GERMANY: New Socialism?

Karl Marx, philosophical father of Socialism but an embarrassing parent to have around since the Russian branch of the family began acting up, was formally read out of the Socialist family.

In a big meeting hall at Frankfurt’s fair grounds last week gathered delegates from 22 Socialist parties in 21 nations (including Socialist Britain) and representatives of Socialist groups exiled from Spain, Argentina and Communist countries (including Yugoslavia). It was the eighth international meeting of Socialist parties* since World War II. At one point, four young Germans in blue shirts advanced to the platform bearing a huge scarlet banner on which the words Sozialistische Internationale were emblazoned in gold. But the old red flag was not what it used to be.

Cautiously the delegates adopted (over some opposition) a new 3,000-word declaration of principles. It spelled out what many democratic Socialists had long practiced, but it had never before been put so bluntly, nor had a Socialist resolution ever been so carefully designed to shake Europe’s Socialists out of their doctrinaire dreams. Instead of the old tenets (“public ownership of the means of production,” etc.) the new Socialist manifesto referred to the “planning of production … in the interests of the people as a whole . . . Socialist planning does not presuppose public ownership of all the means of production. It is compatible with the existence of private ownership in important fields. [However] the workers must be associated democratically with the direction of industry.” To the horror of faithful Marxists, the declaration also noted that “the evils of capitalism are disappearing.”

Added the manifesto: individual freedom and political liberties are the supreme moral objectives. The chief evil in the world today is Communism, the “new imperialism . . . founded on a military bureaucracy and a terroristic police.” Pacifism, once a keynote in the Socialist choir, was soft-pedaled. British Socialists demanded that Socialists everywhere do their fair share in the military defense against Communist danger.

Class lines are changing, the Socialist document said. In the 19th Century Socialism was a “wage earners’ ” movement. Today it appeals more to professional and clerical workers, farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, retailers, artists and scientists. Socialism is not even “inevitable,” as Marx maintained; it is “only one of the choices open to man.”

But there is still a great difference between the choices. In their day-to-day policies, Socialists are fighting Moscow, but they also harass, obstruct and denounce capitalism. Socialism and capitalism have formed an alliance against the Communists; yet they have not, and cannot fuse their long-range aims.

*Earlier Socialist internationals: the First International launched by Marx and Engels in London in 1864, which was split by the Russian anarchist Bakunin a few years later; the Second (“Social Democratic”) International, founded by Karl Kautsky, George Plekhanov and others in Paris in 1889, which fell apart in World War I; the Third International (Comintern), set up by Lenin in Moscow in 1919 and officially dissolved by Stalin in 1943; the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky’s splinter Communist party, which he set up in Mexico in 1938 after Stalin drove him out of Russia.