By 1914 a sizeable labour or working-class movement existed in virtually all European countries. Although its politics was for the most part inspired by socialism, socialism was not its necessary precondition. Both within and beyond Europe there would have been an organized labour movement even without socialism. Prior to the First World War, Britain had no significant socialist party. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Japan has emerged as, arguably, the most successful capitalist country of the world, but has so far produced only a weak and ineffectual socialist party.
Contrary to what virtually all socialists believed at the time, there was no necessary causal link between the rise of an organized labour movement and the ideology of socialism. As for the conjunction between socialism and industrialization, this was characteristic of only a fairly limited geographical area: continental Europe. Its subsequent diffusion outside Europe has been confined to countries without a significant industrial base and, hence, without a significant working-class movement (Australia and New Zealand provide the main exceptions). In continental Europe socialism was, so to speak, `captured' by Marxism which, at the turn of the century, dominated the labour movement. I am concerned here not with Marx's Marxism but with the interpretations of his doctrine which came to prevail in the socialist and social-democratic parties, i.e. what is sometime referred as `vulgar Marxism' or the `Marxism of the Second International'. The interpretation of `Marxism' I am interested in is the one which strongly appealed to the leaders of the working-class movement and the activists who followed them. It was obviously a simplified version of Marx's work. Otto Bauer, the main theoretician of what would later be called `Austro-Marxism', was quite candid about the necessity of such adaptation:
The popular rendering of the new doctrine was diffused through the works of Kautsky and Bebel, which were read and distributed more widely than Marx's own works.
In essence, pre-1914 vulgar Marxism, condensed into its essential outline, consisted of the following fairly simple propositions:
The first proposition embraces the Marxist economic theory of exploitation; the second is the so-called materialist conception of history; while the third, not really elaborated by Marx, was the product of the ideas and political practice of the leaders of European socialism (especially in Germany) after Marx's death.
On one level of analysis these propositions express a simple `trinity': (1) a statement on the present: `the existing social order is unfair'; (2) a statement on the future: `the existing social order can be changed'; (3) a strategic statement on the transition from (1) to (2): `fate alone will not bring about this transition, we must organize and act.' Belief in this `trinity' (the religious expression is rather appropriate) is a necessary requirement for any social movement, socialist or otherwise, whose aim is to change the status quo. What gave the socialist movement its winning edge over other rivals within the working-class movement (e.g. anarchism) was that it had more powerful ideas regarding the third proposition of the trinity, the question of `what is to be done?' -- that is, the strategic aspect. Socialism appeared to be better adapted than its rivals to the mode of organization of the working class into ever larger units of production and the forms of combination of workers, such as trade unions. Socialism distinguished itself from potential rivals (such as utopian movements) by looking frankly to the future and not harking back to an idealized past; though as regards the future nothing more definite than vague generalities was ever said about the end of class society and the withering away of the state. Only after the Soviet Revolution would it be possible to point to a model of `actually existing' socialism.
All this was not enough to guarantee the ideological supremacy of socialist ideology within the working-class movement. This supremacy was largely due to the far-sighted political work of socialist activists. Like earlier revolutionaries and reformers they wanted to change society. They believed the fundamental agency of change to be the working class, and in a sense this act of identification was also one of creation. The socialist activists understood, more or less instinctively, that the working class represented a social subject with tremendous political potentialities. In today's language we could say that the great intuition of the first socialist activists was that they had identified a `new political subject' with definite potential aspirations, able to produce a coherent set of political demands for both the short and the long term. If politics is an art, then this was one of its masterpieces. Socialist politics and the socialist movement could comprehend the most varied issues: short-term demands such as an improvement in working conditions; national reforms such as pension schemes; comprehensive schemes such as economic planning and a new legal system; major political changes such as expansion of the suffrage; utopian projects such as the abolition of the state, etc. All these demands could be embodied into a single overarching project in spite (perhaps because) of their contradictory nature.
