Clara Zetkin’s Obituary of Parvus [1925]

Hello all,

Given our recent focus on Parvus and his contribution to Marxist political strategy, I thought it would be worthwhile translating Clara Zetkin’s obituary of the man from 1925. (Many thanks to my Greek comrade Aris for bringing this text to my attention). This is the first section of what is quite a long piece. What I find most striking about the article is Zetkin’s argument that, while the life and work of figure as unique and bizarre as Parvus might appear to be exceptional, it was in fact an embodiment of ‘the development of the doctrine and deed of the Second International, and especially of German social democracy, from Marxism to class treason’.

In other news, as soon as I finish this final round of marking, I am going to focus on producing the first Marxism Translated podcast, which will feature Lars T Lih and a discussion of another Parvus text on revisionism, written in Russian, which we will be publishing here in English for the first time.   

Many thanks for the continued support!

BL

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Helphand Parvus

Die Kommunistische Internationale, Vol. 1, January 1925, pp. 76-91.

In Berlin in mid-December [1924], Israel Helphand Parvus, aged 57, died following a stroke. A quarter of a century ago, the news of his death would have evoked an outpouring of sincere mourning in the international labour movement: especially here in Germany, and particularly among the left wing of the Social Democracy and the proletarian masses led by it. Today, the news has received little more than the passing interest of another newspaper notice of a similar nature. It certainly did not move the public to the same extent as the cable telegram reporting the death of Samuel Gompers, that most intelligent, consistent, strong-willed of those contemporary workers’ leaders who betray the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois papers carried obituaries about Parvus that mostly struck the tune that he was an interesting, much disputed personality. The undertone was always one of genuine bourgeois admiration for the wealth of the “great merchant” and, depending on the occasion, an anti-Semitic-nationalist note of regret that such enviable earthly blessings fell to, of all people, “a Russian Jew”. The “Vorwärts” devoted a shabbily brief note to the dead man, which leaves his undoubted services to the workers’ movement in the past just as much in the shadows for contemporaries as his sordid career as an unscrupulous capitalist businessman, as a political abettor of German imperialism, as a munificent golden uncle of social democratic publishers and publications, as a lavish host and influential adviser to Ebert and company. “His judgement, as that of a man unusually knowledgeable and brought up in party life, remained esteemed in close party circles.” The restriction, restraint and taciturnity of the otherwise phrase-rich “Vorwärts” is understandable. The “narrow party circles”, i.e. the leaders around Ebert and Wels, gladly put up with the material aid that the rich Parvus gave the party, as well as his advice as somebody who was so far superior to them in knowledge and talent. But these gentlemen had misgivings about sobbing at the coffin of the schemer Helphand, with his head bared and the mourning flag around his arm.

The labour movement in Germany, still less that of any other country, was not even superficially affected by this death. Proletarians who had bravely stood with Parvus against the reformist bourgeoisisation of Social Democracy and who had become despondent as a result of thebetrayal of most of their leaders, shrugged their shoulders and said: “That was once upon a time”. For them, Parvus, the pugnacious, well-armed comrade who fought for the workers’ movement to be infused with the spirit of Marxism, had died while beating the drum for the Wilhelm’s armies in Sofia. Younger comrades, who only joined the revolutionary vanguard of the German proletariat during the war or the post-war period and did not know its history, simply spat out: “Parvus! Disgusting! A scoundrel, a renegade!”

Parvus’s “labyrinthine, erratic course of life” is expressed in these evaluations. The man who first came to public attention as an ardent hater of bourgeois society, determined to put the utmost of his extraordinary strength into the destruction of this society, ends up as its protector and agent in the slippery swamp of German imperialism. The well-schooled Marxist, the friend of Rosa Luxemburg and of all those in the small group who took up the struggle against opportunism in the German workers’ movement with the greatest passion in theory and practice, dies as the intimate of the super-opportunistic Reich President [Friedrich] Ebert, who by [Hans von] Seeckt’s grace had the revolutionary workers of Germany shot down and left to rot behind prison walls; dies as the patron and benefactor of the reformist Social Democratic leaders whose hands since August 1914 have been stained with the betrayal of all their sworn principles, with the blood of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and other honourable fighters. What a gaping, irreconcilable contradiction between the beginning and the end of this man’s life.

Is it solely the fate of earth-bound, individual predisposition that is at work in this contradiction? Or is it determined by the events of the time, by forces of historical milieu, regardless of how much it might appear to be influenced by his personality? Certainly, in Parvus’s life both have intertwined to form the “Moirai”. The extraordinary nature of the man – who was both physically and mentally elephantine – makes the course of his life and the shrill dissonance of the end to the beginning appear at first as an individual case, determined by natural forces. However, on closer inspection, what is strongly individual in nature turns out to be quite typical. Indeed! Parvus is above all a type [Typus]. His life’s fate is the embodied development of the Second International from the time when, despite appearing to blossom from the outside, its inner decay begins, through to its complete rot and decomposition. This historical process is most obvious in Germany. For the German Social Democracy is the leading party of the Second International, and the feverishly rapid and strong development of imperialism in the Reich creates the most favourable breeding ground for its happiness and end.

The incipient transformation of the Second International from an organ of revolutionary class-struggle organ into a reformist coterie evoked a powerful reaction from the Marxist-minded leaders and the revolutionary proletarians. For years, Parvus was a leading figure in this struggle in the face of the most intense hail of bullets, and the international “banner of the seven upright thinkers” of Marxist theory placed great hopes in him. The years then came when revisionism, theoretically defeated by resolutions on paper, in reality – quietly, but industriously – gained more and more ground. It went from individual instances of transgression to become increasingly the practice of the “positive work” of social democracy and of the trade unions in particular. Parvus increasingly ceased to be the old stirrer of strife and struggle; the success-seeking businessman pushed its way to the fore in him. With its approval of the war credits and its bourgeois-nationalist dogma of the defence of the fatherland, German Social Democracy announced the bankruptcy of the Second International. Karl Kautsky underwrote this declaration of bankruptcy with his cowardly-childish theory that the proletarian International is merely an instrument during peace, not during war. Not long after this, and outstanding leaders of the Second International sat as puppets of monarchist or plutocratic powers in war cabinets. Since then, there has been no political, economic or financial trade in blood and filth conducted by the bourgeoisie of any country that the leaders of the Second International do not tolerate, cover up for or participate in. The International has become the racketeering society of global capitalism. Parvus, the grand racketeer, who occasionally had sentimental reminiscences of the May blossom of his radical youthful sins – comparable to the Marxist phraseology spouted by [Ramsey] Macdonald, [Emile] Vandervelde, [Otto] Wels and Fritz Adler at the congresses – was the legitimate offspring and symbol of the Second International. His “maturation” from a militant Marxist to an abrasive, crudely indulgent, corrupt and corrupting profiteer is a reflection of the development of the doctrine and deed of the Second International, and especially of German social democracy, from Marxism to class treason.