The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  In the United States, Marxists and other socialists were also confronted with a mixture of repression and liberal democracy, but they were less successful in establishing a foothold than in most industrialized countries in Europe. Trade unions and socialist movements attracted a large following until the early twentieth century: the medievally named Knights of Labour had about 10 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force as members by 1886. But this left was later undermined by a combination of forces: ethnic divisions; a dominant liberal ideology; male suffrage as an alternative way of seeking change; and high levels of repression.

  The ideal home for the Étienne Lantiers was to be found in Northern and Central Europe. The largest and most successful party was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the ‘SPD’), but Marxist parties were also successful in Scandinavia and some parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is not surprising that the centre of the Marxist hopes moved from France, where they had been in the middle of the century, towards the East. Germany now had a large industrial working class, and many of these workers were attracted by the Marxists’ commitment to modern heavy industry and their promise that the proletariat would inherit the earth. But political conditions were as important, if not more so, than economic structure. In 1878, following an attempt on the life of the Kaiser (for which the socialists were not responsible) Bismarck demanded that the Reichstag pass anti-socialist laws, banning the SPD and repressing workers’ organizations more generally. Nevertheless, the party and unions maintained an underground existence, and Social Democrats were still able to stand for parliament as individuals, thus providing a focus for working-class politics. But discrimination continued, even after the anti-socialist laws lapsed in 1890. The SPD was subject to police harassment, and employers were often harsh in dealing with strikes; workers were often treated as second-class citizens, patronized by the middle class and excluded from their clubs and associations. This state schizophrenia, its combination of freedom and repression, helped the Modernist Marxism of Marx and Engels to flourish. Repression kept the SPD outside established politics and ensured that it did not become a reformist party; the party adopted a Marxist programme at Erfurt in 1891, which promised the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism at some point in the future. But at the same time, the SPD had deputies in parliament, and its representation and strength grew after 1890, allowing the party to achieve a great deal through the existing order. It was therefore only to be expected that pressure for revolution was weak. As a result of these complex circumstances, the SPD was to embody the ideal Marx and Engels pursued in the First International: an independent Marxist party that fought for workers’ interests within the current system without collaborating with the bourgeoisie.

  VII

  Nikolaus Osterroth, born in 1875, was a devout Catholic and a clay miner in Bavaria. On his return from military service in the mid-1890s, he found the mine-owners determined to reduce wages by introducing a new piecework system (paying workers according to how much they produced). Initially, he and the other miners turned for support to the local priest, but they received little sympathy. The priest declared that the employers were appointed by God, and had to be obeyed. Osterroth, in his autobiography, written thirty years later, recalled this incident as provoking a ‘crisis of conscience’, after which he left the church with ‘an empty head and a dying heart’. It was in this low mood that he read a Social Democratic leaflet, thrown through his window by a group of ‘Red Cyclists’ who were passing through the village. ‘The leaflet,’ he remembered, ‘affected me like a revelation’:

  Suddenly I saw the world from the other side, from a side that until now had been dark for me. I was especially aroused by the criticism of the tariff system and the indirect taxes. I’d never heard a word about them before! In all the [Catholic] Centre Party speeches they kept completely quiet about them. And why? Wasn’t their silence an admission that they’d committed an injustice, a clear sign of a guilty conscience? I didn’t believe my eyes – a six-pfennig tax on a pound of salt! I was seized by a feeling of wild fury about the obvious injustice of a tax system that spared the ones who could best pay and plundered those who already despaired of life in their bitter misery.64

  This Damascene moment of almost religious revelation, followed by ‘conversion’ to socialism, can be found in several socialist autobiographies of the period. Conflict with bosses could trigger a more general questioning of their old value system, particularly amongst those who had been Christian believers. Once Osterroth began to think about his economic predicament, he found that there was a whole alternative worldview available to him – one founded on the notion that workers had power and dignity:

  God, how clear and simple it all was! This new world of thought that gave the worker the weapons of self-awareness and self-consciousness was very different to the old world of priestly and economic authority where the worker was merely an object of domination and exploitation!65

  He became a Social Democratic activist, and ultimately a politician, replacing the old ‘dark, vengeful and punishing’ Mosaic God, with a ‘new trinity’ – one that included a new, charitable God, together with Faust and Prometheus, ‘god-men who embody the deepest yearnings of our race’.66

  The Red Cyclists continued to woo Osterroth, giving him a copy of the party’s Marxist Erfurt programme to read. But Osterroth was typical of many German workers in showing little interest in the details of Marxist economics or in the notion that workers would take control of production. Most workers joined the SPD not out of a profound interest in Marxist economic ideas, but because they were angry about wages and conditions and, commonly, out of a sense of humiliation at the hands of bosses. Some felt that they were being treated ‘like dogs’, sworn at and humiliated;67 others resented bosses’ control over their lives. The cigar-maker Felix Pauk, for instance, became sympathetic to the Social Democratic cause when a fellow worker was sacked for suggesting to his boss that sales would improve if the picture of the Kaiser on the cigars were replaced with one of the Marxist leader August Bebel.68

