Illustration: “Revolution”, Konštantín Bauer, 1924–1927, pencil on paper (https://www.webumenia.sk/dielo/SVK:VSG.K_1070)

Reform Programme, the Left and Communists

Social democracy was from the beginning a participant in the struggle for Czech and Slovak emancipation from the monarchist form of power. After the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, it thus naturally became a state-forming party. Such it remained throughout the entire Czechoslovak Republic [1918-1938 and again in 1990-92]. This marked all its fortunes.

Above all, it determined its relationship to the bourgeoisie, which in the resistance against the monarchy stood on the same side as social democracy. For social democracy, the question of political power appears from the beginning as a form of power-sharing. It understands the struggle for political power as creating space for changing the social order.

Thus enters into state formation the socialist alternative concentrated in a set of demands that the congress formulated in 1918: expropriation and state supervision over large estates and the associated abolition of aristocratic privileges and the nobility altogether; expropriation of coal and ore mines, water sources, railways, military industry and monopolistic companies. The congress conceives this programme as realisable within the democratic constitution of the state, because it gives space for the organisation of the working class as well. With this programme, Vlastimil Tusar became the first Social Democratic Prime Minister (1919-1920). And Rudolf Bechyně, who was part of the so-called Pětka [the “Big Five” - the five most influential political parties under President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s leadership], implemented many Social Democratic concepts in fields ranging from education to transport.

Acceptance of participation in state power step by step establishes a differentiating movement between revolutionary and national-emancipatory socialism. Part of the left refuses participation in the state, which it considers an instrument of the power and interests of the bourgeoisie.

Participation in Power and the Reform Programme

From a purely pragmatic perspective - after the split and the formation of the Communist Party [KSČ - Komunistická strana Československa] (1921) - tendencies towards the de-Marxisation of social democracy appear. Intellectual support is sought from Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, first President of Czechoslovakia, in English socialism (the Labour Party had been the governing party since 1924), from Jean Jaurès [French socialist leader], Hendrik de Man [Belgian socialist theorist] and so forth. However, study of the functionality of these variants leads conversely to the revitalisation of Marxist socialism; primarily because the creative application of Marx’s legacy, as it was cultivated in the Second International, was capable of explaining new political and economic realities as well. The new programme is conceived gradually from 1924 to 1930. Meanwhile, broad theoretical discussion takes place, newspapers and journals are formed, new theorists emerge, and the situation crystallises.

At the XVI Congress (1930), social democracy adopted a new fundamental programme, building on the Hainfeld [1888] and Vienna [1901] programmes [of Austrian Social Democracy]. Czechoslovak social democracy reaffirms its profound reformist goal: changing the capitalist order to a socialist one. Compared to previous programmes, it approaches concrete points that already present in clearer contours the first seeds of new socialist structures. But it still proceeds from the basic premise: from understanding capitalism as a society of separation of producers from means of production, as a society of wage labour and private property enabling the exploitation of man by man and a society of productive anarchy, economic crises and imperialist interests producing war.

Socialism is then understood as the abolition of this private property that exploits, and its replacement with new forms of production: state, self-governing, cooperative and mixed. Social reform is thus not directed against small tradesmen and small farmers. On the contrary, it is their essential protection against big capital. Participation in political power is considered a duty, as a means of struggle; coalition with so-called bourgeois parties is not an expression of “partnership” or even “favour”, but a partial defeat of the right, the bourgeoisie, which is no longer capable of governing alone.

KSČ: From Revolutionary Left to Stalinism

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) developed from the left wing of social democracy. It was the main expression of those who declared themselves for communism. However, not yet the Leninist and Bolshevik kind. And it did not arise somehow automatically, unproblematically. From the beginning, a struggle over orientation took place within it. The adoption of Leninism was not at all self-evident. Its leader Bohumír Šmeral was an heir and adherent of Central European Marxism, Austro-Marxism, and not Leninism or later Stalinism. Until Stalinisation in 1929, when Klement Gottwald took over the party, it could rather be understood as the left, radical wing of the social democratic movement. Unlike the centre-left current, this radical wing categorically refused participation in government politics, but also in state institutions. This clearly defined sectarianism was in sharp contrast to the conception of the Social Democrats, who were, except for one short period, part of all governments of Czechoslovakia’s First Republic [1918-1938].

From this concept, however, a second consequence also emerged, which would accompany communist politics until November 1989 [the Velvet Revolution]. “We will do real politics only when we have the state in our power, when we can use it only for our purposes” - this is the strategic position of the Czechoslovak communists expressed in brief. In the logic of this concept, we can clearly see the second dimension that complements sectarianism: totalitarianism. Not co-participation in power. Only power as a whole.

