For a century now, humanity has stood at a crossroads in its history. Already in the 19th century the working class starkly outlined this historical watershed in the expression: "socialism or barbarism". The lucid marxist analysis revealed and expressed in this slogan cannot however be reduced to an empty slogan. Hence we want here to insist briefly on its historical importance and depth.

When we look at the human species' distant, obscure beginnings, we cannot help but be astounded at the immense steps forward that have marked mankind's emergence from the animal realm and marked its development since then: language, dance, art, architecture, the production of an immense wealth of material goods, and the ability to create a wealth and diversity of cultural, moral, and intellectual needs – all this represents a historical acceleration which takes the breath away.

Yet, when we focus our attention on the different epochs of human history, we must also acknowledge that mankind's development has never been a smooth progression. Still less has this been the case since the emergence of class society and the first great civilisations, all of which have long disappeared: only a very few of them have been able to transform themselves into something new. History reveals to us many epochs of cultural regression, the loss of skills and knowledge, generally accompanied by moral stultification and a brutalisation of human relationships.

The foundation of man's progress lies in his ability to transform nature with a view to the satisfaction of his own needs, and in the first place of his material needs, through the improvement and development of his tools and techniques – what Marx called "the productive forces". Fundamentally, it is the degree of development of these productive forces, and of the division of labour that they imply, which determine the way that society is organised to put them into operation: the "relations of production". When the framework provided by these relations allows the development of the productive forces, then society flourishes, not just on the material but also on the moral and cultural levels. But when the relations of production become a barrier to the continued development of the productive forces, then society undergoes repeated and worsening convulsions: it is threatened with a return to barbarism. To take just one historical example: one of the pillars of the Roman Empire was the exploitation of slave labour, especially in agriculture. The appearance of new farming techniques which could not be put into operation by producers whose status was lower than cattle was one of the causes of the Empire's decadence and final collapse.

The steps forward achieved by human culture,1 from the Neolithic revolution to the Renaissance, the emergence of humanism, and the Russian revolution, appear to us today as a grandiose prelude to the world revolution. These giant strides of human culture have always been the product of long periods of struggle, where new social relationships overcame and replaced the old. Today, they carry us towards a new leap forward: socialism, the first conscious and worldwide socialisation of the human species! Marxism, the theory that the proletariat adopted to light the way in its struggle against capitalism, is able to study this history with lucidity, free from mystification, and to recognise its major tendencies. This has nothing to do with crystal-ball gazing. We cannot predict when, or even whether, the world revolution will take place. What we can do is to understand in depth – and defend against all comers, including the incomprehension of some revolutionaries – the immense historical importance of capitalism's entry into its decadence. For 100 years, we have been faced with an alternative which can be summed up thus: either we succeed with the next social and cultural leap forward to socialism, or we fall back into barbarism.

The gravity of this alternative is greater than ever before in history, because today the growth in the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production has reached a point where it threatens humanity not just with social and cultural decline, but with complete destruction. For the first time in history, a mode of production's decadence is a menace for the very survival of the human species. Yet at the same time, it bears with it immense, historic possibilities for its future development: the beginning of humanity's truly conscious history.

The capitalist model of socialisation is the most successful in human history. Capitalism has absorbed – when it has not simply destroyed – all previous social and cultural milieux, and has for the first time created a worldwide human society. Its basic form of exploitation is wage labour, which makes possible the appropriation and the accumulation of surplus labour, as well as the unpaid appropriation of the enormous productive capacity created by associated, socialised labour. This is what explains the unparalleled technical and scientific explosion which is part and parcel of capitalism's rise. But one of capitalist socialisation's specificities is that it is carried out unconsciously. It is determined by laws which – although they are the expression of given human social relationships based on the exchange of labour power for wages, between the producers and the owners of the means of production – appear to be "natural" and "unchangeable", and so beyond the reach of human will. In this mystified – reified – view of reality, where human beings and the relations between them have become mere objects, the enormous increase in material resources and productive power appears as the product of capital rather than of human labour. Capitalism set out to conquer the world, but it turns out that the world is round. A world market has been created (on the ruins of alternative forms of production, like the textiles of China, India, or the Ottoman Empire for example). The success of the capitalist mode of production is a progressive step in human history; nonetheless for the vast majority of the population at the heart of capitalism the industrial revolution meant the destruction of previous ways of life and ferocious exploitation, while in much of the rest of the world it meant famine, epidemics and slavery. Capitalism is undoubtedly the most modern form of exploitation, but in the end it is every bit as parasitic as its predecessors. To keep the machine of accumulation going, capitalist socialisation demands ever more raw material and markets, and must constantly dispose of a reserve of human beings forced to sell their labour power to survive. This is why its victory over previous modes of production meant the ruin and starvation of the previous producers.

Capitalism presents itself as the aim and apogee of human development. If we are to believe its ideology, there is nothing beyond capitalism. But this means that capitalist ideology must hide two things: first, that historically capitalism is largely dependent on an environment and relations of production outside itself; second, that capitalist socialisation, like all the social forms that have preceded it, is only a stage in the process of humanity's coming to consciousness. The driving force of capitalist accumulation constantly creates internal contradictions which erupt in crises. During capitalism's ascendant phase, these crises were overcome by the destruction of excess capital and the conquest of new markets. With the new equilibrium thus achieved came a further extension of capitalist social relations – but once the world market had been shared out among the central capitalist powers the limits of this extension were reached. At this point, the great nation states can only pursue their world conquest at each other's expense. Since all the cake has been shared out, each can only increase his share by taking from the others.

The nation states plunge into an arms race and hurl themselves at each others' throats in the First World War. In a world wide slaughter, the productive forces chained in by historically obsolete relations of production are transformed into a destructive force of enormous power. With capitalism's entry into decadence, warfare becomes a matter of equipment, and subjects the best part of production to military needs. The blind machine of annihilation drags the whole world down into the abyss.

Well before 1914, the left wing of the Socialist International, the revolutionary forces around Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, fought with all their strength against the threat of imperialist war. Living marxism – the only real marxism – which is not enclosed in dogmas and formulae supposedly valid for all time, realised that this was not just another war between the nations like those before it, but that it marked the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase. The marxists knew that we were then, as we still are today, at a historical crossroads which threatens for the first time to become a struggle for the very survival of the human species. Capitalism's entry into decadence 100 years ago is irreversible, but this does not mean that the productive forces have come to a halt. In reality, these forces are so enchained and compressed by the logic of capitalist exploitation that society's development is dragged down into an ever more barbaric maelstrom. Only the working class can give history a different direction and build a new society. We have seen just what capitalism's unadulterated brutality is capable of after the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge in the years 1917-23. The course towards a new world war was opened, men reduced to ciphers, shut up in camps destined to murderous exploitation or plain extermination. Stalinist mass murder was surpassed by the annihilating madness of the Nazis; nor did the "civilised" ruling classes intend to miss the festivities of barbarism: the "democratic" atom bombs wiped two Japanese cities from the map and inflicted hideous suffering on the survivors.

The state capitalist machine may have learnt from history to the point of avoiding its own self-destruction – the bourgeois class will not simply commit suicide and abandon the historical stage to the proletariat – but only the return of the working class after 1968 offers any guarantee against a new course towards war. However, if the working class has proven capable of barring the road to a new world holocaust, it has not so far been able to impose its own perspective. In this situation, where neither of its two determining classes are capable of imposing a decisive response to an irreversible and ever deeper economic crisis, society is more and more rotting where it stands; a growing social decomposition makes it ever more difficult for the working class to achieve a clear awareness of its historical perspective – a historical perspective which a century ago was widely shared in the workers' ranks.

One hundred years ago, the working class faced a gigantic historic task, and so it still does today. The class of associated labour as such bears in itself the whole of human history: it is the central class in the struggle for the abolition of classes, and it must rise up against this barbarism. In the struggle against capitalism's nihilistic and amoral barbarity, the working class is the incarnation of a humanity become conscious of itself. It is the productive force of the future still in chains. Within it lies the potential for a new leap forward in human culture.

In the struggle against capitalism's entry into decadence, a whole generation of revolutionaries worldwide stepped forward, to set against capitalism's perverted and reified socialisation the conscious association of the working class, guided by the beacon of the Communist International.

With the Russian revolution, it took in hand the struggle for world revolution. For us today, one hundred years later, this great task of taking up our responsibilities for humanity's future remains an electrifying prospect. Even in the face of general stultification, a moral indignation arises in the heart of the working class, which gives us our bearings today. The working class suffers with the rest of humanity under the burden of decadence. Atomisation and the absence of perspective for the future attack our very identity. In the confrontations to come the working class will show whether it is capable of becoming conscious once again of its historical duty.

In the sweep of history, it is only a short step from moral indignation to the politicisation of an entire generation. A new leap forward in the history of human culture is both possible and vital. This is what living historical experience tells us.

ICC

2014: a year of forgetting

Even today the war that began in August 1914 goes by the name of the Great War, despite the fact that the Second World War that followed it in 1939 killed more than twice as many people, and despite the fact that the unending worldwide warfare since 1945 has been responsible for even more death and destruction than World War II.

To understand why 1914-18 is still the “Great War”, we need only visit any village in France, even the most isolated lost in its Alpine pastures, and read the roll-call of the dead on the war memorials: whole families are there – brothers, fathers, uncles, sons. These mute witnesses to horror stand not just in the towns and villages of the European belligerent nations, but even on the other side of the world: the memorial in the tiny settlement of Ross on the Australian island of Tasmania bears the names of 16 dead and 44 survivors, presumably of the Gallipoli campaign. Humanity was no stranger to war, but 1914 was the first time it had been involved in World War.

For two generations after the war ended, 1914-18 was synonymous with senseless carnage, driven by the uncaring blind stupidity of an aristocratic ruling caste, and the unbridled greed of imperialists, war profiteers and arms manufacturers. Despite all the official ceremonies, the laying of wreaths and (in Britain) the symbolic wearing of poppies on Memorial Day, this view of World War I passed into popular culture in the belligerent nations. In France, Gabriel Chevalier's autobiographical novel of life in the trenches Fear (La Peur), published in 1930, had an enormous success, to the point where the book was briefly banned by the authorities. In 1937, Jean Renoir's anti-war movie The Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), played continuously at the Marivaux cinema in Paris from 10 in the morning till two at night, beating every previous box office record: in New York it played for 36 weeks.1

In 1920s Germany, George Grosz’s satirical cartoons lambasted the generals, politicians and profiteers who had done well out of the war. The war veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1929 and 18 months later had sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages; the 1930 film version by Universal Studios was a smash hit in the USA, winning an Oscar for best picture.2

In its disintegration, the Austro-Hungarian empire bequeathed to the world one of the greatest anti-war novels: Jaroslav Hašek's The good soldier Svejk (Osudy dobrélo vojáka Švejk za světové války), published in 1923 and since translated into 58 languages – more than any other work in Czech.

The revulsion at the memory of World War I survived the still greater bloodletting of World War II. Compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima the barbarity of Prussian militarism and Tsarist oppression – not to mention French or British colonialism – which had provided the justification for war in 1914, almost paled into insignificance, making the slaughter in the trenches seem still more monstrous and absurd: World War II could be portrayed as, if not exactly a “good war” then at least as a just and necessary war. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in Britain, where a stream of heroic “good war” movies (Dambusters in 1955, 633 Squadron in 1964, etc) filled the cinema screens in the 1950s and 60s, while at the same time the anti-war writings of war poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves were required reading for 15-year old school students.3 Perhaps the finest composition of Benjamin Britten, the 20th century's best known British composer, was his War Requiem (1961) which set Owen's poetry to music, while in 1969 two very different films hit the silver screen: Battle of Britain, in the patriotic vein, and the viciously satirical Oh What a Lovely War!, which succeeded in creating a musical denunciation of the First World War using original soldiers' songs from the trenches.

Two generations later, we stand on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war on 4th August 1914. Given the symbolic importance of round number anniversaries, and still more of centenaries, preparations are under way to commemorate (“celebrate” is perhaps hardly the word) the war. In Britain and France, budgets of tens of millions (euros or sterling) have been set aside; in Germany, for obvious reasons, preparations are more discreet and have no official government benediction.4

“He who calls the piper pays the tune”, so what are the ruling classes getting for the tens of millions they have budgeted to “commemorate the war”?

Look at the websites of the organisations responsible for the commemoration (in France, a special body set up by the government; in Britain – appropriately – the Imperial War Museum) and the answer seems clear enough: they are buying one of history's most expensive smokescreens. In Britain, the Imperial War Museum is devoting itself to bringing together the stories of individuals who lived during the war and turning them into podcasts.5 The Centenary Project's website (1914.org) offers such crucial events as the Museum display of “JRR Tolkien's First World War revolver” (we're not joking – presumably the aim is to cash in on the success of the Lord of the Rings movies); the commemoration of a Surrey war playwright, the London Transport Museum collecting World War I bus stories (seriously!); Nottingham City and County's “major program of events and activities (...) will highlight how the conflict was a catalyst for huge social and economic change in the communities of Nottinghamshire”. The BBC have produced a “groundbreaking” documentary: “The First World War from above” – photos and film footage taken from aircraft and observation balloons. The pacifists will get a look-in with commemorations of conscientious objectors. In short, we are going to be drowned in an ocean of detail, and even of trivia. According to the Imperial War Museum's Director-General “Our ambition is that a lot more people will understand that you can’t understand the world today unless you understand the causes, course and consequences of the First World War”6 and we would agree 100%. But the reality is that everything possible is being done – including by the honourable Director-General – to prevent us from understanding those causes and consequences.

In France, the centenary website carries the impeccably official “Report to the President on commemorating the Great War” dated September 20117 which begins with these words from General de Gaulle's speech at the 50th anniversary in 1964: “On 2nd August 1914, the day mobilisation was announced, the whole French people came to their feet as one. This had never been seen before. Every region, every district, every category, every family, every living being, suddenly found common cause. In an instant, political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared. From one end of the nation to the other, words, songs, tears, and above all the silence, expressed a single resolve”. And in the report itself we read that “While the Centenary will provoke amongst our contemporaries dread at the mass slaughter and the immense sacrifices that were accepted, it will also send a shiver through French society, reminding us of the unity and national cohesion that the French displayed in the face of the trial of World War I”. It seems unlikely then, that the French ruling class intends to tell us anything about the brutal police repression of workers' anti-war demonstrations during July 1914, or about the infamous “Carnet B” (the government's list of socialist and syndicalist anti-militarist militants to be rounded up and interned or sent to the front at the outbreak of war – the British had their own equivalents), and still less about the circumstances in which anti-war socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated on the very eve of the conflict, or about the mutinies in the trenches8...

As ever the propagandists can count on the support of the learned gentlemen of Academe to provide them with themes and material for their talk-shows and TV programmes. We will take just one example which seems to us emblematic: Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, first published in 2012, published in paperback in 2013, and already translated into French (Les Somnambules) and German (Die Schlafwandler).9 Clark is an unashamed empiricist, And his Introduction sets out his intentions quite openly: “This book (...) is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilisation”. Missing from Clark's list of course is “capitalism”. Could capitalism as such generate war? Could war be not just “politics by other means” (to use von Clausewitz's famous expression), but the ultimate expression of the competition inherent in the capitalist mode of production? Oh no, no, no: perish the thought! Clark sets out then, to lay before us “the facts” on the road to war, and this he does with immense erudition and in enormous detail right down to the colour of the ostrich feathers on Archduke Franz Ferdinand's helmet on the day of his assassination (they were green). Had anyone bothered to note down the colour of his assassin Gavrilo Princip's underwear that day, it too would be in this book.

The book's length, its overwhelming mastery of detail, makes one huge omission all the more striking: despite devoting whole sections to “public opinion”, Clark has nothing whatever to say about the one part of “public opinion” that really mattered – the stand adopted by the organised working class. Clark cites extensively from newspapers like the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mail, or Le Matin, and others long since deservedly forgotten, but not once does he cite Vorwärts or L'Humanité (the press respectively of the German and French Socialist Parties), nor La Vie Ouvrière, the quasi-official organ of the French syndicalist CGT,10 nor its Bataille Syndicaliste. These were not minor publications: Vorwärts was only one of the SPD's 91 dailies, with a total circulation of 1.5 million (by comparison, the Daily Mail claimed a circulation of 900,000),11 and the SPD itself was the largest political party in Germany. Clark mentions the SPD's 1905 Jena Congress and its refusal to call for a general strike in the event of war, but there is no mention of the anti-war resolutions adopted by the Socialist International's congresses at Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912). The only leader of the German SPD to merit a mention is Albert Südekum, a relatively insignificant figure on the right of the SPD who is given a walk-on part reassuring German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on 28th July that the SPD will not oppose a “defensive” war.

On the struggle between left and right in the socialist and broader working class movement, there is silence. On the political combat of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Domela Nieuwenhuis, John MacLean, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Pierre Monatte and many others, there is silence. On the assassination of Jean Jaurès there is silence, silence, silence...

Clearly, the proletarians cannot rely on bourgeois historiography truly to understand the causes and consequences of the Great War. Let us then turn instead to two outstanding militants of the working class: Rosa Luxemburg, arguably the finest theoretician of the German Social-Democracy, and Alfred Rosmer, a stalwart militant of the pre-war French CGT. In particular, we will draw here on Luxemburg's Crisis in the German Social-Democracy12 (better known as the “Junius Pamphlet”), and on Rosmer's Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la Première Guerre mondiale13 (The workers' movement during the First World War). The two works are very different: Luxemburg's pamphlet was written in 1916, in prison (no privileged access to libraries and government archives for her, and the power and clarity of her analysis is all the more impressive for that); the first volume14 of Rosmer's work, where he deals with the period leading up to war, was published in 1936, and is the fruit both of his painstaking dedication to historical truth and his passionate defence of internationalist principle.

World War I: its importance and its causes

Some might ask whether it really matters. It was all a long time ago, the world has changed, what can we really learn from these writings from the past?

We would answer that understanding World War I is vital for three reasons.

First, because World War I opened a new historical epoch: we are still living in a world shaped by the consequences of that war.

Second, because the underlying causes of the war are still very much present and operational: there is an all too striking parallel to be drawn between the rise of Germany as a new imperialist power prior to 1914, and the rise of China today.

Finally – and perhaps most importantly, because this is what the government propagandists and the historians really want to hide from us – because there is only one force that can put a stop to imperialist war: the world working class. As Rosmer says: “the governments know very well that they cannot undertake the dangerous adventure of war - this war above all - unless they have behind them the virtually unanimous support of public opinion, and above all of the working class; to get it, they must deceive, dupe, mislead, excite”.15 Luxemburg quotes “the well-known words of [German Chancellor] Bülow: 'They are trying to put off the war chiefly because they fear the Social-Democracy.'”; she also quotes from General Bernhardi's Vom Heutigen Krieg: “when great, compact masses once shake off their leaders (...) then the army becomes not only ineffectual against the enemy, it becomes a menace to itself and to its leaders. When the army bursts the bands of discipline, when it voluntarily interrupts the course of military operation, it creates problems that its leaders are unable to solve”. And Luxemburg continues: “capitalist politicians and military authorities alike believe war, with its modern mass armies, to be a dangerous game. And therein lay for the Social-Democracy the most effectual opportunity to prevent the rulers of the present day from precipitating war and to force them to end it as rapidly as possible. But the position of the Social-Democracy in this war cleared away all doubts, has torn down the dams that held back the storm-flood of militarism (...) And so the thousands of victims that have fallen for months on battlefields lie upon our conscience”.16

The outbreak of generalised, world wide imperialist war (we are not talking here about localised conflicts, even major ones like the Korean or Vietnam wars, but about mass mobilisation of the proletariat in the heart of capitalism) is determined by two opposing forces: the drive toward war, toward a new division of the world among the great imperialist powers, and the struggle to defend their own existence by the working masses who must provide both the cannon fodder and the industrial army without which modern war is impossible. The Crisis in the Social-Democracy, and especially in its most powerful fraction, the German Social-Democracy – a crisis systematically ignored by the tame historians of Academe – is thus the critical factor that made war possible in 1914.

We will look at this in more detail in a later article in this series, but here we propose to take up Luxemburg's analysis of the shifting imperialist rivalries and alliances that drove the great powers inexorably into the bloodbath of 1914.

“Two lines of development in recent history lead straight to the present war. One has its origin in the period when the so-called national states, i.e., the modern states, were first constituted, from the time of the Bismarckian war against France. The war of 1870, which, by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, threw the French republic into the arms of Russia, split Europe into two opposing camps and opened up a period of insane competitive armament, first piled up the firebrands for the present world conflagration (...) Thus the war of 1870 brought in its wake the outward political grouping of Europe about the axes of the Franco-German antagonism, and established the rule of militarism in the lives of the European peoples. Historical development has given to this rule and to this grouping an entirely new content.

The second line that leads to the present world war, and which again brilliantly justifies Marx’s prophecy,17 has its origin in international occurrences that Marx did not live to see, in the imperialist development of the last twenty-five years”.18

The last 30 years of the 19th century thus saw a rapid expansion of capitalism throughout the world, but also the emergence of a new, dynamic, expanding and confident capitalism in the heart of Europe: the German Empire, which had been declared in Versailles in 1871 after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, which Prussia entered as merely the most powerful of a multitude of German statelets and principalities, and emerged from as the dominant component of a new, united Germany. “It is obvious”, writes Luxemburg, “that this live, unhampered imperialism, coming upon the world stage at a time when the world was practically divided up, with gigantic appetites, soon became an irresponsible factor of general unrest”.19

By one of those quirks of history which allow us to symbolise a shift in the historical dynamic with a single date, the year 1898 witnessed three events which mark one such shift.

The first was the “Fashoda Incident”, a tense face-off between British and French troops for control of the Sudan. At the time, there seemed to be a real risk that France and Britain would go to war for the control of Egypt and the Suez Canal, and for dominance in Africa. Instead, the incident ended with an improvement in Franco-British relations which was formalised in the “Entente Cordiale” of 1904, and a growing tendency for Britain to back France against a Germany that both saw as a threat. The two “Moroccan crises” of 1905 and 191120 showed that henceforth Britain would block German ambitions in North Africa (though it was prepared to leave Germany some titbits: Portugal's colonial possessions).

The second event was Germany's seizure of the Chinese port of Tsingtao (today's Qingdao),21 which announced Germany's arrival on the imperialist stage as a power with world wide, not merely European aspirations – a Weltpolitik as it was called at the time in Germany.

Appropriately, 1898 also saw the death of Otto von Bismarck, the great Chancellor who had guided Germany through unification and rapid industrialisation. Bismarck had always opposed colonialism and naval construction, his main foreign policy concern being to avoid the emergence of anti-German alliances amongst other European powers jealous – or fearful – of Germany's rise. But by the turn of the century Germany had become a world class industrial power second only to the United States, with world class ambitions to match. Luxemburg quotes then Foreign Secretary von Bülow on 11th December 1899: “When the English speak of ‘a greater Britain’, when the French talk of ‘The New France’, when the Russians open up Asia for themselves, we too have a right to aspire to a greater Germany. If we do not create a navy sufficient to protect our trade, our natives in foreign lands, our missions and the safety of our shores, we are threatening the most vital interests of our nation. In the coming century the German people will be either the hammer or the anvil.” And she comments: “Strip this of its coastal defence ornamentation, and there remains the colossal program: greater Germany, as the hammer upon other nations”.

