Bebel’s Marxism

Bebel’s achievements in the early stages of the movement’s development accounted for his profound popularity and influence within German socialism. Involved at first in nonpolitical endeavors of social improvement and reform, Bebel quickly became convinced that Karl Marx’s approach to political activity was more in keeping with working-class interests. In this view, the working class must pursue its own welfare independently of coalitions and agreements with groups emanating from the middle and upper classes, even when those groups supported similar legislative measures and reforms, such as the secularization of publicly funded elementary schools or the introduction of universal suffrage.

With Bebel, Marxian socialism transformed itself from an instrument of social criticism into a form of mass-based politics. Bebel also helped expand socialism into new realms, especially those of women’s emancipation and gender equality. One of the initial campaigns undertaken by the fledgling socialist movement in Germany was the organization of a dual-gender union, the first such initiative in any of the then-industrializing countries.

Based in the textile industry, which was itself in the midst of a rapid and tumultuous transition, the union recruited its supporters among the members of producer cooperatives, independent weavers and clothing workers (the so-named cottage industry), and from workshops and small factories organized along capitalist lines. The dual-gender union welcomed the highly skilled, semiskilled, and relatively unskilled alike, foreshadowing the industrial unions founded in the United States during the latter part of the 1930s.

German Marxists were involved in multiple initiatives: forming a party that took part in elections, organizing unions by trade and industry, establishing producer and consumer cooperatives, and founding benefit societies that functioned as insurance collectives to provide unemployment and medical coverage. They also organized leisure-time activities, reading clubs, educational associations, and much more. It was the breadth of the organizational efforts in which they participated that distinguished the Marxists from other politicized tendencies within the working class. Marxism represented a politics of inclusion, class-wide and multifaceted.

The dual-gender union, however, was a short-lived phenomenon, lasting some eighteen months before disappearing from the historical record. It could not withstand the pressures that emanated from within the textile industry, which was in a process of transition from an artisanal to a manufacturing basis, all of which was exacerbated by the political fallout and repression that followed the Paris Commune of 1871. Nonetheless, the struggle for gender equality had already emerged as a matter of pride among both male and female socialists.

Women and Socialism

This background helps explain how Bebel came to author the profoundly influential work Women and Socialism, the most widely read nonfiction book among the working class in its time. This was true not only in Germany but everywhere a socialist movement similar to the German one was present. Women and Socialism was translated into more than twenty languages during Bebel’s lifetime.

Lending libraries at union halls and party meeting rooms all recorded that Bebel’s volume was preferred even to Marx’s Capital. The discussion of gender and women’s equality schooled the working class on the ABCs of socialism. One pioneering aspect of Women and Socialism was the seriousness with which Bebel treated the issue of biological sex and its transformation into a system of socially determined gender.

The first edition, published in 1879, was an odd book — a long-winded pamphlet of 180 pages, yet without chapter headings or subdivisions. This was because it acutely reflected the oral traditions that were key to the spread of socialist ideas. Bebel was also known as a great orator, often lecturing for hours at a time at party conferences.

Roughly divided into three sections, Women and Socialism dealt with the situation of women in the past, present, and future. The first part, “Women in the Past,” was substantially revised to reflect the more schematic presentation of pre-capitalist gender relations by Friedrich Engels in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The third part, “Women in the Future,” drew heavily on the economic writings of Marx, focusing in particular on the gloomy prognostications that emanated from Thomas Malthus’s theories of population growth and the limits of an agricultural sphere organized in line with capitalist principles.

The middle sections of the book, however, were uniquely the work of Bebel and dealt with contemporary situations. The topics he addressed were wide-ranging and often considered taboo in bourgeois circles.

Some themes were economically oriented, such as the delineation of sex-segregated occupations, discrimination in the workplace, the possibility of collective households and approaches to childrearing, and the struggle for equal rights and equal pay. Other parts of the book addressed cultural norms: female agency and self-determination, women’s legal status, sexual harassment, fertility rates, class-based definitions of romance, dual standards, and male views of women.

Most controversial was the discussion of sexuality in all its forms and varieties: sexual desire and enjoyment, abstinence and intercourse, birth control and abortion, sex education, the idea of marriage as a form of prostitution, multiple partners, incest and rape, male prostitution, and much more.

Bebel was also quite conscientious (even if not always consistent) in his use of gender-neutral vocabulary to refer to people in general: “humankind” rather than “mankind,” “person” or “people” rather than “he” or “him” (Menschheit or der Mensch in German rather than der Mann or die Männer). Notably, the three separate translations of Women and Socialism into English reintroduced male-laden language into Bebel’s text.

Fighting for Equality

Because of Bebel’s stature within the socialist movement, these subjects and this manner of expression became legitimate among the party’s rank and file. The status of women in society and their ability to function on an equal basis with men formed part of everyday discussions, and both female and male activists routinely drew material from Bebel’s book for their agitational work among the working class.

The party funded separate newspapers and publications that were written by and aimed at women. It also sponsored special elections to ensure the inclusion of women in internal party governance boards. In German districts that outlawed the participation of women in political meetings, which comprised the majority of the country at the time, it undertook major campaigns that eventually overturned those prohibitions.

As a widely read and influential author, Bebel devoted considerable time to new editions of Women and Socialism, to the point that it would eventually triple in length. Yet his activities during this period centered on his role within the SPD leadership and his responsibilities as cochair of the party’s Reichstag delegation. In the history of the latter, we can track the party’s drift that eventually transformed it into a pillar of capitalist society, despite its ongoing opposition to many of capitalism’s manifestations.

Ever-widening influence implied ever-widening accommodation. To enhance its popularity, the party needed to prove that it was capable of enacting laws and policies and putting its own imprint on the contours that determined social existence within capitalism. Thousands of German Social Democrats participated in governmental administration, primarily in local districts where they were tolerated without the intense hostility they faced on the state and federal levels.

Bebel, as head of the Reichstag delegation, was known for his courageous stances. His long-standing attempts to loosen restrictions on divorce were widely publicized. Against the will of the majority of the Social Democratic bloc in the Reichstag, he also supported the repeal of restrictive measures against homosexuals. These legislative initiatives aimed to make life within capitalism more bearable, and they concerned all social classes, not just the proletariat.

Such initiatives were important in their own right, but they also gave the impression that capitalism could be tamed and humanized. Through a gradual process of incorporation, social democracy became a form of progressive liberalism, far in advance of the development of similar cultural inclinations among the middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century.

Although German Social Democracy never delivered the new society that founding leaders like Bebel hoped it would, the movement did establish an important template that acted as a source of inspiration for socialists in many other countries. Bebel’s work to establish the centrality of women’s liberation for socialism was an important example of that. For the Left today, it should serve as a reminder that there is a natural affinity between struggles against gender and class oppression that was as clear in Bebel’s time as it is today.