The merit of having first grasped the fact that trade unions are indispensable organs of the democracy, and not only passing coalitions, belongs to a group of English writers. This is not wonderful if one considers that trade unions attained importance in England earlier than anywhere else, and that England in the last third of the nineteenth century passed through a change from an oligarchic to an almost democratic state of government. The latest and most thorough work on this subject, the book on the theory and the practice of the British Trade Unions, by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, has been rightly described by the authors as a treatment of Industrial Demo- cracy. Before them the late Thorold Rogers, in his lectures on the Economic Interpretation of History (which, in the passing, has little in common with the materialist conception of history, but only touches it in single points), called the trade union, Labour Partnership — which comes to the same thing in principle, but at the same time points out the limits to which the function of a trade union can extend in a democracy, and beyond which it jias no place in a democratic community. [Indepen- dently of whether the state, the community, or capitalists are employers, the trade union as an organisation of all persons occupied in certain trades can only further simultaneously the interests of its members and the general good as long as it is content to remain a partnerj Beyond that it would run into danger of degenerating into a close corporation with all the worst qualities of a monopoly. It is the same as with the co-operative society. The trade union, as mistress of a whole branch of production, the ideal of various older socialists, would really be only a monopolist productive association, and as soon as it relied on its monopoly or worked upon it, it would be antagonistic to socialism and democracy, let its inner constitution be what it may. Why it is contrary to socialism needs no further explanation. Associations against the community are as little socialism as is the oligarchic government of the state. But why should such a trade union not be in keeping with the principles of a democracy?
This question necessitates another. What is the principle of democracy?
The answer to this appears very simple. At first one would think it settled by the defini- tion " government by the people. M But even a little consideration tells us that by that only quite a superficial, purely formal definition is given, whilst nearly all who use the word democracy to-day understand by it more than a mere form of government. We shall come much nearer to the definition if we express ourselves negatively, andj~define democracy as an absence of class government, as the indication of a social condition where a political privilege belongs to no one class as opposed to the whole community By that the explanation is already given as to why a monopolist cor- poration is in principle anti-democratic. This negative definition has, besides, the advantage that it gives less room than the phrase "government by the people' ' to the idea of the oppression of the individual by the majority which is absolutely repugnant to the modern mind. [To-day we find the oppression of the minority by the majority " undemocratic,' ' although it was originally held to be quite con- sistent with government by the peopleTj The * The consistent advocates of Blanquism also always conceived of democracy as at first an oppressive force. Thus Hippolyte Castille publishes a preliminary intro- duction to his History of the Second Republic which culminates in a veritable glorification of the Reign of Terror. " The most perfect community," he says, " would be where tyranny was an affair of the whole community. That proves fundamentally that the most perfect society would be one where there is least freedom in the satanic (i.e., individualistic) meaning of this word...What is called political freedom is only a beautiful name to adorn the justifiable tyranny of the idea of democracy includes, in the conception of the present day, a notion of justice — an equality of rights for all members of the community, and in that principle the rule of the majority, to which in every concrete case the rule of the people extends, finds its limits. The more it is adopted and governs the general conscious- ness, the more will democracy be equal in meaning to the highest possible degree of free- dom for all. [Democracy is in principle the suppression of many. Political freedom is only the sacrifice of the freedom of a number of individuals to the despotic God of human societies, to social reason, to the social con- tract.' ' "From this epoch (the time from October, 1793, to April, 1794, when Girondists, Hebertists, Dantonists, were beheaded one after the other) dates in truth the re-incarnation of the principle of authority, of this eternal defensive warfare of human societies. Freed from the moderates and the ultras, secured against every conflict of authority, the committee of public safety acquires the form of government necessitated by the given circumstances, the necessary force and unity to maintain its position and to protect France from a threatening anarchy...No, it is not the government that killed the first French Republic, but the Parlia- mentarians, the traitors of Thermidor. The anarchist and liberal republicans whose swarming hordes covered France, continue in vain the old calumny. Robespierre remains a remarkable man, not on account of his talents and virtues, which are here incidental, but on account of his genius for authority, on account of his strong political instinct."
