The following article was transcribed and edited from a talk given by David Tettodoro at the IMG summer cadre school in September 1975. It was the introduction to one of the sessions set aside at that school for discussion on the origins, development and present role of social democracy and the orientation which revolutionaries should take towards it.
Social democracy, as a distinctive political current inside the international workers movement, has just celebrated its 61st anniversary. It may seem at first a little peculiar to be able to assign such a specific date to the birth of such a complex political and social phenomenon. But this is a point on which one of the most perceptive of contemporary commentators — Lenin — was very clear and very precise. For Lenin, a very specific set of events clearly marked the division of the international workers movement into two: into the camp of class collaboration and the camp of revolution. Those events were the beginning of the First World War on 4 August 1914 and the capitulation of the mass workers parties in all the major European countries — including the two major parties of the Second International, the French and German social democratic parties — to their respective bourgeois governments. In Lenin's view, writing shortly afterwards, this one set of events represented the final conquest of the major organisations of the European working class by opportunistic and class collaborationist trends which had been growing and developing, as he put it, from a mood into a current, and finally into a distinctive stratum inside the working class. Faced not with just some secondary question of a particular tactical collaboration or compromise with the ruling class, but with the launching on a European and indeed world-wide scale of a major confrontation between the different imperialist powers, this stratum had to make a crucial decision: did it fundamentally support its 'own' bourgeoisies, or was it prepared and capable of launching the sort of revolutionary struggle which could lead to the revolutionary overthrow of these bourgeoisies. These forces chose the former course. Thus differences which had previously been issues of debate, or which had been disregarded in the past, or had been seen as matters of tactical manoeuvres, all became polarised around two very distinctive poles. The international workers' movement was now fundamentally split, unfortunately not in a numerical sense down the middle, but with only a very small fraction holding onto the ideas of proletarian revolution. All those forces and political currents favouring class collaboration, opportunism and revisionism now crystallised together as the dominant force within the international workers movement, giving birth to 'social democracy' as we now understand it. The question was then clearly posed in a very sharp way, and indeed is still posed to us today, how such currents could win out within a movement whose origins lay with the revolutionary ideals of Marx and Engels, and whose programme centred around the idea of a social revolution in which the proletariat would be the leading force, and the objective of which would be the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society. How could opportunism conquer these parties which had undeniably mass roots within the social class that was to be the gravedigger of capitalism? The distinctive feature of social democracy, the root of everything else and from which we have to start, is its class collaborationism, its systematic subordination of the historic interest of the working class to the historic interest of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, irrespective of the fact that social democracy may in some sense represent the interests of the working class on one or another particular question, fighting or struggling for this or that particular reform, in terms of the historic organisation of the entire society it subordinates the struggle of the working class for the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society to the preservation of the capitalist social order. In attempting to make some diagnosis of this situation, the theory that was propounded most consistently by the analysts of the revolutionary current, what was to become the Third International, was the theory of the 'labour aristocracy', one which still retains a certain amount of influence today. Just to cite one example: in the ABC of Communism — Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's commentary on the programme of the Russian Communist Party — the authors write: 'In order to understand the inglorious collapse of the Second International, we must study the development of the working class movement prior to the war. Before this conflict, capitalism in Europe and the USA had largely owed its development to the frantic plunder of the colonies. By brutal exploitation, by robbery, fraud and force, funds were extracted from the colonial nations and were transmuted into profits for the sharks of European and American finance capital. Out of these surplus profits the trust could afford to pay his wage slaves a trifle more than the ordinary wages of labour; not of course to all the wage workers, but only to those who are usually spoken of as skilled workers. These strata of the working class are thereby won over to the side of capital.' This is also the position to be found in the commentaries written by Lenin at this time, and also by other representatives of the revolutionary current, in particular by Zinoviev. But in this particular form it represents an oversimplification, a distortion, both of Lenin's own views of the actual trend of events and of the forces that lay behind the growth of