1926

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.

-Karl Marx

The course of the world invariably frustrates our moral demands.

-Ernst Cassirer​

Some Key Events, 1926

January 3rd: To the general disbelief of American, German, and even some British financial commentators, the pound slowly recovers against the dollar at the beginning of 1926. Many expected that after the Syrian, French, and Kenyan crises, the Empire would be forced to reverse its burgeoning policy of imperial preference to win concessions from the Americans, but the continuing strength of British industry, coupled with liberal military austerity, has restored trust in the currency.

January 5th: The one-time neo-kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer publishes The Ethical Imperative in the Young Marx. While he studiously avoids any explicit reference to contemporary German politics, the interpretation of the text is widely understood as a defense of Bernstein’s neo-revisionism. Cassirer makes the case that the “ethical, Kantian socialism” of Hermann Cohen in fact has roots within Marx’s own thinking; he traces a direct line between the “ethical humanism” of German Idealism and Marx’s own “Social and Concrete Humanism.”

January 7th: Ormsby-Gore files a formal report to the colonial commission recommending the partition of both Punjab and Bengal along ethno-religious lines, as well as a considerable extension of the domains of the loyal princes.

January 10th: Harry F. Byrd, the Governor of Virginia, meets with Jules Molle and applauds his “responsible stewardship” of Algeria. He petitions the United States congress to offer assistance to this “refuge of white christendom in the red and brown mediterranean.”

January 11th: Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian Minister of Culture, writes a short article in the Frankfurter Zeitung criticizing Cassirer’s “undialectical” reading of Marxian “Species Being”. He will later receive support from a surprising source: Edmund Husserl and his school of phenomenologists, who have thus far sought to remain detached from the realm of politics. Lukacs understands such concepts as Alienation and Species Being as dealing with the “uneven integration of the agential and subjective into the social totality”, rather than as being ethical-normative concepts tout court.

January 14th: Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer publish “Hegelian Vestiges? Species Being, Alienation, and the Origins of the Marxian Dialectic”. The paper does not respond to those of Lukacs and Cassirer, and it advances a considerably more “Orthodox” understanding of the early Marx’s texts. For Mannheim and Horkheimer, the varieties of “idealist concepts” present in the early Marx manuscripts are in fact subverted, turned “inside-out” and employed for distinctively materialist purposes.

January 16th: Over the objections of the Russian and Greek communities, Richard Haldane orders the vice-roy of the Constantinople International Zone to permit Sultan Mehmed VI to return to Istanbul.

January 17th: Speaking to reporters, Eduard Bernstein explains that he no longer considers himself a revisionist, given the “ample grounding” for ethical socialism to be found in the “recently published texts of Marx.”

January 18th: George Padmore, a trinadarian student at the University of Berlin, takes up work at the anti-colonial committee.

January 20th: Female workers at several major factories in Berlin stage a strike against the exclusion of many women from council elections. In fact, all of the participants in the strike have representation through the worker-councils, but many middle-class - or formerly middle-class - women who primarily work as homemakers do not. The de facto exclusion of middle-class women from the franchise has served as a boon for the RAF, which performs better amongst working-class and male workers. Historians will later point out that the position of middle-class women in Germany is paralleled by that of working-class ones in England.

January 22th: Citing displeasure with their own parties, William Mcadoo, Burton K. Wheeler, William Borah, and Robert M. La Follette announce the formation of the “People’s Party of America”. It will campaign on a populist message that mixes isolationism, labor rights, agricultural protection, trust-busting, anti-British sentiment, and civil libertarianism.

January 26nd: Herbert Hoover shocks his own party by vetoing a bill overhauling the remnants of Bryan-era welfare programs, and the Senate narrowly fails to override it. Although journalists at the time attribute Hoover’s decision to a desire to avoid additional defections to the burgeoning People’s Party, in reality he had decided weeks in advance to veto the bill, which his advisors suggested might destabilize the economy.

January 29th: The Chicago Tribune and New York Times simultaneously publish stories on a secret rendezvous between Hoover and Yukio Otaki in Honolulu which allegedly occurred from the 26th to the 28th. By meeting clandestinely, Hoover had hoped to avoid incurring public displeasure for his diplomacy with the Japanese leader, but the ploy has now disastrously backfired, with both the public and congress demanding information about the meeting.

