Social Democracy
In 1875 Bernstein the Gotha Conference at which the Eisenachers united with the Lassalleans to form what was to become the German Social Democratic Party.
For Engels, the danger was that a concentration on peaceful parliamentary activity might cause Social Democrats to forget their revolutionary objective.
In 1890 Bismarck fell from power. The Social Democrats got almost 1,5 million votes in the Reichstag elections. Erfurt Conference was held in 1891. The new party programme which the conference eventually accepted has been drafted mainly by Kautsky and Bernstein.
Until 1897 Bernstein concluded that the main point on which Marx was not right was his theory that the capitalist economy, driven by its own inner contradictions, would inevitably founder, thus providing the occasion for the revolutionary proletariat to seize political power and establish a socialist order of society.
Bernstein was what Hyndman liked to call a ‘gas and water’ socialist. He was not inclined to state or society management of economy and he believed that the individual is responsible for his own welfare. Socialist should take a constructive view on possibilities of trade unions, cooperative societies and local governments institutions. The objective of cooperative activity in these various organizations should be, not the class interest of the proletariat, but “the common good”.
Scientific socialism. Any science has pure and applied part. The pure is constant, universally valid. The applied consists of propositions which are generated by applying the principles of pure science to particular sets of circumstances. These propositions are valid as long as the circumstances remain unchanged.
For Marx and Engels it was the dialectical character which made their theory scientific rather than ideological. For them revolution was a structured feature of the bourgeois order of society. If the party decided to represent other classes as well it would acquire a different class interest and therefore cease to be revolutionary.
Liebknecht put it at the Erfurt Conference: “What is revolutionary lies, not in the means, but in the end.” The notion of the final goal was therefore central to the way German Marxists in the 1890s understood their political activity. It united revolutionary theory with day-to-day practice. Bernstein on the other hand said in 1898 that this goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to him, the movement is everything.
Socialism was the legitimate heir of liberalism for Bernstein.
In 1920 the party suffered an electoral setback, and Bernstein became a member of the commission appointed to redraft the party’s programme. The resulting Gorlitz Programme of 1921 abandoned much of the Marxist analysis embodied in the Erfurt Programmes of 1891 and was widely regarded as owing much to Bernstein’s influence. The Heidelberg Programme of 1925 restored most of the basic principles of Erfurt. In 1928 Bernstein retired from active politics, and in 1932 he died.
The basic tenets of Marxist socialism
The taking of political power cannot be achieved without political rights, and the most important tactical problem which Social Democracy has to solve at the present is the best way to extend the political and industrial rights of the German working man.
The pure part of the science of Marxism is based on historical materialism and the general theory of class conflict. According to the materialist theory, matter moves of necessity in accordance with certain laws; there is therefore no cause without its necessary effect and no event without a material cause. The application of materialism to the interpretation of history therefore means asserting, from the onset, the necessity of all historical events and developments.
Modern society is much richer than earlier societies in ideologies which are not determined by economics or by nature working as an economic force.
The starting point of the class conflict between capitalists and workers is the conflict of interests which results from the use which the former make of the latter’s labour. The investigation of this process of utilization leads to the theory of value and of the production and appropriation of surplus value.
The capitalist can achieve a reduction in costs in three ways: by lowering wages, by increasing the hours of work, or by raising the productivity of labor.
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes.
Marxism and the Hegelian dialectic
Various authors have characterized Hegelian philosophy as a reflex of the great French revolution.
In Germany, Marx and Engels, working on the basis of the radical Hegelian dialectic, arrived at a doctrine very similar to Blanquism.
In the modern socialist movement, we can distinguish two main streams. The one starts from the proposal for reform worked out by socialist thinkers and is in the main aimed at construction, the other derives its inspiration from popular revolutionary upheavals and is in the main aimed at destruction. Marx’s theory tried to combine the essentials of both streams.
All indications are that, in advanced European countries, a political revolution which would initially bring a radical bourgeois party to power is a thing of the past.
Engels, in the preface to The Class Struggles, extolled universal suffrage and parliamentary activity with unprecedented emphasis as means to the emancipation of the workers and dismissed the idea of seizing power by revolutionary assaults.
The material basis of the socialist revolution remains unexamined; the old formula, appropriation of the means of production and exchange, reappears unchanged.
The great illusion of Hegelian dialectic is that it is never entirely in the wrong.
