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| Rosa Luxemburg |
Part I is available here: The Evolution of Karl Kautsky Part I
Kautsky Against the Left
In a 1912 essay, Massenaktion und Revolution, Pannekoek argued in essence that
capitalism—or at least its German version--had entered a new period in which
the steady, gradual progress of the working class was no longer possible. Such
advancement, he held, was tolerated by the ruling class only when the workers’
movement had been weak. But growing proletarian strength, combined with
intensified competition among imperialist powers, made the bourgeoisie much
more prone to militarism and repression. German parliamentary democracy,
truncated to begin with in the constitutional monarchy the country then was,
was becoming even more impotent. The enemy of the workers did not consist of
particular political parties, but the armed power of the state as a whole, to
which the workers could counterpose nothing but their own concentrated force.
Under
these conditions, the workers would be compelled to rely chiefly upon
extra-parliamentary struggle, the major weapon of which was the mass strike.
Contrary to Kautsky, Pannekoek asserted the mass strike could not be understood
as a discretely employed tactic or single event, but as rather a recurring, and
sometimes spontaneous, inflection point
in an ongoing mass struggle. Moreover, he asserted that such a struggle
could not be confined to the existing organizations of the proletariat—unions
and party-- as in what Pannekoek decried as Kautsky’s “cult of formal
structures”. He viewed revolution as a profound social paroxysm that would inevitably overflow established
organizational bounds and draw in new layers, which were not mainly the
marginal lumpen elements of times past,
but part of a larger proletarianized mass. The revolutionary process would
consist of both organized efforts and spontaneous improvisations. Following
Marx in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Pannekoek argued that one of the
most important things to emerge from revolutionary struggle would be alternative, more radically
democratic forms of political power, distinct from, and destined to replace,
bourgeois parliaments and state structures. He also took exception to a view of
imperialist war Kautsky had expressed earlier: that a socialist party too weak
to prevent a war could do little to stop it once begun. On the contrary,
Pannekoek declared, wars create social crises by straining the resources of the
nation to the limit, and imposing heavy burdens upon the working class. Its
sons comprise most of imperialism’s mass armies, and could therefore not
necessarily be relied upon to repress the
revolts that war could trigger.
It
was in answer to Pannekoek that Kautsky clarified his own contrasting views on
the transition to socialism, as they
evolved since he had taken up the cudgels against Bernstein and the
revisionists in 1909. Kautsky reaffirmed
his belief in the slow but unstoppable advance of the working class. The SPD
and the unions were far too big and powerful ever to be annihilated by the
state or right-wing forces; reactionary thrusts aimed at breaking their power
could be nothing more than transient episodes. The vehicles of proletarian
progress were, and could only be, the party and the trade unions. In
championing the ‘new tactic’ of mass action, Pannekoek and Luxemburg were
indulging in romantic pipe dreams. Spontaneous initiatives on the part of
unorganized elements, being both unpredictable and beyond party and union
control, were highly suspect, and potentially damaging to the planned and
methodical efforts of workers’ organizations . The attempts of the left to
import the methods of a backward and undemocratic country like Russia into an
advanced semi-democracy like Germany ignored all the obvious differences
between the two countries. Germany had a stronger state, and to confront it
directly would spell certain defeat.
“To direct the workers’ movement toward mass actions is merely to
replace the old one-sidedness for which Marx coined the expression
parliamentary cretinism with a new cretinism, which we may define, continuing
the metaphor, as a cretinism of mass actions”[8]
Kautsky called for a strategy of attrition rather than confrontation. The
proletariat, growing continually in strength, could in his view wear down and
exhaust the ruling class.
