organisations and institutions.
Social democracy will thus be obliged to demand for the municipality, when the franchise becomes democratic, an extension of the right of expropriation (which is still very limited in various German states) if a socialist policy of local government is to be possible. Further, demands respecting the creation of municipal enterprises and of public services, and a labour policy for the municipality, are rightly put into the forefront of the programme. With respect to the first, the following demand should be set up as essential, that all enterprises having a monopolist character and being directed to- wards the general needs of the members of the municipality must be carried out under its own management, and that, for the rest, the muni- cipality must strive constantly to increase the area of the service it gives to its members. As regards labour policy, we must demand from the municipalities that they, as employers of labour, whether under their own manage- ment or under contract, insert as a minimum condition the clauses for wages and hours of labour recognised by the organisations of such workmen, and that they guarantee the right of combination for these workmen. It should, however, be observed here that if it is only right to endeavour to make municipalities as employers of labour surpass private firms with regard to conditions of labour and arrange- ments for the welfare of the workers, it would be a shortsighted policy for municipal workmen to demand such conditions as would place them, when compared with their fellow-workers in the same trades, in the position of an unusually privileged class, and that the municipality should work at a considerably higher cost than the private employer. That would, in the end, lead to corruption and a weakening of public spirit.
Modern evolution has assigned to municipali- ties further duties: the establishment and superintendence of local sick funds, to which perhaps at a not very distant epoch the taking over of insurance against invalidity will be added. There has further been added the establishment of labour bureaux and industrial arbitration courts. With regard to the labour bureaux the social democracy claims as its minimum demand that their character should be guaranteed by their being composed of an equal representation of workmen and em- ployers; that arbitration courts should be established by compulsion and their powers extended. Social democracy is sceptical of, even if it does not protest against, municipal insurance against unemployment, as the idea prevails that this insurance is one of the legitimate duties of trade unions and can best be cared for by them. But that can only hold good for well-organised trades which unfor- tunately still contain a small minority of the working population. The great mass of workers is still unorganised, and the question is whether municipal insurance against unem- ployment can, in conjunction with trade unions, be so organised that, so far from being an encroachment on the legitimate functions of the latter, it may even be a means of helping them. In any case it would be the duty of the social democratic representatives of the muni- cipality, where such insurance is undertaken, to press with all their energy for the recognition of the unions.* From its whole nature, municipal socialism is an indispensable lever for forming or com- pletely realising what I, in the last chapter, called " the democratic right of labour." But it is and must be patch-work where the fran- chise of the municipality is class franchise. That is the case in more than three-fourths of Germany. And so we stand here, as we do with reference to the diets of the federal states, on which the municipalities depend to a great extent, and to the other organs of self-govern- ment (districts, provinces, etc.), face to face with the question: how will social democracy succeed in removing the existing class franchise and in obtaining the democratisation of the electoral systems?
Social democracy has to-day in Germany, besides the means of propaganda by speech and writing, the franchise for the Reichstag as the most effective means of asserting its demands. Its influence is so strong that it has extended even to those bodies which have been made inaccessible to the working class owing to a property qualification, or a system of class franchise; for parties must, even in these * Since the above was written the question has in several German towns been solved by a municipal con- tribution to the unemployed funds of the unions.
assemblies, pay attention to the electors for the Reichstag. If the right to vote for the Reich- stag were protected from every attack, the question of treating the franchise for other bodies as a subordinate one could be justified to a certain extent, although it would be a mistake to make light of it. But the franchise for the Reichstag is not secure at all. Govern- ments and government parties will certainly not resolve lightly on amending it, for they will say to themselves that such a step would raise amongst the masses of the German workers a hate and bitterness, which they would show in a very uncomfortable way on suitable occa- sions. The socialist movement is too strong, the political self-consciousness of the German workers is too much developed, to be dealt with in a cavalier fashion. One may venture, also, to assume that a great number even of the opponents of universal suffrage have a certain moral unwillingness to take such a right from the people. But if under normal conditions the curtailing of the franchise would create a revolutionary tension, with all its dangers for the governing classes, there can, on the other hand, be no doubt as to the existence of serious technical difficulties in the way of altering the franchise so as to allow, only as an exception, the success of independent socialist candidatures. It is simply political considerations which, on this question, deter- mine the issue.
