August Bebel (1840–1913)

Activist of the German and the international workers’ movement; one of the founders of the Union of German Workers’ Associations; one of the founders and leaders of the Second International.

Bebel was born on 22 February 1840, in a suburb of Cologne, Germany. He led a vagrant life without permanent job during his childhood. In 1861, Bebel joined Leipzig Workers’ Educational Association. In August 1865, he met Wilhelm Liebknecht and became a socialist under his influence and assistance. In 1866, he founded the Saxon People’s Party with Liebknecht and joined the First International. In 1867, Bebel served as chairman of the Union of German Workers’ Associations and prompted it to join the First International in 1868. In 1869, he co-founded the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (the Eisenachers) with Wilhelm Liebknecht, became one of its founders and leaders, and became one of the founders of Der Sozialdemokrat and waged a struggle against the Lassalleans. During the Franco-Prussian War, he stood for proletarian internationalism, used the parliamentary rostrum to oppose the Bismarck government’s policy of invasion and annexation, and supported the revolutionary cause of the Paris Commune. In 1872, he was sentenced to imprisonment for two years for his struggle against militarism, and was released in April 1875. In 1880, Bebel attended the secret congress of the Social Democratic Party in Switzerland to revise the Gotha Programme. At the end of the 1880s, he actively devoted himself to the founding work of the Second International, was a delegate to the International Socialist Workers’ Congress in 1889, 1891 and 1893, and became a famous social activist of the Second International. In the 1890s and early 1900s, he actively participated in the struggle against reformism and revisionism. Bebel also opposed imperialist wars of aggression and severely condemned the crimes of the Eight-Nation Alliance in invading China.

The chief works of August Bebel in his life are Woman and Socialism, My Life, etc. Bebel was adept at applying the principles of historical materialism to analyze and study a variety of historical and practical questions, especially the relationship between women’s emancipation and proletarian revolution. He held that in order to fundamentally change the status quo of proletarian women, it was necessary to radically change the existing state system and its social organization. During his tenure as chairman of the Party executive committee, he criticized Bernstein’s revisionism and defended the Party’s scientific-socialist theoretical foundations. After Marx and Engels, the two revolutionary mentors of the proletariat, departed from this life one after another, Bebel always stood for the cause of the emancipation of the working class and made great contributions to the emancipation of the working class, and was a friend and comrade-in-arms of Marx and Engels. Bebel died in August 1913 in Zurich, Switzerland.