The Proud Tower (75 page)

The cause drew men like the Italian Amilcare Cipriani, one of the founders of the Congress of 1889. Type of the eternal rebel, he had fought with Garibaldi’s Red Shirts and as a volunteer in the Cretan insurrection against Turkey and turned up in Brussels to join the comrades in the general strike of 1893. “Magnificent in cape and soft felt hat, with black beard streaked with grey and eyes of flame,” he carried a handbag in which “there were doubtless more explosives than toilet articles … ready to fight in any corner of the world for the cause of Revolution.”

It drew men of troubled conscience from the upper class, like the American Robert Hunter, married to a daughter of the banker and philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes. Like others of his class, Hunter was startled by the articles of the Muckrakers and moved to seek a remedy for social injustice. He saw his first vision of the poor in settlement-house work, discovered Socialism, and at the age of twenty-eight in 1904 wrote a small classic,
Poverty.
With the undulled emotion of his time he described a valley in Italy “so smiling and peaceful, with a thousand terraced gardens on its exquisite slopes, under skies that enrapture the soul; and with men, women and children whose faces with big eyes and sunken cheeks lacerate the heart.… Great God, is not the Valley of the Tirano all the school that Italy needs for Socialism?… The faces are with you when you eat and your food sickens you.… Any man with a heart would become a Socialist in Italy.”

Valleys of the Tirano in every country made Socialists out of intellectuals who saw them and workers who were born in them. What both had in common was faith that man had it in his power to make things better. The obstacles were massive; the House of Have was old and strong and entrenched. But the grievances of the working class were rising and were concerned as much with social inequality as with pure want. The workers resented disparity in suffrage, due to property qualifications. They resented the unequal working of compulsory military service, from which the privileged could be exempted; the bias of the law, which worked one way for the rich and another for the poor; the layers of hereditary privilege of all kinds, which the ruling class took for granted. Socialism was making the workers’ wants conscious and articulate. The apathy of the masses which had disillusioned Bakunin and caused Lassalle to rail at “the damned wantlessness of the poor” was passing. They were beginning to know what they wanted, though on the whole it was not revolution. Socialism’s inclusion of that goal was what gave it fervor and impetus, as in the case of Julius Braunthal, who joined the Austrian Socialist party at the age of fourteen “for the sake of the Revolution.” But revolution appealed more to intellectuals who had no doubt of their capacity to manage society than it did to the working class.

Like a crack in a plank of wood which cannot be sealed, the difference between the worker and the intellectual was ineradicable in Socialism. Organized Socialism bore the name Workingmen’s Association but in fact it was never any such thing. It was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class, and the distinction remained basic. Although it spoke for the worker and made his wants articulate, goals and doctrine were set, and thought, energy and leadership largely supplied by, intellectuals. The working class was both client and ultimately, in its mass strength, the necessary instrument of the overthrow of capitalism. As such it appeared as Hero; it was sentimentalized. In the illustrations for an English pamphlet commemorating the London Congress of 1896, the workingmen appeared as handsome strong-muscled Burne-Iones figures in smocks accompanied by indomitable women with long limbs and rippling hair. They were not the same race as Zola’s soiled figures, harsh, hungry, consumptive and alcoholic. The reality was neither all one thing nor the other; neither all
lumpenproletariat
nor curly-bearded, clenched-fisted revolutionist. The working class was no more of a piece than any other class. Socialist doctrine, however, required it to be an entity with a working-class mind, working-class voice, working-class will, working-class purpose. In fact, these were not easily ascertainable. The Socialist idealized them and to be idealized is to be overestimated.

Owing to its internal quarrels, the founding Congress of 1889 did not lay down a body of doctrine to which the member parties were obliged to subscribe. Agreement went no farther than four resolutions which established four objectives as proper Socialist aims short of the maximum program: the eight-hour day; universal equal manhood suffrage; substitution of citizens’ militias for standing armies; observance of May Day for a show of working-class strength.

