I.3. The Introduction of Socialism through Social Reforms

Bernstein rejects the “theory of collapse” as the historical road to the realisation of socialist society. What is the road that leads there from the standpoint of the “theory of the adaptation of capitalism”? Bernstein has answered this question only by hints; Konrad Schmidt has made the attempt to set it out in more detail in Bernstein’s sense. According to him, “the trade-union struggle and the political struggle for social reforms” will bring about “an ever more widely extended social control over the conditions of production”, and through legislation will “press the owner of capital more and more down into the role of an administrator by restricting his rights”, until finally “the capitalist, worn down and seeing his possession become ever more worthless to himself, is relieved of the direction and administration of the enterprise”, and so social enterprise is finally introduced.

Trade unions, social reforms and, as Bernstein adds, the political democratisation of the state: these, then, are the means of the gradual introduction of socialism.

To begin with the trade unions: their most important function (and no one has shown this better than Bernstein himself, in the Neue Zeit in 1891) consists in being the means, on the workers’ side, of realising the capitalist law of wages, that is, the sale of labour-power at its current market price. The service the trade unions do the proletariat is to exploit for its benefit the conditions of the market given at any moment. But these conditions themselves (on the one hand the demand for labour-power determined by the state of production, on the other the supply of labour-power created by the proletarianisation of the middle strata and the natural reproduction of the working class, and finally also the degree of productivity of labour at any given time) lie outside the sphere of influence of the trade unions. They therefore cannot overturn the law of wages; at best they can keep capitalist exploitation within the “normal” limits of the moment, but they can by no means abolish exploitation itself step by step.

Konrad Schmidt, to be sure, calls the present trade-union movement “feeble initial stages”, and promises himself from the future that “trade unionism will gain an ever increasing influence on the regulation of production itself”. But by the regulation of production only two things can be understood: interference in the technical side of the production process, and, secondly, determination of the volume of production itself. What can be the nature of the trade unions’ influence on these two questions? It is clear that as far as the technique of production is concerned, the interest of the capitalist coincides, within certain limits, with the progress and development of the capitalist economy. It is his own need that spurs him to technical improvements. The position of the individual worker, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite: every technical revolution runs counter to the interests of the workers directly affected by it and worsens their immediate position, by depreciating their labour-power and making their work more intense, more monotonous, more painful. In so far as the trade union can interfere in the technical side of production, it can evidently act only in the latter sense, that is, in the sense of the individual group of workers directly concerned, and so oppose innovations. In that case, however, it acts not in the interest of the working class as a whole and of its emancipation, which rather coincides with technical progress, that is, with the interest of the individual capitalist, but in just the opposite sense, in the sense of reaction. And in fact we find the effort to influence the technical side of production not in the future, where Konrad Schmidt looks for it, but in the past of the trade-union movement. It marks the older phase of English trade unionism (up to the 1860s), when it was still linked to medieval guild traditions and was characteristically borne up by the antiquated principle of the “acquired right to suitable work”. The effort of trade unions to determine the volume of production and the prices of commodities, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of quite recent date. Only very lately have we seen attempts in this direction appear, again only in England. In their character and tendency, however, these efforts too are entirely equivalent to the former. For to what does the active participation of the trade union in determining the volume and prices of commodity production necessarily reduce itself? To a cartel of the workers with the employers against the consumer, and that with the use of coercive measures against competing employers that are in no way inferior to the methods of regular employers’ associations. At bottom this is no longer a struggle between labour and capital, but a united struggle of capital and labour-power against consuming society. In its social value it is a reactionary undertaking, which cannot be a stage in the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation if only because it is rather the very opposite of a class struggle. In its practical value it is a utopia which, as a moment’s reflection shows, can never extend to larger branches producing for the world market.

The activity of the trade unions is therefore limited in the main to the struggle over wages and the shortening of working hours, that is, merely to the regulation of capitalist exploitation according to the state of the market; influence on the production process remains closed to them by the nature of things. Indeed, still more: the whole trend of trade-union development is directed, exactly contrary to what Konrad Schmidt assumes, towards the complete separation of the labour market from any direct relation to the rest of the commodity market. Most characteristic of this is the fact that even the effort to bring the labour contract at least passively into direct relation with the general state of production, through the system of sliding wage scales, has now been overtaken by development, and that the English trade unions are turning away from them more and more.

But even within the actual limits of its influence the trade-union movement is not moving, as the theory of the adaptation of capital presupposes, towards unlimited expansion. Quite the reverse! If one looks at longer stretches of social development, one cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that on the whole we are moving not towards times of a victorious unfolding of power but towards growing difficulties for the trade-union movement. When the development of industry has reached its peak and the “descending branch” begins for capital on the world market, then the trade-union struggle becomes doubly difficult: first, the objective conditions of the market for labour-power get worse, as demand grows more slowly and supply more rapidly than is now the case; secondly, capital itself, to compensate itself for its losses on the world market, falls back all the more stubbornly on the portion of the product due to the worker. For the reduction of wages is one of the most important means of holding back the fall of the rate of profit! England already offers us the picture of the beginning of the second stage in the trade-union movement. The movement is necessarily reduced more and more to the mere defence of what has already been won, and even this becomes more and more difficult. It is this general course of things whose counterpart must be the upswing of the political and socialist class struggle.

