“Knowledge is Power—Power is Knowledge”

The German Social Democrats staked a great deal on the elections to the Reichstag in 1907. They were met with a resounding defeat and the loss of almost half their seats.¹ In the aftermath, the different wings of the Party drew drastically different conclusions. The inability to compete with the newly invigorated bourgeois parties prompted the conservative wing to advocate revising Social Democratic Party (SPD) positions on colonialism and the military in order to appeal to the increasingly nationalist center of the electorate. The response by the left wing of the Party was to point to the need for workers to rely on themselves, not other classes or representatives, in a situation of sharpening class struggle. This argument was typified by Heinrich Schulz, who in an article for Die Neue Zeit, stressed that above all, “the social democratic clubs must approach the theoretical schooling of their members in a much more rigorous fashion.”² The course was set for a renewed collision between the two wings of the Party, this time around the role of theory and education in the socialist movement. At stake in the ensuing debates on political education were not only much deeper strategic questions, but the soul of the SPD: What kind of party was being built? What were its aims? Who would be the agents of socialist politics, the working masses or the experts?

By the time of the 1908 SPD Congress eight months later, the conservative wing had mostly taken over the Party apparatus. Their strength was reflected in their bold attacks on the left wing, in particular on the Party school, which by then had been operating for less than two years. On the floor of the Nuremberg convention hall, a fierce debate broke out on the nature and function of the Party school, pitting the conservatives against the radicals, who defended Marxist theory as a “compass” for the practical work of the SPD.³ Prior to the Party Congress, ex-theologian Max Maurenbrecher had called for the effective dissolution of the Party school and a reorientation in the SPD’s educational efforts. Kurt Eisner spoke early in the discussion, echoing the call to focus on the hard facts of life and arguing that theory was useless, even harmful to the working class’s capacity to take action.⁴

A fierce debate broke out on the nature and function of the Party school, pitting the conservatives against the radicals.

It was then that the notorious orator and author of The Mass Strike approached the podium. To an unusually sympathetic audience, Rosa Luxemburg caustically admonished those who refused to learn from historical experience. “The materialist concept of history,” she thundered, “the theory of Marx and Engels, which lit the path of the Russian proletariat in its great deeds at the beginning of the century, is supposed [by the conservatives] to kill the power to come to conclusions and to take action!”⁵ Workers already knew the hard facts, she pointed out, but were demanding a theoretical framework to systematize them and forge an ideological weapon against the class enemy.

After the raucous applause subsided, Luxemburg’s students and allies elaborated her line of argument. Wilhelm Pieck attacked the revisionists in no uncertain terms. By calling for the Party school to teach mere facts free of all context, he accused, “they want the masses without a will of their own to manipulate, a masses incapable of clarifying the relation and meaning of historical facts.”⁶ Theory should not belong only to professors, but was tied to historical action, as the radical trade unionist Heinrich Brandler argued: “What we lack and what the party school is designed to teach us is the methodological thinking which allows us to grasp the laws of capitalist production and all historical occurrences, in order to organize our practice accordingly.”⁷ At stake in the debate on the Party school was not merely the educational institution itself but theory in general and who was given access to it.⁸ The SPD left wing argued for a broad-based education in historical materialism, designed to equip the ranks of the Party to act independently, to make their own decisions about their future.

Political education was a core component of the larger strategy of worker self-activity as the path to revolution. Speaking for the Central Education Commission to the Party Congress, Heinrich Schulz drew out the strategic issues from the debate. The proletariat prevents itself from falling under the bourgeois leash “only insofar as it does not allow the cultivation of theory to be or become a monopoly of the leaders, insofar as it continues as before to develop the closest possible connection between theory and practice.”⁹ A prerequisite for the self-activity of the workers, for Schulz, was their possession of revolutionary theory on the broadest scale. Indeed, the left within the Party would become the driving force behind the expansion and deepening of the SPD’s educational efforts before the war.

Workers Education and the Origins of Social Democracy

Long before the 1908 Congress, German social democracy had sprung from efforts in workers education. Fledgling labor unions and workers educational associations in the 1850s and ’60s already saw the advantages of creating book collections and conducting courses for workers.¹⁰ In February 1872, while European socialists regrouped in the aftermath of the Paris Commune’s bloody suppression and the Franco–Prussian war, workers of two such associations came together to hear a speech by Marx’s close friend Wilhelm Liebknecht.

