Was Bebel becoming reformist/a renegade?

[Brutus]

This all originates from a visitor message that Rakunin sent me:


That is the big question... for me. We all have our opinion of what happened to Karl Kautsky and his peers, but we can agree on this: it was safe to concider him a renegade in that crucial period somewhere between 1910/1914 and 1917/1919. Liebknecht died in 1900, so he's safe, but Bebel only did in 1913. Luxemburg became disgusted with the party right before the war. She even became disgusted with Bebel on some occasions. What would the old man have thought of the situation?


Anyway, I don't have the knowledge to give this question the attention that it deserves. We know that Bebel didn't challenge the right wing of the party in his later years, but whether this was due to his old age, his reluctance to do so as it may cause a split, or due to his growing sympathies with the right I do not know.

I decided to stick the question up here as I do not have the knowledge to expand it past that.

Thanks in advance.

[Zederbaum]

Well, what is a renegade? I find it is mostly just a curse word taken up Lenin and applied to opponents, specifically Kautsky, with whom he disagreed.

Perhaps you should come up with a definition of a renegade and reformism for that matter, and then examine whether Bebel or Kautsky or Lenin fit into that definition.

Do you mean Bebel was a renegade from socialism, from revolutionism, or from Marxism?

More generally, I’m not sure it’s massively useful to concentrate so much on the personal attributes of one or two people. After all, who doesn’t take a wrong turn in their life? What’s really important are the tendencies that express collective desires and forces. Insofar as Bebel or Lenin are the personification of those collective tendencies, it is fine and useful to examine their politics, but only if a moralistic approach is going to be avoided in favour of a materialist one which seeks to understand the deeper social forces at work.

Like a lot of religious and political movements, Bebel was a charismatic leader whose leadership could really help hold an organisation together in a hostile context. Part of that came from an ability to forge coalitions as well as an ability to be a mirror for what people wanted to see, thus holding the movement together. You see it a lot, e.g. Lenin, Togliatti, Gerry Adams. They often remain in a leadership position for thirty years.

The pragmatists in the party were able to interpret his unwillingness to expel the revisionists as an implicit endorsement while the radicals could be reassured by his adherence to the Erfurt Program.

The split in the Marxist camp after the 1905 Russian Revolution between the pro-offensive wing, led by Luxemburg, and the strategy of attrition wing, led by Kautsky, weakened them at a time when the trade union influence in the party was growing. Bebel, as party leader — as opposed to theoretician — came to realise the strength of the unions within the party and in society generally. That is, no really major offensive action liable to lead to revolution could be taken in the absence of union support, which wasn’t forthcoming.

Realpolitik led him to accept that reality and he was careful to not allow the SDP campaigns for universal suffrage to run headlong into the Prussian Military. Depending on your view he could be faulted for a lack of revolutionary élan or praised for a realistic insight into the balance of forces in Germany at that time.

But the trajectory of the man himself is of relatively little importance to understanding the structural dynamics that led the SPD right to gain the upper hand over the Marxists — not just Luxemburg, but Kautsky too.

Bebel would probably not have been averse to supporting a defensive war, but I doubt he would have supported the expansionist war, as did the Majority SPD. I’d guess in this he would have been somewhere between Kautsky and the majority, but who knows.

His death could actually be a case of the individual in history being important because even if he did support the war, and assuming he wouldn't have devolved into the jingoism of David et al, he would surely have done a better job of holding the party together, which would have seen the German Revolution play out very differently.

There's a massive multi-player alternate reality game there for ya :)

[Brutus]

A renegade is someone who betrays their previous principles- like kautsky did.

Anyway, thanks for your very detailed answer. :) I shall have to think it over to give it the reply it truly deserves.

[Zederbaum]

A renegade is someone who betrays their previous principles- like kautsky did.

This is an argument that has been played out in previous threads, so it might be worth taking a look at them.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/did-lenin-break-t177243/index.html
Or see my post here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2522755&postcount=70
Or see http://forum.spiritofcontradiction.eu/topic/28/reforms-reformism-and-renegacy/ in which we await the reply of comrades Q and l'Enfermé :)

The question of whether Bebel or Kautsky or Lenin (remember how he reneged on war communism in favour of the NEP!) was a renegade or reformist assumes we have a universally agreed version of true Marxism.

