Social Democracy. II

NOTE: Some readers might like to start with the ending, below the last ***,  for a clearer idea of where it's meant to be going.

"Women! Same rights, same responsibilities. Vote Social Democratic!" Election poster by Gustav Fritz Kirchbach, 1919.

So, as I was saying, so much for Marx as theorist. The never-to-be finished edifice of the "critique of political economy" would never have worked as science, and it's possible we should just blame the whole concept, as commenter William R. Hackman suggested in response to the previous segment, on the enthusiastic Engels, or perhaps more likely, as Michael Heinrich thinks,  later on with the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Marx himself was very diffident on the subject:

“Je ne suis pas marxiste,” stated Marx, rather annoyed, to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when the latter reported the doings of French “Marxists.” Engels had circulated this statement numerous times, including in letters to newspapers – definitely for public consumption. Marx’s distance from Marxists is also expressed in other comments. When he stayed in France in 1882, he wrote to Engels that “the 'Marxistes' and 'Anti-Marxistes”' […] at their respective socialist congresses at Roanne and St-Étienne” had “both done their damnedest to ruin my stay in France.” ...  But not only that; when the German economist Adolph Wagner was the first to deal with Marx’s theory in his textbook and wrote of Marx’s “socialist system,” the latter, outraged, noted in his marginalia that he had “never established a socialist system.” 

And Heinrich is clearly right to emphasize the critical character of Marx's own thinking, "critique" being his own favorite way to describe his intellectual work, "far more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties in order to open up new spaces for thought and action – in which it’s not immediately clear what the correct result will be."

The legacy of Marx as politician, on the other hand, as a man of the "party" he worked to bring into being, intriguing from London to make things happen in France and Germany, and its after-effects, is honestly more interesting, leaving a complex footprint of which the "social democracy" and "democratic socialism" that are bedeviling us right now in the US are some of the important residue. 

The term sozialdemokratisch used in Bebel's and Liebknecht's 1869 organization was intended as a direct reference to Marx, and the Marxian aim of establishing a socialist state, with some kind of worker-owned production economy, through democratic means, when the capitalist mode of production underwent its inevitable collapse, and in the meantime to encourage worker organization on an international basis to assert their economic power. The merger with the Lassalleans in 1875 and adoption of the simple sozialistisch in the new party's name signaled a set of compromises with the rival movement presented at its first party conference, in Gotha,  that infuriated Marx, reading about it in London, and he sent Liebknecht the angry letter now known as the Critique of the Gotha Program, complaining about its seeming focus on the preservation of the bourgeois state, its lack of support for labor unions, and its failure to say anything at all about the economic analysis he himself had been publishing for 15 years, or about revolution, or the coming "dictatorship of the proletariat" (actually a democratic administration, at least in conception, I think, since proletarians would be in the voting majority) that would manage the transition to whatever "communism" was going to be (informed at this point, I think, by the story of the Commune in Paris after France lost the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, which Marx had followed with intense interest, as an illustration of how a dictatorship of the proletariat might work, in spite of the violent suppression with which it ended). 

Marx died in 1883, but his influence over the German Socialist Workers continued to increase during the period 1878-90 of the Anti-Socialist laws in Germany, when the members were somewhat underground (though they could and did run successfully as independent candidates for seats in the state legislatures and the Reichstag), and the repression seems to have radicalized them to some extent, and after the laws were repealed, they reemerged, under the political leadership of Bebel and Liebknecht and the theory advice of Karl Kautsky, with the Social Democrat name and a much more Marxian new platform written by Kautsky, the Erfurt Program, offering a choice between a more revolutionary "maximalist" approach (emphasizing the need to prepare for worse and worse economic crises by assigning the working class to move capitalist private ownership of production facilities into "social ownership") and a more parliamentary "minimalist' one (with a laundry list of proposals for democratization—universal suffrage including for women, proportional representation, use of referendums, graduated income tax—and workers' rights—eight-hour day, end of child labor, right to organize, and extension of social insurance, some of which was actually already ahead under Bismarck and Kaiser Bill of where we are in US today, not that Bismarck was more "left" than, I don't know, Hakeem Jeffries, but he was better at politics).

Over the next 20 years they were able to accomplish quite a bit of stuff from the second list, especially in local reforms at the "sewer socialism" level, regulating worker safety, and the like: An American visitor, William Jennings Bryan, reported in 1907 that

the socialists of Germany have organized a liberal party [yes, he thought of calling it "liberal"] of unrivaled strength; they have educated the working classes to a very high standard of political intelligence and to a strong sense of their independence and of their social mission, as the living and progressive force in every social respect; they have promoted the organization of trade unions; and have by their incessant agitation compelled the other parties and the government to take up social and labor legislation.

and by 1912 the Social Democrats were the biggest party in the Reichstag (as was the Austrian party, from 1911). But it remained unthinkable that the Kaiser should allow any of them to be invited into government, let alone to form one themselves.

