GREGORY CLAEYS LIEBKNECHT, WILHELM (1826–1900)

Wilhelm Liebknecht was at the forefront of the development of socialism in Germany. With August Bebel he founded the Saxon Workers’ Party in 1865 and the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1869. His political career began with participation in the failed Baden uprising of 1848–9. He then fled to Switzerland where he was imprisoned, following which he went into exile in London until 1862. There he became a regular visitor to the Marx household. His Karl Marx. Biographical Memoirs is the fullest direct

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account we have of Marx’s life with his family and London friends. Once Liebknecht returned to Germany, Marx tried to use him to guide the development of German socialism. This was not an enviable situation. Marx and Engels suffered the frustrations of having assumed intellectual leadership while being devoid of actual power. Disciple though he was, Liebknecht did not always do his masters’ bidding, or at least not to their full satisfaction. In spite of his loyalty they referred to him as ‘that dumb ox’, ‘donkey’ and ‘little William’. Liebknecht certainly did not choose the easiest life. He first entered Parliament in 1867 but interspersed the more dignified side of his political career with frequent spells in prison for his insults to the army and the monarchy.

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war Liebknecht showed what use could be made of a public forum and what costs had to be borne. Rather than succumb to the allure of the parliamentary arena, he used his position to express hostility to chauvinism abroad and repression at home. The result was predictable. Following his opposition to the German annexation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, abstention on the war credits and his sympathetic attitude to the 1871 Paris Commune, Liebknecht, with Bebel, was arrested on a charge of high treason. He used the courtroom as a platform for propagating his political ideas and so, in March 1872, was sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment. In this instance Marx and Engels were delighted with Liebknecht’s radical stance. His imprisonment confirmed that he had been doing the right thing: making demands incompatible with the prevailing socio-political order.

For much of his political career Liebknecht managed to combine membership of the Reichstag with the general principle of anti-parliamentarism. However, by the middle 1880s the paradox of his position caught up with him. He suddenly concluded that parliamentary institutions could function as more than mere propaganda platforms; they might also provide instruments for the achievement of socialism.

This change of emphasis sits uneasily with Liebknecht’s battle against BERNSTEIN’S revisionism. Liebknecht argued that the contradictions of capitalism were actually getting deeper, making it all the inore necessary to keep the idea of class conflict in the forefront. Where Bernstein thought the movement was everything and the final goal nothing, Liebknecht saw the two as intertwined. The movement had to be towards the final goal of the overthrow of capitalist society. Liebknecht thought that if Bernstein’s proposals were followed the party would no longer be a working-class one. He felt that whereas he had gone to England and become a Marxist, Bernstein had gone there and become a Fabian. It seemed wrong of Bernstein to import English assumptions into Germany. Germany was more backward; its middle class had not won an independent position but had, instead, abdicated political power to the Junkers, the traditional landowning class. It was this contrast between an anachronistic social and political order and the rapid development of modern industry that made fundamental conflict inevitable. It was not, Liebknecht stated, that he personally wanted conflict but rather the recalcitrance of the ruling powers that made it inevitable. This more militant stance was more than replicated in the actions of his more famous son, Karl Liebknecht, who co-founded the revolutionary Spartacist movement in 1916 and the German Communist Party in 1918.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 388

GREGORY CLAEYS LIEBKNECHT, WILHELM (1826–1900)