[Peace-discuss] Marxist classics: An appreciation of Zinoviev’s ‘The War and the Crisis of Socialism’

[David Green]

Marxist classics: An appreciation of Zinoviev’s ‘The War and the Crisis of
Socialism’Posted: October 15, 2015 by Admin in At the coalface
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[image: Rosa Luxemburg championed internationalism against the SPD
chauvinists and was murdered by them]
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Rosa Luxemburg championed internationalism against the SPD chauvinists and
was murdered by them

*This is part of a series in which we review books which are important for
revolutionary activists; they include, but are certainly not limited to,
Marxist classics. We start off with a key text on social-democratic
reformism. The appreciation was written in 1981.*

by *Sabena Norten*

The collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of war in 1914
showed how the social democratic parties had identified with the interests
of the imperialist nation states. It was a result, as Lenin put it, of “the
victory of opportunism and of the national liberal-labour policy in the
majority of European parties” (*Socialism and War*, 1915). But how and why
had the political movement of the European working class taken the side of
imperialism?

Lenin’s writings of this period prepared the ground for a scientific
understanding of this phenomenon. But his critique of social-chauvinism was
limited because it referred almost exclusively to the evolution of the
British labour aristocracy. Zinoviev’s study, written between 1914 and
1916, fills the gap. By examining the most prominent social democratic
party, the German SPD, it shows how the consolidation of reformism was
intricately related to the growth of the trade union bureaucracy and
bourgeois parliamentary politics. Zinoviev’s work demonstrates how the
labour bureaucracy developed a distinct social and political standpoint and
became a pillar of bourgeois society.

This book is the most penetrating analysis ever written of pre-First World
War social democracy. Although the German Social Democratic Party possessed
a strong and articulate left wing, it took Zinoviev, a member of the
Bolshevik Party, to expose its inherently reactionary character. This fact
itself is significant: today as in Zinoviev’s time there is no lack of
‘criticism’ of official labour politics. But such criticisms are
ineffectual because they too rest on reformist premises, are influenced by
opportunism and reflect an unhealthy attachment to the existing
institutions of the working class which time and again have proved
inadequate. What justifies a review of a book written so many decades ago
is that this conservatism still prevents a realistic appraisal of the
character of social democracy and modern bourgeois labour politics.

*Parliamentary socialism*

The most important theoretical chapter analyses “the social roots of
opportunism”. It is a study of the social forces which pushed working class
politics in a bourgeois direction. Zinoviev identifies two influences on
the SPD which led to its disintegration into the state: the trade union
bureaucracy and electoral opportunism.

The point he makes about the trade union bureaucracy is that its distinct
outlook and interests derive not from its position in the labour market (as
was the case for the classical British labour aristocracy) but from the
power it gains from its position at the head of the working class
organisations. The cultivation and preservation of trade unions – within
the confines of the capitalist labour market – is the union bureaucrat’s
narrow objective which subordinates the wider political interests of the
working class. Zinoviev further shows how, once the conservative influence
of the trade union leadership had pushed the party into the framework of
parliamentary reformism, electoral pressure drove it to adapt to the
outlook and interests of broad petit-bourgeois layers and become a people’s
party. Other more recent historical studies of the SPD confirm the
correctness of this analysis.

*Bourgeois at birth*

>From the outset the SPD was only in a very limited sense an independent
party of the working class. Like most continental socialist parties it was
in origin a creation of the petit-bourgeoisie. In the early 1860s, the
middle classes in the anti-Prussian states of southern Germany sought to
win working class support in their fight against Bismarck’s drive to unite
the country under Prussian domination. Workers Associations were formed on
the initiative of Liberal politicians. In Prussia itself, Ferdinand
Lassalle’s General German Workers Association (ADAV), founded in 1863,
attempted to persuade the Bismarck regime to concede an extension of
suffrage and freedom of association by supporting its expansionist aims.

The nascent German working class movement was divided along lines which
reflected the belated and unresolved conflict between feudalism and
bourgeois liberalism: on one side, Lasalle’s ADAV and, on the other, the
Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD), formed by August Bebel and
Johann Baptist von Schweitzer in 1869 after it became evident that the
bourgeoisie had no interest in a consistent fight against Prussian
absolutism. Both wings were dependent on rival factions of the bourgeoisie.

In 1875 the split in the German labour movement was healed. At Gotha the
SAPD and the Lassalleans united. With the unification of Germany under
Prussia, the cause of national and liberal opposition to Prussian hegemony
which previously shaped the young labour movement had vanished. The Gotha
Programme adopted as the platform of the united SAPD, however, reflected
the continued hold of petit-bourgeois politics among its leaders.