In the early 20th century, having a Weltpolitik meant having a world class navy. As Luxemburg points out very clearly, Germany had no immediate economic need for a navy: nobody planned to seize its possessions in China or Africa. A navy was above all a matter of prestige: to continue its expansion Germany had to be seen as a serious player, a power to be counted with, and for this a “first-class aggressive navy” was a prerequisite. In Luxemburg's unforgettable words, it was “a challenge not only to the German working class, but to other capitalist nations as well, a challenge directed to no one in particular, a mailed fist shaken in the face of the entire world...”.

The parallel between the rise of Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and that of China 100 years later, is obvious. Like Bismarck, Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy went to great lengths to avoid alarming both China's neighbours and the world hegemon, the United States. But with its rise to the status of second world economic power, China's prestige demands that it should be able, at a minimum, to control its maritime boundaries and protect its sea-lanes: hence its naval build-up, construction of submarines and an aircraft carrier, and recent declaration of an “Air Defence Identification Zone” covering the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

The parallel between Germany in 1914 and China today is not of course an identity, for two reasons in particular: firstly, Germany in the early 20th century was not only the world's second industrial power after the United States, it was also in the forefront of technical progress and innovation (as can be judged, for example, by the numbers of German Nobel prize winners and German innovation in steel, electrical machinery, and chemical industries); secondly, Germany could project military power globally in a way that China cannot, at least not yet.

And just as the United States today is bound to meet China's threat to its own prestige and to the security of its allies (Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in particular), so Britain could only see Germany's naval build-up as a threat, and an existential threat at that, directed against the vital artery of Channel shipping and its own coastal defences.22

Whatever its naval ambitions, however, the natural direction for a land power like Germany to expand, was towards the East, and specifically towards the decaying Ottoman Empire; this was all the more true when its ambitions in Africa and the Western Mediterranean were blocked by the British and French. Money and militarism went hand in hand, as German capital poured into Turkey,23 fighting for elbow room with its French and British competitors. A large share of this German capital went to financing the Baghdad railway: this was in fact a network of lines intended to link Berlin to Constantinople and then on to the south of Anatolia, Syria, and Baghdad, but also to Palestine, the Hejaz and Mecca. In a day when troop movements depended on railways, this would make it possible for a Turkish army, equipped with German guns and trained by German instructors, to send troops by rail to threaten both Britain's oil refinery at Abadan (Persia, modern Iran),24 and British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal: here again was a direct German threat to Britain's vital strategic interests. During much of the 19th century, the main security threat to the British Empire had been Russian expansion into Central Asia, bringing it to the border of Persia and posing a menace to India; but Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 had dampened its Eastern ambitions such that an Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907 had – at least for a time – resolved disputes between the two countries in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet. Germany was now the rival to be opposed.

Germany's Eastern policy necessarily gave it a strategic interest in the Balkans, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles. The fact that the route of the Berlin-Constantinople railway was planned to run through Vienna and Belgrade made control over Serbia, or at least Serbian neutrality, a matter of great strategic importance to Germany. This in turn could only bring it into conflict with a country which in Bismarck's day had been a bastion of autocratic reaction and solidarity, and hence Prussia and Imperial Germany's firm ally: Russia.

Ever since the reign of Catherine the Great, Russia had established itself (in the 1770s) as the dominant power on the Black Sea coast, displacing the Ottomans. Russian industry and agriculture's increasingly important Black Sea trade depended on free passage through the Bosphorus straits controlled by Constantinople, and Russian ambition looked to the Dardanelles and control over maritime traffic between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (Russian designs on the Dardanelles had already led to war with Britain and France in the Crimea in 1853). Luxemburg sums up the dynamics within Russian society driving its imperialist policies: “On the one hand, the traditional tendencies of a conquest-loving Czardom, ruling over a mighty nation whose population today consists of 172 millions of human beings, demand free access to the ocean, to the Pacific Ocean on the East, to the Mediterranean on the South, for industrial as well as for strategic reasons. On the other hand, the very existence of absolutism, and the necessity of holding a respected place in the world-political field, and finally the need of financial credit in foreign countries without which Czarism cannot exist, all play their important part (…) But modern capitalist interests are becoming more and more a factor in the imperialist aims of the Czarist nation. Russian capitalism, still in its earliest youth, cannot hope to perfect its development under an absolutist regime. On the whole it has advanced little beyond the primitive stage of home industry. But it sees a gigantic future before its eyes in the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources (...) It is this hope, and the appetite for foreign markets that will mean increased capitalistic development even at the present time, that has filled the Russian bourgeoisie with imperialistic desires and led them to eagerly voice their demands in the coming division of the world’s resources”.25 Rivalry between Germany and Russia over control of the Bosphorus thus inevitably found its nexus in the Balkans, where the rise of nationalist ideology characteristic of developing capitalism, had created a situation of permanent tension and intermittent bloody warfare between the three new states broken off from the decaying Ottoman Empire: Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. These three countries fought a First Balkan War as allies against the Ottomans, then a Second Balkan War among themselves to re-divide the plunder from the First, especially in Macedonia and Albania.26

The rise of aggressive new nation states in the Balkans could hardly be a matter of indifference to the region's other decaying dynastic empire: Austria-Hungary. “Not the political expression of a capitalist state, but a loose syndicate of a few parasitic cliques, striving to grasp everything within reach, utilizing the political powers of the nation so long as their weakened edifice still stands”,27 Austria-Hungary was under constant threat from the ambitious new nations around it, all of which shared ethic populations with parts of the Empire: hence Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was part of a constant concern to prevent Serbia from gaining access to the Mediterranean.

By 1914, the situation in Europe had developed into a lethal Rubik's cube, its different pieces so interlocked that moving one must necessarily displace all the others.

The wide-awake sleepwalkers

Does this mean that the ruling classes, the governments, did not know what they were doing? That – as the title of Christopher Clark's book The Sleepwalkers implies – they somehow walked into war by accident, that World War I was just some terrible mistake?

Not a bit of it. Certainly, the historical forces that Luxemburg describes, in what is probably the most profound analysis of the outbreak of war ever written, held society in their grip: in this sense the war was the inevitable result of interlocking imperialist rivalries. But historical situations call forth the men to match them, and the governments that took Europe, and the world, into war not only knew very well what they were doing, they did it deliberately. The years from the turn of the century to the outbreak of war had been marked by repeated war scares, each one more serious than the last: the Tangier Crisis in 1905, the Agadir Incident in 1911, the First and Second Balkan Wars. Each of these incidents brought the pro-war faction in each ruling class more to the fore, heightened the sense that war was anyway inevitable. The result was an insane arms race: German launched its naval construction programme and Britain followed suit; France increased the length of military service to three years; huge French loans financed the modernisation of Russian railways designed to carry troops to the Western Front, as well as the modernisation of Serbia's small but effective army. All the continental powers increased the number of men under arms.

Convinced as they increasingly were that war was inevitable, the question for the governments of Europe became simply a matter of “when?”. When would each nation's military preparedness be at its height compared to that of its rivals? Because this moment would be the “right” moment for war.

If Luxemburg saw a rising Germany as the new “irresponsible element” in the European situation, does this mean that the powers of the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) were the innocent victims of German expansionist aggression? This is the thesis of certain “revisionist” historians today: not only that the struggle against German expansionism was justified in 1914, but that in essence 1914 is nothing but a precursor of the “good war” in 1939. This is undoubtedly the case, but the Triple Entente were anything but innocent victims and the idea that Germany was uniquely “expansionist” and “aggressive” is laughable if we compare the size of Britain's empire – the result of British expansionist aggression – with that of Germany: somehow this never seems to cross the minds of Britain's tame historians.28

In fact, the Triple Entente (Britain, Russia, France) had been preparing for years a policy of encirclement of Germany (just as the US developed a policy of encircling the USSR during the Cold War and is trying to do the same with China today). Rosmer demonstrates this with inexorable clarity, on the basis of the secret diplomatic correspondence among the Belgian ambassadors in the different European capitals.29

In May 1907, the ambassador in London writes that “It is obvious that official Britain is pursuing an underhand and hostile policy which tends towards the isolation of Germany, and that King Edward [ie Edward VII] has unhesitatingly put his own personal influence into the balance in favour of this idea”.30 In February 1909, we hear from the ambassador in Berlin: “The King of England asserts that the preservation of peace has always been his goal; he has repeated this over and over since he began his successful campaign to isolate Germany; but one cannot help remarking that world peace has never been in greater danger than since the King of England set about defending it”.31 From Berlin again, in April 1913 we read: “...the arrogance and contempt with which [the Serbs] receive the protests of the government in Vienna can only be explained by the support they expect from St Petersburg. The Serbian chargé d'affaires said here recently that his government would never have taken such risks, taking no account of Austria's threats, if it had not been encouraged by the Russian ambassador Mr Hartwig...”.32

In France, the conscious development of an aggressive chauvinist policy was perfectly clear to the Belgian ambassador in Paris (January 1914): “I have already had the honour to inform you that it is Messrs Poincaré, Delcassé, Millerand and their friends who have invented and put into practice the nationalist, jingoistic and chauvinist policy whose rebirth we are seeing today (…) I see here the greatest danger for European peace (…) because the attitude adopted by the Barthou government is, in my view, the determining cause of the increasing militarist tendencies in Germany”.33

The re-introduction by France of the three year military service was not a policy of defence, but a deliberate preparation for war. Here is the ambassador in Paris again (June 1913): “The cost of the new law will weigh so heavily on the population, the resulting expenses will be so exorbitant, that the country will soon protest, and France will be faced with the dilemma: either a climb-down which it could not tolerate or war in the short term”.34

How to declare war

Two factors entered into the calculations of statesmen and politicians in the years leading to war: the first was their estimation of their own and their adversaries' military preparedness, but the second – equally important, even in autocratic Tsarist Russia – was the need to appear to the world and their own populations, especially the workers, as the injured party, acting solely in self-defence. All the powers wanted to enter a war that had been started by someone else: “The game consisted in leading one's adversary into committing an act which could be used against him, or making use of a decision he had already taken”.35

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand which provided the spark that set off the war was hardly the work of an isolated individual: Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot, but he was only one of a group of assassins, themselves organised and armed by one of the networks organised by the ultra-nationalist Serbian groups “Black Hand” and Narodna Odbrana (“National Defence”), which formed almost a state within a state and whose activities were undoubtedly known to the Serbian government and in particular its Prime Minister Nicolas Pasič. Relations between the Serbian and Russian governments were extremely close, and it is certain that the Serbs would not have undertaken such a provocation had they not been assured of Russian support against an Austro-Hungarian reaction.

For the Austro-Hungarian government, the assassination seemed a chance too good to miss, to bring Serbia to heel.36 The police investigation had little difficulty pointing the finger at Serbia, and the Austrians counted on the shock provoked among Europe's ruling classes to gain support, or at least neutrality, when they attacked Serbia. In effect, Austria-Hungary had no choice but to attack, or humiliate Serbia: anything less would have been a devastating blow to its prestige and influence in the critical region of the Balkans, leaving it completely in the hands of its Russian rival.

The French government saw a “Balkan war” as the ideal scenario for their attack on Germany: if Germany could be forced into war in defence of Austria-Hungary, and Russia came to the defence of Serbia, then French mobilisation could be presented as a precautionary measure against the threat of German attack. Moreover, it was extremely unlikely that Italy, nominally an ally of Germany but with its own interests in the Balkans, would go to war to defend Austria-Hungary's position in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Given the alliance ranged against it, Germany found itself in a position of weakness with Austria-Hungary, that “organised heap of decay” to use Luxemburg's words, as its only ally. The war preparations in France and Russia, the development of their Entente with Britain, led German strategists increasingly to the conclusion that war would have to be fought sooner rather than later, before their adversaries were fully prepared. Hence the remark of the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that “Should the conflict [between Serbia and Austria-Hungary] spread, then it is absolutely necessary that Russia should bear the responsibility”.37

The British population was hardly likely to go to war to defend Serbia, or even France. Britain too needed “a pretext to overcome the resistance of a large part of its public opinion. Germany provided an excellent one, by launching its armies through Belgium”.38 Rosmer quotes Viscount Esher's Tragedy of Lord Kitchener to the effect that “The German invasion of Belgium, although it made no vital difference to the resolve already taken by [Prime Minister] Asquith and [Foreign Secretary] Grey, preserved the unity of the nation, if not the integrity of the government”. 39 In reality, British plans for an attack on Germany, prepared in concert with the French military for several years, had long intended to violate Belgian neutrality...

All the belligerent nations' governments thus had to deceive their “public opinion” into thinking that the war which they had prepared and deliberately sought for years, had been forced unwillingly upon them. The critical element in this “public opinion” was the organised working class, with its trade unions and Socialist Parties, which for years had stated clearly its opposition to war. The single most important factor that opened the road to war was therefore the betrayal of the Social-Democracy, and its support for what the ruling class falsely portrayed as a “defensive war”.

The underlying causes of this monstrous betrayal of Social-Democracy's most elementary internationalist duty will be the object of a future article. Suffice it to say here that the French bourgeoisie's claim today that the “political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared....in an instant” is a bare-faced lie. On the contrary, Rosmer's account of the days before the outbreak of war is one of constant working-class demonstrations against war, brutally repressed by the police. On 27th July, the CGT called a demonstration, and “from 9 o'clock to midnight (…) an enormous crowd flowed without a break along the Boulevards. Huge numbers of police were mobilised (…) But the workers who came to the city centre from the outskirts were so numerous that the police tactics [of splitting up the workers] led to an unexpected result: there were soon as many demonstrations as there were streets. Police violence and brutality failed to dampen the crowds' combativeness; throughout the evening, the cry of 'Down with war' resounded from Opéra to the Place de la République”.40 The demonstrations continued the following day, and spread to the major towns in the provinces.

The French bourgeoisie was faced with another problem: the attitude of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. Jaurès was a reformist, at a moment in history when reformism became an untenable middle ground between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but he was profoundly attached to the defense of the working-class (and his reputation and influence among the workers was for this reason very great), and passionately opposed to war. On 25th July, when Serbia's rejection of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was reported in the press, Jaurès was due to speak at an electoral meeting in Vaise, near Lyon: his speech was devoted not to the election, but to the terrible danger of war. “Never in forty years has Europe been confronted with a more threatening and tragic situation (…) A terrible danger menaces peace, and the lives of men, against which the proletarians of Europe must make the supreme effort of solidarity of which they are capable”.41

At first, Jaurès believed the French government's fraudulent assurances that it was working for peace, but by the 31st July he was disillusioned and in Parliament was once again calling on the workers to resist war to the utmost. Rosmer takes up the story: “the rumour spread that the article he was shortly to write for the Saturday issue of L'Humanité would be a new 'J'accuse!'42 denouncing the intrigues and lies that had brought the world to the brink of war. In the evening, (…) he led a delegation of the Socialist [parliamentary] group to the Quai d'Orsay43. [Foreign Minister] Viviani was absent, and the delegation was received by under-secretary of state Abel Ferry. After hearing Jaurès out, he asked what the socialists intended to do in the situation. 'Continue our campaign against the war' replied Jaurès. To which Ferry answered: 'That you will never dare, for you will be killed on the next street corner'.44 Two hours later, Jaurès was about to return to his office at L'Humanité to write the dreaded article, when he was shot down by the assassin Raoul Villain; two revolver shots at point-blank range caused his instant death”.45

Decidedly, the French ruling class was leaving nothing to chance in order to ensure “unity and national cohesion”!

No war without workers

So when the wreaths are laid, when the great and the good bow their heads in sorrow during the commemorations that our rulers are buying at the cost of millions of pounds or euros, when the trumpets sound the last call at the end of these solemn ceremonies, when the documentaries unfold on the TV screens and the learned historians discourse on all the reasons for war except the one that really matters, and on all the factors that might have prevented the war except the one that could really have weighed in the balance, then let the proletarians of the world remember.

Let them remember that World War I was caused not by historical happenstance, but by the inexorable workings of capitalism and imperialism, that the world war opened a new period in history, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” as the Communist International called it. This period is still with us today, and the same forces that drove the world to war in 1914 are responsible today for the endless massacres in the Middle East and Africa, for the ever more dangerous tensions between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea.

Let them remember that wars cannot be fought without workers, as cannon fodder and to man the factories. Let them remember that the ruling class must have national unity for war, and that they will stop at nothing to get it, from police repression to bloody assassination.

Let them remember that it is those very same “Socialist” parties that today stand to the forefront of every pacifist campaign and humanitarian protest, who betrayed their forebears' trust in 1914, leaving them unorganised and defenceless to face capitalism's machinery of war.

And finally, let them remember that, if the ruling class had to make such an effort to neutralise the working class in 1914 it is because only the world proletariat can stand as an effective barrier to imperialist war. Only the world proletariat bears within itself the hope of overthrowing capitalism, and the danger of war, once and for all.

One hundred years ago, humanity stood before a dilemma whose solution lies in the hands of the proletariat alone: socialism or barbarism. That dilemma is still with us today.

Jens

Of all the parties federated in the 2nd International, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) was by far the most powerful. In 1914, the SPD had more than one million members, and had won more than four million votes in the 1912 parliamentary elections:1 it was, in fact, the only mass party in Germany and the biggest single party in the Reichstag – although under the autocratic imperial regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II it had no chance of actually forming a government.

For the other parties of the 2nd International, the SPD was the party of reference. Karl Kautsky,2 editor of the Party's theoretical journal Neue Zeit, was the acknowledged "pope of marxism", the International's leading theoretician; at the 1900 Congress of the International, Kautsky had drawn up the resolution condemning the participation of the French socialist Millerand in a bourgeois government, and the SPD's Dresden Congress of 1903, under the leadership of its chairman August Bebel,3 had roundly condemned the revisionist theories of Eduard Bernstein and reasserted the SPD's revolutionary goals; Lenin had praised the SPD's "party spirit" and its immunity to the petty personal animosities that had led the Mensheviks to split the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) after its 1903 congress.4 To cap it all, the SPD's theoretical and organisational supremacy was clearly crowned by success on the ground: no other party of the International could claim anything close to the SPD's electoral success, and when it came to trade union organisation only the British could rival the Germans in the numbers and discipline of their members.

“In the Second International the German ‘decisive force’ played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the international socialist bureaux, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. ‘For us Germans that is unacceptable’ regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere”.5

It was obvious therefore, as the storm clouds of war began to gather in the month of July 1914, that the attitude of the German Social Democracy would be critical in deciding the outcome. The German workers – the great masses organised in the Party and the unions, which the workers had fought so hard to build – were placed in a position where they alone could tip the scales: towards resistance, the fighting defence of proletarian internationalism, or towards class collaboration and betrayal, and years of the bloodiest slaughter humanity had ever witnessed.

“And what did we in Germany experience when the great historical test came? The most precipitous fall, the most violent collapse. Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism. Nowhere is the state of siege borne so docilely. Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany.”6

The betrayal of German Social Democracy came as such a shock to revolutionaries that when Lenin read in Vorwärts7 that the SPD parliamentary fraction had voted in favour of war credits, he at first took the issue for a fake, black propaganda put out by the Imperial government. How was such a disaster possible? How, in a matter of days, could the proud and powerful SPD renege on its most solemn promises, transforming itself overnight from the jewel in the crown of the workers’ International to the most powerful weapon in the armoury of the war-mongering ruling class?

As we try, in this article, to answer this question, it might seem paradoxical to concentrate in large part on the writings and actions of a relatively small number of individuals: the SPD and the unions were after all mass organisations, capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of workers. It is justified however, because individuals like Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg represented, and were seen at the time to represent, definite tendencies within the Party; in this sense, their writings gave voice to political tendencies with which masses of militants and workers – who remain anonymous to history – identified. It is also necessary to take account of these leading figures’ political biographies if we are to understand the weight they had in the Party. August Bebel, chairman of the SPD from 1892 until his death in 1913, was one of the Party's founders and had been imprisoned, along with his fellow Reichstag deputy Wilhelm Liebknecht, for their refusal to support Prussia's war against France in 1870. Kautsky and Bernstein had both been forced into exile in London by Bismarck's anti-socialist laws, where they had worked under Engels’ direction. The prestige, and the moral authority, that this gave them in the Party was immense. Even Georg von Vollmar, one of the leaders of South German reformism, first came to prominence as a left-winger and a vigorous and talented underground organiser, suffering repeated prison sentences as a result.

This then was a generation which had come to political activity through the years of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, through the years of clandestine propaganda and agitation in the teeth of Bismarck's anti-socialist laws (1878-1890). Of a very different stamp were men like Gustav Noske, Friedrich Ebert, or Philipp Scheidemann, all members of the right wing in the parliamentary fraction of the SPD who voted for war credits in 1914 and played a key role in the suppression of the 1919 German Revolution – and in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Freikorps. Rather like Stalin, these were men of the machine, working behind the scenes rather than actively participating in public debate, the representatives of a Party which, as it grew, tended more and more to resemble and identify with the German state whose downfall was still its official goal.

The revolutionary left ranged against the growing tendency within the Party to make concessions to "practical politics" and was, strikingly, in large part both foreign and young (one notable exception being the old Franz Mehring). Apart from the Dutchman Anton Pannekoek, and Wilhelm Liebknecht's son Karl, men like Parvus, Radek, Jogiches, Marchlewski, all came from the Russian empire and were forged as militants under the harsh conditions of Tsarist oppression. And of course, the outstanding figure on the left was Rosa Luxemburg, an outsider in the German Party in every possible way: young, female, Polish, and Jewish, and – perhaps worst of all from the point of view of some of the German leadership – standing intellectually and theoretically head and shoulders above the rest of the Party.

The foundation of the SPD

The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP – German Workers’ Party), later to become the SPD, was founded in 1875 in Gotha, by the merger of two socialist parties: the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP),8 led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, and the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), originally established by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.

The new organisation thus sprang from two very different sources. The SDAP had only been in existence for six years; through Marx and Engels’ longstanding relationship with Liebknecht – although Liebknecht was no theoretician he played an important role in introducing men like Bebel and Kautsky to Marx's ideas – they had played an important part in the SDAP's development. In 1870, the SDAP adopted a resolutely internationalist line against Prussia's war of aggression on France: at Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates, representing 50,000 Saxon workmen, adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect: “In the name of German Democracy, and especially of the workmen forming the Democratic Socialist Party, we declare the present war to be exclusively dynastic... We are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France... Mindful of the watchword of the International Working Men’s Association: Proletarians of all countries, unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies.”.9

The ADAV, by contrast, had remained faithful to its founder Lassalle's opposition to strike action, and his belief that the workers' cause could be advanced by an alliance with the Bismarckian state, and more generally through the recipes of “state socialism”.10 During the Franco-Prussian war, the ADAV remained pro-German, its then President, Mende, even pushing for French war reparations to be used to set up state workshops for German workers.11

Marx and Engels were deeply critical of the merger, although Marx's marginal notes on the programme was not made public until much later,12 Marx considering that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”.13 Although they refrained from open criticism of the new Party, they made their views clear to its leading members, and in writing to Bebel, Engels highlighted two weaknesses which, untreated, were to sow the seeds of the 1914 betrayal:

• “the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! (...)

• as its one and only social demand, the programme puts forward — Lassallean state aid in its starkest form, as stolen by Lassalle from Buchez. And this, after Bracke has so ably demonstrated the sheer futility of that demand; after almost all if not all, of our party speakers have, in their struggle against the Lassalleans, been compelled to make a stand against this “state aid"! Our party could hardly demean itself further. Internationalism sunk to the level of Amand Goegg, socialism to that of the bourgeois republican Buchez, who confronted the socialists with this demand in order to supplant them!”14

These fault-lines in practical politics were hardly surprising given the new Party's eclectic theoretical underpinnings. When Kautsky founded the Neue Zeit in 1883, he intended it to be “published as a Marxist organ which had set itself the task of raising the low level of theory in German social democracy, destroying eclectic socialism, and achieving victory for the Marxist programme”; he wrote to Engels: “I may be successful in my attempts to make the Neue Zeit the rallying point of the Marxist school. I am winning the collaboration of many Marxist forces, as I am getting rid of eclecticism and Rodbertussianism”.15

From the outset, including during its underground existence, the SAP was thus a battleground of conflicting theoretical tendencies – as is normal in any healthy proletarian organisation. But as Lenin once remarked “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice”, and these different tendencies, or visions, of the organisation and of society, were to have very practical consequences.