And then, at the beginning of August 1914, the world blew up. Not that people commonly understood that was what had happened. The governments and newspapers were confident the new war wouldn't take long; "You'll be home by Christmas",  they told the troops. The chief concern of socialist activists all over Europe, Social Democrats as they were mostly all calling themselves at this point, as the threat of war loomed that summer from the June assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb conspiracy and the mobilization of Austria against Serbia, Russia against Austria, and Britain and France against Russia's enemy Germany, had been to maintain some semblance in the movement of international working class solidarity against the patriotic belligerence pushed by the bourgeois authorities. French socialist leader Jean Jaurès put the threat in the form of a regular conspiracy theory not long before he was assassinated by nationalists in July:

Alarmed by the growth of the socialist movement, a government might attempt to create a foreign diversion rather than directly battle Social Democracy. If a war breaks out in this way between France and Germany, would we permit the French and German proletariat to murder one another on behalf of the capitalists and for their benefit without Social Democracy attempting to exert the greatest effort to stop it? If we were not to make the attempt, we would all be dishonored.

But once the war was inevitable as German forces moved into Belgium and France for the first battle of the Marne, few of the parties were able to resist the pull of nationalism, and fell into line quickly in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and obviously Belgium itself (in the Netherlands, which aimed to remain neutral, the Social Democrats were particularly powerful and invited to join the government, but decided not to; and the relevant faction of the leadership of the Russian Social Democrats, of whom I'll have something to say presently, was in exile in Zurich at the time when the Tsar signed on to the war himself). 

These surrenders roused some angry opposition inside some parties, though, where some Marxian loyalists felt that Marxian principles of internationalism were being betrayed (in an echo of the conflict between the internationalist Marxians and nationalist Lassalleans in the 1860s). In Britain, there was an Independent Labour Party opposing the Parliamentary Labour Party in support of the war; and most especially in Germany, where some of the most influential voices, those of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and party ideologist Karl Kautsky, began a pacifist opposition. Liebknecht and Luxemburg formed their own caucus, the International Group, which led to a large number of them being expelled from their own party and eventually forming a new one, the Independent Social Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, as the war dragged on, mostly with the senseless slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front, while Russian attacks on Germany on the Eastern Front seemed (were) entirely ineffectual, and the British attempt to halt the Ottomans in Anatolia was going even worse, the "Bolshevik" leader Vladimir Il'ich Ulyanov, aka "Lenin", came up with a totally different take on the correct Marxist analysis of the situation, which he had in particular from the Austrian economist Rudolf Hilferding: that the ongoing struggle in Western Europe was really a sign of the end times: its true object was a struggle within the different national imperialisms, which Marx and Engels had ignored, as he wrote in his 1916 book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (published 1917) and it signaled the actual apocalyptic end of capitalism.

Lenin argued that capitalism in the era of imperialism had become dominated by capitalist oligarchies. These capitalist systems needed a strong state to protect their domestic market and to conquer and defend foreign markets, and this would lead to a growing level of conflict between rival capitalist states. Inevitably, Lenin theorized, attempts by these states to assert monopoly control over increasingly large parts of the world would result in war, and oligarchies would reorganize the capitalist system to minimize the anarchy of laissez-faire competition within each country. As a result, a new order of rationally regulated economic production would emerge and could form the basis for the socialist system that would be rapidly implemented after capitalism’s overthrow.

Leading him to wonder whether, somehow, the road to world revolution would be not in powerfully industrialized Britain, France, and Germany, as Marx and Engels had assumed, but just maybe someplace like Russia, where industrialization was decades behind, though a substantial proletariat had begun to emerge in the cities from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the vast country was full of coal, petroleum, and metal ore reserves to jumpstart the process. And after all Russia's 1905 revolution, such as it was, was one he had participated in himself, so he was certain, even though that one had failed to overthrow the government, that it was possible.

He was in fact concluding that Marxian principle needed to be reformulated altogether:

whereas he had once believed that policies could be developed on the basis of predetermined scientific principles, he now believed that the only test of whether a practice was right or not was through practice. Although still perceiving himself as an orthodox Marxist, he began to divert from some of Marx's predictions regarding societal development; whereas Marx, as Robert Service maintains, had believed that a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the middle-classes had to take place before a socialist revolution of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia, the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without the intermediate revolution.

And when another attempt at bourgeois-democratic revolution really occurred in Russia, in March 1917 (February, in the Julian-calendar Old Style), and this time the revolutionaries really did overthrow the Tsar, Lenin hurried back to Russia through Germany, Sweden, and Finland (the German leg was the most difficult, Russia and Germany being at war), getting off the train at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd, where he was met by a crowd of supporters and launched immediately into his campaign against the liberal-socialist provisional government shakily installed in the capital on top of many local workers'  councils known as "soviets" that had taken form all over the country in the revolution, dominated by Social Democrats, with a majority (Menshevik) supporting the provisional government, while Lenin's Bolshevik faction opposed it (confusingly, Bolshevik literally means "member of the majority" and Menshevik "member of the minority"—the Bolsheviks had appropriated the name in 1903, when they were in fact in the majority on the Central Committee, and never given it up). 

