Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [276]
Revision continued to cut deep inroads. Jaurès, while defending collaboration as a fact of political life, refused to accept Bernstein’s revision of theory. In the controversy between Bernstein and Kautsky, he told a Socialist Student Conference in 1900, “I am, on the whole, with Kautsky.” Bernstein was wrong, he said, about the proletarian and bourgeois classes merging at their edges. Between the class that possesses the means of production and the class that does not “there is a definite line of demarcation,” although of course there were intermediate shadings; and from these, Jaurès, once more the professor, launched himself happily on the wings of philosophic discourse. “One goes from white to black, from purple to red, from night to day by these imperceptible transitions which allowed Heraclitus to say that in day there is always some night and in night some day.… In fact, it is a characteristic of extremes that they are approached by intermediary nuances.…” Jaurès sailed on, holding his audience entranced until with a snap he came back to the issue. However “radically antagonistic” the classes, that did not mean there could be no contact or cooperation, and he closed with a final appeal for Socialist unity “amid loud applause, prolonged acclamations and cries of Vive Jaurès!”
As one of the four vice-presidents of the Chamber after his re-election in 1902, Jaurès practiced cooperation daily, becoming virtual leader of the left bloc of the parties which supported the Government in its battles against the Army and the religious orders. Life was pushing him toward Revision. He attended garden parties at the British Embassy and a banquet in the Elysée Palace for the King and Queen of Italy in 1903. At the Bordeaux Congress of his party that year he argued that the State was not, as Guesde maintained, an impenetrable bloc to stand or be overthrown, but penetrable by reforms. As these were gained, one by one, the workers’ state would one day be discovered to have replaced the bourgeois state and “we shall be aware of having entered the zone of Socialism as navigators cross into the zone of a new hemisphere, though there is no rope stretched across the ocean to mark it.” But he acknowledged that the problem of reconciling collaboration with class struggle was “complicated.” In their party Congress at Dresden that year the Germans were finding it painfully so.
The issue came to a head in the great “knee-breeches” debate. The Social-Democrats were fresh from an electoral victory in which they had polled over three million votes to win eighty-one seats in the Reichstag. To maintain rigid Marxian apartness under these circumstances, Bernstein argued, was senseless. He urged the party to assume the prerogatives of its strength, namely, to accept one of the vice-presidencies of the Reichstag which was its due. Since this required paying an official call upon the Kaiser in court costume, the problem provided matter for days of passionate dispute. Imagine Socialists dressed up in knee-breeches, stockings and buckled shoes! scolded Bebel. To make the Socialist party hoffähig (acceptable at court) was an insult to the entire working class. Bernstein suggested that the issue was less a question of what Socialists wore than of what they did in Parliament, but the debaters were too absorbed in the awful yet alluring prospect of knee-breeches to listen to him.
The debate on Revision continued for three days with fifty speakers participating. Bernstein’s expulsion was demanded by a group led by Rosa Luxemburg, whose small,