By the mid 1870s the SAP had some 32,000 members in more than 250 districts, and in 1878 the Chancellor Bismarck imposed an “anti-socialist” law with a view to hamstringing the Party's activity. Scores of papers, meetings, organisations were banned, and thousands of militants were sent to jail or fined. But the socialists' determination remained unbroken by the anti-socialist law. Indeed, the SAP's activity thrived under the conditions of semi-illegality. Being outlawed compelled the party and its members to organise themselves outside the channels of bourgeois democracy – even the limited democracy of Bismarckian Germany – and to develop a strong solidarity against police repression and permanent state surveillance. Despite constant police harassment, the party managed to maintain its press and expand its circulation, to the point where the satirical paper Der wahre Jacob (founded in 1884) alone had 100,000 subscribers.

Despite the anti-socialist laws, one public activity remained open to the SAP: it was still possible for SAP candidates to compete in elections to the Reichstag as unaffiliated independents. Hence a large part of the Party's propaganda centred around electoral campaigns at national and local levels, and this may account both for the principle that the parliamentary fraction should remain strictly subordinated to the Party Congresses and the Party's central organ (the Vorstand),16 and for the increasing weight of the parliamentary fraction with the Party as its electoral success grew.

Bismarck's policy was a classic "carrot and stick". While the workers were prevented from organising themselves, the Imperial state tried to cut the ground from under the feet of the socialists by introducing social insurance payments, in the case of unemployment, sickness or retirement, from 1883 onwards – a full twenty years before the French law on workers' and peasants' pensions (1910) and the British National Insurance Act (1911). By the end of the 1880s some 4.7 million workers received payments from the social security.

Neither the anti-socialist laws nor the introduction of social security achieved the desired effect of reducing support for Social-Democracy. On the contrary, between 1881 and 1890 the SAP's electoral score rose from 312,000 to 1,427,000 votes, making the SAP the biggest party in Germany. By 1890 its membership had risen to 75,000 and some 300,000 workers had joined trade unions. In 1890 Bismarck was dropped from the government by the new Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the anti-socialist laws were allowed to lapse.

Emerging from clandestinity, the SAP was refounded as a legal organisation, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD – German Social-Democratic Party), at its Erfurt Congress in 1891. The Congress adopted a new programme, and although Engels considered the Erfurt programme an improvement on its Gotha predecessor he nonetheless felt it necessary to attack the tendency towards opportunism: “somehow or other, [absolutism] has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground in a large section of the SocialDemocratic press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all manner of over-hasty pronouncements made during the reign of that law, they now want the party to find the present legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all party demands by peaceful means (…) In the long run such a policy can only lead one’s own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? (…) This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”.17

Engels was remarkably prescient here: public declarations of revolutionary intent were to prove impotent without any concrete plan of action to back them up. In 1914, the party did indeed find itself “suddenly helpless”.

Nonetheless, the SPD's official slogan remained "Not a man nor a penny for this system", and its Reichstag deputies systematically refused all support for government budgets, especially for military spending. Such principled opposition to any class compromise remained a possibility within the parliamentary system because the Reichstag had no real power. The government of the Wilhelmine German Empire was autocratic, not unlike that of Tsarist Russia,18 and the SPD's systematic opposition therefore had no immediate practical consequences.

In South Germany, things were different. Here, the local SPD under the leadership of men like Vollmar, claimed that "special conditions" applied, and that unless the SPD was able to vote meaningfully in the Länder legislatures, and unless it had an agrarian policy able to appeal to the small peasantry, then it would be doomed to impotence and irrelevance. This tendency appeared as soon as the Party was legalised, at the 1891 Erfurt Congress, and as early as 1891 the SPD deputies in the provincial parliaments of Württemberg, Bavaria and Baden were voting in favour of government budgets.19

The Party's reaction to this direct attack on its policy, as expressed in repeated Congress resolutions, was to sweep it under the carpet. An attempt by Vollmar to put forward a special agrarian programme was voted down by the 1894 Frankfurt Congress, yet the same congress also rejected a resolution banning any vote by any SPD deputy in favour of any government budget. As long as reformist policy could be limited to south German "exceptionalism" it could be tolerated.20

Legality saps the SPD’s fighting spirit

Soon, the experience of the working class with a dozen years of semi-illegality began to be undermined by the poison of democracy. By its very nature bourgeois democracy and individualism, which go hand in hand, undermines any attempt by the proletariat to develop a vision of itself as a historical class with its own perspective antagonistic to that of capitalist society. Democratic ideology constantly drives a wedge into workers' solidarity, because it splits up the working class into a mere mass of atomised citizens. At the same time, the party's electoral success, both in terms of votes and seats in parliament grew rapidly, while more and more workers organised in the Trades Unions and were able to improve their material conditions. The growing political strength of the SPD, and the industrial strength of the organised working class, gave birth to a new political current, which began to theorise the idea not only that it was possible to build socialism within capitalism, to work towards a gradual transition without the need of having to overthrow capitalism through a revolution, but that the SPD should have a specifically German expansionist foreign policy: this current crystallised in 1897 around the Sozialistische Monatshefte, a review outside SPD control, in articles by Max Schippel, Wolfgang Heine, and Heinrich Peus.21

This uncomfortable, but bearable, state of affairs was exploded in 1898 with the publication of Eduard Bernstein's Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Preconditions of socialism and the tasks of Social-Democracy). Bernstein's pamphlet explained openly what he and others had been suggesting for some time: “Practically speaking, we are no more than a radical party; we have been doing no more than the bourgeois radicals do, with this difference that we hide it under a language out of all proportion to our acts and our capacities”.22 Bernstein's theoretical position attacked the very foundations of marxism in that he rejected the inevitability of capitalism's decline and final collapse. Basing himself on the booming prosperity of the 1890s, coupled with capitalism's rapid colonialist expansion across the planet, Bernstein argued that capitalism had overcome its tendency towards self-destructive crisis. In these conditions, the goal was nothing, the movement was everything, quantity was to prevail over quality, the antagonism between the State and the working class could supposedly be overcome.23 Bernstein proclaimed openly that the basic tenet of the Communist Manifesto, according to which workers have no fatherland, was “obsolete”. He called upon the German workers to give their support to the Kaiser's colonial policy in Africa and Asia.24

In reality, a whole period, that of the expansion and ascension of the capitalist system, was drawing to a close. For revolutionaries such periods of profound historical transformation always pose a major challenge since they must analyse the characteristics of the new period, and develop a theoretical framework for understanding the fundamental changes taking place, as well as adapting their programme if necessary, all the time continuing to defend the same revolutionary goal.

The rapid expansion of capitalism across the globe, its massive industrial development, the new pride of the ruling class and its imperial posture – all this made the revisionist current believe that capitalism would last forever, that socialism could be introduced from within capitalism, and that the capitalist state could be used in the interests of the working class. The illusion of a peaceful transition showed that the revisionists had in fact become prisoners of the past, unable to understand that a new historic period was on the horizon: the period of capitalism's decadence and of the violent explosion of its contradictions. Their inability to analyse the new historical situation and their theorisation of the “eternity” of the conditions of capitalism at the end of the 19th century also meant that the revisionists were unable to see that the old weapons of the struggle, parliamentarism and the trade union struggle, no longer worked. The fixation on parliamentary work as the axis of their activities, the orientation on struggling for reforms within the system, the illusion of a “crisis-free capitalism” and the possibility of introducing socialism peacefully within capitalism, meant that in effect large parts of the SPD leadership had identified with the system. The openly opportunist current in the party expressed a loss of confidence in the historical struggle of the proletariat. After years of defensive struggles for the “minimum” programme, bourgeois democratic ideology had penetrated the workers’ movement. This meant that the existence and the characteristics of social classes were put into question, an individualistic view tended to dominate and dissolve the classes in “the people”. Opportunism thus threw overboard the marxist method of analysing society in terms of class struggle and class contradictions; in fact opportunism meant the lack of any method, of any principles whatever and the lack of any theory.

The left fights back

The reaction of the Party leadership to Bernstein's text was to downplay its importance (Vorwärts welcomed it as a “stimulating contribution to debate”, declaring that all currents within the Party should be free to express their opinions), while regretting in private that such ideas should be expressed so openly. Ignaz Auer, the Party secretary, wrote to Bernstein: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them”.25

Within the SPD Bernstein was opposed in the most determined manner by those forces who had not been accustomed to the long period of legality following the end of the anti-socialist laws. It is no coincidence that the clearest and most outspoken opponents to Bernstein’s current were militants of foreign origin, and specifically from the Russian Empire. The Russian born Parvus, who had moved to Germany in the 1890s and in 1898 was working as the editor of the SPD press in Dresden, the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung26 launched a fiery attack on Bernstein’s ideas and was backed by the young revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who had moved to Germany in May 1898 and who had experienced repression in Poland. As soon as she settled in Germany, she started to spearhead the struggle against the revisionists with her text Reform or revolution written in 1898-99 (in which she exposed the method of Bernstein, refuted the idea of the establishment of socialism through social reforms, exposing the practice and theory of opportunism). In her reply to Bernstein, she underlined that the reformist trend had come into full swing since the abolition of the anti-socialist law and the possibility to work legally. Vollmar’s state socialism, the Bavarian budget approval, south-German agrarian socialism, Heine’s compensations proposals, Schippel’s position on customs and militia were elements in a rising opportunist practice. She underlined the common denominator of this current: hostility towards theory. “What distinguishes [all the opportunist tendencies in the party] on the surface? The dislike of ‘theory’, and this is natural since our theory, i.e. the bases of scientific socialism, sets our practical activity clear tasks and limits, both in relation to the goals to be attained as much as in regard to the means to be used and finally in the method of the struggle. Naturally those who only want to chase after practical achievements soon develop a desire to liberate themselves, i.e. to separate practice from theory’ to make themselves free of it.”27

The first task of revolutionaries was to defend the final goal. “the movement as such without any link to the final goal, the movement as a goal in itself is nothing, the final goal is what counts.”28

In a 1903 text Stagnation and progress of marxism, Luxemburg considers the theoretical inadequacy of the Social-Democracy in these terms: “The scrupulous endeavour to keep ‘within the bounds of Marxism’ may at times have been just as disastrous to the integrity of the thought process as has been the other extreme – the complete repudiation of the Marxist outlook, and the determination to manifest ‘independence of thought’ at all hazards”.

In attacking Bernstein, Luxemburg also demanded that the Party’s central press organ should defend the positions decided by Party congresses. When in March 1899 Vorwärts replied that Luxemburg’s critique of Bernstein’s position (in an article Eitle Hoffnungen – Vain hopes),was unjustified. Luxemburg countered that Vorwärts “is in the fortunate situation of never being in danger of having a mistaken opinion or changing its opinion, a sin which it likes to find in others, simply because it never has or defends an opinion”.29

She continued in the same vein: “There are two kinds of organic creatures: those with a spine and which can walk upright, sometimes even run; and there are others who have no spine and therefore can only creep and cobble to something.” To those who wanted the Party to drop any programmatic positions and political criteria, she replied at the 1899 Party conference in Hannover: “If this is to mean that the party – in the name of freedom of critique – should not be entitled to take up position and declare through a majority vote. We do not defend such a position, therefore we have to protest against this idea, because we are not a club for discussions, but a political fighting party, which must have certain fundamental views.”30

The swamp wavers

Between the determined left wing around Luxemburg, and the right defending Bernstein's ideas and revisionism in principles, lay a “swamp”, which Bebel described in the following terms at the 1903 Dresden Congress: “It is always the same old and eternal struggle between a left and a right, and in between the swamp. They are the elements who never know what they want or rather who never say what they want. They are the smart-alecks, who usually first listen to see who is saying what, what is being said here and there? They always sense where the majority stands and they usually join the majority. We also have this sort of people in the party (…) the man who defends his position openly, at least I know where he stands; at least I can fight with him. He is victorious or I am, but the lazy elements that always duck out of something and always avoid a clear decision, who always say ‘we all agree, yes we are all brothers’, they are the worst. I fight against them hardest.”31

This swamp, unable to take a clear position, wavered between the straightforward revisionist, right and the revolutionary left. Centrism is one of the faces of opportunism. Positioning itself always between the antagonistic forces, between the reactionary and radical currents, centrism tries to reconcile the two. It avoids the open clash of ideas, runs away from debate, always considers that “one side is not completely right, but the other side is not totally right either”, views political debate with clear arguments and polemical tones as “exaggerated”, “extremist”, “trouble-making”, even “violent”. It thinks that the only way to maintain unity, to keep the organisation intact is to allow all political tendencies to coexist, even including those whose aims are in direct contradiction to those of the organisation. It shies away from taking responsibility and positioning itself. Centrism in the SPD tended to ally reluctantly with the left, while regretting the left’s “extremism” and “violence” and effectively preventing firm measures – such as the expulsion from the Party of the revisionists – from preserving the Party’s revolutionary nature.

Luxemburg on the contrary considered that the only way to defend the unity of the Party as a revolutionary organisation was to insist on the fullest exposure and public discussion of opposing opinions:

“By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.”32

The epitome of the centrist current, and its most prestigious representative, was Karl Kautsky.

When Bernstein started to develop his revisionist views, Kautsky initially stayed silent and preferred not to oppose his old friend and comrade in public. He also completely failed to appreciate the extent to which Bernstein’s revisionist theories undermined the revolutionary foundations on which the Party had been built. As Luxemburg pointed out, if once you accept that capitalism can go on forever, that it is not doomed to collapse as a consequence of its own inner contradictions, then you are led inevitably to abandon the revolutionary goal. 33 Kautsky’s failure here – in common with most of the Party press – was a clear sign of the decline of fighting spirit in the organisation: political debate was no longer a matter of life or death for the class struggle, it had become an academic concern of intellectual specialists.

Rosa Luxemburg’s arrival in Berlin in 1898, from Zürich where she had just completed her studies of Polish economic development with distinction, and her reactions to Bernstein’s theories, were to play a major role in Kautsky’s attitude.

When Luxemburg became aware of Bebel’s and Kautsky’s hesitation and unwillingness to fight Bernstein’s views, she criticised this attitude in a letter to Bebel.34 She asked why they did not push for an energetic response to Bernstein, and in March 1899, after she had begun the series of articles which were later to become the pamphlet Reform or revolution, she reported to Jogiches: “As for Bebel in a conversation with Kautsky I complained that he won’t stand up and fight. Kautsky told me that Bebel has lost his drive, he has lost his self-confidence and no longer has any energy. I scolded him again and asked him: Why don’t you [Kautsky] inspire him, give him encouragement and energy? Kautsky replied: ‘You should do this, go and talk to Bebel, you should encourage him…”. When Luxemburg asked Kautsky why he did not react, he replied: “How can I get involved in rallies and meetings now, while I am fully engaged in the parliamentary struggle, this only means there will be clashes, where would this lead to? I do not have any time and no energy for this.”35

In 1899, in Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik (Bernstein and the Social-Democratic programme – an anti-critique) Kautsky at last spoke up against Bernstein’s ideas on Marxist philosophy and political economy and his views on the development of capitalism. But he nevertheless welcomed Bernstein’s book as a valuable contribution to the movement, opposed a motion to expel him from the party and avoided saying that Bernstein was betraying the Marxist programme. In short, as Luxemburg concluded, Kautsky wanted to avoid any challenge to the rather comfortable routine of Party life, and the necessity of criticising his old friend in public. As Kautsky himself admitted privately to Bernstein: “Parvus and Luxemburg already grasped the contradiction of your views with our programmatic principles, while I did not yet want to admit this and believed firmly that all this was a misunderstanding (…) It was my mistake that I was not as farsighted as Parvus and Luxemburg, who already then scented the line of thought of your pamphlet.”36 In fact, in Vorwärts Kautsky minimised and trivialised the attack on Bernstein’s new revisionist theory, saying that it was being blown out of all proportion, in a manner typical of the “absurd imaginings” of a petty bourgeois mentality.37

Friends or class?

Out of loyalty to his old friend, Kautsky felt he had to apologize to Bernstein in private, writing: “It would have been cowardice to stay silent. I do not believe that I caused you any harm now that I have spoken. If I had not told August Bebel that I would answer your declaration, he would have done it himself. You can imagine what he would have said, knowing his temper and his callousness”.38 This meant he preferred to stay silent and blind towards his old friend. He reacted unwillingly, and only after being forced into it by the left. Later he admitted that it had been a “sin” to allow his friendship with Bernstein to dominate his political judgment. “In my life I only sinned once out of friendship, and I still regret this sin to this day. If I had not hesitated so much towards Bernstein, and if I had confronted him right from the start with the necessary sharpness, I would have spared the party many unpleasant problems.”39 However, such a “confession” is of no value unless it goes to the root of the problem. Despite confessing his “sin” Kautsky never gave a more profound political explanation why such an attitude, based on personal affinity rather than political principle, is a danger for a political organisation. In reality, this attitude led him to grant the revisionists unlimited “freedom of opinion” within the party. As Kautsky said on the eve of the Hannover Party Congress: “In general we have to leave it up to every Party member to decide whether he still shares the principles of the Party or not. By excluding someone we only act against those who damage the Party; nobody has yet been excluded from the Party because of reasonable criticism, because our Party has always highly valued freedom of discussion. Even if Bernstein had not deserved so much esteem for his part in our struggle, and the fact that he had to go into exile because of his Party activities, we would not consider expelling him”.40

Luxemburg’s answer was clear-cut. “However great our need for self-criticism, and however broadly we set its limits, there must nonetheless remain a minimum of principles which make up our essence, indeed our existence, which found our cooperation as members of a Party. Within our ranks, ‘freedom of criticism’ cannot apply to these principles, which are few and very general, precisely because they are the precondition for all activity and therefore also any criticism directed at this activity. We have no reason to block our ears when these principles are criticised by somebody outside the Party. But as long as we consider them to be the basis of our existence as a Party, we must remain attached to them and not allow our members to call them into question. Here, we can only allow one freedom: to belong to our Party or not. We force no-one to march with us, but as long as he does so voluntarily, we must suppose that he has accepted our principles”.41

The logical conclusion of Kautsky’s “lack of position” was that everyone could stay in the Party and defend what he liked, the programme is watered down, the Party becomes a “melting pot” of different opinions, not a spearhead for a determined struggle. Kautsky’s attitude showed he preferred loyalty to a friend to the defence of class positions. At the same time, he wanted to adopt the pose of a theoretical “expert”. It is true that he had written some very important and valuable books (see below), and that he had enjoyed the esteem of Engels. But, as Luxemburg noted in a letter to Jogiches: “Karl Kautsky limits himself to theory”.42 Preferring to refrain from any participation in the struggle for the defence of the organisation and its programme, Kautsky gradually started to lose any fighting attitude, and this meant that he placed what he saw as his obligations to his friends above any moral obligations to his organisation and its principles. This led to a detachment of theory from practical, concrete action: for example, Kautsky’s valuable work on ethics, including in particular a chapter on internationalism, was not welded to an unwavering defence of internationalism in action.

There is a striking contrast between Kautsky’s attitude towards Bernstein, and Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude towards Kautsky. On her arrival in Berlin, Luxemburg enjoyed close relations with Kautsky and his family. But she quickly came to feel, that the great regard the Kautsky family showed towards her was becoming a burden. Already in 1899 she had complained to Jogiches: “I am beginning to flee their honeyed words. The Kautskys consider me to be part of their family.” (12/11/1899). “All these tokens of affection (he is very well meaning towards me, I can see this), feel like a terrible burden, instead of being a pleasure to me. In fact, any friendship established in adult age, and more over such a ‘party’-based one, is a burden: It imposes on you certain obligations, is a constraint etc. And precisely this side of the friendship is a handicap for me. After the writing of each article I wonder: Will he not be disappointed, will the friendship not cool down?”.43 She was aware of the dangers of an attitude based on affinities, where considerations of personal obligation, friendship, or common tastes, obscure the militant’s political judgment, but also what we may call his moral judgment as to whether a particular line of action is in conformity with the organisation’s principles.44 Luxemburg nonetheless dared to confront him openly: “I had a fundamental row with Kautsky about the whole way of looking at things. He told me in conclusion, that I would be thinking like him in twenty odd years, to which I replied that if so I would be a zombie in 20 years.”45

At the Lübeck party congress of 1901 Luxemburg was accused of distorting the positions of other comrades, an accusation she considered slanderous and demanded to have cleared up in public. She submitted a statement for publication in Vorwärts with this in mind.46 But Kautsky on behalf of Neue Zeit urged her to withdraw her demand for publication of her Statement. She replied to Kautsky: “Of course I am willing to refrain from publishing my declaration in the Neue Zeit but allow me to add a few words of explanation. If I were one of those people, who without consideration for anyone, safeguarded their own rights and interests – and such people are legion throughout our Party – or rather that is the way they all are – I would naturally insist upon publication, for you yourself have admitted that you as editor had certain obligations towards me in this matter. But while admitting this obligation, you at the same time placed a revolver of friendly admonition and request at my breast [to prevent me] from making use of this obligation and thus getting my rights. Well I am sickened at the thought of having to insist upon rights if these are only to be granted amid sighs and gnashing of teeth, and when people not only grab me by the arm and thus expect me to ‘defend’ myself but try in addition to beat me to a pulp, in the hope that I may thus be persuaded to renounce my rights. You have gained what you are after – you are free of all obligations towards me in this case.

But it would seem that you labour under the delusion that you acted solely out of friendship and in my best interests. Permit me to destroy this illusion. As a friend you ought to have said: ‘I advise you unconditionally and at any cost to defend your honour as a writer, for greater writers (…) like Marx and Engels wrote whole pamphlets, conducted endless ink-wars, when anybody dared to accuse them of such a thing as forgery. All the more you, a young writer with many enemies, must try to obtain complete satisfaction…’ That surely is what you should have advised me as a friend.

The friend, however, was soon pushed into the background by the editor of the Neue Zeit, and the latter has only one wish since the Party congress [at Lübeck]; he wants peace, he wants to show that the Neue Zeit has learned manners since the whipping it got, has learned to keep its mouth shut.47 And fur such reasons the essential rights of an associate editor and regular contributor… must be sacrificed. Let a collaborator of Neue Zeit and one at that who by no means does the worst of the work – swallow even a public accusation of forgery as long as peace and quiet is maintained! That is how things are, my friend! And now with best greetings, your Rosa.”.48

Here we see a young, determined revolutionary, and a woman to boot, insisting that the “old”, “orthodox”, experienced, authority should take personal responsibility. Kautsky replied to Luxemburg: “you see, we should not antagonise the people of the parliamentary fraction, we should not leave the impression that we are patronising them. If you want to make them a suggestion, it is better to send them a private letter, which will be much more effective.”49 But Rosa Luxemburg tried to “revive” the fighting spirit in him “You must thoroughly hit out with guts and joy, and not as though it was a boring interlude; the public always feels the spirit of the combatants and the joy of battle gives resonance to controversy, and ensures moral superiority.”50 This attitude of not wanting to disturb the normal running of party life, not taking up position in the debate, not pushing for clarification of divergences, running away from debate and tolerating the revisionists, more and more alienated Luxemburg and it brought to the fore how much the fighting spirit, the loss of morality, the loss of conviction, of determination, had become the overriding trait of Kautsky’s attitude.  “I now read his [article]‚Nationalism and Internationalism, and it was a horror and nauseating. Soon I shall no longer be able to read any of his writings. I feel as if a nauseating spider web is covering my head…”.51 “Kautsky is becoming more and more brackish. He is more and more fossilising inside, he no longer feels any human concern about anybody except his family. I really feel uncomfortable with him.”52

Kautsky’s attitude can also be contrasted to that of Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. After the break-up of her relationship with Leo Jogiches in 1906 (which caused her immense pain and stress, as well as great disappointment in him as a partner) the two remained the closest comrades until the day of her assassination. Despite deep personal grudges, disappointment and jealousies, these profound emotional feelings over the break-up of the relationship never prevented them from standing side by side in the political struggle.

