Fighting for a world where working people can democratically shape their lives also means dealing with the little things. For the nineteenth-century German labor movement, amidst the turmoil of that beer-friendly country’s rapid industrialization, this also meant talking about alcohol. Schnapps, which was distributed even on the factory floor, dulled workers’ senses and led to chronic misery. The mighty German Social Democratic Party (SPD) declared war on the “liquor plague” — and advised workers to crack open a cold one at the bar down the street instead.

One of the most definitive statements on the highly ambivalent role alcohol played in Germany’s socialist movement came in an 1891 article in the esteemed SPD journal Die Neue Zeit. Karl Kautsky, the guru of German socialism, bluntly told readers that “schnapps is the enemy.” This statement may sound straightforward, but the debate in which Kautsky was intervening was more complicated. Kautsky was anything but a supporter of temperance or prohibition — though he vilified schnapps, he defended the labor movement’s bars and taverns as crucial foundations of proletarian self-emancipation.

Over the decade before Kautsky’s article, Germany’s pubs had offered a crucial space for the SPD to build its social base, even as the repressive Sozialistengesetzte, or “anti-socialist laws” sought to curtail its activity. These were, indeed a key social space — collective “proletarian living rooms” for workers whose own apartments were too cramped for them to spend any free time in. In nineteenth-century Germany, beer truly was the lubricant of a new and defiant class movement.