By thinking of the working class as a political class, ascribing to it a specific politics and rejecting the vaguer categories (`the poor') of earlier reformers, the pioneers of socialism thus virtually `invented' the working class. Those who define, create. `Democratic' politics, that is, modern mass politics, is a battlefield in which the most important move is that which decides what the battle is about, what the issue is. To be able to define the contending parties, name them and thus establish where the barricades should go up, or where the trenches should be dug, gives one a powerful and at times decisive advantage. This is what all major movements for social change have had to do. Although Marxism attempted to elaborate a theoretical definition of the working class -- propertyless producers of surplus separated from the means of production -- in practice this was never seriously used to define the proletariat politically. Self-definition was always more important. For example, on 19 April 1891 in Castelfiorino, a small town in the heart of Tuscany, where the prevailing social group was made up of sharecroppers, a group of `workmen' signed a May Day manifesto in which they invited the local population to join them in a banquet to celebrate May Day, the feast day designated `exclusively' for workers, under the banner of `unity makes us strong'. The workmen who signed this appeal, and who identified themselves completely with the cause of the working class, were not factory workers, producers of surplus value, exploited by capital-owning entrepreneurs. They were a blacksmith, a printer, a bricklayer, a shoe-maker, a carpenter, and so forth. All were self-employed, all were their own bosses, all -- in Marxist terms -- petty bourgeois. Nevertheless, they remained certain that their cause was the same as that of the workers, indeed that they were workers.
To say that the working class was `invented' is not to claim that its members did not exist. Practically `all observers of the working class were agreed that "the proletariat" was very far from being a homogeneous mass, even within single nations.' What existed was a vast array of different occupations ranked by skills, divided by territories, separated by nationalities, often segregated sexually or racially, secluded from each other by religion, traditions, prejudice, constantly reorganized by technological developments. These fragments were given an ideological cohesion and an organizational unity. Class consciousness was constructed by political activists, just as nationalism was constructed by nationalists, feminism by feminists, racism by racists. This process does not, of course, depend solely on activism. For the activists to be successful, they must build on real foundations, not on thin air. The appeal must be recognized and interiorized. As Machiavelli explained, the Prince, to be successful, must rely not only on his own skills, his virtu, but also on objective circumstances, on his fortuna.
If the hegemony achieved by socialism was due in decisive part to its superior understanding of Proposition Three of the `trinity' (strategy), the victory of Marxism in the socialist movement of continental Europe was almost certainly due to its superior handling of Propositions One and Two -- that is, to the fact that it had the best available theory of exploitation and the best available theory of history. These theories gave powerful intellectual backing to the moral outrage arising from the iniquities of capitalism and to the hope that a system which ought to disintegrate would eventually do so. It was important that the theories provided by Marxism should be strong and sophisticated enough to appeal to the intellectual-minded, while being amenable to simplification and diffusion at a mass level by the socialist activists who were the real NCOs of the movement. The fact that the `theory of history' of Marxism (the succession of stages, the inevitability of socialism) could be presented in a positivist light -- that is, as a science on a par with Darwinism -- contributed considerably to its success. Those who detested capitalism could not avoid being encouraged by reading in Kautsky's The Class Struggle that `Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalistic production.' Most radical intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century were totally committed to the positivist notion that the only true knowledge was scientific and that the methods of the natural sciences could be imported into the study of society. They would not have taken so readily to an overtly anti-positivist doctrine.
Of course, the diffusion of Marxism towards the end of the last century was helped by other factors. The prolonged crisis of profitability which caused such doom-laden predictions about the destiny of capitalism between 1873 and 1896 (the putative `Great Depression') encouraged its enemies. However, more important must have been the relative success of socialism in organizing a significant sector of the working class, thereby forcing its opponents to view it seriously or make attempts either to suppress it, or to offer concessions. Often they were forced to do both.
Marxism expanded rapidly throughout the European Left after it became, in 1891, the official ideology of the most successful socialist party of the time, the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). The diffusion of Marxism in the SPD was in part a response to Bismarck's anti-socialist legislation (1878), while its official `adoption' occurred immediately after the German Reich had more or less been forced to withdraw in 1890.
