Revisionism and Empire

Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897-1914

Roger Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351059299
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1984. Revisionism or reformism has long been recognised as one of the main intellectual ancestors of democratic socialism, the last survivor of the tradition of Enlightenment progressivism and the only viable alternative to conservatism on the one hand and Marxist-Leninism on the other. Both as a movement and as an ideology, revisionism, like Marxism, had its origins in Germany, but has not received anything like the same attention. This study is concerned with two relatively neglected aspects of German revisionism - its diversity and its international relations theorising – while focusing on those revisionists who were associated with Joseph Bloch's journal, the Sozialistische Monatshefte.

Roger Fletcher demonstrates that the revisionist movement consisted of neo-Kantians, 'pragmatists' and reformists of several kinds as well as theoretical revisionists like Edward Bernstein, the alleged 'father of revisionism', and that the political importance of Bernstein, who was primarily a transplanted British Radical, has been widely misunderstood and exaggerated. He shows that the most influential figure in pre-1914 German revisionism was not Bernstein but Bloch, the leader of a small band of socialist imperialists who hoped to use nationalist ideology as a means of integrating the German working class into the Wilhelmine state and society. He argues that despite the limited success enjoyed by this grey eminence of Wilhelmine Social Democracy, Bloch and Bernstein both came to grief on the masses' rock-like indifference to all theory.

This is the first serious study of revisionism as a movement and one of the only studies of right-wing German socialist foreign policy views in the Wilhelmine era. While revealing the central importance of the previously neglected Bloch, and his journal in Wilhelmine Social Democracy, it also sheds fresh light on the thought of Bernstein and his role in classical German Social Democracy. The result of extensive research in Germany and Austria, it is based on a solid grasp of the secondary literature as well as thorough mastery of all the relevant primary sources.

PART ONE

The SPD and the Imperialism Debate

We must realise that at this point in time it is none of our business to speak of an ethereal concept of Weltpolitik. It is not my object to enter into theoretical discussions of which Weltpolitik Social Democracy is called upon to promote. I think we can postpone the task until Social Democracy is in possession of political power and able to practise Social Democratic Weltpolitik.

(Paul Singer, Mainz party congress, 1900)

Imperialism and imperialism are two quite different things.

(Eduard Bernstein, 1900)

In combating the imperialist plague in bourgeois society, we are unfortunately obliged to take into account that a few people in our own ranks are already infected by it. We have seen, in a publication distributed here, the Sozialistiche Monatshefte, Comrade Bernstein holding a brief for this imperialist colonial policy ... I believe it is no laughing matter that we are compelled actually to counteract within our ranks half-and-half supporters of such imperialism.

(Georg Ledebour, Mainz party congress, 1900)

The discussion of questions of international politics is a completely novel matter for us German Social Democrats. We have no political tradition in foreign policy questions … Only in the last decade, and more especially over the last half-decade, has the grave pressure and constraint of the real world compelled the party, in the face of imminent conflict among the nations, to adopt a responsible position and thus to proceed from declamation to politics.

(Max Maurenbrecher, 1909)

The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, imperialism, can not be free trade, can only be socialism.

(Rudolf Hilferding, 1910)

1

Factional Alignments, Ideology and the Imperialism Debate in pre–1914 German Social Democracy

I have not the slightest intention of confuting Bernstein. Perhaps I cannot. In any case, I will not. I simply do not have the time to engage in theoretical hair-splitting.

(Adolf Hoffmann, 1901)

As far as I am concerned, I certainly have never described myself either as a Bernsteinian or as a Bebelite, nor even called myself a Marxist. I have no inclination or talent for such ‘isms’. For me it is quite sufficient that I am a Social Democrat.

(Georg von Vollmar, 1903)

We are a party of class struggle and not of ‘historical laws’.