One might object that in the case of Kautsky this reflected the lack of personality and character of Kautsky, but it would be more correct to say that he epitomised the moral rot within the Social-Democracy as a whole.

Luxemburg was forced early on to confront the resistance of the “old guard”. When she criticised revisionist policy at the 1898 Stuttgart Congress, “Vollmar reproached me bitterly that I as youngster of the movement want to give lessons to the old veterans (...) But if Vollmar replies to my factual explanations with ‘you greenhorn, I could be your grandfather’, I only see this as proof that he has run out of arguments.”.53 As regards the weakening fighting spirit of the more centrist veterans, in an article written after the 1898 congress she declared that: “We would have preferred it if the veterans had taken up the struggle from the very beginning of the debate (…) If the debate did get off the ground this did not happen because of but despite of the behaviour of the Party leaders (…) Abandoning the debate to its fate, watching passively for two days to see how the wind is blowing and only intervening when the mouthpieces of opportunism have been forced to come out in the open, then making snide remarks about the ‘sharp tone’ of those whose point of view you then defend, is a tactic which does not cast a good light on the Party leaders. And Kautsky’s explanation as to why he has not made a public statement so far about Bernstein’s theory, because he wanted to reserve his right to say the final word in a possible debate, does not really look a good excuse. In February he published Bernstein’s article without any editorial comment in Neue Zeit, then he stays silent for 4 months, in June he opens the discussions with some compliments to the ‘new’ point of view of Bernstein, this new poor copy of the lecture-room socialist [a term used by Engels in his Anti-Dühring], then he stays silent again for 4 months, lets the Party congress begin then declares during the course of the debate that he would like to make the concluding remarks. We would prefer that the theoretician ex officio should always intervene in the debates and not just make the conclusion in such crucial matters, and that he should not give the wrong and misleading impression of not having known for a long time what he should have said.”54

Thus many of the old guard, who had fought under conditions of the anti-Socialist law, had been disarmed by the weight of democratism and reformism. They had become unable to understand the new period and started to theorise instead the abandonment of the socialist goal. Instead of passing on the lessons of the struggle under the conditions of the anti-Socialist law to a new generation, they had lost their fighting spirit. And the centrist current which was hiding and avoiding the combat, by running away from an open battle with the opportunists, paved the way for the rise of the right.

While the centrists were avoiding the struggle, the left wing around Luxemburg showed its combative spirit and was ready to take over responsibility. Seeing that in reality “Bebel himself has already become senile, and lets things slide; he feels relieved if others struggle, but he himself has neither the energy nor the drive to take the initiative. K [Kautsky] restricts himself to theory, nobody takes on any responsibility.”55 “This means the party is in a bad way (…) Nobody leads it, nobody takes on responsibility.” The left wing aimed at gaining more influence and was convinced of the need to act as the spearhead. Luxemburg wrote to Jogiches: “Only one year of perseverant, positive work, and my position will be great. At the moment I cannot restrict the sharpness in my speeches, because we have to defend the most extreme position”.56 This influence, however, was not to be achieved at the price of a watering down of positions.

Convinced of the need for a determined leadership, and recognising that she would be facing the resistance of the hesitant, she wanted to push the party. “A person, moreover who does not belong to the ruling clique [Sippschaft], who won’t rely on anyone’s support but uses nothing but her own elbows, a person feared for the future not only by obvious opponents like Auer and Co. but even by allies (Bebel, Kautsky, Singer), a person best kept at arm’s length because she may grow several heads too tall? (…) I have no intention of limiting myself to criticism. On the contrary, I have every intention and urge to ‘push’ positively, not individuals but the movement as a whole… point out new ways, fighting, acting as a gadfly – in a word, a chronic incentive for the whole movement”.57 In October 1905 Luxemburg was offered the opportunity to participate in the editorial board of Vorwärts. She was intransigent on a possible censorship of her positions. “If because of my articles there is a conflict with the leadership or with the editorial board, then I should not be the only one to leave the editorial board, but the whole left would show solidarity and leave Vorwärts, then the editorial board would be blown up”. For a short spell the left gained some influence.

The decline of proletarian life in the SPD

The process of degeneration of the Party was not only marked by open attempts to abandon its programmatic positions, and by the lack of fighting spirit in broad sections of the Party. Beneath the surface lay a constant under-current of petty spite and personal denigration directed at those who defended most intransigently the organisation’s principles and disturbed the façade of unity. Kautsky’s attitude towards Luxemburg’s criticism of Bernstein, for example, was ambivalent. Despite his friendly relations with Luxemburg he could nonetheless write to Bernstein: “That spiteful creature Luxemburg is unhappy with the truce until the publication of your pamphlet, every day she presents another pinprick on ‘tactics’”.58

At times, as we will see, this under-current would break through the surface in slanderous accusations and personal attacks.

It was above all the right which reacted by personalising and scapegoating the “enemy” within the party. When a clarification of the profound divergences through an open confrontation was needed, the right – instead of coming forward with arguments in a debate, shied away and instead began slandering the most prominent members of the left.

Showing a clear feeling of inferiority on a theoretical level, they spread slanderous innuendo about Luxemburg in particular, making male chauvinist comments and insinuations about her “unhappy” emotional life and social relations (her relationship with Leo Jogiches was not known to the party): “this clever spiteful old maid will also come to Hanover. I respect her and consider her to be stronger than Parvus. But she hates me from the bottom of her heart.”59

The right wing party secretary Ignaz Auer admitted to Bernstein: “Even if we are not equal to our opponents, because not everyone is able to play a big role, we stand our ground against the rhetoric and the rude remarks. But if there was a ‘clean’ divorce, which nobody by the way considers seriously, Clara [Zetkin] and Rosa would be left on their own. Not even their [lovers] would take their defence, neither their former nor their present ones.”60

The same Auer did not hesitate to use xenophobic tones, saying that the “main attacks against Bernstein and his supporters and against Schippel were not by German comrades, and did not come out of the German movement. The activities of these people, in particular of Mrs. Rosa Luxemburg were disloyal, and not nice amongst comrades”.61 These kinds of xenophobic tones – especially against Luxemburg, who was of Jewish origin – became a permanent feature in the right’s campaign, which was to become increasingly vicious in the years leading up to World War I.62

The right wing of the party even wrote satirical comments or texts on Luxemburg.63 Luxemburg and other figures on the left had already been targeted in a particularly vile manner in Poland. Paul Frölich reports in his biography of Luxemburg, that many slanders were levelled against left figures such as Warski and Luxemburg. Luxemburg was accused of being paid by the Warsaw police officer Markgrafski, when she published an article on the question of national autonomy; she was also accused of being a paid agent of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police.64

Rosa Luxemburg started to feel sickened by the atmosphere in the party. “Each closer contact with the gang of the Party creates such a feeling of unease, that each time I am determined to say: three sea miles away from the lowest point of low-tide! After having been together with them I smell so much dirt, I sense so much weakness of character, so much shabbiness, that I rush back to my mouse hole.”65

This was in 1899, but 10 years later, her opinion of the behaviour of some of the party's leaading figures had not improved: “After all, try to remain calm and do not forget that apart from the Party leadership and the scoundrels (canaille) of the Zietz type. there are still many beautiful and pure things. Apart from the immediate inhumanity he [Zietz] appears as a painful symptom of general wretchedness, into which our ‘leadership’ has sunk, a symptom of a frightening terribly poor mental state. Some other time this rotting seaweed will hopefully be swept away by a foaming wave”.66 And she frequently expressed her indignation at the stifling bureaucratic atmosphere in the party: “I sometimes feel really miserable here and I feel like running away from Germany. In any Siberian village you care to name there is more humanity than in the whole of German Social Democracy.”67 This attitude of scapegoating and trying to destroy the reputation of the left was sowing the seeds for her later physical assassination by the Freikorps, who killed Luxemburg in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD. The tone employed against her within the Party prepared the pogrom atmosphere against revolutionaries in the revolutionary wave of 1918-1923. The character assassination which gradually seeped into the Party, and the lack of indignation about it, in particular from the centre, contributed to disarming the party morally.

Censuring and silencing the opposition

In addition to the scapegoating, personalisation and xenophobic attacks the different instances of the party under the influence of the right began to censure the articles of the left, and of Luxemburg in particular. Above all after 1905, when the question of mass action was on the agenda (see below), the Party increasingly tried to muzzle her and prevent her articles on the question of the mass strike and the Russian experience from being published. Although the left had strongholds in some cities,68 the whole right wing of the party apparatus was trying to prevent her from spreading her positions in the Party’s central organ Vorwärts: “We have regretfully to decline your article since, in accordance with an agreement between the Party executive, the executive commission of the Prussian provincial organization [of the SPD], and the editor, the question of the mass strike is not to be dealt with in Vorwärts for the time being.”69

As we shall see the consequences of the moral decline and the decline in solidarity within the Party were to have a noxious effect when imperialist tensions sharpened and the left insisted on the need to respond with mass action .

Franz Mehring, a well-known and respected figure of the left, was also often attacked. But unlike Rosa Luxemburg he was easily offended, and tended to retire from the struggle when he felt he had been unjustly attacked. For example, before the Party congress in Dresden 1903, Mehring criticised Social Democrats writing in the bourgeois press as being incompatible with Party membership. The opportunists launched a campaign of slander against him. Mehring asked for a Party tribunal, which met and adopted a “mild judgement” against the opportunists. But more and more, as he came under increasing pressure from the right, Mehring tended to withdraw from the Party press. Luxemburg insisted that he should stand up to the pressure from the right and to their slanders: “You will surely feel that we are increasingly approaching times when the masses in the Party will need energetic, ruthless and generous leadership, and that without you our powers-that-be – executive, central organ, Reichstag caucus, and the ‘scientific paper’, will become continually more wretched, small-minded and cowardly. Clearly we shall have to face up to this attractive future, and we must occupy and hold all those positions which make it possible to spike the official leadership’s guns by exercising the right to criticise. (…) This makes it our duty to stick it out and not do the official Party bosses the favour of packing up. We have to accept continual struggles and friction, particularly when anyone attacks that holy of holies, parliamentary cretinism, as strongly as you have done. But in spite of all – not to give an inch seems to be the right slogan. Neue Zeit must not be handed over entirely to senility and officialdom.”70

The watershed of 1905

As the new century opened, the foundation on which revisionists and reformists alike had built their theory and practice began to crumble.

Superficially, and despite occasional setbacks, the capitalist economy still appeared to be in robust health, continuing its unstoppable expansion across the last regions still unoccupied by the imperialist powers, notably Africa and China. The expansion of capitalism across the globe had reached a stage where the imperialist powers could only expand their influence at the cost of their rivals. All the great powers were increasingly involved in an unprecedented arms race, with Germany in particular engaged in a massive programme of naval expansion. Though few realised at the time, the year 1905 marked a watershed: a dispute between two great powers led to large-scale war, and the war in turn led to the first massive revolutionary upsurge of the working class.

The war, begun in 1904, was fought between Russia and Japan for control of the Korean peninsula. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, and the strikes of January 1905 were a direct reaction against the effects of the war. For the first time in history, a gigantic wave of mass strikes shook an entire country. The phenomenon was not confined to Russia. Although not as massively and with a different background and different demands, similar strike movements broke out in a series of other European countries: 1902 in Belgium, 1903 in the Netherlands, 1905 in the Ruhr area in Germany. A number of massive wildcat strikes also took place in the United States between 1900 and 1906 (notably in the Pennsylvania coal mines). In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg – both as a revolutionary agitator and journalist for the German Party, and as a member of the SDKPiL’s Central Committee71 - had been following attentively the struggles in Russia and Poland.72 In December 1905, she felt that she could no longer remain in Germany as a mere observer, and left for Poland to participate directly in the movement. Closely involved in the day-to-day process of class struggle and revolutionary agitation, she witnessed at first hand the newly unfolding dynamic of the mass strikes.73 Together with other revolutionary forces she began to draw the lessons. At the same time as Trotsky wrote his famous book on 1905 where he highlighted the role of the workers’ councils, Luxemburg in her text Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions74 underlined the historical significance of the “birth of the mass strike” and its consequences for the working class internationally. Her text on the mass strike was a first programmatic text of the left currents in the 2nd International, aimed at drawing the broader lessons and highlighting the importance of autonomous, massive action of the working class.75

Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike went completely against the vision of class struggle generally accepted by the Party and the trade unions. For the latter, class struggle was almost like a military campaign, in which confrontation should only be sought once the army had built up an overwhelming strength, while the Party and union leaderships were to act as a general staff with the masses of workers manoeuvring according to orders. This was a long way from Luxemburg’s insistence on the creative self-activity of the masses, and any idea that the workers themselves might act independently of the leadership was anathema to the union bosses, who in 1905 were faced for the first time with the prospect of being overrun by just such a massive wave of autonomous struggles. The reaction of the right wing of the SPD and the union leadership was simply to ban any discussion of the issue. At the unions’ May 1905 Congress in Köln they rejected any discussion on the mass strike as “reprehensible”76 (verwerflich) and went on to say that “The TU congress recommends all organised workers to energetically oppose this [propagation of the mass strike]”. This heralded the cooperation between the ruling class and the SPD and unions in fighting revolution.

The German bourgeoisie had also followed the movement attentively, and wanted above all to prevent German workers from “copying the Russian example”. Because of her speech on the mass strike at the SPD’s 1905 Congress in Jena, Rosa Luxemburg was accused of “incitation to violence” (Aufreizung zu Gewalttätigkeit) and was sentenced to two months in prison. Kautsky meanwhile tried to play down the significance of the mass strikes, insisting they were above all a product of primitive Russian conditions, which could not be applied to an advanced country like Germany. He used “the term ‘Russian method’ as a symbol for lack of organisation, primitiveness, chaos, wildness”.77 In his 1909 book The Road to Power, Kautsky claimed that “mass action is an obsolete strategy of overthrowing the enemy” and contrasted it with his proposed “strategy of attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie).78

The mass party against the mass strike

Refusing to consider the mass strike as a perspective for the working class across the world, Kautsky attacked Luxemburg’s position as if it were merely a personal whim. Kautsky wrote to Luxemburg: “I do not have the time to explain to you the reasons which Marx and Engels, Bebel and Liebknecht accepted as substantive. Briefly, what you want is a totally new kind of agitation, which we have always rejected so far. But this new agitation is of such a kind that it is not advisable to debate this in public. If we publish the article you would act on your own account, as an individual person, and proclaim a totally new agitation and action, which the Party has always rejected. A single person, no matter how high her standing may be, cannot act on her own account and make a fait accompli, which would have unpredictable consequences for the Party.”.79

Luxemburg rejected the attempt to present the analysis and importance of the mass strike as a “personal policy”.80 Even though revolutionaries must acknowledge the existence of different conditions in different countries, they must above all grasp the global dynamic of the changing conditions of the class struggle, in particular those tendencies which herald the future. Kautsky opposed the “Russian experience” as an expression of Russia’s backwardness, indirectly refusing international solidarity and spreading a viewpoint imbued with national prejudice, pretending that the workers in Germany with their powerful trade unions were more advanced and their methods “superior” … i.e. at a time, when the trade union leadership was already blocking the mass strike and autonomous action! And when Luxemburg was sent to jail for propagating the mass strike, Kautsky and his followers showed no sign of outrage and did not protest.

Luxemburg, who could not be silenced by such attempts at censorship, reproached the party leadership for focussing their entire attention on preparing the elections. “All questions of tactics should be drowned out by the delirium of joy over our present and future electoral successes? Does Vorwärts really believe that the political deepening and reflection of large layers of the Party could be fostered with this permanent atmosphere of hailing future electoral success a year,, possibly a year and a hal, before the elections and by silencing any self-critique in the Party?”81

Apart from Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek was the most vocal critic of Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition”. In his book “Tactical differences/ in the workers’ movement”82 Pannekoek undertook a systematic and fundamental critique of the “old tools” of parliamentarism and the trade union struggle. Pannekoek was also to be the victim of censorship and repression within the Social Democratic and trade union apparatus, and lost his job at the Party school as a result. Increasingly, both Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s articles were censored by the Party press. In November 1911 Kautsky for the first time refused to publish an article by Pannekoek in Neue Zeit.83

Thus the mass strikes of 1905 forced the SPD leadership to show its real face and oppose any mobilisation of the working class that tried to take up the “Russian experience”. Already, years before the unleashing of the war,, the trade union leadership had become a bulwark for capitalism. Under the pretext of taking different conditions of the class struggle into account, in reality this was used to reject international solidarity, with the right wing forces within Social Democracy trying to provoke fears and even whip up national resentment about “Russian radicalism” This was going to be an important ideological weapon in the war which started a few years later. Thus after 1905 the centre, which had been wavering until then, gradually became more and more pulled over towards the right. The inability and unwillingness of the centre to support the struggle of the left in the party meant that the left became more and more isolated within the Party.

As Luxemburg pointed out, “The practical effect of comrade Kautsky’s intervention is reduced to this: he has provided a theoretical cover to those in the Party and the unions who observe the impetuous growth of the mass movement with growing unease, and would like to bring it to a halt as soon as possible and return the struggle to well-worn and comfortable old rut of union and parliamentary activity. Kautsky has provided them with a remedy to their scruples of conscience, under the aegis of Marx and Engels; at the same time he has offered them a means to break the back of a movement of demonstrations that he supposedly wanted to make ‘ever more powerful’”.84

The threat of war and the International

The 2nd International’s 1907 Stuttgart Congress tried to draw the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war and to throw the weight of the organised working class into the balance against the growing menace of war. Some 60,000 people took part in a demonstration – with speakers from more than a dozen countries warning of the danger of war. August Bebel proposed a resolution against the danger of war, which avoided the question of militarism as an integral part of the capitalist system and made no mention the struggle of the workers in Russia against war. The German Party intended to avoid being tied by any prescriptions as to its action in the event of war, in the form of a general strike above all. Lenin, Luxemburg and Martov together proposed a more robust amendment to the resolution: “Should war break out in spite of all this, it is [the Socialist Parties’] duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.”.85 The Stuttgart congress voted unanimously for this resolution, but afterwards the majority of the 2nd International failed to strengthen their opposition to the increasing war preparations. The Stuttgart Congress entered into history as an example of verbal declarations without action by most of the attending parties.86 But it was an important moment of cooperation amongst the left wing currents, who despite their differences on many other questions took up a common stand against the question of war.

In February 1907 Karl Liebknecht published his book Militarism and Anti-militarism with special attention to the international youth movement, in which he denounced in particular the role of German militarism. In October 1907 he was sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment for high treason. Yet in the same year, the leading right wing figure in the SPD, Noske, declared in a speech in the Reichstag, that in case of a “war of defence” Social Democracy would support the government and “defend the fatherland with great passion..Our attitude towards the military is determined by our view on the national question. We demand the autonomy of each nation. But this means that we also insist on the preservation of the autonomy of the German people. We are fully aware that it is our duty and obligation to make sure that the German people are not pushed against the wall by some other people”.87 This was the same Noske who in 1918 was to become the bloodhound of SPD-led repression against the workers.

Selling internationalism for electoral success

In 1911 Germany’s despatch of the destroyer Panther to Agadir provoked the second Moroccan Crisis with France. The SPD leadership renounced any anti-militarist action in order to avoid putting at risk its electoral success in the upcoming 1912 election. When Luxemburg denounced this attitude, the SPD leadership accused her of betraying Party secrets. In August 1911 after much hesitation and attempts to avoid the question, the Party leadership distributed a leaflet which was meant to be a protest against the Morocco policy of German imperialism. The leaflet was strongly criticised by Luxemburg in her article “Our leaflet on Morocco”,88 unaware as she wrote that Kautsky was the author. Kautsky replied with a very personalised attack. Luxemburg fought back: Kautsky, she said, had presented her critique as “a malicious, back-stabbing, perfidious attack against [Kautsky] as a person. (…) Comrade Kautsky will hardly be able to doubt my courage to face someone in an open manner, to criticise or fight against someone directly. I have never attacked a person from ambush and I strongly reject the suggestion of comrade Kautsky that I knew who had written the leaflet and that I had – without naming him – targeted him. (…) but I would have taken care not to begin an unnecessary polemic with a comrade who overreacts with such a flood of personal vituperation, bitterness and suspicion against a strictly factual, although strong critique, and who suspects a personal, nasty, bitchy intention behind each word of critique.”89 At the Jena Party congress in September 1911, the Party leadership circulated a special pamphlet against Rosa Luxemburg, full of attacks against her, accusing her of breaching confidentiality and of having informed the International Socialist Bureau of the 2nd International of the SPD’s internal correspondence.

Kautsky deserts the struggle against war

Although in his 1909 book on The Road to Power Kautsky warned that “the world war is coming dangerously close”, in 1911 he predicted, that “everyone will become a patriot” once war breaks out. And that if Social Democracy decided to swim against the current, it would be torn apart by the enraged mob. He placed his hopes for peace on the “countries representing European civilisation” forming a United States of Europe. At the same time he began to develop his theory of “super-imperialism”; underlying this theory was the idea that imperialist conflict was not an inevitable consequence of capitalist expansion but merely a “policy” which enlightened capitalist states could choose to reject. Kautsky already thought that the war would relegate class contradictions to the background and the proletariat’s mass action would be doomed to failure, that – as he would say when war broke out – the International was only good for peace time. This attitude of being aware of the danger of war but bowing to the dominant nationalist pressure and shying away from a determined struggle disarmed the working class and paved the way for the betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. Thus on the one hand Kautsky minimised the real explosiveness of imperialist tensions in his theory of “super-imperialism” and so completely failed to perceive the ruling classes’ determination to prepare for war; while on the other he pandered to the nationalist ideology of the government (and increasingly of the right wing in the SPD also) rather than confronting it, out of fear for the SPD’s electoral success. His backbone, his fighting spirit, had disappeared.

When a determined denunciation of the war preparations was needed, and while the left wing did its best to organise anti-war public meetings which attracted participants in their thousands, the SPD leadership was mobilising to the hilt for the upcoming 1912 parliamentary elections. Luxemburg denounced the self-imposed silence on the danger of war as an opportunistic attempt to score more parliamentary seats, sacrificing internationalism in order to gain more votes.

In 1912 the threat to peace posed by the Second Balkan War led the ISB to organise an emergency special Congress held in November in Basel, Switzerland, with the specific aim of mobilising the international working class against the imminent danger of war. Luxemburg criticised the fact that the German Party had merely tail-ended the German unions who had organised a few low-key protests, arguing that the Party as a political organ of the working class had done no more than pay lip-service to the denunciation of war. Whereas a few parties in other countries had reacted more vigorously, the SPD, the biggest workers’ party in the world, had essentially withdrawn from the agitation and abstained from mobilising further protests. The Basel congress, which once again ended with a big demonstration and appeals for peace, in fact masked the rottenness and future betrayal of many of its member parties.