This worship of Robespierre was not to outlast the second Empire. To the younger generation of the Blanquist socialist revolutionaries who stepped on the stage in the middle of the 'sixties and who were above all anti-clerical, Robespierre was too philistine on account of his Deism. They swore by Hebert and Anacharsis Cloots. But for the rest they reasoned like Castille — i.e., they carried out to extremes, like him, the just idea of the subordination of individual interests to the general interests of the community.
j class government, though it is not yet the actual suppression of classesj They speak of the conservative character of the democracy, and to a certain degree rightly. Absolutism, or semi-absolutism, deceives its supporters as well as its opponents as to the extent of their power. Therefore in countries where it obtains, or where its traditions still exist, we have flit- ting plans, exaggerated language, zigzag politics, fear of revolution, hope in oppression. In a democracy the parties, and the classes standing behind them, soon learn to know the limits of their power, and to undertake each time only as much as they can reasonably hope to carry through under the existing circum- stances. Even if they make their demands rather higher than they seriously mean in order to give way in the unavoidable compromise — and democracy is the high school of com- promise— they must still be moderate. [The right to vote in a democracy makes its mem- bers virtually partners in the community, and this virtual partnership must in the end lead to real partnership. With a working class unde- veloped in numbers and culture the general right to vote may long appear as the right to choose ' ' the butcher ' '; with the growing number and knowledge of the workers it is changed, however, into the implement by which to transform the representatives of the people from masters into real servants of the peoplej Universal suffrage in Germany could serve Bismarck temporarily as a tool, but finally it compelled Bismarck to serve it as a tool. It H5 could be of use for a time to the squires of the East Elbe district, but it has long been the terror of these same squires. In 1878 it could bring Bismarck into a position to forge the weapon of socialistic law, but through it this weapon became blunt and broken, until by the help of it Bismarck was thoroughly beaten. Had Bismarck in 1878, with his then majority, created a politically exceptional law, instead of a police one, a law which would have placed the worker outside the franchise, he would for a time have hit social democracy more sharply than with the former. It is true, he would then have hit other people also. [.Universal franchise is, from two sides, the alternative to a violent revolution But universal suffrage is only a part of democracy, although a part which in time must draw the other parts after it as the magnet attracts to itself the scattered portions of iron. It certainly proceeds more slowly than many would wish, but in spite of that it is at work. And social democracy can- not further this work better than by taking its stand unreservedly on the theory of democracy — on the ground of universal suffrage with all the consequences resulting therefrom to its tactics.
In practice — that is, in its actions — it has in Germany always done so. But in their explana- tions its literary advocates have often acted otherwise, and still often do so to-day. Phrases which were composed in a time when the poli- tical privilege of property ruled all over Europe, and which under these circumstances were explanatory, and to a certain degree also justified, but which to-day are only a dead weight, are treated with such reverence as though the progress of the movement depended on them and not on the understanding of what can be done, and what should be done. Is there any sense, for example, in maintaining the phrase of the " dictatorship of the prole- tariat n at a time when in all possible places representatives of social democracy have placed themselves practically in the arena of Parlia- mentary work, have declared for the propor- tional representation of the people, and for direct legislation — all of which is inconsistent with a dictatorship.
The phrase is to-day so antiquated that it is only to be reconciled with reality by stripping the word dictatorship of its actual meaning and attaching to it some kind of weakened interpretation. [The whole practical activity of social democracy is directed towards creating circumstances and conditions which shall render possible and secure a transition (free from convulsive outbursts) of the modern social order into a higher oneT| From the consciousness of being the pioneers of a higher civilisation, its adherents are ever creating fresh inspiration and zeal. In this rests also, finally, the moral justification of the socialist expropriation towards which they aspire. But the * ' dicta- torship of the classes " belongs to a lower civilisation, and apart from the question of the expediency and practicability of the thing, it is only to be looked upon as a reversion, as H7 political atavism, j If the thought is aroused that the transition irom a capitalist to a socialist society must necessarily be accomplished by means of the development of forms of an age which did not know at all, or only in quite an imperfect form, the present methods of the initiating and carrying of laws, and which was without the organs fit for the purpose, reaction will set in. I I say expressly transition from a capitalist to a socialist society, and not from a " civic society," as is so frequently the expression used to-day. This application of the word il civic " is also much more an atavism, or in any case an ambiguous way of speaking, which must be considered an inconvenience in the phraseology of German social democracy, and which forms an excellent bridge for mistakes with friend and foe. The fault lies partly in the German language, which has no special word for the idea of the citizen with equal civic rights separate from the idea of privileged citizens.