(Rosa Luxemburg, 1905)

Germany is the only country in the world where the pharmacist cannot even fill a prescription without thinking about the connection of his activity with the fundament of the universe

(Friedrich Albert Lange, 1866)

When the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was founded in April 1917, it appeared as a mélange of ultra-left Spartacists, former spokesmen of the party centre and centre-left, and a handful of renegade revisionists. Apart from their opposition to the war, they seemed to have little in common other than the fact that the new party attracted virtually all the leading theorists and intellectuals of prewar German Social Democracy. At first glance the wartime realignment on the extreme right wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was no less incongruous, comprising as it did not only erstwhile second-string revisionists but, more surprisingly, a number of ranking mavericks from the radical left. In the meantime, the leadership of the rump SPD seemed to have fallen entirely into the hands of revisionists or party practitioners who had previously been regarded as dupes or minions of the right. How had it come to this? Historians of the German labour movement have long recognised that these developments had their origins both in what Carl Schorske called ‘the hammer blows of war’ and in the cat’s-cradle of prewar factional dispute going back to 1905 at least (1972, p. vii).

This fateful and seemingly paradoxical metamorphosis of the party that had once been the backbone of the Second International and a model to socialists the world over arose at least partly out of the maelstrom of fierce intra-party debate over domestic politics. But in the last years of peace foreign policy issues also became a significant determinant of factional allegiance, cutting across and blurring previously established distinctions between centre, left and right. By the Moroccan crisis of 1911, German Social Democrats of all factions had come to contemplate imperialism, in particular, as one of the most important problems darkening the political horizon. Those who had not already done so now felt compelled to confront the issue theoretically and within the framework of party tactics and organisation. Among the protagonists in this debate were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, both prominent theorists in their own right and spokesmen of the centre and left respectively. Their views, considered in the context of party faction, provide an illuminating prologue to the imperialism debate which rent the revisionist faction while demonstrating the fluid state of factional alignments within prewar German Social Democracy at large.

Factional Alignments: An Uneasy Triangle

The situation within the German Social Democratic Party on the eve of the First World War marked a sharp separation between appearance and reality. To outward appearances a monolithic juggernaut, the German party was in fact beset by serious fissiparous tendencies. A key element in the ideological and factional make-up of the party was the orthodox Marxist centre espousing an ideology which was, in essence, ‘a synthesis of Enlightenment progressivism and Social Darwinism’ that ‘comforted itself with the label “Marxism” ‘ (Losche, 1969, p. 523). Its sonorous trumpeting of revolutionary rhetoric masked a complete lack of revolutionary strategy coupled with a fierce organisational patriotism. The centre was faced with two ‘revisionist’ challenges: the revisionist right wanted theory brought into line with the realities of the party’s reformist practice; the nascent left demanded that party practice be made to conform with the professed revolutionary ideology. The centrist faction responded defensively by adopting a precarious and ramshackle consensus policy. Vis-à-vis the hated bourgeois state, the position of the party centre in 1914 was that of revolutionary attentisme (wait and see). In intra-party affairs it busied itself with an organisational fetishism that enabled internal differences to be ignored indefinitely rather than resolved.

At this time the radical left was hardly to be taken seriously. With virtually no press of its own, remote from the trade unions and mass organisations, its parliamentary representation minuscule, lacking even ideological consensus, its spokesmen being for the most part querulous intellectuals who owed their limited prominence more to the positions they held within the party machine than to the mass appeal of their views, the radical left scarcely deserved to be called a faction at all (Fricke, 1962, pp. 58–64, 108 ff., 237–50; Laschitza and Schumacher, 1965, p. 33; Groh, 1973, p. 496). Until 1911 this very powerlessness rendered it relatively ‘safe’, as did the fact that in matters of theory, if not of tactics, it generally shared with the orthodox centre a common loathing of the revisionist right and a mutually intelligible ideological patois (Petit, 1969, p. 337; Groh, 1973, pp. 165–6). But the left ceased to be a quantité négligeable only when it was joined by the centre-left in the struggle to shake the party centre out of its tactical torpor and to compel general acceptance of the radical doctrine of mass action (Schorske, 1972, pp. 276–84).¹