Under the title “Knowledge is Power—Power is Knowledge,” Liebknecht took on a slogan that had been deployed by liberal groups since the 1860s against the political strivings of the workers movement. All workers have a thirst for knowledge, Liebknecht contended, and in Bismarck’s new Germany it was only natural that the much-lauded German state school system would appear to provide a solution. But such state education must be seen in its social context, he explained: “The state as it is (i.e., a class state) makes schools into a tool of class domination.”¹¹ The fruits of culture, learning, and education would remain forbidden to the people as long as the contemporary state and society continued to exist.¹² If workers were to achieve Bildung in all its senses as education, culture, and cultivation into full human beings, they must fight for it.

The social democratic movement was the vehicle of that struggle. According to Liebknecht, “Social Democracy is in the highest sense the party of education.¹³ At a time when Marx’s First International was collapsing, Liebknecht reasserted the social character of any education and the tasks required in order to achieve it:

Between us and our goal stand state and society. We must march beyond them. If we give up the struggle, the political struggle, we give up education and knowledge. “Through education to freedom.” That is the motto of friends we don’t need. To them we reply: “Through freedom to education!” Only in a free people’s state can the people be educated. Only when the people win political power will the gates of knowledge be open to them.¹⁴

At the crescendo of his speech, Liebknecht directly inverted the slogan with which he began, leaving no room for doubt as to his meaning: “For our enemies, knowledge is power, for us power is knowledge! Without power there is no knowledge!”¹⁵ From its inception, the organized social democratic workers movement was thus animated by the relation between education and the class struggle for power, with the primacy always placed upon the latter. In the subsequent history of the movement, this duality would occupy a central role through various incarnations and permutations: the relation between theory and practice, intellectuals and workers, class-consciousness and class struggle.

Education and Self-Emancipation

For socialists and communists of the early twentieth century, the distinctive principle of socialist politics was that put forward in the very first clause of the 1864 “General Rules” of the First International: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”¹⁶ Hal Draper has traced how Marx and Engels first came to this concept and then attempted to put it into practice. “The principle,” Draper notes, “was so deceptively simple that naturally academic historians of socialism never got the point till years afterwards.”¹⁷ It was this insistence on self-reliance (Selbstständigkeit) and on self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) which sustained Marxist-inspired socialism in its first several decades and allowed it to repel the various political attempts to substitute for the working class’s own vision and control, whether state-aid schemes or anarchist coup conspiracies.

Self-emancipation was the guiding light for the early socialists, but it presented a challenge for the role of theory and education. According to the principle, workers would not create socialism as foot soldiers carrying out the preconceived theory of a brilliant intellectual. Workers themselves were to be the generative constructors of the new socialist society. What then, is the role of theory in a socialist movement? In the eyes of the Marxists, workers who were socialized within a thoroughly capitalist society were already beholden to a thinking that was not their own.

Instead of coherent frameworks, workers’ worldviews comprised all manner of incoherent ideas about their place in society—ideology pieced together from various sources. For socialist educators, the challenge was to assist workers in wresting themselves from the influence of capitalist “common sense” and finally begin to rely on themselves in their struggle for a new society. Marxist theory and socialist education needed to become a tool in the hands of an active and creative proletariat, who could in turn only make use of and expand the theory if they could think for themselves.

To understand the living practice of political education during this period, we need to look beyond the speeches and writings of prominent socialists to the manner in which ideas were actually spread. Socialist—and later communist—political education took place largely through the vehicles of political parties, their policies, newspapers, lectures, party schools, and local libraries.

Clara Zetkin and Political Education in the SPD

From its inception into the twentieth century, the educational efforts of the German SPD were characterized by a tension between socialist theory and the demands posed by the Party’s routine work. As the 1908 Party Congress illustrated plainly, this tension manifested politically in the debates between the radical left within the SPD (Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and others) and the self-described “revisionists,” such as Eduard Bernstein. While those on the left insisted on upholding a revolutionary principle of worker self-activity and mass action, their challengers saw the expansion of capitalism as heralding the peaceful transition to socialism, as long as the Party organization and routines could proceed uninterrupted.¹⁸ Especially for radicals, practical questions of strategy were increasingly understood through the lens of Marxist theoretical orthodoxy vs. theoretical revisionism.

