First World War Centennial

IX

THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY

Two sights arrested my attention during a first walk in the central streets of Berlin towards the end of April. The public buildings in Unter den linden and the Wilhelmstrasse were still covered with the pock-marks of rifle- and machine-gun fire. The city had gone through the smallpox of revolution, and survived with scars. Rather more interesting than the bullet-marks was a conspicu­ous printed notice which still adorned the Opera House, the University, and some of the buildings where the Ministers were housed. "Under the Protection," it ran, "of the Workers' and Sol­diers' Council of Berlin." Germany is a Parlia­mentary Republic of the conventional pattern, with its President, and its responsible Cabinet of Ministers, its Parliament elected by universal suf­frage, its States built on a similar pattern, while its cities have their orthodox elected Municipal Councils. It had still its small and highly efficient army, the pick of the youth of the old war-ma­chine, and at the doors of these very buildings the sentries paced up and down, sturdy young men in smart "field-gray" uniforms with shapely steel helmets on their heads and hand-grenades in their belts. Yet in spite of Ministers and Parliaments and well-paid volunteer sentries, it was still worth while to remind any insurgent warriors who might have been tempted to assail these buildings that they were under the protection of the Berlin Workers' Council. These Councils, constructed on the plan of the Russian Soviets, have as yet no assured place in the Draft Constitution. They are simply committees elected by the workmen of Berlin, and yet, as these notices suggested, they have some moral power which a legal government, backed as the Ebert-Scheidemann régime was, by horse and foot, by guns and grenades, did not dis­dain to call to its aid.

Hard by the first of these notices which caught my eye was a placard announcing a lecture. It was a striking bill, and I saw it again and again as I wandered about Berlin. Like the "protec­tion" notice, it became for me a symbol of the con­temporary Germany. It announced that at one of an important series of meetings organized by the Democratic Party (i.e. the middle-class Liberals), a well-known Professor would lecture on the theme "Why has Weimar caused disillusion­ment?" The choice of the subject and the word­ing of the title were significant. Weimar, where the National Assembly meets, is, of course, the symbol for democracy of the conventional West­ern Parliamentary type. The pathos of this lec­ture lay in the fact that for three generations the political groups of which the Democratic Party is the heir, have preached representative Democracy as the one thing needful. Others, the Socialists, for example, have preached it, as a necessary in­gredient in something else, or a necessary step­ping-stone to a happier shore, but for the Demo­crats democracy was enough. One may reproach them with infidelities and weaknesses, lapses into Imperialism, and occasionally, though rarely, with a passing sycophantic moment towards royalty, but they and their forefathers, from 1848 down­wards, had certainly stood for Parliamentary gov­ernment, and for most of them England had been the model. The Revolution of November had ful­filled their wildest dreams. It had brought not merely democracy but republican democracy. No opposition from the Right dared any longer raise its head, and it only remained to discuss the de­tails, and to work out the plan of the most en­lightened constitution in Europe. For a genera­tion most of these men had dreamed, not indeed of this complete fulfilment of their hopes, but of some slow and distant approach to it. A year ago even the reform of the Prussian franchise had seemed a slightly precarious hope, and now every­thing had come at once—responsible government, women's suffrage, proportional representation, the democratization of Prussia, and the disappear­ance not merely of the Hohenzollerns but of the whole brood of princely families. A working saddler was President of the German Reich and a former compositor dictated policy in Bismarck's old Chancery. The Democrats, elderly or middle-aged gentlemen of a slow digestion, would have liked to sit down to a lengthy process of rumina­tion, to survey their realized ideal and find it good. They had to recognize, however, that contempo­rary Germany took only the faintest interest in this dream of constitutional perfection. The masses were thinking of anything and everything else, and already a formidable and growing Left Wing talked as though the perfect model of Parlia­mentary democracy were a thing intellectually as obsolete as the Junker ascendancy, and as remote from the real life of the people as the monarchy itself. Of Weimar and the Assembly few troubled even to talk, and those few, for the most part, with impatience. All over Germany the Left was setting up ephemeral Soviet Governments, and when Comrade Noske's "Free Corps" had upset them, with a maximum of bloodshed, it wanted only a fresh epidemic of strikes to prove that nothing in reality was settled. Instead of sitting down to celebrate the triumph of Parliamentary democracy, the unhappy Democrats were reduced to offering apologies for Weimar. They were frank enough to recognize that Germany had lost an illusion.