On this and other grounds it does not seem advisable to make the policy of social democracy solely dependent on the conditions and possi- bilities of the imperial franchise. We have, moreover, seen that progress is not so quickened by it as might have been inferred from the electoral successes of 1890 and 1893. Whilst the socialist vote in the triennial period from 1887 to 1890 rose 87 per cent., and from 1890 to 1893 25 per cent., in the five years from 1893 to 1898 it only rose 18 per cent. — an important increase in itself, but not an increase to justify extraordinary expectations in the near future.
Now social democracy depends not exclu- sively on the franchise and Parliamentary activity. A great and rich field exists for it outside Parliaments. The socialist working class movement would exist even if Parliaments were closed to it. Nothing shows this better than the gratifying movements among the Russian working classes. But with its exclu- sion from representative bodies the German working class movement would, to a great extent, lose the cohesion which to-day links its various sections; it would assume a chaotic character, and instead of the steady, uninter- rupted forward march with firm steps, jerky forward motions would appear with inevitable back-slidings and exhaustions.
Such a development is neither in the interest of the working classes nor can it appear desirable to those opponents of social demo- cracy who have become convinced that the present social order has not been created for all eternity but is subject to the law of change, and that a catastrophic development with all its horrors and devastation can only be avoided if in legislation consideration is paid to changes in the conditions of production and commerce and to the evolution of the classes. And the number of those who recognise this is steadily increasing. Their influence would be much greater than it is to-day if the social democracy could find the courage to emancipate itself from a phraseology which is actually outworn and if it would make up its mind to appear what it is in reality to-day: a democratic, socialistic party of reform.
It is not a question of renouncing the so- called right of revolution, this purely speculative right which can be put in no paragraph of a constitution and which no statute book can prohibit, this right which will last as long as the law of nature forces us to die if we abandon the right to breathe. This imprescriptible and inalienable right is as little touched if we place ourselves on the path of reform as the right of self-defence is done away with when we make laws to regulate our personal and property disputes.
But is social democracy to-day anything beyond a party that strives after the socialist transformation of society by the means of democratic and economic reform? According to some declarations which were maintained against me at the congress in Stuttgart this might perhaps appear to be the case. But in Stuttgart my letter was taken as an accusation against the party for sailing in the direction of Blanquism, whilst it was really directed against some persons who had attacked me with arguments and figures of speech of a Blanquist nature and who wanted to obtain from the congress a pronouncement against me.
Even a positive verdict from the Stuttgart Congress against my declaration would not have diverted me from my conviction that the great mass of the German social democracy is far removed from fits of Blanquism. After the speech at Oeynhausen I knew that no other attitude of the congress was to be expected than the one which it in fact adopted.* The Oeynhausen speech has since then shared the fate of so many other speeches of extra- ordinary men, it has been semi-officially cor- rected. And in what sense has the party expressed itself since Stuttgart? Bebel, in his speeches on the attempts at assassination, has entered the most vigorous protests against the idea that social democracy upholds a policy of force, and all the party organs have reported these speeches with applause; no protest against them has been raised anywhere. Kautsky develops in his Agrarian Question the principles of the agrarian policy of social * 4t Some days before the Stuttgart Congress on the 6th September, 1898, William II. at Oeynhausen, West- phalia, announced a law threatening with penal servitude those who dared to prevent a man from working or incited him to strike. That such a speech should create a revolutionary mood amongst German social democrats was the most natural thing in the world. But the threat came to nought. The Reichstag rejected a Bill on the subject by a large majority, although it was only a diluted edition of that announced by the Kaiser. The fate of the speech confirmed my assertions."
democracy. They form a system of thoroughly democratic reform just as the Communal Pro- gramme adopted in Brandenburg is a demo- cratic programme of reform. In the Reichstag the party supports the extension of the powers and the compulsory establishment of courts of arbitration for trades disputes. These are organs for the furtherance of industrial peace. All the speeches of their representatives breathe reform. In the same Stuttgart where, accord- ing to Clara Zetkin, the " Bernstein-iade M received the finishing stroke, shortly after the Congress, the social democrats formed an alliance with the middle-class democracy for the municipal elections, and their example was followed in other Wurtemberg towns. In the trade union movement one union after another proceeds to establish funds for out-of-work mem- bers, which practically means a giving up of the characteristics of a purely fighting coalition, and declares for municipal labour bureaux em- bracing equally employers and employees; whilst in various large towns — Hamburg, Elberfeld — co-operative stores have been started by socialists and trade unionists. Everywhere there is action for reform, action for social progress, action for the victory of democracy. M People study the details of the problems of the day and seek for levers and starting points to carry on the development of society in the direction of socialism. " Thus I wrote a year ago,* and I see no reason to induce me to delete a word of it.