In 1895 Engels congratulated the SPD for the intelligent way in which it used universal (manhood) suffrage (`a new weapon, and one of the sharpest'), resulting in a remarkable expansion of the social-democratic vote: `they have used the franchise in a way which has paid them a thousandfold and has served as a model to the workers of all countries.' `The irony of world history turns everything upside down,' Marx's old friend added. `We the "revolutionaries", the "rebels" -- we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt.'
The success of the SPD had been decisive. It initiated a phase in which most European socialist parties were formed and expanded rapidly. Most were founded between 1890 and 1900, but their electoral strength varied considerably. Neither the date of creation of the socialist party, nor its electoral strength correlates with the level of industrialization or the size of the working-class electorate. In fact, the statistical correlation is negative (see Table 1.1). Italy's socialist party, established in 1892, had conquered one-fifth of the electorate by 1904, while Great Britain, with a far stronger industrial base, a more developed and more ancient trade union movement, had no significant socialist party until 1900 (or even 1918) and its pre-1918 electoral peak was a paltry 7 per cent (1910). Clearly, a more important determinant of electoral strength than the level of industrialization was the introduction of universal manhood suffrage or competition from parties which could, conceivably, promote some of the demands of the working class (e.g. the British Liberals). This suggests that the key factors in the development of socialist parties were political, rather than social or economic. Table 1.1 gives a general comparative perspective of the expansion of socialist parties before 1918.
Notes: (a) In the German-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (roughly corresponding to modern Austria). (b) Some double votes. (c) In 1905 various socialist groupings formed the SFIO. (d) Suffrage was granted to men and women, thus making Finland the first country in Europe to achieve true universal suffrage even though it was a Grand Duchy of the Tsar. (e) Year in which the Social-Democratic Workers' Party (the so-called Eisenachers), led by W. Liebnecht and A. Bebel, joined forces with the General Association of German Workers (which had been founded by Lassalle) to form the SPD. (f) The 1912 law enfranchised all men over 30, all those who completed military service and all literate men over 21. (g) Those in receipt of public assistance could not vote. (h) Women over 30 were enfranchised if they (or their husbands) were householders. Note that the 1884 legislation enfranchised five-sixths of the adult male population.
Sources: Year of foundation of the various socialist parties and organizations in Stefano Bartolini, `I primi movimenti socialisti in Europa. Consolidamento organizzativo e mobilitazione politica', in Rivista italiana di scienza politica, Vol. XXIII, no. 2, August 1993, p. 245. Electoral data in Thomas T. Mackie and Richard Rose, The International Almanac of Electoral History, Macmillan, London 1974. Data on industrial workforce in Peter Flora et al., State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975. A Data Handbook, Campus Verlag, Macmillan Press and St James Press, Frankfurt, London and Chicago 1987, Vol. 2, chapter 7.
The `hegemonic' role of the German SPD in the European socialist movement cannot be attributed solely to its great electoral success. As the figures show, the socialist parties of Belgium, Sweden, Finland and Denmark were as strong or stronger than the SPD; but parties in small and politically peripheral countries can never hope to play an international role. Had the first communist revolution occurred in, say, Bulgaria, it would never have become the first great international model for the construction of socialism even if it had, improbably, survived. This is not to deny the important role the Swedish `model' of socialism or the Cuban `model' of communism have played in their respective geographical areas.
The emergence of the SPD as the key party of the Second International was due to a unique combination of circumstances: the SPD operated in what was by then the strongest country in Europe, having more steel and more soldiers than Britain. Germany thus became a `model' of development for other countries. Culturally, and especially in the social sciences and philosophy, Germany had no rivals. The SPD was unquestionably the best organized socialist party in Europe. It was electorally stronger than most other socialist parties at an earlier stage; in fact, in the same year as the Reichstag refused to renew the anti-socialist laws (1890), the SPD had become, in percentage terms, the largest party in Germany (due to the first-past-the-post system, it became the first party in the Reichstag with 110 seats only in 1912). The rapid development of the SPD as a mass party was not only due to the ability of its leaders or the size of the working class. Its mass basis was connected to specific German factors which also led to the formation of a mass party of the Catholics, the Zentrumspartei (Centre Party). Both these parties `considered themselves largely outside the course of political life in Imperial Germany'. By 1914 the SPD had one million members, but the Centre Party was not far behind with 850,000. By contrast, the French SFIO was not a mass party; but then there were no mass parties in France.
