The Proud Tower (79 page)

Revisionists were not blind to the implications of abandoning the primacy of the class struggle. Nationalism was in the air and they felt its invigorating force. As Socialists they wanted to participate in national life, not to stay shut out, waiting for the promised collapse which never came. In the
Socialist Monthly
Bernstein used the English experience of imperialism and its relation to employment to argue that the fate of the working class was “indissolubly tied up” with the nation’s external affairs, that is, with its foreign markets. Labour’s interest, he said forthrightly, lay in a “
Weltpolitik
without war.”

While the Germans disputed at Dresden, Revision cut a historic schism among the Russian Social-Democrats, who held their own party Congress of sixty members that year in London. No
cas Millerand
or even knee-breeches appeared on their horizon, nevertheless they split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over the issue of collaboration in the future. The former insisted on revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat in one leap with no interim accommodation; the latter believed this could not be achieved until Russia had first passed through a bourgeois stage of parliamentary government during which Socialists would have to collaborate with the liberal parties.

As a member of the Second International, the Russian party was perennially represented at international Congresses by its founder, Georgi Plekhanov, who had lived so long in exile that he had lost touch with affairs inside his own country. Apart from him, the other Russians in exile had little or no contact with the Socialists in whose countries they lived. Absorbed in their own fierce factional quarrel they held their own Congresses with little role in the International. Moving through London, Paris, Geneva and Munich, Plekhanov’s rival, Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction, relentlessly poured out his denunciations of “opportunism” and “social-chauvinism.” Now and then he visited the Bureau at Brussels, but no one, wrote Vandervelde, paid much attention to this “little man with the narrow eyes, rusty beard and monotone voice, forever explaining with exact and glacial politeness the traditional Marxist formulas.”

Elsewhere the facts of political life were making a necessity of Revision whether the Marxists liked it or not. Industry was expanding, bringing with it a rise in trade-union membership which increased the lever of pressure in the hands of the working class. While the battle of capital and labour continued as fiercely as ever, the working class through the Socialist parties was enlarging its representation in every European Parliament. In Italy, where the peasants’ unions and agricultural cooperatives were strongly Socialist, the party increased from 26,000 votes and 6 seats in Parliament in 1892 to 175,000 votes and 32 seats in 1904. In France, Jaurès’ party, followed by the imprecations of Guesde and his followers, was performing a role in national life; and Jaurès himself was emerging as the real if not nominal leader of the Government’s majority in the Chamber. In the Socialist world he moved forward to challenge the domination of the great German monolith at the next Congress of the International, held in Amsterdam in August, 1904.

The duel of Jaurès and Bebel made the Amsterdam Congress remembered by everyone present as the most stimulating of all the meetings of the Second International. Five hundred delegates attended, of whom about two hundred at any one time understood the language of the speaker. The platform was draped in red stamped with a gold monogram of the initials I.S.C., which, with the
S
twining around the
I
bore a startling resemblance to a well-known symbol of capitalism. Overhead a banner bore in Dutch the device on which everyone could still agree,
Proletaariers van alle Landen, Vereinigt U!
(Workers of the World, Unite!)

Factions were multiple. Britain had four delegations: the ILP led by Keir Hardie, the Socialist-Democratic Federation by Hyndman, the Labour Representation Committee by Shackleton, and a Fabian group. France had three delegations and the United States two, with the inevitable De Leon casting his scorn on all. He disapproved of the “social and picnic” aspect of the Congress, of delegates rustling papers and conversing and walking about during speeches, visiting with foreign friends, introducing one to another, arriving and departing and slamming doors. He pronounced Jaurès an “unqualified nuisance in the Socialist movement,” Bebel its “evil genius,” Adler “absurd,” Vandervelde a “comedian,” Hyndman “too dull” to understand what was going on, the British trade unionists “disastrous,” Shackleton a “capitalist placeman,” and Jean Allemane a “flannel-mouthed blatherskite.” The only party which did not betray the working class by “revisionist flapdoodlism” was his own, whose attitude at all times was “sword drawn, scabbard thrown away.”