opportunism and revisionism, and their crystallisation into international social democracy. It is certainly true that one of the things which Lenin is eager to establish when he launches into his polemics against the 'social chauvinists', as he termed those who took the line of support of their own bourgeoisie in the war, is the connection between their positions and the historic views of revisionism which were fought for so long inside the Second International. He is equally concerned to establish the connection between the victory of social chauvinism and the growth of imperialism, which he does via the use of the concept of 'labour aristocracy'. This concept is drawn from Engels' description of developments in the British working class in the 1860s, where he attributes relatively passive character and the acceptance of the leadership of the Liberal Party by the British workers to the international monopoly of British capital in the world economy. This, Engels says, has allowed it to re-distribute a certain proportion of the monopoly surplus that it thus accumulates into the hands of a section of the working class, producing a privileged stratum who provide the basis for bourgeois politics within the heart of the labour movement. Lenin says that Kautsky is correct when he argues that there is no longer a British monopoly of the world market, but in its place has grown up imperialism, embracing all of the major countries of the capitalist world. Through the mechanisms of imperialism, Lenin argues, precisely the same sort of process is able to take place in all the industrial capitalist countries as took place in Britain at the time when Engels developed his ideas. If we look at Lenin's discussion of the empirical content of this concept of 'labour aristocracy' however, a few problems strike. For example: 'A few crumbs of the bourgeoisie's huge profits may come the way of a small group of labour bureaucrats, labour aristocrats and petit-bourgeois fellow-travellers. Social chauvinism and opportunism have the same class basis, namely the alliance of a small section of privileged workers with their national bourgeoisie against the working class masses.' Here we have essentially the same ideas as that put forward by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, but both here and elsewhere the question is not very clearly answered: precisely who are the beneficiaries of this accumulated surplus? Precisely which are the strata that provide the link between the bourgeoisie and the workers movement? Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are very clear — they say it's the skilled stratum of workers, the skilled working class. But Lenin is not so clear-cut. He continually talks about a small stratum, but never defines it precisely. And indeed, whenever he moves towards greater precision the social group most regularly referred to is what he calls the labour bureaucracy — the functionaries of the trade unions and the social democratic parties. Insofar as the concept of the labour aristocracy is given any clear specificity by Lenin, it tends to centre not on the skilled working class, as others would have, but on the labour bureaucracy. In that sense, Lenin's concept of the labour aristocracy differs in important respects both from that propounded by Engels and also from the cruder versions prominent inside the Comintern. Of course, there's not an absolute gulf involved here, because the mass organisations of the labour movement in the period in which Lenin is writing, both the political organisations, the social democratic parties, and also for the most part the trade union movement, were heavily based on the skilled stratum of the working class. They were totally dominated by this stratum, and for the most part the unskilled workers and those emerging in the new forms of mass factory production remained both unorganised economically and unrepresented politically. They may have constituted part of the electoral foundation of the social democratic parties, but were not a major component of the base of those organisations. So when one is talking of the growth of a privileged bureaucratic stratum inside the labour movement in the late 19th and early 20th century, that growth is largely based upon the skilled working class. But there remain some important differences here. If we were to accept the position that the skilled working class are a stratum won over en bloc to the side of the bourgeoisie it becomes hard to explain some very important events, and one is led to extremely pessimistic political conclusions. Because what do the 'privileges' of the skilled working class rest on? On the fact that the skilled workers are that section which has been most capable of organising itself and carrying on the struggle to defend its material interests on the political and the economic terrain. To say that this entire stratum is won over by the imperialist bourgeoisie in any kind of historic sense, as opposed to merely some immediate conjuncture in which this may occur, is to say that the most organised, class conscious and combative sections of the working class are permanently lost to the workers movement. This would be a situation in which the working class would have lost its vanguard, and what one would have to talk about is trying to recreate a vanguard out of the most impoverished and most backward sections of the working class. (That, of course, is the way in which the theory of the labour aristocracy has actually been used by some currents, for example in the American New Left and those influenced by 'Third World' ideologies, who argue that the entire Western working class is part of such a labour aristocracy, and that therefore it is necessary to create