February 1st: British Parliament passes a bill rescinding the harshest restrictions on trade union activity. Despite a campaign of unprecedented repression against the unions, Britain still has the highest union density in the capitalist world. By relaxing restrictions, Haldane hopes to domesticate and pacify the worker’s movement, though his Tory opponents claim that he is “opening the floodgates” for Bolshevism.

February 5th: Edwin Montagu, the Liberal Secretary of Colonial Affairs, passes away, leaving the seat vacant. Ormsby-Gore will be appointed to fill the vital role.

February 8th: The British Colonial Commission meets under Ormsby-Gore’s new leadership. The new colonial secretary presses for an ambitious plan that will see a little under a third of British-India ceded to the Princely States, and the remainder placed under a single administration. This will involve abolishing the Bombay, Madras, and Bengal Presidencies.

February 12th: After lengthy negotiations over the precise details of its platform, the Communist Party of India is formed in Moscow. Among its founding members are M.N. Roy, Subhas Chandras Bose, and Jawalarlul Nehru.

February 14th: A lecture of Ernst Cassirer at the University of Hamburg is disrupted by a group calling itself the “Revolutionary Committee of Marxist Students”, who declare their intent to expel all “Bourgeois hangers-on” from the university.

February 15th: Writing in the University of Vienna-affiliated journal “Erkennetis”, Rudolf Carnap attempts to show that the thought of the early Marx was merely a “psuedo-hegelian, idealist vestige” superseded by the “scientific, positive socialism” of Capital. Unlike Cassirer, Lukacs, Mannheim, and Horkheimer, he finds nothing of value in these “previously unpublished musings”. Carnap’s reading of the text is later reviewed positively in Vorwarts, the official newspaper of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats.

February 18th: Herbert Hoover speaks before Congress, defending his decision to meet with the Japanese Prime Minister in the interests of “international peace and the containment of Bolshevism”. A vote to censure the president in the house is later narrowly defeated.

February 21st: The yearly income of the average white settler in Algeria surpasses that of metropolitan France. The colony’s economy has been buoyed by the arrival of wealthy French, German, and Italian emigres.

February 24th: International Jewry and the Spread of Global Bolshevism is published in the United States. The feverish text is dictated by a mostly paralyzed Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who will die just a year after its publication. It will nonetheless go on to be a huge sensation, selling over three million copies over the next few years and surviving several court challenges from Jewish civil rights organizations which seek to ban the text.

February 28th: Construction is completed on the New World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan. The 108-story building is the tallest in the world, and will house the offices of many firms trading on the nearby New York Stock Exchange.

March 2nd: The Journal of Marx Studies is established at the University of Leipzig. Although nominally affiliated with the Center for Scientific Sociology, it will serve as a generally neutral platform for the ongoing debate about Marx’s early writings.

March 5th: In a shocking turn of events, Antonio Gramsci, the long-time leader of Italy, is ousted in a leadership election by Palmiro Togliatti, who promises a return to a more Orthodox Marxism, the creation of state-run industries, and a reform of the sclerotic and slow-moving Italian Central government. While Togliatti’s faction is inspired by the economic planning regimes in both Germany and Russia, the allied Bordigists to their left hope for a more thoroughgoing transformation of Italian society, which would include the eventual phasing out of the Italian currency for a system of labour vouchers. Togliatti’s victory is greeted with congratulations in Germany and the Netherlands, both of whose leaders see him as a more congenial figure than the sometimes opportunist Gramsci.

March 7th: Gramsci, technically still the leader of the Italian government, agrees to resign. Togliatti becomes Chairmen the next day, and will call on the various Chambers of Labour to hold new elections.

March 10th: Sun Yat-sen dies at his residence in Nanjing, setting off a leadership crisis in the KMT.

March 11th: Feng Yuxiang, the commander of the National Revolutionary Army, is assassinated under mysterious circumstances. Chiang Kai-shek, the second-in-command, assumes leadership of the National Revolutionary Army.