The economic development of modern society.
Surplus value is, according to Marx’s theory, the pivot of a capitalist society’s economy.
In the capitalist world, profit and rent are, for Adam Smith, constituent elements of value in addition to labour, that is wages.
The surplus product is increasing everywhere; but the ratio of its increase to the increase of wages-capital is, at present, declining in the most advanced countries.
A scientific basis for socialism or communism can not be built just on the fact that the wage labourer does not receive the full value of the product of his labour.
The rate of the profit is the incentive for the productive use of capital.
The prospect of socialism depend not on the decrease but on the increase of social wealth.
What Marx said is true: the growth of capital means the growth of production. Property is property, whether fixed or movable. A share is not only capital, it is capital in its most perfect, one could say its most sublime, form.
In Prusia in 1895, 38 per cent of industrial workers belonged to large-scale industry. In France industry represented only 25.9 per cent.
Only very small businesses decline both absolutely and relatively.
Agriculture shows either a standstill or an actual decline in the size of enterprises. In GB around 27 to 28 per cent of agricultural land is in large holding. And in GB the proportion is greater than in Germany.
Crises are always prepared by a period in which wages generally rise, and the working class actually does receive a greater share in the part of the annual product destined for consumption.
Miss Luxemburg tells us that credit aggravates the contradiction between the mode of production and the mode of exchange stretching production to the maximum while paralyzing exchange at the slightest pretext.
Overproduction is to a certain extent unavoidable. However, overproduction in individual industries does not mean general crises.
Credit nowadays is subject not to more but to the fever of the contractions that lead to a general paralysis of production.
Protective tariffs are not a product of the economy but an intervention in the economy by political authorities seeking to bring about economic effects.
Perhaps nothing has contributed so much to the mitigation of business crises, or to the prevention of their increase, as the fall in rents and food prices.
The tasks and opportunities of Social Democracy
The most precise characterisation of socialism will be the one that takes the idea of cooperation as its starting point, because the idea expresses simultaneously an economic and a legal relationship.
We identify forms of society not according to their technological or economic foundations but according to the basic principle of their legal institutions. This fits in with the characterisation of socialism as a movement towards, or the state of, a cooperative order of society.
What are the preconditions for the realization of socialism?
The first precondition of the general realization of socialism we have a certain level of capitalist development, and as a second, we have the exercise of political power by the class party of the workers, Social Democracy.
The material precondition for the socialization of production and distribution, the advanced centralization of industry, is only partly achieved.
For the second precondition, one question is, what is modern proletariat? If it include the ones without property, who derived no income from property, then it does certainly constitute the absolute majority of the population of the advanced countries.
The industrial workers are everywhere a minority of the population. The proposition that industrial workers yearn for socialist production is also, for the most part, an assumption rather than an established fact.
The socialist vote expresses primarily a vague demand rather than a definite intention.
There can surely be no dispute that an immediate takeover of the total production and distribution of products by the state is out of the question.
In Marxist literature, the question of the effectiveness of cooperatives has hitherto been treated in a very cursory fashion. For all socialists of the 1860s, real cooperatives were cooperatives for production, and consumers’ associations were at best part of the bargain. However, it was precisely the producers’ cooperatives founded in the 1860s that failed nearly everywhere. It was consumers’ cooperatives that in the course of time really proved to be an economic force.
Dr. Franz Oppenheimer introduced into the classification of cooperatives the distinction in principle between associations for buying and associations for selling.
Everyone consumes, but not everyone produces.
What society itself cannot manage, whether at the national or the local government level, it would be wise to leave to the enterprise itself to handle, especially in troubled times.
In short, cooperative production will be a reality, though probably not in the forms imagined by the first theorists of the cooperative movement. At present, it is still the most difficult way to actualize the idea of cooperation.
The use of mechanical power, the procuring of credit, a more secure market – the cooperative can make all this available to the peasant.
For the industrial worker, however, cooperatives offer the possibility of, on the one hand, counteracting commercial exploitation and, on the other, raising the resources which in various ways smooth the path of liberation.
Just as consumers’ cooperatives are concerned with the rate of profit in trade, so trade unions are concerned with the rate of profit in production.
An increase in the cost of human labour produces, in most cases, either technological improvement and better organization of industry or a more equitable division of the proceeds of labour. Both are advantageous to general well-being. With certain limitations.