Just
as wild-eyed, according to Kautsky, as the “cretinism of mass action” was all talk
of “smashing” or replacing the existing state. It was utopian, he said, to
imagine that the modern state, with all its complex functions and intricate division of labor, could be
replaced by ordinary citizens who would run the state in their spare time
(although it is not clear that Pannekoek or Luxemburg ever argued this
position; Pannekoek said only that new, more democratic state forms would grow
up in the course of mass struggle). Under a socialist regime, parliament, as
well as all the old ministries, would
remain intact, although more decentralized and responsive to the people. What
socialists should aim at was not a new state, but a shift of power within the state, i.e. not new state
forms, but a new government, which would direct the old apparatus in
working-class interests. “The objective of our political struggle,” he wrote,
“remains what it has been up to now: the conquest of state power through the
conquest of a majority in parliament and the elevation of parliament to a
commanding position within the state [as opposed to the then commanding
position of the Kaiser—JC] Certainly not the destruction of state power.”[9]
If
Kautsky’s polemic with Luxemburg and Pannekoek made explicit certain tendencies
in his thinking implicit even in 1909, his writings on war and imperialism
between 1912 and 1913 represent a complete abandonment of earlier views. At the
Second Congress of the Second International in 1910, Kautsky reaffirmed his
position that militarism and an
armaments race were necessary
parts of the foreign policies of all major capitalist powers:
…It is utopian to believe that
bourgeois pacifist conferences or visits by friends of peace to foreign
governments can abolish the danger of war and introduce disarmament and
submission to international courts… national conflicts, like social conflicts,
cannot be overcome in the bourgeois world of competition.[10]
Yet,
in an article titled “Ultra-Imperialism”, published after the outbreak of the
war but completed beforehand, Kautsky argues that imperialism, while it arises
for economic reasons, is not an economic necessity for capitalism. Just as
competition within advanced countries leads to the formation of cartels, by
which competition is restrained, so the calamities brought about by
inter-imperialist rivalries can jolt the rival states into recognizing the
necessity of restraining themselves in order to promote free trade, and come to
international agreements to respect each other’s spheres of influence. Such an
arrangement Kautsky dubs “ultra-imperialism”, reprising a term coined by the
German socialist economic theorist Rudolf Hilferding. Kautsky further avers
that, while imperialist nationalism is in the interest of finance capital, it
is contrary to the interests of industrial capital, and socialists should
therefore encourage the pacific sections of capital against the more bellicose
ones.
Kautsky wrote in 1907 that, in the event of
war:
…The German government could convince the workers that they were under attack, the French
government could likewise convince the French workers, and we would then find
ourselves confronted with a war in which the German and French proletariats
would march with equal enthusiasm behind their own governments and massacre and
slaughter each other. This must be averted, and it will be averted if we reject
the criterion of a war of aggression and instead adopt the criterion of the
interests of the proletariat, which are international interests.[11]
But
also around this time, Kautsky discovered the distinction between offensive and
defensive wars. He wrote that, while the working class might be persuaded to
oppose a war of aggression on its government’s part, attempting to turn it
against a war for the defense of its own soil against invaders was a fool’s errand.
It was this distinction that Kautsky invoked when he advised the SPD Reichstag
deputies to vote for war credits in
1914. One cannot but suspect
that, beneath his resignation to the proletariat’s sympathy for a supposedly
defensive war, lay a sneaking sympathy of his own.
Thus,
by August 1914, all the theoretical arguments used to justify Kautsky’s
capitulation were already elaborated. Their guiding thread—from a reverence of
parliamentary forms to ultra-imperialism—is a
worship of order, methodical action and incremental progress, combined
with a correlative abhorrence of spontaneity and confrontation. Kautsky even
goes so far as to impute his faith in peaceful, reason-governed progress to the
imperialist powers, or factions thereof, at the very time when
inter-imperialist rivalries were exploding in salvos of machine gun and cannon
fire, and the class struggle in many European countries was overflowing
parliamentary sluice gates.
In the Crucible
Kautsky’s
post-World War I political thought cannot be usefully approached as an abstract
debate over governmental forms—class dictatorship versus universal suffrage—as it is by James Muldoon in Jacobin. It must rather be understood
concretely, amid the political crosscurrents of the time.
As German soldiers streamed home in defeat
from the fronts in 1918, they joined forces with rebellious sailors and workers
to follow the Russian example by setting up democratically elected councils and
overthrowing the Kaiser. The more radical of these insurgents were also
inspired by the October Revolution to attempt to replace the Kaiser with a
government based upon the active, participatory democracy of the councils. The
majority Social Democrats adamantly rejected such efforts, insisting upon
limiting the mass movement to the goal of establishing a conventional
parliamentary republic.
