A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (51 page)

Social democracy

The rapid expansion of industry, and of the industrial working class, created a new audience for the ideas of the socialist organisations which had been battered by the defeats of 1848 and 1871. But nowhere did these organisations feel strong enough to make a head-on revolutionary challenge to the state. Instead they followed a strategy developed by German socialists. They took advantage of the opening provided by the new electoral systems, however limited and skewed in favour of the upper classes, and built legal workers’ organisations such as trade unions, welfare organisations, sports bodies and even singing clubs.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany was enormously successful in some ways. Its vote grew from election to election and was bigger than that of either the big landowners’ party or the industrialists’ party. It survived a 12 year period of illegality under ‘anti-socialist’ laws, achieved a membership of a million and ran 90 local daily papers. Its network of ancillary organisations (unions, welfare societies and so on) became part of the fabric of people’s lives in many industrial districts. It managed to do all this despite the repeated arrest of its newspaper editors, organisers and parliamentary deputies. It seemed to show that capitalist democracy could be turned against capitalism—a lesson Frederick Engels hammered home in article after article.

The German example was soon being followed by other parties. It was the model which Engels urged upon the French Workers’ Party of Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue. In Spain the Madrid worker Pablo Iglesias began building a socialist party, the PSOE, along essentially the same lines. So did activists in Italy. Even in Britain, where 20 years of rising living standards for skilled workers had made them receptive to the message of the Liberal Party of Gladstone, a group of radical democrats moved leftwards in 1883 and set out to build a miniature version of the German party, the Social Democratic Federation. When an international federation of workers’ organisations, generally known as the Second International, was formed in 1889, the German party was the guiding light within it.

But there was a contradiction between the theory of these parties, with their commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and their day to day practical activity, which consisted of carefully applying pressure for reform within capitalism. This came to the fore in the mid-1890s.

One of the leading intellectuals in the German party was Eduard Bernstein. He had been a friend of Engels, and had played an important role in keeping the party going from exile during the period of illegality. In the mid-1890s he declared that the basic theoretical assumptions of Marx and Engels had been wrong. He argued that generalised economic crises were no longer an integral part of capitalism, and said they had also been wrong to foresee an ever-greater polarisation between classes:

Bernstein argued that this process could come to fruition without the ‘dissolution of the modern state system’
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demanded by Marx in his writings on the Paris Commune. All that was necessary was a further spread of parliamentarianism, with socialists embracing a thoroughgoing ‘liberalism’
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and a policy of piecemeal reform within the existing system.

Karl Kautsky, the SPD’s main theorist, denounced Bernstein’s argument. He insisted that capitalism could not be reformed out of existence—at some point there had to be a ‘struggle for power’ and a ‘social revolution’. But his practical conclusions were not very different from Bernstein’s. He argued that the socialist revolution would come about through the inevitable growth of the socialist vote. Eventually the party would have an electoral majority and the legitimacy to put down any attempted overthrow of a socialist government by the forces of capitalism. Until then it had to avoid action which might provoke reprisals. Unlike Bernstein, Kautsky said that there remained a distant goal of social transformation. But his prescriptions for day to day socialist activity were hardly any different.

Both shared the optimistic ‘scientism’ or ‘positivism’ of the middle class intelligentsia and believed in the mechanical inevitability of progress. For Bernstein, science, technology and increasing democracy were turning capitalism into socialism. Kautsky saw the process as taking place in the future, not the present, but was just as certain about its inevitability. Throughout history, changes in the forces of production had led to changes in the relations of production, and they would do so now, he said, if people only waited. The 27 year old Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was alone in challenging such complacency.

The SPD’s organisers, who spent all their energies on getting out the vote and maintaining the ancillary organisations, threw their weight behind a formal condemnation of Bernstein’s ideas, but continued to pursue a path of moderate action within the system. So too did the trade union leaders, whose main concern was trying to get employers to negotiate. Bernstein lost the vote within the party, but won the argument.

Yet the ability of the socialist parties to expand their influence within capitalism depended, in the end, on the stability of capitalism itself. Bernstein recognised this when he made the supposedly crisis-free character of the system a central part of his argument. German capitalism did go through a phase in the 1890s when it seemed to have overcome any tendency to move into crisis, and Bernstein generalised from this into the future.

By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg insisted that the very processes which seemed to be stabilising capitalism in the 1890s would lead to even greater instability later.
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She also grasped something which had already been half-recognised by the English liberal economist Hobson and would be spelt out in 1916 by the Russian revolutionaries Nicolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin—the phase of rapid capitalist growth was closely connected to the imperial expansion of the Great Powers.

Imperialism

In 1876 no more than 10 percent of Africa was under European rule. By 1900 more than 90 percent was colonised. Britain, France and Belgium had divided the continent between them, leaving small slices for Germany and Italy. In the same period Britain, France, Russia and Germany established wide spheres of influence extending from their colonial enclaves in China; Japan took over Korea and Taiwan; France conquered all of Indochina; the US seized Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain; and Britain and Russia agreed to an informal partitioning of Iran. Even the smaller islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans were subject to the dictates of London or Paris. The number of genuinely independent states outside Europe and the Americas could be counted on the fingers of one hand—the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.

The mythology conveyed by children’s stories and the novels for their parents was of intrepid white explorers subduing ignorant but subsequently grateful ‘natives’—people who were ‘half-devil and half-child’, according to Kipling in a poem urging the Americans to emulate the glories of British colonialism. This mythology depicted the peoples of Africa and the islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans as uniformly ‘primitive’, characterised by cannibalism and witchcraft.

