Chapo Trap House - Hinge Points Episode 1: Social Democratic Party Poopers

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

Welcome to our new mini-series Hinge Points, a tour of historical “what-ifs.” We’re publishing the first episode free to all. Subsequent episodes will post on Fridays exclusively to subscribers on patreon.com/chapotraphouse. Matt and Danny Bessner, from the American Prestige podcast, take you on a tour of the history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and explore the importance of the party's decision to vote to fight World War I. They examine the party's structure and history, the clash between party elites and workers, and the importance of nationalism, exploring why World War I represented such a devastating blow against international socialism.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's hinge points. I'm Danny Bestener, here as always with Matt Christman. So on today's episode, we're going to explore what is probably one of the most consequential decisions in modern history, and certainly in the history of the left, which was the Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD's decision to vote for war credits in World War One, and essentially to abandon the international class struggle, which had been the basic, you know, the tiliology, the telos of Marxism. So World War One breaks out in June 1914.

And Matt, why don't you describe a little what happened? Why did this war break out? What was going on? Who did what? Well, it was the culmination of a process of military buildup between the various imperial states of Europe as they scrambled for access to the resources of the globe, but also the territory within Europe itself. It was a period when the relatively recently united German Empire was making an effort

to gain parity or to even eclipse the power of England on the high seas. And where all of this brinksmanship was being carried out in the context of these alliance systems between states meant to prevent any one power from becoming too belligerent. But what ended up happening is that it was that very alliance system that triggered a continent-wide conflagration, which began after the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, by Serb nationalists. Because the war's proximate cause was what Bismarck predicted it would be, some damn business in the Balkans, because the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans had

led to a scramble for control of those territories by the European powers. Russia was seeking to position itself as the guardian of slavs everywhere and was looking to try to make a grab for the Dardanelles, while Austria-Hungary was trying to keep its multi-ethnic empire together and to extend its influence into Bosnia. And so you get the end of this concert of Europe, this post-Napoleonic piece. It wasn't actually much of a piece, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point. There was actually quite a few wars over the course of the 19th century, and this piece comes to an end with the assassination of the Archduke.

And it's really important to emphasize, and I think this mirrors what's happening today, was that in Germany, and particularly amongst the German middle classes, the war was actually embraced significantly, particularly at the beginning. It was seen as a way to finally break through the bourgeois norms, the bourgeois civilization that had led the end of the cycle, the Fontescikla, the turn of the 20th century to appear so boring. And the idea amongst many people in Germany was that you'd actually be able to use the war to basically move from particular interests into new collectivities, that you'd be actually

able to express meaning, to express a romantic valor in the sacrifice of war. And the war was actually embraced by a lot of people at the time. Not just in Germany, but all across Europe. Wherever the war was, wherever it was time to declare war, the popular energies were all excited, because everywhere in Europe, the logic of capitalism was draining meaning from life, by the day, and people were aware of that, and among the working class that was expressed in this burgeoning socialist movement, the socialist political formations that were coming into being, but among the middle class, there's this more individuated

desire to transcend the mechanisms of capitalism and the alienations that they produced. And as has traditionally been the case, war is the fantasy realm, where all the solid and stodgy elements of existence sort of melt away, and you live this new life that is more at the quick, that is more animal, that is not a prison of rationality, and that the experience of undergoing that then can transmogrify a alienated social existence into a collective experienced one, where people have bonded through fire and come out forged into something else. Right, there's something more organic.

There's this idea that war is a more organic experience, and so I think it's important to view World War I as two things. One, it's really the end of feudalism and the aristocracy. The aristocracy was dealt its fatal blow, I'd say, in the French Revolution and in the Industrial Revolution that came quickly after. Eric Habsbaum's famous dual revolution of the French and Industrial Revolutions. But it kept on limping along, and World War I is really when a lot of them literally just get annihilated and killed.

So it could be viewed as the period on the aristocracy, but it's also an important turning point in the history, as Matt suggested, of the bourgeoisie, where things could have gone a different way. Yeah, this is the last gasp of aristocratic rule, and as with everything else in the history of modern Europe, what ends up destroying them is that interstate competition, that it was interstate competition that led them to unleash these forces of capitalism that ended up undermining them and empowering a different emergent social force of the bourgeois. And then they resisted it to one degree or another.

