Posted on

The Propertied and the Propertyless by Anton Pannekoek

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original text in German can be found here.

Gerd Arntz, Strike, 1936

Anton Pannekoek is well-known as one of the principal theorists of council communism, a man who broke from both the traditions of Kautskyist social democracy as well as Bolshevism. By 1935, this break had crystallized into a clear attitude against the party as an instrument for working-class liberation: “a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class.”1 However, Pannekoek was very much a child of orthodox Second International Social Democracy, and a self-described pupil of Karl Kautsky, just as much as Lenin was. By presenting a translation of this short text, I hope to emphasize the Social Democratic inheritance of Pannekoek and the continuities of council communism with radical readings of Karl Kautsky.

The essay ‘The Propertied and the Propertyless’ was originally published in the SPD paper Leipziger Volkszeitung and eventually compiled as one of seven essays in a pamphlet Der Kampf der Arbeiter (The Struggle of Workers) in 1907. Much of Pannekoek’s early career in German Social Democracy resulted from his close friendship with Kautsky. After the German authorities prevented Pannekoek from taking up his position at the SPD Party School, it was Kautsky who found him alternative positions, including writing a weekly column for socialist newspapers. Kautsky’s aid hence embedded him into the German socialist movement and Pannekoek eventually moved to Bremen, where he was part of ordinary party life.

It would be wrong to construe this as simply a close personal friendship: Kautsky and Pannekoek shared a political outlook about the world. Both were representatives of the last great generation of scientific socialism. This was not ‘scientific’ in the sense of a vulgar determinism in which one keeps vigil for the final set of statistics that make revolution inevitable, but scientific in that it posited hypotheses and demanded proofs, one had to show their working when they claimed to solve the formula of social change. An amusing article in the SPD’s satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob in 1912 aptly illustrated their affinity in approach, even when their conclusions differed. In an imaginary debate about fashion, Kautsky writes a beautiful chapter about the “genesis of trousers” in the emergence of humanity, ending with the proposition that had Adam had trousers, he may not have bitten into the fatal apple. Pannekoek, who had witnessed the conversations with Kautsky, reproaches Kautsky for having overestimated the role of trousers as a Marxist.2

This exchange mirrored the real split between Kautsky and Pannekoek that first became public in 1911-12 (one may note that Pannekoek split with Kautsky somewhat later than Rosa Luxemburg did) in a debate in Die Neue Zeit about mass action, in light of the 1911 strikes in England. Kautsky outlined a perspective in which the development of capitalism causes the emergence of mass actions by periodically creating conditions of extended unemployment, taxation pressure, inflation, and war.3 However, the development of the organized proletarian masses, through the institutions of Social-Democracy and the trade unions, changed the character of mass actions to ensure both that defeat is not a disaster and that victories are enjoyed by the proletariat, and not exploited by a faction of the enemy. Yet Kautsky’s case against embracing spontaneous mass actions as a tactical principle is simple: they are completely unpredictable and hence nothing can be said about what is to be done when they arise in advance, the party can only ensure that it is not caught off guard by them, by building up its own understanding of state and society and power.

What marks Pannekoek’s response to this analysis is his own disappointment with a great master of Marxism. In his view, although no one had proven the significance of Marxist theory as much as Kautsky did in his historical writing, in this instance Kautsky had “left the Marxist tools at home” and hence obtained no result.4 For Pannekoek, contemporary mass action differentiated itself from the mass actions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because the class who carried it out had changed: from bourgeois to proletarian. The distinction between the unorganized and organized is irrelevant, as many of the unorganized are capable of the same proletarian discipline and solidarity through the conditions of their work. In Pannekoek’s most cutting perspective, Kautsky “is not doing himself justice” in claiming he is unable to ascribe a particular political character to the masses when he has successfully done so for parliamentary politics.

It becomes clear that Pannekoek’s first critiques of Kautsky’s Marxism emerged from wanting to push it beyond its limits and seek to apply it to new scenarios. Pannekoek’s ultimate conclusion in 1912 was that the party must instigate revolutionary action at the right moment, not when the masses can simply no longer be held back, but when the conditions mean that large-scale actions by the masses have a chance of success. Only later disillusionments turned him away from the party form altogether. There is much merit in Pannekoek’s objection to Kautsky that one has not determined very much at all if the determination is that the masses are unpredictable. Yet it was clear that Pannekoek’s own formulas didn’t hold up in the light: the masses by no means tend towards radicalism in all cases, and there has been no guarantee that they would rise against war. In their final parting of ways, both Kautsky and Pannekoek sought a more rigorous application of a Marxist framework they shared from each other.

This translation demonstrates the analytical clarity that this Marxist framework had to offer at its strongest.

The political struggle that the socialist working class leads and of which every election campaign is an episode is not in the first instance a struggle about particular political institutions and legal demands, but instead a universal struggle between the propertied and propertyless class. To understand it correctly, it is necessary to take a close look at the combatants, the causes, and the aims of this struggle.

According to this classification of both of the parties in conflict, it may appear that the ownership of money or income is the basis for class division. This is how it’s often understood by our bourgeois opponents. They take income or assets statistics in their hands, draw a few lines that separate the low from the middle incomes and the middle from the high incomes, and believe that they’ve obtained an insight into the class relations of the present-day. Even more comically, they do this when they present a statistic from the Middle Ages or the eighteenth century and from this prove that there were proportionately just as many low, middle and high incomes at the time as there are now and with this they believe they have refuted the concentration of capital, the demise of the middle class and the escalation of class contradictions.