a new proletariat, a new vanguard, based on those who are most crushed down by capitalist exploitation. And if you take this version of the theory of 'labour aristocracy' seriously those implications are very hard to deny.) On the other hand, one also has to explain away a number of incompatible facts. For example, within the German Social Democratic Party, the left had its strongest base among the more skilled sections of the workers. It was in those areas of the Berlin Party where there was the highest concentration of skilled metal workers that the proletarian bastions of the left were to be found, both in the struggles against revisionism prior to the First World War, during the War itself (albeit in a much more limited way), and towards the end of the War, as the left began to re-emerge, recompose itself and find a new mass base. Moreover, the whole revolutionary wave which swept Europe at the end of the First World War was not fuelled simply by the impoverished masses of the working class throwing off their political backwardness and going into struggle. Rather it was rooted in the breakdown of the temporary ability of the bourgeoisie to find support within the skilled layer of the working class, and the emergence of a new set of relationships inside the workers movement. The skilled working class once again became the source of a class conscious vanguard of the mass movement, and that in turn made possible the revolutionary unification of the most impoverished layers of the proletariat (ordinary unskilled workers, the unemployed, sections of the dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie, etc.) with the organised skilled working class. This was the basis of the various workers' councils movements that sprung up in Britain, Italy, Germany, and first and foremost in Russia itself. In all these instances — in the German, Russian and Italian cases and also in the British shop stewards movement — the leadership was provided in general by the most highly skilled and in many cases the most craft conscious sections of the working class, the skilled workers involved in war production. It was these workers directly involved in the war industries who provided the impetus for the shop stewards movement in Britain, the workers councils in Germany, the councils movements in Italy, and the beginnings of the Soviet movement in Russia in 1917. But while this section of the working class, this layer of skilled workers, which might for a period have been won over by the bourgeoisie, remained at heart a proletarian force still capable of playing a leading part in the historic fight of the proletariat for socialism, the other layer to which Lenin referred, the labour bureaucracy, is a very different phenomenon indeed. In the post-war revolutionary phase this bureaucracy, far from returning to the historic camp of the proletariat along with the skilled working class, became more and more openly, intransigently and aggressively the instrument of the bourgeoisie inside the workers movement. In the case of Germany, where the spectre of proletarian revolution assumed its most tangible form in any country outside Russia, the labour bureaucracy became the decisive instrument of counter-revolution on behalf of the bourgeoisie, whose last line of defence was the Social Democratic Government. Viewing these problems today in a broader spectrum, we can locate the social roots of social democracy more precisely. Certainly they grow out of the general social process that Lenin, Zinoviev and the theorists of the Third International pointed to: the growth of imperialism, the availability to the bourgeoisie of a certain material flexibility with which it feeds concessions to various sections, often very broad sections, of the workers' movement. But we must add that the primary and central factor, flowing out of these general social conditions, is of various forms of organisation at the top of which is born a distinctive stratum — the labour bureaucracy. The social base of social democracy is to be found first and foremost in this bureaucratic current. Parallel to this social root of social democracy, there are a series of ideological roots closely related to its material foundations. A central ideological feature of the labour bureaucracy, a distinctive feature of its outlook on the world, is that it has no concept of what the actual seizure of power by the proletariat would constitute. As a result, its whole political strategy, its whole approach to the political tasks which it sees facing the workers movement, is set entirely within the framework of the bourgeois state. This is a constant thread that runs through the very different faces which social democracy has assumed, from its earliest awakenings in periods like the 1880s and 1890s, through until the present moment. At various points in history, political currents which we now see were part of the historical foundations of social democracy required very radical images, and made very radical statements about the need to destroy the power of the exploiters, about having nothing to do with the exploiters' state, about the need for the proletariat to take power before any kind of meaningful reform could be attained, etc. — a very different image from that put forward today by Wilson or Schmidt in the name of social democracy. But something links these apparently different phenomena on the level of political outlook and political ideology — and that is their complete attachment to the bourgeois state, to the existing political framework created by their respective bourgeoisies, as the framework within which the class struggle is to be carried on. As a result of that, they share a complete failure to project any concrete form