* The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Revolu- tion of Society. — Neue Zeit xvi., i, p. 451.
Conclusion, ultimate aim and tendency. kant against CANT.
Reference has already been made in different passages of this book to the great influence which tradition exercises, even amongst social- ists, upon judgments regarding facts and ideas. I say expressly u even amongst socialists V because this power of tradition is a very wide- spread phenomenon from which no party, no literary or artistic line of thought, is free, and which penetrates deeply even into most of the sciences. It will probably never be quite rooted out. A certain interval of time must always pass before men so far recognise the inconsis- tency of tradition with what exists as to put the former on the shelf. Until this happens tradition usually forms the most powerful means of linking those together whom no strong, constant, effective interest or external pressure knits together. Hence the intuitive preference of all men of action, however revo- lutionary they may be in their aims, for tradition. " Never swop horses whilst cross- ing a stream. M This motto of old Lincoln is rooted in the same thought as Lassalle's well- known anathema against the " nagging spirit of liberalism, the complaint of individual opining and wanting to know better. M Whilst tradition is essentially conservative, criticism is almost always destructive. At the moment of important action, therefore, criticism, even when most justified by facts, can be an evil, and therefore be reprehensible.
To recognise this is, of course, not to call tradition sacred and to forbid criticism. Parties are not always in the midst of rapids when attention is paid to one task only.
For a party which has to keep up with a real evolution, criticism is indispensable and tradition can become an oppressive burden, a restraining fetter.
But men in very few cases willingly and fully account for the importance of the changes which take place in their traditional assump- tions. Usually they prefer to take into account only such changes as are concerned with undeniable facts and to bring them into unison as far as can be with the traditional catch- words. The method is called pettifogging, and the apologies and explanations for it are called cant.
Cant — the word is English, and is said to have been first used in the sixteenth century as a description of the saintly sing-song of the Puritans. In its more general meaning it denotes an unreal manner of speech, thought- lessly imitative, or used with the consciousness of its untruth, to attain any kind of object, whether it be in religion, politics, or be concerned with theory or actuality. In this wider mean- ing cant is very ancient — there were no worse 11 canters,' ' for example, than the Greeks of the past classic period — and it permeates in countless forms the whole of our civilised life. Every nation, every class and every group united by theory or interest has its own cant. It has partly become such a mere matter of convention, of pure form, that no one is any longer deceived by its emptiness, and a fight against it would be shooting idly at sparrows. But this does not apply to the cant that appears in the guise of science and the cant which has become a political battle cry.
My proposition, " To me that which is gener- ally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything," has often been conceived as a denial of every definite aim of the socialist movement, and Mr. George Plechanow has even discovered that I have quoted this u famous sentence M from the book To Social Peace, by Gerhard von Schulze-Gävernitz. There, indeed, a passage reads that it is certainly indispensable for revolutionary socialism to take 23 its ulti- mate aim the nationalisation of all the means of production, but not for practical political socialism which places near aims in front of distant ones. Because an ultimate aim is here regarded as being dispensable for practical objects, and as I also have professed but little interest for ultimate aims, I am an " indis- criminating follower " of Schulze-Gävernitz. One must confess that such demonstration bears witness to a striking wealth of thought.
When eight years ago I reviewed the Schulze- Gävernitz book in Neue Zeit, although my criticism was strongly influenced by assump- tions which I now no longer hold, yet I put on one side as immaterial that opposition of ulti- mate aim and practical activity in reform, and admitted — without encountering a protest — that for England a further peaceful development, such as Schulze-Gavernitz places in prospect before her was not improbable. I expressed the conviction that with the continuance of free development, the English working classes would certainly increase their demands, but would desire nothing that could not be shown each time to be necessary and attainable be- yond all doubt. That is at the bottom nothing else than what I say to-day. And if anyone wishes to bring up against me the advances in social democracy made since then in England, I answer that with this extension a develop- ment of the English social democracy has gone hand in hand from the Utopian, revolutionary sect, as Engels repeatedly represented it to be, to the party of political reform which we now know.* No socialist capable of thinking, dreams to-day in England of an imminent victory for socialism by means of a violent revolution — none dreams of a quick conquest of Parliament by a revolutionary proletariat. But they rely more and more on work in the munici- palities and other self-governing bodies. The early contempt for the trade union movement has been given up; a closer sympathy has been * I use the words " social democracy " here in the wider sense of the whole independent socialist move- ment. (English edition.)
won for it and, here and there also, for the co-operative movement.
