Marx and Engels had always put a far greater stress on a correct socialist program rather than a particular strategy. When the SPD was founded in 1875, they were furious with their acolytes, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, for merging with Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Association, which they disapproved of as reformist and unscientific. Marx accepted cooperation between the two parties but not the joint program, which he saw as an attempt to find common ground with the bourgeoisie, as if conflict was based on an unfortunate misunderstanding. It was vital not to “expunge the class struggle from the movement” or even hint at the possibility that workers were too uneducated to emancipate themselves and could only be freed by the bourgeoisie.4 Three years later, Engels published a critique of the gradualist notions of the blind socialist philosopher, Eugen Dühring, who argued against the determinism of Marx and Engels and for self-governing cooperatives. This tract, known as Anti-Duhring, played a significant role in transmitting Marxism in an accessible form to a new generation of socialists. It urged the working class not to settle for second-best, not to rely on philanthropy when they deserved power.
In 1891, following the repeal of an antisocialist law, the SPD adopted the Erfurt Program, written by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. This still anticipated the end of capitalism but was prepared to pursue socialism through peaceful means. After Engels died it was Bernstein, his literary executor, who began the process of adjusting revolutionary theory to reformist practice. He noted, contrary to Marx’s predictions, that working-class conditions were not declining but improving. In 1898, he published Evolutionary Socialism, which, as the title suggested, concluded that revolution was unnecessary and that combinations of cooperatives, unions, and parliamentary representation allowed the progressive and benign transformation of society. He contrasted an intelligent, methodical, but slow process of historical development, depending on legislative activity. While revolutionary activity offered faster progress, it was based on feeling and depended on spontaneity. For Bernstein, “the movement [was] everything, the goal nothing.”
His erstwhile collaborator Karl Kautsky disagreed, presenting himself as a keeper of the true faith. As the leading exponent of Marxism in the leading party which embraced Marx, Kautsky was extraordinarily influential in shaping views about scientific socialism. His approach was plodding and unreflective, betraying no doubts about the essential correctness of Marxism and its broad application. Even after the turmoil of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, he never deviated from a set of views acquired at an early age. The science told Kautsky that socialism would develop as capitalism matured and classes polarized. He argued against Bernstein that the issue was not so much the increasing poverty of the workers but the sharpening of class antagonism. Eventually capitalism would be ripe for destruction and the proletariat could take power. Premature action could not lead to the destruction of capitalism. Exactly how the right moment could be properly recognized he never quite explained, nor how the seizure of power would actually occur. It would be a revolution, but its form was hard to judge in advance. His hope was that the more the working class prepared during the prerevolutionary struggles, the more likely the great event would pass peacefully. This left him claiming that SPD was a revolutionary party that saw no point in actually making a revolution.
In principle this made little sense. A party preparing for a long haul of gradual acquisition of power had educational and organizational tasks quite different from one geared to a “once-and-for-all act of violence.”5 Yet in terms of political strategy it made perfect sense. As the party’s chief theoretician, Kautsky had hit upon a formula that followed Engels: dogmatic Marxism combined with cautious politics. It kept the revolutionaries in the fold but gave the authorities no excuse for repression. It was hard to argue with success. From 10 percent in the 1887 Reichstag elections, the social democrats polled almost double in 1890, getting up to over 30 percent by 1903. To understand the maturity of the class consciousness of the proletariat, one only had to observe the SPD’s developing support.6
Rosa
Rosa Luxemburg was a ferocious critic of the revisionists, but she was also wary about the complete identification of the worker’s cause with the party. Though born in Russian-ruled Poland, she moved to Zurich after her radical politics got her into early trouble. There she gained a doctorate and then moved to Germany, soon establishing a reputation as brilliant but extreme in her views. She provided a unique link between the Russian and German parties and at different times was active in both, although that meant she also could be an outsider in both. She described herself as “thrice stigmatized: as a woman, as a Jew, and as a cripple.” As an intellectual, she introduced a complex proof of why capitalism was doomed economically. Her main impact, though, was as a theorist of socialist strategy and tactics. She was a lively writer, with a vivid turn of phrase, reflecting her conviction that readers must be enthused and inspired and her despair at the language of party articles: “The style is conventional, wooden, stereotypical …just a colorless, dull sound like that of a running engine.”7
Luxemburg’s starting point was that workers would become increasingly socialist through struggle and experience. The task for a party was to help draw this out, but there was no need to impose the ideology from above. She was opposed to the very idea of a centralized, bureaucratic party. The real tactical innovations were not the organizational inventions of party leaders but the “spontaneous product of the movement in ferment.” Where there had been upsurges, “the initiative and conscious leadership of the Social Democratic organizations played an insignificant role.” She was aware of the potentially troubling implications of Engels’s preface to The Class Struggles in France. This supported the legal struggle and rejected a rush to the barricades. She insisted, however, that Engels was referring to how the proletariat would struggle while confined by the capitalist state, not to the actual seizure of power. He had been “giving directions to the proletariat oppressed, and not to the proletariat victorious.” When the moment came, the proletariat would do whatever was necessary to secure the future of socialism. Only by falling for “Blanquism,” or a coup d’état, was there a risk of a premature seizure of power. So long as reliance was placed on the “great conscious popular mass,” then the moment would be right for power because, by definition, this could only have come about as a result of the “decomposition of bourgeois society.” It was impossible to believe that “a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.” The struggle would be a long one, no doubt with setbacks. What she found difficult to imagine was how the struggle could proceed, or the point of victory be identified, without attacks on state power.8
