Some of the Old Debates in the Left

Some of the Old Debates in the Left
Paul Buhle 
 
Social Democacy: Flickering Candle or Blazing Son. Raymond Barglow. Privately Published. Berkeley, 2024. No price given. 39pp
 
Luther Vs. Müntzer:  Nicht der Kopf Verlieren. By Johannes Saurer and Ulrike Albers. Evangelisch Miedenhaus: Stuttgart, 2017. No price given. 28pp 
 
Two definitely odd and fascinating books, fun to look at and fun to read (in the second case, definitely better if you can read German).
 
Ray Bargelow,  a fellow comrade (with yours truly, among 70,000 others) in Democratic Socialists of America, offers a text plus old photos and political art of various types, to offer a popular view of the question that Rosa Luxemburg titled in her famous pamphlet, Reform or Revolution?
 
Luxemburg (honored recently in her own full length comic, Red Rosa, edited by myself, written and drawn by Kate Evans) argued that a true radical movement had to free itself of existing institutions so the proletariat could make its own way. Eduard Bernstein insisted, on the contrary, that working through the existing order, step by step, offered the only real way forward.
 
By the time we get to p.5, the reprint of “The Strike,” a beautiful full-page, later nineteenth century painting by a German immigrant working the US, takes us far from Germany but probably someplace in Germanic Wisconsin. Never mind the details, we get the idea of class struggle.
 
The following pages describe the rise of the German Social Democratic Party near the end of the nineteenth century and explains how the institutions around the SDP offered working people a world of politics and culture. (Germans in the US, but also a dozen the European immigrant groups, did the same, with results that lasted into the second generation). The “Erfurt Program of 1891” spelled out  the socialist plan or vision. We learn that British socialists were on a similar path, with the Independent Labour Party determinedly eclectic and influential on Bernstein himself, then living in the UK.
 
Bargelow then usefully (if very quickly: it’s a small book) passes on to ponder the Jewishness of Luxemburg, a  Polish Jew living in Germany, and her counterparts. He reminds us that his own grandfather came from Dresden and “served proudly in the Kaiser’s Army.” (p.16).
 
Serving, that is to say, in the Great War (as it was called, when not called “The War to End All Wars”), initially popular, with the press whipping up popular opinion, and then steadily less popular. German Socialists divided sharply on what to do. Luxemburg argued that the War grew out of a struggle for empire, that is to say, empire over the vast global South, its people and its resources. Bernstein favored colonization, Luxemburg bitterly opposed colonlization on economic and racial lines. The German Social Democrats including Bernstein voted “credits,” that is to say a war budget, to the government. Luxemburg opposed the war and was jailed.
 
The German government that emerged with defeat soon encompassed the SDP, while an uprising of Luxemburg’s party led to an urban commune (young Herbert Marcuse was one of the participants) that was soon crushed, herself murdered. Communists would later accuse German socialists of being, in an extended way, a party to her assassination (along with Karl Liebknecht, her famous political comrade). It was a charge difficult to refute.
 
We push onward past Naziism to something close to the present, and in Bargelow’s vision, Bernstein, still in the SDP, is locking arms with the ecological if militantly hawkish Green Party. Luxemburg’s ghost curses the compromises, the militarism and the continuing role of the ruling class.
 
The following several pages tell a similar, roughly parallel story of neighboring Austria, where Friedrich Adler led a similar social democratic party, most notably creating an urban cooperative network of neighorhoods and progressive schools. All this ended with the 1938 Anschluss. So did Austria itself, re-emerging at the war’s end.
 
Bargelow goes on to offer us a page on Walter Benjamin, a page on the hopes for the future, and a page on his own family’s story,  an Austrian tale with charming photos ending in Berkeley, California.
 
I like it and I hope others will find their way to this booklet. If something is missing, it must be Rosa Luxemburg’s dire warning. Capitalism’s conquest of the Global South would extend its deadly life, and threaten everything, all civilization, all life on earth Thus “Socialism or Barbarism,”  as she put it, which is to say more or less where we are now.
 
Luther Vs Müntzer was created for the five hundred year anniversary of the Refomation. I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Wartburg, across two streets from the “Luther Church” with a pig on the roof signalling the unwanted, hated Jews, whose organized dehumanization reminds us more than a little of the treatment of Palestinians just now.
 
Read more.

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It’s a pretty straightforward account, in unsophisticated comic form. Readers can learn more by consulting The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer, the Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary, by a Scottish novelist-historian, Andrew Drummond. The comic does a good job of setting forth their positions,but Drummon fills in the details. By 1520, the Hartz Mountain area of what would become Germany was full of valuable minerals, and full of peasant revolts against the miseries they suffered under kings and armies. 
 Luther led a spiritual revolt for the proto-bourgeoisie, with vast implications. He briefly praised the preacher-pamphleteer Müntzer, and then cursed the young man for embracing the assorted peasant uprisings. In 1524, Müntzer led an actual rebellion on behalf of the Party of God, saw “the rainbow” (an idea derived from Moses’ glimpse of the end to the Flood), and led his several hundred followers…into total disaster. Soon, Müntzer’s head was on a pike and Lutherism was winning adherents, also ripping away the intricate interiors of historic churches so that all (Protestant) eyes would be on the Preacher, on a pulpit looking down at them.  You could call it an architectural anticipation of Urban Renewal. 
 The radical rebellion had failed and the reformers turned against Jews. Luther repented the violence of the pogrom against them, but not too much. The future was fixed? No, certainly not. Engels’ Peasant Wars in Germany (1850) saw a brighter future that flickered in and out of existence and in Engels’ vision, would be seen again, this time with the proletariat marching to victory. The newest of the German New Left today, in the streets for Palestinian rights but cursed by the Jewish Establishment, carries on the struggle.
 Thanks be, in any case, for Raymond Bargelow’s highly illustrated booklet. See if you can find it. You might need to get to Wartburg for the German comics. The Dreadful History and Judgement of God is freshly published by Verso, and my full review of the volume appears at year’s end.
 Paul Buhle