ABSTRACT
When the Independent Social Democratic Party was founded in April 1917, it appeared as a melange of ultra-left Spartacists, former spokesmen of the party centre and centre-left, and a handful of renegade revisionists. Apart from their opposition to the war, they seemed to have little in common other than the fact that the new party attracted virtually all the leading theorists and intellectuals of prewar German Social Democracy. By the Moroccan crisis of 1911, German Social Democrats of all factions had come to contemplate imperialism, in particular, as one of the most important problems darkening the political horizon. In Germany the extent to which the position of the pre-1914 centre-orthodoxy was fundamentally Marxist or a perversion of Marxism has been hotly debated between Social Democrats and Communists ever since. Bebel understood the value of the Marxist orthodoxy as an integrative ideology.
