Tillman Fichter describes the effect this way in the 1980 discussion: "Marcuse ist wirklich damals aufgetreten als einer der letzten Zeugen einer Revolte, die in den 30er Jahren gescheitert war und als einer der letzten, die überlebt hatten und auch versucht hatten, unter ganz schwieriger Bedingungen politisch weiterzuarbeiten." ("Marcuse appeared at that time as one of the last witnesses of a revolt that failed in the 1930s and as one of the last who had survived and also attempted, under very difficult political conditions, to keep on working.") By which presumably he meant that Marcuse kept on working on that defeated revolt.
Fichter's comment refers to conditions and understandings that were present in 1967 that wouldn't be so self-evident to people today, particularly outside of Europe. Marcuse's audience for both speeches were primarily students who were politically active in what we could broadly call the German socialist tradition. Some number of them, probably most, viewed themselves as Marxists. Some West German Marxists, including some members of the leading student organization, the SDS (Sozialischtischer Deutscher Studentenbund, which only coincidentally shared the initials of a militant student group in the United States), were sympathetic to the Soviet-line Communism that was in power in East Germany. Most were not. Rudi Dutschke, the most famous of the student leaders in Germany, and his fellow SDS militant Bernd Rabehl, had come from East Germany (the DDR from its German initials) and considered themselves Marxists and revolutionaries but rejected the DDR model.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of today - currently the junior partner in Germany's ruling coalition government - was founded in the 19th century as the workers' party. Karl Marx himself was part of the Party. The SPD emerged in 1875 from the fusion of the Allgemeinen deutschen Arbeiterverein founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863 and the Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands founded by August Bebel und Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869. The Gotha Party Congress of 1875 formally established the union.
The SPD specifically considered itself a revolutionary Party but envisioned the revolution as one that could be achieved through democratic means. That meant in 1875 and for decades to come, fighting for their right to participate openly in parliamentary politics, expanding suffrage for workers and establishing the Parliament as the supreme governmental authority to replace the Imperial system, in which the Parliament was not entirely powerless, but close. They worked for union rights and other reforms to improve conditions for workers, but also had as their goal the replacement of capitalism by socialism, which meant for them public ownership of the major industrial and financial institutions. In terms unfamiliar in American politics, they considered themselves a class party of the working class, not a "popular" party appealing to all classes.
The First World War (1914-1918) split the SPD between the majority faction that supported the Kaiser's war and a minority faction that held that the SPD should oppose the war as one that was fundamentally an imperialist war, waged on behalf of competing nations' capitalist ruling classes against the interests of the workers and in pursuit of competition over colonies in what we now called the underdeveloped world. The war was a massive catastrophe for those who initiated it, resulting in the end of five great empires: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman Empires. A little more restraint after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand strongly recommends itself in retrospect.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 put the Russian Communist Party into the role of the leading socialist party in the world, a status previously held by the German SPD. The Western European social-democratic parties split in the coming months into Communist factions and parties that supported the Russian model of revolution and those who favored a road to socialism through parliamentary democracy. That split acquired extreme bitterness in Germany. In the 1918 democratic revolution, the Kaiser abdicated and turned power over peacefully to the SPD, headed by Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann.
The popular pressure for this change came in particular from the formation of self-governing workers' councils, soldiers' council and sailors' councils, a form of workers protest and opposition that had first emerged in the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. ("Soviets" were workers councils.) Ebert and Scheidemann initially cooperated with the councils. But they did not try to pursue the option of governing on the basis of the councils, which would have meant replacing the existing partliamentary institutions.
But in January 1919, another mass wave of workers protest broke out which has gone down in history as the Spartakusaufstand, the Spartacus uprising, from the name of one of the left socialist groups that had merged into the new German Communist Party (KPD) that had formed at the turn of the year 1918-19. Official Communist history viewed this event as a revolt led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, son of Wilhelm Liebknecht. That's a shaky picture of the event at best. But what is not in dispute is that the SPD government crushed the revolt by force. And it is also not in doubt the Social Democratic Minister of the Army, Gustav Noske, used the Freikorps in doing so; the Freikorps were rightwing militias organized by reactionary officers and politicians after the war. Even in the world of hard-nosed politics, the SPD-Freikorps alliance was a genuinely unholy one.
The political repercussions were long-lasting. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the SPD and the KPD both enjoyed substantial electoral strength among workers. But they were never able to cooperate with each other politically to preserve Weimar democracy. There were other factors involved in that result. But the bloody suppression of the 1919 workers' uprising/protest by the SPD government was certainly a major one.
The SPD during Weimar officially still stood for a program of ending capitalism and having state ownership of industry and finance. But even during the war, the party under the more conservative leadership of those like Ebert and Scheidemann became known as "the Kaiser's social democrats", an indication of a definite ebb of revolutionary enthusiasm. And realistically, the SPD had in practice accepted the basic structure of the capitalist economy in the 1920.
