Death-bringing Parasitic Ivy

Wilhelm Liebknecht was a leader of the German workers' party, the SPD, and a frequent writer for its enormous range of newspapers (by which he made a quite incredibly huge amount of money). After fighting in the 1848 Revolution, he lived in exile in England for a good number of years, before returning to Germany in the 1860s. He was very close to Marx and Engels.  The latter were pretty scornful of Liebknecht in their private correspondence (as was their wont), but there was probably no one more important in implanting Marxism in Germany.

 

In the early 1870s, he occasionally intimated that the party was there to prepare for a violent social revolution. However, particularly as time went on, Liebknecht's line was that the SPD needed to complete the 'bourgeois revolution' - i.e. subordinating the executive government by making it responsible to the representative parliament - and then to win the 'battle of democracy': protecting universal suffrage against counter-coup, and having a workers' government elected. This was different from Britain and France, where constitutionalism was already established.

 

Here he is looking back on the circumstances of German unification in 1899:

 

In Germany where Capitalism was developed later than in England and France, and where it was not preceded, as in those two countries, by an era of economic prosperity for the bourgeoisie as well as of political supremacy by it, the whole political development was obliged to take on a different character. There [Britain and France] a soil cleared of medieval mould and undergrowth; here [Germany], the most modern of modern conditions, as modern as in France and England, in between medieval mould and undergrowth; the healthy growth entwined with ivy, which sucks the life out of everything that it clasps with its tendrils; which only lives from death and rottenness and which must be torn off and grubbed up to prevent the healthy and growing from being sacrificed to the dead.

The German bourgeoisie, which was sleeping the sleep of impotence at the time when in other lands the bourgeoisie impressed upon the state its bourgeois character, does not even now possess the strength to tear away and extirpate the romantic and death-bringing parasitic ivy of landlordism and medieval semi-barbarism.

The political impotence of the German citizenry in past and present is what distinguishes the political life of Germany from that of the other advanced countries, and has assigned to the German proletariat the mission not only of solving its own strictly proletarian problem, but also of accomplishing the work left undone by our bourgeoisie.

[Excerpted in William A. Pelz (ed.). Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 189.]

 

It has elements of the theory of Sonderweg, but perhaps without the suggestion that Germany was entirely unique.

---

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.