Chapter Two Social Democracy Before 1914

The split between Social Democrats and Communists, the basis for which had existed since August 1914, when almost every socialist party supported its government on the outbreak of the First World War, and which was realised in 1919 with the establishment of the Communist International, has projected a distorting light on the history of the International. Many writers, politicians and historians who have attempted to discover the roots of this significant split treat it as a phenomenon which could have been foreseen. Although the tensions and debates within the International prior to 1914 were implicit pointers to a split, few if any socialists desired a schism. The Russian Bolshevik faction, the nucleus of the future world Communist movement, regarded itself as no more than a Russian faction constructing a workers’ social-democratic party – which in the language of those times meant ‘revolutionary Marxist’ – in the given historical conditions of the empire of the Tsars. When Lenin was polemicising in 1905 against Peter Struve, he angrily denied that he wanted to split the Party:

When and where did I call the ‘revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky’ opportunism? When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in international social democracy not identical with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky? When and where have there been brought to 12 • Chapter Two

light differences between me, on the one hand, and Bebel and Kautsky, on the other – differences even slightly approximating in gravity the differences between Bebel and Kautsky, for instance, on the agrarian question in Breslau?1

The indignation of the Bolshevik leader in 1905 was legitimate. Despite many discussions and differences, he maintained this attitude until 1914, and let slip no occasion to pay homage to German Social Democracy, the model of that ‘revolutionary social democracy’ which he wished to construct in Russia, in opposition to those he regarded as the opportunists, whom he wished to exclude from the Party only because they denied the necessity for its existence and wished to ‘liquidate’ it.

A model of revolutionary social democracy Lenin believed up to the Stuttgart Congress in 1907 that German Social Democracy ‘had always upheld the revolutionary standpoint in Marxism’.2 When he condemned the German delegates at that congress for their opportunism, he concurred fully with Kautsky’s criticism of them. He maintained this position right up to the eve of the First World War. On 6 August 1913, he ended an article in Pravda devoted to the life and work of August Bebel with these lines:

The period of preparation and the mustering of working-class forces is in all countries a necessary stage in the development of the world emancipation struggle of the proletariat, and nobody can compare with August Bebel as a brilliant personification of the peculiarities and tasks of that period. Himself a worker, he proved able to break his own road to sound socialist convictions, and became a model workers’ leader, a representative and participant in the mass struggle of the wage-slaves of capital for a better social system.3

On 4 April 1914, Lenin sharply criticised the opportunist positions which the trade-union leader Karl Legien had defended during his visit to the USA, but he again hailed ‘the great services’ performed by German Social Democracy,

1 V.I. Lenin, ‘The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, Collected Works, Volume 9, Moscow, 1972, p. 66. 2 V.I. Lenin, ‘The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart’, Collected Works, Volume 13, Moscow, 1978, p. 85. 3 V.I. Lenin, ‘August Bebel’, Collected Works, Volume 19, Moscow, 1977, p. 300.