8 - Never ... a Less Fruitful Scholastic Debate: Intramural Strife—Evolution vs. Revolution (1903–1905)

Summary

UNDETERRED BY BEBEL's HARANGUES at Dresden, Eisner resolved to maintain a centrist stance at Vorwärts befitting the national party's organ. Over the next two years his influence would rise to its prewar crest as he engaged in public debate with Kautsky on the nature and aims of Social Democracy, only to fall precipitately when he was driven from office in a purge orchestrated by Bebel, Kautsky, and Mehring. Never again would Vorwärts achieve the eminence or credibility it enjoyed under Eisner's direction.

The task at hand upon Eisner's return to the capital was the campaign for the Prussian Landtag, the first in which the party had determined “to participate experimentally in order to gauge how much success working people can achieve in an electoral system that makes a mockery of right and fairness.” By the byzantine system prescribed by Bismarck in 1867 to preserve privilege, candidates divided into three categories by the taxes they paid were to be chosen as electors by their class-based constituencies. These electors then would choose the representation to the lower house of the Landtag, the House of Deputies. All voting was by public declaration rather than secret ballot, and votes counted more or less, depending on the class of the voter. As a result of these constraints and Social Democracy's historic boycott, Prussia's largest political party had not a single representative in the Landtag. This year, though, after the phenomenally successful Reichstag campaign, Social Democratic candidates were standing in every district where there was some prospect of a mandate.

In his lead article of 4 October 1903 Eisner recapitulated the state of affairs in a feudal society surviving into the twentieth century and restated his critique of the “tragicomedy” of Prussia's liberal bourgeoisie. “Prussia has remained a barbarian state hostile to education, where the churches flourish and the schools wither; where the greatest part of the rural populace languishes in intellectual and material bondage; where the administration reposes in a small, narrow-minded caste of ruling families, the justice system completely alienated from popular sentiment; where the citizens are still denied the most basic rights and the state as chief employer embraces the basest practices of rapacious enterprise and exploitation; where even the freedom of thought and research is forbidden and artistic creativity is subject to the police saber.”