Still quoting Pierre Broue’s The German Revolution.

…

Historically, the Social-Democratic bureaucracy was personified by Fritz Ebert,34 who became Secretary in 1906 at the age of 36, and Chairman of the Party in 1913 after Bebel died. This former saddler, who joined the Party when very young, had a noteworthy talent for organisation. At first, he was a manual worker in the shipyards in Bremen, and then manager of a Party canteen which was a centre of Social-Democratic propaganda. In 1900, he was a full-timer, a member of the Party secretariat in Bremen responsible for labour problems, where he won the reputation of being an efficient official. When elected General Secretary, he made himself the champion of modern methods of organisation, introduced telephones, stenographers and typists into the dusty offices, multiplying reports and questionnaires, card-indexes and circulars. Schorske writes of him: ‘Colourless, cool, determined, industrious and intensely practical, Ebert had all those characteristics which were to make of him, mutatis mutandis, the Stalin of social democracy.’35

It was Ebert who constructed the apparatus, and in whom the revisionists finally placed their confidence. In 1911, he had the support of Legien and the trade-union leaders against Haase – whom Bebel supported – for the succession to the chairmanship vacated by the veteran radical Singer.36 He was defeated on this occasion,37 but was to succeed Bebel himself two years later, this time without difficulty. His lieutenants, the other bosses of the apparatus, seem at first sight to be less dull. Otto Braun, of working-class origin, had belonged in his youth to the left-wing opposition group which opposed the Erfurt Programme. Later a journalist in Königsberg, he subsequently kept his distance from the great theoretical disputes in the Party. The former compositor Philip Scheidemann had become a journalist in Hesse; he was a talented agitator, and passed for a radical until he was elected to the Executive, but he too had stood back from the great debates, and did not speak at any of the three congresses to which he was delegated between 1906 and 1911. In the Reichstag, he became the Party fraction’s expert on stock-rearing.38

At first, one may feel surprised at the importance of the role which such insipid personalities played in a movement as broad and as important as Social Democracy. The fact is that Ebert, Braun, Scheidemann and the others found themselves placed in what was in a certain sense a privileged position, between opposed class forces. The economic transformation of Germany and the relative social peace in Europe, interrupted only by the revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905, the advances in social legislation, which were won by Social Democracy and the trade unions, together with the prospects of social advancement and individual success which the workers’ organisations and their closed world offered to capable members of the working class, all nourished the revisionist tendencies.

These tendencies were fundamentally opposed to Marxism, in particular the tendency which favoured a ‘national-socialist’ movement, in which the standard of living of the German workers was considered to be linked to the prosperity of ‘its’ capitalists and the expansion of German imperialism.

Such perspectives were developed in the wake of Bernstein’s revisionism, but much more crudely and cynically, and without the idealism and the moral preoccupations which inspired him.39 These people were ‘socialists’ for whom the working classes were in league with capitalism, with its colonial and military policies, defensive in principle, but offensive where necessary. If the German Empire were drawn into a war, whether it be offensive or defensive, the German workers could under no circumstances desire its defeat.

Noske, a former woodcutter who had become a Party functionary and then a deputy, expressed more clearly than anyone else this repudiation of the very foundations of proletarian internationalism, when he declared in the Reichstag that the socialists were not ‘vagabonds without a fatherland’, and called on the deputies of the bourgeois parties to give the German workers sound reasons for being soldiers of Germany.40 The forces at work behind Noske were not disguising themselves.

The junker and Prussian Minister for War, von Einem, grasped the opportunity which this speech offered, and called upon Bebel to repudiate the anti-militarist writings of his comrade, Karl Liebknecht.41 Indeed, it was through Noske and the Prussian minister as intermediaries that the SPD was to be brought to engage in the debate on the national question and, in particular, the problem of national defence. The Imperial High Court was to pronounce when it sentenced Karl Liebknecht to eighteen months in prison.42