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Title: On German Social Democracy Author: Rudolf Rocker Date: 1935 Language: en Topics: social democracy, Germany, fascism, Dielo Truda Source: Retrieved on 23rd May 2022 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/ttf0xg Notes: Published in Dyelo Truda, 1.II. [February] 1935. Reprinted in Le RĂ©veil (Geneva) 30 March 1935. Translated by Paul Sharkey.
To many people the current developments in Germany seem almost
unfathomable. Only a few understand the character and true causes for
the so-called “national revolution”. Above all there is amazement that a
country that could call on an organized labour movement, the largest in
the world, with a long history of growth behind it, that a country like
that could have been defeated by Hitler’s supporters and brought to its
knees at one fell swoop, without any serious resistance. In actual fact,
the fascist victory was not achieved by surprise attack but was the
logical outcome of a lengthy evolution, with a variety of factors at
play.
Ever since the days of the First International, a huge change has taken
place in the character of the labour movement in most European
countries. Instead of the old socialist ideological factions waging an
economic battle (organizations in which the vanguard of the
International saw the building blocks of the society of the future and
the natural agencies for overhauling the popular economy in accordance
with the spirit of socialism) we had the current political labour
parties and their parliamentary efforts alongside other parties, all
within the parameters of the bourgeois State. The formerly socialist
education of the workers whereby it was explained to them why they
needed to capture the land and industrial ventures, has been gradually
forgotten. In its place, the talk these days is of nothing but the
conquest of political power in accordance with a movement definitively
abiding by the capitalist current.
The new workers’ parties directed their activities primarily into
drawing the workers into the parliamentary struggle and moving towards
the gaining of political power as a precondition of achieving socialism
in practical terms. Over time. The upshot of that was a brand-new
ideology differing in its very essence from the socialist ideology of
the First International. After swiftly taking first place among the
labour parties in most countries, parliamentarism drew into the
socialist ranks a majority of bourgeois and intellectual personnel on
the look-out for a career in politics. The spiritual climate within the
movement underwent even greater changes and all authentically socialist
aspirations were little by little relegated to the background. A
surrogate, that had nothing in common with socialism beyond the name,
supplanted the First International’s constructive socialism.
And so, increasingly, socialism was drained of its nature as a novel
cultural ideal that was called upon to prepare people mentally for the
abolition of capitalist civilization and for making them capable of
implementing this change in practical terms and that trend was not
halted by the artificial borders of nation-states. In the catalogue of
“leaders” of this new phase in the movement, the ideology of the
nation-state was increasingly blended with party ideology, to the point
where one could no longer quite make out where one ideology ended and
the other began. A habit developed of looking at socialism through the
spectacle of so-called “national interests”. When all is said and done,
the contemporary workers’ movement found itself being gradually subsumed
as a necessary component part, into the structures of the nation state,
providing it with an inner equilibrium which it had just lost. The
drip-drip infiltration of capitalist society into the proletariat’s
ideals was conditioned by the practical activism of the workers’
parties, an activism that necessarily impacted upon the ideology of
their political leaders. The very same parties that once upon a time
marched off to war to conquer political power under socialism’s colours,
found themselves being obliged by the relentless logic of events to
sacrifice one morsel after another of their erstwhile socialism to the
State’s national policy. All undetected by their members, these same
parties became tools, buffers between capital and labour, or turned into
political lightning rods, protecting the capitalist economic system from
looming catastrophe.
Germany never having had, broadly speaking, any form of workers’
movement other than social democracy, was additionally devoid of all
revolutionary tradition, albeit that this trend ran very deep there.
Then its sway was brought to bear on the movement in most other
countries. The mighty organizational machinery of the German Social
Democracy and its seeming successes in every election earned it huge
undeserved prestige abroad. It was forgotten that none of this could
shake capitalist rule. And as other socialist parties elsewhere, were
increasingly directing their movements along the lines set by the German
movement, they were more and more inclined to overstate the German
Social Democracy’s influence and the might of its organization.
The campaigning by Ferdinand Lassalle smoothed the way for the German
labour movement, and his influence lingered into the years thereafter.