For the contempt in which Weimar was rather generally held there were some accidental and temporary reasons. It was generally said of William II that he had destroyed the monarchy for ever by his inglorious flight. The removal of the National Assembly from its natural seat in the Capital to the provincial calm of Weimar had a like effect. It was an act of cowardice, a retreat before the passionately discontented masses of Berlin. In the second place, Weimar had to as­sume responsibility for the government of Ger­many in an hour of universal malaise. It was free, indeed, of responsibility for the catastrophic defeat for which Kaiserdom, the Junkers, and the Pan-Germans bore the blame. The real cause of the social misery, the hunger, the cold, the un­employment of the terrible winter that followed the armistice, was the continued Allied Blockade, maintained with completer rigidity than ever, in the matter of food, up till the month of April, while as regards raw materials it was never for a moment relaxed. No one could fairly blame Weimar for the blockade—though, to be sure, I have heard Left-Wing Socialists argue (absurdly, in my opinion) that the whole attitude of the Allies would have been gentler, if persons less compromised than Scheidemann and his col­leagues had sat at the council-table. Certainly Weimar was blamed for the inadequacy of its remedial measures, and for the savagery with which the Spartacus revolt was suppressed. Few peoples are just to their governments at such times, and Weimar became associated with hunger, revolt, and distress. The worst of all was that the Assembly took its functions as a constituent body with enormous seriousness. It set to work at once, and worked with German thoroughness at the task of elaborating the Constitution. As luck would have it, what Germany in this dark winter needed was not the ideal democratic Constitution, but some interim solutions of social problems which would give confidence to the workers and ease the difficult task of persuading them to work and think constructively. Those who had voted for the Socialist lists saw with satisfaction a So­cialist President and a Socialist Premier at the head of the State, but nothing was socialized, not even the coal-mines. They had expected some im­mediate result from their votes, but nothing hap­pened that touched their daily lives. In some degree the very perfection of the democratic ma­chine was to blame. The Proportional system had given to every group its exact share of representa­tion but it returned no one party in numbers suf­ficient to form a homogeneous administration. Under a simple majority vote with single-member constituencies the Parties of the Right instead of securing 15 per cent, of the representation would probably have disappeared and the two Socialist parties would have had numbers enough (if they could have composed their feud) to form a purely Socialist Government with an adequate majority. Finally, Weimar was a disappointment, because the German people, when it made its revolution, expected that a democratic Germany would re­ceive better treatment from the Allies than the old "autocracy" would have done. That had been the burden of speeches in which Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George had held out this hope in plainer words than statesmen often use. As the months went by, that expectation vanished, and Germans understood that their democratic Republic was to be a pariah and a helot in Europe. As the news of one scheme after another, of annexation and economic enslavements, reached them from Paris, the task of making a Constitution for a vanishing fatherland began to look vainer than ever. I happened to be talking to Professor Press, the Minister charged with drafting the Constitution, when the first summary of the Peace Terms ar­rived. "We had nearly finished our building plan," was his comment, "but you are destroying our site."