in which the struggle of the proletariat can go beyond the bourgeois state and lay the foundations of proletarian political power and a proletarian State. What all this represents is the triumph within the workers movement, through this bureaucracy, of what can be termed an essentially petit-bourgeois ideological current. This petit-bourgeois current has two essential ideological components. The first is the actual political tradition of the radical petit-bourgeoisie, the tradition of that layer of European capitalist society who were involved in petty commodity production and provided the mass basis for the great social struggles in the era of bourgeois revolutions, but who in a whole [series] of European countries did not actually see their own [politic]al goals, the goals of radical bourgeois democracy, [systematically] achieved. This was particularly true in the [case] of Germany, and is an important fact in explaining the [develop]ment of German social democracy. [As the] petit-bourgeois currents were increasingly faced with the fact that their political aims would not be carried through by the bourgeoisie, who were prepared to enter into various forms of collaboration with the traditional ruling class and the traditional state machine (for example, the German bourgeoisie and the large Prussian landowners reached a compromise on the form of the German state which excluded the revolutionary democratic alternative, which the petit-bourgeoisie had fought for since the revolutionary wave of 1848). Seeing that, the petit-bourgeoisie were forced to look towards the workers movement as the only alternative instrument through which its particular goals could be realised. Certainly one finds at the base of social democracy all sorts of expressions of this, even in terms of individuals. For example, the founders of the so-called 'Marxist' wing of German social democracy, Bebel and Liebknecht, were both clearly, in a social and ideological sense, drawn out of this current. Bebel was an old south German revolutionary democrat, a petit-bourgeois shoemaker by trade. (Obviously one should not reduce ideological and social questions to a matter of individuals, but you can actually see expressed in individuals the forces which had such tremendous sway in forming the political outlook of these organisations.) Bebel, despite the favour in which Marx often held him, remained throughout his life essentially a radical petit-bourgeois democrat; one can find him as late as the 1890s making passionate statements in the Reichstag, that he is a loyal patriot and that the Social Democratic Party has no desire to undermine patriotism, that it is the most loyal defender of the German nation — indeed, a better defender of German nationhood than the Prussian aristocracy and those sections of the German bourgeoisie which supported them. The second element which, despite an apparent anachronism, one should also consider as part of this petit-bourgeois ideological current, is the economism which holds sway over very large sections of the working class — that is to say, the notion that the aim and goal of working class struggle is to attain significant improvements in the material welfare of the working class, the limitation of the political horizon of the working class to immediate material gains. Certainly in terms of its social influence, this is a proletarian element — an idea which finds its expression in layers of the proletariat and arises out of the proletarian condition under capitalism. It flows out of the fact that under capitalism the proletariat is employed in a multiplicity of different enterprises, engaged in a multiplicity of different tasks, on the basis of a wide variety of different forms of education and activity. In other words, under capitalism the immediate social conditions of the proletariat divide and atomise it, and it does not spontaneously obtain consciousness of its global position as a class, as the collective producer of the total product of capitalist society. As a result its vision has a fragmented and atomised character, and the problems which it spontaneously poses for itself are not the historic ones of overthrowing the social order, but the immediate ones of obtaining improved material conditions. Nevertheless, it seems correct to term this a petit-bourgeois ideological element, despite its essentially proletarian location, because what it reflects is the failure of the working class to obtain a political vision corresponding to its actual class position in capitalist society, an atrophying of the class consciousness of the proletariat to the point where it comes to see itself in the same isolated and fragmented way as the petit-bourgeoisie. What social democracy does is to pull together these two different ideological standards: on the one hand the economism of the working class, and on the other the desire of sections of the petit-bourgeoisie to carry through the thorough democratisation of the institutions of the bourgeois state. It is out of this that the concept which we have frequently referred to as a fundamental ideological concept of social democracy grows — the separation between the sphere of politics and the sphere of economics, between the political struggle and the trade union struggle. For German Social Democracy this was from the very earliest stage quite a central concept, enshrined with the growth of the trade union bureaucracy in the so-called 'twin-pillars' theory — the notion that the social democratic workers movement as a whole rested on two equal but distinct 'pillars', that of the party, and that of the trade unions. Neither one nor the other was superior to the other or embraced a higher form of struggle; the fight for the