Stalin and German Communism

A Study in the Origins of the State Party

Ruth Fischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351488280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Through her long involvement in the German Communist party, Ruth Fischer amassed valuable material on its changing fortunes, the transformation of the Bolshevik party into a totalitarian dictatorship, and the degeneration of the Comintern. Drawing on this material and on her own vivid recollections, Fischer reconstructs the history of the German Communist party from 1918 to 1929. First published in 1948, this fundamental work opened up the study of the inner organizational life of a major revolutionary movement. In his introduction to the Social Science Classics edition, John Leggett reviews and summarizes the social, political, and economic issues and events that precipitated the revolution and those factors that contributed to its failure.

1.
THE ORIGINS OF GERMAN COMMUNISM

Chapter 1 Resistance to the First World War

On the eve of the outbreak of the war in 1914, Germany, of all the belligerents, had in the Left wing of its Social Democratic Party one of the strongest and most conscious anti-war movements. In 1914 the party comprised one million members, the trade-unions some two and a half millions. The Italian Socialist Party, second in size to the German, had about half its membership.

In the fifty years before the war during which the party had grown, it had nurtured a steadfast anti-militarist tradition. The strongest labor organization of Europe was expected to be a decisive factor in breaking Germany’s war potential; the German Social Democrats, it was believed, would resist mobilization—they would not fight the Kaiser’s war. When instead the Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag voted for war credits and the workers submitted to the draft without protest, there was a cry from the socialist and liberal world against this betrayal of its expectations. But these critics had failed to note both the power of the Bismarckian Reich and the fundamental change, behind the continuing façade of revolutionary rhetoric, that had taken place in the imposing Social Democratic Party.

The latent rebellion against the war in the ranks of the party and among some of its second-file leaders was not able to find an appropriate channel immediately, but it did make itself felt by a kind of inner rust on the party structure. Later, when events moved faster, it could be seen what had happened to the authority of the party in the interim. The German worker, conditioned to believe that his organizational strength of itself made war impossible, suffered a rude shock at the outbreak of the conflict; and during its progress, with the ever gloomier prospect of defeat before him, he continued to learn.

By the turn of the century the German party had become the heart of the Socialist International, the model throughout the world of Social Democrats. It was not only its membership figure that was impressive; it was the unparalleled strength of organizational discipline, the creation of a unique combination of political with trade-union loyalties into one amalgam—the first modern mass organization. Oswald Spengler, a philosophical forerunner of Nazism, admired the great mass organizer, the great mass leader, in August Bebel, the party’s founder; he compared him with a general of a modern army. Lenin wrote that in the struggle to organize more effectively the weak, dispersed groups of Russian Social Democrats, Russian Bebels would emerge to mold their cadres into a powerful socialist army.

The Social Democratic Party participated, however, in neither the central government nor the administration of the various states. The Kaiser’s Reich was a bastard form between Russian autocracy and English parliamentarianism. Bismarck had created a German parliament on the Western model, but governmental power was vested in the Bundesrat, the council of princes, who continued to rule Germany with semifeudal prerogatives. He fought the Social Democrats with violence, and his successors admitted them to full citizenship only slowly and under pressure.

This isolation from national politics that Bismarck imposed was in part self-defeating, for it served to increase the devotion of the worker to his party. The German Social Democrats were able to realize a type of organization that was more than a loosely knit association of individuals coming together temporarily for temporary aims, more than a party for the defense of labor interests. The German Social Democratic Party became a way of life. It was much more than a political machine; it gave the German worker dignity and status in a world of his own. The individual worker lived in his party, the party penetrated into the worker’s everyday habits. His idea, his reactions, his attitudes, were formed out of this integration of his person with his collective.

In Marxist social science—”scientific socialism”—its adherents believed that they possessed a coherent and complete theory of history, independent of the institutional science of the bourgeois world. Socialist ritual began to be substituted for religious ceremonies in the most important personal relations—in baptisms, weddings, funerals. Organized recreation, travel and sport helped create the new type of worker. For the Social Democrat the unorganized worker became a lower species of human; nowhere else in the world could the epithet “indifferent” be applied with the specific contemptuous flavor it had among German socialists. A man was stigmatized who would not raise himself into the elite of his class, to join there the millions ardently certain that the future was theirs.