Enough of faith and optimism was left even in this defeated and despondent nation to seek out an alternative to the older democratic form which had disappointed it. An ever-widening circle saw in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, based on the Russian Soviet model, the future structure of rep­resentation in Germany. The reasons which have made this tendency a stream too strong to be re­sisted are as various as the reasons which dis­credited Weimar. The Extreme Left, of course, saw in these Councils the apt instruments of the coming social revolution. Without that motive it is doubtful whether they would ever have been created. With some disguises the Left built them up for this purpose, and whenever the Revolution triumphed, whether in reckless Munich or sober Hanover, the Councils were ready to direct it. The curious fact was that although this intention was barely disguised by the Left, the more mod­erate parties were obliged to fall into step. The Majority Socialists, or rather the inner directing ring of their powerful organization, were never really friendly to the Council idea. They are an essentially conservative force, like all disciplined political machines. They have a long past behind them, and their instinctive attitude towards every new idea is one of jealousy and hostility. In poli­tics they believe in the old Parliamentary forms, and could not advance beyond the ideal for which they had battled for a generation. In industry, they believed in the Trade Unions as the organs of class struggle, and the Trade Union officials, who are as influential among them as they are in the British Labor Party, regarded the Councils as dangerous rivals to their own Unions. None the less, the Majority Socialists were carried by the public opinion of the working-class far beyond their own wishes in a recognition of the Councils, and busied themselves, not with open opposition, but with the invention of compromises which would give the Councils some place in the working-class movement compatible with the survival of Parliament and the Trade Unions. More interest­ing still was the attitude of the "black-coated" workmen, especially the clerks, who were at first considered as "bourgeois," and were left outside these class organizations. One of the most start­ling results of the war and the blockade in Central Europe is that the wall of partition between the manual worker and the brain-worker has worn very thin. The clerk, the teacher, the civil serv­ant, and the small professional man have been much less successful than the well-organized Trade Unionises in raising their nominal earnings, and as the value of money fell, they have often sunk to a level of poverty much below that of the artisan. The struggle to preserve appearances and to seem to be members of the master-class is maintained with much less than the old obstinacy. More and more these salaried employees have learned to think of themselves as proletarians. The Berlin clerk to-day votes for the Majority Socialists, or if he clings to a bourgeois party, his choice is the Democrats. So it happened that the bank clerks of Berlin made an obstinate strike (and won it) not merely for an increase of salary, but for the right to form their Council like other workmen, and to send their delegates to the Berlin Soviet. There are in that big and stormy body, by no means tolerant to minorities, a little group of "Democratic" (or as we should say "Liberal") representatives, who take their full part in debate with the Socialists, and prove their loyalty to the institution by their good humor in facing a noisy and far from sympathetic audience. While I was in Berlin, continual declarations of adhesion to some form of the Council idea were appearing in the Press. One came from the veteran Liberal economist Professor Brentano, and another in the form of a lengthy, reasoned resolution was passed by the organization which represents the employ­ers of Berlin. They obviously believed that the way out of revolutionary chaos lay in the friendly recognition of these Councils by the State, and the attribution to them of a real but limited sphere of influence.

The Left had its own clear and decided idea of the function and future of the Councils. It in­tended that they should remain a class organiza­tion in the broad meaning of that word. Every genuine worker, including the salaried employee and the professional man, should have a vote for them, but no employer, no rentier, none who lived by the toil of others. I heard a debate on the draft of a new formal Constitution in the Berlin Soviet during May. Some of the marginal cases were rather curious. The Left was quite ready, for example, to enfranchise doctors in ordinary practice, but it wanted to exclude doctors who made a living by keeping sanatoria in which they "exploit" the labor of junior doctors and nurses. The Right wished to include even the employer if he were himself active as manager and organizer; but in the Berlin Soviet, as it is to-day, the Left is dominant. The real driving forces of the move­ment, the extremer "Independents" like Däumig and Richard Miller, and, of course, the Commun­ists, regarded Parliamentary institutions as obso­lescent. They meant sooner or later to make Ger­many a "Rate-Republic"; in other words, to sup­press the rival institutions, and to make the Kate (Councils) the sole legislative and executive au­thorities. Any compromise they regarded as purely transitional.

For the moment the idea of compromise has won. The one permanent result of the March general strike was that the Government promised to give the Workers' Councils a definite place in the Ger­man Constitution. As yet, the scheme agreed upon between the Scheidemann Cabinet and a dele­gation from the Berlin Soviet (in which at that time the Majority Socialists were leading) exists only in outline. It is a promise that the Consti­tution shall recognize, or set up (1) Works' Com­mittees representing all workers and employees in every factory, mine, etc.; (2) Industrial Councils in every trade, of the "Whitley" type, to regu­late the general conditions of production, repre­senting both employers and workers; (3) Cham­bers of Work, representing employers, the profes­sions, and the workers of all trades in definite ter­ritorial districts; and (4) a Chamber of Work for the whole German Realm, with a right of sugges­tion and consultation on all industrial and social-political legislation.