Through his activities, Lassalle left a special imprint on German
socialism, which made itself felt especially powerfully, and through he
years leading up to the World War as well as in the wake of the
so-called German “revolution” this was replicated. Lassalle was a
life-long fanatical supporter of the Hegelian notion of the State and
furthermore he espoused the thinking of the French statist socialist
Louis Blanc. Lassalle’s successors believed so profoundly in the State’s
“mission to liberate” that the German liberal press accused them of
being “Bismarck’s patsies”. The accusers adduced no material evidence to
back up these charges: yet Lassalle’s odd stance on the “social empire”
made such an accusation quite understandable. Abroad, there were many
who thought that Germany was a “marxist country”, if ever there was one,
and this view was bolstered by the barbarous struggle that the new
powers-that-be wage against “marxism”. But that was not the case. The
number of genuine marxists in Germany was very small and Lassalle’s
thinking influenced the Social Democracy’s political aspirations a lot
more than the ideas of Marx or Engels. True, Marx did announce that the
conquest of political power is the essential pre-condition for achieving
socialism, but, from his viewpoint, once the State had accomplished its
supposed purpose and done away with the class divisions within society
and done away with the monopolies, its fate would be to fade away and
make way for a society freed of authority. This was a miscalculation,
entirely exposed as such by the Bolshevik experiment in Russia; since
the State has emerged as not just the defender but also as the mainstay
and creator of monopolies and class ascendancy in society. But even so,
Marx foresaw the ultimate dismantling of the State, whereas Lassalle was
an enthusiastic champion of the statist idea and ready to sacrifice all
civil liberties to it. From Lassalle the German socialists have
inherited their ardent belief in the State and most of their
anti-freedom aspirations. From Marx all they have borrowed is his
economic fatalism, a belief in the invincible power of economic
circumstances. This belief, like any other version of fatalism, sapped
the will of the popular masses and systematically dismantled their
appetite for serious revolutionary action.
Bearing in mind the powerful influence that that embodiment of a
militaristic, bureaucratic State, Prussia, wielded over German social
life, thus we can grasp what the necessary outcome of the “educating” of
the masses of the people upon which the social democrats concentrated
was bound to be. That outcome gained substance with a precision and
tragic clarity when the German revolution of November 1918 erupted. The
German socialists, absorbed for years by run-of-the-mill parliamentary
efforts had gradually lost all their spiritual baggage and were no
longer capable of anything creative. The most influential social
democratic leaders and especially Fritz Ebert, the German republic’s
first president, strove by all means possible to snuff out the
revolutionary sentiments at large among the popular masses in the wake
of Germany’s defeat and did everything in their power to keep popular
activity within the parameters of the law. To the very last, those
leaders resisted any measures that they considered too radical and on
the very eve of 9 November, the Vorwärts newspapers carried an article
cautioning its patient readers against setting their sights too high,
arguing that the German people had yet to reach the age when it might
entertain dreams of a republic.
One can imagine what such a “revolution” might result in. Just a year
after the 1918 coup d’état, the democratic bourgeoisie’s gazette, the
Frankfurter Zeitung, expressed the view that in the history of the
peoples of Europe there had never before been a revolution so
impoverished in terms of creative thinking and energy as the German
revolution. A revolution that grew of the irresistible ambition on the
part of an oppressed people to cast off its shackles and pursue a
brand-new future. But in Germany the revolution was foisted on to the
people from outside. After the allied powers had announced that they
were refusing to conclude a peace with the Hohenzollern dynasty [the
republic] followed pretty much automatically. The people acted, not out
of any inner conviction of its own, but under the lash of necessity.
True, in Germany there was also a certain number of honest, determined
revolutionaries striving to inject some added vigour into events and
open up wider vistas for the revolution. But those revolutionaries
represented a tiny minority and were unable to reverse the impact that a
protracted education had had on the people. They were unable to rouse
the millions of German workers banded together in the ranks of political
and professional workers’ organizations. Never before had it been so
obvious that within revolutionary movements the mentality prevailing
among the masses of the populace is a factor that looms even larger than
their technical organization. An organization that cannot command
revolutionary enthusiasm and has no initiative of its own, is just a
force to be reckoned with on paper and disappoints when put to the test.
Which is exactly what occurred in Germany. The German working class had
no real heavyweight revolutionary tradition. The only weapons with which
it had any familiarity were parliamentary action and the entirely
reformist activities of the workers’ trades organizations and it looked
to those things alone for its salvation. Even universal suffrage, which
in France and elsewhere had had to be extorted by means of revolutionary
action, had been bestowed upon Germans by Bismarck as a gift, so to
speak, without any special effort on their own part. And so the
revolution was tainted from the outset and there was no spread of the
sort of inner energy that is absolutely a requirement if there is to a
radical transformation of the past.