While the first was the essential demand of the clientele, the second was fundamental to the whole Socialist purpose and program. The vote was the one means by which the masses could translate numbers into power; their only means to equalize the power of capital. For the same reason, the ruling class resisted it. Equal manhood suffrage at this date existed only in France and the United States, and only in national elections, not local government, in Germany. In most other countries the propertyless were disqualified or plural votes were given to taxpayers, university graduates and fathers of families. Socialists demanded the one-man-one-vote principle.

May Day, last of the four resolutions, was agreed on in response to a message from the American Federation of Labor, which planned to open its campaign for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. It was adopted at the suggestion of a French trade unionist, but the result was divisive because the Germans refused to commit themselves to a gesture likely to anger officialdom and evoke reprisals.

Nevertheless it was the Germans who spoke with most authority in the International. As the oldest and largest of the Socialist parties, the German party enjoyed the greatest prestige and, by virtue of the fact that Marx was a German, regarded itself as the Petrine rock, not to mention the Vatican, of Socialism. In 1890, released from the anti-Socialist law, it won 1,400,000 votes, nearly 20 per cent of the total, and thirty-five seats, in the elections for the Reichstag, a victory that dazed Socialists in the rest of the world. In practice, the German Social-Democratic party, as a result of its successes among the voters and its close ties with the trade unions, adapted itself to the possible. In theory it remained stoutly Marxist and at its Erfurt Congress in 1891 restated the Marxian view of history as official.

The Erfurt Program reaffirmed that the middle class, small businessmen and farmers, were being squeezed out, sinking along with the proletariat into increasing misery, and that the greater the masses grew in number, increasing the pool of labour, the sharper became the division between exploiters and exploited. Since the ultimate solution of public ownership could only be accomplished through the conquest of political power, the program of the party must be to gain political control, using trade unions as the source of votes but maintaining direction of policy in the party.

The Erfurt order for political action stamped its image upon the Second International, though not without the furious resistance of the Anarchists and their friends whose split with the Marxists on this issue had broken up the First International. Although not invited to the Congress of Zurich in 1893, the Anarchists arrived anyway, whereat August Bebel, the German chairman, a master of Marxian abuse, harangued them for having “neither program nor principles.” In Zurich, “accustomed to German methods,” he had no difficulty in having them expelled by force. In protest against such methods, Amilcare Cipriani resigned as a delegate. The Anarchists retired to conduct a diminutive counter-Congress in a café while the majority unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing the “necessity of organizing the workers for political action.” Only those parties and groups accepting this principle could henceforth call themselves Socialists and take part in Congresses of the International. Not wishing to cut themselves off from their foundations, they made an exception for trade unions, which in future were to be admitted without being required to subscribe to the political principle. According to the Belgian delegate Emile Vandervelde, these difficult problems were solved in an atmosphere of “profound calm.” It seemed anything but calm to a young British trade-union delegate, J. R. Clynes of the cotton workers, who had never been abroad before. He was astonished at the “verbal orgies” and violence of the Latin and Slav delegates and at the flareups of hostility in which one delegate flourished a knife and “everyone was yelling and struggling.” Among Socialists, human bellicosity found its vent in factionalism whose vehemence Clynes tactlessly ascribed to “national rivalries and hatreds growing out of past wars.”

Going for a swim in the Lake of Zurich Clynes saw “a ruddy beard on the surface of the water floating gently towards me” which proved to be attached to Bernard Shaw, also a delegate to the Congress, representing the Fabian Society. Having already discounted Marx and revolution, Shaw did not spare his contempt, in his reports of the Congress, for Wilhelm Liebknecht’s duping of his followers with the “rhetoric of the barricade.” The German leaders, he decided thereafter, were forty years out of date. At sixty-seven, Liebknecht, founder of the party in 1875, was now its elder statesman. Descended from a long line of university professors reaching back to the Eighteenth Century, he had been imprisoned for his role in the bourgeois revolution of 1848, and afterwards lived in exile in England for thirteen years, where he studied with Marx. When he died in 1900 a crowd of an estimated hundred thousand mourners and spectators lined the streets along the route of his four-hour funeral procession.