On June 3rd 1913, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted in favour of a special military tax: 37 SPD deputies who opposed the vote in favour were reduced to silence by the principle of the discipline of the parliamentary fraction. The open breach with the previous motto of “not a single man, not a single penny” for the system prepared the parliamentary fraction’s vote for war credits in August 1914.90 The moral decline of the party was also revealed through Bebel’s reaction. In 1870/71 August Bebel – together with Wilhelm Liebknecht (Karl Liebknecht’s father) – distinguished himself by his determined opposition to the Franco-Prussian war. Now, four decades later, Bebel failed to take up a resolute stand against the danger of war.91

It was becoming increasingly clear that not only was the right going to betray openly, but also that the wavering centrists had lost all fighting spirit and would fail to oppose the preparation for war in a determined manner. The attitude defended by the most famous representative of the “centre”, Kautsky, according to which the Party should adapt its position on the question of war following the reactions of the population (passive submission if the majority of the country assented to nationalism or a more resolute stand if there was increasing opposition to war), was justified by the danger of “isolating oneself from the bulk of the Party”. When after 1910 the current around Kautsky claimed to be the “Marxist centre” in contrast to the (extremist, radical, unmarxist) left, Luxemburg labelled this “centre” as representatives of cowardice, cautiousness and conservatism.

Their desertion from the struggle, their inability to oppose the right and to follow the left in their determined struggle, helped to disarm the workers. Thus the betrayal of August 1914 by the Party leadership came as no surprise; it was prepared little by little in a piecemeal process. The support for German imperialism became tangible in several votes in parliament to support war credits, in the efforts to curb any protests against the war, in the whole attitude of taking sides with German imperialism and chaining the working class to nationalism and patriotism. The process of muzzling the left wing was crucial in the abandonment of internationalism and prepared the repression of revolutionaries in 1919.

Blinded by numbers

While the SPD leadership had been focussing its activities on parliamentary elections, the Party itself was blinded by electoral success and lost sight of the final goal of the workers’ movement. The Party hailed the apparently uninterrupted growth in voters, in the number of deputies and in the readership of the Party press. The growth was indeed impressive: in 1907 the SPD had 530,000 members; by 1913 the figure had doubled to almost 1.1 million. The SPD in reality was the only mass party of the 2nd International and the biggest single party in any European parliament. This numerical growth gave the illusion of great strength. Even Lenin was remarkably uncritical about the “impressive figures” of members, voters and the impact of the party.92

Although it is impossible to establish a mechanical relationship between political intransigence and electoral scores, the 1907 elections, when the SPD still condemned the barbaric repression of German imperialism against the Herero risings in South-West Africa, led to an electoral “set-back”, as the SPD lost 38 parliamentary seats and was left with 43 seats ‘only’. Despite the fact that the SPD’s share of the overall vote had actually risen, in the eyes of the Party leadership this electoral set-back meant that the Party had been punished by the voters, and above all by the voters of the petty bourgeoisie, because of its denunciation of German imperialism. The conclusion they drew was that the SPD should avoid opposing imperialism and nationalism too strongly, as this would cost votes. Instead the Party would have to focus all its forces on campaigning for the next elections, even if this meant censuring its discussions and avoiding anything which might put its electoral score at risk. In the 1912 elections the party scored 4.2 million votes (38.5% of the votes cast) and won 110 seats. It had become the biggest single parliamentary group, but only by burying internationalism and the principles of the working class. In the local parliaments it had more than 11,000 deputies. The SPD boasted 91 newspapers and 1.5 million subscribers. In the 1912 elections, the SPD’s integration into the game of parliamentary politics went one step further when it withdrew candidates in several constituencies to the benefit of the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive People’s Party), even though this party supported unconditionally the policy of German imperialism. Meanwhile the Sozialistische Monatshefte (in principle a non-Party publication, but in effect the revisionists’ theoretical organ) openly supported Germany’s colonial policy and the claims of German imperialism for a redistribution of colonies.

Gradual integration into the state

In fact the full mobilisation of the party for parliamentary elections went hand in hand with its gradual integration into the state apparatus. The indirect vote for the budget in July 1910,93 the increasing cooperation with bourgeois parties, (which had up to then been anathema), such as abstaining from nominating candidates in some constituencies in order to make possible the election of MPs of the bourgeois Fortschrittliche Volkspartei, the nomination of a candidate for the mayoral elections in Stuttgart – these were some of the steps on the road to the SPD’s direct participation in running the state administration.

This whole trend towards a growing interconnection between the SPD’s parliamentary activities and its identification with the state was castigated by the left, in particular by Anton Pannekoek and Luxemburg. Pannekoek dedicated a whole book to the Tactical differences within the worker’ movement. Luxemburg, who was extremely alert to the suffocating effect of parliamentarism, pressed for initiative and action from the rank and file: “the most ideal party executive would be able to achieve nothing, would involuntarily sink into bureaucratic inefficiency, if the natural source of its energy, the will of the Party, does not make itself felt, if critical thought, the initiative of the mass of the Party’s membership is sleeping. In fact it is more than this. If its own energy, the independent intellectual life of the mass of the Party, is not active enough, then the central authorities have the quite natural tendency to not only bureaucratically rust but also to get a totally wrong idea of their own official authority and position of power with respect to the Party. The most recent so-called ‘secret decree’ of our Party executive to the Party editorial staffs can serve as fresh proof, an attempt to make decisions for the Party press, which cannot be sharply enough rejected. However, here also it is necessary to make it clear: against both inefficiency and excessive illusions of power of the central authorities of the labour movement there is no other way except one’s own initiative, one’s own thought, and the fresh, pulsating political life of the broad mass of the Party.”94

Indeed, Luxemburg constantly insisted on the need for the mass of the Party members to “wake up” and take up their responsibility against the degenerating Party leadership. “The big masses [of the Party] have to activate themselves in their own way, must be able to develop their own mass energy, their own drive, they have to become active as a mass, act, show and develop passion, courage and determination.”95

“Every step forward in the struggle for emancipation of the working class must at the same time mean a growing intellectual independence of its mass, its growing self-activity, self-determination and initiative (…) It is vitally important for the normal development of the political life in the Party, to keep the political thought and the will of the mass of the Party awake and active,.. We have, of course, the yearly Party conference as the highest instance which regularly fixes the will of the whole party. However, it is obvious that the Party conferences can only give general outlines of the tactics for the Social Democratic struggle. The application of these guidelines in practice requires untiring thought, quick-wittedness and initiative (…) To want to make a Party executive responsible for the whole enormous task of daily political vigilance and initiative, on whose command a Party organisation of almost a million passively waits, is the most incorrect thing there is from the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle. This is without doubt that reprehensible ‘blind obedience’ which our opportunists definitely want to see in the self-evident subordination of all to the decisions of the whole party”.96

Fraction discipline strangles individual responsibility

On 4th August 1914, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted unanimously for war credits. The Party leadership and parliamentary fraction had demanded “fraction discipline”. The censorship (state censorship or self-censorship?) and false unity of the Party followed their own logic, the very opposite of personal responsibility. The process of degeneration meant that the capacity for critical thinking and opposition to the false unity of the Party had been sapped. The moral values of the Party were sacrificed on the altar of capital. In the name of Party discipline the Party demanded the abandoning of proletarian internationalism. Karl Liebknecht, whose father had dared to reject the support for the war credits in 1870, now bowed to Party pressure. It was only a few weeks later, following a first regrouping of comrades who had remained loyal to internationalism, that he dared to express openly his rejection of the mobilisation for war by the SPD leadership. But the vote for war credits by the German SPD had triggered off an avalanche of submission to nationalism in other European countries. With the betrayal of the SPD the 2nd International signed its death warrant and disintegrated.

The rise of the opportunistic and revisionist current, which had appeared most clearly in the biggest Party of the 2nd International, and which abandoned the goal of the overthrow of capitalist society, meant that proletarian life, fighting spirit and moral indignation disappeared within the SPD, or at least in the ranks of its leadership and its bureaucracy. At the same time this process was inseparably linked to the SPD’s programmatic degeneration, visible in its refusal to adopt the new weapons of the class struggle, the mass strike and workers’ self-organisation, and the gradual abandonment of internationalism. The process of degeneration of German Social-Democracy, which was not an isolated phenomenon in the 2nd International, led to its betrayal in 1914. For the first time a political organisation of the workers had not only betrayed the interests of the working class, it became one of the most effective weapons in the hands of the capitalist class. The ruling class in Germany could now count on the SPD’s authority, and the loyalty it inspired in the working class, to unleash war and then to crush the workers’ revolt against war. The lessons of the degeneration of Social Democracy thus remain crucially important for revolutionaries today.

Heinrich / Jens

For more than ten years, the distant din of war had echoed across Europe - colonial wars in Africa, the Moroccan crises, the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, the Balkan wars - and the workers of Europe had trusted in the International to keep the threat of generalised war at bay. The contours of the war to come - already predicted by Engels in 18871 - had become clearer year by year, so much so that the International's congresses at Stuttgart in 1907, and at Basel in 1912, had denounced them clearly: not a defensive war, but a war of imperialist competition, pillage and rapine. Over and over, the International and its member parties had warned the workers of the danger and threatened the ruling classes with their own overthrow should they dare defy the power of the organised working class and unleash the hounds of war. And yet in August 1914, the International disintegrated, blown away like insubstantial dust, as one after the other its leaders and parliamentary deputies betrayed their most solemn promises, voted war credits and called the workers to the slaughter.2

How could such a disaster happen? Karl Kautsky, once the Second International's foremost theoretician, blamed it on the workers: "who would dare assert that an order given by a handful of parliamentarians is sufficient to make four million class-conscious German proletarians turn right-about face within twenty-four hours, in direct opposition to their former aims? If this were true, it would, of course, be evidence of a terrible collapse, not only of our Party, but also of the masses. [Kautsky’s emphasis] If the masses were such a spineless flock of sheep, we might just as well allow ourselves to be buried”.3 In short, if four million German workers allowed themselves to be marched off to war, it was of their own volition, nothing to do with the parliamentarians who, with the backing of the majority of their parties, voted war credits and (in France and Britain) soon found a place in bourgeois governments of national unity.

To this wretched, cowardly excuse, Lenin gave a stinging retort: “Consider: the only people in a position to express their attitude to the war more or less freely (i.e., without being immediately seized and dragged to the barracks, or the immediate risk of being shot) were a 'handful of parliamentarians' (who were free to vote, with the right to do so; they were quite able to vote in opposition. Even in Russia, no one was beaten up or even arrested for this), a handful of officials, journalists, etc. And now, Kautsky nobly places on the masses the blame for the treachery and the spinelessness of that social stratum of whose links with the tactics and ideology of opportunism Kautsky himself has written scores of times over a number of years!”.4

Betrayed by their leaders, their organisations transformed almost overnight from fighting organisations for workers’ defence to recruiting sergeants for the slaughter, the workers were left to confront the full might of the state’s military machine individually and alone. As one French syndicalist was to write later: “I have only one reproach to make to myself (…) and it is that I, an anti-patriot and anti-militarist, left with my comrades on the fourth day of mobilisation. I did not have the strength of character not to go, although I did not recognise frontiers or fatherland. I was afraid, it’s true, of the firing squad. I was afraid... But at the front, thinking of my family, scratching the names of my wife and son on the bottom of the trench I said ‘How is it possible that I, anti-patriot, anti-militarist, who acknowledged only the International, come to be attacking my companions in misery and perhaps shall die for my enemies against my own cause and my own interests?’”.5

All over Europe, the workers had had confidence in the International, believed its congresses’ repeated resolutions against the coming war. They trusted the International, that highest expression of the power of the organised working class, to stay the criminal hand of capitalist imperialism.

In July 1914, with the threat of war more and more imminent, an emergency meeting was called in Brussels of the International Socialist Bureau – the nearest thing that the International had to a central organ. The leaders of the parties present found it hard at first to believe that a full-scale war would really break out, but by the time the ISB met on 29th July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia and imposed martial law. Victor Adler told the meeting that his party was impotent, no attempt was planned to resist mobilisation or the war itself. No plans had been made for the Party to go underground and to continue its activity in clandestinity. The discussion lost itself in deliberation about changing the venue for the upcoming congress of the International, which was to have been held in Vienna: no practical action was considered. Forgetting everything that had been said at earlier congresses, the leaders were still trusting the diplomacy of the great powers to prevent war from breaking out, unaware – or unwilling to see – that this time, all the powers were bent on war. The British delegate Bruce Glasier6 wrote that “although the dread peril of a general eruption of war was the main subject of the deliberations, no one, not even the German representatives, seemed apprehensive of an actual rupture between the great powers taking place until at least the full resources of diplomacy had been exhausted”.7 Jaurès could even declare that “at this moment the French government wants peace and is working for the maintenance of peace. The French government is the best ally in the cause of peace of that admirable English government which has taken the initiative in conciliation”.8

After the ISB meeting, thousands of Belgian workers gathered to hear the leaders of the International speak against the threat of war. Jaurès gave one of his greatest anti-war speeches ever, and the workers cheered him to the rafters. Yet one orator was notably absent from the platform: Rosa Luxemburg, the most clear-sighted and the most indomitable fighter of them all, refused to speak, sick to the heart at the spinelessness and self-delusion she saw all around her: she alone could see the wave of cowardice and betrayal that was to sweep the socialist parties into supporting their national governments’ imperialist ambitions.

Once war had broken out, the socialist traitors in every belligerent country claimed to be fighting a “defensive” war: in Germany the war was to defend German “Kultur” against the Cossack barbarism of Tsarist Russia, in France it was to defend republican France against Prussian autocracy, in Britain it was to defend “little Belgium”.9 Lenin demolished these hypocritical pretentions, reminding his readers of the solemn promises that the leaders of the 2nd International had made at the Congress of Basel in 1912 to oppose, not just war in general but this particular imperialist war which the workers’ movement had long seen in the making: “The Basel resolution does not speak of a national or a people’s war – examples of which have occurred in Europe, wars that were even typical of the period of 1789-1871 – or of a revolutionary war, which Social-Democrats have never renounced, but of the present war, which is the outcome of ‘capitalist imperialism’ and ‘dynastic interests’, the outcome of ‘the policy of conquest’ pursued by both groups of belligerent powers – the Austro-German and the Anglo Franco-Russian. Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co. are flagrantly deceiving the workers by repeating the selfish lie of the bourgeoisie of all countries, which is striving with all its might to depict this imperialist and predatory war for colonies as a people’s war, a war of defence (for any side); when they seek to justify this war by citing historical examples of non-imperialist wars”.10

Without centralisation, no action

How was it that the International, in which the workers placed such confidence, proved incapable of action? In fact, its ability to act was more apparent than real: the ISB was a mere coordinating body whose role was largely restricted to organising congresses and mediating in the disputes within and among the socialist parties themselves. Although the International’s left wing – around Lenin and Luxemburg in particular – considered the congress resolutions against war to be binding undertakings, the ISB had no power to enforce them; it was unable to take action independently – still less against the wishes – of each country’s socialist parties themselves and especially of the most powerful among them: the German SPD. Indeed, although International’s founding congress was held in 1889, the International Socialist Bureau was only constituted at the congress of 1900: until then, the International in effect only existed while the congress was in session. The rest of the time it was little more than a web of personal relationships among the different socialist leaders, many of whom had come to know each other personally during years in exile. There was not even any formal network of correspondence; August Bebel was even to complain to Engels in 1894 that all the SPD’s dealings with other socialist parties remained entirely in the hands of Wilhelm Liebknecht: “To meddle with Liebknecht in his foreign connections is simply impossible. No one knows to whom he writes or what he writes; he talks to no one about that...”.11

The contrast with the First International (the International Workingmen’s Association) is striking. Practically the first act of the IWA following its creation in 1864 by a meeting of largely British and French workers held at St Martin’s Fields in London, was to draft an organisational programme and to form a General Council – the centralising body of the International. Once the statutes were drafted, a broad range of workers’ organisations across Europe (political parties, unions, even cooperatives) joined the organisation on the basis of agreement with the IWA’s statutes. Despite the attempts by Bakunin’s “Alliance” to undermine it, the General Council, elected by the IWA’s congresses, enjoyed all the authority of a true centralising body.

This contrast between the two Internationals was itself the product of a new and different historical situation, and indeed confirmed the prescient words of the Communist Manifesto: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”.12 Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the workers’ movement entered a period of fierce repression and contraction especially in France – where thousands of the Communards were shot or exiled to penal servitude in the colonies – and in Germany where the SDAP (the SPD’s predecessor) was driven underground by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. It was clear that revolution was not on the immediate agenda as many revolutionaries, including Marx and Engels themselves, had hoped and believed during the 1860s. Economically and socially, the thirty years from 1870 to 190013 were to see a period of massive capitalist expansion both internally with the growth of mass production and heavy industry at the expense of the artisan classes, and externally as capitalism spread into new territories both within Europe itself and across the seas, especially in the USA and in the growing number of the Great Powers’ colonial possessions. This in turn meant a huge increase in the numbers of workers: the period was one where the working class had in effect to transform itself from an amorphous mass of displaced artisans and peasants, into a class of associated labour capable of asserting its own historical perspective and defending its own immediate economic and social interests. This process, indeed, had already been proclaimed by the First International: “the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor (...) To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organisation of the workingmen’s party”.14

By its very nature, given the conditions of the epoch, this self-formation of the working class was to take on forms that were specific to and determined by the historical development of each country. In Germany, the workers struggled at first in the difficult conditions of clandestinity imposed by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, where the only possible legal action was in parliament, such that the unions grew under the wing of the socialist party. In Britain, still Europe’s most advanced industrial power, the crushing defeat of the great political movement of Chartism in 1848 had all but discredited political action and the workers’ organising energy was largely devoted to building up their trades unions: the socialist parties remained small and insignificant on the political scene. In France, the workers’ movement was fractured between marxists (Jules Guesde’s “Parti ouvrier’ founded in 1882), the Blanquists inspired by the revolutionary tradition of the great Paris Commune (Edouard Vaillant’s “Comité révolutionnaire central”), the reformists (known as “Possibilists”) and the unions grouped in the CGT and strongly influenced by the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism. Inevitably, all these organisations struggled to develop the workers’ organisation and education, and to win union and political rights, against their respective ruling classes and therefore within the national framework.

The development of mass union organisations and a mass political movement also helped to redefine the conditions under which revolutionaries worked. The old Blanquist tradition – the idea of a small, conspiratorial band of professional revolutionaries who would seize power with the more or less passive support of the masses – was outdated, replaced by the need to construct mass organisations which perforce must operate within a certain legal framework. The right to organise, the right of assembly, the right to free speech, all these became objects of vital interest to the mass movement: inevitably all these demands, yet again, were posed within the legal framework specific to each nation. To take just one example: whereas the French socialists could get deputies elected to a Republican parliament which wielded effective legislative power, in Germany the government’s direction depended not on the Reichstag (the Imperial parliament), but on the autocratic decisions of the Kaiser in person. It was thus far easier for the Germans to maintain an attitude of rigorous refusal to ally with bourgeois parties, since they were highly unlikely to be called on to do so; how fragile was this position of principle was shown by the way in which it was ignored by the SPD in South Germany, whose deputies regularly voted in favour of budget proposals in the regional Landtags (Länder parliaments).

Nonetheless, as the workers’ movements in different countries emerged from the period of reaction and defeat, the proletariat’s inherently international nature reasserted itself. In 1887, the German party congress held at St Gallen in Switzerland decided to take the initiative of organising an international congress; in the same year, the British TUC meeting in Swansea voted in favour of an international conference to press for an eight-hour working day.15 The latter led to the holding of an exploratory meeting in November 1888 in London at the invitation of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee, attended by delegates from several countries, though not from Germany. These two simultaneous initiatives quickly demonstrated a fundamental split within the labour movement, between the reformists led by the British unions and the French Possibilists, and the revolutionary marxists, whose most important organisation was the German SDAP (the British unions, indeed, were opposed to any participation at all in their initiative by political organisations).

In 1889 – the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, still a reference for all those who aspired to the overthrow of the existing order – there were thus not one but two international workers’ congresses held in Paris simultaneously: the first called by the French Possibilists, the second by the marxist Parti Ouvrier16 led by Jules Guesde. The subsequent decline of the Possibilists meant that the marxist congress (known after its meeting-place in the Salle Petrelle) was thereafter considered as the 2nd International's founding congress. Inevitably, the congress was marked by inexperience and a great deal of confusion: confusion over the highly charged question of validating delegates’ mandates, and also over translations which were undertaken by whichever members of the polyglot assembly happened to be available.17 The most important aspects of the Congress were thus not so much its practical decisions but first, the fact that it met at all, and second the roll-call of delegates. From France came Marx’s sons-in-law Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, together with Edouard Vaillant, the hero of the Commune; from Germany came Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, together with Eduard Bernstein and Klara Zetkin; Britain’s best-known representative was William Morris, and this was in itself indicative of the political backwardness of British socialism, since the membership of his Socialist League was barely numbered in the hundreds. A highlight of the congress was the handshake between the joint presidents Vaillant and Liebknecht, symbolic of the international fraternity between French and German socialists.

The Gauche Communiste de France were thus right, in 1948, to highlight two major characteristics of the new International. First, it “marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle... [it] was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat”. At the same time, the fact that the International was founded as an explicitly marxist, revolutionary organisation “marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission”.18

May Day and the difficulty of united action

The 2nd International was founded, but it still had no permanent organisational structure. Existing only for the duration of its congresses, it had no means of enforcing the resolutions that these congresses adopted. This contrast between apparent international unity and national particularities in practice was nowhere more evident than in the campaign for the eight-hour day, centred on the May Day demonstration, which was one of the International’s major preoccupations during the 1890s.

Probably the most important resolution of the 1889 Congress was that proposed by the French delegate Raymond Lavigne: that the workers in every country should take up the campaign for the eight-hour day decided by the 1888 St Louis congress of the American Federation of Labour, in the form of massive demonstrations and a generalised stoppage of work to be held every year on 1st May. Yet it soon became clear that the socialists and the unions in different countries had very different ideas as to what the May Day celebrations should mean. In France, partly as a result of the revolutionary syndicalist tradition in the unions, May Day quickly became the occasion for massive demonstrations leading to clashes with the police: in 1891 at Fourmies in the North of France, troops fired on a workers’ demonstration leaving ten dead, including several children. In Germany on the other hand, difficult economic conditions which encouraged the employers to turn a strike into a lock-out combined with the German unions’ and the SDP’s reluctance to have their action dictated to them by anyone outside Germany, even by the International: as a result, there was a strong tendency within Germany to avoid putting the resolution into practice other than by holding meetings at the end of the working day. This German reluctance was shared by the unions in Britain.

The fact that the strongest socialist party in Europe should sound the retreat in this way alarmed the French and the Austrians in particular, and at the 1893 Congress of the International in Zürich, the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler proposed a new resolution insisting that May Day should be the occasion for a real stoppage of work: the resolution was passed against the votes of the majority of the German delegates.

Yet only three months later, the SPD’s Cologne Congress was reducing the extent of the International’s resolution, by declaring that it should only apply to those organisations who actually felt it possible to join a stoppage.

The history of the May Day stoppages illustrates two important aspects that determined the International’s ability – or inability – to act as a united body. On the one hand, it was impossible to get around the fact that what was possible in one country was not necessarily possible in another: Engels himself was dubious about the May Day resolutions on precisely these grounds, fearing that the German unions might discredit themselves by making commitments that they would in the end be unable to honour. On the other, the very fact of operating in a national framework, combined with the dissolving effects of reformism and opportunism within the movement, tended to make the national parties and unions jealous of their prerogatives: this was especially true of the German organisations since as the largest party they were even more reluctant than others to be dictated to by the smaller parties who ought – so thought many German leaders – to be following the German example.