Already in 1904, an article by Otto Rühle in the SPD’s theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, had renewed a discussion about the need for systematic education within the Party. The idea for a school in Berlin emerged partially from these discussions, with the aim of training younger Party members in socialist theory, economics, history, and the humanities.¹⁹ The Russian Revolution of 1905 had a dramatic impact on SPD members’ valuation of theoretical education within the Party. For Luxemburg and the Party left, the mass strikes showed in concrete form an alternative mode of revolutionary politics—not as the purview of experts or parliamentarians but as a mass phenomenon flowing from the self-activity of the ranks of workers.

At and after the Jena Party Congress in 1905, worker education initiatives flourished, and the debates on the mass strike that followed were full of appeals to cultivate full personalities among Party members, capable of taking on the whole complex of political problems now posed.²⁰ These discussions prompted leading Party educator Heinrich Schulz to outline plans for a permanent school with a rigorous curriculum. By 1906, the SPD had set up a Central Education Commission with political representation from both the right and left, under the leadership of Schulz.

The SPD inaugurated its systematic educational work with a founding document, “Guiding Principles on Social Democracy and Public Education,” authored jointly by Schulz and Zetkin. Presented to the Mannheim Party Congress in 1906 for discussion, the document took up social democracy’s positions on Germany’s education system and the role of women, parents, and children. As Schulz was to write retrospectively, however, the strongest differences in opinion revolved almost exclusively around cadre education within the SPD, not the Party’s position on schools.²¹

The most controversial claim of “Guiding Principles,” rooting socialist education in a “proletarian worldview,” can be attributed to Zetkin.²² Not only is it perhaps one of the earliest theoretical contributions on proletarian ideology or class consciousness in the history of the German social democratic movement, it also clearly establishes political education as part of a broader strategy of worker self-reliance.²³ The paragraph in question reads as follows:

The proletariat is the bearer of a self-contained worldview. That worldview is indeed the consistent extension and further development of the highest scientific and artistic ideals of our epoch, but it stands in sharp opposition to the bourgeois worldview. Because of that, it is also opposed to the bourgeois science and art of our epoch, which possess a distinct class character. In light of its historic mission, therefore, the proletariat cannot simply take over the bourgeois intellectual culture but must rather reassess it in accordance with its own worldview. These facts explain the relative value of bourgeois efforts—well-meaning and praiseworthy in themselves—toward popular education in the sciences and arts. Social democracy can thus have nothing to do with such efforts; although in light of the dire need for education by the broadest masses, we are sympathetic to them, insofar as they are not consciously debased into means of clouding the proletariat’s class consciousness and sapping the energy of its class struggle.

Far from aiming to provide workers with equal access to bourgeois art, culture, and education, Zetkin here outlines a sharp delineation between class ideologies and the necessity for class struggle on the ideological terrain. The reality of this battle of ideas meant that the Social Democratic Party must arm its members with theory as well:

There is a growing need for social democracy itself to take up the task of providing for the all-sided continuing education of its members. The first priority in this regard is theoretical schooling through systematic introduction to the principles of scientific socialism. Several means for this are suitable: the founding or expansion of workers’ education schools, hosting systematically structured lecture courses, hosting reading and discussion evenings…the treatment of theoretical questions in the daily press.²⁴

While Schulz was at least sympathetic to these remarks at the time of their formulation, over the following eight years he shifted toward more traditional educational conceptions under the influence of several SPD revisionists.²⁵ Although the dispute would foreshadow future differences over the methods of workers education, for now they did not stop the Central Education Commission from embarking on an ambitious plan for systematic political education in the SPD.

Marxist theory and workers movement history was disseminated through various mediums: from reading groups to newspapers to the Berlin Party school.

In the early years of social democracy, Marxist theory and workers movement history was disseminated through various mediums: workers libraries and reading groups, travelling lectures and mass meetings, reviews and summaries in social democratic and union newspapers, and through the Berlin Party school.²⁶ The SPD’s “alternative culture” provided a vehicle and a context that gave stakes to political education.