The issue then becomes whether Bebel deviated from the path laid down by the prophet himself.

This is an essentially moralistic and useless approach to politics. It is a retreat to the utopian moralism which Marxism laboured so hard to overcome. Indeed, it moves Marxism from being a form of scientific sociology to just another form ethical socialism, thus defeating the point of its own existence.

It removes the need to argue the case on its merits and resorts to an argument from authority that depends on exegetical analysis that is basically Talmudic Marxism, all the while covering its weakness by increasing the invective of ad hominem attack.

The real question is to understand the context, that is, the structural pressures, in which these guys made the choices they did. But then I am a skeptic when it comes to free will ;)

As it happens, Kautsky was almost rigidly loyal to core doctrines of Marxism. A century of hot air fails to dislodge that stubborn fact.

[Tower of Bebel]

Here's a rather schematic explanation of mine:

A renegade abandons his position, goes over to the other camp. Did Bebel do this? No, of course not.

But concerning Marxism, to renege without any public denial sort of takes a whole change of the underlying situation instead of a conscious retreat. Though someone claims that his ideas are Marxist, the fact that he uses the ideas of one period to define the characteristics of a totally different period, means his words are basically hollow. It's not before long when someone who's using hollow phrases also starts to admit that. In other words: most of the time, the conscious denial of Marxism by a (former) Marxist follows after a change in the material conditions, which would explain why someone who used to call himself a Marxist is now forced to deny it.

In this case the changing material conditions were the pre-war economic crisis, the imperialist war and the post-war revolution. E.g. Engels's idea of a defencive war was used to justify the socialist involvement in an imperialist war in which Germany was only tactically/militarily in the defensive, not politically/socially. When it became clear that this war was far from defencive and liberating, many socialists started to denounce that they had always been against wars in the first place. Suddenly they became 'realists'.

Bebel died in 1913, so he spend his last years living in what was called a time of wars and revolutions. A confusing time at best, when Marxism still had to develop a decent analysis of imperialism and when a sharp debate was going on over the question whether the war could lead to a socialist revolution or not and what the implications of militarism were on the prospect for civil war. He died before the war revealed sharp contradictions, before the different camps clearly became opposing camps. It partially explains why he hadn't chosen camp at that time.

Concerning reformism, the word means that you not only believe reforms are possible but you also think that they can replace revolution, that they need to be used to avoid revolution. However, sometimes, many times actually, social democrats used concealment to express their revolutionary message. And more: in certain periods of time reform itself was a revolutionary idea. This explains the old social democratic formula for the minimum-maximum programme: a programme for reform that would clear the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the working class.

But so goes the story that during an international gathering of Marxists and anarchists in Belgium in 1877, Wilhelm Liebknecht told he was in favour of reform and against the revolution of gunpowder, blood and guts. And what did the historian conclude? That Liebknecht was a reformist, plain and simple. However, when the police is watching you and when it tries to find all the (il)legal arguments possible to disrupt and disband this gathering, a revolutionary speaking in public should weigh his words. Bebel's works is full of such conceiled language. Especially his works related to social democratic activity in the Reichstag. I don't think it is possible to observe a gradual blunting of his wording that would prove his gradual turn to reformism. He was continuously oscillating between two extremes. To claim he was reformist on the basis of a few quotes is almost futile.

All this however leaves out the question of centrism, a harder nut to crack! It will take some time for me to answer it.

[Zederbaum]

But concerning Marxism, to renege without any public denial sort of takes a whole change of the underlying situation instead of a conscious retreat.

The concept you are looking for here is not ‘renegadism’ but correctness. If a Marxist applies old, irrelevant modes of thought to a new era, then he or she is simply likely to be wrong.

We've no need to resort to personal abuse by labeling people renegades. It’s just vacuous pseudo-psychology that carries the implication of having an insight into the psychological state of the alleged renegade.