What is the struggle against, or the aboli- tion of, a civic society? What does it mean specially in Germany, in whose greatest and leading state, Prussia, we are still constantly concerned with first getting rid of a great part of feudalism which stands in the path of civic development? No man thinks of destroying civic society, as a civilised ordered system of society. K)n the contrary, social democracy does not wish to break up this society and make all its members proletarians together; it labours rather incessantly at raising the worker from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citizen, and thus to make citizenship uni- versal^ It does not want to set up a proletarian society instead of a civic society, but a socialist order of society instead of a capitalist onej It would be well if one, instead of availing himself of the former ambiguous expression, kept to the latter quite clear declaration. Then one would be quite free of a good portion of other contradictions which opponents, not quite without reason, assert do exist between the phraseology and the practice of social demo- cracy. A few socialist newspapers find a pleasure to-day in forced anti-civic language, which at the most would be in place if we lived in a sectarian fashion as anchorites, but which is absurd in an age which declares it to be no offence to the socialist sentiment to order one's private life throughout in a M bourgeois fashion. M* Finally, it is to be recommended that some moderation should be kept iruthe declaration of war against " liberalism." Lit is true that the great liberal movement of modern times arose * In this point Lassalle was much more logical than we are to-day, granted that it was one-sidedness to derive the idea of the bourgeois simply from political privilege instead of at least from his economic position of power also. But for the rest he was sufficient realist to blunt beforehand the point of the above contradiction when he declared in the Workers' Programme: "In the German language the word * bourgeoisie ' had to be translated by * Biirgerthum ' (citizendom). But it has not this meaning w;th me. We are all citizens (' Bürger ') — the workman, the poor citizen, the rich citizen, and so forth. In the course of history the word * bourgeoisie ' has rather acquired a meaning by which for the advantage of the capitalist bourgeoisie first of all, and the parties which assumed the names of liberals were, or became in due course, simple guardians of capitalism?! Naturally, only opposition can reign between these parties and social democracy. \But with respect to liberalism as a great historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only in chronological sequence, but £lso in its spiritual qualities, as is shown moreover in every question of principle in which social democracy has had to take up an attitud^j Wherever an economic advance of the socialist programme had to be carried out in a manner, or under circumstances, that appeared seriously to imperil the development of freedom, social democracy has never shunned taking up a position against it. The security of civil freedom has always seemed to it to v. stand higher than the fulfilment of some economic progress.
o/^Jk \The aim of all socialist measures, even of \J^ *r those which appear outwardly as coercive A? measures, is the development and the securing ^ aP of a free personality?} Their more exact *yy to denote a well defined, political line of thought " #* 4/ (Collected Works, II., p. 27). What Lassalle further ™ (S> says there of the distorted logic of Sansculottism is LJ especially to be recommended to writers in the belles * lettres style who study the middle class "naturalistically" in the cafd and then judge the whole class according to their dried fruits, as the philistine thinks he sees the type of the modern workman in his fellow tippler. I feel no hesitation in declaring that I consider the middle, class — not excepting the German — in their bulk to be still fairly healthy, not only economically, but also morally.
i5o examination always shows that the coercion included will raise the sum total of liberty in society, and will give more freedom over a more extended area than it takes away. The legal day of a maximum number of hours' work, for example, is actually a fixing of a minimum of freedom, a prohibition to sell free- dom longer than for a certain number of hours daily, and, in principle, therefore, stands on the same ground as the prohibition agreed to by all liberals against selling oneself into personal slavery. It is thus no accident that the first country where a maximum hours' day was carried out was Switzerland, the most demo- cratically progressive country in Europe, and democracy is only the political form of liberalism. Being in its origin a counter-movement to the oppression of nations under institutions imposed from without or having a justification only in tradition, liberalism first sought its realisation as the principle of the sovereignty of the age and of the people, both of which principles formed the everlasting discussion of the philosophers of the rights of the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until Rousseau set them up in his Contrat Social as the fundamental conditions of the legitimacy of every constitu- tion, and the French Revolution proclaimed them — in the Democratic Constitution of 1793 permeated with Rousseau's spirit* — as inalien- able rights of men.
