A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891
Appendix to Section I
Section summary
Engels’s proposed wording for the ten paragraphs, written into the draft: the social means of labour as means of exploitation; growing insecurity rather than misery; the ruin of the middle strata; planned socialist production; the working class’s self-emancipation; and a closing sentence that the party must clear away feudal and absolutist remnants, the work the bourgeois parties were too cowardly to do.
2. In the hands of their appropriators (or owners) the social means of labour have become means of exploitation. The economic subjection of the worker to the appropriators of the means of labour, that is, of the sources of life, which this brings about, is the foundation of servitude in every form: of social misery, of mental stunting, of political dependence.
3. Under the rule of this exploitation the accumulation of the wealth produced by the exploited in the hands of the exploiters—the capitalists and big landowners—increases with growing speed; ever more unequal becomes the distribution of the product of labour between exploiters and exploited, ever greater the number and the insecurity of the condition of the proletariat, etc.
4. “Private” (production) out … worsen, by ruining the urban and rural middle strata, the petty bourgeois and small peasants, widen (or deepen) the abyss between the possessing and the propertyless, raise general insecurity to the normal condition of society, and furnish the proof that the class of the appropriators of the social means of labour has lost the vocation and the capacity for economic and political leadership.
6. … and the transformation of capitalist production for the account of individuals or joint-stock companies into socialist production for the account of society as a whole and according to a plan determined in advance, a transformation for which capitalist society itself creates the material and intellectual conditions, and through which alone the emancipation of the working class, and with it the emancipation of all members of society without exception, is accomplished.
7. The emancipation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself. It goes without saying that it cannot let itself be emancipated either by the capitalists and big landowners, its opponents and exploiters, or by the petty bourgeois and small peasants, who, crushed by the competition of the big exploiters, have no choice but to follow in the train either of these or of the workers.
9. … puts, and thereby unites in one hand the power of economic exploitation and of the political oppression of the worker.
10. … class rule and of classes themselves, and for equal rights and equal duties of all without, etc. … descent. (End struck out.) In its struggle for the … of humanity, however, it is hampered by the backward political conditions of Germany. It has first to conquer free room to move, to clear away massive remnants of feudalism and absolutism; in short, to do the work which the German bourgeois parties have been too cowardly to do, and still are. It must therefore, at least today, also take into its programme demands which in other civilised countries the bourgeoisie itself has already settled.