l'Enfermé

Who knows, other that the mistake to split at the expense of the USPD left and center.

Spartakusbund had 7,000 members in 1927 according to the Weimar Police.

Hi Inferme

I think the point about Lenin's redefintion of socialism is that he was not "merely" updating the term to reflect modern usage. He was himself actively contributing to this alteration in the meaning of the term. An added complication is that his describing socialism as the lower phase of communiusm (which is a distortion of Marx's view) contradicts his other new definition of socialism as state capitalist monopoly run in the interests of the whole people. Lenin was thus fundamentally inconsistent even in his redefintion of socialism

Ok, cheers.

Thanks for cluing me in. Interesting stuff. Do you have any good sources for this?

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 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.

Preobrazhensky outlined a kinder form of "socialist primitive accumulation." It was indeed primitive because lots of surplus would have been extracted from the peasantry in any event. The further compounding by the Stalin regime was the depression of real wages until a couple of years after his death.