But
more was at stake here than a political preference. Behind the mask of
parliamentary democracy, the ruling strata of German society—Junkers,
capitalists and the army general staff—scrambled desperately to preserve their dominion. The more astute
among them knew that the official representatives of the status quo were now
too thoroughly discredited to intervene effectively. They were forced to rely
upon a party that wielded some influence among the masses. The leaders of the
SPD, who were only too willing to lend themselves to these counterrevolutionary
designs, were therefore allowed to form a government and proclaim a republic.
But, unknown to the people, the new president, Friedrich Ebert, was colluding
with the German commander of internal troops Wilhelm Groener, to suppress the
growing revolt, which much of the SPD
rank-and -file had joined. The SPD placed itself at the head of many workers’ and
soldiers’ councils, with the concealed aim of disempowering them. Military
detachments were moved into Berlin to suppress the workers. Ebert’s minister of
defense, the right-wing social democrat Gustav Noske, engaged and trained the
proto-Nazi elite military bands called
the Freikorps, which, in the sanguinary finale to first phase of the German
revolution in January 1919, slaughtered Berlin red guards and smashed in the
skulls of the two principal leaders of the Spartakusbund,
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
During
these events, and for some time after,
Kautsky still adhered to the centrist USPD, or Independent Social Democrats,
and realized that the repressions of the so-called Spartakus Week represented a
victory for reactionary forces in the country. Yet he assigned the principal blame
for this reversal to the Spartakusbund, which
he claimed had provoked the right by misreading the temper of German workers,
and leading a minority into a confrontation in which they were bound to be
defeated.
While
it was true that the rising of January 1919 was premature in that the majority
of workers had not been won to the revolutionary cause, it was not the work of
a small band of revolutionary conspirators in the newly formed German Communist
Party (KPD, still widely called Spartacists), which was still far too small to
wield any mass influence. The rising
rather took place on the initiative of the more militant sections of the
workers, centered in Berlin and the Ruhr valley, who were intent on making a
bid for state power despite Luxemburg’s warning that the German revolution was
still in an early phase. The other principal leader of the KPD, Karl
Liebknecht, although showing exemplary
courage in opposing the war, was not a level-headed leader, and, much to Luxemburg’s
reproof, allowed himself to be carried along by the wave of revolutionary
enthusiasm that enveloped his Berlin precincts. Yet, once the die had been
cast, Luxemburg put aside all reservations to voice her complete solidarity
with the revolutionary workers. Kautsky, on the other hand, moved rapidly in
the opposite direction. From this time forth, his major efforts were directed
at denouncing the German revolutionary left and the ‘Bolshevik menace’.
Mending Fences
Kautsky
attempted to justify his rightward motion in theoretical terms. In the early 20s, when socialist revolution
seemed to many a more immediate prospect than ever before, Kautsky argued that
the socialist goal had to be put on indefinite hold. Socialism, he wrote,
required a high level of economic development, which in turn strengthened the
proletariat and democracy. The war, however, had set back the economies of the
belligerent powers, and temporarily strengthened the forces of militarism and
right-wing reaction. Socialists should therefore seek to restore the preconditions
of socialism by helping to revive capitalist economies, and align themselves
with more democratic capitalist forces to achieve this end. We have already
seen how, even when arguing against Bernstein in 1909, Kautsky revered
bourgeois parliaments, and, even before 1914,
abandoned his belief that imperialism was endemic to capitalism. Now,
with this endorsement of coalition politics, the last remnant of his earlier,
more radical thinking—his assertion, in The
Road to Power, that the working class and its party alone could begin the
transition to socialism—had gone by the boards. In a 1932 obituary for
Bernstein, Kautsky admitted that, since 1914, he and his erstwhile revisionist
adversary “have always adopted the same point of view”[12]
Kautsky’s
theoretical mending of fences with Bernstein was accompanied by a political
rapprochement with German social democracy. The centrist party to which Kautsky
adhered since 1917, the USPD, represented an alliance of all those tendencies
in German socialism—some revolutionary, and others decidedly reformist-- that
criticized the SPD from the left. Such a combination, however, could not
withstand the polarization that took place in the aftermath of the war and the
October Revolution.