Cooperation was the question to be settled, placed on the agenda by demand of Guesde. Bebel’s object was to impose the Dresden Resolution of the German party upon the International. It provided, he said, the correct guidance for Socialists at all times in all circumstances since it stated the fundamental antagonism between the proletarian and the capitalist state. He took occasion to cite the growing strength of the German party. Jaurès retorted that if Socialists were as strong as that in France, they would “make something happen.” Between the appearance of German strength and the reality of their influence, he said, launching upon a major offensive, there was a startling contrast. Why? Because “there is no revolutionary tradition among your workers. They never conquered universal suffrage on the barricades. They received it from above.” All the deputies in the Reichstag were powerless, for the Reichstag was itself powerless in any case. It was the very helplessness of the German Socialists which enabled them to take an uncompromising stand on doctrine. What weighed most heavily upon Europe now was not the bold attempt of French Socialists to play a part in their national life, “but the tragic impotence of German Social Democracy.” Passionately he defended his main thesis: that Socialists without abandoning principle must be the “marching wing” of democratic progress, even if necessary in liaison with bourgeois parties.

“Certainly Germany is a reactionary, feudal, police state, the worst governed country in Europe” except for Turkey and Russia, Bebel replied, “but we scarcely need anyone from the outside to tell us how dismal our conditions are.” Jaurès’ policy, he said, would corrupt the proletariat. The Dresden Resolution was the only safe guide. Shrilly Rosa Luxemburg denounced Jaurès as “
der grosse Verderber
” (the great corrupter). When he stood up to reply, asking who would translate for him, she answered, “I will, if you like, Citizen Jaurès.” Looking around with a broad smile Jaurès said, “You see, Citizens, even in battle there is collaboration.”

Refusing to give up the principle of class war, the majority voted for the Dresden Resolution against Jaurès, combining, as Vandervelde said, doctrinal enmity with personal sympathy. “We remembered the Dreyfus Affair” and the “magnificent ardor” of Jaurès’ great battle against the accumulated forces of reaction, but the majority could not nerve themselves to cut the umbilical cord to Marx. In a final effort to close the rifts of Revision, the Congress adopted a last resolution stating it to be “indispensable” to have only one Socialist party in each country henceforth. All who claimed the name of Socialist must work for unity in the interest of the working classes of the world, to whom they would be responsible for “the mortal consequences of a continuance of their divisions.”

A problem that had not yet been their main concern made a tentative appearance at Amsterdam. With the echo of the Russo-Japanese War in their ears, delegates discussed working-class responsibility to society in the event of another war and the feasibility of a general strike. German Marxist ardor cooled at the very word. To talk general strike was one thing; to get the unions to act on it quite another. So far as the German trade unions were concerned, the “political mass strike,” as they called it, was anathema. If the Fatherland were attacked, said Bebel, old as he was, he with every other Social-Democrat would shoulder a rifle and fight to defend his country. Looking very grave, Jaurès said to Vandervelde on their way out, “I think, my friend, I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.”

On his return home, as a loyal Socialist in obedience to the Amsterdam decision, he moved back toward a rapprochement with Guesde, reuniting the two parties in the following year as the Socialist Party, French Section of the Workers’ International, commonly called, from its French initials, the SFIO. It declared itself to be “not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution” and verbally repudiated collaboration. Although this was a defeat for his position, Jaurès did not make a fetish of words. He let doctrine follow action and could the more easily concede formula to Guesde since he himself was the real leader of the union. Cooperation for him was not an end in itself but an avenue of action.

For some it proved indeed the corrupter in a political sense. In 1906, the same year in which the ILP entered the House of Commons and John Burns the Cabinet, French Socialists polled 880,000 votes and won fifty-four seats in the Chamber. Briand, who had been active in the matter of disestablishing the religious schools, was offered the post of Minister of Education. He accepted and in the ensuing bitterness left the party. A few months later Viviani followed him into office as Minister of Labour. Together with Millerand, who now called himself an Independent Socialist, they held a succession of offices from now on, with Briand reaching the premiership within three years and Viviani five years later. Carrying cooperation to its logical extreme, they became, as Ambassador Izvolsky said, “reasonable through the exercise of power.”

