Socialism after Marx

Near the anarcho-communists on the decentralist side of socialism were the syndicalists. Inspired in part by Proudhon’s ideas, syndicalism developed at the end of the 19th century out of the French trade-union movement—syndicat being the French word for trade union. It was a significant force in Italy and Spain in the early 20th century until it was crushed by the fascist regimes in those countries. In the United States, syndicalism appeared in the guise of the Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” founded in 1905.

The hallmarks of syndicalism were workers’ control and “direct action.” Syndicalists such as Fernand Pelloutier distrusted both the state, which they regarded as an agent of capitalism, and political parties, which they thought were incapable of achieving radical change. Their aim was to replace capitalism and the state with a loose federation of local workers’ groups, which they meant to bring about through direct action—especially a general strike of workers that would bring down the government as it brought the economy to a halt. Georges Sorel elaborated on this idea in his Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence), in which he treated the general strike not as the inevitable result of social developments but as a “myth” that could lead to the overthrow of capitalism if only enough people could be inspired to act on it.

Related to syndicalism but nearer to Fabianism in its reformist tactics, Guild Socialism was an English movement that attracted a modest following in the first two decades of the 20th century. Inspired by the medieval guild, an association of craftsmen who determined their own working conditions and activities, theorists such as Samuel G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole advocated the public ownership of industries and their organization into guilds, each of which would be under the democratic control of its trade union. The role of the state was less clear: Some guild socialists envisioned it as a coordinator of the guilds’ activities, while others held that its functions should be limited to protection or policing. In general, however, the guild socialists were less inclined to invest power in the state than were their Fabian compatriots.

In 1889, on the centenary of the French Revolution, a Second International emerged from two rival socialist conventions in Paris. Intended as a revival of the International Working Men’s Association, this new organization was dominated by Marxists in general and the SPD in particular. By this time the SPD was both officially Marxist and a force to be reckoned with in German politics. Despite Otto von Bismarck’s attempts to suppress it, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and other leaders had transformed the SPD into a mass party.

But its considerable success—the SPD won almost one-fifth of the votes cast in the parliamentary elections of 1890, for example—raised the question of whether socialism might be achieved through the ballot box rather than through revolution. The “orthodox” position, as developed by the SPD’s chief theorist, Karl Kautsky, tried to reconcile the SPD’s electoral practice with Marx’s revolutionary doctrine. But others had begun to think that it would be better to recognize that circumstances had changed and to revise Marx’s doctrine accordingly.

Foremost among the “revisionists” was Eduard Bernstein, an SPD leader who became an associate of Engels while living in England to escape Bismarck’s harassment. Bernstein was also exposed to the Fabians while in England, and their example encouraged him to question aspects of Marx’s theory. Like others, Bernstein observed that the living and working conditions of the proletariat were not growing more desperate, as Marx had predicted, but were on the contrary improving, largely as a result of trade-union activity and the extension of the franchise. This led him to conclude that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism was neither necessary nor desirable. A gradual, peaceful transformation to socialism, he argued in Evolutionary Socialism (1899), would be safer than the revolutionary route, with its dangerously vague and potentially tyrannical dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bernstein’s writings drew a swift and hostile reaction from his SPD comrades, Kautsky in particular, and from revolutionary Marxists elsewhere. After several years of polemical war between revisionists and orthodox Marxists, the revisionists eventually triumphed within the SPD, which gradually abandoned its revolutionary pretenses. Nevertheless, some stalwarts, such as Rosa Luxemburg, remained faithful to the spirit of revolutionary Marxism.

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Vladimir Lenin, 1920.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (file no. LC-USZ62-101877)

Among the remaining orthodox Marxists was the Russian revolutionary V.I. Ulyanov, better known by his pseudonym Lenin. As the leader of the Bolshevik, or “majority,” faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, Lenin himself had been accused of straying from the Marxist path. The problem for Russian Marxists was that Russia in the late 19th century remained a semifeudal country with barely the beginnings of industrial capitalism.

To be sure, Marx had allowed that it might be possible for a country such as Russia to move directly from feudalism to socialism, but the standard position among Marxists was that capitalism was a necessary stage of economic and historical development; otherwise, there would be neither the productive power to overcome necessity nor the revolutionary proletariat to win freedom for all as it emancipated itself from capitalist exploitation.

This had been the standard position among Russian Marxists too, but it was not Lenin’s. Lenin had little faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, arguing in What Is to Be Done? (1902) that the workers, left to themselves, would fight only for better wages and working conditions; they therefore needed to be educated, enlightened, and led to revolution by a “vanguard” party of professional revolutionaries. Moreover, the authoritarian nature of the Russian government required that the vanguard party be conspiratorial, disciplined, and elitist. Lenin’s Russian-Marxist rivals disputed these points, but his manipulation of the vote at a party congress enabled him to label them the Menshevik, or “minority,” faction.

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Socialists gather at a rally in New York City on May 1, 1912.

