The Belgian Teachings

The elections on June 2 shattered the cartel (the alliance of liberals and social democrats) – that was the first general impression that the election victory of the Catholic Party in Belgium created everywhere. Bloc politics had failed completely; it had achieved precisely the opposite of what it wanted to achieve. The alliance had been concluded to overthrow the Catholic power; it had the effect of strengthening and consolidating it. And not for accidental minor reasons, but for causes rooted in general class relations. All the news from Belgium, from whatever quarter it comes, is in perfect agreement as to the cause of the liberal-socialist defeat: a part of the liberal bourgeoisie voted Catholic for fear of the social laws of a socialist-influenced government. The extent to which the lack of advertising power of the social democracy associated with liberalism among the Christian proletariat also played a role cannot be precisely measured.

Thus the result of Belgian bloc politics is a lesson of international significance. For wherever the workers lead the political struggle, the same tactical tendencies in social democracy arise from similar conditions. In all countries there exists, stronger or weaker, a revisionist tendency that propagates alliance and bloc politics with the progressive liberals. What the proletariat cannot achieve because of its own weakness, it is supposed to achieve by joining with a section of the bourgeoisie. In Belgium, the conditions for such tactics were particularly favorable because of the oppressive Catholic rule. Nevertheless, it also failed here.

The Belgian electoral failure therefore meant a resounding defeat for international revisionism. Not in the sense that its disadvantages and its weakening of the proletariat first came to light here – these were already well known and proven in countless examples. But in the sense that the advantages it seemed to promise in comparison, and for the sake of which the damage was accepted, proved to be non-existent.

But this is not simply to say that a shift in tactics would have been enough, or, if it had happened earlier, would have been enough to bring better results. The mass strikes that broke out immediately after the elections, especially in the South, were able to express the workers' discontent sharply, but they could do nothing against the authority of the government, which had been consolidated by the election: the party executive rightly called for them to be stopped. For what the elections reveal is more than the weakness of a tactic; it is the weakness of the Belgian proletariat in general, and the impossibility of overcoming the necessary consequences of this weakness through tactical cunning.

It is only too understandable that in this moment of disappointment the masses returned to the old method of struggle, which brought them the conquest of universal suffrage, albeit made unequal by prural votes in the interests of the bourgeoisie, at the end of their finest period of struggle (1886 to 1893). There, for the first time, the power of the political mass strike was demonstrated in the hands of a modern proletariat. But the mass strike is no more a miracle cure than the ballot paper; it can bring the full force of proletarian power to bear like no other method, but it cannot make up for a lack of real power. This was demonstrated in 1902, when the proletariat tried to abolish plural suffrage; the struggle had to be abandoned without result because not only the Catholic government but also the liberal bourgeoisie defended plural suffrage, of which they were the real beneficiaries. The power of the proletariat in 1893, supported by the sympathy of the liberal bourgeoisie, had been sufficient to abolish the privileged suffrage of a small clique; it was not sufficient to abolish the political foundations of the entire bourgeois rule.

It had been necessary at that time to tailor the tactics exclusively to the internal strengthening of the workers' movement. Instead, the leaders hoped to achieve the goal of universal equal suffrage through a steady rapprochement with the liberal opposition – an internally absurd tactic, since the liberals would thus saw off the branch on which they were sitting. And only through the class consciousness of the liberal bourgeoisie are the liberal politicians, who entered into the alliance out of hunger for power, spared the trouble of breaking their promises afterwards. Now, ten years later, this tactic has also collapsed. Plural suffrage first withstood the onslaught of the masses and now the diplomatic politics of the leaders; obviously neither mass power nor alliance politics can win the same vote. What now?

Universal equal suffrage can only be won through the power of a well-trained, insightful, vigorously organized working class. Training this power must be the goal and the guideline of tactics. What is important in Belgium is not to try to conquer a fortress by artificial means, for which the workers' movement is still too weak, but to recognize the weakness of the proletariat and to overcome it more and more through tireless work, above all through principled fighting tactics.

The causes of this weakness and the path to improvement are clearly set out in the instructive essay on the labor movement in Belgium by De Man and De Brouckere (supplement to “Neue Zeit”). There is a lack of knowledge and a lack of organization. Nowhere in Western Europe is school education as poor as in Belgium, where it is almost completely at the mercy of priests and nuns. Nor is there any trace of an attempt to educate the people in the bourgeois sense of the word from the limited, ignorant, philistine bourgeoisie. Incredibly long working hours and low wages make it extremely difficult for the working masses to work their way up spiritually. The lack of education and the lack of organization are mutually dependent.

The party is a federation of mostly support associations and cooperatives, without any political activity on the part of the masses. The trade unions are still in their first stages of development. The role of organizing the working masses has been fulfilled by the cooperatives for an age. They first gathered the hopeless, fragmented proletarians, instilled self-confidence in them, financed the political struggles and strikes and built people's houses. But as a form of organization of the proletariat, they had one major shortcoming: they were not fighting organizations. Only the associations that serve the struggle and unite those directly involved generate, through the practice of struggle itself, those proletarian virtues that form the ferment of proletarian power: firm solidarity, sacrifice of each individual for the whole, discipline, insight into class relations, pride and self-confidence. The trade unions bring all this through their struggle, but not the cooperatives. They can displace small traders, but not fight capital. Their mass is not the proletarian struggle, but competition and business. They improve the situation of the workers not by wringing a piece of profit out of capital, but by eliminating a piece of intermediate trade. By taking the worst sting out of the misery that forces the workers to fight, they take the water out of the trade unions, they take over their function in a certain sense, without being able to replace their educational effect on the proletariat. And finally, the material advantage is again illusory: if the cooperative allows better use to be made of the money wage, this money wage must fall or remain low if there is no strong trade union behind it, because the driving force for improvement is weakened.

The Belgian workers therefore still have a huge amount of building work to do. The trade unions must develop into powerful associations, capable of wresting advantages from capital in a regulated struggle. Organizational institutions must be created to provide workers with solid support in the face of the sophisticated apparatus of the many Catholic associations offering personal advantages and the harassment of the authorities. Through a network of educational institutions – the beginnings have already been made – the proletariat must, without waiting for school laws, provide itself with knowledge and enlightenment. And if, at the same time, the parliamentary activity of the leaders, freed from the suffocating embrace of liberalism, controlled by the will and class consciousness of the masses, takes the path of principled fighting tactics, the electoral defeat of 1912 will mark a new turning point in Belgian history, the conclusion of a period of staganization of weakness into a cause of rising power.