Šmeral’s concept is different, non-Leninist: he rejects the party of professional revolutionaries, one must rely on the broad working movement; not seizing power, not a putsch, but winning, permanent, for the socialist programme; intra-party democracy, not centralised decision-making and ideological primacy of leadership; the party as an internal component of society, and not as ruler over it and over the state.

Šmeral was a typical and perhaps the last political Marxist in Czechoslovakia, an Austro-Marxist of the Bauer type. His concept is almost identical to the critique of Lenin’s concept and politics from the pen of Rosa Luxemburg [German-Polish Marxist theorist and revolutionary].

The early Communists did not forget that they were part of social democracy, the great current of the political rise of the industrial proletariat. A current that at that time also represented the most progressive social, ideological, but also intellectual and artistic advancement. What we would call progressivism in today’s terminology.

When the KSČ was ’Bolshevised’ in 1929 (in reality Stalinised), the majority did not accept it, and left the party. The Communist Party became a relatively small, sectarian and politically unsuccessful party. The number of its members fell from about 130,000 to approximately 35,000. Stalinists gained dominance in it, artistic and intellectual support was significantly narrowed. Gottwald’s politics was from the beginning a politics of a kind of “natural” Stalinisation.

This requires “purges”: a habit maintained after February 1948 [Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia]. And in normalisation after the suppression of Dubček’s Spring [1968]. Massive and ruthless purges: not only from the party, but from the entire social body. First in line in both periods was the [progressive] “resistance”: the anti-fascist one after the war, the anti-Stalinist and democratising one in normalisation.

The Idea of Communism as Party Doctrine

On the opposite side of this party sectarianism and political nihilism, the party relies on the great, conceptual idea of communism. Scientifically justified by Marx’s work, ideologically completed by Engels on the soil of the old social democracy of the Second International; but politically radicalised by Lenin and the victory of the Bolsheviks, transformed into the form of Soviet communism. It was precisely from this theoretical scheme of historical development from capitalism to communism that the legitimacy and tasks of the Communist Party were derived. The party and the Communists placed themselves in it and understood themselves as the vanguard, the avant-garde of this historical development. Socialism was a transitional phase on the path to communism.

Therefore, discussion was not conducted primarily about practical politics. Socialism was understood mainly as a category of philosophy of history. It secured legitimacy precisely through this philosophy, and so logically these philosophical foundations or forms of its existence were first questioned. From the validity of the historical-philosophical doctrine, the legitimacy of communism and the position and politics of the KSČ was dogmatically derived until the end of the existence of the “real socialist” regimes in Eastern Europe.

The entire Czechoslovak communist movement had this doctrinal character from the beginning. The KSČ thus declared that it relies on Marx’s idea of communism, but politically radicalised by Lenin into the form of Bolshevism. The party was to be the vanguard implementing the historical path to communism. Not a representative of the empirically manifested will of the proletariat, but an implementer of the theoretically postulated iron law of history! And thus the KSČ adopted the Leninist doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat, violent overthrow and expropriation of the bourgeoisie... And this process was to be implemented and carried out by the revolutionary party. This caused concerns, disappointment and departure of a large part of KSČ supporters immediately after its Bolshevisation. Not because socialism lost support, but because subordination to the Russian Stalinist model did not suit a large part of leftists.

Stalinisation did not suit the majority of communist intellectuals and educated people either. They were rather followers of Western fashionable trends, Parisian bohemia, cultural-artistic and scientific uplift, philosophical left-wing heresy. They were also impressed by Sovietism in the phase of great cultural-artistic and scientific uplift, when the avant-garde was being born and created, a new life feeling of unlimited freedom to advance... These were the 1920s [which we will return to in a later article].

Those years in the eyes of communist intelligentsia shone like Vladimir Mayakovsky [Soviet poet], Dziga Vertov [Soviet filmmaker], El Lissitzky [Soviet artist], Eisenstein [Soviet filmmaker] and hundreds of others. Sectarianism after the Bolshevisation of the party no longer suited them. With Stalinism, iron discipline, self-sacrificing service, the austerity of that real industrialisation, the factory-mining kind, avant-garde poetics was lost. This was the fate of many Czech artistic currents, Slovak artists, philosophers, but also politicians of the Šmeral type at the beginning of the modern Czecho-slovak left or Alexander Dubček at the end.

Boris Zala is a philosopher and vice-chairman of the Slovak Anti-Fascist Movement and the Restart 21 organisation.
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[1] Otto Bauer was the leader of Austrian social democracy, as well as leader of the Austro-Marxists, a group of thinkers developing Marx’s concept in the conditions of the new republican Austria. He belonged to the radical socialists, but rejected Leninism and Bolshevik politics. He considered democracy a prerequisite for any development of the left and socialist politics. In the first post-war government, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and sought unification with democratic Weimar Germany.