And you see this process whereby in the more advanced capitalist countries, the aristocracy is essentially either decapitated or bought out or some combination of that, whereas further east, traditional forms of monarchial rule hold on until this point, but all of them are smashed, all the idols are smashed by the war, because it turns out it's not a very efficient way to run a government. Absolutely not. And so you could view the beginning of World War I as this sort of cleansing moment, and people really recognize it as a time.

It really reminds me of our own era where people are essentially looking for something meaningful. You know, they're fighting anti-fascism and all those things. So there's a lot of comparisons or analogies that I think could be drawn, but this really brings us to our hinge points, early August 1914 in the German parliament. And this is really important because it's at this moment, on August 3rd and August 4th, 1914, when the Social Democratic Party of Germany, again, the SPD, one of the most august socialist parties in the world, one of the most important ones is socialists.

The model for all the other ones. The socialist party of Marx's own country decide in a world historical decision to vote with all the other parties in Germany in favor of war credits. Now at the time, the SPD defenses by saying that the war is a defensive one. It's against Russia. It's against Tsarist reactionary Russia, and so you needed to do it. But from the larger long-term historical perspective, and certainly from Matt and my perspective, this is when the SPD formally abandons its commitment to international class struggle

in the hopes that the German working classes would ally with other national working classes to prevent First World War. And in essence, the party begins to express its commitment to being a national party as opposed to an international party based on working class struggle. And this is, I think, it's important to emphasize a betrayal of the rank and file. Right after the war breaks out in June, July, August, there's actually significant opposition from the German working classes against the war. And in fact, this leads to a division of the SPD where in 1917, the party splits between

an SPD, the majority SPD is what the original party is called, and an independent SPD. And you get basically the sundering of the radical and reformist strands of the party to some degree. And the original, the majority SPD becomes a party that rules during Weimar, and some might say didn't react effectively to Hitler's rise. But we're going to suppose here is what if the SPD didn't vote in favor of war credits? What if the party actually had significantly refused to ally with the rest of the German political parties and instead of becoming a national party committed itself to an international

working class politics? And I think to understand why this would be so important, we have to think what Marx wanted and what Marx thought the role of Germany would be. Yeah, so Germany is the model for the rising working class consciousness that takes hold all throughout Europe as the industrial revolution intensifies in the 19th century, because obviously the fact that Marx is German is key to this. He is conceiving his notions in a context of Germany. And the emergence of the German state after the Franco-Prussian war created a dynamic,

rapidly industrializing economy that had such a federal working class movement and so much agitation and so much effective propagandization and ideological formation that the German ruling class broke really with much of the rest of the continental European tradition in the 1880s and actually legalized the socialist movement, which had been illegal until that point, instituted a series of social reform measures to alleviate a lot of their most persistent complaints and brought the working class into the political fold by allowing the social democrats to run for office, to sit in parliament, and very quickly they became the sole political organ of the working class in Germany, and that really was the blueprint

that Marx had predicted. Because Marx really, and this is I think when we start talking about the Soviet Union in another episode, this is really critical because a lot of the Marxist theory of revolution, a lot of the Marxian understanding of history, in my opinion at least in their disagreements over this, but really depended on essentially central Europe being the site of revolution. It really depended on central Europe being the space where the working class would become the subject and the object of history, where this proletarianizing population that is moving to the cities for the first time in the 19th century that is pushing this new dynamic thing

called capitalism is going to be able, is going to become conscious of itself, seize the means of production and instigate a world revolution. And of course, what happens over the course of the 19th century, particularly by the fall of the CIECLA, is that the working class movement begins to be channeled into political parties. And the SPD is really, I think, the most important working class political party on earth. And so it's really in the SPD that the hopes for international revolution are placed. And I think rightly, especially when we see what happens when the revolution occurs in

the decrepit, czarist empire, the Russian empire and what happens with the Soviet Union. And I think one of the reasons that occurred as it did was because the SPD voted to essentially become a national party. So Matt, what do you think happens? Let's say the SPD, it's August 1914, and the leaders are like, you know, fuck this, we're not going to go along with this, we're not going to become a national party, we're going to make links to the French working class, we're going to make links to the British working class, we're going to try to reach out to the Russian empire and the peasantry

there and try to prevent the World War One. What do you think would have happened or at least what possibilities would that have presented to people at the time? It would, at the very least, have given the socialist movements and political leadership of those in the other European countries a chance to do something other than what they did. It became, once the German Socialist Democratic Party votes for war credits, it dooms all other working class parties in Europe to follow suit.

