Die Neue Zeit
9th March 2015, 00:56
Parvus’s ‘Fourth of August’ (http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1023/parvuss-fourth-of-august/)
Sections of the left also adopted a German-defencist position during 1914-18
On August 4 1914 the Reichstag Fraktion of the Social Democratic Party of Germany infamously voted for war credits for the kaiser’s government. Opponents of the decision within the Fraktion went along with the decision for reasons of party discipline. The dominant narrative on the far left is that this was a political collapse of the ‘centre’, whose most prominent figure was Karl Kautsky, with its roots in the SPD’s ‘passive’ policy before 1914; but that the party’s ‘left’, previously advocates of an ‘offensive’ policy - most prominently Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - redeemed the honour of German Marxism by anti-war agitation.
As Ben Lewis has explained in this paper, this story is incomplete. An important section of leaders of the SPD’s pre-war left also adopted a German-defencist policy in autumn 1914, and from 1915 organised round the journal Die Glocke, published by Alexander Parvus. Over the next few months we will be carrying a number of extracts from these authors’ writings. Not because we support them, but because their arguments and errors are recognisably present in many modern far-left arguments about imperialism, war and Marxist policy. Perhaps seeing how the same arguments led to German-defencism in 1914-18 will help some of today’s comrades overcome their own mistakes.
We begin with Parvus’s own August 4 1914: his interview with the Constantinople (Istanbul) daily Tasvir-i Efkâr on that day (also the day of the formal British declaration of war on Germany), translated by Esen Uslu. In the interview, Parvus argues in a partially ‘coded’ way for Turkey (at this time the Ottoman empire) to take the opportunity provided by the war to break the chains of control by its British and French imperialist creditors: that is, to side with Germany.
Parvus, aka Alexander Helphand or Gelfand (‘Elephant’), aka Izrail Lazarevitch (surname unknown) was born in 1867 in Berezino, Belarus, but brought up in Odessa, Ukraine. In his teens he was a supporter of Norodnaya Volya and in 1886 spent some time in Zurich, where he was in contact with Georgi Plekhanov and the early Russian Marxist group, Emancipation of Labour. In 1887 he went to Basle to study political economy, obtaining a doctorate in 1891. He then moved to Germany, where he supported himself by writing for SPD periodicals.
He was a prominent writer of the left in the party: an early advocate of the mass strike tactic, an early critic of Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, whose sharp criticisms provoked a storm of protest and forced the party leadership to respond to Bernstein. He was also an early writer against imperialism in his 1898 pamphlet Marineforderungen, Kolonialpolitik und Arbeiterinteressen (Naval demands, colonialism and workers’ interests). His sharp renewal of the revisionism debate with Opportunism in practice (1901) led Kautsky to refuse further articles from Parvus in Neue Zeit, the SPD theoretical journal.
In 1901-06 Parvus was more involved in the Russian workers’ movement, taking the side of the Mensheviks (after initial neutrality) in 1904 and writing in that year in the Menshevik Iskra on the likelihood that the Russo-Japanese war would lead to revolution. At this period he influenced Leon Trotsky and his ‘permanent revolution’ theory, and in 1905 he collaborated with Trotsky in Petrograd, playing a leading role in the second Petrograd soviet in December-January 1905-06 before being arrested.
Back in Germany after escaping from exile in Siberia, Parvus encountered a renewed debate on imperialism in the SPD following the 1906 ‘Hottentot election’, where the right, centre and liberal parties formed a bloc against the SPD around the defence of the German state’s genocidal Herero war in what is now Namibia. The SPD had denounced the war and as a result of the bloc it lost Reichstag seats and saw its share of the vote reduced (though its total vote went up). The SPD right used this defeat to attack the SPD’s anti-imperialism. Parvus responded with a major book on the topic, Die Kolonialpolitik und der Zussamenbruch (Colonial policy and breakdown [of capitalism]). This combined savage attacks on German colonialism with a theoretical analysis of the roots of imperialism, influencing Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance capital (1910) and thus, indirectly, Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which relied on Hilferding.
In 1910 Parvus moved to Constantinople, initially as a journalist. He rapidly became involved with the ‘Young Turk’ nationalist movement, which had obtained power in the revolution of 1908. He wrote around 50 articles in Young Turk-affiliated periodicals, especially the pan-Turkist Türk Yurdu, mainly on economic issues, and a book on the Ottoman debt problem. He seems in this work to have arrived at the conclusion that finance imperialism led to what has more recently been called ‘underdevelopment’; and, with the Anglo-French control of Ottoman finances, and the ‘capitulations’ (special privileges of Europeans in the Ottoman empire), he was brought face to face with the reality of British imperialism in a way which had not featured more than abstractly in his previous work.
This Turkish anti-imperialist nationalism, focused on British and French imperialism, seems to provide the context for Parvus’s own ‘Fourth of August’: his turn from pre-war leftist anti-imperialism to German-defencism in the world war. After the interview, translated below, he wrote two pamphlets in Osmanli Turkish: Umumî harb neticelerinden: Almanya galip gelirse (The outcome of the general war if Germany wins), and Umumî harb neticelerinden: İngiltere galip gelirse (The outcome of the general war if England wins). If Britain won, the Russians would take Constantinople and the Bosporus, while Britain would take control of the Ottoman empire. If Germany won, the Franco-British debts would be cancelled, the Turks could expect to recover territory from the Russians and in north Africa from the French, while German investment would promote Turkish industrial development.
He went on to write further articles justifying German-defencism, some of which we will publish later in this series. But August 4 was for Parvus, as for the SPD leadership, the decisive moment.