In fact, European ‘explorers’ such as Mungo Park in the 1790s and 1800s, and Livingtone and Stanley in the 1850s and 1860s, were only able to make their famous journeys through Africa because structured societies and established states existed. These states had been easily able to deal with the first European attempts at conquest. In 1880, it is worth remembering, western Europeans had been in regular maritime contact with the African coast for 400 years—and Indians, Arabs and Turks had been in contact with whole swathes of the African interior for considerably longer. Yet Europeans directly controlled only a few isolated, mainly coastal, regions. As Bruce Vandervort has written, ‘In the early modern period at least, Europe’s technological edge was seldom very great, or important, except perhaps at sea. Indigenous peoples were quick to catch up with European innovations’.
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The first European attempts to carve out colonies in Africa involved them in bloody battles which they often lost. The French had to fight long and bitter wars to conquer Algeria and Senegal. The British lost to an Ashanti army in the early 1870s, to the Mahdi’s Sudanese army at Khartoum in 1884 (when the same Charles George Gordon who had helped crush the T’ai p’ing rebellion in China met a justly deserved death), and to the Zulus at Isandlwana in 1879. The Italians suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of an Ethiopian army at Adowa in 1896, when ‘a whole swaggering ethos of white conquest was shattered’.
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But by the 1880s the accelerated industrialisation of Western Europe was shifting the balance decisively towards the would-be colonisers. New weapons—breech-loading rifles, steel-plated steamships capable of navigating far up-river and, most notoriously, the Gatling machine gun—gave European armies the decisive edge in most battles for the first time. What is more, the endless flow of commodities spawned by industry made it relatively easy for Europeans to bribe African allies to fight for them. Half the ‘Italian’ troops at Adowa were Eritreans or Tigrayans, and many of the ‘British’ troops in Sudan were Egyptian or Sudanese. The ‘divide and rule’ strategy which had worked so well for Britain’s rulers in India now began to be applied on a large scale in Africa.

The Europeans claimed to be fighting against ‘savagery’, but their methods were barbaric. When the British army of Lord Kitchener finally conquered Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, his machine-gunners killed 10,000 Sudanese troops with the loss of only 48 men. ‘The many thousands of Mahdists dying and wounded on the battlefield received no aid from the British, who simply turned their backs and marched away’.
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‘They called for water and they called for our aid, but our officers spurned them,’ a British soldier wrote in his diary. Kitchener had the skull of their leader, the Mahdi, turned into an inkstand.
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Just as brutal was Lord Lugard’s expedition against the rebellious village of Satiru in Nigeria. He estimated that his men killed 2,000 rebels without loss. Prisoners were executed and their heads put on spikes.
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The Belgian king, Leopold, was in the forefront of pushing for a Western crusade in Africa, claiming it would bring ‘civilisation’ and stamp out slavery. He carved out the huge territory of Congo as a personal empire, and used methods notorious even among other colonial powers. In an official report to the British foreign office, Roger Casement told of a visit to a rubber-producing region where ‘whole villages and districts I knew well and visited as flourishing communities…are today without human beings.’ He learned that Belgian soldiers who looted and burned villages then collected basketloads of severed hands hacked from victims to prove they had not wasted ammunition.
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The capitalist powers certainly did not expend money and effort conquering the rest of the world out of philanthropy. But they were not led to do so simply by racism either, however much they saw this as justifying their mission. The motive was profit.

There has been much argument among historians as to whether the colonial powers were right to believe that empires would make them richer. But, like the similar argument about the economics of the slave trade in the 18th century, it is misplaced. The great powers
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empires would make them richer. Those in the forefront of imperial expansion were hard-faced men who understood only too well that it was money which made the world go round. People like King Leopold or the British adventurer Cecil Rhodes might have considered themselves idealists, but they were out to enrich themselves. As Leopold wrote to the Belgian ambassador in London, ‘I do not want to miss a chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake’.
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The carve-up of the world cannot be understood without looking at what was happening to the capitalism of the West in this period. The 1870s and 1880s were a period—often called ‘the Great Depression’—of depressed markets, falling prices, and low profits and dividends, especially in Britain. To British investors there seemed one way to maintain their incomes—investment abroad. Total investment in foreign stocks rose from £95 million in 1883 to £393 million in 1889. It soon equalled 8 percent of Britain’s gross national product and absorbed 50 percent of savings.
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The money went mainly in ‘stocks’—fixed interest investments for the construction of railways, bridges, harbours, docks and waterways, or for the financing of government bodies. Whatever the investments were for, they promised a level of profitability higher than that to be obtained at home. They also provided a market for domestic industrial output (such as steel rails, locomotives and bridge girders) and led to an increased flow of cheap raw materials. In this way they helped pull British capitalism into a new period of expansion.
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Such investments required a means to stop foreign borrowers defaulting on their payments. Colonialism provided this through the armed force of the state.

So Britain and France jointly took charge of Egypt’s finances when its rulers could no longer pay their debts in 1876, and in the early 1880s the British government used armed force to establish a ‘protectorate’—in effect absorbing Egypt into the British Empire, guaranteeing the dividends of the Suez Canal Company and safeguarding the route to Britain’s even bigger investments in India.

In a similar way, British forces attempted to seize control of the Transvaal area of southern Africa, ruled by Dutch speaking Boers, after the discovery of gold and diamond deposits. A bitter war established South Africa as a stable protector of British business interests.