She hit upon the idea of the mass strike as the best way to avoid the pitfalls of parliamentary reformism without risking all in a premature insurrection. Her inspiration came not from Germany but from Russia. In January 1905, there began in Russia the first serious uprising in a European country since the 1871 Commune. Against the backdrop of Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan, and with the shooting of unarmed workers marching on the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the Tsar as the trigger, years of economic and political anger spilled over onto the streets. Numerous organizations, from workers’ committees to trade unions, sprang up, reflecting the unrest and giving it expression. Soldiers and sailors mutinied, peasants seized land, and workers put up barricades. Luxemburg returned to Warsaw to play her part and emerged convinced that the true revolutionary method was the strike. This would be the spontaneous expression of an objective revolutionary condition, a deeply radicalizing process from which appropriate organizations would emerge. Class feeling would be awoken “as if by an electric shock.” Once a real, earnest period of mass strikes began, all calculations of cost would become “merely projects for exhausting the ocean with a tumbler.”9
There was nothing particularly new in the idea of the mass strike, but i
t was not normally associated with Marxists. Its potential had been demonstrated by the General Strike in Britain in 1842, which involved some half a million workers. This was a response to wage cuts during tough economic times but then picked up on the political demands associated with the Chartists. Even then the Chartist leadership was equivocal about the connection and in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, strikes had come to be associated with trade unions and economic demands. Only anarchists adopted the idea of political strikes as a reflection of the sort of mass spontaneity celebrated by Bakunin. For that reason alone, the tactic was treated skeptically by Marxists. In 1873, Engels had mocked the Bakuninist idea that
one fine morning all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at the most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use this opportunity to pull down the entire old society.
According to Engels, a mass strike required a “well-formed organization of the working class and plentiful funds.” Before that was achieved, the workers would have achieved power by other means. And if they did have the organization and the funds “there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general strike to achieve its goal.”10
Luxemburg therefore needed to explain how her idea met Engels’s objections. She argued that 1905 had demonstrated something new about the tactic and that it had nothing to do with anarchism. However, her enthusiasm for the idea of change coming about as a natural, organic response of the working classes to their conditions rather than as a device of party strategy was not far away from Bakunin. In her treatise, she thus went out of her way to demonstrate her contempt for anarchism. Still, her distrust for party bureaucrats was evident in the polemics against those who treated tactics as if a “board of directors” could decide on them for an appointed day, and against those who respected only “orderly and well-disciplined” struggles that ran “according to plan and scheme.” In Russia in 1905 there was “no predetermined plan, no organized action.” The parties were almost left behind by the “spontaneous risings of the masses.” Here she was careful to argue that the events were not wholly spontaneous but reflected years of agitation by social democrats.
Nor did she agree with those, such as the German trade unions, who saw strikes in a separate category of economic actions. The economic and political spheres could not be separated. One fed off the other. The advantage of the mass strike was that this was where they came together. The strikes could start with economic demands and then the combination of socialist agitation and government responses would turn them into something more political. Above all, they would be consciousness-raising events: “The most precious, lasting, thing in the rapid ebb and flow of the wave is its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat, which proceeds by fits and starts, and which offers an inviolable guarantee of their further irresistible progress in the economic as in the political struggle.” Her aim was to assert the role of the mass strike in Germany as the “first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle.” The more developed the antagonism between capital and labor, the more effective the mass strikes. They would not replace “brutal street fights,” for at some culminating point the armed power of the state would have to be faced. This would be no more than “a moment in the long period of political struggle.”11
In his memoir, Leon Trotsky described being present at an encounter between Luxemburg and Kautsky in 1907. The two had been close friends but since 1905 had diverged. Trotsky described Luxemburg as small and frail but intelligent and courageous, with a “precise, intense and merciless” style. Kautsky, by contrast, Trotsky found “charming,” but with an “angular and dry” mind lacking in “nimbleness and psychological insight.” He was caught up in the reality of reform: revolution was just a “misty historical prospect.” Together they went to a demonstration, and the exchanges between the two intensified: “Kautsky wanted to remain an onlooker, whereas Rosa was anxious to join the demonstration.”12 The antagonism between the two came out in 1910 over Luxemburg’s continued advocacy of the mass strike.
