II.2. Trade Unions, Co-operatives and Political Democracy

We have seen that Bernstein’s socialism comes down to the plan of letting the workers share in the wealth of society, of turning the poor into the rich. How is this to be accomplished? In his articles “Problems of Socialism” in the Neue Zeit Bernstein let slip only barely intelligible hints; in his book he gives full information on the question. His socialism is to be realised by two roads: through trade unions, or, as Bernstein calls it, economic democracy, and through co-operatives. Through the former he means to lay hands on industrial profit, through the latter on commercial profit.

As for the co-operatives, and above all the producers’ co-operatives, by their inner nature they are a hybrid in the midst of the capitalist economy: production socialised on a small scale, with capitalist exchange. In the capitalist economy, however, exchange dominates production and, in the face of competition, makes ruthless exploitation, that is, the complete domination of the production process by the interests of capital, a condition of the enterprise’s existence. In practice this shows itself in the need to make labour as intensive as possible, to shorten it or lengthen it according to the state of the market, to take on labour-power or throw it out on to the street according to the demands of the market for the product; in a word, to practise all the familiar methods that make a capitalist enterprise able to compete. In the producers’ co-operative this gives rise to the contradictory necessity for the workers to govern themselves with all the absolutism required, to play the part of the capitalist employer towards themselves. And it is on this contradiction that the producers’ co-operative perishes, either by developing back into a capitalist enterprise or, if the workers’ interests are stronger, by dissolving. These are the facts that Bernstein himself records but misunderstands, when, following Mrs Potter-Webb, he sees the cause of the downfall of the producers’ co-operatives in England in a lack of “discipline”. What is here superficially and shallowly called discipline is nothing other than the natural absolute regime of capital, which the workers, to be sure, cannot possibly exercise over themselves.

It follows that the producers’ co-operative can secure its existence in the midst of the capitalist economy only if, by a roundabout way, it abolishes the contradiction concealed within it between the mode of production and the mode of exchange, by artificially withdrawing itself from the laws of free competition. This it can do only if it secures for itself in advance a market, a fixed circle of consumers. The consumers’ co-operative serves it as just such an expedient. Here again, and not in the distinction between purchasing and selling co-operatives, or whatever else Oppenheimer’s notion may be, lies the secret, treated by Bernstein, of why independent producers’ co-operatives go under, and why only the consumers’ co-operative can secure their existence.

But if the conditions of existence of the producers’ co-operatives in present-day society are thus bound up with the conditions of existence of the consumers’ co-operatives, it follows, as a further consequence, that the producers’ co-operatives are at best confined to a small local market and to a few products of immediate need, preferably foodstuffs. All the most important branches of capitalist production — the textile, coal, metal and petroleum industries, as well as machine-building, locomotive-building and shipbuilding — are excluded from the outset from the consumers’ co-operative, and therefore also from the producers’ co-operative. Leaving aside their hybrid character, therefore, the producers’ co-operatives cannot appear as a general social reform for the simple reason that their general application would presuppose above all the abolition of the world market and the dissolution of the existing world economy into small local groups of production and exchange, that is, in essence, a return from large-scale capitalist to medieval commodity economy.

But even within the limits of their possible realisation, on the basis of present society, the producers’ co-operatives are necessarily reduced to mere appendages of the consumers’ co-operatives, which thus come to the fore as the chief bearers of the intended socialist reform. In this way, however, the whole socialist reform by means of co-operatives is reduced from a struggle against productive capital, that is, against the main trunk of the capitalist economy, to a struggle against commercial capital, and indeed against retail and middleman capital, that is, merely against small offshoots of the capitalist trunk.

As for the trade unions, which according to Bernstein are for their part to be a means against the exploitation of productive capital, we have already shown that the trade unions are unable to secure the workers any influence on the production process, either as regards the scale of production or as regards technical methods.

But as for the purely economic side, “the struggle of the rate of wages against the rate of profit”, as Bernstein calls it, this struggle, as has likewise already been shown, is fought out not in the free blue air but within the definite bounds of the law of wages, which it can only realise, not break through. This also becomes clear if one takes the matter from another side and asks what the real functions of the trade unions are.

The trade unions, to which Bernstein assigns the role of leading the real attack on the industrial rate of profit in the working class’s struggle for emancipation and of gradually dissolving it into the rate of wages, are in fact quite unable to conduct an economic policy of attack against profit, because they are nothing but the organised defence of labour-power against the attacks of profit, the resistance of the working class to the depressing tendency of the capitalist economy. This for two reasons.

First, the task of the trade unions is to influence, through their organisation, the market situation of the commodity labour-power; but the organisation is constantly broken through by the process of proletarianisation of the middle strata, which keeps bringing new commodities on to the labour market. Second, the trade unions aim at raising the standard of living, at increasing the working class’s share of social wealth; but this share is constantly pushed down, with the fatality of a natural process, by the growth of the productivity of labour. To see the latter one need not be a Marxist at all, but merely have once held Rodbertus’s Zur Beleuchtung der sozialen Frage in one’s hands.

