Strategy (52 page)

The influence of the military debates of the past decades was evident as he tried to think of ways in which insurrectionists could operate as a successful army. The only way the balance of forces could be tilted in favor of the revolution was by playing on the doubts of troops about the cause for which they were fighting and encouraging them not to fire on their own people. In all other circumstances, the superior equipment and discipline of the regulars would prevail. It was always likely that poorly armed demonstrators would be outnumbered, but now army reserves could use the railways to rush to any trouble spot. Their arms would also be far more effective. Even city planners had been working against the revolution. Cities were now “laid out in long, straight, broad streets, tailor-made to give full effect to the new cannons and rifles.”

It would be difficult for the revolution to defend a single borough, never mind a whole town.

Concentration of the military forces at a decisive point is, of course, out of the question here. Hence passive defense is the predominant form of struggle; an attack will be mounted here and there, by way of exception, in the form of occasional thrusts and assaults on the flanks; as a rule, however, it will be limited to the occupation of positions abandoned by retreating troops.
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The only value of the barricade was in its moral rather than material effect, as a means of shaking the “steadfastness” of the military. This was another reason why revolutions could not be undertaken “by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness.” If the masses were not directly involved there was no chance.

By contrast, universal male suffrage had created real opportunities and the working classes, via the SPD, had taken full advantage. If the steady rise in the party's vote continued, “we shall grow into the decisive power in the land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like it or not.” The risk to the rise of socialism in Germany therefore would be “a clash on a grand scale with the military, a blood-letting like that of 1871 in Paris.” To avoid that, resources should be conserved. So Engels saw it as ironic that the “revolutionaries” and “overthrowers” were thriving far better on legal methods. It was the “parties of order” that were “perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves.” If the movement was “not so crazy as to
let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them,” it would be their opponents who would have to contemplate illegal action.

Engels privately was adamant that he could not advocate complete abstinence from force. He was annoyed at being presented as “a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price.”
²
He was of the view that when socialists acquired the sort of electoral strength that would justify them taking power, the government would clamp down. It might then be necessary to take to the streets. A couple of passages in his testament, which the party hierarchy feared were too inflammatory, referred to the need to avoid frittering away strength in “vanguard skirmishes” but to “keep it intact until the decisive day.” Rather than start the revolutionary process on the streets as a way of stimulating support, his view was that it would only be taken when the masses were fully behind the revolution, for this would be the time when the resolve of the government troops would be at its lowest. A few years earlier he had explained that he doubted that the SPD would be allowed to take power as a majority party. He gave ten to one odds that well before that point “our rulers” would “use violence against us, and this would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of revolution.”
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Marx's theory implied economic determinism, but as an activist he never denied the possibility of consequential action within the political sphere. Works such as
The Eighteenth Brumaire
made little sense unless it was recognized that the links between class interests and political action could be diffuse and distorted, and that poor choices caused revolutionary opportunities to be lost. Marx would not dismiss any setting, including parliamentary elections, where the cause of the working class might be promoted. His political judgments could be quite pragmatic even while he remained dogmatic in his underlying theory.

By insisting on the scientific basis of socialism, not a mere act of imagination but a causal theory, everything had to turn on how the working classes came to understand their situation and struggle against it. The key moment would come when the proletariat moved from being a class
in
itself to one
for
itself, grasping their full power and potential. One reading of Marx was that this should, somehow, happen naturally—almost spontaneously—as collective eyes were opened to the reasons for their misery and how all could be transformed. But what role did this leave for the party? Surges of popular anger and yearnings for a better life so often resulted in dashed hopes and
more persecution and misery. Radical movements either petered out or suddenly took a turn toward respectability, becoming part of the system rather than a means to its overthrow.

This was the curse of Marx, from which he personally suffered: a theory of inevitable, progressive change but one that could doom the activist to frustration. If the politics could never be right without the correct material base, what was the revolutionary politician to do? One answer was to wait until the conditions were right, building up strength until the moment eventually arrived and the working class was ready. The alternative was to find a way of accelerating the pace of change, creating conditions in which class consciousness could develop faster. The SPD as the most substantial and confident of all Marxist parties presented itself as having found the happy medium. The rise in class consciousness could be measured in the growth of party membership and steady successes in elections. There would be no mystery about when the moment of transition to socialism would come: the party would have majority support among the electorate. The risk was that successes in achieving improvements in workers' conditions would drain the movement of its revolutionary fervor, while the party would develop a stake in the system.

Marx and Engels had always put a far greater stress on a correct socialist program rather than a particular strategy. When the SPD was founded in 1875, they were furious with their acolytes, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, for merging with Ferdinand Lassalle's General German Workers' Association, which they disapproved of as reformist and unscientific. Marx accepted cooperation between the two parties but not the joint program, which he saw as an attempt to find common ground with the bourgeoisie, as if conflict was based on an unfortunate misunderstanding. It was vital not to “expunge the class struggle from the movement” or even hint at the possibility that workers were too uneducated to emancipate themselves and could only be freed by the bourgeoisie.
⁴
Three years later, Engels published a critique of the gradualist notions of the blind socialist philosopher, Eugen Dühring, who argued against the determinism of Marx and Engels and for self-governing cooperatives. This tract, known as
Anti-Duhring
, played a significant role in transmitting Marxism in an accessible form to a new generation of socialists. It urged the working class not to settle for second-best, not to rely on philanthropy when they deserved power.