The difficulties experienced in this first attempt at united international action were to bode ill for the future, when the International would play for higher stakes by far.

The illusion of inevitability

The meeting in the Salle Petrelle not only founded the International, it founded it as an avowedly marxist organisation. The marxism of the 2nd International at its beginnings, dominated as it was by the German party and especially by Karl Kautsky as the editor of the SPD’s theoretical review Neue Zeit, tended strongly towards a vision of historical materialism which emphasised the inevitability of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This was already evident in Kautsky’s unexpected critique of the Vorstand’s (the Party Executive committee) proposed draft of the SPD’s programme to be adopted at the 1891 Erfurt congress. In an article published in Neue Zeit, Kautsky described communism “as a necessity resulting directly from the historical trend of capitalist production methods”, and criticised the Vorstand’s proposal (drawn up by the veteran SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht) for deriving communism “not from the character of current production, but rather from the character of our party (...) The train of thought in the proposal of the Vorstand is as follows: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; therefore we must eliminate them (...) In our opinion, the correct train of thought is this: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; it also creates, however, the possibility and necessity of communism”.19 In the end, Kautsky’s proposal insisting on the “inherent necessity” of socialism, became the Erfurt programme’s theoretical preamble.20

To be sure, the evolution of capitalism makes communism a possibility. It is also a necessity for humanity. But in Kautsky’s conception it is also increasingly an inevitability: the growth of the trades unions, the resounding electoral victories of the social-democracy, all appeared as the products of an inevitable force that could be predicted with scientific accuracy. In 1906, following the 1905 revolution in Russia, he could write that “any coalition of European powers against the revolution, such as took place in 1793, is inconceivable (…) There is no fear of a coalition against the revolution”.21 In his polemic with Pannekoek and Luxemburg titled The new tactics, he argued as follows: “Pannekoek imagines that the destruction of the proletariat’s organisations will be a natural consequence of sharpening class struggle, that they will no longer be protected by law and justice (…) The attempt, the effort to destroy the organisations of the working class certainly increases as these organisations become stronger and more dangerous to the established order. But the ability of these organisations to resist also increases to the same extent, and yet more so their irreplaceability. To deprive the proletariat of any possibility of organisation has become impossible in the developed capitalist states today (…) Any destruction of working class organisations today could only be a passing episode”.22

During the last years of the 19th century, with capitalism still in the ascendant – enjoying, indeed, the massive expansion and prosperity that was later to be known, by contrast with the post-1914 era, as the Belle époque – the idea that socialism would be the natural and all but inevitable outcome of capitalism, was undoubtedly a source of strength for the working class. It gave a historical perspective and meaning to the painstaking work of building union and party organisations and it gave the workers a profound confidence in themselves, in their struggle, and in the future – this confidence in the future is one of the most striking differences between the working class at the beginning of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

History, however, is not a linear progression and what had been a strength for the workers as they built their organisations was to be transformed into a dangerous weakness. The illusion of the inevitability of the passage to socialism, the idea that this could be achieved by a gradual build-up of the workers’ organisations until, almost painlessly, they could simply step into a place left vacant by a capitalist class whose “private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their appropriate application and full development” (Erfurt programme), obscured the fact that a profound transformation was under way in the capitalism of the early 20th century. The significance of these changing conditions, especially for the class struggle, was made explosively evident by the Russian revolution of 1905: suddenly, new methods of organisation and struggle – the soviet and the mass strike – burst onto the scene. Whereas the left on the SPD – above all Rosa Luxemburg in her famous pamphlet on the Mass strike, party and unions – saw the significance of these new conditions and began pushing for a debate within the German Party, the right and the unions did everything they could to suppress any discussion of the mass strike: the trades unions' 1905 congress explicitly banned any discussion of the mass strike, while in the SPD it became more and more difficult to have articles on the subject published in the Party press.

On the centre and right of the SPD, confidence in the future had become blindness, to the point where Kautsky could write in 1909 “The proletariat has now grown so strong that it can contemplate a war with more confidence. We can no longer speak of a premature revolution, for it has already drawn so great strength from the present legal basis as to expect that a transformation of this basis would create the conditions for its further upward progress (…) if war should break out in spite of it, the proletariat is the only class that could confidently await its outcome”.23

Unity obscures division

In the Communist Manifesto Marx reminds us that the "natural condition" of workers in capitalism is that of competing, atomised individuals: it is only through the struggle that they can achieve the unity which itself is the vital precondition for the struggle to succeed. It is therefore no accident that many a 19th century union banner bore the inscription "unity is strength"; the slogan expressed the workers' awareness that unity was something to fight for, and something to guard preciously once achieved.

The same drive towards unity exists within and among the political organisations of the working class, inasmuch as they have no separate interests to defend, either for themselves or within the class itself. Naturally enough, this drive to unity finds its highest expression when the class struggle is historically on the rise, to the point where it becomes possible to create an international party: the IWA in 1864, the 2nd International in 1889, the 3rd International in 1919. The three Internationals themselves expressed a growing political unification within the working class: whereas the IWA had contained a very broad spectrum of political positions - from Proudhonists and Blanquists to Lassalleans to Marxists - the 2nd International was avowedly marxist, while the Third International's 21 Conditions for entry were explicitly intended to restrict membership to communists and revolutionaries and to correct precisely those factors which had caused the failure of the Second, in particular the absence of any centralising authority capable of taking decisions for the whole organisation.

Nonetheless, all the Internationals were real arenas of debate and ideological struggle, including the Third: witness, for example, Lenin’s polemic against Left-wing communism and Herman Gorter’s reply.

The 2nd International was deeply committed to the unity of the different socialist parties, on the grounds that since there was only one proletariat in any country, with the same class interests, so there should only be one socialist party. There were constant efforts to keep the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks united after 1903, but the main issue during the International’s first years was the unification of the various French parties. This came to a head at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress, where Jules Guesde presented a resolution which was in effect no more than a translation of that adopted by the SPD at Dresden the year before, condemning “revisionist tactics [whose result] would be that instead of being a party which works for the most rapid transformation possible of existing bourgeois society into the socialist social order, ie revolutionary in the best sense of the word, the party would become one which is content with reforming bourgeois society”.24 This was an explicit condemnation of Millerand’s25 entry into government, and an implicit one of the reformism of Jean Jaurès’ Parti socialiste français. Guesde’s motion was passed by a massive majority, and the congress went on to pass unanimously a motion demanding the unification of the French socialists: the following April, the Parti socialiste and the Parti ouvrier united to form the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière. It is a measure of Jaurès’ greatness that he accepted the majority vote of the International and gave up his own deeply held convictions26 in the name of the International’s unity.27 This moment was probably the closest the International ever came to imposing unity of action in the name of principle on its member parties.

Unity of action, however necessary for the proletariat as a class, can be a double-edged sword in moments of crisis when the tide of history turns. And the International was entering just one such period of crisis as the increasing tensions between the imperialist powers brought the threat of war closer. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.”28

Nowhere is this danger more evident than in the resolutions adopted against the looming threat of war. The final paragraphs of the 1907 Stuttgart resolution read as follows: “If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”

The problem, is that the resolution has nothing to say about how the socialist parties were to intervene in the situation: they are merely to adopt “the means they consider most effective”. This swept under the carpet three major issues.

The first of these was the question of the mass strike, which the left in the SPD had been trying to bring to the fore ever since 1905 against the determined and largely successful opposition of the opportunists in the Party and union leadership. The French socialists, and Jaurès in particular, were fervent supporters of the general strike as a means to prevent war, although by this they meant a strike organised by the unions on the syndicalist model rather than the mass upsurge of proletarian self-action that Luxemburg envisaged, in a movement which the Party should encourage but could in no way launch artificially. It was noteworthy that a joint attempt by the French Edouard Vaillant and the Scot Keir Hardie at the 1910 Copenhagen Congress, to get a resolution passed committing the International to general strike action in the event of war, was voted down by the German delegation.

The second was the attitude the socialists in any particular country could be expected to take should that country be attacked: this was a critical question, since in imperialist war it is invariably the case that one belligerant appears as the “aggressor” and the other the “aggressed”. The period of progressive national wars was still very recent, and national causes such as the independence of Poland or Ireland remained on the socialist agenda: Rosa Luxemburg’s SDKPiL29 was very much a minority even on the left of the International, in opposing Polish independence. In the French tradition, the memory of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune was still active, and tended to identify revolution with the nation: hence Jaurès’ statement that “revolution is necessarily active. And it can only be so if it defends the national existence which serves as its base”.30 For the Germans, the danger of Tsarist Russia as the “barbaric” crutch of Prussian autocracy was equally an article of faith, and in 1891 Bebel could write that “The soil of Germany, the German fatherland belongs to us and the masses as much and more than to the others. If Russia, the champion of terror and barbarism, went to attack Germany (…) we are as much concerned as those who stand at the head of Germany”.31

Finally, for all the threats of proletarian action against war, the leaders of the International (with the exception of the left) continued to believe in the diplomacy of the bourgeois classes to preserve peace. Hence while the Basel Manifesto of 1912 could declare: “Let the governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves”, yet at the same time it could “consider the best means [to bridge the hostility between Britain and Germany] to be the conclusion of an accord between Germany and England concerning the limitation of naval armaments and the abolition of the right of naval booty”. The working classes were called to agitate for peace, not to prepare themselves for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which alone could guarantee that peace: “The Congress therefore appeals to you, proletarians and Socialists of all countries, to make your voices heard in this decisive hour! (...) See to it that the governments are constantly kept aware of the vigilance and passionate will for peace on the part of the proletariat! To the capitalist world of exploitation and mass murder, oppose in this way the proletarian world of peace and fraternity of peoples!”.

The unity of the International, on which any hope of united action against the threat of war depended, was thus founded on an illusion. The International, in reality was divided between a right wing and a left, the former ready and even eager to make common cause with the ruling class in defence of the nation, the latter preparing to answer war with the revolutionary overthrow of capital. During the 19th century, it was still possible for right and left to exist within the same workers’ movement, and participate in the organisation of the workers as a class aware of its own interests; as the “epoch of wars and revolutions” opened, this unity became an impossibility.

Jens, December 2014

Hardly a town in the country is without a square or an avenue, or at the very least a street, that bears his name. The ruling class has all but transformed him into a national monument, and yet today Jean Jaurès is almost unknown outside France. It was not always so. At the height of his powers, Jaurès was, together with August Bebel, one of the “twin peaks of the Second International” to use Trotsky’s expression. A giant of a man, physically, mentally, and morally, Jaurès was, along with Rosa Luxemburg, one of the outstanding orators of the International; still more remarkable, he was one of very few French socialists able to address German workers in their own language. For the French ruling class, who all now claim him as one of their own, an exemplary democrat, Jaurès was the object of violent hatred. His assassination, on 31st July 1914, can be said to have cleared the way definitively for France’s entry into war, yet the circumstances surrounding his assassination remain a mystery which has never been completely cleared up.

Who then, was Jean Jaurès? What did he represent – as he still does today – for the international working class? What role did he play in the International and its struggle for the emancipation of the workers and against war? Why, finally, was he murdered?

Jaurès can, it is true, be a very useful person for a ruling class which has transformed his life into a sort of propagandist’s Swiss army knife. Depending on the occasion, they can always find a blade to suit: there is the national hero who lies in the Pantheon alongside the heroes of imperialist war like Jean Moulin for example, or then there is the moderate socialist who disapproved of the violent methods of the revolution, or again the partisan of the parliamentary and national road to socialism; there is a blade in favour of the French Communist Party, and another for the pacifist who broke the ties between the struggle against war and the struggle for proletarian revolution. All these clichés are lies and Lenin’s adage that the best way to deal with a man who is a danger to the established order is to make an inoffensive icon of him has been validated once again.

But who was Jean Jaurès really? Quite simply he was a product of the workers’ movement, the collective and historic product of a particular class of society, one of its most remarkable products given the epoch wherein Jaurès used his talents. Born in 1859 into the provincial petty bourgeoisie of Castres, a small town in the department of the Tarn (south-west France), he proved a brilliant student at school winning a scholarship which allowed him to study for the entrance exam to the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. Returning to the South he taught high school in Toulouse, and became involved in the political activity of the day to the point where he was elected to parliament on a republican unity list in 1885, at the age of only 25; he lost the seat at the next election in 1889, and returned to teaching and journalism.

His transformation from radical republican to socialist came with the 1892 miners’ strike in Carmaux. The strike was sparked off by the sacking of Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, a miner who had been elected mayor of the town; the miners’ considered, quite rightly, that this was an attempt by the local big bourgeoisie to silence the workers’ efforts to express and defend themselves politically. Jaurès, now aged 34, was greatly impressed by the miners’ struggle and took an active part in it, defending the miners’ cause in the pages of La Dépêche and participating in their meetings. He was also scandalised by the bloody repression of a demonstration at Fourmies in the north where the workers were fighting for the 8-hour day. As a result of the Carmaux struggle, Jaurès threw himself whole-heartedly into the socialist cause, and was elected to parliament as socialist deputy for Carmaux in 1893. Like Marx and many other militant workers, it was the proletariat itself that won Jaurès over to the cause of revolutionary socialism. It was as a martyr to this cause that he was assassinated on the eve of the First World War, after throwing all his strength into the fight against militarism in the hope that the international action of the proletariat would stop the mobilisation for war. Certainly Jaurès belonged to the reformist wing of socialism and as such had several times contributed to a considerable weakening of the working class struggle, but his unconditional devotion to the proletarian cause allowed him to correct his mistakes, unlike his fellow socialist deputies such as Pierre Renaudel, Aristride Briand, René Viviani or Marcel Sembat who were very quickly carried away by the most crass opportunism. The members of the left in the 2nd International fought his ideas vigorously but the majority of them admired his personality, the eminence of his thought and his moral strength. Trotsky wrote in his autobiography: “Politically I had been far removed from him. But one could not help feeling the pull of his powerful personality (…) With a mighty force as elemental as a waterfall, he combined great gentleness, which shone in his face like a reflection of a higher spiritual culture. He would send rocks tumbling down, he would thunder and bring the earthquake, but himself he never deafened. He stood always on guard, watched intently for every objection, quick to pick it up and parry it. Sometimes he swept all resistance before him as relentlessly as a hurricane, sometimes as generously and gently as a tutor or elder brother”1. Rosa Luxemburg, this other great figure of the left, expressed similar sentiments. As Jaurès read German, she offered him a dedicated copy of her doctoral thesis on The industrial development of Poland. Jaurès had the same athletic physique as the sculptor August Rodin, and on the latter’s death, Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Sonia Liebknecht: “His must have been a marvellous personality: frank, natural, overflowing with warmth and human intelligence; he decidedly reminded me of Jaurès”2.

So rich and complex a personality can only be understood in the context of his epoch: the final phase of the ascendency of capitalism which unfolded into the First World War. Nor should one ever forget how much he was capable of learning at the school of proletarian struggle and the International. Although he never adopted completely Marx and Engels’ theories, at a conference in Paris on 10th February 1900, he felt the need to express his agreement with all the essential ideas of scientific socialism3.

The constitution of the proletariat as a class

The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated that the proletariat was capable of taking power and exercising it through the means of mass assemblies and elected and revocable delegates. It brought a decisive clarification: the working class could not simply take hold of the machinery of the state and use it for its own ends; it must first of all destroy the old bourgeois state edifice then set up a new state specific to the period of transition from capitalism to communism. In his magnificent work State and Revolution, Lenin was to remind those who had forgotten them of these fundamental lessons. But the Paris Commune also demonstrated that the proletariat had not yet the strength to keep power and to engender a revolutionary process at the international level. The proletariat appeared as a distinct class with its own programme at the time of the June 1848 insurrection, but the process through which it could constitute itself as an international force provided with a class consciousness and a political experience was far from complete. This immaturity was matched by a massive development of capitalism which was, precisely, the precondition and the context for the constitution of the proletariat into a class. This was a period of gigantic economic and colonial conquests during which the last “uncivilised” areas of the globe were opened up to the imperialist giants and which witnessed an enormous technical: electricity, the telephone, the automobile to mention but a few.

This period was not without danger for the proletariat, but it had no choice. Only capitalism could create the conditions for the international communist revolution, it alone could produce its own gravediggers. Basing itself on obtaining real reforms in its favour, the working class developed great economic struggles and, with this aim, organised itself into powerful trade unions and social-democratic parties. As the Communist Manifesto says: “It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried”4.

The struggles for workers’ legislation, for universal suffrage, including the defence of the bourgeois Republic faced with the forces of reaction, were understood as preparing the conditions for proletarian revolution which would overthrow bourgeois domination. The minimum and maximum programme formed a unity on condition that in the daily struggles, with their inevitable alliances with certain bourgeois and petty bourgeois factions, the proletariat defended its class independence and kept in mind the final revolutionary objective. It was the period par excellence of workers’ parliamentarism and Jean Jaurès, an orator of great talent, gave to it all his energy. Jaurès was part of the massive entry of socialists into parliament following the legislative elections of 1893. According to the clearest political tendencies of the time, workers’ parliamentarism was not an objective in itself but only a support to the general struggle of the proletariat. And indeed, when the socialists spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, they declared themselves to be speaking to those “outside the windows” to make it clear that their aim was not to convince bourgeois deputies but to clarify things for the working class, to encourage it to throw itself into great political struggles which would give it the necessary experience to exercise its future power. In the Considerations of the programme of the French workers’ party, drawn up in 1880 by Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, Engels and Marx, we find the following significant formulation:

“Considering,

That this collective appropriation [of the means of production] can only come out of revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organised in a distinct political party;

That a similar organisation (of society) must be pursued by all the means of which the proletariat disposes, including universal suffrage, transformed thus from an instrument of deception that it has been up to now into an instrument of emancipation (...)”5.

Parliamentarism is absolutely not seen here as the means for workers’ emancipation in place of revolution but, if one reads the preceding paragraph attentively, as one of the means for progress towards the great objective of the collective appropriation of the means of production. The unity of means and end is thus clearly asserted. The development of a gigantic international workers’ movement at the end of the 19th century in part fulfilled its promise by building a bridge between the Paris Commune and the revolutionary wave that culminated in Russia 1917 and Germany 1918. This development provoked a nameless dread in the ruling class: their desperate efforts to distort Jean Jaurès are not simply useful to them, they also serve to exorcise their fears.

In the end, opportunism, parliamentary cretinism and reformism gained the upper hand within the Second International; the failure of the workers’ organisations in 1914 and their unity with their bourgeoisie was a catastrophe which had profound repercussions on the workers’ movement. But it is necessary to be clear that this victory of opportunism was not a foregone conclusion and its origins are not to be found principally in the parliamentary fractions, the permanent political and union structures or in the general bureaucracy of these organisations. Even if these were vectors of the rot that ate away at the International, the latter’s fundamental origins are to be found in the lack of vigilance of the workers’ organisations faced with the surrounding atmosphere of the capitalist world. Capitalism’s headlong development during a time of relative peace (at least in the central countries of Europe) finished up by inducing the idea that the transition to communism could be effected in a gradual and peaceful manner. We should remember that the growth of the workers’ movement is not linear and that it is only possible at the price of constant struggle against the penetration of the ideology of the ruling class within the proletariat.

The testimony of Trotsky on this epoch and on the man who embodied it is invaluable, because it covers the transition between the ascendance and decadence of capitalism. This period of some 25 years is at the highest contradictory point where it “drew the spirit by the perfection of its civilisation, the uninterrupted development of technology, of science, of workers’ organisation and seemed at the same time paltry in the conservatism of its political life, in the reformist methods of its class struggle”6. In My Life, he underlined the high moral standing of such militants of the workers’ movement as Jean Jaurès and Auguste Bebel, of whom he wrote that “Jaurès’ mind, which was a composite of national traditions, of the metaphysics of moral principles, of love for the oppressed, and of poetic imagination, showed the mark of the aristocrat as clearly as Bebel’s revealed the great simplicity of the plebeian”.7 At the same time he showed their limits: “Jaurès and Bebel were at opposite poles, and yet at the same time they were the twin peaks of the Second International. Both were intensely national, Jaurès with his fiery Latin rhetoric, and Bebel with his touch of Protestant dryness. I loved them both, but with a difference. Bebel exhausted himself physically, whereas Jaurès fell in his prime. But both of them died in time. Their deaths marked the line where the progressive historical mission of the Second International ended”8.

Marxism and the heritage of the French revolution of 1789

Ever since the great bourgeois revolution of 1789, France had dominated European history. Whether in 1830 or in 1848, it was France that gave the signal for general upheaval. These circumstances gave to the proletariat in France a great political education and a capacity for action which continues to this day. But these qualities also have their other side. The working class in France has a tendency to underestimate the daily economic struggle which explains why the unions were less developed than in other countries. On the other hand, political struggle was seen in a restrictive sense, limited to the insurrection. On the opposing side, the bourgeoisie and most particularly, the industrial bourgeoisie, quite quickly achieved complete political sovereignty under the regime of the democratic Republic. And it was very proud of this. Thus this great bourgeois revolution led to bombastic, hollow speeches typical of French orations: the country of the Rights of Man granted itself the messianic task of the liberation of peoples from tyranny, understanding by that economic competition between nations and wars of rapine which led to the imperialist war of 1914. For many leaders of the workers’ movement in France this phraseology hid a deep-rooted nationalism.

Jean Jaurès is a classical representative of this republicanism which has weighed heavily on the workers’ movement in an epoch where the bourgeoisie was still progressive and where the form that proletarian power would take was still far from clear. Even for the elements of the left within the 2nd International, the Republic was the only form possible of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Jaurès expressed himself thus in an article in La Dépêche of 22nd October, 1890: “Neither England nor Germany have in their past a democratic Republic such as that proclaimed in France in 1792. Hence the hopes of English and German workers do not take a republican form and this is why the party of popular reforms there more particularly calls itself the socialist party. In France on the contrary, the single word Republic, full of the great dreams of the first republican generations, contains within it alone all the promises of fraternal equality”9.

Karl Kautsky was to defend the marxist position on this question. In an article published in Die Neue Zeit in January 1903, he recalls that, despite the historic continuity between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions there is a still more important political break simply because it is a matter of different classes with different political programmes each with specific aims and means: “It is really because of the great strength of the revolutionary tradition within the French proletariat that it is nowhere more important than here to lead it to think in an autonomous fashion by showing it that the social problems, the objects, the methods and the means of struggle are quite another thing today than they were in the epoch of Revolution, that the socialist revolution must be something quite other than a parody or a pursuit of the bourgeois revolution; the proletariat can borrow from it its enthusiasm, its faith in victory and its temperament but certainly not its way of thinking”10.

This classic position of revolutionary socialism was based on the work of Marx and Engels who, after the setback of the 1848 Revolutions, had called into question their idea of a permanent revolution based upon an organic unity between bourgeois and proletarian revolution and the growth of one into the other11.