* Sovereignty "rests with the people. It is indivisible, imprescriptible, inalienable " (Article 25). " A people has at any time the right to revise, reform and alter its constitution. No generation can bind the next to its laws " (Article 28).
The Constitution of 1793 was the logical expression of the liberal ideas of the epoch, and a cursory glance over its contents shows how little it was, or is, an obstacle to socialism. Baboeuf, and the believers in absolute equality, saw in it an excellent starting point for the realisation of their communistic strivings, and accordingly wrote " The Restoration of the Constitution of 1793 M at the head of their demands. r f*0 ^There is actually no really liberal thought/ j-^^ which does not also belong to the elements of the ideas of socialism] Even the principle of economic personal responsibility which belongs apparently so entirely to the Manchester School cannot, in my judgment, be denied in theory by socialism nor be made inoperative under any conceivable circumstances. Without re- sponsibility there is no freedom; we may think as we like theoretically about man's freedom of action, we must practically start from it as the foundation of the moral law, for only under this condition is social morality possible. And similarly, in our states which reckon with millions, a healthy social life is, in the age of traffic, impossible if the economic personal responsibility of all those capable of work is not assumed. The recognition of individual responsibility is the return of the individual to society for services rendered or offered him by society.
Perhaps I may be allowed to quote some passages from my article on The Social- Political Meaning of Space and Numbers.
<c Changes in the economic personal respon- sibility of those capable of work can, then, as far as we can see, only be made relatively. Labour statistics can be developed very much more, the exchange or adjustment of labour be very much perfected, the change of work be made easier and a right of the workers developed which renders possible an infinitely greater security of existence and facility for the choice of a calling than are given to-day. The most advanced organs of economic self- help — the great trade unions — already point out in this respect the way which evolution will presumably take...If already strong trade unions secure to those of their members fit to work a certain right of occupation, when they impress the employers that it is very inadvisable to dismiss a member of the union without very valid reasons recognised also by the union, if they in giving information to members seeking occupation supply their wants in order of application, there is in all this an indication of the development of a democratic right to work. M* Other beginnings of it are found to-day in the form of industrial courts, trades councils, and similar creations in which democratic self-government has taken shape, though still often imperfectly. On the other side, doubtless, the extension of the public services, particularly of the system of education and of reciprocal arrangements (insurances, etc.) helps very much towards divesting economic personal responsibility of its hardness. But a right to work, in the sense that the state guarantees to everyone occupation in his calling, is quite improbable in a visible time, and also not even desirable. What its pleaders want can only be attained with advantage to the community in the way described by the combination of various organs, and likewise the common duty to work can only be realised in this way without a deadening bureaucracy. In such great and complicated organisms as our modern civilised states and their industrial centres an absolute right to work would simply result in dis- organisation; it is u only conceivable as a source of the most odious arbitrariness and everlasting quarrelling. M* I Liberalism had historically the task of break- ing the chains which the fettered economy and the corresponding organisations of law of the middle ages had imposed on the further development of society. That it at first strictly maintained the form of bourgeois liberalism did not stop it from actually expressing a very much wider-reaching general principle of society whose completion will be socialism] [Socialism will create no new bondage of any kind whatever. The individual is to be free, not in the metaphysical sense, as the anarchists dreamed — i.e., free from all duties towards the community — but free from every economic compulsion in his action and choice of a calling} Such freedom is only possible for all by means of organisation. In this sense one might call * IWd.
socialism " organising liberalism," tor when one examines more closely the organisations that socialism wants and how it wants them, he will find that what distinguishes them above all from the feudalistic organisations, outwardly like them, is just their liberalism, t^eir demo- cratic constitution, their accessibility^ There- fore the trade union, striving after an arrange- ment similar to a guild, is, in the eyes of the socialist, the product of self-defence against the tendency of capitalism to overstock the labour market; but, at the same time, just on account of its tendency towards a guild, and to the degree in which that obtains, is it an unsocialistic corporate body.