You have to. At that point, it has been fully foreclosed because you're essentially asking your people to unilaterally disarm in the face of a German military machine that is the, at that point, like the national enemy of France entirely. And also very successful over the course of the 19th century, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, you know, extremely, extremely successful military. And ruled over by a fucking Kaiser, you know, I mean, the defensive democracy propaganda from the allies of World War I is, of course, pretty silly, especially when you consider

the Tsarist Russia as a key component of the coalition. But it's certainly true that if you're on the other side of, you know, the Rhine, and you're looking at the Bosch, and here's, and your fellow workers have decided that they're going to back the war, you have no choice. There is no other alternative. You have to convince yourself that this is actually defensive war and that there's some sort of benefit to this, that you're not betraying socialism. But in that context, the choice has been made for you by the Germans.

That's not to say that there would have been some inevitable uprising across Europe in opposition because, you know, nationalist sentiments had been the real foundational, they had been the passions that had replaced the religious wars of early modern Europe in the 19th century and were nothing to sneeze at and were present all throughout every element of European life, including in the working classes of all of these countries. So there is a strong tide that you would be pushing against, which is what more than anything made them decide to not do it, to not press their luck as it were. Right.

And I think you could look at the 19th century from the perspective of 2021 as to some degree of battle between class consciousness and national consciousness. Yes. And something's got to replace God. Right. God died and there has to be something to fill the space, something to organize your understanding of the world around you, to create, you know, hosts of angels and demons, to negotiate your life between, and those were the two offerings.

Race comes into it more in the 20th century, but at that time it is nationalism and class. And that contest was moving in the direction of class for many of the workers of Europe, but it was certainly not universal. Right. And the whole Marxist prediction, in my opinion at least, was premised on that something like World War I couldn't happen. Was that the whole thing was that the workers wouldn't do what they did, which was, and I actually want to underline, this is where it gets into complicated territory, whether

it was the workers or sort of the professionalized workers of the party leadership. And this is where you get a lot of... Yes. See, that's the issue. This is the issue. This is where, if you want to say, you know... This is the... DSA versus the, you know, the Amazon workers.

Yeah. DSA is voting, or in the sense that like the people who are of a particular economic class in general are voting for the social formation, this class formation, which they're supposed to represent. It was the legalization of the party that made the SDP the power it was, but that decision also, over time, bourgeoisified the party in that its leadership were no longer workers in a material sense. The people who made decisions both in the party itself and in the labor unions that

supported it because it was a... It wasn't just a party. It was a party that ruled through a collaboration with labor unions. The leaders of both of those groups were not workers in any sense. They did not go to factories. They did not perform the alienating work that Marx talks about that is the thing that radicalizes people and creates class consciousness. And workers used to actually call them in German, the dicken bunzen, the fat cats.

And so there was a lot of talk at the time about the dicken bunzen basically betraying the working class. And that fact is meaningful because when the decision-top point comes, when the summer of 1914 comes, the calculus of your fat cats within the party and in the labor movement is going to be different than those of the workers. For one thing, there's much more likely that they're going to actually have to fight this war and get shot during it. But also, if they do decide to vote against credits and to resist the war, they will likely

lose their positions in parliament. Absolutely. They will likely lose their... There is a very good chance they'll get arrested. Right. The Socialist Party was illegal for a lot of the 19th century in Germany, literally illegal. It was well understood, especially at the top, that the Social Democratic Party existed at the sufferance of the state and that that sufferance could be removed. And doing something like refusing to vote for war credits in a continent-wide conflagration

would count as a reason to do that. And that, I think, more than anything, determined the decision, is they had convinced themselves by that point that they were on a reformist road to communism that would not require revolution. They had fully metabolized the Bernstein revisionism, because the thing that convinced them... And I really do think that the thing that convinced them of that was nothing logical, rational. It was not a grasp of the immortal science. It was their full bellies. It was their pocket watches. It was the fact that by pursuing this course, they personally had advanced, which they were

able to, in their minds, conflate to the advance of the working class in general. So let's say, for some reason, the Dick and Bonson, they all wake up one day and they're like, no, we're not going to do it. We're going to do the Marxist working class. What happens? First of all, World War I probably can't happen if there's a general strike in Germany. In the summer of 1914, if there's a huge general strike, there probably can't be that sort of invasion of the Western front and these various fights that happen. So what happens? Is there a way for the workers of the world to unite, or is that an impossibility?