These poor jokers, who want to demonstrate away the obvious facts of the great social upheaval in this way, clearly don’t have the faintest idea of what a social class actually is. A class is not a group of people that have the same size of income, it is instead a group of people who fulfill a particular function economically in social production. We say ‘economically’ so that you don’t fall for the idea that the technical side of work is understood as the social function. A weaver and a typographer professionally have a different function, technically their work is varied, but economically they are both waged workers and belong to the same class.

In the manifold diversity of the social production process it is no wonder that a colorful picture of the most diverse social classes appeals to the eye. In industry, capitalist employers stand against waged workers; from this universal fundamental relationship, different class relationships are built up, according to the scale of the industry. The independent craftsman concurs with the capitalists that he is an independent businessman, but he employs no waged workers. And the small masters of artisanal small enterprises, just like shopkeepers, are even described in colloquial language as separate from the large-scale capitalists, as the middle class. Their difference consists in the smaller number of workers and the smaller amount of capital, without it being possible to identify firm boundaries between the two groups. In large industry, a group of overseers and technical work managers slide in between the capitalists and the workers. The high technical and scientific demands placed on today’s large and giant conglomerates have called into being a class of private technical and scientific officials that form the ‘intelligentsia’ alongside similar and equally-placed public officials. Economically they belong to wage workers as even they sell their labor power—a special intellectual labor power trained by long studies and better paid—for wages. The higher level of wages, i.e. their very different living standards, again separates them from workers. At the same time, the development of large industry has effected a separation between the industrial entrepreneur, who lives off profits, and the owners of money, who live off interests, through the vast amounts of capital that it demands. In the stock company, a paid official even steps into the role of the employer, the director. The double function of the capitalist, to direct production and to pocket the surplus-value, has been divided between two types of people. However, all finance capitalists cannot be lumped together, just like all industrial capitalists. According to their size, a differentiation persists like in the world of fish in the sea: the big devour the little. A little rentier is as much a finance capitalist as a member of high finance, but to these stock market wolves he is a stock market lamb as it were and hence his social role is another one.

If we now take a look at agriculture, we find the same gradations, even if not in exactly the same way, as in industry. Only a class is added here, because the landowners, through their monopoly, can extract a ground rent from the yield of agriculture without playing any active role.You have dwarf peasants, small farmers, medium and large farmers and farmworkers. Here the hybrid and transitional forms are emerging that confuse the picture of social classes to an untrained eye. The agricultural workers often have a small plot of land, while owners of smaller plots of land, too small to live off, seek additional income as agricultural or even industrial workers. They are hence simultaneously independent landlords and wage workers. In the home industry we find supposedly independent craftsmen that are totally dependent, body and soul, upon capitalist businessmen. That the legal form of waged service doesn’t suffice to ascertain class is shown by the numerous transitions from the paid director to the worker, via subdirector, head of department, chief engineer, technician, draughtsman, supervisor. Here one will often be at a loss to define precisely, in the gradual transitions, which class distinctions one must accept and where their boundaries lie.

So social life offers a colorful picture of the most diverse classes whose functions, and hence interests, directly show sharp contradictions and enormous differences and even gradual transitions. Isn’t this picture a resounding refutation of our assertion that only two classes stand against each other in the social struggle? And doesn’t a look at the varied functions of classes immediately show that the definition of two groups, only according to their assets is unscientific and unsustainable— a fictitious assertion only for the purpose of demagogic sedition?

No. This definition is substantiated in the social order in its deepest essence. It emerges from the specific role that money plays since the advent of capitalism. All money has the characteristic of being able to work as capital, i.e. when the owner buys the means of production with it, rents workers, and sells the commodities they produced, it comes back in their hands as more money, as larger, as capital blessed by surplus-value. They do not even have to do it themselves, with the greatest pleasure others will take away the stress and worries of running a business and pay them part of the profit as interest for the use of their capital. Money has acquired the characteristic of bringing its owner interest through capitalism. Whoever has access to money can hence secure an income without any work.

This income comes from surplus-value which formed in the process of production. The working class brings into being vast quantities of value through their work; they only receive a part of it back as wages. The remainder is surplus-value which falls to the capitalists. This surplus value must be distributed amongst the different capitalists and groups of capitalists because they all live from it. The landowners demand their share, the businessmen and middlemen ask for their share, the directors and highly paid industrial managers take their piece, the finance capitalists obtain their interest or dividends. They fight amongst themselves about the distribution of surplus-value. The distribution is partly decided by economic laws and partly by political power balances. What matters to us here is the fact that all those who have money are thereby entitled to a certain extent to some of the surplus-value, provided of course that they do not hide it in an old stocking like the former misers. The surplus-value is created by the exploitation of the lower classes whose work produces that surplus; all those classes who share the surplus value among themselves together form a great society of exploitation, and everyone who has money is thereby, by the grace of Mammon, a shareholder in this excellent corporation.

This is the reason we can speak about a great class contradiction between the propertied and the propertyless. It is because these words are synonymous with the exploiting and the exploited classes. Whoever doesn’t own anything is forced to sell their labour-power to the owners of the means of production, i.e. indirectly to the owners of capital, in order to live. These capital owners give them a wage for long and hard work, which only suffices for a poor living standard, and the remainder of the worker’s produced value goes into their pockets. Whoever does not own anything must allow themselves to be exploited, the private ownership of the means of production cuts them off from any other way out. The situation remains mainly the same even when the worker owns a little bit of money, the interest of which forms a small subsidy to their wages. Even if they have money at the bank, they are still not exploiters. In this interest, they only gain a tiny little piece of the great mass of surplus-value which is squeezed out of the entire working class, and this little bit doesn’t even come into view next to the surplus-value they contribute to the total mass by their own wage labor. They increase surplus value and are exploited, they find themselves in the same situation as their comrades. And as a rule, they regard this money not as capital but as a saving fund by which they will meet their needs in the case of unemployment or accidents. 