Far more serious was the threat from the right. Since Georg von Vollmar’s El Dorado speeches in 1891, and more so following publication of Bernstein’s ‘bible of revisionism’ in 1899,² the ‘Marxist centre’ was subjected to sustained and embarrassing theoretical pressure from the right. The innumerable ‘Bernstein debates’ notwithstanding (culminating in the resounding defeat of revisionism at Dresden in 1903), revisionism both survived and prospered as an ideological alternative to the official party line. It did so not because it was better organised than the left and the centre or because it evolved a common programme, which it never acquired, but principally because it found in the revisionist press (Joseph Bloch’s Sozialistische Monatshefte, Bernstein’s Dokumente des Sozialismus and Neues Montagsblatt, and Heinrich Braun’s Neue Gesellschaft) a haven from party discipline and an ideological sanctuary. To a considerable extent the independence enjoyed by these publications, and by the Monatshefte in particular, enabled revisionism to affect an Olympian detachment from party debate and to elaborate its own theoretical position with little regard to the claims and counter-claims advanced by centrist and radical opponents. After 1905, when the party began to build up a centralised bureaucracy (conceived originally as a weapon against the right), the revisionist challenge quickly acquired solid organisational roots as well. By the outbreak of the First World War, the revisionists had become powerfully entrenched in the trade union and co-operative hierarchies, in the party press, among party functionaries, in the Reichstag party caucus or Fraktion and in other socialist parliamentary bodies. The dual ideological-organisational onslaught of the right triumphed ultimately because the revisionists were most nearly attuned to the needs and aspirations of the party rank and file. By 1914 diligent and capable party practitioners like Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske emerged as the legitimate spokesmen of the whole party because they sprang from the people, retained close contact with the grass roots, and instinctively shared their attitudes and outlook. To a large extent, it is true to say that ‘reformism, gradualism and a “non-political” trade-union movement were all … the results of the need “to meet effectively the challenge of the social and industrial conditions”’ confronting ordinary German workers in an age of exceptionally rapid economic modernisation (Crew, 1979, p. 217; cf. Hickey, 1978, pp. 215–40).

In 1914, with the revisionist right occupying key positions and wielding enormous influence within Social Democracy as a whole, the party centre no longer dared to move openly to squash it. Since the revisionists, with few exceptions, preferred to work unobtrusively in the wings and eschewed theoretical debate after the Dresden fiasco, the ‘Marxist centre’ was content to let well-enough alone. In any event, the centre found its do-nothing tactic and its authority under heavy attack from the radical left after 1910. This encouraged the centrists to seek allies in the right and, in self-defence, to narrow the ideological chasm that had formerly separated right and centre. The upshot was a paradoxical situation in which orthodox paragons like Kautsky and Bebel strutted centre-stage, as they had always done, while revisionist mummers like Eduard David, Albert Südekum, Philipp Scheidemann, Ebert and Noske increasingly, yet unobtrusively, assumed total responsibility for the scenario.³

Such, in brief, was the factional line-up within Wilhelmine Social Democracy. A far cry from the monolith it pretended to be, the German party more closely resembled a rickety triangle. Two of its sides were usually in uneasy alliance against the third. In 1900 the faction most under pressure from within the party had been the revisionist right wing. By 1914 it was the radical left.

Party Marxism and Radicalism: The Irrelevance of Theory

Labour Leadership and Revolutionary Attentisme

It is debatable whether German Social Democracy in 1914 was still, or ever had been, a truly Marxist party. There can be no doubt that until the adoption of the Erfurt Programme in 1891 the SPD had not been Marxist in any meaningful sense. Throughout the period of the anti-socialist law (1878–90) the party had been exposed to a variety of influences, including those of Lassalle, Dühring, Schäffle, Rodbertus, F. A. Lange, Höchberg and the followers of Darwin. It was only after 1878 when Engels’s Anti-Dühring appeared that Bebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, as the principal proponents and popularisers of Marxism within the party, began to acquire a solid grasp of Marxist theory (Gustafsson, 1972, pp. 29–30; H.-J. Steinberg, 1972, pp. 23, 43). Thereafter, in competition with state and ethical socialism, and supported by Engels and rank-and-file radicalism, the Marxist coterie gradually overcame the party’s right wing and the suspect Marxism of the Gebildeten (intellectuals) to establish their own theoretical position as the dominant and official party ideology.