But let's say they do unite. What then? World War I doesn't happen. Is there a European wide revolution? Is there a linking up with Lenin in the Soviet Union? What things could have gone differently if it didn't occur as in the way that it did? I would say that as historical counterfactuals go, this one is a little over-determined. I think that the fact that the war hadn't happened yet kind of doomed any kind of alternative course because nobody thought it was going to be the war that it turned out to be. The reason that they call it a peace period after the Council of Vienna isn't that there weren't wars. There were. It's just that the prolonged, years-long, massively bloody warfare of the

Napoleonic era was over. Wars of the 19th century, later 19th century in Europe were largely very short. One season, one campaign, maybe one or two big battles, and then people signed a peace treaty. And there was a generalized understanding that this war would be like that. And its decisions are made in that context. Like we look at now, and we see World War I as this apocalyptic explosion at the heart of capitalism, and the moment that the working class had been waiting for, the moment to come to a fundamental conflict with capitalism. And that is the reality that is often masked by the day-to-day necessities of living in a society and doing your part as a lawful citizen in one way or another, even if you

consider yourself a radical, is that all political action, all party building, all labor activism, it might be narrowly about winning an election. It might be narrowly about narrowly about winning concessions from an employer in a strike. But the long-term goal needs to be to be marshalling forces for the moment of conflict, the final irrevocable moment of conflict with capitalism to transcend the system. And that, and that is what got obscured by the success of the of the SDP as Bain said in Batman, the fucking victory is defeated you. They lost that urgency at the top of the party and convince themselves that no, we can legislate our way to reforms that will take the power away from capitalists

and take and and fundamentally change our relationship to one another, which is the thing that is hardest to keep you in your head on a day-to-day level is that socialism will would require a a social transformation that is by definition disruptive, wildly disruptive and at the expense of a class of people who currently have concentrated power because of the socialist party that will not give it up. Right. And so while you may decide that elections are worth pursuing, and they often are, they're often the only thing to do in a given moment. You can't say, well, because we're trying to do a world revolution, we can't do elections like no, you have to build capacity, but you're building capacity

for a confrontation. And I think that the leadership of the SDP convinced themselves that this wasn't it. So then this raises an interesting question, particularly as we pursue this podcast, will we come up against certain moments that are over determined and that are impossible? Because essentially what we're saying here to some significant degree is that the workers revolution that Marx envisioned was impossible, that it was going to have to be some sort of war between actually existing nation states, which emerged in the 19th and early 20th century, and that it was basically impossible for there to be a workers revolt against the leaders,

thereby making the Marxist Tilos impossible to fulfill an actual history. By saying that it's over determined, we're essentially saying that there another world wasn't possible, that there was no way that there was ever going to be workers revolution. I would say to that, that the period from 14 to 45 is the deciding time, and that what ended up happening was not an inevitability, basically, and that means that the Marxist Tilos is in my mind still alive, and in the future we'll talk more about this, and that's why I think that the real moment when history gets liquid, and when you can imagine alternatives to what we've got is in the aftermath of World War I, because I think one of the things...

So World War I is inevitable, basically. I think so. The world war we're coming at, there has to be some sort of conflagration between the declining European empires. And there has to be a final, there has to be a violent dissolution with the system as it exists, because those workers of Germany, they might not have been too keen on going to war, and many of them might have been opposed to it, but would you have had sufficient will in the German working class to say no to this war that the rest of the continent

is starting, say no to the nationalist identity that many of them had imbued by that point, and then keep saying no in the face of what would be obvious and immediate and violent repression by the state, and then hope, basically, that you have inspired the working classes of those other countries to a point of solidarity, even though at that point, not just for the rulers, not just for the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, but for ordinary workers, the revisionist road had shown results. They had gotten concessions from labor. Their lives were less alienated and less miserable than they had been in the earlier days of

capitalism. There was an ameliorative effect going on now, but that's, you know, thanks to the spoils of empire and the creation of international markets that are like changing, allowing more surplus to flow to workers than, like Marx had imagined in a closed system of national capitalism. Right. Very critical point. Yeah.

