[Marxism] fatal flaw in socialism ?

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Adding to Mark's comments, one should consider that in the decade
prior to the second world war, the labor movement in Europe (and many other
countries) was rapidly expanding, something which was reflected both in a
rapid increase in trade union membership, the number of strikes to lever up
wages and conditions, and in the membership of social democratic parties
(see Walter Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe). This had a strong
effect on popular ideology. The dominant view at that time was an
inexorable growth and forward march of the socialist movement,
and that historical development was leading almost inevitably to socialism.

Thus, there was a real sense in which masses of people
thought socialism was imminent, that it was on the historical agenda
in the near future. Just prior to the outbreak of war, the German SPD had
about a million members and 2.5 million trade union affiliates, the party
bureaucracy had something like 15,000 fulltime party officials, assets worth
more than 21 million gold marks, 90 daily newspapers and 62 printing
offices. It had numerous periodicals and party schools, a socialist news
agency. It had a parliamentary vote of over one-third of the total German
electorate. This is why the vote for the war credits appeared to many
a bit like the sinking of the Titanic.

To a significant extent, socialist ideology at that time was
mixed with religious or semi-religious beliefs, and internationalism was
often mainly an abstract idea mooted in resolutions, rather than something
that was actually given substance in practice through real solidarity
actions. The contact that people from different countries had was
actually much more limited, and in fact many socialdemocrats
viewed imperialism as a progressive "civilising influence". A
distinction was drawn between the minimum programme (defence
of wages and conditions, civil and social reforms) and
the maximum programme (socialist revolution), but there
existed few specific ideas about how one could get from the
one to the other. Thus, essentially the SPD was a party of
reform, emphasising independent workingclass organisation
in which socialist beliefs functioned as a theoretical rationale.

In many Western European countries, the working classes
had conquered voting rights (see Goran Therborn, "The Rule of Capital
and the Rise of Democracy," New Left Review 103 (1977), pp. 3-41)
and Kautsky actually envisaged "the dictorship of the proletariat"
as a socialdemocratic majority in parliament that would come
about through steadily growing political influence and
incremental membership growth. However, in Eastern Europe
little or no popular democracy existed, and it was difficult for socialist
political organisations to exist at all legally; struggles for better wages
and conditions therefore assumed a more radical character there, for that
reason alone. In Russia, there were frequent terrorist attacks by
Narodniks, something which did not occur in Western Europe.
But apart from utopian schemas, realistic and articulate
theories of socialist society and its forms of association were almost
absent, beyond the idea of state ownership of the means of production,
and workers' control of industry, based upon a parliamentary majority.
Since there never had been any socialist revolution, it was also difficult
for people to visualise or specify, what it would look like.

Voting for the war credits was an opportunist move led by the rightwing
social democrats, in a situation where masses of workers initially supported
war. The Marxists were only a left-wing in the German social democratic
party, and there were concerns about keeping the party united, and prevent
splits over this and other issues, and of losing contact with the masses
and popular moods. The vote for the war credits itself was of course
formally speaking not the same as a declaration of war.  The whole Social
Democratic delegation, consisting of 110 members, voted for the credits,
despite the party's previous anti-militarist stand. At the party fraction
meeting on August 3rd, 1914 however, fourteen deputies including Karl
Liebknecht and Otto Ruhle opposed the vote, but in keeping with party
discipline, they too voted for the credits the next day. Four months later,
on 2 December 1914 there was a second vote in parliament to grant the
government more credits to pursue the war, and Liebknecht alone opposed the
war budget; the Left failed to organise any effective opposition. It was
only after war was declared, that opposition within the party began to
grow. Thus, in March 1915, 25 SPD deputies voted against war credits, in
August 1915 the number rose to 36, and by December 1915, 43 of
the 108 SPD deputies said they would no longer respect party discipline. The
Spartacists called an (illegal) anti-war demonstration for May Day 1916
which attracted about 10,000 workers. In 1917, partly under the
impact of events in Russia and mutinies in France, the German social
democracy did split, but the new USPD and the Spartacists took
away only about 14,000 members.

The general perspective developed by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and others
was one of "war-revolution"; the war would culminate in strikes and
revolutionary upsurges throughout Europe. They were not entirely wrong
about that, because there were attempts at revolution, in Germany and in
Hungary, and mass strikes in many other countries. However, while
socialist ideology had educated workers in anti-militarism,
socialdemocratic parties had never educated their members in
revolutionary warfare, in taking power, or seriously strategised
about it beyond generalities, except possibly in places like
Russia and Poland where political activity often could not be
publicly carried out.

So if there was a "fatal flaw in socialism", it was a lack of a specific
and realistic theory of how a socialist society could come into
being, and of the conduct and strategy of revolutionary struggle
beyond parliamentary activity and trade union activity. Lenin did
moot the idea of turning military war into civil war, but in reality,
in Western Europe at least, that was not a perspective seriously
adopted or pursued by the majority of socialdemocratic parties.

>From about 1901, Lenin began to call his own Marxism
"revolutionary Marxism" to distinguish it from Marxist social-
democrats whom he felt had turned Marxist theory into an
apology for parliamentary reformism and emptied it of all
revolutionary content. It is interesting to read Kautsky's
response to the dissolution of the constituent assembly
in Russia in 1917 - he was basically shocked because
he considered that "the workers are not ready" for the
direct exercise of power, and it violated his deeply held
belief in democratic methods. By contrast, Lenin had
consistently argued that if the workers were not ready,
then "we must make them ready" and this involved
a centralised party apparatus using both legal and
illegal methods. But even when he had returned to
Russia in 1917 with the slogan "All power to the
Soviets" many leaders of his own party thought
he'd gone crazy and he had to defend himself in
pamphlets such as "Can the bolsheviks hold state
power ?".

Jurriaan




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