Though someone claims that his ideas are Marxist, the fact that he uses the ideas of one period to define the characteristics of a totally different period, means his words are basically hollow. It's not before long when someone who's using hollow phrases also starts to admit that. In other words: most of the time, the conscious denial of Marxism by a (former) Marxist follows after a change in the material conditions, which would explain why someone who used to call himself a Marxist is now forced to deny it.

Are you calling renegades all those anarchists, Leninists, Trotskyists, left communists, and Maoists who never seem to grasp that the overthrow of the pre-capitalist regimes, e.g. the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, which were based on the military monarchies, constituted a revolution and that, therefore, they — the Leninists et al — are all renegades for misapplying a structural analysis that may have been appropriate to pre-1918 but is utterly out of date today?

*whistles innocently*

Wouldn’t it better just to argue that they are wrong? The concept of ‘renegade’ brings nothing to the discussion.


Concerning reformism, the word means that you not only believe reforms are possible but you also think that they can replace revolution, that they need to be used to avoid revolution. However, sometimes, many times actually, social democrats used concealment to express their revolutionary message. And more: in certain periods of time reform itself was a revolutionary idea. This explains the old social democratic formula for the minimum-maximum programme: a programme for reform that would clear the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the working class.

You make a good point on the use of cautious terminology in public discourse, but I’m not sure that the old social democratic formula of the minimum-maximum programme had quite the character you impute to it (at least it’s not clear to me from your brief statement).

The minimum programme required the revolutionary overthrow of the Kaiser. All the reforms in the world weren’t going to change that fact (this was essentially the strategic point in dispute between Bernstein and Kautsky).

The maximum programme was socialism. It is not so much that reforms clear the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoise, but that the revolution clears the way for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production.

To repeat, winning the minimum programme was necessary to implement the maximum programme. The minimum programme, creates the freedom, through the democratization of society, to replace the capitalist mode of production, but it by no means guarantees it.

But in order to win the minimum programme, there first had to be revolution.

This is because revolution concerns state-power. The bourgeoise were not the holders of state power at that time (one reason for Germany’s reckless expansionism) and could not be just overthrown by revolution.

Although state power is necessary for developing productive social relationships of a socialist nature it is not a sufficient basis for it. In this sense, revolution is the wrong tool for the job. It is only of use against the state, in particular against an undemocratic state. It can’t create those new social relationships that are the material conditions of a socialist society.

However, given the undemocratic nature of the states of that period, including Perfidious Albion, it was not possible to come to power democratically. Hence the necessity for revolution.

So, it is revolution against the undemocratic regimes based on absolutism that opens up the road for a democratic republic based on universal suffrage — decentralized council democracy was merely an anarchist demand at this time — which, together with the labour organisations, is the basis for transforming the mode of production itself.

Moreover, if the ideas expressed in the 1859 Preface are on the right track, then a mode of production cannot be replaced unless there is a more productive one waiting in the wings. Only revolutions which seek to spread — as opposed to create — a more productive mode of production can said to be successful in overthrowing an old ruling class.* If there is no such mode of production ready and waiting to expand rapidly then the old social relationships will reassert themselves, albeit with some plump new faces.


* All due credit to Stalin; he is the exception that proves the rule.

[Tower of Bebel]

We've no need to resort to personal abuse by labeling people renegades. It’s just vacuous pseudo-psychology that carries the implication of having an insight into the psychological state of the alleged renegade.I agree to some extent: we don't need to see an age old polemic as an eternal truth. And we should refrain from personal abuse as much as possible. But whether Lenin did not need to resort to such personal abuse is another matter, I think.


Are you calling renegades all those anarchists, Leninists, Trotskyists, left communists, and Maoists who never seem to grasp that the overthrow of the pre-capitalist regimes, e.g. the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, which were based on the military monarchies, constituted a revolution and that, therefore, they — the Leninists et al — are all renegades for misapplying a structural analysis that may have been appropriate to pre-1918 but is utterly out of date today?Well, my scheme isn't perfect. Far from it. I admit that. Because I never meant to write about Marxism in general. I had Kautsy in mind, the "Pope of Marxism". And I shouldn't have written about "ideas". It should have more more like this:


Though someone claims that his ideas are Marxist, the fact that he uses [phrases from] one period to define the characteristics of a totally different period, means his words are basically hollow. It's not before long when someone who's using hollow phrases also starts to admit that. In other words: most of the time, the conscious denial of Marxism by a [stuborn] (former) Marxist follows a change in the material conditions, which would explain why someone who used to call himself a Marxist is now forced to deny it.