March 14th: Hu Hanmin, the most prominent right-wing member of the Kuomintang, is placed under house arrest in Nanjing by troops loyal to Chiang.

March 16th: The Italian Chambers of Labour agree to hold simultaneous elections on the 28th. Several anarchist cells in Central Italy engage in strikes protesting this decision, which they consider to be a violation of the “spirit” of Italy’s provisional constitution, which has no mechanism mandating simultaneous elections to the Chambers of Labour.

March 19th: Chen Jiongming condemns the “extra-constitutional” coup of Chiang. He is soon joined by Yan Yangchu and Liao Zhongkai, representatives of the right and center of the Kuomintang. On the 22nd, all three will call for a Kuomintang Congress to determine the next leader of the party, and by extension, China as a whole. Thus far, Wang Jingwei and Jiang Kanghu have remained silent as the leadership struggle unfolds.

March 23rd: The governors of several outlying Chinese Provinces, including Shaanxii, Hunan, and Sichuan, echo the call for a Kuomintang Party Congress and for an immediate investigation into the causes of Feng’s death.

March 25th: Wang Jingwei and Jiang Kanghu publish a document that they allege is the last will of Sun. It condemns the spread of American influence in the Chinese government, and warns against the machinations of Hu and Yan.

March 27th: Lacking the support of most of the party left, Chiang relinquishes his control of Nanjing and agrees to a party congress, to be held next month.

March 28th: Italian elections return mixed results for Togliatti. While the Italian Union of Revolutionary Marxists receives its best results to date, winning control of over half the Chambers of Labour, the ultimate apportionment of delegates prevents them from winning an outright majority in the government.

March 29th: George Bernard Shaw wins a leadership election to the British Labour Party. Shaw, who for some years remained relatively distant from formal politics, earned increasing renown in Labour circles for his opposition to the Great War and his articles and plays denouncing the crackdown on worker’s activism during the great strike of 1919. With Ramsay MacDonald’s leadership largely discredited, Shaw emerged as a compromise candidate between the remaining, moderate trade unionist leadership who hoped to return the party to an adjunct of the Liberals and a revolutionary left hoping to affiliate with IntRevMar.

April 2nd: Ahead of the planned KMT Party Congress, Chiang is placed under arrest pending the ongoing investigation into the death of Feng.

April 5th: George Bernard Shaw comes under attack from the British press for his association with Sidney Webb and Oswald Mosley, two Labour Party members who had spent stints overseas in Vienna and who now serve as advisors for the new Labour Party leader.

April 9th: The Kuomintang Party Congress begins. Over 100 Soviet and American spies, diplomats, and clandestine observers are present. Many delegates will leave the congress far wealthier than they entered it.

April 11th: The Kuomintang Party Congress descends into chaos and in-fighting as Wang Jingwei reads the “Last Will of Sun Yat-sen”. His opponents accuse him of presenting a forgery to the body.

April 12th: A document begins to circulate at the Party Congress which implicates Wang Jingwei and Jiang Kanghu of involvement in Chiang’s coup attempt. Both strenuously deny the charges, but their reputations are damaged.

April 15th: Liao Zhongkai secures enough votes to become the Chairman of the Kuomintang. Liao, who is situated somewhere in the middle of the party, was in charge of its finances, and used this power to channel money from the party’s coffer to potential supporters. Both the Soviets and Americans see reason to trust the man; the former, because of his prior association with Jingwei and Kanghu, and the latter, because of his staunch opposition to Chiang’s coup attempt.

April 16th: Responding to press criticism, Shaw formally repudiates the use of strike action to achieve a revolutionary transformation of society, instead advocating for the achievement of socialism “through the ballot box”. He also commits the Labour Party to “independence” from all foreign organizations, which is widely understood to be a rejection of any association with IntRevMar. Despite this bid for broader public acceptability, Shaw holds fast to the Labour Party’s “minimum programme”, which includes the socialization of heavy industries, mines, and railways, strict neutrality in the on-going global struggle for influence between America, Moscow, and Berlin, and a drastic retrenchment of Britain’s world-wide military presence.