Paul Frölich describes spending evening after evening at the turn of the century at the Leipzig Workers’ Association, which was outwardly an educational institution, but in reality hosted “vigorous battles over party theory and tactics.”²⁷ Workers libraries proliferated in the first decade of the twentieth century, giving rise to a professional journal (Der Bibliothekar) and a staff of trained socialist librarians.²⁸ Against the opposition of some conservatives within the SPD, regular reading groups for small numbers of women were set up with the intention of training women unionists, activists, and organizers.²⁹ Such reading groups read and discussed political books and pamphlets, although Marxist theory in the early years did not generally reach workers through the works of Marx himself, to which they had little access at first.³⁰ By far the most influential book of theory within the German social democratic movement was August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism.³¹

Still, the most effective disseminator of socialist theory was word-of-mouth conversation at the pubs and in the many spheres of the social democratic lifeworld. In that context, trained propagandists proved valuable sources of theoretical and historical knowledge which could then filter through the dense web of Party and movement life.³² Although the political education work of the SPD involved extensive nationwide plans (more on those below), the major achievement was the establishment of the central Party school.

The Party School

The crowning gem of the SPD’s educational work, the Party school opened its doors in Berlin on November 15, 1906. In contrast to travelling lectures and local meetings, the education here was more concentrated, focusing on intensive engagement with a smaller number of students over winter courses lasting six months. Selected from the entire SPD with strict regional representation, students during the school’s first five years were primarily Party functionaries: journalists, newspaper workers, officials in various local parliaments or trade unions, or Party workers in SPD bookshops or cooperatives.³³ The average age of those participating was about thirty, and each cohort and their families were financially supported by the Party to take part in the intensive courses. Teachers such as Schulz, Franz Mehring, and Luxemburg taught courses on political economy, historical materialism, and socialist history, alongside more mainstream topics such as rhetoric, journalism, local politics, and law.

As time went on and the stakes of Party debates rose dramatically, the Party school came to function as a bastion of the SPD’s Marxist left.³⁴ It would be described in police reports as “an academy for agitators inspired by the most rigid Marxism.”³⁵ Trade union leaders within the Party pushed a practical and explicitly apolitical conception of workers education, and increasingly distrusted the radical “war academy” in Berlin.³⁶

Many of the students who went through the Party school experience would go on to become the backbone of the Communist movement during and after the war. Heinrich Brandler, Jacob Walcher, Ernst Meyer, Rosi Frölich (formerly Wolfstein), Hermann Duncker, Wilhelm Koenen, Hermann Remmele, and other left-wingers forged lifelong bonds and convictions during their time at the school. For all its impact, the number of students who passed through the full course load remained relatively small. Based on SPD Congress reports, historian Nicholas Jacobs estimates only about thirty students per year, or between two hundred and two hundred and forty total, attended between 1906 and 1914.³⁷

In part, the small size of the cohorts was intentional. As Vernon Lidtke notes, the “schools were not set up to convert new disciples, but to train those already devoted fully to the labor movement,” while the faculty emphasized “studies on a comparatively advanced level of theory.”³⁸ For all their insistence on the necessity of theory for the masses of SPD members, the radicals were generally not interested in defending a stale theoretical orthodoxy. Writing in Die Gleichheit in 1911, Zetkin criticized the educational work of the SPD among women for focusing only on the immediate questions of the day, to the neglect of theory. In reference to the underlying stakes of the 1908 debate, she wrote that this approach was useful for training reasonable reformists but not revolutionary fighters.

On the other hand, an education in Marxist theory had a reputation for its difficulty and disconnect from practical life. Zetkin refused the dichotomy: “We are of the heretical opinion that theory in and of itself does not have to be grey, boring, incomprehensible, etc., but it certainly can be made that way. All of the supposed horrors of theory can be avoided with some pedagogical talent.”³⁹ Pedagogy, including on an individual level, was integral to the theoretical efforts of the Party’s left.

Proletarian Pedagogy

Each teacher at the central Party school had their own pedagogical methods, but Luxemburg’s were most consistent with the broader arguments made by the left tendency about the appropriate role of theory in the work of the Party. Luxemburg herself emphasized the paramount significance of deep theoretical work for the school to be successful, insisting on ample time for self-study and review. Without the possibility for thorough consideration of relevant materials, she wrote in a letter to Wilhelm Dittmann in May 1911, “the entire course is utterly worthless and futile.”