During the period of anti-socialist legislation many of its leaders and intellectuals operated from Zurich, which was then the foremost meeting place for exiled radical students and thinkers from the Tsarist Empire, from the Balkans and even from the USA. They were thus ideally situated for an accelerated diffusion of SPD ideas. Zurich is where Karl Kautsky had moved in 1880. There he started working with Eduard Bernstein who, in 1881, became the editor of the SPD's monthly, the Sozialdemocrat. The programme of the SPD, the Erfurt Programme, jointly drafted by Kautsky and Bernstein and adopted in 1891, became one of the most widely read texts of socialist activists throughout Europe. Kautsky's commentary, The Class Struggle, was translated into sixteen languages before 1914 and became the accepted popular summa of Marxism. Editor-in-chief and founder of Neue Zeit, the monthly theoretical organ of the SPD, Kautsky enjoyed incomparable prestige and was much admired by Lenin. As Haupt has written: `In Budapest, Kautsky was called "the revered old master", and the further one went into South Eastern Europe, the more admiration turned into infatuation and even into a cult.'
Most social-democratic parties were created after the German SPD and followed its lead as a `model' -- for instance, the Austrian (1889), the Swedish (1889) and the Swiss parties (1888). At its Tenth Congress (25-26 March 1894), the Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB) adopted the Charte de Quaregnon, a programme drafted by Emile Vandervelde, which would remain its basic manifesto until the end of the following century. It was as influenced by German social democracy as by French radicalism. It began with a general statement of values, rather than with a Marxist-style analysis of capitalist society as did the Erfrut Programme. Its Walloon members were particularly influenced by the French revolutionary tradition of Fourier, Blanc and Proudhon. The fundamental trait which united this party was a staunch anti-clericalism. This led Belgian social democracy, after the war, to forge links with the pro-capitalist Liberal Party, otherwise quite distant (especially in economic policy), while confessional Christian parties (especially in Flanders) developed a social outlook and a solid base in the working class. The Norwegian Labour Party (founded in 1887) -- like its Danish counterpart -- took its programme straight from the SPD. Even the Finnish Social-Democratic Party, which might have been expected to be somewhat influenced by Russian Marxism (Finland being under the rule of the Tsar), drew its main inspiration from the Germans. The small parties of south-east Europe were the most loyal disciples of the SPD. Their socialist intellectuals, seduced by the scientific claims of Marxism, were attracted by the rigorous exposition of it provided by Kautsky's SPD.
There are good reasons why the French socialists could not offer a model to rival the SPD, in spite of the French revolutionary tradition. They were weak in theory and organizationally divided. The painful and difficult revival of working-class activity in France after the crushing of the Paris Commune, and the persecutions which followed, failed to help the socialist movement to cohere and develop.
French socialism was chronically split along organizational and ideological lines. There was little ground between the followers of Fourier (utopian socialists), Saint-Simon (technocrats), Louis Blanc (reformists) and Auguste Blanqui (insurrectionists). By 1911 France had only one million organized workers, while the German and British trade unions had around three million members. The real `magnetic pole' (both repelling and attracting) round which the French socialist party eventually emerged was the Parti Ouvrier Francais (POF), founded in 1879 by Jules Guesde with a vulgarized Marxism as its guide and German social democracy as its model. Other tendencies joined forces with it under the banner of the SFIO (Section Francaise de l'Internationale Ouvriere). To the `Guesde-style' Marxism, with its emphasis on the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state, was added the French revolutionary tradition, with its pronounced distrust of organization, strong taste for direct democracy and virulent anti-clericalism.
