Seeking Allies

I my book, I talk about socialists cooperating and clashing. I don't talk so much about socialists becoming liberal (or vice versa). Re-reading for the Nth time Robert Gildea's outstanding Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, I was reminded of the case of Peter Struve:

The manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party (RSDLP), which was penned by ...  Peter Struve after the party was formed at Minsk in March 1898, noted that Russia had escaped the 'life-giving hurricane of the 1848 revolution' that had conferred freedom of speech, writing, organization and assembly on Europe. The Russian working class had to conquer these liberties as a pre-condition of the struggle 'for its final liberation, against private property, for socialism'.

The struggle for political democracy ushered in the possibility of collaborating with other classes in Russia. Unfortunately, Struve's manifesto asserted that 'the farther east one goes in Europe, the weaker, meaner and more cowardly in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie, and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat.' The historical task of the proletariat was not only to carry out the socialist revolution but also, before that, to push the fearful bourgeoisie towards undertaking its own, democratic revolution. Struve, who saw working-class agitation decline in Russia after 1900 and, as an accomplished economist, was impressed by Bernstein's views on the improving condition of the working class and the attenuation of class struggle, began to move closer to opposition groups in the zemstvos and their administrative organs. In 1901 he launched a paper called Liberation around which all supporters of a constituent assembly in Russia might gather.

Lenin was unimpressed, and condemned Struve for his dalliance with liberals.

While Mensheviks  and Bolsheviks had similar views of the approaching revolution - they expected it to be radically democratic, but not actually socialist - The Mensheviks looked to bourgeois allies, while the Bolsheviks preferred an alliance with the peasantry. As the Bolsheviks were to find (and as Trotsky had predicted), a party couldn't easily neuter bourgeois civil society with disintegrating capitalism itself. Lenin's objective of a kind of 'state capitalism' transitional to socialism proved to be a non-starter. Instead civil society dissolved in a the cauldron of a class-based civil war, and after a tenuous pivoting around a peasant economy, the command economy took over.

Whether a liberal-socialist alliance in 1917 was ever viable is another question. Probably not, I'd say.

Revolutionary Germans in the Kaiserreich

It's often considered a bit of a mystery why the respectable German Social Democratic Party cleaved to a revolutionary Marxist programme before the First World war. One reason, of course, is that revolution was a relatively recent experience in Germany: the 1848 Revolutions lived in memory, and the Prussian constitutional crisis of the early 1860s had more of a pre-revolutionary feel than is usually admitted. If bourgeois liberals had only recently been revolutionary, socialists could hardly in honour be merely loyal subjects of a semi-authoritarian crown.

Perhaps more important still was the fact that the monarchical state - which was largely autonomous of direct popular control - was explictly anti-revolutionary, and would treat Social Democrats organizing workers as a revolutionary threat in potentia, no matter what rhetoric the socialists might employ. Typically, Kaiser Wilhelm II was blunt in making the point. Here's a report of a 1901 address by the Kaiser to soldiers of the conscript army just outside his royal residence:

Like a firm bulwark, your new barracks stand in the neighborhood of the palace, which it is primarily your duty to be ever ready to defend. The Emperor Alexander Regiment is called upon in a sense to stand ready as body-guard by night and by day and, if necessary, to risk its life and its blood for the King and his house; (the Emperor here called to mind the faithful bearing of the Alexander Regiment at the time of the revolts against the King in 1848) But if the city should ever again presume to rise up against its master then will the regiment repress with the bayonet the impertinence of the people toward their King.

[Christian Frederick Gauss (ed), The German Emperor, As Shown in His Public Utterances (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915), p. 172.]

For a worker, subversion was impertinence: no wonder so many embraced it.

Egypt and the Lesser Evil

After the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Presidential elections in Egypt, old liberal conundrums are coming back to haunt the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square, not to mention the political classes of Israel, the wider Middle East, the US, and the EU. The Muslim Brotherhood have a mandate, but are soaked through with reactionary obscurantist traditions. Should, then, one prefer the brutally militaristic 'permanent state' in Egypt to remain in effective force, as a check on Islamist ambition, and in extremis - if democracy threatens to spiral off into theocracy - as a counter-revolutionary angel of destruction?

The liberals of 1848 similarly wrestled with this dilemma. Then, of course, they feared not so much populist religion as socially levelling democracy. Gabriel Riesser, Vice President of the liberal revolutionary German National Assembly of 1948, bemoaned the "declaration of bankruptcy on the part of the moderate majority of the Assembly" which left "nothing but the sorry choice between the despotism of the princes and the so-called democrats." He had to admit, however, that "under certain circumstances ... the victory of a despotic, even bloody reaction might be the lesser evil; but I dread the rule of a people which could be happy to see that victory." [Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (London: Macmillan, 2000, German ed. 1988), p. 55]

That last clause: you can contemplate (or adumbrate) almost anything so long as you are blessed with a personally clear conscience. Still, when one considers that Riesser was Jewish, his fear of the vox populi comes across as anything but light-minded.

The best option would seem to be on-going public mobilisation to hold the Brotherhood's ideological wing in check, whilst insisting upon the supremacy of democratic civilian government. Building a civil society not just of businesses - who are historically all to keen to see 'order' imposed at potentially great political cost - but also, and in tension with them, of trade unions, community groups etc. (who in conditions of political freedom can compete with Islamist welfare networks) should be a priority for opposition activists. It'll be a hairy few years, however.

Update: Here's an interesting blog entry about it.

Heinrich Heine on the 'Politics of Fear'

The title of my book comes from Heinrich Heine. His most famous quote is, "That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also." He was referring to the burning of the Quar'an during the Spanish Inquisition. Heine's works were amongst those that were put to the flame by the Nazis when they came to power. The line is displayed at the Yad Vashem centre in Israel, as a still pertinent warning.

Heine was a friend of Marx, but did not share Marx's optimism that a better new society would emerge from the hegemony of the proletariat: Heine feared for the survival of educated merit. Hal Draper, a twentieth-century American socialist, whose massive series on Marx I used for my book, also translated Heine's poetry.

Anyway, here is the longer extract from Heine:

"The Parisian bourgeoisie are obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster. It is not fear of a republic but an instinctive dread of communism, of those sinister fellows who would swarm like rats from the ruin of the present regime. No, the French bourgeoisie would not be alarmed by a republic of the earlier variety, nor even by a little Robespierrism. They would easily reconcile themselves to that form of government and stand watch over the Tuileries regardless whether the building housed a Louis Philippe or a Committee of Public Safety. For what the bourgeoisie warn above all is order and protection - protection of their existing property rights and these are objectives that a republic should be able to guarantee as surely as a monarchy. But as already noted these shopkeepers sense instinctively that today a republic might no longer represent the principles of the seventeen nineties. It might become the instrument through which a new unacknowledged power would seize control, a proletarian party preaching community of goods. The bourgeoisie are therefore conservative by external necessity, not by inward conviction. Their politics are motivated by fear."

[Source: Heinrich Heine (12 July 1843), Geoffrey Bruun, Revolution and Reaction, 1848-1852: A Mid-Century Watershed, ed. Snyder, Louis L. (New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1958), p. 108.]