On 2013-09-23, at 4:24 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: > 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.
I don't claim to be an expert, but I think I'm somewhat familiar. :) > > 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 The major parties of the Second International (British Labour, German SPD, French SP) and their leaders were hegemonic within the international working class movement, but they were being challenged in the tumultuous aftermath of WW I both internally from their radicalizing left wings and from the outside by the fledgling Communist parties of the new Third International. The Leninists of the Third International aimed to supplant the social democratic parties of the Second, including by deepening the split between the leaderships and left-wing party members by reaching out to them. In other words, in contrast to the conservative social democratic leadership, which was characterized as irredeemably "opportunist" and enemies to be overthrown, left socialists, including those within the leadership, like Zeigner - occupying the political space between the latter to their right and the Communists to their left - were typically characterized as "centrist" and allies to be won over. But they remained largely peripheral in the decades-long historic struggle within the working class movement between Social Democracy and Communism. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
