BEBEL, AUGUST (1840–1913)

August Bebel is best known as a founder member of the German Social Democratic Party and as the author of Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism), first published in 1879 and still popular until after the First World War. He was born in Cologne, received only an elementary education, commenced work as a wood-turner and soon became active in trade union organizations. In 1864 he met WILHELM LIEBKNECHT, who introduced him to Marxism and became his life-long political associate. In 1869 they founded the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, the first Marxist party in the country.

In 1867 Bebel was elected to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation but in 1870 he made it clear that his brand of socialism was incompatible with conventional parliamentary practices. With Liebknecht he declared that the Social Democratic Party participates in parliamentary elections solely for purposes of agitation. They had no intention of allying or compromising with other parties. Nevertheless, once German unification was achieved, Bebel was a member of the Reichstag for nearly all of its existence, from 1871–81 and then again from 1883 until his death in 1913. Unsurprisingly, over these years he gradually modified his opposition to parliamentarism.

Though not without nationalist sentiments, during the Franco-Prussian War Bebel joined Liebknecht in abstaining from voting the war credits. For this, and for their support of the 1871 Paris Commune, both were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on

a charge of high treason. This was just one of numerous prison sentences, invariably on charges such as insults against the Chancellor and the army. He used the time to augment his initially scanty education.

In 1875 Bebel accepted the Gotha Progamme by which his party united with Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Labour League to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which exists to this day. Marx wrote a famous denunciation of the compromise programme (‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’), which he saw as too much of a victory for Lassalle’s ideas over his own. It is, in fact, largely through the comments of Marx and Engels that Bebel is known at all outside of Germany. For years Bebel and Liebknecht were watched from afar by Marx and Engels with rather closer scrutiny than they may have desired. Engels once described Bebel, rather unfairly, as ‘a quite efficient chap who has however this one handicap’: not even ‘a smattering of theoretical education’. Yet when Engels died, Bebel, with Bernstein, was made his literary executor.

Bebel’s Woman and Socialism was published in 1879. Here, in a manner typical not only of Marxism but of much wider strands of nineteenth-century social thought, Bebel outlined the stages of historical development from primitive communalism through to the

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presumed arrival of communism. As the title implies, he saw female emancipation as intrinsically linked with the development of socialism and so led to German social democracy accepting the ideas of female emancipation and equal rights. Women were to

be delivered from the tyranny of the private kitchen, which would be superseded by large catering establishments in which machines performed the most mundane and onerous tasks. Bebel’s vision of the future, though clearly based on the Marxist prognosis, is, for better or worse, clearly more detailed than anything supplied by Marx and Engels themselves. Bebel was pessimistic about capitalism, which seemed doomed, but optimistic about the eventual outcome once it was replaced. Under socialism science would at last be applied to all fields of human activity. Although, unlike in bourgeois society, everyone would have to work, they would not have to do so for long, for a two- hour working day would be possible. There would also be a free choice of activity. Thus there would be no permanent positions or occupational hierarchies. The chosen organizers would be comrades quite unlike the managers of the capitalist epoch. Yet even so, partially due to economies of scale, productivity would grow enormously. Bebel was confident that the fuller use of electricity could easily cope with the world’s energy needs. Furthermore, the potential of solar power ‘removes the fear that we shall ever run short of fuel’. Times of shortage, crisis and unemployment would vanish; money would disappear as also would big towns, thieves, tramps, vagabonds and religious organizations. By the year 2000 wars will have been abolished. This can now, of course, easily be dismissed as naïe but remains instructive as an instance of the prevailing optimism that so differentiates Bebel’s age from ours. It furthermore offered a beacon of bright light to people living in dark times.

In the 1890s Bebel, with Karl Kautsky, became a main opponent of EDUARD BERNSTEIN’s revisionist attempts to modify Marxism according to the changed socio- economic conditions. At the 1899 party conference in Hanover Bebel delivered a six- hour speech rejecting Bernstein’s views. Bebel and Bernstein had long been friends and although Bebel remained, on the whole, fairly civil, he did for a time recommend that Bernstein be expelled from the Social Democratic Party. He thought, almost certainly wrongly, that 99 per cent of the party differed from Bernstein, who had thus abandoned social democracy entirely. In his later years Bebel distanced himself from anti-militarism and anti-nationalism. By now he and Kautsky could be placed in the centre of the party as

a more radical left was emerging around ROSA LUXEMBURG, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring. Bebel didn’t quite live long enough to witness the crunch moment of August 1914 when the party he had founded voted the war credits and later split into three separate groupings.

BEBEL, AUGUST (1840–1913)