The trade unions are the democratic element in industry. The Theory and Practice of the British Trade Union from Sydney and Beatrice Webb is a good book about it.
Democracy is the state of society in which no class has a political privilege which is opposed to the community as whole. Nowadays we find the oppression of a minority by the majority undemocratic, although it was originally held to be quite consistent with government by the people. Democracy is the abolition of class government, although it is not yet the actual abolition of classes.
All the practical activity of Social Democracy is aimed at creating the circumstances and conditions which will enable and ensure the transition from the modern social order to a higher one – without convulsive upheavals.
Social Democracy does not want to break up civil society and make all its members proletarians together; rather, it ceaselessly labours to raise the worker from the social position of proletarian to that of a citizen (burger) and thus to make citizenship universal. For Social Democracy, the defense of civil liberty has always taken precedence over the fulfillment of any economic postulate.
Nothing is more harmful to the healthy development of democracy than enforced uniformity and excessive protectionism.
There is no middle course; the commune must be sovereign or only a branch (of the state) – everything of nothing. The local community is an integrated part of the nation and therefore has duties toward it as well as rights in it.
What we call the bourgeoisie is a very complex class consisting of all kinds of groups with diverse or differing interests.
Nearly everywhere it took force to destroy feudalism with its rigid corporate institutions. The liberal institutions of modern society differ from these precisely in being flexible and capable of change and development. They do not need to be destroyed; they need only to be further developed.
Democracy is a precondition of socialism to a much greater degree than is often supposed, that is, it is not only the means but also the substance.
Simply demanding state maintenance for all the unemployed means giving, not only those who cannot find work, but also those who refuse to look for work, access to the public trough.
The total disintegration of nations is not an attractive prospect and it, in any case, not to be expected in the foreseeable future.
Though the worker is not yet a full citizen, he is not so bereft of rights that national interests are of no importance to him.
I regard it as a legitimate objective of German imperial policy to ensure that the voice of Germany is heard; and I do not regard it as the business of Social Democracy to oppose the appropriate measures as a matter of principle.
The question as to whether Germany needs colonies at present can with good reason be answered in the negative, particularly with regard to those colonies still to be obtained.
Higher civilization has ultimately a higher right. It is not conquest but the cultivation of the land that confers an historical right to its use.
The great growth of Social Democracy in the eight years since the Erfurt Programme was drawn up, its effect on domestic politics of Germany, as well as the experience gained from other countries, have made a closer consideration of: the agrarian question, questions of municipal politics, the cooperative questions, and various questions of industrial law; unavoidable.
To what extent Social Democracy should give assistance to the peasant as such, that is, as an independent agricultural entrepreneur, against capitalism.
I regard democracy, combined with the effects of the great revolution in communication and transport, as a more powerful instrument for the emancipation of the agricultural labourer than the technological changes in the peasant economy.
I think that the main current duties of Social Democracy with regard to the agricultural population fall into three groups:
- Opposition to all remaining remnants and supports of land-owning feudalism and the fight for democracy in municipality and province.
- Protection and relief for the agricultural working class.
- Opposition to the absolutism of property and the encouragement of cooperation.
Final goal and movement
People are rarely prepared to take full account of the significance of the changes that have taken place in the preconditions of their traditions. Usually they prefer to take in only change vouched for by undeniable facts and then to bring them as far as possible into harmony with traditional slogans. The method is called pettifogging, and the verbal result is, as a rule, cant. Every nation, every class, and every group united by doctrine, or interest has its own cant.
My proposition ‘that what is usually termed the final goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything’ has often been seen as a rejection of every definite goal of the socialist movement and Mr. George Plekhanov has even discovered that I have quoted this famous sentence from the book Towards Social Peace by Gerhard von Schulze-Gavernitz. Plehanov marks me as the opponent of scientific socialism. Scientific socialism, if ever the word, science, has been degraded to pure cant, this is a case in point.
One can be in the right against Marx without being his equal in knowledge and intelligence. Marx with all his knowledge was still a prisoner of the doctrine.
Despite the great progress which the working class had made on the intellectual, political, and industrial fronts since the time when Marx and Engels were writing, I still regard it as being, ever today, not yet sufficiently developed to take over political power.
For Social Democracy there can be no question of going back to all the socio-political views and opinions of a Friderich Albert Lange.
