man Social Democracy was prepared to resume the open propaganda which it had been obliged to abandon in 1878. But upon the purposes and methods of the propaganda after 1890, the persecutions of the preceding period, 1878-1890, left an indelible imprint.
Congress after congress repeated the formulas of Marxian Socialism—economic determinism, the class struggle, the inevitable social cataclysm of the future, demands for political democracy and for collective ownership and operation of all the economic means of production and distribution, unswerving opposition to the whole capitalistic system, particularly to indirect taxes, militarism, and imperialism. Nor was Marxian internationalism ever lost sight of. German Social Democrats were conspicuous in the councils of the Socialist International. The executive of the German party repeatedly voted appropriations and authorized the collection of special funds for the aid of comrades in other countries, in England, in Belgium, in Denmark, in Austria. The German party, while stigmatizing the Boer War as a barbarous and abominable war of conquest, combated manfully the growing Anglophobia in Germany. At the very time when the German "patriot" press was hypnotizing public opinion by the spectacle of British "atrocities" in South Africa, the Socialist press was exposing the atrocities of the allied troops in China, especially of the German contingent, in the bitingly sarcastic "Letters of the Huns".[1]
To make of the Marxian formulas living realities, it would not suffice to resort to violence and revolution. That was the capital lesson of the Era of Persecution. As Liebknecht said at the Congress of Erfurt:
If we should now accord chief importance to physical force, we should place ourselves in the position of our enemies. Bismarck was the man of brute force, the man of iron and blood. No one has ever employed greater means of force or acted in manner more unscrupulous. And the result? What has become of him? He had at his disposal for more than a quarter of a century the police, the army, the money, the power of the State, in short all the means of physical force, while we could oppose him only with our good right, our good conviction, our naked breasts—and we have conquered. Our arms have been the better. In time brute force must yield to the moral factors, to the logic of events. Bismarck retired in disgrace—and the Social Democracy is the strongest party in Germany. Is not this a potent proof of the value of our present tactics? … The essence of revolution does not lie in the means but in the end. Violence for thousands of years has been a reactionary factor.[2]
No one in the party [said Bebel eight years later at the Congress of