  However unschooled in Marxist theory, it is probable that many members of the party, even at its lower levels, had at least a rudimentary idea of its fundamental principles, learnt from popularizations of the ideology. These included the idea of Marxism as a science, the centrality of economic forces in historical development, the class struggle, the proletariat’s status as the progressive class emancipating the whole of mankind, and the ultimate crisis of capitalism. But workers had little interest in studying the details of Marxist theory, however much Social Democratic intellectuals encouraged them. A survey of Social Democratic workers’ libraries between 1906 and 1914 shows that 63.1 per cent of books borrowed were imaginative literature, and only 4.3 per cent were in the social sciences, including Marxist texts. Zola was number one or two on most library lists, much to the irritation of socialist intellectuals who regarded him as a pessimist, with too little faith in human reason.69

  But there was much the SPD could offer beyond theory, or even political radicalism: it provided an alternative world to that of the factory, where workers were accorded dignity and could improve themselves. For Otto Krille, an unskilled factory worker from Dresden, this was its main attraction. He despaired of the ‘general stupor’ in his factory, and felt ‘completely isolated’ amidst his fellow workers’ parochialism and ‘erotic banter’; for him, Social Democracy provided an escape from this grim world. He observed that ‘only a tiny fraction [of party members] are socialists from scientific conviction; most come to socialism from a vast internal and external wasteland like the people of Israel out of the wilderness. They have to believe in order not to despair.’70 Krille’s attitude was typical of the average Social Democratic Party member: a young, urban, male and Protestant worker, with ambitions to better himself.71

  In place of Krille’s ‘wasteland’, the Social Democratic Party provided a world of culture, self-improvement and orderly recreation.72 Educational societies p
romised a socialist version of Bildung, or cultivation and learning – precisely what gave the bourgeoisie its status in German society – through lectures and classes. The subjects covered included ‘socialist’ and ‘scientific’ topics, like political economy and hygiene, as well as the study of conventional ‘bourgeois’ culture – art, literature and music. Even more popular were the leisure societies. A whole range of activities and societies were on offer under the party’s auspices, from shooting and cycling clubs to choral societies (which had 200,000 members), and even smoking clubs. The ideological content of the clubs’ activities varied. Some had their own club languages: members of gymnastic clubs used the greeting ‘Frei Heil!’ (‘Hail to Freedom!’) from the late 1890s.

  The most visible aspect of Social Democratic culture was the parade – especially the May Day parade. Despite the threat of harassment by the police, thousands attended and watched processions celebrating socialism and workers’ trades. Some of the symbolism came from the socialist past, stretching back to the classicism of the French Revolution. A central place in the 1910 Nuremberg Social Democratic choral festival was taken by the ‘Goddess of Freedom’ – a figure in a white Grecian gown, a Phrygian cap on her head, a ‘Freedom banner’ in her right hand, surrounded with busts of Marx, the German socialist leader Lassalle, and a lion, symbolizing power.73 Other festivals, however, had a more explicitly military style, complete with uniforms, marching bands, standards and flags. Many Social Democratic songs reveal the martial culture:

  What moves down there along the valley?

  A troop in white uniform!

  How courageous sounds their vigorous song!

  Those tones are known to me.

  They sing of Freedom and the Fatherland.

  I know this troop in their white uniform:

  Freedom Hail! Freedom Hail! Freedom Hail!

  The gymnasts are moving out.74

  The appeal of military types of organization was not, of course, new, and Marx himself had used military metaphors when discussing socialism. Indeed Marxism was committed to a strong, disciplined socialist state, unlike anarchists to the left and reformists to the right. But Marx’s and Engels’ vision was more commonly an industrial one, and the military style of German Social Democracy probably owed much to the political culture of Imperial Germany – even though the party’s ideology favoured internationalism.75 Whilst the party – like other Social Democratic parties – in theory championed the equality of women, in practice party members frequently saw women as apolitical and ‘backward’, and the party culture was highly masculine. A high value was also placed on discipline and even hierarchy. Gymnastic exercises were regimented, and teams were organized in military fashion: an elected overseer presided over a number of squad leaders, who, in turn, organized the teams. As the ‘gymnastic code’ ruled: ‘Ranks must be strictly held in each team. No one may move from the team without special permission.’76

  It was discipline and organization that appealed to Otto Krille – a man educated in a military school but expelled as ‘unfit’. As he remembered:

  I slowly became familiar with Social Democratic ideas. In the past, the idea of the state had seemed to me to have a kind of medieval crudity that was embodied in barracks and prisons. This attitude changed imperceptibly, because I learned to see myself as a citizen of this state who, though oppressed, still had an interest in it because I hoped to take it over for my own class. And the strangest thing was… that I, the despiser of unconditional military discipline, willingly submitted to party discipline. As contradictory as it may seem, socialist ideology reconciled me to a certain extent with my proletarian existence, and taught me to respect manual labour. I no longer shied away from the name ‘worker’.77

  For Krille and many others, the SPD provided a parallel state in which workers could achieve some dignity, and which had the organization necessary to defend the working class against a fundamentally hostile German Empire.

