16.04.1998

White sepulchres

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, April 11 1918

If anything were wanted to fill the bitter cup of our disappointment and humiliation, the behaviour of the German socialists has done it.

We have all read the reports of the recent speeches made in the Reichstag by Scheidermann and David on the Russian peace, and their tenor has helped to soften the mortification which everyone among us felt at the apparent acquiescence of the German socialist proletariat in the march of Prince Leopold’s troops against the Socialist Republic of Russia. A protest, be it only in words, is still a protest, and helps to salve a ruffled conscience. But it was just because they know this that the leaders of the German majority socialists delivered their orations, knowing that ... they would help to weaken the impression, both at home and abroad, created by their acceptance of the peace of force concluded at Brest.

... The socialists had been fully warned of what was coming by the amazing somersault executed by the German negotiators between December 25 and December 27. Their press at once noticed it, and condemned it in severe terms. The demonstrative strike movement which then spontaneously broke out in many places in Germany, involving in the aggregate a million workers, was the proletariat’s way of reacting against the treacherous conduct of German imperialist and militarist diplomacy towards Russia.

Here was a lever placed in the hands of the socialists, which, if they had only been their former selves, could have been used by them with deadly effect, both against the war and the hated junker-capitalist domination. But just because those who now represent the majority among the socialists of Germany had long been emasculated by opportunism and debauched by the war, the effect of the strike movement on them was exactly opposite. Frightened by the spectre of revolution and attacked by the bourgeois parties, the Scheidermannites hastened to put out the incipient fire and to proclaim at the top of their voices that they were not Bolsheviks and would in no circumstances permit a revolution amidst the war ...

The result was a further stiffening of the German negotiators at Brest, the rupture of negotiations, and the treacherous attack on the defenceless Russians with the subsequent imposition of still harsher terms at Brest.

... The Scheidermannites ... recognised that the peace was not a proper one, but asked who was to blame for it. None but the Bolsheviks themselves, who had disorganised their country and delivered it defenceless into the hands of the German imperialists and had moreover, by their obstructive tactics at Brest, aiming much more at a revolution in Germany than at peace, paralysed the strong arm of the German socialists.

... It is a fact, which but a few years ago would have seemed perfectly monstrous and impossible, that the German majority socialists have deliberately betrayed the Russian Socialist Republic into the hands of the junkers and capitalists of their country.

Are the hands and honour of the minority - the so-called independent - socialists who follow Haase and Kautsky any cleaner? ... In reality they are in their way as complete a set of political bankrupts as the others ... On August 3 this ‘revolutionary’ opposition dared not propose anything more drastic than abstention from voting the war credits. Kautsky afterwards set out to prove in long and elaborate articles that the war was not “entirely” an imperialist war ...

The real influence among them soon passed to the former revisionists, with Bernstein at their head, whose anti-revolutionary tendencies became conspicuous after the Bolshevik Revolution. Kautsky and the principle organ of the party did their best to prove that the Bolsheviks were mere usurpers and a disgrace to socialism ... It is not surprising that they too failed to make use of the revolutionary temper of the people ...

What is the moral of this tale of shame and bankruptcy? The Germans have only shown us what in similar circumstances would be the action of the French and other ‘patriotic’ and opportunist socialists, who at present are either for ‘national defence’ or prate about a “peace by understanding”, meaning a peace of governments. They are whited sepulchres, and revolutionary socialists can have nothing to do with them either in the present or in the future.

WAMM