The work here indicated is no very simple problem; it rather conceals within itself a whole series of dangers. \Political equality alone has never hitherto sufficed to secure the healthy development of communities whose centre of gravity was in the giant towns. It is, as France and the United States show, no unfailing remedy against the rank growth of all kinds of social parasitism and corruptions If solidity did not reach so far down in the constitution of the French nation, and if the country were not so well favoured geographi- cally, France would have long since been ruined by the land plague of the official class which has gained a footing there. In any case this plague forms one of the causes why, in spite of the great keenness of the French mind, the industrial development of France remains more backward than that of the neighbouring countries. If democracy is not to excel central- ised absolutism in the breeding of bureau- cracies, it must be built up on an elaborately organised self-government with a corresponding economic, personal responsibility of all the units of administration as well as of the adult citizens of the state. Nothing is more injurious to its healthy development than enforced uni- formity and a too abundant amount of pro- tectionism or subventionism.
To create the organisations described— or, so far as they are already begun, to develop them further — is the indispensable preliminary to what we call socialism of production. Without them the so-called social appropriation of the means of production would only result presumably in reckless devastation of produc- tive forces, insane experimentalising and aim- less violence, and the political sovereignty of the working class would, in fact, only be carried out in the form of a dictatorial, revolutionary, central power, supported by the terrorist dictatorship of revolutionary clubs. As such it hovered before the Blanquists, and as such it is still represented in the Communist Manifesto and in the publications for which its authors were responsible at that time. But "in presence of the practical experiences of the February revolution and much more of those of the Paris Commune when the proletariat retained politi- cal power for two months,' ■ the revolutionary programme given in the Manifesto has " here and there become out of date. " " The Com- mune notably offers a proof that the working class cannot simply take possession of the state machinery and set it in motion for their own ends."
So wrote Marx and Engels in 1872 in the preface to the new edition of the Manifesto. And they refer to the work, The Civil War in France, where this is developed more fully. But if we open the work in question and read the part referred to (it is the third), we find a programme developed which, according to its political contents, shows in all material features the greatest similarity to the federalism of Proudhon.
' * The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but on the contrary it was to be organised by the destruction of that power of the state which pretended to be the personification of that unity but wanted to be independent of, and superior to, the nation on whose body it was after all only a parasitic growth. Whilst they were occupied in cutting off the merely oppressive organs of the old governing power its rightful functions as a power which claimed to stand above the community were to be taken away and given over to the responsible servants of the community. Instead of deciding once in three or six years what member of the ruling class should trample on and crush the people in Parliament, universal suffrage should serve the people constituted in communities, as indi- vidual suffrage serves every other employer to select for his business workers, inspectors, and clerks. M The antagonism between the commune and the power of the state has been looked on as an exaggerated form of the old fight against over-centralisation...The constitution of the commune, on the contrary, would have restored to the community all the powers which until now the parasitic growth, the state, which lives on the community and hinders its free action, has absorbed.' ' Thus Marx wrote in the Civil War in France.
Let us now listen to Proudhon. As I have not his work on Federalism at hand, a few sentences may follow here from his essay on the Political Capacity of the Working Classes, in which he incidentally preaches the forming of the workers into a party of their own.
(<Ina democracy organised according to the true ideas of the sovereignty of the people, i.e., according to the fundamental principles of the right of representation, every oppressive and corrupting action of the central authority on the nation is rendered impossible. The mere supposition of such a thing is absurd.' ' 4 'And why?
" Because in a truly free democracy the central authority is not separated from the assembly of delegates, the natural organs of local interests called together for agreement. Because every deputy is, first of all, the man of the locality which named him its representa- tive, its emissary, one of its fellow-citizens, its special agent to defend its special interests, or to bring them as much as possible into union with the interests of the whole community before the great jury (the nation); because