But as soon as the wealth exceeds a certain level, it enables the owner to live from exploitation instead of his own work, modestly if he is a small rentier or entrepreneur, lavishly if he is one of the rich. As much as there are class differences among these people, as much as they perform different active or passive functions in the exploitation process, as much as they still struggle with each other for their share of the spoils – the reason why their property is not always secure – they do have a common interest because they are all participants in the exploitation. In the great social opposition between exploiters and exploited, the size of the fortunes within the community of exploiters is not important. Equally, it follows from this discussion that we do not claim that society consists only of these two large groups. There is a layer between them, of which it is impossible to say whether it is closer to one or the other group, such as a peasant who exploits workers and are themselves exploited by the landlord, or a civil servant who receives a mediocre salary. How they will stand in the great political struggle can only be determined from a particular examination of their class situation. But for the greater masses of people and classes, in the vast political struggle their various specific social functions will stand behind the basic question of whether they belong to the propertied or the propertyless, that is, to the exploited or the exploited.

 

Posted on

Against Socialist Reactionaries: a response to Jacob Richter

Rosa Janis responds to Jacob Richter’s April 9th, 2020 letter to Cosmonaut on social conservatism and the left. 

Normally we do not respond to letters that are sent to us. However, Jacob Richter’s recent letter, which is more of a short article, merits a response for a number of reasons. The sentiments expressed are, to put it bluntly, a deadly spew. This poison of “anti-idpol” social conservatism is spreading quite quickly among certain parts of the socialist movement in the wake of the defeat of both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It’s always easier to scapegoat others than applying Marxist analysis to political failures. We are forced to respond to this sentiment both on the level of our political commitments as Communists towards general social progress as well as on the personal level of two people on the Cosmonaut editorial board being trans women (myself included) who would be affected negatively by a tolerance toward social conservatism in our movement. Also, while we welcome disagreement among comrades, it is particularly disappointing that Richter would express such reactionary sentiments, as he was an early proponent of the “neo-kautskyism” that influenced us. Despite taking a polemical tone here, we genuinely hope that he and those who hold similar views can be reasoned with. 

Does Reaction have a class character? 

Richter claims that social conservatism can be divided into two distinct categories of class character: proletarian and petit-bourgeois. The difference between these two categories of social conservatism can be traced out through empirical data that has been gathered by mainstream social scientists like Thomas Piketty. While it’s impossible to deny that there are reactionary sentiments common among the working class, to argue that there is social conservatism with particular class characteristics is an abuse of class analysis. At first glance it may be obvious that certain social conservative sentiments have a working-class basis, with anti-immigrant sentiment tied to working-class fears about being replaced by illegal immigrants who are willing to work at starvation wages. However, this is one of the few examples where It can appear to be as clear-cut as this. The vast majority of reactionary sentiments cut across class. For example, racism was practically universal among American whites before and during the Civil Rights Movement. In a Gallup poll from 1963, 78% of the white participants said they would move out if a black family moved into their neighborhood, while 60% said that they disapproved of the marches of MLK while a plurality of Americans thought the Civil Rights Movement was made up of Communists. Although it could be argued that the white population the United States at the time were unevenly proletarianized and consisted of a large labor aristocracy (a claim one can dismiss as cheap Maoism), this reality leaves one in a particularly sticky situation, as whites were the majority of workers in the United States and expressed racist attitudes. Therefore, according to this logic it makes sense to say that racism at the time had a working-class character, making it possible to rationalize racism in workerist terms. The introduction of more blacks and women into the workforce drastically reduced the wages of white men since such minority workers were willing to work for less, meaning the worker’s movement in the United States accommodated racist and sexist views on numerous occasions. However, racist attitudes were nearly universal among the white population of all classes. The same can be said for a number of different forms of prejudice ranging from sexism to homophobia. 

If these sentiments are not born out of a particular class character, then where do they come from? For this, I will give you the standard Marxist answer which was best articulated by the great theorist Louis Althusser: these reactionary sentiments only come to be thought of as common sense throughout society because they are spread through the social practices of ideological state apparatuses such as the church, the school, media, etc. Ideology, spread through the social practices of such institutions, unconsciously reinforces the status quo of capitalism. One might point out that such civil institutions have been weakened by the advancement of neoliberal capitalism, yet this does not mean that said institutions do not exist in their entirety, but rather only in weaker forms. Thus, we see weaker and less universal forms of these reactionary sentiments. 

It could even be argued that social conservative sentiments are more common among the petty-bourgeois than they are among working-class People. Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital and ideology argues that social progressivism correlates the views of “professional-managerial class” but Thomas is not using a Marxist understanding of class to analyze class politics. The professional-managerial class is not a class unto itself but rather a subsection of a larger petty-bourgeoisie. When this fact is taken into account we get a much different picture of the social politics of class. The petty-bourgeois in the United States consistently votes for the Republican party on average, with your average Trump voter having a significantly higher income than even the majority of Hillary supporters. This preference towards social conservatism among the petty-bourgeois can be explained by the fact that the ideological state apparatuses of civil society are more well-funded and operational among the petty-bourgeois then they are among the proletariat. The proletariat is more likely to be politically apathetic rather than socially conservative. They might express reactionary or progressive sentiments but these do not amount to a meaningful ideological commitment to social conservatism. So, in a certain sense, it could be said that social reaction, in general, does have a particular class character. However, when it was in its prime it was a universal ideology across classes and in the current moment, it more strongly correlates to the petty-bourgeois than the proletariat. 