In both of its chief economic functions, therefore, the trade-union struggle is transformed, by the force of objective processes in capitalist society, into a kind of labour of Sisyphus. This labour of Sisyphus is, to be sure, indispensable if the worker is to obtain at all the rate of wages that falls to him according to the given state of the market, if the capitalist law of wages is to be realised and the depressing tendency of economic development to be paralysed in its effect, or more exactly, weakened. But if one thinks of turning the trade unions into a means of gradually reducing profit in favour of wages, this presupposes above all, as social conditions, first a halt in the proletarianisation of the middle strata and in the growth of the working class, and second a halt in the growth of the productivity of labour: that is, in both cases, just as with the realisation of the consumers’ co-operative economy, a return to conditions that preceded large-scale capitalism.

Bernstein’s two means of socialist reform, the co-operatives and the trade unions, thus prove to be wholly incapable of transforming the capitalist mode of production. At bottom Bernstein himself is dimly aware of this and regards them merely as means of nibbling away at capitalist profit and enriching the workers in this way. But in doing so he himself renounces the struggle against the capitalist mode of production and directs the Social-Democratic movement towards a struggle against capitalist distribution. Bernstein also repeatedly formulates his socialism as the striving for a “just”, a “juster” (p. 51 of his book), indeed an “even juster” (Vorwärts, 26 March 1899) distribution.

The immediate impulse to the Social-Democratic movement, at least among the masses of the people, is of course the “unjust” distribution of the capitalist order. And in fighting for the socialisation of the whole economy, Social Democracy naturally strives thereby also for a “just” distribution of social wealth. But thanks to the insight gained by Marx that the distribution of any period is merely a consequence, following natural law, of the mode of production of that period, it directs its struggle not at distribution within the framework of capitalist production but at the abolition of commodity production itself. In a word, Social Democracy wants to bring about socialist distribution by abolishing the capitalist mode of production, whereas Bernstein’s procedure is the exact opposite: he wants to fight capitalist distribution, and hopes in this way gradually to bring about the socialist mode of production.

But in that case how can Bernstein’s socialist reform be grounded? In definite tendencies of capitalist production? Not at all: for first he denies those very tendencies, and secondly, according to what has just been said, the desired shape of production is for him the result and not the cause of distribution. The grounding of his socialism therefore cannot be economic. Having stood the end and the means of socialism, and with them economic relations, on their heads, he can give no materialist grounding for his programme and is forced to resort to an idealist one.

“Why derive socialism from economic compulsion?” we then hear him say. “Why degrade men’s insight, their sense of right, their will?” (Vorwärts, 26 March 1899). Bernstein’s juster distribution is thus to be realised by virtue of men’s free will, a will not acting in the service of economic necessity; or more precisely, since the will itself is merely an instrument, by virtue of insight into justice; in short, by virtue of the idea of justice.

And so we have happily arrived at the principle of justice, that old nag ridden for thousands of years by all would-be reformers of the world for want of surer means of historical transport, that rickety Rosinante on which all the Don Quixotes of history have ridden out to the great reform of the world, only to bring home in the end nothing but a black eye.

The relation of poor and rich as the social basis of socialism, the “principle” of co-operation as its content, “juster distribution” as its aim, and the idea of justice as its only historical legitimation — with how much more force, how much more wit, how much more brilliance did Weitling champion this sort of socialism more than fifty years ago! The brilliant tailor, it is true, did not yet know scientific socialism. And if today, after half a century, his conception, torn to shreds by Marx and Engels, is happily patched together again and offered to the German proletariat as the last word of science, this too needs a tailor at the very least … but not a brilliant one.

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Just as the trade unions and co-operatives are its economic points of support, so the most important political premise of the revisionist theory is an ever-advancing development of democracy. The present outbursts of reaction are to revisionism merely “convulsions”, which it considers accidental and transitory, and which need not be reckoned with in laying down the general guiding line of the workers’ struggle.

For Bernstein, for example, democracy appears as an inevitable stage in the development of modern society; indeed, democracy is for him, just as liberalism is for the bourgeois theorist, the great fundamental law of historical development in general, whose realisation all the active forces of political life must serve. In this absolute form, however, this is utterly false, and nothing but a petty-bourgeois and superficial reduction to a formula of the results of one small tail-end of bourgeois development, roughly the last twenty-five or thirty years. If one looks more closely at the development of democracy in history, and at the same time at the political history of capitalism, a substantially different result emerges.