And so there was still something for them in the system as it existed that would have made the risk of saying no to the war, especially when you don't know what that war is. You don't know how bad it's going to be. You don't know how how disruptive it's going to be a bridge too far. And I think not only were the social Democrats too comfortable to make that decision. They were too unsure of the actions of the other parties in Europe because, you know, they had their international, they had their second international, they had their meetings, but they didn't really have an ordination between each other.

And I wanted to underline that because I think this is one of the biggest questions of left-wing politics in modern history, which is how do you actually build those sorts of international or transnational connections that are as that feel literally as organic as the connection to the nation? Exactly. Exactly. This is the big question of left-wing politics that we haven't answered and frankly haven't even come close to answering.

And so that question, I think was initiated all the theory before 1914 is that it's going to build there that you're going to get this international, transnational working class consciousness. And it seemed to be moving in that direction. But then before those bonds had been made, before the connective tissue had really built up, you have this decision, you have this lightning strike in the form of the war. And because of the lack of development along those lines and because of the lure of war that's always there, and it's certainly in Europe, my God, those guys love going to war.

At least they did until they, like, you know what, enough, although honestly, now maybe they want to go to war again. Who knows? Well, they really enjoyed all the responsibility to protect the second they were able to bomb the global south. They love that stuff. The ICC loves trying people. They love trying Africans.

It's their favorite thing. It's their favorite thing. And so Europeans once in a while in the Balkans, we return again to the Balkans. But in the absence of faith that they have created a thing that can withstand the reaction that that would cause, they do the safe. They make the safe decision, what feels to them like the safe decision. And if they hadn't, I think you likely get some degree of coordinated resistance in the form of strikes and stuff, but my, my instinct from my knowledge of the moment is that it

would have stuff. It would have guttered out and the war still would have happened. So if we're, if we're arguing that World War I is overdetermined to some degree, when we're looking at 1914 as a synchronic moment, I agree, was there anything that could have happened over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries to make that different? Because this is also the big question, or was the fact of essentially colonialism serving as an sort of escape valve of class tension within the major powers of Europe, the UK, France, and Germany, essentially prevented the types of transnational solidarity that

would have been necessary to make the SPD vote against war credits? I think that that is the part of that. That's what has always saved European capitalism. I mean, it's what created European capitalism, it was, it was the plunder of, of the West, of West, the Western Hemisphere that, that, that created the, the capital formations that, that built Western capitalism. It was the war, the war, the money from the New World fueled the wars of the, of the 16th and 17th centuries that, that created the Westphalian system.

And then it was exploiting the colonial properties that created the trade networks that built capitalism in the North Atlantic, where it then, you know, spread throughout the entire continent and then the world. And also creates, which is so important to us today, consumers, right? You get the rise of fashion, you get the rise of mass consumption, you get the rise of mass politics over the course of the 19th century, and all of these things are working to mitigate class consciousness. Yes.

Like the marginal revolution in economics that says we don't, you shouldn't think about a value in terms of the labor that goes into it, but in, in terms of its value as in the eye of a consumer, that is a, that is an epistemic shift. You are no longer viewing the, the, the, the individual, the citizen as a producer, but as a consumer and that, and even though they are still producing, they aren't thinking of themselves as per, exactly. They're thinking of themselves as consumers because the death spiral of is miseration that Mark sees in capitals and is part of capital is objectively happening, is objectively

happening, is subjectively is not occurring in Europe because of imperialism, because of the opening of markets elsewhere and, and the bringing in of, of cheap resources into Europe to be consumed. And so you have this battle between class consciousness and, and this consumer identity, which is by definition nationalist, right, because you are not a consumer, you're not a, you are a consumer in a national context, in, in, in a specific cultural context that, that, that does not have the inherent solidarity and linkages that, that the idea of, of being a worker does.

So this is the big question. I mean, we're getting to enormous questions of Marxist theory in the very first episode, but why is that so powerful? All right. This is, why is national organic connection to a land or envisioned organic connection to a land and imagined community as Benedict Anderson, family put it, what was, what proved so much more powerful about that ideology as opposed to viewing things through class, viewing things through an international class?