Historical responses to Social Reaction 

Since Richter brought up the history of the SPD and Stalin in relation to social conservatism it would be relevant to talk about the particularities of their responses to social conservatism among the working-class. While the SPD in many respects was “conservative” on social issues such as prostitution and gambling, to label them socially conservative would be somewhat mistaken. The “socially conservative” positions that the SPDtook when they were still an authentically socialist mass party were rooted in Marxist rather than conservative reasoning. Prostitution and gambling were opposed not because of the cheap moralism of the petit-bourgeois concerned about the impurity of such acts but because they took advantage of working-class and surplus population poverty by selling people into sexual slavery and debt. The SPD was also willing to push against the prevalent social reactionary sentiments of the time. On 13 January 1898, the great Marxist August Bebel stood before the German Parliament to advocate for the decriminalization of sodomy, arguing clearly and concretely against Victorian social conservatism in favor of a scientific understanding of human sexuality. He would also sign a petition put out by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, an early LGBT advocate group. 

Compare the SPD response to homophobia to that of the USSR. Initially, with the abolition of the laws of tsarist Russia, there was a small opening for social progress on the issues of sexuality in the Soviet Union since anti-sodomy laws were effectively gone in certain parts of the Federation. This, along with a number of members of the party like Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, commissar of Health, actively pushed for a scientific understanding of homosexuality to be the official policy of the USSR. Leading a team of Soviet scientists to meet members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany, Nikolai Aleksandrovich and a small number of Bolsheviks within the party opened up the possibility of genuine progress during this brief moment. However, with the rise of Stalin, things changed rapidly and in an attempt to appeal to the peasantry Stalin put forward a series of socially conservative policies that would not only set back the small bits of progress made by gay rights activists but also the advances of women and ethnic minorities within the USSR. Stalin was particularly vicious towards homosexuals, imprisoning homosexuals en masse in a witch hunt to take down a supposed fascist pederast conspiracy. After everything was said and done the Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko rationalized Stalin’s anti-gay pogrom as being class warfare against the remnants of the effeminate aristocracy. The same sort of story would repeat in other supposedly socialist nations with the notable exceptions of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. 

The worst elements of reaction within the worker’s movement have always been justified as a means of appealing to a socially conservative working-class, leaving oppressed minorities within the working class defenseless against pseudo-democratic demagogues. Social conservatism in the workers’ movement has always been rationalized by appealing to a proletarian class character. As a result, if we were to accept Richter’s arguments, we would have to accept the darkest aspects of our own history as authentic class positions. 

Minorities and the Minimum Program

Coming back around to Richter’s initial argument, he seems to be making less of a claim about what issues working-class people happen to be socially conservative than arbitrarily labeling certain positions petit-bourgeois social conservatism as opposed to proletarian. This arbitrary division leaves open a non-scientific approach to this issue and opens the door for simply rationalizing personal bigotry by throwing on the label of class character. This is exemplified by the offhand mentioning of Paul Cockshott’s reactionary views on gender as an example of social-conservatism with a proletarian class character. Cockshott’s views on gender, whatever the merits of the rest of his work, are especially abhorrent in their hatred of transgender identity and belief in homosexuality as bourgeois deviance. To suggest such views are an example of proletarian class positions is personally insulting to the transwomen on the editorial board of Cosmonaut and also seems bluntly absurd when one looks at the specific details of the trans issue. The bulk of anti-trans sentiment is AstroTurf by conservative think-tanks in both the United States and the UK while among the working class general acceptance of LGBT people is popular. The majority of people who identify as LGBT are working class and young according to recent Gallup polling. Expecting a party of the working class to accommodate the bigotry of petty-bourgeois boomers with reactionary views on gender like Paul Cockshott is asinine, to put it bluntly.

 

Even if trans acceptance was not popular among the working class it would not matter because we are not vulgar workerists. We understand the role of the mass party as leading the working class towards proletarian politics which means we will often have to cut against the grain of what is popular among working-class people. The Party must uphold the Democratic rights of minority groups such as women, oppressed races/nationalities, and LGBT people as a part of the minimum program. Through this commitment to social progress, the party molds the consciousness of the working class towards genuinely proletarian politics. 

 

Posted on

Fighting Fascism: Communist Resistance to the Nazis, 1928-1933

The failure of the German left to unite against Hitler is often used as a warning to those who fail to build unity with liberals in order to stop the far-right. Why did the German Communists and Social-Democrats not unite against the Nazis? John K argues not all blame can be placed on the Communists for their failure to build a proper united front, as their uneasy relationship with the Social-Democrats was based on the treacherous behavior of the Social-Democrats themselves. We publish this despite believing that the reductionist and ultra-left politics promoted by the Stalin-dominated Comintern deserve heavy critique and that ultimately the party made major strategic and political errors in leading the working class with its lack of democratic flexibility and exercise. 

Meeting of the Roter Frontkämpferbund, or Red Front, a Communist paramilitary group in Berlin 1928.

On the night of February 27th, 1933 in Nazi Germany, not even one month after Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the Reichstag, home of Germany’s parliament, was destroyed in a fire. This fire, an act of arson, was a pivotal and tragic moment for the German left. In Hitler’s “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State,” issued the following day “as a defensive measure against Communist Acts of violence endangering the state,” the Communists were blamed for the terrorist act.1

With this decree, Hitler began a process that effectively crushed any and all potential political resistance to the Nazi regime. The left, not just the German Communist Party, but also the German Socialist Party which had enjoyed national prominence during the Weimar Republic years, was silenced. In a matter of months following the decree, Germany’s political left was assaulted by the Nazi state, and its leaders sent to Concentration Camps or into exile. In the months and years leading up to the Nazi triumph over the left, a unified right developed in Germany while the left remained divided. In particular, the Communists ( the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) was never willing to work in an alliance with the Social-Democrats ( the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD). While both parties drew on Marxism for their ideological platform, the more radical KPD considered the SPD to be a social fascist enemy. Thus, while the right was unifying behind the Nazis during the 1928-1933 period, the KPD devoted its resources to fighting both the Social-Democrats and the Nazis.