During the Third Reich, both the KPD and the SPD were suppressed and both to some extent actively supported the anti-Hitler international coalition. (This is apparently that to which Tillman Fichter refers in speaking of the failure of the the "revolt" in the 1930s.) After the Second World War, the Soviets in their occupation zone, which was later to become East Germany, forced a merger of the SPD and KPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which became in reality the East German Communist Party. The Western SPD under the leadership of the remarkable Kurt Schumacher (1895-1952) insisted on maintaining the SPD as an independent party in the West and clearly rejected the Soviet-style Communist model in East Germany. Meeting at Bad Gotesburg in November 1959, the SPD adopted the Godesburg Program which formally recognized what had largely been the case for decades, that the SPD accepted the basic structure of the capitalist economy, their commitment to Western-style parliamentary democracy, and embraced the NATO alliance. They also formally gave up their self-understanding as a "workers party" and defined themselves as a "popular party".
And this is the immediate background for the politics of the 1960s German student movement. The Godesburg Program was generally understood as the abandonment of any Marxist worldview, even a reformist variety. The SDS at that time was the student group of the SPD. But its leadership rejected the changes of the Godesburg Program and the SDS was expelled from the SPD, after which the SDS continued as an independent organization. The Godesburg Program set the stage for the first Grand Coalition government, which ruled Germany from 1966 to 1969. This was a government headed by the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) with the SPD as a junior partner. At the time, those were the two major parties and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was the only other significant parliamentary party. So the CDU-SPD government had a two-thirds majority, meaning they could amend the Constitution with a party-line vote.
For the SPD, the Grand Coalition experience allowed them to increase their credibility with voters to the point that in 1969 they could form a government with the FDP, headed by Willy Brandt as Chancellor. But during the Grand Coalition, it seemed to many activists that the country was dangerously lacking in a real opposition. One effect was an increase in votes for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). One of the worries on the part of many unions and student groups and activists was an Emergency Law to define procedures for setting aside the German Consitition in a severe national emergency. Not surprisingly, for many this sounded awfully similar to the Emergency Law of 1933 that allowed Hitler to set aside the Weimar Constitution permanently without ever formally abolishing it.
This situation dramatized Herbert Marcuse's notion that Western capitalist democracies had largely become societies without opposition. The student movement came to understand itself as an extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), a concept that applied to the broader movement rather than to any particular organization. And the hardline responses of the Berlin police and the SPD-controlled city government to protests, which came to a head with the events surrounding the killing of Benno Ohnesorg and the aftermath. It's not surprising that Berlin activists would have related the conduct of the Berlin SPD to the approach taken by Ebert's SPD government in crushing the workers' movement in 1919.
The two speeches of Marcuse's preserved in this volume are "Das Ende der Utopie" and "Das Problem der Gewalt in der Opposition". English translations of both appear in a collection rather unimaginatively titled Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (1970), translated by Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry Weber, along with three other essays on Freudian psychoanalysis. The discussions after those lectures is included in Shapiro's translation in somewhat abbreviated form.
Marcuse, as Ficther indicated, was for the leftist students in Berlin a living link to those long-ago events of 1918-19 and the Weimar Republic, and one who overtly sympathized with their activism. In this comment, Marcuse reflects some of the resentment that lingered from those days (Shapiro/Weber translation):
Q[uestion from Wolfgang Lefèvre of SDS]. On the definition of revisionism mentioned in the previous question: revisionists are those who think they can change something in this society within the established institutions, while a large number of students thinks it is necessary to form an anti-institutional and extra-parliamentary opposition.The "until nothing left was left in them" is a bit of cutsiness on the translators' part, but the English word play captures the meaning well. Marcuse's German wording was "bis von der Linken nichts mehr übriggeblieben ist." Which translates more literally as "until nothing more remained of the leftists."
M[arcuse]. It is necessary to see important differences and make significant distinctions. Let me say something personal. If you mean by revisionism the German Social-Democratic Party, I can only say to you that from the time of my own political education, that is since 1919, I have opposed this party. In 1917 to 1918 I was a member of the Social-Democratic Party, I resigned from it after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht [by the Freikorps], and from then on I have criticized this party's politics. Not because it believed that it could work within the framework of the established order - for we all do this, we all make use of even the most minute possibilities in order to transform the established order from inside it - that is not why I fought the S.P.D. The reason was rather that it worked in alliance with reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces.
Since 1918 I have always been hearing of left forces within the Social-Democratic Party, and I have continually seen these left forces move more and more to the right until nothing left was left in them. You see that I am at least not very convinced by this idea of some kind of radical work within the party. [my emphasis]
Marcuse had been part of one of the soldiers' councils (Soldatenrat) in 1917, so he had direct experience in his youth in the revolutionary events of that time. Marcuse studied philosophy in the 1920s and worked for a publisher. In 1933, he joined the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung, whose work and tradition is known as the Frankfurt School. Marcuse was not only a leftist but Jewish, so he emigrated in 1933 and in 1934 came to the United States and taught at Colombia. During the Second World War, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) doing analyses of Germany on behalf of the war effort, which for the German students of 1967 enhanced his "anti-fascist" reputation. After the war, he taught at Columbia and at Brandeis, moving to the University of California at San Diego, where he taught from 1965-69.
Continued in Part 2
Tags: critical theory, herbert marcuse
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