For me, the latter approach is more productive, because I do not believe that historical events come out of nowhere and against no set of background conditions, I think that events are generally best understood as the product of underlying contradictions that were already present (though constantly evolving) over long periods of time. The task of a historian of the SPD is to examine the party's trajectory as it existed before 1914 in order to understand why the betrayal of that year was possible.
But in the "evidence" you provided for the SPD's opposition to war, you effectively pointed to congresses that were held at intervals not more than ten years preceding the outbreak of the war. So you either you insist that those events were indicative of serious opposition to war and argue that the turn of the SPD to reformism and chauvinism basically occurred within an extremely short period of time before the outbreak of the war, or you examine, as a Marxist, the longer processes that culminated in the SPD's betrayal in 1914, signifying a transformation of quantitative into qualitative change, which would entail a more critical stance towards the SPD's pre-war declarations, and an awareness of the party's sustained integration into capitalist society and the imperialist world-system.
The betrayal of the SPD in 1914 says nothing of what the party was during it's revolutionary period.
The SPD stated this, the SPD stated that - what matters is whether the party took radical action (i.e. as opposed to making empty statements at periodic congresses) at the actual outbreak of war to bring the efforts of the German state to a grinding halt, and your beloved SPD did not do that, it directly facilitated the butchering of millions, through the support of its parliamentary deputies for war credits, and through its failure to make use of its trade union apparatus to conduct strike action in a mass scale. That's the key historical fact I care about, and anyone who is not clear on the sordid history of the SPD is no comrade of mine.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...05&postcount=7 You got it all wrong there comrade. The pre-war, Bebel-lead SPD(Bebel died in 1913) was the flagship of the international revolutionary Marxist party-movement. The reformist influence came from the dominantly right-wing syndicalist trade unionionists(2,500,000 workers were in SPD trade unions before the war). The alleged "chauvinism" of the SPD is a stupid claim, the Second International, and the SPD at it's head, came out against an outbreak of war in 1907, 1910 and at the Basel Congress in 1912 it threatened the bourgousie order with proletarian revolution if the bourgousie launched a war, and in the same year, at the SDP Annual Congress at Chemnitz, the SPD came out strongly against imperialism, German militarism, and war. The pre-war SPD was a revolutionary Marxist party, the original "vanguard mass-party".
