Red Banners, Books and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914
(By Andrew G Bonnell)
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This collection of essays by a Marxist historian who specializes in the history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) is composed of eight essays. The first is on the Lassalle cult in the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), which was partly carried over into the SPD. It will remind many Trotskyist militants of their own experiences with certain “personality cults” in their own organizations – sadly the Trotskyist organizations after Trotsky have had a tendency to inherit all the bad qualities of Social Democracy and none of its positive aspects, beginning with its ability to become a mass political organization of the working class. By 1912, the SPD had 34 per cent of the national vote. Despite the undemocratic representation system, this equated to 110 Reichstag seats out of 397, making the Social Democrats the largest group in parliament. By 1914, the party counted over a million members, 175,000 of whom were women in a country in which women had only been allowed to organise politically, in most of the country, since 1908 (199). It also controlled Germany’s cooperative and trade-union movements: the Catholic Christian trade unions reached 350,000 by 1912 compared with the Social Democrat-aligned Free Trade Unions’ 2.5 million (197).
The second essay provides a useful summary of the attitude of the then two socialist organizations in Germany towards the three wars of German unification, and particularly towards the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which resulted in prison sentences for August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht for their uncompromising internationalist stand. It is important to highlight this militant internationalist ideology of the SPD to avoid anachronistic interpretations based on its capitulation to chauvinism in August 1914, when it voted for war credits in the Reichstag. In one exchange noted by the police, in February 1905, against the background of revolution in Russia, a Polish worker apparently long resident in Hamburg lamented that the Polish nobility showed too little solidarity with the oppressed Polish people. He was angrily reproved by a German comrade for nourishing the nationalistic illusion that the nobility could be anything but an exploiter of the people, whether in Germany or Poland. The German Social Democrat concluded emphatically: “I shit on all nationality and stand with Social Democracy, which is international” (52).
The third essay, dealing with attitudes to labour in the SPD, offers of good example of the way in which the Party connected Marxist theory with the everyday experience of its working-class members and readers of its periodicals. In Capital, Marx spoke of the statistical summaries of workplace accidents and resultant deaths and injuries as “despatches from the battlefront, which add up the wounded and killed of the industrial army”. Social Democratic papers ran regular rubrics with titles like “from the battlefield of labour”, to stress the senseless waste of human life that resulted from inadequate regulation of workplace safety. Bonnell mentions as an example the article “Vom Schlachtfelde der Arbeit”, from the Frankfurt Social-Democratic newspaper Volksstimme of 30 November 1906, which offered a description of the scene after an explosion in a chemical factory in Dortmund (70).
The fourth essay shows how the SPD was able to convey to the workers in its agitation the connection between issues that affected them directly, such as the price of bread and foodstuffs, and more “abstract” political issues such as the tariff and agrarian policies of the Kaiserreich, where the monarchical state had a special connection with the landowning Junker class of Prussia. Chapter five deals with the fate of the Social Democrats in the Imperial army, where abuse of recruits was rife, and the special precautions that the SPD had to take in its anti-militaristic agitation, not just in order to avoid persecution but also the mishandling of conscripted youth.
The sixth essay, entitled “reading Marx,” shows how Marx’s teachings percolated among the party rank-and-file through a variety of channels, from theoretical organs like Kautsky’s Die neue Zeit to study groups, party and trade-union libraries, book series like the Internationale Bibliothek, and particularly the mass edition of brochures synthetizing the main points under discussion. By way of example, the protocol of the SPD congress held at Erfurt in 1891, at which the party adopted its Marxist programme (the previous year, just emerging from the illegality of the Anti-Socialist Laws, it had adopted democratic Statutes at the Halle congress), was distributed in 30,000 copies. The programme itself was printed in half a million copies, and 120,000 copies of the brochure explaining the programme were distributed (132). Bebel’s best-selling book, Woman under Socialism, which incorporated into its successive editions material from Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Pri...”