The
Spartakusbund, which had joined the
USPD for want of a better alternative, split off to form the Communist Party in
1918. In 1920, a majority of the USPD voted at its Halle Congress to join the
Communist International. Kautsky was one of the leaders of the right-wing
faction that voted against the merger and advocated re-entering the SPD. The
latter party’s role in saving the day for the ruling class and decapitating the
incipient revolution did not deter him in the least. According to Kautsky, the major threat facing
the working class was not the re-armed German bourgeois state, but Bolshevism,
which divided the working class and threatened to interrupt its peaceful
parliamentary ascent by damaging the economy and provoking civil war. His
denunciations of the left matched that of any reactionary in point of vehemence
and class abuse: he wrote that Bolshevism represented, “The rule of the unorganized over the
organized, of the ignorant over the educated, of the selfish over the
disinterested”[13]
Kautsky’s
opposition to the Russian Bolshevik regime at this time was also more
implacable than that of many a Menshevik and right social democrat. He wrote
that Bolshevism aimed to impose a dictatorship of a militant working-class
minority over the rest of the proletariat and other classes. The threat it
posed to parliamentary democracy, which Kautsky regarded as the main
institutional vehicle for worker advance, combined with the danger it presented
of civil war, which would undermine the economic progress he viewed as a
prerequisite for socialism, made Bolshevism the most deadly enemy of the
working class, even more so than Mussolini or the Hungarian fascist dictator,
Miklós Horthy.
There
was, according to Kautsky, nothing defensible in the Soviet regime. Unlike
western capitalist states, it could not be reformed, but could only be
overthrown Against the Menshevik, Fyodor
Dan, he argued that state ownership of the means of production was nothing more
than the power base of a Bonapartist dictatorship, and was not worth preserving
by the working class; he even favored a partial restoration of private
property. In a polemic with the Austrian centrist, Friedrich Adler, Kautsky
categorically rejected the idea of any united-front effort with the Communists
against the National Socialists .
As
for the Nazis themselves, Kautsky initially maintained that they were impotent
against steady democratic advance of the working class; they would prove to be
nothing more than passing episode. When, contrary to his predictions, the Nazis
came to power in 1933, Kautsky blamed the Communists for having created the
brown scourge by inflaming the class struggle to begin with. Thus did the “pope
of Marxism” end his days, in Amsterdam in 1938, with a political analysis which
in certain respects anticipates the arguments of the 1980s German historians
Ernst Nolte and Joachim Fest to the effect that the rise of Nazism can be
traced to the original “totalitarian” sin of the October Revolution.
Kautsky as Guide?
If Marxists in the western countries during the
1950s and 60s faced the dilemma of maintaining a revolutionary outlook amid
relative peace and prosperity, Kautsky’s thinking suffered from the opposite
incongruity: a deepening commitment to orderly progress and comity among
nations during a period in which the imperialists were bent on war, and (in
Trotsky’s phrase) the voltages of class struggle in many European countries
were far too high for parliamentary circuits.
Heightened
class struggle and revolution involve the unleashing of explosive social
passions and hatreds, and are by their very nature disorderly affairs for which
there was little room in Kautsky’s tidy schema for the transition to socialism.
As far removed as this writer is from the formulaic thought of the Chinese
revolution’s “Great Helmsman”, Mao’s
famous dictum about revolution not being a tea party or a card game, etc. seems
appropriate in this context, if to these instances we add, a parliamentary debate.
Some have argued that Kautsky became suddenly transformed from revolutionary to
reformist in 1910. But we have seen that
his evolution involved no abrupt turns,
but rather an unfolding of tendencies implicit in his thinking from at least as
early as 1909. On each occasion when his
schema ran up against the realities of class war, Kautsky clung all the
more desperately to his schema to avoid reality. The end result was his
adherence, despite centrist misgivings, to Social Democracy in its role as mobilizer
of workers for imperialist war and savior of last resort of German capitalism.
His aversion to “anarchy”, when all is said and done, amounted to a
renunciation of revolution itself. His partiality to ‘order’ ultimately led to
an embrace of the (temporarily) reconsolidated bourgeois order of Germany under
the Weimar Constitution.