Konrad Schmidt commits the same error of reversed historical perspective with regard to social reform, from which he expects that “hand in hand with the trade-union combinations of the workers it will impose on the capitalist class the conditions under which alone it may employ labour-power”. In the sense of social reform so understood, Bernstein calls the factory laws a piece of “social control”, and as such a piece of socialism. Konrad Schmidt too, wherever he speaks of state protection of labour, says “social control”; and having thus happily turned the state into society, he confidently adds: “that is, the rising working class”; and through this operation the harmless labour-protection regulations of the German Federal Council are transformed into socialist transitional measures of the German proletariat.

The mystification here is obvious. The present state is simply not “society” in the sense of the “rising working class”, but the representative of capitalist society, that is, a class state. That is why the social reform it administers is not an exercise of “social control”, that is, of the control of free working society over its own labour process, but a control by the class organisation of capital over the production process of capital. In this, that is, in the interests of capital, social reform also finds its natural limits. To be sure, in this respect too Bernstein and Konrad Schmidt see in the present only “feeble initial stages”, and promise themselves from the future a social reform in favour of the working class that grows without limit. But in doing so they commit the same error as in assuming an unlimited unfolding of power of the trade-union movement.

The theory of the gradual introduction of socialism through social reforms presupposes as its condition, and here lies its centre of gravity, a definite objective development both of capitalist property and of the state. With regard to the former, the scheme of future development as Konrad Schmidt presupposes it runs towards “pressing the owner of capital more and more down into the role of an administrator by restricting his rights”. In view of the supposed impossibility of a sudden expropriation of the means of production at one stroke, Konrad Schmidt makes himself a theory of expropriation by stages. For this he constructs as a necessary precondition a splitting of the right of property into a “superior ownership”, which he assigns to “society” and wants to see extended more and more, and a right of usufruct, which in the hands of the capitalist shrinks more and more to the mere administration of his enterprise. Now either this construction is a harmless play on words in which nothing much further was thought; and then the theory of gradual expropriation is left without any backing at all. Or it is a seriously meant scheme of legal development; and then it is completely wrong. The splitting up of the various powers contained in the right of property, in which Konrad Schmidt takes refuge for his “expropriation by stages” of capital, is characteristic of feudal society based on a natural economy, in which the distribution of the product among the various social classes took place in kind and on the basis of personal relations between the feudal lords and their subordinates. The division of property into various partial rights was here the organisation, given in advance, of the distribution of social wealth. With the transition to commodity production and the dissolution of all personal bonds between the individual participants in the production process, the relation between person and thing, private property, on the contrary grew firmer. Since distribution no longer takes place through personal relations but through exchange, the various claims to shares in social wealth are measured not in fragments of the right of property in a common object but in the value each person brings to market. The first upheaval in legal relations that accompanied the rise of commodity production in the urban communes of the Middle Ages was also the development, within the womb of feudal legal relations with their divided property, of absolute, closed private property. But in capitalist production this development continues further. The more the production process is socialised, the more the process of distribution rests on pure exchange, the more inviolable and closed capitalist private property becomes, and the more property in capital turns from a right to the product of one’s own labour into a pure right of appropriation of the labour of others. So long as the capitalist himself manages the factory, distribution is still tied to a certain degree to personal participation in the production process. To the extent that the manufacturer’s personal management becomes superfluous, and completely so in joint-stock companies, property in capital, as a title to a claim in distribution, separates itself entirely from personal relations to production and appears in its purest, closed form. It is only in share capital and in industrial credit capital that the capitalist right of property reaches its full development.

The historical scheme of the development of the capitalist as Konrad Schmidt draws it, “from owner to mere administrator”, thus appears as the actual development stood on its head, for that development leads, conversely, from owner and administrator to mere owner. Konrad Schmidt is in the same case as Goethe:

And just as his historical scheme goes back economically from the modern joint-stock company to the manufacturing workshop or even to the craftsman’s shop, so legally it wants to put the capitalist world back into the eggshells of the feudal natural economy.

From this standpoint “social control” too appears in a different light from the one in which Konrad Schmidt sees it. What functions today as “social control” (labour protection, the supervision of joint-stock companies and so on) has in fact not the slightest thing to do with a share in the right of property, with “superior ownership”. It acts not as a restriction of capitalist property but, on the contrary, as its protection. Or, to put it economically, it represents not an encroachment on capitalist exploitation but a standardisation, a regulation of this exploitation. And when Bernstein asks whether there is much or little socialism in a factory law, we can assure him that there is exactly as much “socialism” in the very best factory law as in the municipal regulations on street cleaning and the lighting of the gas lamps, which is, after all, “social control” too.