We noted in the last section the influential distinction, introduced by the military historian Hans Delbrück, between a strategy of annihilation, which demanded a decisive battle to eliminate the enemy’s army, and a strategy of exhaustion, which drew on a range of alternative means to wear down the enemy. These could also be understood respectively as strategies of overthrow or attrition—terms that might be more helpful in the context of political strategy. In 1910, responding to Luxemburg, Kautsky drew explicitly on Delbrück’s work. While overthrow depended on drawing “forces rapidly together in order to go to meet the enemy and to deal decisive blows by means of which the enemy is overthrown and rendered incapable of struggle,” with attrition
the commander-in-chief initially avoids any decisive battle; he aims to keep the opposing army on the move by all sorts of maneuvers, without giving it the opportunity of raising the morale of its troops by gaining victories; he strives to gradually wear them out by continual exhaustion and threats and to consistently reduce their resistance and paralyze them.13
Kautsky was all in favor of attrition. Luxemburg’s mass strike was an attempt at overthrow, imprudent because it would provoke the state repression and antisocialist legislation he was so anxious to avoid. What if a mass strike was called and few turned up? All the gains from the parliamentary strategy would be lost.
Lenin
Kautsky’s distinction between overthrow and attrition was also adopted by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats. He was arguing about the meaning of 1905 with the opposing Menshevik faction who had used Kautsky’s formulation.14 Later, Kautsky and Lenin would fall out, but for the moment Kautsky was the leader of European socialists and Lenin had his own disagreements with Luxemburg.
Lenin’s extraordinary appetite for factional struggle reflected his top priority, which was to get the right form of party organization—with him in control. It was for this reason that while the 1905 revolution was getting started, he was locked in battle in a party congress in London, vying for control of the party newspaper. His approach to all revolutionary matters betrayed a single-mindedness acquired at an early age. Lenin’s formative political experiences included his brother Aleksandr being executed for an attempted assassination attempt against the Tsar and expulsion from university for participation in demonstrations. In 1891, having spent two years studying Marx, he was drawn into more active politics (as were others of his generation) by the terrible famine that overtook the country that year, which was only aggravated by government action. He began to identify himself as a socialist revolutionary, true to the word of Marx. He had followed the familiar Russian path of imprisonment and exile, traveling around Europe, attending meetings with other revolutionaries, attempting to establish clandestine organizations that could escape police scrutiny, and editing a revolutionary paper (Iskra) while in Zurich.
If Lenin had a model it was Rakhmetov, the new man of Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is to Be Done? He shared the ascetic lifestyle, neither smoking nor drinking, and had a total devotion to the cause, for which he was prepared to sacrifice all. He also borrowed Chernyshevky’s title for his first major statement of strategy, published in March 1902 when he was 33. The character he deliberately cultivated was hard, tough, disciplined, and uncompromising, prepared to break with old comrades over points of doctrine and tactics, blistering in his polemics. There was little attempt at empathy with those of different views; he could not admit to error. Into his own What Is to Be Done? Lenin poured all that he had studied in theory and learned in practice. He intended it as a landmark statement. It took broadly accepted positions in socialist circles to ruthlessly logical conclusions. Even those who deplored revisionism recoiled at the starkness of Lenin’s message.
If moving quickl
y to a revolution meant accelerating the pace of historical development, in the case of Russia there was an awful lot of history to be passed through in short order. Russia was backward in its material development, straining to leave feudal times. At the same time, it was forever showing symptoms of mass discontent and militancy. Lenin’s energies were geared to making revolution. His pamphlet explained why alternative approaches led to dead ends and why his own might succeed, but only if it was conducted relentlessly by a tightly controlled and disciplined party.
For much of What Is to Be Done? Lenin’s main target was “economism.” The economists in question derided doctrinaire Marxists for filling workers’ heads with unrealizable demands. Better to concentrate on practical proposals that could show real and early results. In the context of the oppressive conditions prevailing in Russia, economic demands were less risky than political demands, which could be left to the bourgeoisie who were still waiting for their revolution. Lenin derided this approach as “tailism,” following rather than leading the proletarian movement. He pointed to the German SPD as demonstrating how effective organizations could encourage workers to embrace socialism as the best explanation for their everyday struggles. Because socialism was the best explanation it must not be diluted. The “philosophy of Marxism” was “cast from a single block of steel.” It was impossible to “eliminate a single substantial premise, a single essential part, without deviating from objective truth, without falling into the arms of bourgeois, reactionary falsehood.”15
As his critics pointed out, this assumed that workers could not be trusted with their own struggle and so must be guided by those with the education to grasp socialist theory. “Social-Democratic consciousness,” Lenin wrote, “had to be brought to the workers from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness.” As there were only two forms of political consciousness—bourgeois and socialist—failure to adopt one inevitably meant being part of the other. Lenin did not seem, however, to have worried about this part of the equation. He was optimistic about the natural instincts of workers. So he was not suggesting that the efforts of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries could substitute for those of the working class. His main concern was with the defects of Russian socialism. With its limited political development and poor organization, it was unable to give the struggle the necessary coherence and purpose and steer it away from “bourgeois consciousness.” This required professional revolutionaries. He was not against a democratic party in principle, but in practice revolutionaries were bound to act conspiratorially, otherwise they could not survive. One of Lenin’s closest associates turned out to be a police agent.
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