Mike Macnair
Sections of the left also adopted a German-defencist position during 1914-18
On August 4 1914 the Reichstag Fraktion of the Social Democratic Party of Germany infamously voted for war credits for the kaiser’s government. Opponents of the decision within the Fraktion went along with the decision for reasons of party discipline. The dominant narrative on the far left is that this was a political collapse of the ‘centre’, whose most prominent figure was Karl Kautsky, with its roots in the SPD’s ‘passive’ policy before 1914; but that the party’s ‘left’, previously advocates of an ‘offensive’ policy - most prominently Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - redeemed the honour of German Marxism by anti-war agitation.
As Ben Lewis has explained in this paper, this story is incomplete. An important section of leaders of the SPD’s pre-war left also adopted a German-defencist policy in autumn 1914, and from 1915 organised round the journal Die Glocke, published by Alexander Parvus. Over the next few months we will be carrying a number of extracts from these authors’ writings. Not because we support them, but because their arguments and errors are recognisably present in many modern far-left arguments about imperialism, war and Marxist policy. Perhaps seeing how the same arguments led to German-defencism in 1914-18 will help some of today’s comrades overcome their own mistakes.
We begin with Parvus’s own August 4 1914: his interview with the Constantinople (Istanbul) daily Tasvir-i Efkâr on that day (also the day of the formal British declaration of war on Germany), translated by Esen Uslu. In the interview, Parvus argues in a partially ‘coded’ way for Turkey (at this time the Ottoman empire) to take the opportunity provided by the war to break the chains of control by its British and French imperialist creditors: that is, to side with Germany.
Parvus, aka Alexander Helphand or Gelfand (‘Elephant’), aka Izrail Lazarevitch (surname unknown) was born in 1867 in Berezino, Belarus, but brought up in Odessa, Ukraine. In his teens he was a supporter of Norodnaya Volya and in 1886 spent some time in Zurich, where he was in contact with Georgi Plekhanov and the early Russian Marxist group, Emancipation of Labour. In 1887 he went to Basle to study political economy, obtaining a doctorate in 1891. He then moved to Germany, where he supported himself by writing for SPD periodicals.
He was a prominent writer of the left in the party: an early advocate of the mass strike tactic, an early critic of Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, whose sharp criticisms provoked a storm of protest and forced the party leadership to respond to Bernstein. He was also an early writer against imperialism in his 1898 pamphlet Marineforderungen, Kolonialpolitik und Arbeiterinteressen (Naval demands, colonialism and workers’ interests). His sharp renewal of the revisionism debate with Opportunism in practice (1901) led Kautsky to refuse further articles from Parvus in Neue Zeit, the SPD theoretical journal.
In 1901-06 Parvus was more involved in the Russian workers’ movement, taking the side of the Mensheviks (after initial neutrality) in 1904 and writing in that year in the Menshevik Iskra on the likelihood that the Russo-Japanese war would lead to revolution. At this period he influenced Leon Trotsky and his ‘permanent revolution’ theory, and in 1905 he collaborated with Trotsky in Petrograd, playing a leading role in the second Petrograd soviet in December-January 1905-06 before being arrested.
Back in Germany after escaping from exile in Siberia, Parvus encountered a renewed debate on imperialism in the SPD following the 1906 ‘Hottentot election’, where the right, centre and liberal parties formed a bloc against the SPD around the defence of the German state’s genocidal Herero war in what is now Namibia. The SPD had denounced the war and as a result of the bloc it lost Reichstag seats and saw its share of the vote reduced (though its total vote went up). The SPD right used this defeat to attack the SPD’s anti-imperialism. Parvus responded with a major book on the topic, Die Kolonialpolitik und der Zussamenbruch (Colonial policy and breakdown [of capitalism]). This combined savage attacks on German colonialism with a theoretical analysis of the roots of imperialism, influencing Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance capital (1910) and thus, indirectly, Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which relied on Hilferding.
In 1910 Parvus moved to Constantinople, initially as a journalist. He rapidly became involved with the ‘Young Turk’ nationalist movement, which had obtained power in the revolution of 1908. He wrote around 50 articles in Young Turk-affiliated periodicals, especially the pan-Turkist Türk Yurdu, mainly on economic issues, and a book on the Ottoman debt problem. He seems in this work to have arrived at the conclusion that finance imperialism led to what has more recently been called ‘underdevelopment’; and, with the Anglo-French control of Ottoman finances, and the ‘capitulations’ (special privileges of Europeans in the Ottoman empire), he was brought face to face with the reality of British imperialism in a way which had not featured more than abstractly in his previous work.
This Turkish anti-imperialist nationalism, focused on British and French imperialism, seems to provide the context for Parvus’s own ‘Fourth of August’: his turn from pre-war leftist anti-imperialism to German-defencism in the world war. After the interview, translated below, he wrote two pamphlets in Osmanli Turkish: Umumî harb neticelerinden: Almanya galip gelirse (The outcome of the general war if Germany wins), and Umumî harb neticelerinden: İngiltere galip gelirse (The outcome of the general war if England wins). If Britain won, the Russians would take Constantinople and the Bosporus, while Britain would take control of the Ottoman empire. If Germany won, the Franco-British debts would be cancelled, the Turks could expect to recover territory from the Russians and in north Africa from the French, while German investment would promote Turkish industrial development.
He went on to write further articles justifying German-defencism, some of which we will publish later in this series. But August 4 was for Parvus, as for the SPD leadership, the decisive moment.
Mike Macnair