KARL MARX, FRIEDRICH ENGELS, AND THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, 1875 TO 1895

In the period of this study, Marx was working on the second volume of Kapital. Engels handled the correspondence with European socialist leaders. The two men discussed by letter the policies they sought to have adopted by socialist parties.;Marx and Engels had regarded Germany as the center of the European workers' movement since 1871. They followed socialist activity there more closely than anywhere else. Both regarded Bismarck's Germany as "Bonapartist.";The Londoners were stunned by the totality of their defeat when, in 1875, the Eisenacher party united with the Lassallean General German Workingmen's Association under a Lassallean program. They blamed Wilhelm Liebknecht for the fact that their teachings found no place in the new party. Neither Marx nor Engels ever appreciated the strength of reformist, petty-bourgeois ideas or eclectic socialism in Germany.;Marx and Engels strove to bring the new party closer to their views. Twice they threatened to break with the party and to attack it publicly. Engels' Anti-Duhring (1877-78) began the Marxist penetration of the party. By 1883, the year Marx died, they were able regularly to reach the German proletariat through the party's illegal organ, Der Sozialdemokrat.;The political climate of Germany militated against the spread of revolutionary Marxism. The majority of the party's Reichstag deputies were opportunist, reformist, or both. Engels believed that when the Anti-Socialist Law fell, the party would split into revolutionary and reformist wings. The fall of the law would also create an environment in which the German working class could become clear in revolutionary theory.;Engels did not have first-hand information on the German workers. The massive SPD victory in the election of 1890 caused Engels to revise his opinion of the necessity of a split in the party. After the election he fancied that the influx of new party supporters would receive their revolutionary educations from the older, more experienced comrades. Above all others, Engels relied on August Bebel for information concerning the German proletariat. Bebel told him that the proletariat was revolutionary, but that its leaders were largely opportunistic. Engels did not view the party as an organic whole.;August Bebel, on whom Marxism had made a deep impression, was a revolutionary of the breakdown theory variety. He believed that directly out of an economic crisis socialism would emerge. Engels did not grasp this element in Bebel's thinking. He believed instead that Bebel was holding the party to a revolutionary course.;Bebel embraced Marxist ideology as an opposition tactic. Passionate in his hatred of capitalism, he adopted the rhetoric of the class struggle only to disinherit it whenever the party was threatened. Engels failed to notice until the last weeks of his life that Bebel would waver on the question of violent revolution.;While Der Sozialdemokrat ceased publication in 1980, Engels lost the only major German organ he could decisively influence. Engels believed that the German proleteriat could be instructed in revolution. Yet Liebknecht blurred all questions of principle in Vorwarts, the legal central organ, and did not editorially support Marxism. Engels did not attack Liebknecht publicly. The proletariat did not receive a revolutionary education.;In the period 1890-95 Engels' influence in the party declined rapidly. His decline in influence was terminated only by his death. If he had lived until 1919, he would have broken with the Majority Social Democrats.;This study is based on published correspondence and on German socialists' collections in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.