Moreover, against Lassalle, the partisan of state socialism, and against Bakunin, who preached class equality, Marx and Engels always defended the final aim of communism of the abolition of classes, which means the end of the political domination engendered precisely by the existence of antagonistic classes, which implies the withering away of the state. But the end of the state is also an end to democracy which is only a particular form of the state. The ambition of communism, which appears huge but which is in fact the only realistic one faced with the laws of history and the dangerous contradictions of capitalism, consists of a mastering of the productive forces and the social forces at the world level, the only ground on which the contradiction between the general and particular interests, between the collectivity and the individual can be overcome. For the first time it has become possible to make the human community a concrete reality. That does not mean the end of problems and contradictions, but that the abolition of classes and of the political sphere could allow the liberation of all human potential whereas the promise contained in the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, has never been honoured by the democratic bourgeoisie. Communism does not mean the end of history, but the end of prehistory and the beginning of real history. This idea of a passage from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom, in other words the perspective of a society free from commodity production and the state, was not an unknown position during this epoch of workers’ parliamentarism and the struggle for reforms. The clearest political minorities tried hard to defend this, including William Morris in England12 and August Bebel in Germany13.

Like so many others, Jaurès never managed to free himself from this republican tradition, which prevented him from defending working class autonomy against the enemy class.

The Dreyfus Affair

Captain Richard Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army high command, was judged by court martial in December 1894, falsely accused of passing secrets to Germany. This affair of espionage, in a context profoundly marked by anti-Semitism and chauvinism after the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, inflamed the Third Republic right up to 1906, when the Court of Appeal declared Dreyfus innocent and definitively rehabilitated him. It was not merely a matter of judicial error but of the defence of particular reactionary and nationalist factions of the bourgeoisie coming from and supported by military, clerical and monarchist elements. The crisis of the Radical party in power opened the way for them.

After some hesitation, Jean Jaurès threw himself into the battle for to defend Dreyfus and overturn the judgment against him. “And Jaurès was right” wrote Rosa Luxemburg “The Dreyfus Affair had awakened all the latent forces of reaction in France. The old enemy of the working class, militarism, stood completely exposed, and it was necessary to direct all spears against its body. The working class was called upon for the first time to fight out a great political battle. Jaurès and his friends led the workers into the struggle and thereby opened up a new epoch in the history of French socialism”14.

The marxist party of Guesde and Lafargue, as well as the party of the ex-Blanquistes of Vallant continued to preach neutrality, in other words political abstention when in fact the working class had to undertake a fight against the reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie including the defence of the bourgeois Republic. It had to seize this opportunity and combine its forces, mature politically while safeguarding its class autonomy. It is on the question of class autonomy that the political weaknesses defended by Jaurès are revealed. The working class supporters of Dreyfus had to keep their independence vis-a-vis his bourgeois supporters such as Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. Because he defended a fundamentally republican position, Jaurès engaged in the support of a radical government up to the point of going against the specific positions of the working class. He supported the government on the amnesty law adopted by the Chamber on 19th December 1900, despite the fact that its aim was amnesty for all, including and even especially those officers implicated in the plot against Dreyfus. He refused to launch a direct and systematic attack against militarism through the demand for a popular militia because there was a risk of a split among the various factions supporting Dreyfus. And these capitulations multiplied in the name of a so-called “combined republican work” which carried “the certainty of future victories”. Here is what Luxemburg said about it:

“The present attitude of the Jaurès group towards the policies of the government is, in one sense, in direct contradiction to its position during the Dreyfus Affair. But, in another sense, it is nothing but a direct continuation of the previous policy. The same principle – unity with the bourgeois democrats – served as the basis of socialist policy in both cases. It served during two years of unyielding struggle for a solution of the Dreyfus Affair, and, today, because the bourgeois democrats have deserted the fight, it leads the socialists to also liquidate the Dreyfus Affair and to give up all attempts at a fundamental reformation of the army and a change in the relations between Republic and Church.

Instead of making the independent political struggle of the Socialist party the permanent. fundamental element and unity with bourgeois radicals the varying and incidental element, this principle caused Jaurès to adopt the opposite tactic: the alliance with the bourgeois democrats became the constant, and the independent political struggles the incidental element.

Already in the Dreyfus campaign, the Jaurès socialists failed to understand the line of demarcation between the bourgeois and the proletarian camps: If the question presented itself to the friends of Dreyfus as an attack upon the by-products of militarism – as the cleansing of the army and the suppression of corruption – a socialist had to view it as a struggle against the root of the evil – against the standing army itself. And if the bourgeois radicals considered justice for Dreyfus and punishment for the guilty ones as the single central point of the campaign, a socialist had to view the Dreyfus Affair as the basis for an agitation in favor of the militia system. Only thus would the Dreyfus Affair and the admirable efforts of Jaurès and his friends have been a great agitational service to socialism”15.

Not only did Jaurès refuse to break with the government at the right moment, but he continued to support unreservedly the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet and the participation of a socialist in government; thus opened the darkest chapter of Jean Jaurès’ political life.

The Millerand Affair

In June 1899, the socialist Alexandre Millerand, alongside General Gaston de Galliffet, the assassin of the Paris Commune, entered the Radical government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. For Millerand, who belonged to the movement of independent socialists, this was a purely personal decision: he had no mandate from a socialist party. We should take into account that this was at the time of the full-blown Dreyfus Affair where the degraded officer was still suffering the torments of the penal colony in Guyana. Jaurès did his utmost to support socialist participation in government. He saluted the courage of the French socialists who had sent one of their own “into the fortress of bourgeois government”. The whole affair strongly encouraged all the right wing of the International which impatiently waited for the this experience to be repeated in other countries, particularly Germany. The right warmly approved of the arguments of Jaurès according to which the evolution of capitalist society towards socialism engendered an intermediate stage during the course of which political power was exercised in common by both the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein had just published his revisionist work where he called into question the marxist theory of the crises of capitalism and where he proclaimed: “The final aim, whatever it is, is nothing, the movement is everything”.

Rosa Luxemburg hurled herself into the battle with passion. She replied to Bernstein in a series of articles which later appeared in the celebrated pamphlet Reform or Revolution. At the same time she attacked the arguments of Jaurès. To begin with she recalled the basic principles of scientific socialism: “In bourgeois society, social-democracy, from the fact of its very essence, is destined to play the role of a party of opposition; it can only come to government on the ruins of the bourgeois state”16. She particularly emphasised the fundamental difference between the participation of socialists in the parliament of the bourgeois state or in local councils, which had been accepted for a long time, and the participation in the executive of the state. This was for two very simple reasons. Firstly, it was a question of making their claims effective but always on the basis of a critique of the government which persecuted the workers ceaselessly while trying to render null and void any social reforms that it was forced to adopt. This was the principle which motivated the systematic refusal of the socialists to vote for a parliamentary budget. Secondly, whatever party the members of the government belong to, they are required to share joint responsibility for government policy for which they are necessarily considered to be accountable.

The international socialist congress held in Paris from 23rd to 27th September 1900, condemned Millerand’s “governmental socialism”, which demonstrated that the conditions for an offensive of opportunism within the International did not yet exist. The resolution was titled: “The conquest of state power and alliance with bourgeois parties”. It was adopted on the basis of a motion presented by Kautsky and the majority of the members of the permanent commission. The problem was that the resolution’s author tried hard to give it a general theoretical character without confronting the specific case of Millerand. All the most far-fetched interpretations were allowed. That is why this resolution of Kautsky was called the “Rubber Resolution”. Jaurès, Vollmar, Bernstein, all the right including the most avowed revisionists charged into the breach. They presented the outcome of the Congress as favourable to Millerand.

They based themselves specifically on an idea presented in the resolution according to which in certain exceptional cases the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments could appear necessary. And indeed, all the socialist programmes of the day contained the position, which was valid at the time, that in the case of a defensive war (and therefore absolutely not in case of imperialist war) the socialists could participate in government.17 Alternatively, this might be the case should a political crisis threaten to bring down the Republic and its democratic victories. Rosa Luxemburg responded that in these exceptional cases it was not just a question of taking complete responsibility with the whole of government policy. But it was essential to define if the situation really corresponded to one of these exceptional cases. Jaurès declared that it did.

Since about 1885, France had been hit by constant political crises: the Boulanger crisis,18 the Panama scandal,19 the Dreyfus Affair. These revealed the existence of a rowdy nationalism, anti-Semitic outbursts, gross and hateful press campaigns, fighting in the street. The last hour of the Republic seemed to be imminent. But Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly showed that this was not in fact the case. The militarist and clerical reaction and the radical bourgeoisie were fighting for the control of this Republic in the framework of a profound crisis of the Radical Party in power. It was necessary to take part in these political struggles but certainly not by participating in government and pandering to the petty bourgeoisie, the traditional clientele of the Radical Party.

Jaurès invoked certain passages of the Communist Manifesto concerning the alliance of the workers with the bourgeoisie. First of all it is a question of an entirely different historic period where, as in Germany for example, the power of the bourgeoisie was not at all assured in the face of the political forces of feudalism. And above all, he forgot to quote the essential passages on the preservation of the independence of the working class in any circumstances. In particular this on the position of communists: “But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil in the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political condition that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie may immediately begin”20.

Finally, the last argument of Jaurès consisted of underlining the importance of the reforms gained by Millerand for the workers. These were for him, “germs of socialism sown in the capitalist soil which would bear marvellous fruit”. it is enough to examine the reality of these reforms more closely in order to contradict the inordinate enthusiasm which held Jaurès inits grasp. For example, the original intention to shorten the working day ended up with it being lengthened for children and the mere hope of something better in the future. Or again, the guarantee of the right to strike ended up being greatly restricted within narrow legal limits. We have already seen the hypocrisy of the government’s policy over the Dreyfus Affair. To this we should add the hypocrisy of the state’s struggle for secularism, which ended up with charitable donations to the Catholic Church and which served above all as a real war machine against the socialist parties’ growing influence among the workers. Not forgetting that during the whole Millerand experience, troops continued to fire on strikers as they did at Chalons and in Martinique. The era of reforms culminated in the massacre of striking workers.

Rosa Luxemburg saw far and clear when she criticised “ministerialism”. What began in France as a sad farce ended up in Germany in tragedy in 1919 with a social democratic government consciously assuming a counter-revolutionary role. For the moment we can see that Jaurès was capable of learning from experience. Ten years after the beginning of the Millerand affair, he bitterly denounced both Millerand and two other socialist ministers, Briand and Viviani, whom he reproached for being “traitors who allowed themselves to be used by capitalism”.

The foundation of a unified socialist party

We have seen that Jaurès closely followed Bernstein. However it is not possible to place him in the camp of revisionism. Similarly there is no trace in him of the philistinism of Kautsky who succumbed to the sirens of centrism around 1906. We’ve seen the intimate links with the members of the right wing of the workers’ international. His opportunism was one that the workers’ movement of the time had to confront and which is characterised both by an impatience regarding the results of the struggle (preferring to sacrifice the final aim to the profit of, largely illusory, immediate reform) and an adaption to the surrounding capitalist world (being content with the progressive dynamic and the period of peace which increased, relatively and with illusions, the security of the workers, and so sacrificing the interests of the general movement). But his strong personality placed him above other opportunists. After joining the socialist cause, he continued to serve the law, liberty and humanity. But, as Trotsky noted; “That which for the ordinary French disclaimers is only an empty phrase, [Jaurès] fills with a sincere and active idealism”. Trotsky correctly presents him as an ideologue in the positive sense of the term, someone who gripped the idea as a terrible weapon in the practical daily struggle, as opposed to the doctrinaire and the practising opportunist: “The doctrinaire congeals theory and so kills its spirit. The practical-opportunist learns the procedures of the political trade; but should a sudden upheaval occur, he finds himself in a situation of a worker made redundant by the adoption of a new machine. The great ideologue is only impotent at the moment where history disarms him ideologically, but even then he is sometimes capable of rapidly rearming himself, of taking on the idea of a new epoch and continues to play a role at the first level. Jaurès was an ideologue. He drew out of the political situation the idea that it held and, in his service of this idea, never stopped mid-way”21.

We have already noted Jaurès’ reticence towards marxism. He saw here in it cold, economic determinism leaving no place for the individual and for human freedom in general. His outlook was turned towards the past and the great days of the bourgeois revolution: “It is to the honour of the French revolution to have proclaimed that in every individual human being, humanity had the same native intelligence, the same dignity and the same rights”, he said22. As a result of his education and the general situation in France at the time, he did not see that the materialism of Marx, often misinterpreted as a form of absolute economic determinism, contained a coherent explanation of human history which, far from smothering them, on the contrary gave both a place – and a foundation – to the action of classes, to the force and the will of the individual which under capitalism had been wiped out in the name of the collective anonymity of the nation. The glorification of the individual under capitalism was in reality the mask of its absolute negation. In his pitiless critique of bourgeois society, Marx revealed its commodity fetishism and its reification. Nor was Jaurès able to recognise the presence in Marx of an authentic proletarian ethic23.

However the devotion of Jaurès to the cause of proletarian emancipation meant that he never turned away from the perspective of a classless, property-less society, where the means of production would be managed in common. He read Marx, admired his work and adhered to the theory of value exposed by Capital. Whereas in France the tendency was towards the underestimation of theoretical discussions, Jaurès participated, with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, in public discussions on subjects treated in depth. On 12th December 1894, Jaurès responded to an invitation of the Groupe des Etudiants collectivistes who organised a debate on “idealism and materialism in the concept of history”. In his response one feels that he is confronting his own contradictions: “I do not mean that there is a part of history which is governed by economic necessity and another part guided by a pure idea, by a concept, by the idea for example, of humanity, justice and right; I do not want to put the materialist conception on one side and the idealist conception on the other. I maintain that they must penetrate one another, as in the organic life of man the mechanics of the brain and conscious spontaneity inter-penetrate one another”24. Paul Lafargue responded to him on 10th January, 1895. He began thus: “You will understand that it is with hesitation that I have taken on the task of responding to Jaurès whose spirited eloquence knows how to impassion the most abstract of metaphysical theses. While he was talking I said to myself, and you must have felt it, it is fortunate that this devil of a man is with us”25. The experience was repeated in 1900, when Jaurès and Guesde confronted one another at the Hippodrome in Lille, where a polemic “The two methods”, the revolutionary and reformist method were confronted.

The decisive moment in Jaurès’ evolution was the congress of the International in Amsterdam in 1904. With all the conviction of which he was capable, he defended his thesis on ministerialism and the defence of the Republic in several speeches. The confrontation with Auguste Bebel was relentless, but he led his arguments with such brio that he aroused the applause of the congress. Jaurès was an adversary who commanded respect. Rosa Luxemburg even translated one of his speeches because of a lack of translators. The congress finally condemned his positions and in a much clearer fashion than at the previous International Congress in Paris. Jaurès submitted to the discipline of the International because he was profoundly attached to the international movement of the proletariat, because he was aware of the traps involved in government participation, and also because he wanted to avoid at all costs a new setback to the unification of the socialists in France. A special motion of the congress, voted on unanimously, demanded that the French Socialists should at last unite. One of the considerations of this motion said: “There can only be one socialist party as there is one proletariat”26.

The failure of the Paris Commune, drowned in blood by the bourgeois democratic Republic of Adolphe Thiers, provoked a period of depression in the workers’ movement in France. When it began to recover at the end of the 1870’s, it appeared as an incoherent assemblage of disparate elements. There were the Proudhonian mutualists, the Utopians of the old school like Benoit Malon, anarchists, narrow-minded syndicalists patronised by the Radical Party, some Blanquists, Collectivists and finally old Communards still addicted to the verbiage of insurrection. In these circumstances, the unification of the workers’ movement took different forms in comparison to other countries. Before regrouping, it was necessary first of all to take the first step through a process of differentiation and progressive elimination of heterogeneous elements. In 1879 the first strictly marxist party was set up, the French Workers’ Party of Jules Guesde, and two years later, the Blanquists regrouped behind Edouard Vaillant in the Central Revolutionary Committee. A real clarification was appearing on the basis of the present tasks of the socialists which underlined the importance of political action and workers’ parliamentarianism. Despite a rapprochement, those that were called the “Parties of the old school” regarded each other with distrust and were incapable, from the fact of their history and the fact of their accumulated political errors, of fighting for the unification of the movement. Only new and independent forces could fulfil this role.

This offered a whole field of action to such personalities as Jean Jaurès. The crisis in the Radical Party brought new blood and new militants. But they were marked by their petty bourgeois origins and presented themselves as independent socialists who were above parties. There was thus a risk of the movement losing its class character and only the old socialist parties could avoid this trap. Rosa Luxemburg described the situation in this way: “While the old parties have shown themselves incapable of translating the final socialist objective into practical slogans applicable to the politics of the moment, the ‘independents’ could not, in the present political circumstances, preserve the stamp of the final socialist goal. The failings of the independents make it obvious that the mass movement of the proletariat needs a force that is organised and educated on solid principles to lead it; on the other hand, the attitude of the old organisations show that none amongst them is capable of undertaking this task alone”27.

The evolution of the situation with the growth of militarism, imperialist tensions and with the crisis of successive radical governments, gave a final impulse. After the setback of 1899, arising from disagreements over ministerialism, the unification of the socialists was realised at the Congress held in the Salle du Globe in Paris, 1905. The Socialist Party was formed as “French Section of the Workers’ International”28 on the basis of the Resolutions of the Amsterdam Congress. It presented itself as “a class party, which aims at socialising the means of production and exchange, that is to say transforming capitalist society into a collective and communist society”. It “is not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution”. The Party’s parliamentary deputies were to form “a single group against bourgeois political factions” and “refuse the government all the means which assure the domination of the bourgeoisie” in other words refusing appropriations for the military, for colonial conquest, for secret funds and indeed the budget as a whole29. With all his intellectual power Jaurès dominated the new party. April 18th 1904, saw the publication of the first issue of L’Humanité, the great socialist daily founded by Jean Jaurès. It would soon replace the official organ of the finally united party, Le Socialiste.

The revolution in 1905 in Russia and Poland overturned the situation. The glimmers of light from the east carried not only precious weapons for the revolutionary struggle, the mass strike and workers’ councils, they also revealed that bourgeois society was about to pass to the other side of its historic evolution, the downward trend of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. The entire epoch marked by the creation of the Second International in 1889, where: “the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement was placed entirely on the national terrain in the framework of national states, on the basis of national industry, in the domain of national parliamentarism”30, was entering its death throes.

The deadly shock of war

Jaurès’ profound ambiguity was once again revealed in his work L’Armée nouvelle (The new army). Published as a book in 1911, this text first saw the light as an introduction to a proposed law turned down by the Chamber of Deputies. Far from trying to understand and analyse the growth of militarism and imperialism which concerned and mobilised the clearest socialists, Jaurès proposed a “really popular organisation for national defence” based on the “nation in arms”. His idea was some distance away from the demand for an “army of militias” defended in the previous period by the French and German socialists. It was based on the idea of a “defensive war”, an idea that had really lost its meaning with the evolution of events. It was enough that through a series of provocations an imperialist power pushed an enemy to react, for it to appear immediately as the aggressor nation.

The two Moroccan crises, in 1905 and 1911, the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the constitution of two imperialist blocs, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy and the Triple Entente of Britain, France, Russia, all this meant that the era of national wars was finished and war of a new type was appearing on the horizon: an imperialist war for the carving up of the world market. Totally in the grip of his Republican positions, Jaurès did not see the centrality of the internationalist positions of the proletariat and the danger of the least concession to the national interest, trying again to reconcile the two: “It is in the International that the independence of nations has its highest guarantee; it is in the independent nations that the International has its most powerful and noble organs. One could say; a little internationalism distances us from the fatherland; a lot of internationalism brings us back to it.”31

Whereas he was perfectly conscious of the mortal danger that lay in wait for the world proletariat, Jaurès strode the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies calling on this or that minister under the illusion that he could block the fatal gearing up to war and demanding the government to condemn the imperialist appetites of Russia. He multiplied his appeals for international arbitration between nations and supported the International Court of the Hague created by Russian Tsarism and subject to the mockery of the entire world. Basically, in the end he shared the position of Kautsky according to whom the trusts and the cartels would be interested in making peace. This so-called “super-imperialism” obscured the danger of world war, totally disarming the proletariat and rallied centrism to opportunism. The old friends, Kautsky and Bernstein were finally reconciled.

But once again it is very difficult to force Jaurès into a box. Like Engels some years earlier, he understood that a world war would mean a profound defeat for the proletariat which would call the future into question. He recalled his formula condemning capitalism: “Your violent and chaotic society always (...) bears within it war as a sleeping cloud bears the storm”32. In 1913, at the Chamber of Deputies, one could hear him thunder against the return of three-year military service and he employed all his strength to have demonstrations organised in common between the revolutionary syndicalists of the CGT and the Socialist Party. Demonstrations were organised in many towns. In Paris enormous crowds flocked to the Butte-Rouge, at Pré-Saint-Gervais. His condemnation of war was not simply on moral grounds and that is why it carried all the hopes of the world and the international proletariat. He again used all his oratory power in a speech at Lyon-Vaise, July 25 1914: “In this moment when we are threatened with murder and savagery the only chance for the maintenance of peace and the salvation of civilisation is for the working class gather all the strength of its numerous brothers and that all the proletarians, French, English, German, Italian, Russian and we ourselves ask of these thousands of men to unite so that the unanimous beat of their hearts should thrust back this horrible nightmare”33.

This is what made Jaurès the target for the hatred of the whole bourgeoisie. A veritable campaign of slanders and death threats was launched against him. Some demanded he be executed by a firing squad. The most excited voices came from the most reactionary political tendencies and the ultra-nationalists, the petty bourgeois milieu and the lumpenproletariat which played such a big role in the irrational mobs. They were sustained and encouraged by the democratic government. It was like a pogrom against the Jews. They had to find a scapegoat who could play the guilty role, someone to be designated the cause of all the problems, all the anguish for the future. Jaurès was that sort of symbol, a banner that had to be gotten rid off at all costs. Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s deaths were demanded in November 1918 and obtained in January 1919. In the same way the bourgeois called for the death of Jaurès and got it on 31st July, 1914. Raoul Villain, the assassin of Jaurès, was recognised as a “patriot” and was acquitted on March 29 1919.

Jaurès went to the last pre-war meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels on 29th July 1914. After the meeting a public meeting was held with the leading speakers of the Socialist International. Jaurès took the floor and again talked of peace and arbitration between nations. He fulminated against a French government incapable of reasoning with Russia. He pointed his finger at the German, French, Russian and Italian leaders who would be swept away by the revolution that the war would provoke, as in 1871 and 1905. He addressed Rosa Luxemburg sitting alongside him on the tribune: “Allow me to salute the intrepid woman whose thought enflames the heart of the German proletariat”34. Everyone in the room was overwhelmed by Jaurès’ speech and gave him a long standing ovation. But the talk about peace revealed the impotence of the International. What was lacking was the call to break with the bourgeoisie and with the opportunists who supported it. This was the meaning of Karl Liebknecht’s slogan: “The main enemy is in our country, it is our own bourgeoisie”. That was also the meaning of the calls to break with opportunism launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. War should be opposed not by peace but by revolution. Luxemburg, Lenin and Martov stipulated thus in their celebrated amendment at the International’s Stuttgart Congress of 1907: “In case war breaks out anyway, it is the duty [of the working class and its representatives in parliament] to intervene for its speedy termination and to strive with all their power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”35.

It is not for us to speculate on what Jaurès would have done faced with the test of war had he survived. But it seems very likely that the French bourgeoisie or its secret services did not want to take the risk; they knew his weaknesses, but they also knew his strength, his moral uprightness, his hatred of war and his great reputation among the workers. Rosmer recalls that Jaurès began to distrust the pacifist and lying declarations of Poincaré36 and that some hours before his death, a rumour had it that Jaurès was ready to draft an editorial in L’Humanité which would be a new J’accuse!,37 denouncing the government and its warmongering, and calling on the workers to resist it. Before he could write the feared article, Jaurès was killed by Raoul Villain in circumstances which have nver really been clarified. The assassin, after passing the war in prison, was acquitted in proceedings for which the widow of Jaurès even had to pay the costs38.

