Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [277]
With Karl Liebknecht, son of Wilhelm, she represented the militant revolutionary left wing, centered in Leipzig, whose organ was the Leipziger Volkzeitung, edited by Franz Mehring. As the party increased in size and influence and its writers and advocates inevitably mixed in bourgeois circles, she led the resistance to growing respectability. For Revision, or “parliamentary and trade-union cretinism” as she called it, with its “comfortable theory of a peaceful passage from one economic order to another,” she had only burning contempt. She believed in the revolutionary instinct and creative revolutionary energy of the unorganized masses which were to erupt spontaneously when history required it. The task of the party, as she saw it, was to educate, guide and inspire the masses in anticipation of the historic crisis, not to soften the revolutionary impulse through reform.
Between the Radicals and the Revisionists, the General Council of the party arbitrated, maintaining its balance without too much difficulty. As one of the leaders, Georg Ledebour, said, the party was 20 per cent radical, 30 per cent revisionist and the rest “will follow wherever Bebel goes.” Bebel arranged the usual compromise. Without expelling Bernstein, the Dresden Congress defeated his motion for cooperation and passed a resolution reaffirming the policy of class struggle “which we have triumphantly pursued hitherto,” and “decisively” rejecting any policy or tactics of “accommodation to the existing order.” Thus the largest Socialist bloc in Europe maintained fidelity to Marx on paper while the facts of Revision continued to flourish.
Revisionists were not blind to the implications of abandoning the primacy of the class struggle. Nationalism was in the air and they felt its invigorating force. As Socialists they wanted to participate in national life, not to stay shut out, waiting for the promised collapse which never came. In the Socialist Monthly Bernstein used the English experience of imperialism and its relation to employment to argue that the fate of the working class was “indissolubly tied up” with the nation’s external affairs, that is, with its foreign markets. Labour’s interest, he said forthrightly, lay in a “Weltpolitik without war.”
While the Germans disputed at Dresden, Revision cut a historic schism among the Russian Social-Democrats, who held their own party Congress of sixty members that year in London. No cas Millerand or even knee-breeches appeared on their horizon, nevertheless they split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over the issue of collaboration in the future. The former insisted on revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat in one leap with no interim accommodation; the latter believed this could not be achieved until Russia had first passed through a bourgeois stage of parliamentary government during which Socialists would have to collaborate with the liberal parties.
As a member of the Second International, the Russian party was perennially represented at international Congresses by its founder, Georgi Plekhanov, who had lived so long in exile that he had lost touch with affairs inside his own country. Apart from him, the other Russians in exile had little or no contact with the Socialists in whose countries they lived. Absorbed in their own fierce factional quarrel they held their own Congresses with little role in the International. Moving through