Wouldn’t it better just to argue that they are wrong? The concept of ‘renegade’ brings nothing to the discussion.The fact that on some occasions Bebel could have been/was wrong fascinates me. Unlike Trotsky's eternal correctness.. in the eyes and words of some.


The minimum programme required the revolutionary overthrow of the Kaiser. All the reforms in the world weren’t going to change that fact (this was essentially the strategic point in dispute between Bernstein and Kautsky). I agree.


The maximum programme was socialism. It is not so much that reforms clear the way for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoise, but that the revolution clears the way for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production. It depends on what you mean by socialism. I'd prefer full communism instead. At least the minimum programme is not redundant after the political revolution. That's why Lenin argued for a minimum programme in 1919, against Bucharin who thought they already had fulfilled that programme. Because, as you wrote:


To repeat, winning the minimum programme was necessary to implement the maximum programme. The minimum programme, creates the freedom, through the democratization of society, to replace the capitalist mode of production, [B]but it by no means guarantees it.


Moreover, if the ideas expressed in the 1859 Preface are on the right track, then a mode of production cannot be replaced unless there is a more productive one waiting in the wings. Only revolutions which seek to spread — as opposed to create — a more productive mode of production can said to be successful in overthrowing an old ruling class.* If there is no such mode of production ready and waiting to expand rapidly then the old social relationships will reassert themselves, albeit with some plump new faces.That's an interesting point. Are you thinking of co-ops?

[The Idler]

Lenin's renegade theory of history is just a type of the great man theory of history.

[Brutus]

Lenin's renegade theory of history is just a type of the great man theory of history.

It's hardly a theory of history!

[Die Neue Zeit]

But so goes the story that during an international gathering of Marxists and anarchists in Belgium in 1877, Wilhelm Liebknecht told he was in favour of reform and against the revolution of gunpowder, blood and guts. And what did the historian conclude? That Liebknecht was a reformist, plain and simple. However, when the police is watching you and when it tries to find all the (il)legal arguments possible to disrupt and disband this gathering, a revolutionary speaking in public should weigh his words.

I'll make one such contemporary "weighing of words" for the political record, actually a restatement of previous posts:

What should the class movement by, of, and for the working class, its party-movement, the worker-class-for-itself, etc. do in relation to rule-of-law constitutionalism when it has all of

A) majority political support from the class;
B) sentimental hostility between the general population and the state apparatus, or popular resentment of the former towards the latter;
C) no electoral majority, let alone enough to "legally" amend constitutional law; and
D) breakdown of cohesion and lack of internal confidence in the bourgeois state apparatus (grunt soldiers vs. permanent rank officers and military brass, generic police vs. riot police and other paramilitary police, judicial apparatus, civil service, etc.)?

Zederbaum, the two comrades you mentioned already understand the framework above when defining who is a renegade, and we've even discussed the "Lenin-as-lesser-renegade" turn (admitting peasants into membership). The Idler, who posted a mere one-liner, doesn't understand this by being opposed to C) above, and neither do more strategically ultra-left partisans who discount A) above. :)

[Brutus]

A) majority political support from the class

C) no electoral majority, let alone enough to "legally" amend constitutional law

Surely if A was true, then they would have an electoral majority?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Not necessarily. Comrade Miles said that the US working class is two-thirds of the voting population. If over half of the former support, that may still be less than the voting population (since the other side will mobilize politically as well), and not enough to push through constitutional amendments in every US state. By Idler's and Zederbaum's logic, we can't push through until such "legitimate" support is obtained. :glare:

[Brutus]

Not necessarily. Comrade Miles said that the US working class is two-thirds of the voting population. If over half of the former support, that may still be less than the voting population (since the other side will mobilize politically as well), and not enough to push through constitutional amendments in every US state. By Idler's and Zederbaum's logic, we can't push through until such "legitimate" support is obtained. :glare:

I see what you mean now, comrade.