Her characterization of the contrasting methods exemplified in the trade union school give some indication of why this was not a secondary question:

It is utterly incomprehensible to me how practical people can just throw their money and their time out the window like that. First of all, every course there [in the trade union school–S. L.] lasts six weeks (while we can hardly instill much that is sound in six months!). Then they have 60–70 students sit together, so that there is no question whatsoever of a thorough treatment of the material through posing questions and multifaceted debate. Moreover, every day five subjects are taught back-to-back by five separate teachers, all of them but one for only an hour. The subjects are drilled in one after another so that the students can barely come to their senses. The course is designed to take up the whole morning and the whole afternoon—from nine to six in the evening. Where is the time for the students to learn something for themselves, to read, to think over what they have heard and intellectually digest it?⁴⁰

The pedagogical imperative toward self-reliant and independent thinking, even for those who disagreed with her notorious tactical interventions in Party debates at this time, is characteristic of the faith the Marxist left placed in a creative self-activity, rather than dogma. The impulse was felt broadly at the Party school, as one student testified in reference to the shared mission of the teachers there: “From what I could see, all of the teachers were united in their striving to develop self-reliant thinking in the students.”⁴¹

Luxemburg emphasized the paramount significance of deep theoretical work, insisting on ample time for self-study and review.

Luxemburg elaborated her pedagogical guideposts of Marxist education in an article for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, in which she emphasized the active exchange of ideas as the sole method capable of awakening attention and intellectual investment. Foreshadowing the arguments of Paolo Freire, she underlined the political stakes of her pedagogy: “This teaching method is all the more advisable because an educational institute for proletarian revolutionaries first and foremost cannot consider its main goal to be mechanically hammering in a sum of positive knowledge, but rather training for systematic and self-reliant thought.”⁴²

Jacob Walcher, who attended the school as a 23-year-old from October 1910 to March 1911, provides an illustration of how that rhetoric became reality:

The best teacher was Rosa Luxemburg. She was the sovereign master of her material. Her method was to provoke those people who were used to relying on certain formulas and theses, inducing them to think for themselves. Even when an answer was essentially correct, she would raise objections to it so that the students were compelled to defend their opinions.…She was extremely talented as a pedagogue.⁴³

The pedagogical understanding of the Party left was consistent with their political emphasis on worker self-activity. Accordingly, the students did not attend the school to be given the revealed wisdom of its teachers, but only to establish a foundation. Further intellectual development could only be achieved through practice.

Against Eisner’s harsh judgments of the deficiencies of the recent graduates at the 1908 Congress, Zetkin in particular argued that students returning to their districts were not complete and finished products, but would continue to learn through their activity: “The proletariat can only become something through work, through practice, in accordance with the pedagogical principle that one must learn through teaching [daß lehrend gelernt werden muß].”⁴⁴ Graduates of the school should be treated according to the Goethean dictum, “so laßt mich scheinen, bis ich werde” (“let me appear so until I become it”), and grow into their roles.

Political Education Beyond the Party School

Graduates of the Party school would indeed go on to play key roles in the broader educational efforts of the SPD. The system of travelling teachers built up under the Central Education Commission was responsible for ongoing educational events throughout the districts, and teachers’ services were demanded on an ever-increasing scale. The content and integration of these courses was the subject of some investigation and study in the SPD at the time.

Under Schulz’s leadership, the SPD Central Education Commission designed curricula for traveling courses and local educational events, as well as provided suggestions for local library holdings. Local groups were given material assistance in putting on their artistic and educational events. In 1913, the Education Commission established a bulletin to facilitate the consolidation of interdistrict work by coordinating reports from regional education committees. Further cooperation was cemented through two national conferences, bringing regional educational committees together in 1913 and 1914.⁴⁵

The content actually being taught and discussed through the SPD’s educational apparatus indicates a departure from the Party school’s theory-heavy curriculum. According to a 1907 Central Education Commission survey on the hitherto conducted educational work of the Party and unions, courses in local branches were dominated by the themes “Socialism” (155 educational events), “trade unions” (146 events) and “natural sciences” (129 events). Further frequent topics included general history, national economy, legal and technical skills, literature, and hygiene.⁴⁶

Although Schulz identified study of scientific socialism and the trade unions as the two “most important parts of proletarian education,” organized educational work clearly reflected different priorities as time went on. Of the 1,330 courses offered between April 1909 and March 1913, those on “Socialism” and “the trade union movement” combined comprised only 120, or 11 percent, and reached just 12,506 participants of a total 165,530 for all courses. In contrast, the most prevalent and far-reaching courses were far and away those on natural sciences, with 41,834 participants, while the next most popular course on the SPD program reached less than half as many students at 20,625.⁴⁷ The core of the curriculum was rounded out by the main courses on general history and national economy. When one adds to these the plethora of offerings on elementary subjects, legal and technical matters, and various artistic and cultural evenings, SPD education can be considered strongly rooted in the general workers educational clubs and various semi-political Vereinethat made up the budding social democratic lifeworld in the nineteenth century.⁴⁸

The Centrality of Self-Activity

The 1905 Russian Revolution inspired a flowering of initiative and enthusiasm among German social democrats, but as the surge ebbed, the right wing of the SPD began consolidating control and containing radicalism within the Party. Because questions of political education were so closely tied to deeper questions of socialist principle, debates on education quickly replicated themselves in other vital areas of Party work. Nowhere was this more evident than in the social democratic youth movement.

The youth movement had sprung up quite recently in the political climate surrounding 1905. It operated as a further bastion of revolutionary politics in the Party by setting out to “recreate a sense of unity from below with Marxian theoretical knowledge as the fluxing substance.”⁴⁹ The strong antimilitarism of the youth organizations in particular was a threat to the centrist course that Party conservatives preferred to steer after the electoral defeat of 1907.

By 1908, the SPD executive in conjunction with the free trade union leadership insisted on the complete subordination of the SPD youth organization to the Party.⁵⁰ The conservative leadership viewed young workers as in need of an apprenticeship before entering into the fullness of membership. Against them, the left wing came out strongly in favor of youth organizational independence. After a series of smaller meetings and pre-arranged deals, the debate emerged in full force around the SPD’s 1908 Nuremberg Congress. Here, two years after she helped craft the Party’s approach to schools and education in general, Zetkin argued that “The socialist youth movement is part and parcel of any practical proletarian self-reliance.”

The left wing stressed the fundamental function that mass theoretical training had in the achievement of social democratic goals.

She went on to draw the parallels with working-class women:

From the essence of the proletarian liberation movement, we understand that the youth has to be trained up in the spirit of socialism. To significant degree, however, this task can only be accomplished through the work of the youths themselves. The proletariat…which is deeply instilled with the conviction of the equality of the sexes, calls women to work together among its ranks so that they develop through learning and working into self-reliant individuals and co-bearers of the movement. They will prove their equality through their activity and themselves fight for their liberation.⁵¹

For Zetkin, the path of “self-education” for both the youth movement and the women’s movement was derived directly from Marx’s principle of self-activity. “That is why we must afford the socialist youth movement the greatest room for initiative, for activity of the youths themselves.…This accords with the principle of self-activity—vital to socialism—that seeks the emancipation of the working class by the working class itself and is completely oriented toward awakening the will for activity of one’s own.”⁵² By promoting the “greatest room” for the autonomous development of the youth movement, rather than attempting to ensure they were schooled exclusively in the classical theories of the radicals, revolutionaries in the SPD demonstrated a far different relation to “theory” than accounts of “orthodoxy” would imply.

The Interruption and Legacy of SPD Educational Work

For the revolutionaries behind the SPD’s educational efforts, political education was a necessary component of true working-class self-activity, the only road to socialism. The Party’s left rejected the liberal reformers’ approach of intensive educational work for its own sake. But they also rejected a political educational framework geared toward a practice consisting of backroom negotiations among Reichstag deputies or union officials. Instead, the SPD left wing stressed the fundamental function that mass theoretical training had in the achievement of social democratic goals: to better equip workers as sovereign and perspicacious thinkers and actors in the class struggle. Within this framework, theoretical education aimed to help bring about a resolute party of active members taking initiative in their own workplaces and local communities—a socialism implemented from below.

These efforts were counteracted, however, by prewar political and organizational trends within the SPD. Although the Party school may have awakened independent thinking and engaged some members in extensive theoretical work, its influence over the political practice of the Party as a whole was limited. Marxist theory was formally upheld at Party congress after Party congress, while the routine work of parliament and trade union negotiations went on unconcerned with how these were supposed to connect to the theory of working-class emancipation.

But Marxist theory did not simply remain relegated to the radical silo of the Party school. If one “considers the broader diffusion of Marxist ideas through newspapers, pamphlets, and oral communication,” Andrew Bonnell concludes in his recently revised inquiry into the Marx reception among social democratic workers. “There is evidence of a much wider reception of Marxism than a more purist approach allows for.”⁵³ The very fact that the SPD leadership felt compelled to couch their decisions and course of action repeatedly in Marxist terms speaks to the influence of Marxist theory within the Party.

Certainly, there was a strong enough theoretical and practical training among wide swathes of rank-and-file workers and youth to resist the Party executive and regroup after the turn to war in 1914. It is no coincidence that during the war, the fractious radical left still committed to the principle of working-class self-activity cohered around groups of teachers, graduates of the Party school, and pedagogical journals, such as Lichtstrahlen. After the November Revolution broke out in 1918, it took two years before the Communist Party of Germany, initially a propagandist group, rebuilt its mass presence and began implementing an expansive new educational program of “struggle education” as a crucial element of its innovative political strategy, the united front.

From the outset, political education was essential to the project of building mass workers parties, creatively led by their rank-and-file. Armed with the theory and history of the global class struggle, workers and the oppressed were better positioned to think and fight for themselves. A rigorous political education, rooted in wide-ranging social struggles for dignity, remains a vital component of any radical and truly democratic movement today. ×

The left wing stressed the fundamental function that mass theoretical training had in the achievement of social democratic goals.

