Thread by @libcomorg

Today is the 105th anniversary of the SPD voting for war credits in the reichstag at the start of WWI. There's still a lot to learn from that event to understand how we got to where we are today.

"Those who had worked for and wholly believed in the ability of organized labor to stand against war now saw the major social democratic parties of Germany, France, and England rush to the defense of their fatherlands." - Rosa Luxemburg

libcom.org/library/crisis…

Liebknecht was the only SPD deputy who didn't vote in favour of war credits. Less than five years later he was murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps, under the control of SPD minister Gustav Noske.

https://twitter.com/libcomorg/status/1085115075097231361

So from the 1914 abandonment of class solidarity for national defence, within five years the SPD was actively repressing the German Revolution with proto-fascist militias. Administering the capitalist state in the Weimar republic. Here's Noske with some freikorps in 1919.

The right wing of social democracy wasn't specific to Germany. It has US parallels in the Chinese Exclusion Act or Kate Richards O'Hare. Or in the UK, Keir Hardie's nativism, and the Labour Party's support for WWI.

While the SPD helped seal the defeat of the German revolution, factions in the KPD and KAPD also abandoned class struggle to national defence as the revolution waned. First was Laufenberg, expelled from the KAPD for extolling 'National Bolshevism'.
libcom.org/history/sparta…

There were two parts to National Bolshevism:

An attempt to create a right/left alliance with German Nationalists.

And geopolitically, to normalise relations between Weimar and the USSR as a bulwark against France and England.

This culminated in Karl Radek's Schlageter speech, given to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1923.

marxists.org/archive/radek/…

In 1921 Gorter's open letter to Lenin in response to Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, presented the analysis that the comintern was shifting from an instrument of worldwide class struggle to a coalition devoted to Russia's national defence.
libcom.org/library/open-l…

Supporting imperialist wars, taking over the administration of the capitalist state and crushing revolutions, trying to opportunistically recruit from the far right via nationalism and racism, and supporting the national bourgeois of other countries to build geopolitical blocs.

These things aren't really aberrations, much less the influence of far right politics on 'leftists'. They are reactionary tendencies that have existed in the organised left for well over a century - never without being fought against but never completely excised either.

While there aren't clear lineages between the factions of the German left in 1914-24 and ones now, we can see echoes in, Aufstehen's nationalist anti-migrant split from Die Linke, led by Wolfgang Streeck and Sahra Wagenknecht.

There's an excessively generous but nonetheless informative article on Streeck's shift from more or less standard social democracy to explicitly anti-migrant nationalism here. jeromeroos.com/research/intel…

Another problem with understanding this history is that the usage of words changes over time. National bolshevism for example shifted from a 'left courting the right' ideology in the 1920s, to 'fascist third positionist entryism' in the past few decades.

Social democracy in 1914 still contained both Karl Kautsky and Lenin. Most people when they think of social democracy now are talking about the welfare state and nationalisation, a consensus (broadly) supported by both Labour and the Conservatives from 1945 until Thatcher.