This "compromise" was a clever stroke on the part of the non-revolutionary majority, for in a subtle way it turns the weapon of the Left against itself. The intention is that the Chamber of Work, and the local analogous bodies, shall represent employers and employed on a basis of parity. Thus, the pure class organization, the Workers' Council, is transformed into a body based on the equal rights of capital and labor. No one, so far as I know, has suggested the introduction of any disinterested or balancing element. I had an op­portunity of discussing the scheme with Herr Julius Kaliski, the leader of the anti-official Op­position within the Majority Socialist Party, and one of the ablest thinkers in the Socialist move­ment. He regards the Government's offer merely as a first step. In his view, the Chamber of Work is destined to be a more important body in the Constitution than the Reichstag itself. He claims for it parallel legislative powers, even outside the field of industrial and social legislation. How, as he justly asks, can one divorce industrial policy from the foreign policy of the State, in a world where foreign policy turns continually on the struggle for markets and raw materials? He would provide for conflicts between the two Chambers by giving the Reichstag the right which the British Commons have against the Lords, to carry a Bill which it had passed three times, in spite of the veto of the Chamber of Work. When I suggested that a Chamber composed in equal parts of Workers and Employers would be an un­manageable body with no internal cohesion, and no single driving force, and no motive which could give unity of direction, he answered that the Chamber of Work would represent the community as producer, and that the interests of production itself would give it unity. He assumed, in fact, that the desire to serve the community by produc­ing in the best possible way is ultimately the dom­inant motive alike with employers and employed.

There is in this German compromise between the old forms of democracy with their basis in territorial representation and the new form with its basis in industry, a close parallel to the solu­tion propounded, even before the war, by our British Guild Socialists. The Germans have, how­ever, reached their compromise mechanically. They find the State and the old form of democracy in existence, and they make terms with it, but trouble themselves very little to assign it a suit­abe function. The Guild Socialist, on the other hand, does not merely tolerate or accept the "dem­ocratic" Parliament: he regards it as the neces­sary representation of citizens regarded as con­sumers. His structure is no mere compromise: it is a recognition of the fact that the same person will act and vote somewhat differently, according as he is organized as a consumer or producer. The German "Councils" movement, on the other hand, is thinking only of the worker as producer.

This interesting phase of social evolution in Germany was interrupted for a moment by the crisis over the Terms of Peace. The next few months will show whether it can be directed into the channels of a constitutional development, For my part I am inclined to think that the class cleav­age, sharpened intolerably by the miseries of war and the blockade, is too acute to admit of such compromises as the Government or even Herr Kaliski propose. The Independents and the Com­munists scoff at the idea of any Chamber of Work in which the employing class has equal repre­sentation with the workers. They are fanatically attached to the Council idea, not merely because it is a more supple and natural form of repre­sentation than the old territorial basis, but above all because it represents the worker to the exclu­sion of the capitalist. The compromise is not yet accepted, and the power of the Left is growing. The tactical value of the Workers' Council for the Left is, firstly, that it brings together all the workers, no longer sundered in crafts and divided in Trade Unions, as a single class with a solid interest against capital as a whole, and secondly that it can wield the weapon of the political strike. At bottom, it is, I believe, the acuteness of this class cleavage in Germany which explains the de­cay of Parliament. Parliament is neither a Work­ers' nor an Employers' Council, but a confused attempt to reflect the unity of a nation, where, in fact, unity no longer exists.

The compromise might, I think, stand a chance of success if at the start some of the chief in­dustries were already nationalized. If, for ex­ample, the mines and the big metal concerns were represented among the employers on the Council, not by profit-making companies, but by the demo­cratic State as owner, then the two halves of the Chamber of Work would no longer reflect an un­bridgable class cleavage. Under these conditions the Chamber of Work would tend to be a body specially charged with the duty of preparing the progressive socialization of industry and gradu­ating the stages of public control over production. Evolution in the present condition of Germany can hope to cope with revolution only if it moves rapidly and visibly. The pace since November has been too slow, primarily because the makers of the Republic failed to realize that democracy is no longer for any living society an end in itself.