April 23rd: The first of the Anti-Jewish decrees are passed in metropolitan France. The laws cap Jewish participation in the professions, the army, and universities to a level roughly proportionate with their share of the overall population.

April 25th: At a press conference, several Republican Congressmen criticize Hoover for his supposedly “hands-off” policy in the Asia-Pacific region, and press for a more active involvement in Chinese affairs.

April 28th: The Free Society of True Germania is formed in Milwaukee by two dozen right-wing German emigres.

May 1st: On May Day, British Unions begin a five-day general strike in support of universal suffrage. Over two million workers will formally participate in the action, in addition to hundreds of thousands of middle-class suffragettes and casual laborers.

May 2nd: Richard Haldane instructs the police in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham to not interfere with the strike action. Economic activity grinds to a halt in much of England.

May 3rd: Several conservative and liberal backbenchers come out in support of a bill to extend the suffrage. Haldane worries that any further extension of the vote will undermine the Liberals prospects in future elections.

May 5th: The general strike in Britain ends peacefully, with union leaders and Shaw committing to similar strikes in the next two months if a universal suffrage bill is not introduced in Parliament.

May 9th: Palmiro Togliatti and several minor syndicalist parties agree to form a coalition government. Anarchists newspapers warn of a coming assault on the Chambers of Labour.

May 11th: J.M. Keynes’ The Economic and Political Consequences of the War is published in London. Keynes’ warns that Britain’s new status as a borrowing nation has made it overly dependent upon American largesse; should an American administration similar to Bryan’s ever again come into office, Keynes’ writes, Britain would be rendered unable to fund its own continued economic development. He urges that a more active effort be made to pay down domestic loans and re-establish London as a financial rival to New York.

May 14th: Fearing a deterioration of the party’s reputation with the masses, a universal suffrage bill is introduced into Parliament by the Liberal Party. Haldane publicly supports it.

May 17th: The suffrage bill passes parliament and the house of lords, becoming law. Barring a vote of no confidence or the calling of early elections, the next parliamentary election to which it will apply will be in 1929.

May 19th: Ahead of the 1926 mid-term elections, an unprecedented number of Republicans have announced primary challenges to sitting members. This is part of an ongoing struggle for influence within the party between Hoover’s so-called “Internationalist” wing, which favors close relations with Britain and Japan as well as a drawdown of domestic repressive measures, and a “nationalist” faction desirous of increased involvement in China, a more forceful challenge to British trading practices, and greater domestic protection of industry. The Democrats, who have been reduced to a rump in the solid south, have yet to show any signs of revival.

May 22nd: The secretive Redeemed Order of Jesuits is founded in the Sicilian city of Palermo. By the end of the year, it will have branches in over eighteen countries and four continents.

May 24th: To a crowd of over 2,000 students, journalists, and academics, Lukacs, Cassirer, Mannheim, and Carnap meet at the so-called “Munich Summit” to debate the finer points of Marx interpretation.

May 27th: At a party congress, Sverdlov is renominated as leader of the Bolsheviks and announces the beginning of the first five-year plan. Among other goals, the plan aims to increase agricultural production by over 20%, develop the native machine-tools industry, and build up the Soviet Navy, particularly in the Black Sea region but also in the Pacific.

June 3rd: Bombay formally becomes the new capital of the British Raj. The wealthy Indian industrialists of the city had remained loyal throughout the revolution, and will be rewarded with the patronage of the British State. Shortly after the declaration is made, Ormsby-Gore visits Dorabji Tata in a high-profile meeting in Bombay, where they publicly discuss the best means of promoting the new capital.

June 5th: The Indian Communist Party adopts Hindustani as its official language of business.

June 8th: Following another assassination attempt, Yukio Ozaki calls elections to the Japanese Diet, with his populist party winning a super-majority.

June 10th: Ole Hanson, the anticommunist former leader of the NBII, announces that he will be running for a Washington Senate seat under a new, “All-American” ticket.

June 13th: The population of Metropolitan, Fascist France falls below twenty million as those with the means to leave continue to trickle out of the country to England, the United States, Algeria, and even Indochina. De La Rocque, the minister of the interior, will soon institute punitive exit taxes in an attempt to tamp down on emigration.