Why did the KPD adopt such a course of action? Many scholars, such as Beatrix Herlemann argue that the KPD had evolved, by the late 1920s, into a Stalinist party whose interests were subservient to the orders of the Communist International. As Herlemann argues, the KPD “followed without reservation the Comintern’s political line – namely the “social fascism” thesis launched in 1928 to 1929, by which the KPD directed its entire force toward the fight against social democracy and enormously neglected the growing danger of National Socialism.”2 The view taken by Herlemann is not without merit. The KPD leadership did advocate action against the SPD, and even reached out to Nazi rank-and-file workers for an alliance against the SPD Union leadership.3 

It is wrong, however, to assume that the KPD devoted all of its resources to a fight against the SPD and neglected the Nazi threat. On the contrary, most of the political violence practiced by the KPD during 1928-1933 was directed against the Nazis, not the Socialists. It is also incorrect to assume that the divide between the KPD and the SPD was entirely motivated by the orders of the Comintern. Certainly, the Comintern heavily influenced the KPD’s course of action, but deep divisions had existed between the KPD and the SPD from the very day that the KPD became a political entity. Further, the differences between the two parties were not merely ideological. KPD and SPD membership came from different economic spheres, they lived in different neighborhoods, and they experienced the Weimar Republic in different ways. The SPD, for much of the Republic’s existence, was one of the main parties of government. When the KPD accused the SPD of Social Fascism, they were not targeting another radical left party; they were focusing their criticisms on one of the most powerful political entities in the Republic. Related to this, the SPD had in its position of power pursued repressive tactics against the KPD. Thus, the KPD’s view of the SPD as social fascists was not merely the result of ideological dogmatism but was in fact shaped by the actual experience of the KPD in the Weimar Republic.

To fully understand the schism between the KPD and the SPD, one must turn to the fall of Imperial Germany at the end of the First World War in 1918, and the revolutionary period that followed, before turning to the formation of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Before the First World War, the Marxist left was united as the SPD. By the time the Great War began, the SPD was the most popular political party in Germany and had gained more seats than any other political party in the Reichstag. The unified SPD, however, was internally divided between those who wanted to achieve the party’s ideological goals through participation in the government and those who wanted to actively pursue Revolution. The tension between these two groups erupted after SPD delegates to the Reichstag, representing the more moderate wing of the party, voted unanimously in favor of Germany entering the First World War. The more radical elements of the party that opposed this action, who were eventually cast out of the SPD in 1917, became the genesis for the KPD.

As Revolution erupted in Germany once it became clear that the war was lost, the more radical group of Marxists, calling themselves Spartacus League, issued their November 26th Manifesto declaring that “the revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of the soldier, who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse… and the masses of workers… have revolted.”4 While the Spartacus League declared a revolution, the majority of the SPD continued to work with the crumbling German State. The split between Germany’s left, apparent with the issuance of the Spartacus Leagues Manifesto, became final when Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg authored the “Founding Manifesto of the Communist Party of Germany, [KPD].” In the manifesto, Luxemburg declared “that it is time to shake ourselves [the KPD] free of the views that have guided the official policy of the German social democracy down to our own day, of the views that share responsibility for what happened on August 4, 1914.”5 Luxemburg further asserted that “what passed officially for Marxism [in the SPD] became a cloak for all possible kinds of opportunism, for persistent shirking of the revolutionary class struggle, for every conceivable half measure.”6

As can be seen, it was not simply the orders of the Communist International that spurred the KPD into opposing the SPD. The Party’s very birth came as a result of profound disagreements within the German left: disagreements that were not simply theoretical, but deeply political in the form of the more moderate elements of the SPD’s support for German involvement in the First World War. During the revolutionary period and the early Weimar Republic years, the KPD also experienced oppression and violence as a result of SPD actions. Historian Eve Rosenhaft notes that after the Weimar Republic was established, the radical left, including the KPD revolted, “demanding… socialist programmes…. Freikorps and paramilitary police under Social Democratic administration put down the disturbances in two months of bloody fighting.”7 Historian Eric D. Weitz similarly notes that “the SPD’s alliance with the police, the army, and the employers undermined its popular support, which redounded in part to the benefit of the KPD.”8 Of equal importance is Rosenhaft’s assessment that “the political division between the Communists and the Social Democrats that had emerged between 1917 and 1919 was reinforced by increasing divergences between the interests of different sections of the working class.” 9 The wealthier, more skilled proletariat joined the SPD while semi-skilled laborers became the rank-and-file members of the KPD. Thus, when one examines the later actions of the KPD’s declaration of the SPD as Social Fascists, one must understand that the reasoning did not suddenly develop as a result of the Comintern’s policy directives, but that the KPD had actually experienced oppression from the SPD. The KPD had evidence of the SPD working with the right and conceding fundamental goals of socialism, whereas it had yet to experience the far more brutal repression of the Nazis.

