On 9/23/13 4:06 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: > When he characterized the parties of the Second International as > "bourgeois" parties, he mainly had in mind the British Labour Party, > the tactical orientation to which was the subject of What Is To Be > Done. The social Democratic Party in Germany, far from being > "insurrectionary" was counter-revolutionary and, as the governing > party, crushed the Spartacist uprising and facilitated the right-wing > murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. >
You need to familiarize yourself with the history of the German social democracy that tended to oscillate between one strategy or another depending on broader class dynamics. From my article on German Communism and the Comintern: The crisis was deepest in the heavily industrialized state of Saxony where a left-wing Socialist named Erich Zeigner headed the government. He was friendly with the Communists and made common cause with them. He called for expropriation of the capitalist class, arming of the workers and a proletarian dictatorship. This man, like thousands of others in the German workers movement, had a revolutionary socialist outlook but was condemned as a "Menshevik" in the Communist press. The united front overtures to Zeigner mostly consisted of escalating pressure to force him to accommodate to the maximum Communist program. full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