immediate economic improvement of the working class and the fight for the political rights of the working class went hand in hand. In various forms and various guises, this separation between the economic and the political became and remains a central idea of social democracy internationally. The result of this pulling apart of the political and the economic spheres of struggle, is to make absolute the inability of the working class to go beyond the framework of the capitalist state. Because on what basis can you say that the struggle to obtain political rights and material improvements through the mechanism of the state is divorced from the terrain of the economy, i.e. the terrain on which the working class exists and is exploited as a class? That distinction can only be made on the basis of accepting the sphere of politics as defined by the bourgeois state, its machinery, organs and representative bodies, acquiescing in its radical separation from the sphere of society in which the working class actually lives. To do that is permanently to keep apart the only elements which can in their combination produce a revolutionary alternative to capitalist class rule. One can develop a revolutionary criticism of the capitalist state and present a revolutionary strategy to confront the capitalist class, only insofar as one is able to develop an alternative to it — that is to say, only insofar as one is able to project the possibility of creating a proletarian state. But the possibility of such a state can only flow out of the activities, struggles and organisations of the working class which are created and developed within the central areas of the class struggle — that is precisely those areas which are termed by social democracy the 'economic' struggle and thus permanently amputated from 'politics'. Therefore, this 'twin-pillars' theory, or the 'separation of politics and economics', has the double function of making absolute the blindness of social democracy to any concept of proletarian revolution or proletarian state power on the one hand, and thereby limiting its political activity completely to the framework of the capitalist state on the other. We can say, then, that what social democracy represents in general is the historic subordination of the working class to the bourgeoisie, and that the way in which it does so is by subordinating all the forms of the class struggle to the framework of the capitalist state, failing thereby to pose any alternative to the class rule of the bourgeoisie. The social root of social democracy lies in the labour bureaucracy, and its ideological roots in its subordinate attitude towards the capitalist state. However, this relationship can express itself in different forms connected with the emergence of different layers within the bureaucracy of the workers movement. In general, the dynamic is one of subordination of the working class movement as a whole to the capitalist state, and a fusion between the bureaucracy of the workers movement and the machinery of the capitalist state; that is the historic trend. This is expressed most clearly in the electoral, parliamentarist orientation of social democracy, which creates a situation in which an increasingly important layer of the labour movement bureaucracy is based not on the workers movement itself, but rather on the relationship between the workers movement and the capitalist state. In other words, this bureaucracy does not consist simply of full-time functionaries who sit in trade union offices, write for party newspapers, or act as secretaries for local party organisations, but includes, as its most influential layer, those who obtain positions within certain structures of the capitalist state which become accessible to the workers movement — that is to say, within those structures of the capitalist state which have a bourgeois democratic form. There is some basis for arguing that it is with the emergence of this layer that the bureaucracy first becomes crystallised out as a distinctive social force. But in any event it rapidly becomes the most important layer in the labour bureaucracy. This is so because this layer expresses most clearly the accommodation of the workers movement to the capitalist state. In a sense, it is balancing between the two: it occupies a position inside capitalist state institutions, but obtains this position by deploying the political weight and power of the workers movement to apply pressure on the capitalist state. Of course we know, from the Leninist attitude towards parliamentary activity, that it is possible for such representatives to play a revolutionary role. But as Lenin's critique of parliamentarism makes very clear, that is possible only insofar as those representatives base themselves on the workers movement, and on the necessity and capacity of the workers movement to destroy that state structure within which they hold office. In other words, the representatives of the workers movement, in order to follow any kind of revolutionary course, must see themselves as playing a profoundly subversive role — they must be within the capitalist state in order to destroy it. That, of course, is not how social democracy's representatives see their role. They are in the state institutions in order to 'improve' them, in order to fulfil and carry through their 'democratisation', but never ever, in any sense of the word, to actually carry through their destruction. And in that sense they cease to be the representatives of the workers movement inside the state, and become rather a part of the capitalist state machine — the representatives of the capitalist state within the workers' movement. As social democracy develops, and as this particular layer begins to