The 1929 Program of the Communist International, issued as the Nazis were beginning to gain significant national prominence, outlined the Social Fascism concept that would prevent the KPD from uniting with the SPD in opposition to the Nazis. The program detailed the attempts of the Proletariat to ferment revolution in the wake of the First World War, which led to the creation of the USSR but also the defeat of the Communist left in a number of other countries, such as Germany. The program declared that “these defeats were primarily due to the treacherous tactics of the social democratic and reformist trade union leaders” as well as the fact that Communism was just starting to become a popular political ideology.10 The Comintern further argued that “Fascism strives to permeate the working class by recruiting the most backward strata of workers to its ranks by playing upon their discontent, by taking advantage of the inaction of social democracy.”11 The Comintern also asserted that “in the process of development social democracy reveals fascist tendencies which, however does not prevent it…[in other situations from operating as] an opposition party [to the bourgeois].”12

To further understand the position taken by the KPD against the SPD, Ernst Thälmann’s 1932 speech “The SPD and NSDAP are Twins” reveals how the KPD leadership envisioned its struggle against fascism in all forms. Thälmann’s incendiary speech declared that “joint negotiations between the KPD and the SPD… there are none! There will be none!.” 13 This was not to say that the KPD did not recognize the Nazi threat, as Thälmann articulated that “KPD strategy directs the main blow against social democracy, without thereby weakening the struggle against Hitler’s fascism; [KPD] strategy creates the very preconditions of an effective opposition to Hitler’s fascism precisely in its direction of the main blow against social democracy.”14 It is imperative to recognize, though, that the KPD only advocated the blow against the SPD leadership. As Thälmann argued, The KPD’s policy envisioned, the creation of a “revolutionary United Front policy… [that mobilized the masses from below through] the systematic, patient and comradely persuasion of the Social Democratic, Christian and even National Socialist workers to forsake their traitorous leaders.”15

KPD leader Ernst Thälmann gives a speech.

Thus, KPD invective was not aimed at the average member of the SPD, but at its leaders. The KPD was also not devoting resources to fighting Social Democracy instead of fighting Nazism. Rather, it was pursuing a strategy in which it believed that the defeat of Fascism would only be possible through the unification of the proletariat into one Revolutionary mass. This helps explains the KPD leadership’s focus on attacking the SPD rather than completely focusing its energies on Hitler. The KPD believed that what it viewed as a socially fascist SPD was dangerous because it claimed to advocate socialist policies while in reality, it subsumed a large portion of the proletariat into supporting a political entity that actually benefitted the bourgeois. This prevented the proletarian class from achieving true Marxist socialism. KPD leadership devoted its energies to attacking the SPD more so than the NSDAP because the Nazis were an overtly fascist group, whereas the SPD, in the KPD’s view, furthered fascism under the auspices of a claimed leftist ideology. To the KPD, the SPD was an insidious threat that needed to be exposed to all of the working class to see. The KPD did, in fact, want a united left or unified front to fight the fascists. It just did not want to unite with the leaders of the leftist parties. Instead it envisioned a United Front of the masses that would seek revolution to secure the goals of the proletariat, also termed a “united front from below”.

While the KPD leadership devoted much of its rhetorical attack towards the SPD rather than the Nazis, the same can not be said of the actions of the rank-and-file party membership. Between 1928-1933 the party primarily practiced non-violent opposition towards the SPD while political violence was reserved for the NSDAP and its paramilitary SA stormtroopers. Thus, Hearlmann’s contention that the KPD neglected the growing threat of Nazism only holds true if one relegates themselves to examining the documents of the KPD leadership and the Comintern. The reality is that during the 1928-1933 time period, as Eve Rosenhaft shows in her study of the KPD’s use of political violence during this period, the KPD pursued a “wehrhafter Kampf [against the SA] as a fight to maintain or recover actual power in the neighborhoods.”16 As stated before, the KPD and the SPD attracted different groups amongst the proletariat. In the harsh final years of the Depression-era Weimar, though, the Nazis and the KPD were fighting for the hearts and minds of the unemployed and unskilled segments of the proletariat. In cities such as Berlin, this translated to street-fighting between the KPD and SA over control of the neighborhoods these segments of the working class lived in. As Rosenhaft so eloquently puts it, “the terror of the SA… [was] a threat specifically directed against working-class radicalism, [that] evoked a response with the weapons familiar to the neighborhood [violence].”17 Historian Dirk Schumann largely concurs with Rosenhaft’s assessment of the KPD’s use of political violence, noting that “while Communists and Social Democrat’s hardly ever clashed in physical confrontations, both appeared on the scene as enemies of the right-wing groups.”18 Thus, while the KPD leadership advocated opposition to the SPD and the Nazis. The reality on the streets, where political violence served as a potent form of expression for the proletariat, was that the left devoted its energies to fighting the right rather than each other.

In the end, the policies of the KPD failed. What came about in 1933 was not the revolution of the proletarian masses, but rather the Nazi seizure of power and the twelve-year reign of Adolf Hitler. The united revolutionary front against the fascists never materialized and the KPD, along with the rest of the German left, was subjected to repression, exile, and imprisonment. Ernst Thälmann, when he gave his “The SDP and the NSDAP are twins” speech in 1932, did not have the benefit of knowing that twelve years later he would die in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the KPD leadership and the Comintern that helped shape its ideology and actions were unaware of what would soon occur. What the KPD did have, however, was the memory of its experiences during the Revolutionary period following Imperial Germany’s collapse, the everyday experience of an SPD that did not pursue revolutionary Marxist goals, and a party membership that was suffering under the hardships of the Weimar Republic, particularly during the depression years.

KPD propaganda poster. Reads “Only Communism saves you”

In hindsight, the Nazis were clearly the greater threat, but the KPD had experienced more than a decade of an SPD that had, from the Communist’s perspective, disregarded and undermined the Revolutionary goals of the party. The KPD may have made a terrible miscalculation in identifying its threats, but that miscalculation was not the result of ideological dogmatism, but rather experience. The idea that the KPD could have simply pursued a unified front with SPD leadership ignores the very circumstances and reasons for the party’s existence in the first place. Furthermore, the KPD did not devote all of its energy to combatting social fascism while ignoring the threat of the Nazis. The reality of the political violence experienced during the Weimar Republics final years demonstrates that the KPD and the SPD practiced violence, not against each other, but against the Nazis and the right.