Certain contemporary left currents are
rediscovering Kautsky under circumstances very different from those of his
time. His role as a centrist—seemingly poised equally between a reformist right
and a revolutionary left, but veering ever rightward—may be difficult to grasp
today because there is no revolutionary left of any consequence. In this
political void-- and in the absence of sustained and militant industrial struggle—growing
numbers of people discontented with the
manifest inequalities of neoliberal capitalism have nowhere to turn but to the
electoral arena and left-reformist politicians. These left bulges in the
Democratic and Labour Parties are highly significant indicators of shifting
sentiments, which only hidebound sectarians can dismiss. Some on the left,
however, seem determined to make a virtue of a deficiency. They can conceive of
no way forward but the electoral path, and regard Kautsky’s apotheosis of parliaments
and elections as a long-forgotten trove of theoretical support for what they
call ‘democratic socialism’.
The
meaning of the ‘democratic socialism’ now espoused by major currents of the
rebounding left is as ambiguous as this reborn left itself in relation to
reform versus revolution. If “democratic socialism” means a socialism founded
upon institutions of popular participation, as opposed to some kind of state-
bureaucratic dictatorship, few would disagree. But if means, following Kautsky
and social democrats since, that elections and parliaments are sacrosanct,
there is much to argue with.
Parliamentary
democracy is the Western bourgeoisie’s
major source of ideological legitimacy. For this reason, the capitalist
class is willing to put up with this form of government, even though
parliaments may pass legislation it dislikes, and there is always the risk that
legislative bodies may pass out of the control of carefully vetted politicians
and political parties. When this happens despite the multiple levers for
influencing politics that enormous capital sums place in their hands, the
ruling classes resort to economic sabotage and/or deploying the non-elected
components of the state—bureaucracy, police and military—to overthrow
governments and reassert their domination.
This
is not to say that socialists should not fight for the broadest electoral
democracy, and use elections and parliaments to disseminate ideas and win
beneficial reforms. But they must also be aware of democracy’s limits, and
attempt to combat widespread popular illusions about its possibilities. Left
politicians who fail to do this—from
Allende, to Mitterrand, to Tsipras—and lead their followers to believe
that fundamental changes can be achieved simply by electing left-wing parties
and heads of government—find themselves and their supporters defenseless when
the final reckoning comes; they are either overthrown (Allende) or succumb to
pressures to betray their electoral promises and do the bidding of the
bourgeoisie (Mitterrand and Tsipras). Nothing in the experience of the past
hundred years supports the conclusion that
socialism can be attained by voting.
The
above points to the conclusion that, simultaneously with electoral efforts,
socialists should seek to build organizations of working-class power, and
encourage extra-parliamentary mobilizations, able to confront the capitalist
state. These alone can constitute the core of the dual-power institutions
capable of mobilizing subaltern classes for combat when even the most
successful electoral efforts prove unequal to the task.
Electoral
and extra-parliamentary efforts can complement one another. But they can also
come into conflict. Bureaucrats and
elected officials typically shudder at any hint of confrontation; they counsel
moderation to avoid damaging electoral prospects. Bourgeois politicians portray
extra-parliamentary positions of power
as a danger to democracy, and demand their dissolution. This is what happened
in the Prussian suffrage crisis of 1910, and again in Germany in 1918-19.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht chose one course, Kautsky another. Such situations
will arise again if the current
leftward momentum continues.
Thinking in exclusively electoral terms leads inevitably to defeat, and
socialists must, like Luxemburg and unlike Kautsky, place their emphasis on
initiating and advancing struggles that take place outside the electoral
frame.
Whatever
the political forms of
extra-parliamentary power may arise
today will no doubt be quite different from those of a century ago. The masses
of industrial workers, soldiers and sailors who made up soviets no longer exist in western countries.
Developing new forms of popular democracy is a major challenge for socialists
today. In meeting it, the writings of Karl Kautsky may have insights to offer;
the over-all curve of his political career can only serve as a negative
example.
[8] Kautsky,
“Die neue Taktik’, quoted in Karl Kautsky
and the Socialist Revolution by Massimo Salvadori, London, 1990, p.
163
[9] Ibid.
quoted in Salvadori, p. 162
[10] Quoted in Salvadori, p. 171
[11]
Kautsky, Protokol über die Verhandlungen
desParteiages der SPD, quoted in Salvadori p.123
[12]
Quoted in Salvadori, p. 324
[13]
Quoted in Salvadori, p 241
Jim Creegan can be
reached at egyptianarch@gmail.com
************************
Jim Creegan
New York,
May 7, 2019