At no stage in the following one-and-a-half decades did the now official ideology succeed in entirely supplanting its competitors. Lassalleanism survived, as did state and ethical socialism, and theoretically indifferent Praktiker (practitioners) like Ignaz Auer and Karl Grillenberger continued to occupy important positions within the party. Darwinism, in particular, remained a potent force in party theory. In part this was due to Engels’s extremely influential Anti-Dühring, which went through numerous editions and, together with Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (published in English as Woman under Socialism) and Kautsky’s theoretical works (Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren [Marx’s Economic Teachings] and his commentary on the Erfurt Programme), remained among the principal vehicles for the dissemination of Marxist thought in pre-1914 German Social Democracy. In his rebuttal of Dühring, Engels applied the dialectic as a universal law of nature and of history, thereby facilitating a Darwinist interpretation of Marxism. Kautsky, too, had been strongly influenced by positivistic and Darwinist tendencies long before he converted to Marxism, which he initially adopted in the early 1880s only as a ‘more refined’ and ‘modified’ prop to his Darwinism. Although he ceased to be a Darwinist in 1890, evolutionary theory continued to influence his thinking in the sense that he never succeeded in divorcing social from natural evolution (Steenson, 1978, pp. 18, 24–9, 65, 237; Salvadori, 1979, pp. 23–4). Indeed, all tendencies within the party applied the principle of evolution, in varying ways, as a vindication of their own policy and tactical views. Bebel so used it, as did Anton Pannekoek of the party left. Among the revisionists, Eduard Bernstein, Edmund Fischer, Wilhelm Kolb, Albert Südekum and, above all, Ludwig Woltmann made frequent appeal to Darwinism. This was all the more possible because few of the party’s leading theoreticians had any understanding of Hegel and the dialectic (Irrlitz, 1966, pp. 49–50, 56–9; H.-J. Steinberg, 1972, pp. 43–4, 48, 50, 53–60).

Within party-affiliated organisations such as the trade union and co-operative movements there is even less reason to suppose that Marxism was either understood or popular. After 1890 the socialist or Free Trade Unions were organised through the General Commission under Carl Legien. This organisation accounted for the vast majority of all union-organised labour, although its membership represented only a small proportion of the workforce.⁴ In numbers, organisation, wealth and power the trade unions quickly became a force to be reckoned with. From a total membership only slightly in excess of 200, 000 in 1890, the trade unions succeeded in organising 2½ million workers by 1914. At this time the SPD had barely a million members and its coffers were in much poorer shape than those of the union movement. During the 1890s the party regarded its trade union wing as a valuable ‘recruiting school’ for the movement whose supreme authority remained the party Vorstand (executive). At Mannheim in September 1906 these roles were reversed. The trade union movement won recognition of its independence and autonomy and gained a virtual power of veto over the party in the all-important question of the political mass strike (Langerhans, 1957, p. 187; Hermes, 1979, p. 44; Bieber, 1981, Vol. 1, p. 48).⁵

Ideologically, the trade unions professed to be neutral, a position which they defended as a tactical necessity if they were to recruit new members. Since trade union effectiveness depended on membership and organisation, they had a point. In fact, the unions were thoroughly reformist from the beginning. They saw their task as being unique and quite distinct from that of the party:

The difference between the political activity carried on by the workers’ party and the tasks of the unions rests on the fact that the former seeks to transform the organisation of existing society while the efforts of the latter, being circumscribed by law, are anchored in present-day bourgeois society. (Appeal to union members, 1891, cit. Grebing, 1970, p. 100)⁶

The primary concern of union leaders like Carl Legien was not with the realisation of socialism as expounded by Marx, Lassalle or any other theorist but with improving the lot of the workers in existing society and with sharpening the tools appropriate to this task. They had no intention of blunting these tools for the sake of what they regarded as nebulous enterprises such as the political mass strike.

What the party leaders professed in the name of Marxism was, in effect, a combination of fatalism and formal radicalism, what Dieter Groh refers to as ‘revolutionary attentisme’. The development of capitalist society was viewe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART ONE: THE SPD AND THE IMPERIALISM DEBATE
• PART TWO: THE PURSUIT OF NATIONAL INTEGRATION: JOSEPH BLOCH AND THE SOZIALISTISCHE MONATSHEFTE
• PART THREE: THE PURSUIT OF INTERNATIONAL INTEGRATION: EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE ENGLISH MODEL
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index