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The Withered Root of Socialism

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The Withered Root of Socialism THE WITHERED ROOT OF SOCIALISM: SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC REVISIONISM AND PARLAMENTARISMUS IN GERMANY, 1917-1919 Owen Walter York Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History, Indiana University June 2010 Accepted by the Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. ____________________________ Kevin Cramer, Ph.D., Chair ____________________________ Daniella Kostroun, Ph.D. Master’s Thesis Committee ____________________________ Giles R. Hoyt, Ph.D. ii To Melissa iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend the deepest thanks to Dr. Kevin Cramer, the chair of my thesis committee, for his support and guidance throughout this process and for diligently reminding me of the difficulties inherent in the study of German history. I express my gratitude to the members of my committee, Dr. Daniella Kostroun and Dr. Giles R. Hoyt, whose comments and suggestions have been immensely helpful. I would also like to thank Dr. Claudia Grossman for her assistance with translations. Additionally, I would like to thank the Max Kade German-American Center for its generous support. Last, but not least, I would like to thank friends and faculty in the IUPUI History Department. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………….………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Historical Context……………………………………………………….…….8 The German Question…………………………………………………....………10 WWI and Democratization……………………………….……………………...20 Chapter 2: The Philosophical Foundation.…………………………………...………….25 Bernstein’s Critique of Socialism………………………………………………..26 Marx and the ‘Primacy of Philosophy’……………………..……………………34 The Reconciliation of Kant and Marx……………………………………..…….42 Chapter 3: The Blueprint for Parlamentarismus………...……………….………………52 Conceptualizing Democracy…………………………………………………..…53 Necessity and Possibility………………………………………………………...58 Die Volksvertretung……………………………………………………………...63 Die Beamtenfrage………………………………………………………………..68 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….79 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..83 Curriculum Vitae v Introduction In 1784, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant announced, “ Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity . Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another… Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom ; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.”1 Over 130 years later, at the height World War I, a group of politicians and intellectuals associated with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) took up Kant’s idea of enlightenment in an attempt to promote democratization in Germany. In their minds, the freedom to use reason in public affairs would lead to the establishment of specific form of parliamentary social democracy, or Parlamentarismus . However, any history of democratization in Germany is problematic because German development in the first half of the twentieth century has shaped the way historians approach the history of the nineteenth century. The existence of Nazi Germany has subsequently shaped the study of German history, even for those who do not study Nazi Germany directly. Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries find that they must address the Third Reich and the questions that its existence forces us to ask. To answer why the Third Reich occurred necessitates a series of questions revolving around German social, political, cultural, and intellectual development. Historians must ask, even if they do not want to, whether Germany was uniquely predisposed to the anti- 1 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment (1784)?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays , trans., with introduction by Ted Humphrey (Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis, 1983), 41-42. All emphasis is from the original. 1 democratic and illiberal ideology of National Socialism. Even for those historians who have identified democratic ideas and movements that existed in pre-World War I Germany do so with the knowledge that their work contributes in some way to the understanding of the Third Reich. In addition to the history of the nineteenth century, the history of the German Revolution of 1918, and whether it was really a revolution at all, compounds the problems of German democratization. On November 9, 1918, German sailors revolted, sparking an uprising that spread to the workers. The de facto military dictatorship that ruled Germany during the last half of the war handed control of the country over to the civilian, Social Democratic-led government. What the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was already experiencing internal divisions arising from the conflicts over reform versus revolution and German war aims, achieved over the next months and years would be subject to intense scrutiny from contemporary observers and later historians alike. Did the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933 indicate a failure of the SPD more so than a failure of democracy in general? Were there alternatives to the ideas and institutions upon which Weimar Democracy was built? These questions are just some of the problems inherent in the study of German democracy. This thesis examines a group of German intellectuals and politicians who, during World War I, formulated and proposed a democratic ideology based on their interpretation of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and integrated his ideas with those of Karl Marx, the father of modern socialism. Their theory was an attempt to legitimize democracy in Germany at a time in which democratic reforms came 2 to the forefront of German politics. These thinkers advocated a non-revolutionary foundation for social democracy by emphasizing the role of human reason and agency in the process of democratization. Because they had abandoned the need for revolution, which most early nineteenth-century socialists believed was socialism’s ‘final goal,’ these thinkers were known as revisionists. The revisionists’ primary medium through which they espoused their views of social democracy was the journal Sozialistische Monatshefte , which ran from 1893 until 1933. The timeframe on which this argument focuses is the last two years of World War I, when Germany’s failure achieve a victor’s peace opened new avenues for the center-left of the political spectrum to achieve democratic reform. But despite these opportunities, the possibility of achieving reform was under constant threat from the both the increasingly radicalized right and the revolutionary left. Nevertheless, the revisionists sought to carry forward the process of democratization, and by doing so, reconnected with the ideas of the Enlightenment. This reconciliation of Kant’s idealism and Marx’s materialism resulted in a form of parliamentary democracy based on Kantian reason and Marxian economic determinism. For the purposes of this thesis, the German term ‘ Parlamentarismus ’ refers to the democratic system proposed by the revisionists. Although the word literally means ‘parliamentarianism,’ in the context of this argument, Parlamentarismus implies more than just a system of parliamentary government; it incorporates both structural and philosophical concepts relevant to revisionist ideology. By contrast, use of the English term ‘parliamentarianism’ refers to the general, and literal, concept of parliamentary government. While their philosophical methods largely corresponded to traditional notions of ‘German thought’ and placed a heavier emphasis on social, rather than 3 individual, justice, their overall project was similar to that of other European thinkers between the Enlightenment and the turn of the twentieth century, to the extent that they sought to find a philosophical foundation for representative government and mediate the conflicts between individual and social rights. Revisionism may have been a relatively small part of the German left, but the nature of revisionism allowed its proponents to be freer in their work because they were not as constrained by rigid adherence to party programs as their mainstream counterparts. Despite their small numbers, the revisionists are important because they allow us to understand more fully the role of ideas in the process of German democratization. While the revisionists’ goal was some form of socialism, democratization was the most urgent matter during the final two years of World War I. The revisionists had abandoned the Marxist assertion that the collapse of capitalism would lead to revolution and they instead advocated working within the existing framework of the state to achieve reform. As Peter Gay points out, a fundamental difference between Marx and the revisionists was Marx’s belief that the state had to be destroyed before socialism could be implemented. 2 As Karl Kautsky, a preeminent Marxists ideologist who popularized Marxism during the early twentieth century, asserted in 1909, “Worried friends fear that the Social Democratic Party will prematurely gain control of the government through a revolution. However, if there is for us a premature attainment of power, it is the acquisition of an appearance of control of the government before the revolution, that is, before the proletariat
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