With Jaurès dead, those who resisted the chauvinist turn of 1914 were at first a tiny minority. Most of the French leaders from the revolutionary syndicalists to the socialists took the bitter pill of betrayal. All proclaimed that the international working class should hold back the bloody arm of imperialism but added craftily: “On condition that the socialists of Germany do the same. In fact if we renounce the advance of the defence of the country it means that we will be encouraging the chauvinists of the enemy country”. With such reasoning, the workers’ International made no sense, nor did its resolutions against the war at the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, of Copenhagen, 1910 and Basel, 1912. It is true that the International was undermined from within and that it was to collapse like a house of cards when the order for mobilisation was pronounced. The Third International was soon raised on the ruins of the Second.

Jean Jaurès does not belong to our tradition, that of Marx and Engels, that of the Left in the Second and then the Third Internationals, the tradition of Left Communism. But with all his being Jaurès belonged to the workers’ movement, that is to say the only social force which still carries with it to this day the perspective of human emancipation. That is why we pay him homage and we can conclude with Trotsky: “Great men know how to disappear with time. Feeling his death approach, Tolstoy fled from the society that he renounced and went to die in a pilgrimage to an obscure village. Lafargue, epicurean and stoic, lived in an atmosphere of peace and meditation up to sixty-eight years of age, then decided that he had had enough and took poison. Jaurès, an athlete of ideas, fell in the arena while fighting against war, that most terrible scourge of humanity and of the human species. And he remains in the memory of posterity as the precursor, the prototype of superior man who must be born from sufferings, failures, hopes and struggle”39.

Avrom E, August 18 2014

A visit to the "Truth and Memory" exhibition of British war artists, currently showing at London’s Imperial War Museum, prompts some thought about the complex relationship between art, politics and propaganda.

For a start, there is a striking contrast between the paintings in "Truth and Memory" and the conventional World War I special exhibit on the ground floor.1 Where the art is raw, harrowing, the museum exhibit is bland and colourless. Juxtapositions of military uniforms, weapons, reproductions of propaganda posters – a film of muddy fields: nothing there to shock even the most sensitive spectator. There are tin hats and jackets for visitors to try on and take selfies, but heaven forbid that we should be reminded of what this war really was, of the horror and the stench of death in the trenches. World War I has been sanitised and packaged for tourist consumption and it seems unlikely that those who visit it will learn very much, or indeed anything at all.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the World War I exhibit, in your face on the ground floor, is packed with a queue of families waiting to get in, while the exhibition of war art, discreetly hidden away on the third floor behind frosted glass doors, is almost empty. This exhibition is organised in two parts, on opposite sides of the Museum: one part called "Truth" exhibits paintings produced during the conflict, mostly by artists employed by the British War Propaganda Bureau who in some cases were already serving soldiers; the part called "Memory" contains paintings produced after the war, both independent and official. It has to be said that this section is by far the least interesting, artistically and for what it has to say about the war itself. The pictures are for the most part still, almost peaceful, they seem distant from reality, lacking in immediacy, as if both the artist and the spectators – and certainly the state – wanted not to remember but to forget, or at least to gloss over memory with a patina that would relegate the war safely to the past. Only two pictures strike us with any force. One, "A battery shelled" by Percy Wyndham Lewis (who fought in the artillery) shows the soldiers working under fire reduced to machine-like stick figures, while those outside the danger zone are detached, indifferent.

The other, "Over the top" by John Nash (brother of the much better-known artist Paul Nash) evokes the futility of the endless assaults which ended with tens of thousands dead and a military result of zero; there is something dreadful about the soldiers’ hopeless advance towards certain death, all the more so when we know that Nash portrays here an attack by his own unit, the 1st Artists Rifles, which ended with barely a man left alive or uninjured.

One is inclined to think that after the war, for the most part, people wanted to forget or at least to return to life and leave war behind. And that the governments were only to happy to let them do so because World War I had – for many – discredited capitalist society and the governments that managed it.

Society, ideology, the search for truth

Bourgeois society has a more paradoxical relationship to truth than any previous class society. This is due to two factors: the conditions and demands of industrial production; and the specific characteristics of bourgeois class domination.

Capitalism is the first mode of production which cannot live without constantly revolutionising and overturning the productive process through the application of scientific and technical innovation. At the outset, as bourgeois society begins to emerge within its feudal shell, this is not immediately apparent: the woollen textile industry in 13th century England begins to break out of the constricting bonds of the feudal guild system, but the technology remains largely unchanged. The revolution is social, not yet technical, based on new ways of organising production and trade. By the 17th century, experimental science aims to contribute to the improvement of manufacture, and by the 18th century scientific investigation of nature is applied to industry and becomes a productive force in its own right. Today, quantum mechanics and relativity theory may seem abstruse and even weird – nonetheless, a multitude of products in everyday use are dependent on their effects.

Capitalism, then, depends on science. But science itself rests on two pillars: the assumption that a world exists independent of thought, be it human or divine; and the conviction that it is possible to understand this material world through free investigation and freedom of debate.2 A precondition for the development of capitalism and bourgeois society is therefore the victory of Copernicus and Galileo over the Catholic church and the Inquisition: the Catholic church cannot be allowed to maintain its monopoly over thought.

Class rule under capitalism is also unique. Indeed, the bourgeois class is the first in history to pretend that its class domination does not exist, the first to justify its own rule by basing it on "the will of the people". Bourgeois society is therefore the most hypocritical in history.

Yet, if this were all there were to it, such domination would not long survive. The bourgeoisie dominates, but it must not be seen to dominate; its hypocrisy must be sincere. Nor can the search for truth be limited to the domain of science, prevented from spilling out into the social and artistic sphere, for science and art are not two separate worlds, they do not at all rely on antithetical or even different qualities of the human mind. The bourgeoisie then, is forced to give free rein to the search for truth as much in the artistic as in the scientific domain, under pain of loosing out to its competitors. It was the United States, not Nazi Germany, that succeeded in producing the atomic bomb.

There is another new characteristic of capitalist society: for the first time, the revolutionary class is an exploited class. Even more important, this exploited class is a cultured class. For the first time, the exploited class must be educated in order to master the intricacies of capitalist production: workers must be able to read and write, to handle increasingly complex technical and social tasks. Capitalism itself educates and trains the masses of workers in the skills necessary not just to master social organisation but to lay claim to the heritage of all humanity’s artistic, scientific, and technical knowledge and achievements which it will use to satisfy human needs, including human cultural needs. More: at its best, the proletarian class has never been satisfied with the scraps from the table of bourgeois culture, it has set out to grasp this culture and make it its own. "Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture".3

The greater the presence within society of this cultured, revolutionary and exploited class, the less the bourgeoisie can rely solely on lies and repression. Only in regimes where the workers have been utterly crushed – regimes like Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR – is it possible for propaganda to rely solely on the ideological knout.

The British ruling class, perhaps more than any other, is aware of this strange, shifting, and contradictory situation, aware that it must play the propaganda game in two directions. We are almost tempted to answer Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" by turning it round: "Lies are so precious that they must be surrounded by a bodyguard of truth".

Art and propaganda

"There's an east wind coming, Watson."

"I think not, Holmes. It is very warm."

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared".4

These words are spoken at the very end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s last "Sherlock Holmes" story, His Last Bow, in which Holmes foils a German master spy just before the outbreak of war. The fictitious Holmes only echoes here sentiments that were expressed by real characters at the outbreak of war: Collins-Baker, Keeper at the National Gallery, writing in August 1914, believed that art would benefit from a "cleansing war",5 and this was a not uncommon view in the British establishment who hoped the war would "regenerate" art and society and rid both of the disturbances of Cubism, Modernism, and everything offensive to so-called "good taste".

Previous wars had been celebrated "realistically" and patriotically as a series of heroic engagements – the kind of thing that could have been produced during the Crimean war for example:

Doubtless the reactionary wing of the British ruling class and its art establishment expected such painting to drown out foreign, decadent, and corrupting influences. But this turned out to be a dying genre. As we enter the exhibition we are presented, symbolically, with one example: William Barnes Wollen’s "2nd Ox & Bucks defeating the Prussian Guard at Nonne Bosschen".

Step into the next room, and we are in a different world altogether, and here we want to focus on the evolution of two artists who followed diametrically opposed directions from the artistic standpoint as a result of their war experience: CRW Nevinson and William Orpen.

Nevinson was 25 when war broke out, and joined the Friends Ambulance Unit set up by the Quakers; he was profoundly shocked by his experience and this clearly informed his art. He was already in 1914 an established landscape painter associated with the Italian Futurist movement and particularly the painter Marinetti who would later be one of Mussolini’s supporters. In 1914, Marinetti had declared that "We wish to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world" (a sentiment he shared with a Catholic reactionary such as the poet Hilaire Belloc for example, and others that we have cited above), yet there is no trace of any glorification of war in Nevinson’s work. On the contrary, Nevinson declared in 1915 that "Unlike my Italian Futurist friends, I do not glory in war for its own sake, nor can I accept the doctrine that war is the only healthgiver (…) In my pictures (…) I have tried to express the emotion produced by the apparent ugliness and dullness of modern warfare".6 In 1915, he told the Daily Express: "Our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe". Nevinson uses these Futurist techniques of juxtaposed planes and sombre colouring to show man reified and dehumanised, transformed into an adjunct of the machine in a war which was mechanised more than ever before: his painting "La mitrailleuse" ("The machine gun", 1915) is emblematic of this attitude. In "Return to the trenches", the soldiers have almost been transformed themselves into machines.

Nevinson fully intended his art to be an indictment of war and its motivations. Of his painting "La Patrie" ("The fatherland", 1916) he wrote "I regard this picture, quite apart from how it is painted, as expressing an absolutely NEW outlook on the so-called ‘sacrifice’ of war. It is the last word on the ‘horror of war’ for the generations to come"7

Nevinson’s paintings were well received when he exhibited them in November 1916, despite the fact that his modern and "foreign" style typified everything that the more patriotic and reactionary side of British society abhorred. But after two years of war, war weariness and disenchantment were setting in, and Nevinson’s ferocious critique caught the mood better than official government propaganda. Leading critics accepted that "modern methods were needed to depict modern war" and even the Times saw in his work "a nightmare of insistent unreality, untrue but actual, something that certainly happens but to which our reason will not consent".8

Another painting which created a sensation when it was exhibited in 1916 was Eric Kennington’s "The Kensingtons at Laventie". This painting shows his own unit shortly before he himself was wounded (Kennington appears in the background on the left wearing a balaclava helmet).

The enthusiastic reception given to Kennington’s and Nevinson’s work was in large part due to the public’s perception of these paintings as more truthful, more credible, than the drawings produced on the basis of photographs or second hand accounts, in the illustrated magazines: first, because they portrayed a reality that people knew to be far closer to the truth, both visually and emotionally, and second because the artists were, or had been, serving soldiers with real experience of the front line.

These paintings were all produced before either Nevinson or Kennington had been employed as a war artist by the British Department of Information. The latter was the successor to the Bureau of War Propaganda, which had been set up in secret in August 1914 and at first concentrated on the written word, organising the output in favour of Britain’s war effort of well-known writers like John Buchan and HG Wells. One of the Bureau’s first efforts was the "Report on alleged German outrages" (also known as the Bryce Report), which accused the German army of war crimes against civilians following the invasion of Belgium. By May 1916, the Bureau’s chairman, the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, an ally of the Prime Minister Lloyd George, decided to respond to the demand for illustrations from the picture press by recruiting the well-known artist Muirhead Bone (who had lobbied hard for the establishment of an Official War Artists scheme), who was sent to tour the front with an honorary commission. The sketches he brought back, despite their graphic excellence, are bland and lifeless compared with the raw emotion evident in Nevinson’s art.

Even his "Soldiers’ cemetery" is scarcely more stirring than an image of a country churchyard:

This was doubtless what prompted the Ministry of Information to open up to younger artists, especially those serving on the front whose work the public would accept as more authentic. At the same time, bringing artists under the aegis of the Ministry meant that their exhibitions were subject to military censorship. By the time that his second, hugely successful exhibition opened in 1918 Nevinson seems to have come to the conclusion that only a return to realism was adequate to express his horror at the war, as we can see in the picture ironically entitled "Paths of Glory" – a title later used by Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war film starring Kirk Douglas. The irony of the title is only too evident when we see the corpses face down in the mud, already bloated by decomposition.

If Nevinson’s earlier work showed man dehumanised, reduced to the status of a machine, incorporated into the machine one might almost say, we can wonder whether he felt the need to escape from the aesthetic, even an aesthetic of the machine, to show the true horror of what war was doing not to machines but to real human beings of flesh and blood with whom we can identify and sympathise – something we cannot do with a machine.

The painting was banned by the authorities. Nevinson hung it in the exhibition anyway, obscured by a large ribbon inscribed with the word "Censored".

Paul Nash, another war artist who was to become one of Britain’s best known landscape artists of the 20th Century, commented bitterly on his employment as a war artist: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls". And the public could surely not escape the implications of this painting entitled "We are building a new world".

Truth will out

While Nevinson moved from the modernist to the traditional, another very different artist moved almost in the opposite direction. William Orpen was nearly 40 when war broke out, and a popular well-established, and even wealthy high society portrait painter. Sent to France as a war artist with the rank of Major, he was derided by some for his privileged and safe situation well away from any combat experience, and indeed the earliest portraits he produced could readily serve as propaganda images of British troops, especially the pilots treated by the press and the propaganda machines as the new "knights in shining armour" of modern warfare.

His portrait of the young pilot Lieutenant Rhys Davids, killed shortly afterwards in a dogfight, was much reproduced.

Orpen’s portraits of Generals Haig and Trenchard were also widely praised and he could have stuck to merely doing more of the same, but he did not.9 On the contrary, he was increasingly disturbed by the effects of war on those involved in it, both soldiers and civilians, and as time went on he turned more and more to an imagery that sometimes approaches a Dali-esque surrealism.

We know that he had been shocked to see young French prostitutes plying for trade at a burial ceremony. Maybe it was this that prompted his "Adam and Eve at Péronne":

There is something almost pornographic about this picture. Here there is no loss of innocence – it is already long gone, lost in the wreckage of war that we see in the background. Eve’s modest headscarf contrasts oddly with her plunging neckline and the somehow cynical expression on her face, while the bored indifference of the young soldier suggests someone who has seen so much death that he has become indifferent to life.

The same soldier turns up in "The mad woman of Douai", depicting a scene Orpen had witnessed of a woman raped shortly beforehand by retreating German troops . Here he appears equally indifferent to the rape, to the tragedy of the victim, and to the hastily buried corpse whose foot we see sticking out of its grave in the foreground.

Tucked away in a room at the back of the exhibition is a series of seven etchings by Percy Delf Smith, who was a gunner in the Royal Marines on the front.

Where some of Orpen’s pictures reprise themes from Goya (for example, "Bombing, Night"), Smith returns to the imagery of decadent medieval society with its omnipresent portrayals of death. These are some of the most shocking pictures in the exhibition.

In "Death awed", even Death shies away from the slaughter, epitomised by the two boots still filled with the stumps of legs, while "Death intoxicated" makes a mockery of dance as Death cavorts deliriously behind a soldier about to spit an enemy on his bayonet.

It seems natural enough to want, almost to expect, that artists who move us by their critical spirit should share our ideas. Natural, but profoundly mistaken. The artists who figure here – and to them we could add poets like Wifred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, and German Expressionists like Otto Dix or Käthe Kollwitz – were profoundly revolted by the war, indeed several of them suffered nervous breakdowns of varying degrees of severity by the end of the war. But none of them were in the least moved by a proletarian political viewpoint; in some cases they were not even particularly attractive as people.

We sometimes forget that the great masters who we admire today were not alone, on the contrary (with very rare exceptions) they were the greatest exponents of an effort in which many were engaged. And when artists rise above the common run that surrounds them, when their art reaches heights that continue to touch us today when so many lesser contemporaries have been forgotten, then it somehow communicates to us something that goes beyond the artist himself. At such moments, the artist is attuned to something in the social atmosphere, something which is very often not explicit. Is it really an accident, that some of these most stinging indictments of the War should have been produced in the same year – and could almost have served as illustrations for – Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet. In Junius, Luxemburg declared: "Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form". Is it not precisely this that we see reaching out to grip us from the picture frames of the Imperial War Museum? And is it not precisely because there existed, somewhere, a mind capable of Junius, and a workers’ movement bloodied and betrayed but still alive and capable of taking up and transforming into social action the ideas of Junius, that there could also exist a critical artistic spirit capable of speaking not to the consciousness, as Luxemburg did, but directly to the emotions. In doing so, they speak to something constant in human nature, something truly human (as Marx might have said) which can only react with revulsion to the monstrous machine of death that capitalism had become.

Where is the art of World War II?

It is striking, at all events, that while World War I produced some of Britain’s greatest 20th century painting, not to mention some of Germany’s most outstanding artistic expression, nothing of the kind can be said of World War II which produced absolutely nothing comparable.

In part, this was the result of technical evolution. When illustrated magazines like the famous Picture Post looked to show the war in images, they turned less to artists than to photographers, and in particular to the new breed of war photographers such as the great Robert Capa. Much more importantly, the ruling class on both sides of the conflict had a much firmer grasp on the importance of propaganda. The Nazi regime exerted a state control over artistic production, denouncing the Expressionists as "degenerate art": Otto Dix, though he remained in Germany, retreated into a self-imposed exile both personal and artistic, and the great enemy of capitalist war and social corruption spent his last years painting innocuous, though technically irreproachable, portraits such as "Nelly as Flora" from 1940.

Hitler was a great admirer of British war propaganda, and the British themselves lost no time, when war began, in setting up a "War Artists Advisory Committee" subordinated to the Ministry of Information. We need only compare Paul Nash’s almost lyrical "Battle of Britain" with his "We are making a new world" to see that the critical spirit of the latter has completely disappeared.

Or again, compare Alfred Thomson’s 1943 painting of an injured airman receiving treatment, with Nevinson’s World War I depiction of a hospital scene in "La Patrie". Here we have an image of calm peacefulness, far removed from the agony and the anguish of the field hospital.

The critical spirit had not entirely disappeared. Some of the American combat artists featured on the PBS site "They drew fire" – and doubtless it is significant that these men were themselves faced with the terror of war – produced art which echoes the horror experienced by the combatants of World War I.

Of one sketch, the artist Howard Brodie wrote: "My most searing memory of any war was during the Battle of the Bulge, when Germans posing as GI's infiltrated our lines. I heard we were going to execute three of them… A defenceless human is entirely different than a man in action. To see these three young men calculatingly reduced to quivering corpses before my eyes really burned into my being. That's the only drawing I've ever had that's been censored. All coverage of the execution was censored".

And there is certainly nothing glorious about Kerr Eby’s "Helping wounded man" (Eby had served on an ambulance crew during World War I).

The United States’ involvement in World War I had been relatively minor, certainly the involvement of the population as a whole in the fighting was incomparably less than was the case in the European countries, and far less than it was to be in World War II. Perhaps we can explain the powerful effect of the images above by the naïvety of the American working class which – although it had to confront one of the most brutal fractions of the capitalist class in its struggles, had yet to experience the insane barbarism of full-scale modern warfare.

These forthright portrayals of war’s brutality – and the insanity it inflicts on human beings that we see staring out of the eyes of Eby’s "wounded man" – reveal an honest search for artistic truth, which shows that integrity and humanity continued to survive even in the heart of barbarism. But there is one aspect missing when we compare these to the World War I works: a sense of a broader social criticism that goes beyond the individual reaction to individually experienced events. Marx was wrong to say that only bad artists put titles on their paintings (Britain’s greatest landscape artist, William Turner, not only gave his works long titles, he sometimes accompanied them with lines from his own poetry), and titles such as "Paths of Glory" or "We are making a new world" underscore for us the broader protest of the artist against the war, its causes and its consequences.

Thanks to "socialist realism", Russian painting of World War II was anything but realistic, and during the Korean War the principles of socialist realism seem to have been applied with equal enthusiasm by both the Americans and the Chinese.

Vietnam: art against war

It is only with the Vietnam War that art truly returns to a critical onslaught against war, and here it is art of a new kind that comes front-stage: photography.

Photography and painting are very different technical skills: where the painter sketches to prepare a final work, the photographer will take hundreds, sometimes even thousands of shots. Where the painter adds to his work, little by little, teasing out the truth by adding paint, the photographer rejects, pares down to a single shot which best embodies the event, the scene, or the face that he is trying to represent. And of course, black and white photography in particular involves a subtle work with chemicals in the darkroom to deepen shadow, highlight, and bring the focus onto the essentials.

At their highest expression, painting and photography can, like all art, both express a search for truth. And hence we have one of the most emblematic pictures from the Vietnam war. Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut's photo of Trang Bang after Napalm Attack (8th June, 1972). No painting from World War I portrayed the sheer horror, barbarity, and above all senselessness of this war better than does this photo.

Nick Ut was a photographer with Associated Press, a non-profit news cooperative founded during the Mexican War of 1846, which produced much of the best – most emotionally true – photography to come out of the Vietnam War.10 The war itself came at a very specific moment, and was in some ways unique in the annals of war photography. For one thing it was “the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces, yet not subject to censorship.”11 This was a lesson that the United States, in particular, was to learn for future wars. The Gulf Wars, for example, were rigorously censored with television reporting being systematically verified before going on air. All those "live" reports were live only in the sense that they came with a few minutes delay while the military censor checked their content as it streamed: under such conditions, many reporters learned to censor themselves.

Pictures like Ut’s, or like Art Greenspon’s photo of American soldiers awaiting a helicopter coming to evacuate the wounded, are more than just war photography telling a striking story, they are also a form of social criticism. Although there are relatively few pictures of Vietcong troops other than prisoners, we are left in no doubt who are the principal sufferers in the war: the civilians first and foremost, of course, but also the "grunts" as the American GI conscripts were called to distinguish them from the "lifers", or professional military (and of course the South Vietnamese army and the Vietcong had their equivalents): overwhelmingly, it was the conscripts, workers in uniform, who were sent into the most dangerous situations on the front lines.

If this form of social criticism were possible, this is not just because the American army had not yet learnt about censorship. A picture, whether it be painting or photography, is always communication. The artist communicates his truth, but he can only do so if the truth is also heard, if within society there are those able to hear and understand this truth. Those who regard art are also part of its meaning. So it is no accident that these photographs come from 1968 and 1972, from the Vietnam war and not the Korean (just as it is no accident that M.A.S.H., a satirical film about the Korean war, was only made in 1970), for this is the period when the post-war reconstruction is coming to an end and the class struggle is once again on the rise, finding its most momentous expression in May ‘68 in France.

The "spirit of the age", the Zeitgeist, can seem an ungraspable, nebulous notion. Yet when we consider this artistic production that grew out of wars brought to an end either because the working class revolted directly against the war itself (World War I), or because the workers revolted against the effects of the crisis of which the war was a part, and increasingly refused to fight (the Vietnam War), it seems to us clear that such art was only possible because within society there existed a working class with "radical chains", a class which is historically opposed to the present state of society, even if the workers themselves are not aware of it, much less the artists. Balzac, as Engels said, went beyond his own class prejudices in portraying truthfully what he saw: so the artists of the First World War bring to us something that goes beyond what they themselves were because they have teased out the truth that underlies the surface. The relationship between artistic expression within capitalism and the revolt against it, is by no means a mechanical one. Art is not great because it is socialist. Like science, art has its own dynamic and the artist’s first responsibility is to be true to himself. One is tempted to paraphrase what Engels’ said of science: ".... the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly [art] proceeds, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers."

Jens