Notes on Schorske

The vote of the SPD's Reichstag delegation in 1914 in favour of war credits is well known to most with an interest in the history of Marxism. Schorske's book 'German Social Democracy 1905-1917' is an attempt to explain this event as the logical outcome of events prior to the war that led to a decisive split in the party. The growth of revisionism within the party was the result on the one hand of the growth of the trade-union movement, and the corollary establishment of a strata of paid functionaries with a vested interest in the maintenance of the existing social order, and on the other of the provincial character of large swathes of German society. The left which formed in opposition to this was emboldened on the contrary by the Russian revolution, the success in other Western countries of general strikes and signs of increasing class conflict within Germany itself into believing that the revolutionary epoch was approaching and the party needed to adapt accordingly.

The tendency towards revisionism was propped up by the development of the party's internal bureaucracy. Schorske disagrees with the proposition that bureaucracy is conservative as such, pointing towards the later organisation of the KPD, but rather believes that the tendencies of any given bureaucracy must be analysed 'genetically' in terms of it's origins. The SPD bureaucracy formed in a low period of struggle, primarily focusing on a more efficient organisation of the party's electoral efforts. In this capacity, the weakness of the idea of the SPD's vote share as a 'thermometer' for it's social influence comes into question. The SPD membership was a fraction of it's vote share, by far the majority of voters came from the more conservative union movement. Orientations towards acquiring a greater vote share necessarily led to greater conservatism in politics and a preponderance of bureaucratic functionaries and electoral procedures which gave hugely disproportionate weight to the provincial sections of the party in opposition to it's more radical urban majority.

At first the party's executive supported the left against the right, as long as the former appeared merely as defenders of tradition against the latter. But as the left increasingly presented itself as a 'positive' opposition to the dominant party line after 1905, the executive began to ally itself increasingly with the right. The left thus began to develop a hostility towards bureaucracy and centralist organisations which, Schorske believes, ultimately paralysed it's capacity for effective action in the German revolution of 1918-19. This anti-bureaucratic and anti-organisational tendency would develop in it's most extreme form into councilism.

A lot of the left loves to explain the history of the SPD in terms of the ideas of it's most prominent theorists. Bernstein and Kautsky are the ultimate bugbears whose ideas led to the victory of the parties reformist practice over it's revolutionary theory. But this is unsatisfactory, it explains life in terms of consciousness, instead of consciousness in terms of life. Bernstein did not cause revisionism, he merely extrapolated in the realm of theory a social movement that had already begun in the early 1890's with the centralisation of the trade unions. In fact after 1914 he found himself on the anti-war side, perhaps uniquely among revisionists.

We think that more research into this area of history would be necessary to reach any definite conclusions. We would however like to point to one element we find unsatisfactory - Schorske seems to tend towards analysing the split as a result of specifically German conditions, a reflection perhaps of the apparently unfinished nature of the German bourgeois revolution. But the split that occurred was reflected in more or less every major European country. A more international orientation might have provided more cogent insights.