16. My Second Foreign Exile: German Socialism¶
Core Argument¶
At the 1907 London party congress, the Russian revolutionary movement was so financially desperate that an English liberal lent it £3,000, secured by a promissory note signed by all delegates—a debt the Soviet government later redeemed. There, Trotsky met Maxim Gorky for the first time and renewed his acquaintance with Rosa Luxemburg, whose intellect and courage he admired. She agreed with his theory of permanent revolution; when Lenin jokingly attributed her position to poor Russian, Trotsky retorted that she spoke “excellent Marxism.” He restated his view of the proletariat’s role in the bourgeois revolution and its relation to the peasantry, and Lenin acknowledged their solidarity on fundamentals, contradicting the later legend that Trotsky had ignored the peasantry in 1905.
After the congress, Trotsky wrote Russland in der Revolution and, in Hirschberg, a book arguing that the vast organisational machine of German Social Democracy might, at a critical moment, become a pillar of conservative order. At the Stuttgart International, he noted disappointment with revolutionary methods and the German party’s impotence when Quelch was expelled. From 1907, Trotsky lived in Vienna, where he found Austrian Marxist leaders—Hilferding, Bauer, Adler, Renner—to be philistines, not revolutionaries. Renner dismissed Trotsky’s prediction of a second Russian revolution transferring power to the proletariat. Trotsky concluded that these academic Marxists had merely assimilated parts of Marx’s theory without re-educating themselves in its revolutionary spirit; he felt a direct psychological affinity with Marx and Engels instead.
The Austrian Social Democrats established a party bread factory in 1907 to increase income. Trotsky opposed this from the outset, arguing from the position of the proletariat party in capitalist society. Nearly twenty years later, after losses, the party shamefacedly handed it to private hands. Otto Bauer later cited Trotsky’s warnings to justify abandoning the factory, but did not explain why he had ignored them. Trotsky claims this confirmed the superiority of the Marxist method over its Austrian counterfeit. Victor Adler, though superior to his colleagues, was a sceptic who avoided broad political views of the future, tolerating and adapting to the nationalist spirit corroding Austrian Social Democracy. In 1909, Trotsky wrote a cautious article against chauvinism in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, published by Kautsky in Neue Zeit after hesitation. Austrian leaders were angered; Otto Bauer privately admitted the foreign editor had gone too far, but publicly argued that foreign policy did not exist for Austria-Hungary and workers never read about it. Trotsky saw this as evidence they believed neither in revolution nor war.
In Berlin, the atmosphere was different, with less nationalism. Trotsky idealised German Social Democracy from a distance. He attended left-wing gatherings with Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht. He met Kautsky in 1907, finding him charming but intellectually dry and schematic. Kautsky’s strategic philosophy of wearing out the enemy (Ermattungsstrategie) opposed Rosa Luxemburg’s strategy of overthrowing the enemy (Niederwerfungsstrategie). Kautsky adapted to the existing system; Rosa showed how she interpreted loyalty to her ideas. August Bebel personified the slow, stubborn movement of a rising class, knowing no expenditure of mental energy on objects not serving practical purposes. Bebel’s hopes for a successor centred on Haase, an honest mediocrity without revolutionary temperament. Karl Liebknecht was entirely different: a revolutionary man of action, a half-stranger in the German Social Democracy. At the 1911 Jena congress, Bebel asked Trotsky not to speak on tsarist tyranny. At the congress, the Russian delegation voted for the Vienna resolution on the Czech trade unions, against the Prague motion. Trotsky attempted to move an amendment but failed, as he was not yet certain what amendment was needed to the entire policy of Social Democracy. He concludes that the required amendment would have amounted to a declaration of holy war against that policy, a move not made until 1914.