Marx and Engels were extremely critical of this programme. They pointed out
that it contained not an ounce of working class politics, but a mixture of
faint-hearted liberalism and the turgid state socialist theories of
Lassalle. Marx’s polemic against the Gotha Programme drew particular
attention to the fact that it had a narrow, national standpoint and that
this would prevent a systematic struggle against the bourgeoisie. The Gotha
Programme didn’t represent a break with bourgeois tradition. Rather, the
new SAPD stepped into the vacuum created by the desertion of the middle
class to Bismarck to advance the cause of social and political reform
within the Prussian state.

The SAPD therefore had no more roots in Marxism than the British Labour
Party. It was by birth a bourgeois labour party. Although Marxist
literature formed a significant part of its theoretical and ideological
heritage, and had close personal ties with its leaders, its politics
remained opportunist. The conservatism of the party leadership was
consolidated by the growth of the new social forces Zinoviev investigated
in his study.

*Party of the bureaucrats*

Outside events, not the party leadership, were responsible for the adoption
of more radical policies by the end of the 1870s. Anti-working class
repression reached a peak with the adoption of the Anti-Socialist Law by
the Reichstag in 1878, and the SAPD was forced to organise and conduct
propaganda in conditions of illegality. This repression intensified
workers’ hatred of the state and their identification as a class. Marxist
ideas became a force among the advanced sections of the German proletariat,
a development that was reflected in the emergence of a radical left-wing in
the party.

The conservative leadership, however, managed to retain control. During the
period of the Anti-Socialist Law from 1878 to 1890 trade union membership
grew from 50,000 to 300,000. This strengthened working class organisation
ut it also strengthened the bureaucracy which soon became the principal
conservative force in the SPD and the working class. In 1891, Carl Legien,
the first modern German trade union bureaucrat, reorganised the movement
into one centralised federation under the control of his general commission
which thenceforth pursued a systematic policy of partnership with the
Prussian state.

The party was transformed into the political servant of the trade union
leadership. Legien’s aim was to increase his role as mediator between
capital and labour. To this end the state had to be persuaded to lift
restrictions on trade union activity, to introduce social policies and to
formalise the participation of labour representatives in administering
them. The parliamentary party, as the representative of labour within the
political sphere, became the agency through which the bureaucracy put
pressure on for these changes.

This transformation of the party found its reflection in the party’s name.
At its 1891 Erfurt Congress, the SAPD became the Social Democratic Party of
Germany (SPD), dropping the tag ‘workers’ which had expressed its formal
allegiance to the working class. With the change of name the party
leadership indicated that it aspired to be a non-class party of reform.

The change of name indicated the changing social roots of the party. Modern
bourgeois society provided social democracy with a base of support which
permitted it to develop a degree of independence from the working class,
despite the fact that the proletariat formed the bulk of its membership and
electorate.

*Bourgeois reformism*

The corollary of this development was that the party itself became
increasingly dependent on the state, which saw it as the agency for reform.
A mutual interest emerged which speeded up the process. The bourgeoisie
recognised the need to integrate the working class politically and to
institutionalise its domination over the working class. Bismarck, the
founder of modern social policy, recognised at a very early stage that the
working class was a social force he could not ignore. During the 1860s he
attempted – with a fair degree of success – to use the working class
against his middle class opponents. Then in the 1880s the fierce repression
directed against the political emancipation of the working class was
accompanied by certain reforms designed to neutralise opposition. Given
that social reform was also the main objective of the SPD, the channels
through which the leadership was drawn into co-operation opened up quite
naturally.

Throughout the period of the Anti-Socialist Law the party led a virtually
schizophrenic existence. Its members and press suffered fierce persecution
while its representatives in parliament negotiated social reform and
economic policy. The issue most hotly championed by SPD delegates was
opposition to the proposed tariffs on food imports – a measure which
aroused resentment from broad layers of German society.

Whilst its rank-and-file organisation was in chaos, parliamentarism
provided a means through which the SPD could gain influence. Illegality
reinforced this trend. It increased the independence of the SPD’s
parliamentary wing because this was for the time being the only legally
functioning section of the party.