[The Idler]

It's hardly a theory of history!
Pretty sure it has been written about it in an attempt to pin broader historical trends on Kautsky.

[Brutus]

Pretty sure it has been written about it in an attempt to pin broader historical trends on Kautsky.

Do you have any proof?

[Tower of Bebel]

By Idler's and Zederbaum's logic, we can't push through until such "legitimate" support is obtained. :glare:
Wasn't it the task of social democracy to find this support among the people? To be a genuine party of the people?

[Brutus]

Wasn't it the task of social democracy to find this support among the people? To be a genuine party of the people?

I take it that they're rhetorical?

[Tower of Bebel]

Regarding the original question, as far as I'm able to find out, old Bebel turned all his attention to the question of avoiding war instead of preparing the proletariat for war. It looks like it that Bebel did not (explicitly) share the conclusion of Kautsky in The Road to Power (that the proletariat had to prepare itself for wars and revolutions). This did not help the struggle against the growth of revisionism nor vulgar opportunism among the leaders op the party.

I believe it's possible that it could have helped the opportunist tendencies because it paralyzed the party when it was confronted with the threats of war in 1914, a situation which the right wing seized upon to surpress any opposition against the voting for the war credits and support their contention that a vote for the credits was needed to save the workers' organisations (that were not prepared for an illegal struggle).



I take it that they're rhetorical?

But the Socialist Party represents the interests of all non-capitalist classes, not only in the future, but in the present. The proletariat, as the lowest of the exploited strata, cannot free itself from exploitation and oppression without putting an end to all exploitation and oppression. It is, therefore, their sworn enemy, no matter in what form they may appear; it is the champion of all the exploited and oppressed.

...

Only measures of the sort proposed by the Socialist Party are calculated to improve the position of the small producers so far as it is possible to improve it under existing conditions. To assist them as producers by fortifying them in the retention of their outlived method of production, is impossible, for it is opposed to the course of economic development. It is equally impossible to make capitalists out of any considerable number of them. It is only as consumers that the mass of them can be helped at all. But it is precisely the parties most friendly to the small producers that cast upon them, as consumers, the heaviest burdens. These burdens are real, but the elevation of small production which is supposed to accompany them, is nothing more than empty pretense.

To assist the small producer in his character of consumer, tar from hindering economic development, is a means of promoting it. The better the position of the small farmer or small capitalist as consumer, the higher his standard of living, the greater his physical or intellectual demands, the sooner will he cease the struggle against industry on a large scale. If he is accustomed to a good living he will rebel against the privations incident to a protracted struggle, and will the sooner prefer to take his place with the proletariat. And he will not group himself with the most submissive members of this class to which he has joined himself. He will pass directly into the ranks of the militant, purposeful proletarians, and thus hasten the victory of the proletariat.

This victory will not he born out of degradation, as many have believed; no more out of the degradation of the small producers than out of that of the proletariat. Socialism has as much cause to oppose degradation on the one side as on the other, and it does so to the best of its ability. To strengthen the socialist movement, therefore, is to the interest, not only of the wage-earners, but of all sections of the population which live by work and not by exploitation.

...

The more unbearable the existing system of production, the more evidently it is discredited, and the more unable the ruling parties show themselves to remedy our disgraceful social ills, the more illogical and unprincipled these parties become and the more they resolve themselves into cliques of self-seeking politicians, the greater will be the numbers of those who stream from the non-proletarian classes into the Socialist Party and, hand in hand with the irresistibly advancing proletariat, follow its banner to victory and triumph.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Wasn't it the task of social democracy to find this support among the people? To be a genuine party of the people?

Such political support doesn't have to be legal support, comrade. The framework is for a workers-only (voting membership-wise) party that has majority political support from the rest of the class (the more voting members, especially, the better), with all other support being secondary (down to the last protest vote). That framework then is the basis for how to deal properly with ballot spoilages, elections, parliamentary activity, and local council activity.

[The Idler]

Do you have any proof?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm