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Social democracy

We should reflect on the origins and history of social democracy and its debilitating consequences on our class.

By the year 1850 the Communist Manifesto had just appeared, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It had shown at the level of theory that the working class could effect its own emancipation from wage slavery. At the same time, engineers and other skilled workers were showing for the first time anywhere in the world that organised workers could be a match for any employer. In Britain the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was formed as a national union in 1851. The conclusion should have been obvious: use the practical strength to achieve the theoretical goals.

Yet within a few decades, what had happened? The German workers’ party – the largest Marxist party in the world – was bargaining away its principles in merger negotiations with another party at its congress in the town of Gotha in 1875. It united with the Lassallean faction, adopting a programme limited to obtaining concessions from the government. Meanwhile in Britain, it was being proclaimed that the future lay solely with “new unionism”, the organisation of the unskilled. The skilled workers were described as corrupt “labour aristocrats”. (See “Labour Aristocracy”, Marxist Thinking.)

The Communist Manifesto had presented workers as active, self-reliant, able to think, speak and act for themselves, and thus capable of changing the world. It was based on faith in the working class. Social democracy, including its British counterparts such as the Social Democratic Federation and successors including the Labour Party, saw workers as passive, an electorate, a force to be harnessed, “noble savages”, uncorrupted because unlettered, whose lot on earth would be improved by politicians making reforms on their behalf. It was then, and is now, based on fear and hatred of the working class.

The skill, the sheer professionalism, the creative potential in workers is what social democracy most hates and fears, but that is just what must now be tapped if we are to draw up a programme for our class’s survival. Just as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers started the movement for workers’ emancipation, so now the most skilled sections, bringing everyone with them in their wake, must finish the job off.

 

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