Notes & References

Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 60-61.
Heinrich Schulz, “An die Arbeit,” in Neue Zeit 25, no. 1 (1906/07): 744-5. See Karl Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung: Die Bedeutung des Mannheimer Parteitags der SPD im Jahre 1906 für die Entwicklung der Bildungspolitik und Pädagogik der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1975), 171.
Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehalten zu Nürnberg vom 13. bis 19. September 1908 (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1908), 217–42.
Although Eisner spoke against the Left in 1908, he went onto be the leader of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in the German revolution of 1918–19.
Rosa Luxemburg, “The Party School: Speech to the Nuremburg Congress of the German Social Democratic Party” (1908; repr., Rosa Luxemburg Archive, 2004), marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1908/09/14.htm.
Protokoll… 1908, 235.
Protokoll… 1908, 241.
As J. P. Nettl points out, “the attack on the party school was really an attack on theory in general, based on the assumption that the masses had to be ‘taught things’, those things which they in fact learnt in the process of developing their political consciousness, while working and struggling. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg I (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966), 394.
Protokoll… 1908, 221.
This was a tradition that only ramped up in the 1890s when the antisocialist law expired. See Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Knowledge is Power—Power is Knowledge” in Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy, ed. William Pelz (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 19.
Liebknecht, “Knowledge is Power,” 34.
Liebknecht, “Knowledge is Power,” 36.
Liebknecht, “Knowledge is Power,” 37–38.
Liebknecht, “Knowledge is Power,” 38.
The International Workingmen’s Association, “General Rules” (1864; repr., Marxist Internet Archive, n.d.) marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/rules.htm. The classic philosophic version of this principle is laid down already in Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances, and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” trans. W. Lough (1845; repr. Marx/Engels Works Archive, 2002), marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.
Hal Draper, “The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels,” Socialist Register 8 (1971): 102.
See Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike.
Nicholas Jacobs, “The German Social Democratic Party School in Berlin, 1906–1914,” History Workshop Journal 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 180.
Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung, 13.
Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung, 158.
Zetkin’s authorship of Paragraph V is clear from the division of labor described in Peter Faulstich and Christine Zeuner, Erwachsenenbildung und soziales Engagement: Historisch-Biographische Zugänge(Bielefeld: W. Bertelsmann, 2001), 76; as well as, apparently, Heinrich Schulz in a conversation with his son (77). Although Gerd Hohendorf unambiguously claims Schulz as the author, the conception put forward in Paragraph V is consistent with both of their writings at the time. See Gerd Hohendorf, Revolutionäre Schulpolitik und marxistische Pädagogik im Lebenswerk Clara Zetkins (Berlin: Volk und Wissen VEV, 1962), 48. See also Lidtke, Alternative Culture, 166–7.
On Zetkin’s distinct and synthetic view of socialist culture, see Joan Reutershan, Clara Zetkin und Brot und Rosen: literatur-politische Konflikte zwischen Partei und Frauenbewegung in der deutschen Vorkriegssozialdemokratie (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). Reutershan argues that Zetkin had to develop certain theories about ideology and culture because she was directing Gleichheit to housewives/working women, and then Zetkin applied them to education, politics, and literature in general.
Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Abgehalten zu Mannheim vom 23. Bis 29. September 1906 (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1906), 122.
According to a police report on a meeting of the Berlin SPD education committee in February 1914, Schulz even had in mind to strike the contentious paragraph from “Guiding Principles” entirely, though this did not come to fruition. See Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung, 166.
For more on how the SPD mobilized print culture and mass educational meetings in service of an oppositional socialist public sphere, see Andrew Bonnell, Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), ch. 6.
Paul Frölich, In the Radical Camp: A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 46.
Lidtke, Alternative Culture,
Bonnell, Red Banners, 145–6
See Andrew G. Bonnell, “Did They Read Marx? Marx Reception and Social Democratic Party Members in Imperial Germany 1890–1914,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48, no. 1 (March 2002): 4–15.
See Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), ch. 7 and Bonnell, Red Banners, 130.
On the “multiplier effect” applied to works of Marxist theory by SPD cadre and other elements within the SPD ecosystem, see Bonnell, Red Banners, 136–50.
Jacobs, “German Social Democratic,” 184. See also Anton Pannekoek, “The Social Democratic Party-School in Berlin,” International Socialist Review VII, no. 6 (December 1907; repr. Marxists Internet Archive), marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v08n06-dec-1907-ISR-gog.pdf.
Schorske, German Social Democracy, 111.
Cited in Jacobs, “German Social Democratic,” 185.
Lidtke, Alternative Culture,
Jacobs, “German Social Democratic,” 185. See also Lidtke, Alternative Culture,
Lidtke, Alternative Culture,
Cited in Faulstich and Zeuner, Erwachsenenbildung, 72–73.
“Luxemburg to Dittman,” reprintedin Annelies Laschitza, “Zwei bisher unveröffentlichte Briefe Rosa Luxemburgs zur Parteischulung,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 2 (1966): 260–1.
Tarnow, cited in Faulstich and Zeuner, Erwachsenenbildung, 97.
Rosa Luxemburg, “Gewerkschaftsschule und Parteischule,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, June 21, 1911.
Jacob Walcher, in an interview with Jochen Schäfers, February 13, 1962, SAPMO-BArch NY 4087/15, Bl. 1.
Protokoll… 1908, 238.
Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung, 167–9.
Cited in Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung, 167.
Christ, Sozialdemokratie und Volkserziehung,
See Jacobs, “German Social Democratic,” 179–80.
Schorske, German Social Democracy,
See Schorske, German Social Democracy, 97–108.
Clara Zetkin, “Die Jugendorganisation,” in Revolutionäre Bildungspolitik und Marxistische Pädagogik: Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften (Berlin: Volk und Wissen VEV, 1983), 229.
Zetkin, “Die Jugendorganisation,” 229.
Bonnell, Red Banners, 150.

Education, History, Rosa Luxemburg, Social Movements

Self-emancipation was the guiding light for the early socialists, but it presented a challenge for the role of theory and education.

“Knowledge is Power—Power is Knowledge”

Political Education and Self-Activity in the Early German SPD

Sean Larson

Workers Education and the Origins of Social Democracy

Education and Self-Emancipation

Clara Zetkin and Political Education in the SPD

The Party School

Proletarian Pedagogy

Political Education Beyond the Party School

The Centrality of Self-Activity

The Interruption and Legacy of SPD Educational Work

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“Knowledge is Power—Power is Knowledge”

Political Education and Self-Activity in the Early German SPD

Sean Larson

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Clara Zetkin and Political Education in the SPD

The Party School

Proletarian Pedagogy

Political Education Beyond the Party School

The Centrality of Self-Activity

The Interruption and Legacy of SPD Educational Work

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