play a more direct and crucial role for the bourgeoisie, this relationship becomes stronger and stronger. To take the German case, it moves from a situation where there are a handful of social democratic representatives in the Reichstag, generally playing an insignificant political role, to one in which they constitute, as early as 1910, the largest single political bloc inside the Reichstag, where what they do or don't do is very decisive for the political strategy of the bourgeoisie. Then the bourgeoisie begins consciously to draw them into a whole series of different types of administrative machinery in an advisory capacity, and begins to consult them, formally and informally, on a whole series of questions of policy. And of course, lacking any revolutionary alternative, social democracy is quite willing to play this role; they even see this as a sign of their strength, as a victory. Thus social democracy becomes the handmaiden and counsellor of the capitalist State and eventually, in 1918 and 1919, actually forms the government, becomes the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, and takes on the role of a crucial instrument of counter-revolution against the workers' movement. We can see social democracy passing through a similar process in a series of other countries, including Britain. A more recent development in this process stems equally from the political outlook of social democracy, combined after the Second World War with the need for the bourgeoisie to integrate the working class into a number of social and economic projects it wanted to pursue. Because the post-war boom laid the material basis for such a development, it was possible for a new relationship to begin to grow up between social democracy and sections of the formal functionaries of the capitalist state machine: essentially sections of the state bureaucracy based in the nationalised industries. In this way, a new layer begins to emerge expressing a further shift in the labour bureaucracy. This new group is the one which rests most clearly and most completely on the capitalist state itself. This layer of functionaries inside the nationalised industries, who share the political outlook and, where it does not compromise their role as state functionaries, even share direct political connections with the [mass] organisation of social democracy, carry the process of the incorporation of the labour bureaucracy into the state machine yet a stage further. This has certain implications for the political development of the labour bureaucracy. The tendency of this process is to create inside social democracy two currents, or, more accurately, a number of currents which pull broadly [in] two directions. On the one hand there is that section of the labour bureaucracy which is rooted most directly inside the labour movement itself, essentially the functionaries of the mass apparatuses of the working class, and particularly the trade union bureaucracy. On the other hand, there is that section of the bureaucracy whose roots are most deeply inside the capitalist state machine — elected functionaries, in particular those who are drawn into capitalist governments and of course this new layer inside the nationalised industries and other state apparatuses. What one has here is the social root of the division of social democracy into left-wing currents and right-wing currents. The bureaucracy which is rooted inside the workers movement must, to some extent at least, retain a certain degree of sympathy, a certain degree, if you like, of symmetry with its base, moving at least in the same direction, if not at the same pace, as its base — because the mass organisations of the working class, no matter how bureaucratised they may be, still retain certain levers and mechanisms of control by which the masses can influence the selection, the policies and the direction of that bureaucracy. This particular section of the bureaucracy must, then, to some degree, indirectly and most likely for all manner of devious reasons, reflect the mood of the masses on whom it is based. In a period of acute crisis, in a period in which the masses are set off in new directions, the result of this is to begin to generate left currents based on this section of the bureaucracy. The other section of the bureaucracy, however, whose roots are much more within the state apparatus, do not face the same pressures. Their social roots are most directly in the bourgeoisie, and as long as the bourgeois state apparatus remains intact their positions are relatively secure. For them, the logic of a period of crisis is not to push them at all to the left, but rather to begin to push them in the opposite direction. Because, as the working class starts to move into action, to become politically discontented, so does the bourgeoisie. But what the bourgeoisie of course seeks are sounder, surer guarantees for its own social order and the preservation of its own system. The result of that of course is that the bureaucracy which most directly reflects and is based on the needs of the capitalist state, therefore begins to move to the right in order to furnish and provide those kinds of assurances. This can lead to an outright rupture, and an outright split within social democracy, a classical model of which is the experience of the British labour movement in the split of the Labour government of 1931. Here a section of the most important and most seasoned bureaucratic representatives of the workers movement actually broke completely from the workers movement and went over lock, stock and barrel, without retaining any residue of organisational ties with the workers movement, to become outright representatives and functionaries of the bourgeoisie.