Because this is, I do think what Marx predicted and he was right objectively, I would say about everything. Marx objectively gets most things right, not a hundred percent, but he like the, the, the actual course of actually existing capitals into a remarkable degree basically followed the course that Marx predicted in the middle of the 19th century, but where Marx's biggest failing, I think was the subjective experience of actually living workers on the ground. And this to me is the entire counterfactual of European history, which is that nationalism, consumption, over time race really came to supplant and move away class identity as a

founding organizational principle of individual lives. I think that the, the, the root of the answer comes to the fact that nationalism comes first because these are, these notions are built, these notions of identity are, are new, right? They are built up among these people who, whose ancestors throughout most of European history had, had an identity that was fixed to a area of land and that was determined by that, like peasants and, and land owners. That's basically your division of humanity and, and it's all defined by these localities and, and these abstract notions are, are not even conceivable.

They're, they're unnecessary and they don't relate to the conditions of life, but then capitalism begins churning up the earth and bringing people from these fixed relations into either literally bringing them into cities or through mass media and mass culture. If they're staying on the land, bringing them into these notions through that. These imagined spaces of community essentially and, and so the, the place where these new identities are being formed is, is in these cities and the people doing the formation at first are not workers. They're the people who have time to sit around in coffee shops and wonder about like, okay,

what do we have now? If we don't have the one, if you don't have God, what the heck, what are we doing here? And because the people making that culture at that point are not workers, when they're grasping for symbols and ideas and concepts, they're going to, one, they're going to not be in conflict with capitalism because they're being born out of it and the, it's being made by people who are functionally within capitalism and also literally this is where liberalism also starts in the salon and capitalism and liberalism are all linked to enlightenment ideas about rationality, about reason, about order, about progress, and I think that's

also really critical to understand. Yes. We're, we're all, we're all individuals. We're all negotiating our relationships with each other as strangers fundamentally. So how will we come back into reacquaintance with each other? With self-interest that are naturally in conflict with other self-interests and the, the only real material that is amenable to capitalism and that is relatable to the experience of, of this urban bourgeois and the people in the, the urban bourgeois and then the culture

creators around that bourgeois are these national myths and identities and languages that, that, that, that they can build a story around a, a, a story, a narrative of, of personhood of identity, of, of, of belonging. I mean, Benedict Anderson's work on this points out that, that nationalism is very much a media phenomenon, that media being newspapers and that the creation of mass, cheap newspapers all written by these same idle scribes in the cities, inscribes these ideas. And then while this is happening, the working class is also being created. But with less access to the tools of cultural production by definition, because they don't,

they're working, they don't have, they're, they're living the lives that, that Marx and Engels were describing of, of a miseration of, of, of their lives stripped of any time for personal reflection, leisure advancement of any kind. And this is why Marx underlines the importance of the working class becoming conscious of itself. Yes. It's a radical thing that was supposed to happen in the 19th century. And it did, but it came in the back draft of the creation of these national identities.

So first you are, if you're coming into being as an, as a, as a worker in these countries, you are finding yourself first templated with these language and, and, and religious and, and national identities. And then you are also a worker. And because you are working in the conditions that Marx describes of close proximity of, of, of a social homogeneity, people start creating culture that way. They are able to, they steal some time away. They start, they start organizing to improve their lot with their employer, giving themselves

both some space and time to, you know, reflect and also evidence of the effectiveness of organized action and also an understanding of who they're in opposition to an opposition, an understanding of where their lives, miseries come from, not abstract enemies and foreign countries, their employer who speaks the same language comes from the same country, has the same flag, believes the same things about, about the nation, but who is the face of their exploitation. And then in that process, a month through this struggle, now working class people start writing newspapers, professionalization, exactly doing the things that the, the bourgeois

were doing 30, 40 years earlier, and they are now creating a new narrative with a new understanding that is was created within the capitalism, but is now a counter hegemony created by a working class like these pay the newspapers bought by working class people, not funded by the state, you know, organic to this social formation. And so you have within capitalism, this social formation that observes a lot of the forms, but has this different fundamentally different content, and that generates this different identity. And if, and so then the issue is, if that continued on a beta, then we could have expected

the SPD to vote against the war credits. But I think the problem is that what happens is the professionalization, which occurs throughout society, which is essentially, in my opinion, just a new instantiation of the Marxian division of labor, where effectively you have the creation of party structures and party bureaucracies where the existence of party bureaucrats out, they essentially had their own logic where in some sense, the existence of their very jobs depends on the continuation of class exploitation. Yes, it's true.