And the ultimate aim? Well, that just re- mains an ultimate aim. u The working classes have no fixed and perfect Utopias to introduce by means of a vote of the nation. They know that in order to work out their own emancipa- tion— and with it that higher form of life which the present form of society irresistibly makes for by its own economic development — they, the working classes, have to pass through long struggles, a whole series of historical processes, by means of which men and circumstances will be completely transformed. They have no ideals to realise, they have only to set at liberty the elements of the new society which have already been developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society. M So writes Marx in Civil War in France. I was thinking of this utterance, not in every point, but in its fundamental thought in writing down the sentence about the ultimate aim. For after all what does it say but that the movement, the series of processes, is everything, whilst every aim fixed beforehand in its details is imma- terial to it. I have declared already that I willingly abandon the form of the sentence about the ultimate aim as far as it admits the interpretation that every general aim of the working class movement formulated as a principle should be declared valueless. But the preconceived theories about the drift of the movement which go beyond such a generally expressed aim, which try to determine the direction of the movement and its character without an ever-vigilant eye upon facts and experience, must necessarily always pass into Utopianism, and at some time or other stand in the way, and hinder the real theoretical and practical progress of the movement.
Whoever knows even but a little of the history of German social democracy also knows that the party has become important by con- tinued action in contravention of such theories and of infringing resolutions founded on them. What Engels says in the preface to the new edition of Civil War with regard to the Blan- quists and Proudhonists in the Paris Commune of 1 87 1, namely that they both had been obliged in practice to act against their own theory, has often been repeated in another form. A theory or declaration of principle which does not allow attention being paid at every stage of development to the actual interests of the working classes, will always be set aside just as all foreswearing of reforming detail work and of the support of neighbouring middle class parties has again and again been forgotten; and again and again at the congresses of the party will the complaint be heard that here and there in the electoral contest the ultimate aim of socialism has not been put sufficiently in the foreground.
In the quotation from Schulze-Gävernitz which Plechanow flings at me, it runs that by giving up the dictum that the condition of the worker in modern society is hopeless, socialism would lose its revolutionary point and would be absorbed in carrying out legislative de- mands. From this contrast it is clearly inferred that Schulze-Gävernitz always used the concept lt revolutionary " in the sense of a struggle having revolution by violence in view. Plechanow turns the thing round, and because I have not maintained the condition of the worker to be hopeless, because I acknowledge its capability of improvement and many other facts which bourgeois economists have upheld, he carts me over to the "opponents of scientific socialism."
Unfortunately for the scientific socialism of Plechanow, the Marxist propositions on the hopelessness of the position of the worker have been upset in a book which bears the title, Capital: A Criticism of Political Economy. There we read of the "physical and moral regeneration M of the textile workers in Lanca- shire through the Factory Law of 1847, which "struck the feeblest eye. M A bourgeois republic was not even necessary to bring about a certain improvement in the situation of a large section of workers! In the same book we read that the society of to-day is no firm crystal, but an organism capable of change and con- stantly engaged in a process of change, that also in the treatment of economic questions on the part of the official representatives of this society an " improvement was unmistakable." Further that the author had devoted so large a space in his book to the results of the English Factory Laws in order to spur the Continent to imitate them and thus to work so that the process of transforming society may be ac- complished in ever more humane forms.* All of which signifies not hopelessness but capa- bility of improvement in the condition of the worker. And, as since 1866, when this was written, the legislation depicted has not grown weaker but has been improved, made more general, and has been supplemented by laws and organisations working in the same direc- tion, there can be no more doubt to-day than formerly of the hopefulness of the position of the worker. If to state such facts means fol- lowing the " immortal Bastiat," then among the first ranks of these followers is — Karl Marx.
Now, it can be asserted against me that Marx certainly recognised those improvements, but that the chapter on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation at the end of the first volume of Capital shows how little these details influenced his fundamental mode of viewing things. To which I answer that as far as that is correct it speaks against that chapter and not against me.