 2020