The people whose job it is, basically, to get the working class ready for the moment of the real moment of crisis to abolish themselves, are would have to be operating out of a desire to abolish their own cells that abolish their livelihoods, which are relatively comfortable about, like, they get to live, they got to live lives where they lived in bourgeois comfort, but got to feel like they were on the right side of history, which is the greatest dream you can imagine. My God, us sitting here. We're living it, baby.

This is, this is, like, if you want to understand the online left of the last, like the last five, six years, it is this terminal crisis of the middle class in America, and, and people wanting to feel like they are helping while not giving up any of the pleasures. And if they're associated with being a, a bourgeois consumer, so it's a lot to ask of people. And in fact, and it's not really possible, like that is why so many Marxists would focus on the need for a continual infusion of, of like energy from the rank and file to keep the socialist movement from ossifying that way.

And the thing that made that happen, the thing that kept the party responsive was really its degree of discomfort, its degree of criminality, the degree to which that they were the subject of oppression and violence from the state, the degree that they were kept from enjoying the full fruits of bourgeois life, even though they weren't workers, which is what happened with the Russian Social Democratic Party. But in, in the German case, you had people who were living as bourgeois without bourgeois neuroses, because they got to think they were working on the side of history, because bourgeois neuroses is, is being addicted to a life that you know is wrong and then having to figure

out how to live with that and that, that, that defines like the cultural production of the middle class for the last 200 years, especially today as approaching another moment of terminal crisis. But then within that embedded, you have this other, this little mini bourgeois that is hypothetically answerable to this movement, but that in practice is making individual decisions without real accountability that are going to be motivated by their, their not even conscious desire to maintain their position within a system rather than to see it abolished.

Right, which begins to suggest that the institutionalization or domestication of radical movements essentially works against them, at least in capitalism, which is perhaps one of the biggest questions that we're facing today, because I don't see, especially in 2021, any possibility of the type of violent revolution that we'll talk about in the next episode that happened in 1918, 1919 Germany, that sort of thing is impossible. So you have the institutionalization and mechanization of a party structure that inevitably works against its very existence, inevitably works against what you're trying to go for, which is a transcendence of capitalism.

And I think this is one of the major problems that, you know, the modern period, the modern period of political parties, the modern period of elections presents to those of us who want to genuinely transcend capitalism, which is how do you channel that sort of righteous working class anger and rage into an institutional form that maintains its revolutionary capacities. It's never happened. So I think this is, this is one of the biggest, you know, problems facing people who genuinely want to transcend capitalism, not just have, you know, a kinder, nicer capitalism with a nicer face type situation.

And I think that World War One is really the sort of the apex moment of that, which is, which is that decision, the SPD's decision to vote for war credits just underlined the very tension of having a working class political party, not that you don't need it. You do need it and that's the problem because there's no, there's no escaping. There's no, there's no moving outside of the beast. There's no, there's no moving outside of the system. And I would say that, uh, that it was the experience of World War One, the actual experience of what it was, not what people thought it was going to be in 1914 when that decision

was made, that, uh, offers the real what if, the real alternative when, when the people of Germany and all of Europe had, had experienced what are like, holy shit, like Jesus Christ. This is what, this is what we get. This is what we get. This is industrial war. We, we are, we are building machines just to kill each other. Right. Very, very efficiently.

Yeah. For, for the benefit of a decrepit, a sclerotic ruling class who has no connection to us whatsoever. And that, but the thing is, is that that realization could only have come through the experience of the war. Right. He did that war. There is no way to avoid that. And honestly, the, the, the actions of the SDP after the war really show you the degree

to which the bourgeoisification of the party had become, uh, a, had just poisoned it and doomed it in many ways because it was, it was, we'll talk about this later, but it was social Democrats who created the, the nucleus of, of Nazism in the form of the Freikor. Like they were the ones who had the idea to put down a rebellion of workers, sailors, and soldiers, the same ones who had taken power in St. Petersburg, uh, and put it down by hire, by collecting the most damaged, uh, violence-addicted, uh, victims of the, uh, Eastern Front and Western Fronts and, and throw them into battle. And the, the, the culture that they created there ended up becoming the culture of the,

of the Nazi party. And we'll, we'll talk about that in the next episode, but I also just wanted to underline a couple of things that, that already started during the war because once the SPD split, uh, the majority SPD allied with the Catholic center party and the liberal progressive party. So you begin to get these formations that are going to defend the status quo and begin to, uh, to pursue a path, not necessarily towards socialism, but to a finer capitalism. And honestly, the fact that after the war, the, the, the center of gravity of the, of the SDP was making those decisions, was seeing the revolutions in the streets, was seeing