June 15th: The Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1926 formally grants independence to Egypt, though in reality Britain will still have a veto over foreign policy and certain budgetary decisions.

June 18th: Eduard Bernstein’s right-wing “Free Socialist People’s Party” ramps up its campaigning ahead of elections. Bernstein promises to return “normal, orderly administration” to the Socialist Republic: today, its most famous ad is released, depicting a worker and a politician, declaring “we’ll do our job, because we know you’ll do yours”. Bernstein has long campaigned on reducing the long hours that workers are now required to spend in the worker-councils.

June 20th: The Democratic Farmer-Labor Party agrees to affiliate with the People’s Party of America. Two days later, both Thomas J Walsh and Robert Owen, progressive Democratic Senators from the north, jointly announce they will be joining the People’s Party. With only a handful of Democratic Senators left north of the Mason-Dixon line, its status as a national party is being called into question.

June 23rd: In a surprise move, Peter Gerry, the Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, switches his party affiliation.

June 27th: Ernest Hemingway publishes A Journey into the Black, a dizzying tale of changing and mistaken identities set amidst Berlin’s night-life. It will later be considered one of the great works of interregnum literature.

July 2nd: Bela Kun’s Hungarian government begins deporting Romanian minority rights and independence activists to Soviet Romania. The policy, which will often target entire villages, is carried out in secrecy. Thirty years later, the Hungarian state will issue a formal apology and remuneration for those who could prove they were not involved in counterrevolutionary activities.

July 9th: Walter Benjamin, an itinerant socialist intellectual, has a religious experience while vacationing in the Thuringian country-side, and shortly thereafter converts to Catholicism.

July 26th: The Swiss Socialist-Liberal coalition government establishes the “Swiss National Trading Company”. It will be used to purchase advanced American and British machinery on behalf of their socialist neighbors, often running at a budget deficit.

August 1st: Thorstein Veblen, a heterodox American economist currently in Swedish Exile, publishes The Price of Gold, a groundbreaking article which argues that Britain’s decision to leave the gold standard likely saved it from economic collapse at the end of the Great War. It will be reviewed favourably by J.M. Keynes in England, though it is received poorly in America.

August 6th: Liao Zhongkai relieves Wang Jingwei and Jiang Kanghu of their positions in government, the prelude to a wider-ranging purge against the left-Kmt.

August 9th: During a speech in Madrid, Spanish Dictator Jose Sanjurjo proclaims that the pacification of the Rif has been completed, and asserts Spain’s right to rule over “all of Morocco”, causing a diplomatic incident with England.

August 11th: German steel plants in the Rhine-Ruhr area are forced to slow down production as it becomes clear that a crisis of overcapacity looms.

August 18th: The government of Berlin sponsors the creation of the first “Free Psychoanalytic Institute”, which will offer therapeutic services free of charge to the residents of the city. Within weeks there are lengthy queues to schedule an appointment.

August 26th: The slowdown in steel production begins to be felt in other sectors of the German economy. The major syndicates, cooperatives, and labour confederations in the synthetics, chemical, and textile industries also begin to slow down their production. Prices for kew raw materials and finished capital goods have fallen sharply in the past two weeks. Most worker-councils have determined to shift labour to a part-time basis rather than firing workers.

September 3rd: In German elections, Eduard Bernstein’s Free Socialist Party makes large gains in elections to the People’s Assembly, but only moderate strides in establishing a presence in the worker-councils. Bernstein blames the “opaque and undemocratic” structure of the councils for the mixed result.

September 10th: In All-German Congress elections to the executive committee, the Luxemburgist RAF wins a decisive plurality of votes, despite only having won 27% of the People’s Assembly vote.

September 16th: The Executive Committee re-elects Luxemburg and a Revolutionary Social-Democratic coalition almost identical to the previous one. In the People’s Assembly, meanwhile, a speaker from the People’s Socialist Party is elected. A showdown between Parliament and the Executive Committee looks likely.

September 19th: The American House of Representatives passes legislation to create an International Export and Development Bank, to be capitalized by the Federal Reserve Bank of NY. The Bank will be authorized to provide loans in dollars to America’s main trading partners in South America and East Asia, making it easier for them to move off the gold standard.