By all but Shaw the German party was considered the hope of Socialism, bearer of the torch in the country from which Marx expected revolution to come. Everyone was impressed by its size and strength, its wonderful organization, its twenty-eight secretaries and organizers, its training program for party workers, and its mounting membership. In the elections of 1893 the Social-Democrats increased their votes to 1,750,000, close to 25 per cent of the total, more than those of any other single party. Since it was against principle to join forces with any bourgeois party, the Social-Democrats in the Reichstag remained, despite their numbers, a relatively impotent group in what was in any case an impotent body. The fact of their existence, however, exerted a silent pressure which made the Government more reasonable toward concessions. The Kaiser, who in the first careless rapture of his dismissal of Bismarck had lifted the anti-Socialist law in 1890, recovered quickly. By 1895 he had decided that the Social-Democrats were a “gang of traitors” who “do not deserve the name of Germans” and by 1897 that the party “which does not stop attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the last stump.” In 1895 Liebknecht was arrested on a charge of
lèse-majesté
for a speech of which Shaw said that it could have been made “by Mr. Arthur Balfour to the Primrose League tomorrow with the approbation of England.” But this was no special mark of repression, since it could happen to anyone in Germany.

National tended to outweigh class traits among the German Socialists: they were more obedient than bold. For all its size the party did not venture to play host to an International Socialist Congress on German soil until 1907. Despite fiery speeches its leaders were prudent in action; they restricted May Day demonstrations to the evening so as not to interfere with work. Work stoppage, said Liebknecht, was general strike and “a general strike is general nonsense.” In Munich no May Day demonstration was permitted until 1901 and then only on condition that it took place outside city limits and did not form crowds in the streets on the way. Columns of Socialists, “their pockets bulging with radishes,” accompanied by wives and children, marched briskly in dead silence through the city to a beer garden on the outskirts where they drank beer and munched their radishes and struck a Russian exile as “not at all resembling a May Day celebration of working-class triumph.”

They were better off, however, than any Russian worker. Under the heavy throb of German industrial expansion, employment was increasing faster than the population. Unions, under these conditions, were successful in raising wages. Social legislation, originally bestowed from above by Bismarck to weld labour to his state, was the most advanced of any country. By 1903, 18,000,000 workers were insured against accident, 13,000,000 against old age and 11,000,000 against illness, with a total annual expenditure of $100,000,000 in social welfare benefits. Laws regulated wages, hours, time off, grievance procedures, safety measures, and the number of factory windows and toilets. With characteristic thoroughness Germany’s rulers wanted to ensure physical efficiency, leaving as little as possible to chance and bringing everything possible under orderly rule. Professor Delbrück in 1897 publicly supported the right of collective bargaining on the ground that labour peace was necessary for national unity and national defense. To keep labour quiet by judicious concessions was considered the best method of smothering the Social-Democrats, whom the possessing class regarded with increasing enmity and fear.

August Bebel, the party’s dictator, was believed by the bourgeoisie to be a kind of “shadow-Kaiser.” A small-boned, narrow little man with white hair and goatee, he had been born in a barracks in 1840, the same year as Czar Reed. His father was an Army corporal and his mother a domestic servant. Taking up the carpenter’s trade, he had joined the labour movement in the days of Lassalle; and on a charge of incitement to treason had been sentenced to four years in prison, a punishment fruitful in producing Socialists. In prison Bebel read much, received visits from Liebknecht and wrote a magisterial history of
Woman and Socialism.
His brains, Mommsen said, if divided among a dozen Junkers from east of the Elbe, were enough to make each of them shine among his peers. In the Reichstag, where he had debated Bismarck in “savage accents,” Bebel was the spokesman of poverty and misery, loved and admired by the workers, who felt him to be a comrade. He would remain “the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order” until it was destroyed, he proclaimed at a party Congress in 1903. This was traditional verbiage. In fact, Bebel had no great illusions about the mass of his followers. “Look at those fellows,” he said in 1892 to a correspondent of the London
Times
as they watched a march of a battalion of Prussian Guards; “80 per cent of them are Berliners and Social-Democrats but if there was trouble they would shoot me down at a word of command from above.”