Social Democracy and War

It is difficult today to understand the naivete of our grandfather’s generation toward war. Germans and British alike, the French and the Americans, had lived for the fifty years before 1914 through a period of relative stability, of expanding industrialism. Society was being pushed forward by technological change, accompanied by the opening of new trade routes, the development of the natural and the social sciences, the flourishing of art and literature. In one way or another, every member of Western civilization shared the pride in its industrial achievement. The growing cities, all felt, would stand forever, with ever more and better libraries and museums, schools and churches, hospitals. Humanity was climbing up the ladder of progress.

At the turn of the century a vast number of studies was produced on the flaws of society: on slums and on juvenile delinquency, on the care of mother and child, on city planning, on education, on an international language, on—a favorite topic—sex and prostitution. Progressive ideas were assimilated by the socialist parties of Europe and integrated, according to the needs of the working class, the fourth estate rising to a new status in society, into a single pattern of social reform. When the Social Democratic theorist, Eduard Bernstein, attacked Marx’s laws of societal motion, he was only one example of this adaptation of socialist thought to the general optimistic temper. The conflict between Bismarck and the rising workers’ organizations had given the Social Democratic Party prestige as a rebel against the social order, but the revolutionary prospect, the motive power of the early years, had faded into mere propaganda. The revolutionary tactics of 1789 and 1848 were felt to have become obsolete.

Karl Kautsky, before 1914 the party’s leading theorist, had been in his early phase not only a loyal disciple of Marx and Engels but a stimulating teacher of the young Lenin. Later, together with Rudolf Hil- ferding in Vienna, he turned towards a new interpretation of the development of capitalist society. Step by step, they held, the anarchy of the free market would disappear, to be replaced by monopolist control. Parallel with this growth of organized capitalism, mass organizations of the workers would grow irresistibly. In a not too far distant future, the trade-unions and the Social Democratic parties would comprise the majority of the people. More and more, the intelligentsia would get to have the same status in society as the manual workers, and finally would join with them in their organizations. Ultimately machinery would transform agriculture into a type of production increasingly similar to manufacture; the peasant would emerge into the new era as a farmer. The fusion between capitalist monopolies and the state apparatus would become so nearly complete that the borderline would soon be almost invisible. The change to socialism would then be possible by a shift of ruling cadres; labor organizers would replace capitalists. On a world scale, such an organized capitalism would promote peaceful progress. The colonies, industrialized by capitalism, would achieve their independence; their severance from the mother countries would follow once they had acquired a comparable technological base.

This was in substance the credo of the German Social Democrats and their associates in Europe. By this analysis, a system of superimperialism was in the making in which rational cooperation for the peaceful delineation of world spheres, for bigger and better industrialization, would replace the irrational costly methods of war and civil war.

During the last weeks of diplomatic maneuvers following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the party maintained its pacifist protest to the very day of the war’s outbreak, without believing, however, in the imminence of the conflict. After war was declared, the party found itself at a fork in the road. Organized labor in Germany had only two possibilities: an immediate audacious decision to resist the war policy, which would have led to an underground fight and the temporary loss of all party and union property, or qualified cooperation with the Imperial government.

The problems of a revolutionary policy, including the strategy of a general strike, had been discussed; for decades the possibilities and the dangers of a mass uprising had been scrutinized by party and trade- union organizers. At the party conventions in Jena and Mannheim in 1905 and 1906, Carl Legien, the leader of the trade-unions, had opposed the idea of a general strike stubbornly. At these conventions and immediately after them, Rosa Luxemburg, inspired by the mass strikes in Russia, Belgium, and France, had vigorously attacked Legien’s formulations.

It was absurd to expect German Social Democracy to change its character from August 2 to August 3, to abandon in twenty-four hours a decades-old policy restricted to the legal limits set by the Imperial Constitution. The leaders had learned political horse sense, to cross bridges when they were come to, to discard adventurism. In August the Social Democratic Party, loyal to its reformist past, bound the destiny of German labor to that of the German Reich. The socialists of Great Britain and France did the same; on July 31, the outstanding opponent of the war in France, Jean Jaures, had been assassinated. The thirteen Social Democratic deputies to the Russian Duma, of whom six were Bolsheviks, split into Defensists and Defeatists; the Bolsheviks were arrested and sent to Siberia. Only a year later, after the first international opposition to the war began to be felt, did an important legal mass party, the Italian Socialists, oppose the entry of its country into the war.

In Germany, as in the other countries, the most demonstrative gesture of opposition was a vote in the parliament against war credits. On the 3rd of August, the Social Democratic Reichstag deputies met separately and deliberated on whether to support war credits. Of the 111 deputies, 14 fought for a vote of Nay, among them Karl Liebknecht, Georg Ledebour, Otto Riihle, and Hugo Haase. The formal request of this minority to be released from party discipline on the issue was denied, and the vote in the Reichstag the next day was unanimous. It was only in December that Liebknecht broke discipline and voted in the Reichstag against further war credits. The average Social Democrat found it even more difficult to liberate himself immediately from the discipline of his own party and feel his way alone through the entanglement of Germany’s war policy.