the Kiel, uh, mutiny and seeing the Berlin, uh, uh, was marchers and says, let's call, let's get, uh, Ernst Younger in here. Uh, that to me, more than anything proves that there was no other, uh, there was no other historically realistic option than them voting war credits in 1914. If that experience of that war was not enough to, to, to shake from their perch of, of sort of bourgeois self-satisfaction, uh, if they were that, even if anything, even more dedicated to the status quo after that experience, then it's very hard to imagine anything making them, uh, vote otherwise in 1914.

So then why don't we close on this question and, and it's a big one. What did Marx get wrong? And I think in my opinion, and, and I think I'm not new here, basically all this Marxist theory after World War one is essentially addressing this question, but he didn't fully appreciate the other subjective identities that people would be, it would feel a organic connection to the sort of teleology between the lived experience of being a worker and the connections that one draws with other workers by virtue of that lived experience across other, uh, identity groups proved to be incorrect.

So there is a problem in either in his conception of human nature and or his conception of psychology. Uh, I would say, and again, I just want to underline genius. One of the smartest men, uh, of all time, certainly in the last 200 years and basically everything he objectively predicted got right. But there was a subjective lacking there that, that I think is, is, is evident from the beginning, which might be a bit of a controversial claim. Curious what you think. Uh, I don't know if I would even say that he was wrong about it in that, in so much

as he is that he at a certain point, he was sketching out this absolutely accurate diagram of what capitalism was right as a system, as a system. He got it right, but that system is composed of people, right? And, and there, and there is never going to be a, a systematic, uh, analysis of, of the human experience. The experience that has predictive power, because that's where the fucking butterflies come in. Like we make decisions, man makes, you know, man makes his own history, but not, uh, uh,

as he chooses, as Mark said, it's like we are, uh, if only out of our ignorance, we are free to make decisions in our lives, like, because we talk, Marxism talks about, uh, material interests and how that is what motivates people. And then that is true, but we don't know what our material interests are. That is not a thing that exists objectively. We have an idea of what our material or how they're filtered through various things through a million different things that, that give us ideas that are individuated. And while people sort into positions in a society based on their demographics and their

experiences and their relationship to a mode of production, there still are people at crucial points who are going to make decisions that are not determinable and not predictable. And that is why that's what history is. It's the intersection of these machines, these, these determined machines and then the humans within them. And that is why I think that counter history, counterfactual history is so fascinating because if you, if you understand that that is the, the, how history works, then you can always look back at history and find the points where the, where, uh, contingency emerged where the

people in the place are close enough to, uh, consequential decisions, but also, uh, you know, subjective enough that something else could have happened. And so, uh, I'd say that what Mark's in a material sense just didn't process enough was what, uh, imperialism would do. Right. Uh, not so much anything he got wrong about human nature, just stuff that you can't predict about what people who have whatever a human nature is are going to do in a given moment. But the thing that changed the actual equation of European capitalism that he unders as he

understood it was changed by the introduction of this massive, these markets, more importantly, these places where hyper exploitation could go on outside of, of these, the, uh, the metropole outside of these, uh, these, uh, civic concepts, like you could have a situation in, uh, in Germany where, uh, or in France or in England where the worst work, the, the most alienating and still better work is not being done there, right, not being done by Germans or English people. It's being done by subject people who have been racially and geographically in a race from your conception of humanity, right, and, and the benefits of their labor, their surplus

of their labor can then be enjoyed at low cost by workers who now get to view themselves as consumers in a way that they wouldn't have if the grinding immiseration of capitalism was as, uh, was still concentrated in Europe and sustained in Europe the way that Marx imagined it. And it create a new dominant, new relationships of domination and exploitation between the metropole and the colony that I think is right, that I think makes it over determined. And I think one of the most interesting things that we're going to be able to do in this, in this, uh, show is essentially identify which moments were over determined and which

moments were actually plastic, according to what the relationship essentially between structure and agent and the restricted agency of people. Like you said, as Mark said, living in a world, but not entirely of their own making. And this is what we'll explore and next time we'll come back and we'll check out the German revolutions of 1819, when certain different choices could have been made and the world could have been a totally different place, absolutely.