And finally, after retail politics and the simple demand for "bread, land, and peace", three things the provisional government was unable or unwilling to supply, had helped the Bolsheviks win some control over the Petrograd soviet and a big proportion of the others, a thing Lenin saw as the potential embodiment of Marx's idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (because only workers had the vote, in theory), all that remained was to get rid of the provisional government, which was achieved with an old-school coup d'état (after a 10-hour debate in the Bolshevik Central Committee) of the Bolsheviks' party militia, known as Red Guards, and anti-war soldiers and sailors of the regular military. the provisional government was put under arrest, and Lenin, the party first secretary, was effectively the ruler of the entire country. One of the early things he did, by the way, was to urge the Central Committee to change the name of the party from "Social Democratic" to "Communist", in tribute to Marx's and Engels's use of the term in their 1848 manifestso, which the committee did in 1918. 

The Social Democrats of Central and Western Europe followed these events with extreme interest, as you can imagine, and an awareness of the parallels between the tensions in the Russian parties and those in their own. This obviously increased as the war staggered to its end, especially in the loser countries of Austria, Germany, and Turkey (which had gotten rid of its sultan in the Young Turks revolution of 1908, but still had much territory to lose) and Russia itself (which abandoned the victorious allies to sign a separate peace with Germany)—empires whose emperors had fled and that were literally falling to pieces, yielding up nations that hadn't existed for centuries like Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania and Hungary and Finland, or had never existed at all, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, or were hardly imaginable, like the future Iraq and Palestine and United Arab Emirates. It's not hard to understand how some thought Lenin's prophecy of the end of capitalist imperialism was proving true. But then none of that happened to the equally imperialist winners, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the late-entry United States. Indeed, the British and French empires grew quite a bit, at least for a while, from the Ottoman spoils. 

 The pacifist or Leninist or Independent Social Democrat or international-revolutionary parties did tend to change their names to "Communist", but they did not tend to do very well electorally. Hungary had a revolution in 1919 and became the Soviet Republic of Hungary (the great composer Béla Bartók was its culture minister), but for only 133 days before invading Romanian troops (I think paid by Red-scared Americans, but as far as I can tell it really wasn't a very good government anyway) kicked them out. The mainstream, pro-parliamentary or Majority Social Democrats  or "Socialist" or "Labor" parties did at least somewhat better; the Austrian and German parties did very well in their first elections in 1919, and of course they still exist today. The Socialist parties of France, with a glorious history, and of Italy, with an awful one, seem to have fallen apart in recent years, but the Spanish one hasn't. The UK Labour Party has seemed moribund since Tony Blair tried to destroy it, but I note with amazed pleasure that the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, is talking about renationalizing British Rail and even the steel industry. Great ideas can be revived, and nothing is necessarily over.

***

By way of summary/epilogue—I understand this is a structurally pretty goofy piece with all its dialectical teetertottering among paired concepts—what I've been trying to do here is a kind of Rectification of Names exercise on some terms in political economy, "socialism", "social democracy", "democratic socialism", and "communism", whose meaning nobody knows. It's not their fault that they don't know, either, because (1)  the meanings have been extremely unstable in their historical progression in the first place, and  (2) because one particular user, the great whatever-he-was thinker (philosopher? economist? sociologist?) and extraordinarily irritating individual Karl Marx, used all his terminology in two incompatible ways, in a doomed effort to build a monumental Victorian scientific edifice possibly in the mold of his contemporaries Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (but possibly not); and in his role as a Jewish political activist in the mold of the prophet Amos who hoped to make justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Which was also doomed. 

But both have had immense repercussions in the actual world, because whatever crazy Victorian thing Marx was doing really was something that spoke to a lot of people, which came to a head during the Great War, even if that wasn't the end of capitalism. (In hindsight, it looks like the beginning of fascism, whence the necessity for another World War.) 

"Socialism" is a word that has been around for a long time as a name for efforts to "socialize" all kinds of inequity, or for everybody to own a share of inequity, which will make it less inequitable. Individuals shouldn't have to bear it on their own. There are many radically different proposals for socialism and you can be a socialist without agreeing with any of them, and you'll fit right in to the Democratic Socialists of America. That's in part because DSA is so overwhelmingly democratic, at least in intention. (Too much for me, because I hate long meetings where everybody needs to offer a personal take.) Not that the DSA is perfect, but the idea is good. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend! Only for real this time. (Mao didn't mean it, he meant to arrest everybody who fell into the trap of believing him.)

I think the best use of the term is exactly that way, covering everybody with that very general aspiration, of making society fairer, including all the crazy utopian visions that existed before Marx, the whole garden. 

And then dividing it perhaps as Lenin divided the world's socialists (because rightly or wrongly he really sparked that process), into the social democrats, who already existed, and the communists, who he was inventing: the former advertising themselves as having a commitment to democracy and the latter as having an "advance guard" that would act while everybody else was still arguing. (And let the social democrats and democratic socialists simply be the same gloriously messy thing.) 

With the proviso that the communists actually lost, getting on 40 years ago now (the weird forms they developed in China and Indochina when they discovered the uses of capital notwithstanding), making the social democrats, arguing on and on and here and there getting things done or redone as Marx the politician intended them to, winners by default.