The outlook of the two main figures of the new socialist party, Guesde and Jean Jaures, differed sharply in many respects, though, like many French socialists, they had both come to politics through the ranks of free-thinking (and Freemason) radicalism. Jaures had been a dreyfusard, while Guesde and his POF remained neutral during the entire Dreyfus affair on the grounds that this was merely a dispute within the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Unlike Guesde, Jaures felt that socialism had to be adapted to `our political and economic conditions, to the traditions, ideas and spirit of our country'. Only after it had become organizationally united as a single party under Jaures did French socialism acquire some standing vis-a-vis its more influential German `rival'. Such prestige owed more to its being French than to its effective strength: unlike the SPD, the SFIO was organized on a local basis, had no factory groups and was more an electoral front than a party. Factionalism was so rife that the first law on workers' pensions was supported by twenty-five socialist deputies (led by Jaures), while twenty-seven opposed it, and the rest (including Guesde and Vaillant) abstained.
In these years French socialism made no contribution to Marxism at all; few of Marx's works had been translated and the socialist press hardly ever discussed them. It was its lack of theoretical distinction which prevented the expansion of French socialism even into countries profoundly influenced by French culture, such as Romania. Why France, which has contributed so much to political thought, did not produce Marxist theorists of any calibre, not even of the level of Kautsky and Bernstein, is an unanswered question. Some argue that an obstacle to the diffusion of Marxism was that it gave excessive priority to the factory proletariat; this could not appeal to the largely urban petty bourgeoisie and craft artisans who still made up the French `working class'. However, as we have seen, the fact that Italy was even less developed than France did not prevent the development of a thriving Italian Marxism. There is no strong correlation between theoretical and economic developments. Others suggest that French Marxists were disadvantaged because -- unlike those of Germany -- they had to compete with a vibrant radical republican tradition. However, on the same grounds Britain -- as deprived as Germany -- should have produced leading Marxist theorists. Portelli has argued that the weakness was due to the organizational split between the SFIO and the trade unions (the CGT). That being deprived of a union base leads to theoretical weakness remains to be proven. This, however, highlights one of the most striking specificities of the French Socialist Party: it never had any close links with the trade unions because the CGT, imbued with revolutionary syndicalism, had rejected formal links with organized political parties.
In spite of this, elsewhere in Southern Europe the French pattern (though not necessarily French socialist thought) did have some importance. In Spain the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE), founded in 1879, was heavily influenced by Guesdism, taken to be orthodox Marxism. Revolutionary rhetoric, as usual, gave way to practical reformism, especially after the success in the municipal elections of 1890 and the parliamentary elections of 1910 (in alliance with the republicans). Like the French party (but unlike the Italian), the PSOE would never produce a socialist thinker of any stature. In fact, the Marxist parties of the Second International were not, on the whole, led by intellectuals and paid little attention to theorists. Outside the German-speaking world and the Russian empire, socialist leaders were content with reproducing the main tenets of the doctrine.
Italian socialism, however, did produce a notable thinker, Antonio Labriola. But his influence on the new socialist party, founded in Genoa in 1892, was minimal, which is probably why he refused to join it. There were deep cultural differences between him and most of the socialist leadership group around Filippo Turati. Labriola was a southern intellectual, whose theoretical mentors were Hegel and Herbart, while Turati and company were pragmatic northerners and convinced positivists (Labriola held the not unreasonable view that modern positivism was a form of bourgeois cretinism), who took their lead from the German socialists. Labriola understood the prominence of the `Southern Question'. The others, like their bourgeois opponents, did not.
As elsewhere, the main disputes within the party arose not from theoretical questions, but from practical issues and particularly whether socialists should co-operate with non-socialist forces in order to extract reforms and concessions. At the Eighth Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (1904), the majority motion declared: `the class struggle does not permit supporting any governmental initiative or sharing in political power.' In reality, Italian socialists co-operated in varying degrees with other parties. The justification was that the peculiar complexity of the Italian social structure (backwardness of the south, feudal residues, divisions within the other classes, the radical nature of some segments of the petty bourgeoisie, etc.) was such that a totally intransigent line was unrealistic. This appeal to an alleged Italian specificity runs throughout the history of the Italian Left.