Ultimately, the one form of political opposition -violence- which both the SPD and the KPD used against the NSDAP, in part led to the destabilization of the Weimar Republic, which allowed for the Nazis to be elected into office. As Dirk Schuman notes, “National Socialism stood in a tradition of bourgeois-national opposition to the Weimar Republic, which it radicalized so successfully against the backdrop of crisis that voters flocked to it in large numbers.”19 If the KPD and the SPD had presented a united front, would it have made much difference in the end? It was not the division between the left that caused the Depression or spurred the political violence of the SA. In light of the fact that both of these conditions would have existed even if the SPD and KPD had presented a truly united front against Nazism, it is worth questioning what this united front would have achieved. After all, the Nazis did not come to power in a violent revolution. Though violence surrounded their rise, the Nazis were democratically elected into office. Because of their ideology, the KPD and the SPD were permanently parties of the working class. A united left might have allowed for the KPD to devote its full energies to attacking Nazism, but in the end, the only ones that would have listened would have been the proletariat. Would this really have prevented the Nazi electoral victory?

In light of all this, how should KPD actions during 1928-1933 be judged? In terms of preventing fascism, the policy was an unequivocal failure. With regards to the KPD’s fight against what it perceived to be the social fascism of the SPD, though, the evidence suggests that this policy should not be judged too harshly. While it failed to recognize the events that would eventually occur, it was grounded in the KPD experience in Germany and was not simply the result of the dictates of the Comintern. KPD resistance to the SPD was elemental to the very existence of the party. Not only that, but the KPD had actually experienced repression from the SPD. Thus, while the policy failed to recognize the true threat of the Nazis, it should not be viewed as patently ridiculous. The failure of the left to form a United Front also did not prevent the KPD and the SPD from actively fighting the Nazis in the streets. While this political violence only increased electoral support for the Nazis, it was amongst groups such as the Bourgeois-Nationalists, that actively despised the left and everything it stood for.

Posted on

A Worker on Workers’ Education

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original article can be found here.

SPD Party School, Berlin (1907)

This article was originally written by Franz Förster (a painter) in 1909, in the leading theoretical journal of the SPD, Die Neue Zeit.  It was a direct intervention into a heated debate around what the nature of political education should be taking place with German Social Democracy, which came to a head in the 1908 Nuremberg Party Congress over the curriculum of the party school. Whilst the revisionist wing of the party, including the Comrades Eisner and Maurenbrecher mentioned in this article, argued that the Party School should only teach hard facts and elementary sciences, the radical left, many of whom were employed at the Party School, emphasized the necessity of learning theory. Maurenbrecher was roundly criticized for suggesting it was pointless to learn about value theory unless one was first familiar with Thomas Aquinas. Luxemburg insisted on the need for “the theory which gives us the possibility of systematizing the hard facts and forging them into a deadly weapon”. 1 This kind of insistence on “systematization” is present in this article, with theory being the basis of understanding, as opposed to knowledge of historical individualities.

The purpose of presenting this translation is not simply to provide a rerun for English-speakers about a particular debate within Social Democracy but to point towards the problems in the discussion of political education today, and ways forward. This article is caustic, polemical and eloquent; precisely because of the urgency of establishing what a class-based educational programme should do and how. Workers’ education (Arbeiterbildung) represented a turn away from the people’s education (Volksbildung) organized by philanthropic societies for self-improvement, it was intended to increase workers’ capacity to participate in the class struggle. The debate in the SPD really centered upon what skills are needed in this struggle and, implicitly, what shape this struggle should take.

A hundred years and innumerable defeats later, socialists have found ourselves in the middle of a resurgence of popular interest in “the Left”, however, we are still working out how we can build up socialist political infrastructures at the base of our movement. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that the historical institutions we look to as models weren’t conjured out of thin air by parties’ in much better situations than us; they were the product of hard and serious fights and constructed out of insufficient and inadequate parts.

Yet we also need to interrogate how political education works, if it is intended to reduce our dependence on leaders. This article rightly argues that “uncritically tailing leaders” conflicts with democratic principles, however, does teaching theory necessarily prevent this outcome if the leaders are the teachers of theory? Everyone who’s been through school knows that education can cement a hierarchy just as much as it can be used to dismantle it. In order to abide by Franz Mehring’s maxim “With the leaders if they are with us; without the leaders if they fail to act; in spite of the leaders if they oppose us”, there has to be the capacity to build shared understandings of the world and social change which do not hinge upon the leader of the moment, nor act as ideological legitimation for them.2 If socialist theory is a “question of life” for the labour movement, we cannot be content with half-hearted gestures towards education being a good idea, but bring it into the realm of political contestation.

A Worker on Workers Education

By Franz Förster

After Comrade Eisner, tucked away in a casual statement made in justified annoyance, portrayed the “theorising” worker as a pitiable creature, who is not to be taken more seriously in his partial education, and even harms the party, it ought to have deterred any thinking Social Democratic worker from concerning himself with theories, let alone writing about them. And yet I dare.

The issues that I want to discuss were touched upon already by Comrade Kautsky in his article “Some Remarks about Marx and Engels”.

