Context and Occasion
Eduard Bernstein’s Der politische Massenstreik und die politische Lage der Sozialdemokratie in Deutschland (The Political Mass Strike and the Political Situation of Social Democracy in Germany) was published in 1906 by the Berlin publishing house Vorwärts. It is a pamphlet-length intervention in one of the most heated debates inside the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the years before the First World War. Its immediate occasion was the question of whether the party should adopt the political mass strike as a tactic, especially to win or defend universal suffrage in Prussia, where the three-class voting system heavily favored the propertied classes, and more broadly to resist the authoritarian and militaristic tendencies of the Imperial government.
The debate had been stirred by the Russian Revolution of 1905, in which general strikes and mass demonstrations had forced concessions from the Tsarist regime. Rosa Luxemburg had celebrated these events in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, arguing that the mass strike was a living, spontaneous expression of proletarian political consciousness rather than a tactic that could be scheduled by party committees. Bernstein’s book responds to this view, and to the wider mood on the party’s left, from the standpoint of the reformist wing with which he was associated.
The Author and His Position
By 1906 Bernstein was the leading theorist of what came to be called revisionism. Years earlier, in writings collected as Evolutionary Socialism (1899), he had argued that the Marxist expectation of capitalist collapse was not confirmed by the evidence of his time: crises were not becoming more severe, the middle strata were not disappearing, and the working class was gaining political and economic rights through parliamentary and trade union action. He therefore urged the party to pursue gradual reform, to treat democracy and legality as genuine instruments of socialist progress, and to abandon revolutionary catastrophism as a guiding strategy.
The mass strike book applies these commitments to a concrete tactical question. Bernstein’s position is that the party’s strength lay in its organization, its electoral success, its trade unions and its growing presence in local government, and that all of these depended on the continuity of legal activity. A politically motivated general strike, in his view, was far more likely to provoke repression, to split the working class, and to damage the organizations that had been built over decades than to achieve any reform. He was writing against those in the party who regarded the mass strike as a near-magical solution to the stalemate of Prussian politics.
Structure and Method of the Argument
The pamphlet proceeds through a series of linked moves rather than a rigid chapter sequence. It begins by situating the mass strike debate within the history of the German labor movement, reminding readers that the party had long been committed to legality and that its growth had depended on this commitment. Bernstein then examines the concept of the mass strike itself, distinguishing the purely economic general strike of trade union experience from the political mass strike, which aims at a government decision or a change in the political order.
From this definition the argument turns to a comparative and historical analysis. Bernstein draws on the experience of Belgium, where a general strike had been used in 1893 to press for the extension of the franchise, and on the events of Russia in 1905. He is careful about the Belgian case: he treats it as a demonstration that such strikes can achieve limited political ends where a comparable organized base exists and where the state is not prepared to meet a determined movement with unrestrained force. The Russian example he reads very differently. The revolutionary upsurge there, he argues, arose from a state in military and economic collapse, from a war that had discredited the government, and from a peasant and working-class population with very different conditions from those of Germany. Transferring the Russian model to a Germany of a strong, intact state and a highly organized labor movement, he contends, misreads the situation entirely.
The central line of argument is that the political mass strike presupposes either a deep crisis of the state or a level of unity and readiness among the working class that Germany did not then possess, and that it cannot be produced by proclamation. Bernstein insists that a strike without the means to sustain it, without a clear and attainable aim, and without a strong defensive capacity against the state would end in defeat, arrests, and the loss of the trade unions and the press, the very instruments through which the party had advanced.
Key Ideas
Several ideas recur throughout the pamphlet. The first is the priority of organization. For Bernstein the SPD was a large and growing organization whose advance was steady and measurable, and any tactic that risked its existence for a spectacular gesture was, in his terms, imprudent. The second is the primacy of legal and parliamentary means. He treats the Reichstag, the Landtage and the municipal councils not as bourgeois distractions but as real arenas where the working class could win concrete improvements, and where its voice could make a difference.
A third idea concerns the relationship between the mass action and the state. Bernstein does not deny that mass demonstrations can influence governments; he argues that in the German case the state’s power of repression was formidable and that a movement which provoked it prematurely would hand the initiative to the authorities. The fourth is his attention to the political gains that a patient strategy might secure, including the eventual reform of the Prussian franchise, which he regarded as attainable through sustained pressure on parliament and public opinion rather than through a single decisive stoppage.
Bernstein also engages directly with the notion that revolutionary spontaneity should guide party policy. He acknowledges the courage and the energy of the revolutionary mood, but he argues that spontaneity cannot replace planning, and that the responsibility of a mass party is to distinguish between what is possible and what is merely desirable.
Conclusions and Positions in the Debate
The pamphlet concludes that the political mass strike should not be adopted as a standing or central tactic of German Social Democracy under the conditions then prevailing. He does not rule out the possibility that some extraordinary circumstance might one day render a broad stoppage appropriate, but he insists that such a decision must rest on a sober assessment of the forces involved, not on enthusiasm imported from abroad. The party’s task, as he sees it, is to continue building its organizations, to press for democratic reform through every legal channel, and to keep its strategy anchored in the realities of German political life.
The position was contested vigorously. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky in his more nuanced later interventions, and many activists argued against Bernstein, and the matter was formally addressed at the SPD party congress held at Mannheim in 1906, where the party’s leadership, including August Bebel, took a position that ruled out the political mass strike as a general tactic while allowing that it might be discussed in exceptional cases. The result was a compromise that preserved the authority of the parliamentary and trade union leadership while leaving the revolutionary wing unsatisfied.
Significance and Reception
Bernstein’s pamphlet is important less for any single new doctrine than as a clear statement of the reformist conception of the party’s politics at the moment when that conception was under its sharpest pressure. It shows the revisionist case in its tactical form: the argument that German socialism should be judged by the strength of its organizations and the gains of its legal struggle, and that the revolutionary rhetoric of the period concealed the dangers of a strategy that could not be sustained.
Its reception reflected the polarization of the party. Revisionists and moderate leaders regarded it as a sober defense of the movement’s accumulated achievements, while radicals saw it as a retreat from the revolutionary commitments of Marxism. The debate it provoked anticipated the larger quarrels over war, revolution and reform that would divide German Social Democracy during and after the First World War, when the question of how far the working class could and should use extraordinary mass action to alter the political order would become a matter of life and death for the party and for the Weimar Republic that followed.