The political strategy of Italy's ruling class and its ablest leader, Giovanni Giolitti, included attempting to involve the socialists in the existing system of power. This could be achieved by adopting some of the `more reasonable' (Giolitti's words) aspects of the socialist party's minimum programme, as well as abandoning repression. A similar tactic of co-optation (what Antonio Gramsci would later call a `passive revolution') had been tried by other far-sighted representatives of the bourgeois order: Bismarck, Disraeli and Gladstone. What was special about the Italian case was that its bourgeoisie was chronically weak and internally divided. Thus it could not hope to co-opt the labour movement by welfare policies (like the British Liberals), or by anti-clerical radical politics (like the French). The socialists could not openly accept Giolitti's deal: they were not strong enough to compromise effectively. But they were not weak either: underdeveloped Italy could boast a socialist party with three million votes, an unusually strong influence, comparatively speaking, among land labourers, a well-developed complex network similar to that of the SPD and, unlike the British and French Left, trade unions, Chambers of Labours, case del popolo or `people's homes', and co-operatives, in addition to a flourishing `municipal socialism' which led to the conquest, by 1914, of major cities such as Bologna and Milan.
Practically every section of the European Left could invoke some national peculiarity to explain its own deviancy from what was thought to be the norm. Marx's analysis of capitalism provided an abstract model of which all capitalist countries were but an approximation, and the socialist movement had produced a number of demands uniformly applicable to all countries such as the eight-hour day (which in turn assumed standardization of labour) and universal suffrage. But no existing country was purely capitalist and no socialist movement could have emerged fully armed and fully grown outside the specific national tradition which, in reality, had shaped it. Thus, in the world of the empirical as opposed to that of the theoretical, deviancy and abnormality were the norm. Europe was full of special cases. Germany was not the only one to have had a Sonderweg; the English were not alone in musing on their peculiarities.
While the Italians were preoccupied with proclaiming their peculiarities at every congress, the Finns might well have pointed out that their socialist party was largely developed from a temperance movement which at the beginning of the century still had a larger mass base than the party. Furthermore, the Finnish Social Democratic Party, although formally adhering to the strictest of Marxist views and incorporating all the concrete demands of the SPD Erfurt Programme into its own, never discussed the major issues of interest to European Marxists such as militarism; war and imperialism. It was in fact a party of agrarian socialism: at the first general election (1907) it obtained a higher percentage of the rural vote (38 per cent) than of the urban (34 per cent).
The leading candidate for the position of `most anomalous Left' in Europe was and has perhaps remained the British. Prior to 1914, socialism itself did not achieve much popularity among the working class and it took longer to become accepted as the ideology of the labour movement than anywhere else in Europe. Those who were in favour of socialism were reluctant to call themselves socialists for fear of being unpopular. Thus the first socialists, who were overwhelmingly middle-class and included some notably eccentric characters, remained few and their organizations tiny, in spite of powerful trade unions (which were led, on the whole, by non-socialist trade unionists of impeccable proletarian extraction). H. M. Hyndman, a stockbroker, started the Democratic Federation in 1881 on `Marxist' lines. Hyndman himself was a jingoist, an anti-Semite and an imperialist. This did not prevent his group from becoming Britain's first socialist party in 1884 when it changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). It achieved very little other than providing a training for a succession of gifted working-class activists -- an achievement not to be disparaged -- and acting as the main progenitor of the British Communist Party. William Morris, the wealthy writer and artist, had joined Hyndman at first, but then left to found the Socialist League, an organization which did not survive Morris's death in 1896. The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, was an entirely middle-class intellectual organization which drew its main inspiration from the British radical utilitarian tradition, was never Marxist and opposed the formation of an independent socialist party. The report it presented to the 1896 Congress of the International (drafted by George Bernard Shaw) asserted that the Society cared `nothing by what name any party calls itself, or what principles, Socialist or other, it professes, but [has] regard solely to the tendency of its actions, supporting those which make for Socialism and Democracy, and opposing those which are reactionary', thus siding explicitly with those socialists who were prepared to support progressive `bourgeois' reforms. Like Bernstein (who was certainly influenced by the Fabians, and formulated his so-called `revisionism' while living in London between 1888 and 1901), they did not believe in any inevitable collapse of capitalism: `The Fabian Society therefore begs those Socialists who are looking forward to a sensational historical crisis, to join some other Society.' The Scottish Labour Party, founded by the miner Keir Hardie in 1888, was not at first socialist. It was one of the constituent groups of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), at whose founding conference (1893) a proposal to include the term socialist in the title was rejected, because it was felt that neither the electorate nor the trade unions would approve.
