582 THE CLASS STRUGGLE NEW GERMANY 583 one, then numerous Socialists to their city councils. In the national, state and municipal legislative assemblages they forced the adoption of social legislation, and the German protective factory legislation, German old age pension laws, unemployment laws and maternity protection laws have been models for Liberals and Socialists all over the world. The socialist movement grew in power and influence, and in growing moved further and further from revolutionary measures.
Not that the German movement had become a mere reform party. In no other country were the members, the rank and file, so thoroughly familiar with the theories and revolutionary ideals of Marx and Engels. The German Socialist still believed implicitly in the necessity of overthrowing the capitalist state of society. The revolutionary foundation was there, but the radical spirit, the readiness to act had given way to a feeling that amounted almost to a conviction, that society would gradually develop into the socialist state, that it would be possible to bring about a socialist commonwealth, at least in Germany, peaceably, by a gradual evolution into a system of social ownership.
Long before the war broke out, an opposition group had come into existence in the Social Democratic Party which, under the spiritual leadership of Karl Liebknecht, Klara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz. Mehring opposed the tactics persued by the great majority of the party. The National Congresses of the party for years had been the scene of stormy contention between the revisionist reform wing and the majority on the one hand, betwen the radicals and the majority on the other. The recognized leaders spoke of Liebknecht and his radical supporters with ill concealed contempt, and regarded their demands for more radical and more revolutionary methods as the products of unripe, foolish propagandists.
When the war began this fundamental difference assumed gigantic importance. Where it had formerly been limited largely to theoretical discussion it now assumed a practical significance that determined the stand that was taken by the members of the Reichstag group and by the membership at large on the question of war and government support.
The majority felt that the socialist movement of Germany, in view of its achievements on the national field, was interested in the defense of what they termed German Culture against foreign attack. Their whole past made it inevitable that they should feel themselves the protectors, above all, of the German proletariat, and that they should regard the interests of that proletariat as inseparably bound up in the existence and immunity from attack on the German nation. The Liebknecht wing, on the other hand, maintained that the workingman has no country to defend, and that the only real selfdefense of the proletariat lies in the revolution against its own capitalist class. In the caucus that preceded the vote in the Reichstag on the first war loan, only 13 out of 110 members protested against a favorable vote. But they were bound by the unit rule that obtains everywhere in the socialist movement, and voted unanimously in favor of the first war loan, while Haase, himself bitterly opposed to the attitude the party had adopted, as chairman of the socialist delegation, delivered the address explaining the vote of his party. When the vote on the second war loan was taken Karl Liebknecht alone voted against it; at a later vote he was joined by Otto Ruehle.
On December 15, 1915, twenty socialist deputies voted against the new war loan and at the same time officially severed their connection with the official group, sitting in the Reichstag under the name Arbeiter Gemeinschaft. Around this nucleus the Independent Social Democratic Party was soon afterward founded.
From the very beginning, however, this new party displayed no unity of purpose or standpoint. There were two distinct groups, the so called Moderates, Haase, Kautsky, Ledebour and Bernstein, on the one hand, and the radicals, or Spartacus Gruppe, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Zetkin and Mehring, on the other. The latter, from the beginning, insisted upon the complete reorganization of the international movement. It recognized that the socialist movement of the