  The Social Democratic culture could therefore have a martial flavour, as was captured by ‘The Red Flag’ – the song written by the Irish journalist James Connell in 1889, inspired by a London meeting of the Social Democratic Federation:

  The people’s flag is deepest red,

  It shrouded oft our martyr’d dead

  And ’ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,

  Their hearts’ blood dyed its ev’ry fold.

  Then raise the scarlet standard high,

  Within its shade we’ll live and die,

  Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,

  We’ll keep the red flag flying here.

  Connell’s second verse was designed to underscore the international appeal of Social Democracy’s red flag:

  Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,

  The sturdy German chants its praise,

  In Moscow’s vaults its hymns are sung,

  Chicago swells the surging throng.

  Yet references to the ‘sturdy German’ were distinctly patronizing, given how central the Germans were to the movement. In 1914, seven Social Democratic parties had at least a quarter of the national vote: the Austrian, the Czech, the Danish, the Finnish, the German, the Norwegian and the Swedish.78 But the German party was by far the most successful of all. On the eve of World War I it had over 1 million paid-up members and in the 1912 elections attracted over 4 million votes – about a third of the electorate, though the skewed franchise deprived it of a majority of seats in the Reichstag. The trade unions associated with the SPD – the Free Trade Unions – also had a membership of about 2.6 million. This was the largest Marxist party in the world, and became a model for socialists throughout Europe.

  Even so, there were real limits to Social Democratic influence. Whilst some parties, like the French SFIO and the Swedish, forged alliances with peasants, the SPD was committed to the rigid view that peasant agriculture was an outmoded form of production.79 But even in Europe’s proletarian heartlands, such as the mines of the Ruhr, Social Democrats could only attract a third of the vote, and they faced stiff competition from Catholicism and liberalism.80 They were also unable to integrate Polish migrant workers, revealing Social Democracy’s difficult relationship with nationalism. The Austrian party faced some of the greatest problems, as it hoped to preserve the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians’ solution was to create a federal party of the Empire’s constituent peoples, but they were still seen as overbearing big brothers by the Czech Social Democrats and other smaller parties.81 Women were another group Social Democracy could have done more to attract, although women did constitute 16 per cent of the German Party’s membership, and their organization remained one of the most radical groups in the SPD.82

  However, despite such failures, the youthful Marx’s ambition to move the centre of socialist politics from France to the German lands had been achieved. The somewhat chauvinistic leader August Bebel declared: ‘It is not by chance that it was Germans who discovered the laws of modern society… It is furthermore not by chance that Germans are the pioneers who bring the socialist idea to the workers of the various peoples of the world.’83

  VIII

  The Germans’ hegemony in the international socialist movement was clear even as it paid obeisance to the French revolutionary tradition. On 14 July 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the Second International held its inaugural meeting in the Rue Petrelle, Paris. Its initial prospects did not look good. A group of moderate socialists – the French ‘Possibilists’ – held a rival congress at the same time, and there were rumours that they were plotting to accost naïve foreign delegates at the railway station and lure them away from the Social Democrats. But these fears proved groundless. The Rue Petrelle Congress was an enormous success: 391 delegates attended from twenty countries, including the USA.84 British representatives included the poet and Romantic medieval nostalgist William Morris, and the Independent Labour Party MP Keir Hardie.85 The French delegation was the largest, as w
as to be expected given the location. The foreign delegates could visit the newly built monument to industrial modernity and the French Revolution – the Eiffel Tower, and for a time Paris indeed seemed to be the centre of the progressive world. But the most cohesive and dominant group at the Congress was the German SPD. The Second International, which met every two to four years, was by no means a rigid, doctrinaire organization, but it did demonstrate the dominance of the Marxist tradition, and of the elder-brother party, the SPD.

  Engels could take much of the credit for this success. On Marx’s death, few countries had popular Marxist workers’ parties. Engels was determined to remedy this weakness and establish Marxism as a powerful political force, unlike Marx, who took little interest in Marxist political organization. Engels’ easy-going nature, sociability and patience proved to be good assets, and he acted as a mentor to European socialist politicians, engaging in lengthy correspondence and writing hundreds of letters of advice and criticism from his base in London. Marxists throughout Europe, in turn, treated him as the voice of orthodoxy. But Engels did not only use letters to bind his virtual community of Marxists together; he also sent Christmas puddings, cooked in his own kitchen, to favoured revolutionaries every December. They even reached distant Russia – Petr Lavrov, the non-Marxist ‘Populist’ socialist, was a regular recipient of this annual internationalist gift.86