In 1905 the great Marxist event, Revolution, suddenly took place—in the wrong way in the wrong country. Russia had not reached the highly industralized stage which Marx had predicated as necessary for collapse. The rising was not the work of a self-conscious disciplined proletariat but simply of exasperated human beings. No one was surprised that it failed, but the most extraordinary aspect of its passage was that it left Socialism virtually untouched.

All over the world people were horrified by the Cossacks’ shooting down of workers on their march to the Winter Palace with their petition to the Czar. When news of the “fiendish massacre” was heard at a Trade Union Congress in Liverpool, the immediate reaction was to raise a fund of £1,000 for the families of the murdered men. When the Russian workers’ protest became a general strike in October, forcing the regime in its fright to grant a Constitution, the event created a profound impression as a triumph of the working class. Workers in Europe held mass meetings, cheered and waved red flags. “Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live Socialism!” shouted Italian peasants fifteen hundred miles from St. Petersburg. But no spark from the Russian fire ignited a general conflagration. The long-awaited spontaneous uprising had occurred, but no Western working class was prepared to overthrow capitalism. Only the Austrian Socialists alertly used the example to bring to a climax their campaign for universal suffrage.

Seizing the opportunity to work on the fright inspired in the rulers by Russian events, Viktor Adler in Vienna proclaimed a general strike for November 28. He worked on the preparations for a month in advance. One party member in a factory where the workers were not Socialists could not bring them to join; no one would talk about the Revolution or the proposed strike or “touch a political subject with a ten-foot pole.” The demonstration, however, was a success. In Vienna, the Mariahilferstrasse was black with thousands of marchers packed so tightly that it took an hour to cover the half mile to the Ringstrasse, where the parade was joined by even greater crowds from other districts of the city. The tramp of the masses, the clenched fists, the red flags, raised again the terrible vision of Mme Hennebau in
Germinal
. The Austrian regime, frightened by the demonstrations, yielded the promise of manhood suffrage, which went into effect in 1907, virtually the only positive result of the Russian rising.

German Social-Democrats, too, arranged demonstrations for reform of the electoral system in Prussia, which was organized according to the tax roll. The great number of small taxpayers at the base who paid the same total amount as the fewer middle third and as the very few rich at the top were not permitted to elect more than one-third of the local representatives. The Socialists always elected their full third of the municipal councils, but even when they had the votes, could never win control. Nor, confirming Jaurès’ taunt, could they win it on the barricades. Against the steel of the Prussian government, their demonstrations won no improvements.

One effect of the Russian revolution was to lose the Socialists votes. In the German election of 1907 middle-class voters represented by the Progressive party, which previously, when it came to a choice, had supported the Social-Democrats in preference to the reactionary parties, voted for the Conservative candidate. They were influenced too by heavy propaganda of the Navy and Pan-German Leagues, who wanted the election to register an overwhelming mandate for nationalism and imperialism. In the “Hottentot Election,” as it was called from the current war in Germany’s African colonies, the Socialists for the first time since 1890 lost seats.

Leon Trotsky, despairing at the repression under which the Russian revolution now seemed “hopelessly and permanently trampled,” was struck by the lack of interest among the European Socialists. Meeting Kautsky in 1907, a small, delicate man with clear blue eyes and snow-white hair and beard who looked like “a very kind grandpapa” though only fifty-three, he found him “hostile to the transfer of revolutionary methods to German soil.” On paper, revolution had a lovely glow; the reality in the streets was less welcome. The abortive experience in Russia revealed that the Western working class on the whole wanted no part of it. As a result, Revision was encouraged and Revision signified the further from class, the nearer to nationalism.