Free Association of German Trade Unions - Radicalization and Expulsion From The SPD

Radicalization and Expulsion From The SPD

During the first decade of the 20th century, the FVdG was transformed from a localist union federation into a syndicalist labor organization with anarchist tendencies. The process was initiated by the death of Gustav Keßler, the most important ideologue in the FVdG, in 1903. His role was largely assumed by the physician Raphael Friedeberg.

In 1903, a dispute between the FVdG and the Free Trade Unions in Berlin led the party commission to intervene and to sponsor talks aimed at re-unification of the two wings of the German labor movement. At the meeting, the FVdG made a number of compromises, which led to member protests. Soon, over one-third of the members left the union. The 1903 FVdG congress elected a panel to continue negotiations with the Free Trade Unions. This panel demanded that the Free Trade Unions adopt localist organizational principles as a prerequisite for re-unification. The FVdG panel realized this demand was unrealistic, but hoped the expulsion of revisionists from the SPD during the debate on Eduard Bernstein's theses would strengthen their position. The impossibility of a reconciliation between the two became obvious by March 1904, since the re-unification envisioned by both the leadership of the SPD and the Free Trade Unions was more along the lines of an integration of the FVdG into the Free Trade Unions.

The FVdG's disillusionment with the social democratic movement deepened during the mass strike debate. The role of the general strike for the socialist movement was first discussed within the FVdG in 1901. At the SPD's 1903 congress in Dresden, Raphael Friedeberg proposed discussing the topic, but his proposal was rejected by the congress. The following year, a proposal by Wilhelm Liebknecht and Eduard Bernstein to initiate debate on the topic was accepted, since they had distanced themselves from Friedeberg's positions.

Liebknecht and Bernstein, like the left wing of the party, felt the general strike should not be used to provoke the state but rather to defend political rights (especially the right to vote) should the state should seek to abolish them. The more conservative faction in the party was opposed to this concept. In 1904, Friedeberg, speaking for the FVdG, advanced the view that the general strike must be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat and would be the last step before the socialist revolution. In 1905, his speech on the topic was even more radical. He claimed that historical materialism, a pillar of Marxism, was to blame for social democracy's alleged powerlessness, and introduced the alternative concept of historical psychism—which held that human psychology was more significant for social development than material conditions. He also recommended the anarchist literature especially Kropotkin's writings rather than Marx's works, which were most influential in the SPD.

The position that the general strike could be used, but only as a last resort, became dominant in the party during the mass strike debate. This caused much concern among the conservatives in the party, especially among many trade unionists. At a meeting in February 1906, the trade unionists were placated by party leaders, who said they would attempt to prevent a general strike at all costs. The FVdG reacted by publishing the secret protocols from the meeting in Die Einigkeit, greatly angering the party leadership.

At the 1905 party convention, August Bebel, who had always favored a stronger role for the SPD-affiliated unions, proposed a resolution requiring all members of the party to join the centralized trade unions for their respective professions. This would have forced all FVdG members to either leave the party or the trade union. The resolution was adopted, and implemented in 1907. An FVdG survey returned a vote of twenty-two to eight opposing rejoining the centralized unions. This led some of the masons, carpenters, and construction workers in the union to leave the FVdG in 1907 to avoid being expelled from the SPD, saying the organization was "taking a path, which would certainly lead to strife with the SPD and to syndicalism and anarchism." In 1908, the SPD's Nuremberg congress finally voted to make SPD and FVdG membership incompatible.

In addition to causing about two-thirds of its members to quit between 1906 and 1910, the radicalization of the FVdG also correlates to a slight change in the milieu, industries, and regions from which the organization drew its members. Many metal and construction workers, who had a localist tradition, left as a result of the syndicalist and anarchist tendencies in the FVdG. Miners, who worked mostly in the Ruhr area, did not have this tradition but developed a certain skepticism of bureaucratic structures. About 450 of them joined the FVdG before World War I, a sign of what was to come after the war.