In 1900 the unions, together with the ILP, the SDF and the Fabians, set up the Labour Representation Committee: `Yet the trade unionists who accepted the LRC were in the main at heart still Liberals not socialist.' It was not until February 1918 that a Labour Party was constituted on a solid national basis with an unambiguously socialist, though appropriately vague, indication of the final aim of the movement: `To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service' -- the famous fourth paragraph of Clause Four of the party statute drafted by Sidney Webb. It was only then that the British labour movement entered the mainstream of European socialism. Its singularity was that, while its continental counterparts had revolutionary goals co-existing with a reformist practice, the Labour Party was born with reformist goals. It adopted the post-capitalist aim of common ownership in 1918 partly as a radical response to the birth of Soviet communism, partly as an afterthought.
The prestige of German social democracy meant that its internal theoretical disputes would be a matter for debate throughout European socialism just as, years later, the internal vicissitudes of the Bolsheviks would have a correspondingly wide impact on the rest of the international communist movement. The co-ordinates of `vulgar' Marxism delineated at the beginning of this chapter define in rough outline Kautsky's Marxism, i.e. the ruling orthodoxy. Bernstein's challenge occurred at precisely the moment when the SPD had successfully emerged from the period of anti-socialist legislation and was developing into a formidable force in German politics. Bernstein's position, expressed between 1896 and 1898 in articles in Neue Zeit (published in 1899 in Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, `The preconditions for socialism and the tasks of social democracy'; the title of the English edition was Evolutionary Socialism), advanced a substantial modification of hitherto existing socialist positions, on the grounds that capitalism had reached a new stage which had not been foreseen by Marx. This situation required not just adaptation of the current doctrine, but a drastic change.
Bernstein's denunciation of armed struggle was not the main focus of his attack on orthodoxy. Far more important was his critique of the two theses which were closely associated with Kautsky's Marxism and which were pivotal to the Erfurt Programme, namely the `collapse theory' and the `pauperization thesis'.
What was particular about the new stage of capitalism? The system, claimed Bernstein, had developed a structure capable of self-regulation; in other words, it was able to avoid crises. Secondly, the development of parliamentary democracy enabled the working class to struggle against the bourgeoisie in conditions of legality and equality; power could thus be achieved peacefully and within the existing state. Finally, Bernstein identified new tendencies: the development of a complex banking system, the growth of monopolies (cartels), and the vast development in communications. He noted that even though there was a growing concentration in the industrial, distribution and agricultural sectors, there was also a parallel expansion of small and medium-sized firms everywhere in Western Europe and North America, contrary to what Marxist doctrine had projected. There was also a growth of intermediate social groups -- which, he claimed, had a stabilizing function -- rather than a rapid polarization of society.
Bernstein further maintained, wrongly, as it turned out, that capitalism had somehow succeeded in avoiding crises: `Signs of an economic world-wide crash of unheard-of violence have not been established, nor can one describe the improvement of trade in the intervals between the crises as particularly short-lived.' The expansion of international trade, the growth in communication and the improvement in transportation increased the chance of avoiding prolonged economic disequilibria. It was Bernstein's view that the great wealth of European industrial states, the flexibility of credit systems and the birth of industrial cartels had the effect of restricting the impact of local crises, making future economic crises unlikely.
(C) 1996 Donald Sassoo All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-56584-373-8
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