The proponents of the Nuremberg educational methods, the comrades Maurenbrecher and Eisner claim that  Social Democratic workers need to know nothing about value theory or the materialist conception of history. Why? Because firstly they don’t have sufficient background knowledge, secondly because they don’t have enough time at their disposal which is necessary to work through the required material, according to this perspective. And thirdly, because knowledge of these theories for workers and eventually others represents a redundant luxury that one can do without, which Maurenbrecher demonstrates to us with his own person. Indeed, he doesn’t even hesitate to assert that theory, when taken up by the masses, could paralyse the party’s ability to act.

I will refrain from deriding the logic of Maurenbrecher or this claim, even though this restraint costs a great deal in the face of the situation.

A number of comrades, who were not completely satisfied with the level of understanding for our tasks within our own ranks, believed they could accept the curious assertion of Eisner and Maurenbrecher, without perhaps investigating the issue more precisely for the time being. It would be particularly astonishing if the atmosphere in trade union circles was in favour of the Nuremberg educational methods, when even they have reasons to turn against it. At the very least it is very premature to make the proposed educational methods into a shibboleth of revisionism.

If the proponents of new teaching methods say that workers lack the understanding of elementary knowledge and methodical reasoning that are necessary, this is only partially true. Because if understanding and recognition of value theory and the materialist conception of history only depended on mere reasoning, the entirety of our bourgeois social sciences could not oppose them uncomprehendingly. But it is well-known this is not the case. Countless examples could be invoked which show that many intelligent people, some who are even called Professor, commit the greatest offenses against logic as soon as they have to make a judgment on things which fall outside their bourgeois class interests. These are often offenses at which the class-conscious worker pityingly smiles. The effects of the laws of motion of our economy, discovered by Marx, have been sufficiently demonstrated to the working class first-hand. Their theories let us understand what is already familiar to us. The worker is more disposed to understanding socialist theory than members of other classes because as well as the thirst for knowledge, his class interests lend him support. For him, socialist theories are not academic questions, but questions of life itself. Because if he masters them, they become a powerful weapon in his hand in the struggle against his oppressors.

On the other hand, the academically educated new party member, who comes from the non-proletarian classes and therefore lacks the sharp proletarian class consciousness, has to finally free himself from the fetters of the bourgeois ideology which has been instilled in him. Of course, the proletarian way of thinking presents him with much greater difficulties, since enormous amounts of energy were uselessly consumed in the years of higher education. He is usually tired and resentful that he should now expend effort in learning the ropes of a different method of thinking that is completely alien to him. From this perspective, one can empathize with Comrade Maurenbrecher, that he is trying to save so much of the old cargo on the new ship. A longer quarantine would have done a lot of good here.

“If now the worker thinks, then nonetheless he should concern himself with history first and foremost”, that’s a history of quite a strange kind. Maurenbrecher’s method, to lose yourself in a welter of historical episodes, is a rather dangerous sport. These things have already flown over some people’s heads, so they don’t see the wood for the trees. The parts are more important to them than the whole. The danger of confusion through study of events alien to them, ripped out of context and without theory as rendered in the biographies of great men and princes, is particularly strong amongst workers. The workers, who have the doubtful fortune of having to listen to Comrade Maurenbrecher, only have a jumbled mass of historical details in store for them, without the connecting link of the materialist conception of history, because that is only for the leaders. It would “bamboozle” the heads of the workers. Once this is brought about, the soil is prepared for Maurenbrecher sowing the seeds of his bourgeois worldview, on which he – consciously or unconsciously – still stands with both feet.

From this superficial perspective, that Maurenbrecher wants to restrict the workers to, it follows that he and his friends give particular significance to the political constellation in South Germany, which is not merited. They are lost in trivialities, which will turn out to be illusions when disenchantment occurs.

When Comrade Maurenbrecher and his friend Eisner say: “Theory inhibits swift decisions, it is damaging to routine industrial struggles”, they ought to know, or their friends in trade unions ought to know, that serious struggles are not led with merely feelings and desire. As the goals of trade union struggle, just as much as political struggle, are predominantly economic (or would you dispute this too, Comrade Maurenbrecher?), it is our task, as class-conscious proletarians, to attain a clear account of the character of the economy and of bourgeois society. We achieve this through observation and evaluation of experience, in order to discern the laws of the movement, the decisive conditions for the onset of an event, to uncover the relationships between phenomena. A perspective into the past and future of society is only possible by virtue of awareness of the fundamental interconnections between events, only possible when we adopt the materialist conception of history. It alone enables us to turn the political and trade union movement towards the service of the working class wisely and purposefully, and even to overcome particular limitations.

Unquestionably, all of our knowledge about the infinite abundance of social life is only piecemeal. The nuggets of our more or less substantial knowledge must be brought together through a socialist worldview: this and the materialist conception of history consolidate the countless individual events of human affairs in the past and present into a whole. It is the key to understanding these matters. The understanding of our economy is therefore not dependent on the greater or lesser mass of knowledge you have stored up, but rather that whatever “learning” you have at your disposal is harmoniously unified through a clarified outlook, through a “theory”. That is how a worker can often be wiser and more educated than a heavily taught historian or national economist.

The appeal and impact of our party is also dependent on theoretical understanding. We don’t need blind faith, but rather scientific conviction, which gives us certainty and power. The freedom of action of the masses will not be weakened through this, rather strengthened. It is this insight, this knowledge of relevant factors, which guarantees success. A lack of insight absolutely cannot be replaced by “good leaders”. Aside from the fact that we come into sharp conflict with our democratic principles if we uncritically tail leaders, the history of the workers’ movement up until most recently shows us that a working class which is insufficiently aware of these relationships will deny allegiance even to the best leaders.

Perhaps the events which played out in the Nuremberg Party Congress are bringing forth the benefit that comrades concern themselves more with theoretical questions than they previously did.