The reward was overwhelming. The party enlarged its electoral base
significantly. In the Reichstag elections of 1878 it gained eight percent
of the vote; in 1887 10 percent; in 1890 20 percent; and in 1893, the first
election after the end of the Anti-Socialist Law, 23 percent. The party
changed its attitude to parliament too. Up to the early 1890s official
party policy, reflecting resolutions of the First International, was to use
parliament as a rostrum for propaganda and to oppose all bourgeois bills.
But electoral success led the SPD to discard these principles. By the end
of the decade, the SPD even joined regional state governments and formed
coalitions with other bourgeois parties.

Electoral opportunism provided the SPD with another prop of support: the
petit-bourgeoisie. This social stratum was a significant force in backward
German society, and the flabbiness of German Liberalism after 1871 made the
SPD into a natural focus for the expression of urban and rural
petit-bourgeois interests against big capitalists and feudal landlords. As
Zinoviev explained:

“This was the strength as well as the weakness of German social democracy.
The strong point was that the SPD became the only people’s party, that all
dissatisfied people sought its aid, that almost the entire democratic
section of society flocked to its banners. The weakness was the
petit-bourgeois fellow travellers introduced political corruption,
irresolution and bourgeois mentality and all the other features
characteristic of the layers between the two big classes into the party.
Socialism was infected by opportunism” (p485).

Zinoviev provided detailed statistics to illustrate the increasing sway of
the SPD’s petit-bourgeois ‘fellow travellers’. They show that by 1903 up to
50 percent of SPD voters in major towns were non-working class and that 30
percent (one million) of its total electorate were petit-bourgeois. Party
officialdom, as he shows, also began to be permeated by this layer.

As long as the preservation of the immediate interests of both workers and
petit-bourgeois appeared to coincide there was little tension within the
SPD. The Reichstag elections of 1903 were the climax of the SPD’s early
career as a people’s party. With three million votes it became the
strongest party in parliament, a success which reflected it support among
middle strata. But this support depended upon the projection of the party
as a national force, one that could be relied upon to serve the interest of
the German nation.

*Social-chauvinism*

The ephemeral character of the SPD’s fellow traveellers was exposed in the
subsequent elections of 1907 when the bourgeoisie set out to win back the
middle layers by depicting the SPD as traitors to German imperialism. The
demagogic tactic was very successful – the SPD suffered a humiliating
defeat. In the aftermath the real character of the party was revealed.
Party leaders decided that the lesson of defeat was to regain the middle
layers by projecting a more strident patriotic image and curbing the
anti-militarist activities of revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and the
youth wing of the party. The accusation that it lacked patriotism was
rejected as slander by party orators and writers up and down the country.

By 1912, the bourgeoisie was dismayed to find that the middle strata had
returned en masse to the social democratic fold. Some perceptive
commentators, however, noticed that the election result was a small loss
compared to an infinitely more significant achievement – the SPD had
committed itself to the cause of imperialism. Ruedorffer, an ultra
right-wing diplomat and politician, commented:

“If international socialism succeeds in separating the worker from the
nation and making him a mere member of his class, then it will be
victorious. The means of pure coercion which the state in that case would
be forced to apply to control him would in the long term be untenable.
However, if socialism fails to achieve this the ties which link the worker
to the organism we call nation will survive, even if only unconsciously.
The victory of socialism is impossible as long as these ties remain – and
it will face certain defeat if they are flound to prevail over those of
class” (Ruedorffer, *Grundzeuge der Weltpolitik*, 1914, cited in Zinoviev,
p503).

Ruedorffer was proved correct in 1914 and many times since. Unfortunately
this grasp of the significance of internationalism for class politics has
rarely been equalled in the labour movement.

*Building a revolutionary party*

The scientific merit of Zinoviev’s study is that it clearly analyses the
twin forces which lie at the root of social-chauvinism – the trade union
bureaucracy and the petit bourgeoisie. The first drove the SPD in the
direction of pragmatic adaptation to bourgeois society; the second
completed the degradation of the party into a vehicle for chauvinism and
other forms of bourgeois ideology.

His analysis shows that by allowing these influences to grow and prevail
the party bred a working class leadership whose interests began to coincide
with the interests of the ruling class. He demonstrates that this process
is not the result of evil subjective intention or simple material
self-interest, but that it originates in the narrow pragmatic outlook of
reformist labour politics. Its source is in essence political.

There is a conclusion which Zinoviev did not spell out, although his
analysis clearly points to it. The way to overcome the destructive
influence of opportunism is to construct a party which is committed to
fight for the independent interests of the working class. This means taking
on the labour bureaucracy. Only then can a real struggle for power be waged.

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