In 1891, following the repeal of an antisocialist law, the SPD adopted the Erfurt Program, written by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. This still anticipated the end of capitalism but was prepared to pursue socialism through peaceful means. After Engels died it was Bernstein, his literary
executor, who began the process of adjusting revolutionary theory to reformist practice. He noted, contrary to Marx's predictions, that working-class conditions were not declining but improving. In 1898, he published
Evolutionary Socialism
, which, as the title suggested, concluded that revolution was unnecessary and that combinations of cooperatives, unions, and parliamentary representation allowed the progressive and benign transformation of society. He contrasted an intelligent, methodical, but slow process of historical development, depending on legislative activity. While revolutionary activity offered faster progress, it was based on feeling and depended on spontaneity. For Bernstein, “the movement [was] everything, the goal nothing.”

His erstwhile collaborator Karl Kautsky disagreed, presenting himself as a keeper of the true faith. As the leading exponent of Marxism in the leading party which embraced Marx, Kautsky was extraordinarily influential in shaping views about scientific socialism. His approach was plodding and unreflective, betraying no doubts about the essential correctness of Marxism and its broad application. Even after the turmoil of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, he never deviated from a set of views acquired at an early age. The science told Kautsky that socialism would develop as capitalism matured and classes polarized. He argued against Bernstein that the issue was not so much the increasing poverty of the workers but the sharpening of class antagonism. Eventually capitalism would be ripe for destruction and the proletariat could take power. Premature action could not lead to the destruction of capitalism. Exactly how the right moment could be properly recognized he never quite explained, nor how the seizure of power would actually occur. It would be a revolution, but its form was hard to judge in advance. His hope was that the more the working class prepared during the prerevolutionary struggles, the more likely the great event would pass peacefully. This left him claiming that SPD was a revolutionary party that saw no point in actually making a revolution.

In principle this made little sense. A party preparing for a long haul of gradual acquisition of power had educational and organizational tasks quite different from one geared to a “once-and-for-all act of violence.”
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Yet in terms of political strategy it made perfect sense. As the party's chief theoretician, Kautsky had hit upon a formula that followed Engels: dogmatic Marxism combined with cautious politics. It kept the revolutionaries in the fold but gave the authorities no excuse for repression. It was hard to argue with success. From 10 percent in the 1887 Reichstag elections, the social democrats polled almost double in 1890, getting up to over 30 percent by 1903. To understand the maturity of the class consciousness of the proletariat, one only had to observe the SPD's developing support.
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Rosa Luxemburg was a ferocious critic of the revisionists, but she was also wary about the complete identification of the worker's cause with the party. Though born in Russian-ruled Poland, she moved to Zurich after her radical politics got her into early trouble. There she gained a doctorate and then moved to Germany, soon establishing a reputation as brilliant but extreme in her views. She provided a unique link between the Russian and German parties and at different times was active in both, although that meant she also could be an outsider in both. She described herself as “thrice stigmatized: as a woman, as a Jew, and as a cripple.” As an intellectual, she introduced a complex proof of why capitalism was doomed economically. Her main impact, though, was as a theorist of socialist strategy and tactics. She was a lively writer, with a vivid turn of phrase, reflecting her conviction that readers must be enthused and inspired and her despair at the language of party articles: “The style is conventional, wooden, stereotypical …just a colorless, dull sound like that of a running engine.”
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Luxemburg's starting point was that workers would become increasingly socialist through struggle and experience. The task for a party was to help draw this out, but there was no need to impose the ideology from above. She was opposed to the very idea of a centralized, bureaucratic party. The real tactical innovations were not the organizational inventions of party leaders but the “spontaneous product of the movement in ferment.” Where there had been upsurges, “the initiative and conscious leadership of the Social Democratic organizations played an insignificant role.” She was aware of the potentially troubling implications of Engels's preface to
The Class Struggles in France
. This supported the legal struggle and rejected a rush to the barricades. She insisted, however, that Engels was referring to how the proletariat would struggle while confined by the capitalist state, not to the actual seizure of power. He had been “giving directions to the proletariat oppressed, and not to the proletariat victorious.” When the moment came, the proletariat would do whatever was necessary to secure the future of socialism. Only by falling for “Blanquism,” or a coup d'état, was there a risk of a premature seizure of power. So long as reliance was placed on the “great conscious popular mass,” then the moment would be right for power because, by definition, this could only have come about as a result of the “decomposition of bourgeois society.” It was impossible to believe that “a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.” The struggle would be a long one, no doubt with setbacks. What she found difficult to imagine was how
the struggle could proceed, or the point of victory be identified, without attacks on state power.
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She hit upon the idea of the mass strike as the best way to avoid the pitfalls of parliamentary reformism without risking all in a premature insurrection. Her inspiration came not from Germany but from Russia. In January 1905, there began in Russia the first serious uprising in a European country since the 1871 Commune. Against the backdrop of Russia's defeat in the war with Japan, and with the shooting of unarmed workers marching on the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the Tsar as the trigger, years of economic and political anger spilled over onto the streets. Numerous organizations, from workers' committees to trade unions, sprang up, reflecting the unrest and giving it expression. Soldiers and sailors mutinied, peasants seized land, and workers put up barricades. Luxemburg returned to Warsaw to play her part and emerged convinced that the true revolutionary method was the strike. This would be the spontaneous expression of an objective revolutionary condition, a deeply radicalizing process from which appropriate organizations would emerge. Class feeling would be awoken “as if by an electric shock.” Once a real, earnest period of mass strikes began, all calculations of cost would become “merely projects for exhausting the ocean with a tumbler.”
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