September 25th: The first post-war Bayreuth Festival, a week-long celebration of Wagner’s Music, is put on in the leafy suburbs of Waukesha County, Wisconsin. The cream of the crop of Germany’s white emigre community is in attendance, including Thomas Mann, Max Weber, and August von Mackensen.

September 29th: Riding a wave of domestic anti-radical and anti-immigration sentiment, the KKK enrolls its seven millionth member.

October 10th: Austen Chamberlain, the leader of the opposition conservatives, comes out in favor of fixing the pound to a silver-gold hybrid standard, as was done with the Indian rupee for several decades.

October 16th: The Free Socialist People’s Party enters talks with the executive committee; the hope is to exchange the support of the People’s Assembly for seats in a three-way coalition government at the executive level.

October 21st: Amidst the government paralysis in Germany and the potential of a so-called “German Thermidor”, price deflation shows little signs of letting up. Remarkably, unemployment is still below 5%, a testament to both the strengths of the planning system and the resilience of the cooperative sector.

November 2nd: American elections confirm Republican dominance of the party-system. The Democrats are reduced to under 150 seats in the house. In the Senate, all six People’s Party incumbents successfully win their re-election campaign, though the party does not pick up any additional seats. Instead, vote-splitting between the People’s Party and Democratic progressives ensures that several Democratic incumbents in the north who have remained loyal to their party lose their seats. Meanwhile, Ole Hanson, of the far-right anti-communist “All-American Party”, wins a shock upset in a four-way race in Washington, unseating a Republican incumbent. This brings the number of parties in the Senate to four (five, including the People’s Party affiliated DFL).

November 6th: News of the Soviet naval build-up sparks alarms in American papers, and precipitates a debate in the House of Representatives about the cut-backs in Naval spending that followed the Stockholm Congress.

November 9th: German government negotiations deadlock over the issue of constitutional reform. The RAF refuses to reverse legislation passed in the previous year reducing the power of the People’s Assembly, a measure that the People’s Socialist Party has made a condition for its participation in an Executive Committee coalition.

November 13th: Chen Jiongming, the governor of Guangdong Province, assails Liao’s crackdown on the party left and promises to make the province into a place of refuge for dissident voices. More covertly, he begins meeting behind the scenes with the restive governors of China’s western and northern provinces.

November 17th: The writer and publicist Ezra Pound joins a growing American emigre community in the International Concession of Shanghai. The city has become a refuge for conservative, reactionary, and apolitical writers who nonetheless feel the cultural environment of America to be stifling.

November 20th: Indian industrialist Dorabji Tata is appointed as the “provisional mayor” of the city of Bombay, ahead of planned elections next year.

December 1st: Scott K. Fitzgerald’s Among the Ash-heaps and Millionares is published. The novel, set in a Long-Island teeming with foreign millionaires speaking alien languages, will be widely praised for its depiction of an American elite plagued by self-doubt.

December 5th: The cities of Yonkers and Mt. Vernon are formally incorporated into the Bronx Borough of New York. The rapid population growth of the city, spurred on by a metastasizing finance industry and waves of European refugees, has contributed to a drive to enlarge its geographic parameters.

December 9th: Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the embattled World Zionist Congress, meets with Herbert Hoover to discuss the fate of the Zionist project. Hoover, though sympathetic to his concerns about the spread of anti-semitism in America, indicates that he is not receptive to a suggestion that he offer to buy portions of British Palestine to incorporate into an American state.

December 14th: At his second State of the Union Address to Congress, Herbert Hoover restates his internationalist vision of American foreign policy, while also warning against “dark domestic forces” that seek to undermine the American constitutional order from within. Shortly thereafter, he will press for the passing of a bilateral trade treaty with Japan.

December 18th: Germany’s planning bureau and national bank both publish reports advocating for the expansion of welfare programs and the “worker’s rebate”, a subsidy rewarded to those participating in the worker-councils. The theory is that by placing more money in worker’s pockets, demand for civilian goods will be stimulated, allowing for a transition away from an economy dominated by the heavy-industrial sector.