Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [264]
May Day, last of the four resolutions, was agreed on in response to a message from the American Federation of Labor, which planned to open its campaign for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. It was adopted at the suggestion of a French trade unionist, but the result was divisive because the Germans refused to commit themselves to a gesture likely to anger officialdom and evoke reprisals.
Nevertheless it was the Germans who spoke with most authority in the International. As the oldest and largest of the Socialist parties, the German party enjoyed the greatest prestige and, by virtue of the fact that Marx was a German, regarded itself as the Petrine rock, not to mention the Vatican, of Socialism. In 1890, released from the anti-Socialist law, it won 1,400,000 votes, nearly 20 per cent of the total, and thirty-five seats, in the elections for the Reichstag, a victory that dazed Socialists in the rest of the world. In practice, the German Social-Democratic party, as a result of its successes among the voters and its close ties with the trade unions, adapted itself to the possible. In theory it remained stoutly Marxist and at its Erfurt Congress in 1891 restated the Marxian view of history as official.
The Erfurt Program reaffirmed that the middle class, small businessmen and farmers, were being squeezed out, sinking along with the proletariat into increasing misery, and that the greater the masses grew in number, increasing the pool of labour, the sharper became the division between exploiters and exploited. Since the ultimate solution of public ownership could only be accomplished through the conquest of political power, the program of the party must be to gain political control, using trade unions as the source of votes but maintaining direction of policy in the party.
The Erfurt order for political action stamped its image upon the Second International, though not without the furious resistance of the Anarchists and their friends whose split with the Marxists on this issue had broken up the First International. Although not invited to the Congress of Zurich in 1893, the Anarchists arrived anyway, whereat August Bebel, the German chairman, a master of Marxian abuse, harangued them for having “neither program nor principles.” In Zurich, “accustomed to German methods,” he had no difficulty in having them expelled by force. In protest against such methods, Amilcare Cipriani resigned as a delegate. The Anarchists retired to conduct a diminutive counter-Congress in a café while the majority unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing the “necessity of organizing the workers for political action.” Only those parties and groups accepting this principle could henceforth call themselves Socialists and take part in Congresses of the International. Not wishing to cut themselves off from their foundations, they made an exception for trade unions, which in future were to be admitted without being required to subscribe to the political principle. According to the Belgian delegate Emile Vandervelde, these difficult problems were solved in an atmosphere of “profound calm.” It seemed anything but calm to a young British trade-union delegate, J. R. Clynes of the cotton workers, who had never been abroad before. He was astonished at the “verbal orgies” and violence of the Latin and Slav delegates and at the flareups of hostility in which one delegate flourished a knife and “everyone was yelling and struggling.” Among Socialists, human bellicosity found its vent in factionalism whose vehemence Clynes tactlessly ascribed to “national rivalries and hatreds growing out of past wars.”
Going for a swim in the Lake of Zurich Clynes saw “a ruddy beard on the surface of the water floating gently towards me” which proved to be attached to Bernard Shaw, also a delegate to the Congress, representing the Fabian Society. Having already discounted