Anti-war leaflets were already being distributed in the fall of 1914. Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin signed a letter attacking the party’s war policy, and this initiative stimulated the protest movement in the party, which gained weight and began to disquiet its National Executive Committee, the Parteivorstand. Opposition to the war policy was strong among the metal workers of Berlin, who struck on several occasions. These strikes were in fact strikes against the war, despite their formal restriction to union demands. There was unrest in all industrial centers—in Hamburg, in the Ruhr, in Bremen, in Stuttgart. In 1915 the kernel of the industrial proletariat in Germany, of the organized Social Democratic units, of the trade-unions, was already in incipient rebellion.

This mood crystallized around the figures of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who together worked to make it articulate and mature.

Liebknecht and Luxemburg

Karl Liebknecht, the bearer of an illustrious socialist name, was the son of one of the party’s founders. Old Wilhelm Liebknecht had participated in the revolution of 1848. He had lived in London with Marx, and with August Bebel he had laid the groundwork for the new Social Democratic Party in Germany. For the older generation of German socialists, “Bebel and Liebknecht” had the same ring as, in 1917 Russia, “Lenin and Trotsky.” In 1871 he protested the annexation of Alsace- Lorraine; he called the stand of the intellectuals, journalists, professors, and other literati who did not oppose the war “high treason to civilization and humanity.” For a few months in 1872 he was imprisoned for his anti-war propaganda, which he continued even from his Prussian fortress, maintaining his intimate connection with Marx in London and carrying on his attack on the government.

A year before Liebknecht’s imprisonment, on August 13, 1871, Karl was born in Leipzig. As editor of the Vorwärts (“Forward”), the Berlin party daily, his father had so small an income that Karl and his brother Theodor were able to study law at the university only with the party’s help. Karl, thus born and bred in the Social Democratic Party, carried his heritage with enthusiasm. In 1905, with the German party rocked by the Russian revolution, he became more active in the fight against imperial militarism, propagandizing particularly among the young men about to be drafted. In 1907, after a trial at which the book he had just published, Militarismus und Antimilitarismus, was an exhibit, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. During his imprisonment he was elected to the Prussian Diet, and in 1912 he became a Reichstag deputy. But despite his great party name and his personal courage, nothing before 1914 foretold the unique role he later played.

Liebknecht’s co-leader in the fight against the imperialist war, Rosa Luxemburg, was one of the socialists who, fleeing from Tsarist persecution,* had joined the German movement.¹ She was born in 1870 in a small town of Russian Poland, the youngest of five children of a wealthy cultivated Jewish family. Early in life she was afflicted with an ailment of the hip, which kept her in bed for a year and left her somewhat handicapped. Her parents sent her to a Warsaw Gymnasium, an unusual thing for a Jewish girl of that period, and here she became involved in revolutionary youth circles. In 1889, threatened with imprisonment, she escaped hidden in the hay of a peasant’s wagon “over the green border” into Germany and went to Zurich, whose university was the rallying point of Russian socialists forced into exile. After a short excursion into zoology and botany, she studied economics, which for her meant Marxism.

From her exile, Rosa participated actively and passionately in the life and struggles of the Polish underground. She fought against the Polish nationalism flourishing among Polish Social Democrats and in 1893, together with Jogiches and others, helped to organize a split and to found a new party, the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. She led a double political life: while her importance in the legal German party was growing, she was also still involved in the continual feuds and calumnies that are the inevitable accompaniment of major political differences between illegal parties. Rosa, who defended her point of view with vigor, went the full gamut of ad hominem attack. She was accused of being an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police; it was rumored that she had been able to escape from Poland only with the help of Colonel Markgrafski of the Warsaw gendarmerie. At the 1896 London conference of the Polish socialists, Daszynski, a deputy to the Austrian parliament, shouted, “It is intolerable that our movement is encumbered with such scoundrels as Rosa Luxemburg, Urbach, etc. ... If our international army is not freed of this band of journalistic brigands, they will destroy our liberation movement.“

Despite her lifelong activity in the Polish party, Rosa could not be satisfied with the vicarious activity from abroad in an underground movement; she did not want to live in perpetual exile. She longed for a Western socialist movement to absorb her energy; and when she decided to settle down, she chose Germany, irresistibly drawn t...