George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain-10505)

Lenin’s commitment to revolution thus put him at odds with those who advocated a revised, evolutionary Marxism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin argued against the revisionists, stating that the improvement in conditions enjoyed by the proletariat of Europe and the United States was a kind of bribe made possible by the “superprofits” that their countries’ capitalists were extracting from the labor and resources of the poorer parts of the world. But imperialism would also be the last stage of capitalism, for it was bound to expose the contradictions of capitalism not only in the industrial countries but also in the countries exploited by the imperialistic powers—hence the possibility of revolution in a country that had not itself gone through capitalism.

Lenin wrote Imperialism during World War I, which proved to be a watershed in the history of socialism. In the years before war broke out in August 1914, most European socialists had held that the only war the proletariat should fight was the class war against the bourgeoisie. When the war began, however, socialists were forced to choose between international socialism and their countries, and they generally chose the latter—though there were notable exceptions, Luxemburg and Lenin among them. Once the SPD’s contingent in the Reichstag voted to issue war credits, socialists in other countries fell into line behind their own governments. The Second International lingered for a time, but to no effective purpose.

World War I also inflicted severe hardships on the Russian people, thereby contributing to the collapse of the tsarist regime and creating an opportunity for revolution, which the Bolsheviks seized in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin’s standing among revolutionary Marxists soared, though Luxemburg and others deplored the way in which the dictatorship of the proletariat was becoming a dictatorship of the All-Russian Communist Party, as the Bolsheviks named themselves in 1918. Still, the communists’ victory gave Luxemburg and other revolutionaries hope that the Russian example would inspire socialist revolutions elsewhere.

For his part, Lenin feared that his regime could not survive without the aid of friendly—and therefore socialist—neighbors. Accordingly, he called a meeting in Moscow to establish a Third International, or Communist International (Comintern). The response from other countries was tepid, and, by the time the delegates convened in March 1919, the prospects for a new international had been further dimmed by the failure of the Spartacus Revolt of the new Communist Party of Germany—a failure that claimed the lives of Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht), who were summarily executed by counterrevolutionary forces in 1919 (see also Spartacus League).

Lenin pressed on with the formation of the Comintern, but it was soon apparent that it was an agent of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (formally created in 1922) and not of international socialism as such. Indeed, by this time a fissure had clearly developed between communists on the one hand and socialists, or social democrats, on the other.

The division took institutional form as communist parties emerged in one country after another to challenge existing socialist parties and their common enemy, capitalism. In general, the communists were revolutionary Marxists who adhered to what came to be called Marxism-Leninism. Their socialist rivals—variously known as socialists, social democrats, and laborites—were a more diverse group, including both revisionists and non-Marxists, but they were united in their commitment to peaceful, democratic tactics. They were also less likely than the communists to claim that history was moving inexorably toward the demise of capitalism and more likely to appeal to ethical considerations. In England, for example, the reformer Richard Henry Tawney found a receptive audience within the Labour Party when he rested the case for socialism on its promotion of fellowship, the dignity of work, and the equal worth of all members of society.

On the communist side, the standard was set by the increasingly totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Lenin’s death in 1924 led to a power struggle between Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin not only won the struggle but eventually ordered the deaths of Trotsky and other rivals—and of millions more who opposed or resisted his policies. While professing to be a revolutionary in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, Stalin concentrated his efforts on building “socialism in one country,” largely through a program of forced collectivization and industrialization.

There were occasional deviations from the Marxist-Leninist line, as in the case of Antonio Gramsci, who helped to found the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Gramsci resisted the tendency to reduce Marx’s theory to economic terms, focusing instead on the way in which the “hegemony” of the ruling classes over schools, churches, the media, and other cultural institutions encouraged workers to acquiesce in their exploitation. But Gramsci’s attempt to convince other communists of the revolutionary potential of cultural transformation was restricted by his imprisonment, from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

Fascist oppression, in fact, was a major problem for communists and socialists alike, not only in Italy but subsequently in Spain under Francisco Franco and in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Socialist parties had drawn enough votes in Germany, Britain, and France to participate in or even to lead coalition governments in the 1920s and ’30s, and in Sweden the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party won control of the government in 1932 with a promise to make their country into a “people’s home” based on “equality, concern, cooperation, and helpfulness.” Wherever fascists took power, however, communists and socialists were among the first to be suppressed.

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Eugene V. Debs.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Nor were there any signal victories for socialism outside Europe in the years between the world wars. Although Eugene V. Debs won nearly one million votes in the U.S. presidential election of 1920, his showing represented less than 4 percent of the votes cast and remains the electoral high point for American socialists. In India, Mahatma Gandhi attracted a mass following, but his popularity owed more to his campaign for independence from Britain than to the traces of socialism in his philosophy.

In China another mass movement for national liberation developed at this time, though it was explicitly communist. Its leader, Mao Zedong, helped to found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. After a disastrous beginning—the Comintern had pushed the Chinese communists into an alliance with the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who attacked the communists as soon as he thought it expedient—Mao retreated to the fields and hills to rebuild the CCP. While remaining faithful to Lenin’s notion of the communist party as the revolutionary vanguard, Mao proceeded to lead a guerilla movement that established its power base among the peasantry, which he regarded as a rural proletariat. In Mao’s hands, moreover, the concept of nation largely replaced that of class, with China represented as a poor and oppressed proletarian nation that had to rise against the oppressing imperialist nations and their bourgeois underlings.