A Perilous European Choice
BAUMANN, FRED
A Perilous European Choice The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917-1922 By David W Morgan Cornell. 520 pp....
...One of Morgan's most illuminating chapters describes how the Soviet Union took advantage of the situation to split the USPD and clear the way for a large German Communist party dominated by the Kremlin...
...Reviewed by Fred Baumann For 30 years European Social Democrats have been locked into an alliance with other liberals against a totalitarian movement that calls itself Socialist...
...it believed greater concessions were possible than the SPD was willing to press for...
...Indeed, the responsibility for not reforming the government of the young Republic may belong as much to the USPD as to the SPD leaders who traditionally get the blame...
...Under these circumstances, schism was probably inevitable...
...Yet if no clear choice between democracy and Socialism faces them now, it seems fair to assume that eventually it will...
...19.50...
...Similarly, elections were to be fought largely to boost morale and strengthen organization...
...In essence, therefore, the USPD condemned itself to a policy of pious waiting...
...The last, imitations of the early Soviets that seemed to challenge representative democracy with a kind of participatory democracy, aroused little interest...
...The Soviet committee, directed by Grigori Zinoviev, skillfully alternated a hard and soft approach until the breakup it wanted was accomplished in October...
...They do not see themselves as being faced with extreme alternatives...
...On the other hand, the bulk of the party was contemptuous of the infantile activism of the Spartacists, who banked on conflict alone to galvanize the masses into a violent revolution that the USPD realized was not in the cards...
...Although it appeared to the USPD that their former associates had sold out socialism, the SPD actually considered Weimar institutions necessary inconveniences, and gave priority to such goals as quiet and order rather than liberal democracy...
...The rest of the Independents hung on for a while, finally returning to the SPD in 1922...
...Thus, by the start of 1920 the Independents were close to equality with the regular Social Democrats and seemed a fair bet to take over the leadership of the democratic Left...
...He gives due weight to the weakness of the central office, to the institutional conservatism of radical officials in the trade-union branch, and to critical clashes of personality...
...The USPD program, as Morgan describes it, consisted of inflammatory but unspecific rhetoric, organizational activity, and support for "factory councils...
...Now, tempted by power and the prospect of achieving a degree of socialism never before possible in bourgeois societies, some of them have begun considering new associations with a tamed, parliamentary Communism...
...But the main error of the party was perhaps more basic, and it was shared by the SPD: Neither saw any necessity to support liberal institutions...
...The two parties reunited in the name of a campaign to purge the Army and the judiciary of anti-republican Rightists—something that the SPD felt unable to do in 1919 and that the USPD never did much about...
...The USPD did well in its first years...
...In the summer of 1920, exploratory negotiations got under way in Moscow on the conditions the USPD would have to meet to enter the Comintern...
...It was met halfway by an SPD then gratefully leaving government and retreating to opposition...
...A series of murders culminating in the assassination of Walter Rathenau aroused the rump USPD to defend the Republic whose origins the party had found so disappointing...
...Morgan emphasizes, though, that the frustration of the USPD Left's leaders at the party's ineffectuality is what really drove them to overcome their distaste for Leninist methods and for the notion of Soviet domination...
...It could be argued that the negative passivity of the USPD was merely a tactical miscalculation...
...Before the year was out, however, the USPD began to fall apart when its own Left split to join the Communists in a new, Soviet-dominated party...
...The recently formed Communist party, composed of the Sparta-cist remnant, was almost invisible...
...Until the very end, even its Right-wing leaders would discuss nothing but an all-Socialist regime with a straight USPD program...
...Having seen how radical fervor was diverted and diffused in the petty horsetrading of parliamentary politics, they would have none of it...
...The SPD government, headed by President Friedrich Ebert, had concentrated on achieving stability rather than liberalizing government institutions or nationalizing the economy...
...In fact, the party's trade-union elements opposed them...
...Dismayed by the SPD's complicity in a war effort they could no longer justify as purely defensive, and upset by the party's drift away from traditional noncooperation with capitalist governments, the Left-wing group?including its chief theoretician, Karl Kautsky—moved cautiously from organizing a caucus within the Reichstag delegation to establishing an independent organization in April 1917...
...For his history of its six-year existence provides a classic case study of the dilemma faced by sincere Social Democrats forced to choose between placing primary importance on attaining socialism or defending democracy...
...In 1922, the Right found itself succumbing to temptation...
...All of which makes David W. Morgan's scholarly examination of the German Independent Social Democratic party (USPD) very timely reading...
...Most members were further repelled by the centralized power, cruelty and terror of the Bolshevik model...
...From Morgan's detailed account, it becomes apparent that the USPD's inflexible stance was responsible for its downfall...
...Those policies gave rise to the feeling that it was betraying the masses...
...Yet one overriding cause for the party's collapse emerges: Many of the USPD's basic tenets continued to serve as fixed points of reference for day-to-day activities long after changing circumstances had rendered them unrealistic...
...In places like Italy, France and Portugal this has revived debates of the past on such themes as the dangers of the "popular front," suggesting that many of the old problems persist...
...The situation of the French and Italian Socialist parties today is of course different...
...It won followings in major cities, dominated Berlin, and enjoyed substantial trade-union support...
...They would be wise to ponder the history of the USPD, whose earnest efforts to bridge the gap between democratic and totalitarian Socialism indicate how deceptively wide that chasm can be...
...It benefitted enormously, too, from the SPD's rapid decline in popularity following the 1919 National Assembly elections...
...In addition, it had crushed the violent, extreme-Left Spartacists, but failed to remodel the Army and judiciary in accordance with Socialist principles...
...They sought a less destructive, more gradual road to Socialism...
...The USPD, Morgan tells us, was founded by the guardians of Marxist orthodoxy in the German Social Democratic party (SPD...
...they hope to have their democratic cake at their Socialist feast...
...Interestingly, most of them were maneuvered out of the Communist party within two years...
...The founding principle of the USPD was nonparticipation in a bourgeois government...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8