As regards the former, we find democracy in the most diverse social formations: in the primitive communist societies, in the slave states of antiquity, in the medieval town communes. Likewise we meet absolutism and constitutional monarchy in the most diverse economic settings. On the other hand, capitalism in its beginnings, as commodity production, calls a democratic constitution into being in the town communes; later, in its more developed form, as manufacture, it finds its corresponding political form in absolute monarchy. Finally, as a fully developed industrial economy, it produces in France by turns the democratic republic (1793), the absolute monarchy of Napoleon I, the aristocratic monarchy of the Restoration (1815 to 1830), the bourgeois constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe, again the democratic republic, again the monarchy of Napoleon III, and finally, for the third time, the republic. In Germany the only truly democratic institution, universal suffrage, is not a conquest of bourgeois liberalism but an instrument for welding the small states together politically, and only to that extent has it any significance in the development of the German bourgeoisie, which is otherwise content with a semi-feudal constitutional monarchy. In Russia capitalism long flourished under oriental autocracy without the bourgeoisie showing any sign of longing for democracy. In Austria universal suffrage appeared largely as a lifebelt for the disintegrating monarchy. In Belgium, finally, the democratic conquest of the labour movement, universal suffrage, is unquestionably connected with the weakness of militarism, and so with Belgium’s particular geographical and political position; and above all it is a “piece of democracy” won not by the bourgeoisie but against the bourgeoisie.

The uninterrupted rise of democracy, which to our revisionism, as to bourgeois liberalism, appears as the great fundamental law of human or at least of modern history, thus turns out on closer inspection to be a castle in the air. No general, absolute connection can be constructed between capitalist development and democracy. The political form is in each case the result of the whole sum of political factors, internal and external, and within its limits admits the whole scale from absolute monarchy to the democratic republic.

If, then, we must set aside a general historical law of the development of democracy even within the framework of modern society, and turn simply to the present phase of bourgeois history, here too we see factors in the political situation that lead not to the realisation of Bernstein’s scheme but, on the contrary, precisely to the abandonment by bourgeois society of the gains made so far.

On the one hand, democratic institutions (and this is most important) have to a high degree played out their role for bourgeois development. In so far as they were necessary for welding the small states together and creating the modern great states (Germany, Italy), economic development has meanwhile brought about an inner organic coalescence.

The same holds for the transformation of the whole political and administrative machinery of the state from a semi-feudal or wholly feudal mechanism into a capitalist one. This transformation, historically inseparable from democracy, has today likewise been achieved to so high a degree that the purely democratic ingredients of the state, universal suffrage and the republican form of state, could in themselves drop out without the administration, finance, the military and so on needing to fall back into their pre-March forms.

If liberalism has thus become essentially superfluous to bourgeois society as such, in important respects it has, on the other hand, become a direct obstacle. Two factors come into consideration here which positively dominate the whole political life of present-day states: world politics and the labour movement, both merely two different sides of the present phase of capitalist development.

The formation of the world economy and the sharpening and generalisation of the competitive struggle on the world market have made militarism and navalism, as instruments of world politics, the dominant factor in the external as in the internal life of the great states. But if world politics and militarism are a rising tendency of the present phase, bourgeois democracy must logically move on a falling line. In Germany the era of great armaments, which dates from 1893, and the world politics inaugurated with Kiaochow were at once paid for by bourgeois democracy with two sacrifices: the disintegration of the Freisinn and the conversion of the Centre from an opposition party into a government party. The latest Reichstag elections, of 1907, which were fought under the sign of colonial policy, are at the same time the historical burial of German liberalism.

If foreign policy thus drives the bourgeoisie into the arms of reaction, domestic policy, the rising working class, does so no less. Bernstein himself admits this when he makes the Social-Democratic “devouring legend”, that is, the socialist aims of the working class, responsible for the desertion of the liberal bourgeoisie. In connection with this he advises the proletariat to drop its socialist final goal, so as to lure liberalism, frightened to death, back out of the mousehole of reaction. In so doing, however, by making the disappearance of the socialist labour movement the condition of life and the social precondition of bourgeois democracy today, he himself proves most strikingly that this democracy contradicts the inner tendency of development of present-day society to the same degree that the socialist labour movement is a direct product of that tendency.

But he proves something further. By making the working class’s renunciation of the socialist final goal the precondition and condition for the revival of bourgeois democracy, he himself shows how little, conversely, bourgeois democracy can be a necessary precondition and condition of the socialist movement and of socialist victory. Here Bernstein’s reasoning closes into a vicious circle, in which the last conclusion “devours” the first premise.

The way out of this circle is a very simple one. From the fact that bourgeois liberalism has breathed out its soul in terror of the rising labour movement and its final aims, it follows only that the socialist labour movement is, precisely today, the only support of democracy and can be nothing else; and that it is not the fate of the socialist movement that is bound up with bourgeois democracy but, conversely, the fate of democratic development that is bound up with the socialist movement. That democracy does not become more viable to the extent that the working class gives up its struggle for emancipation, but on the contrary to the extent that the socialist movement becomes strong enough to fight the reactionary consequences of world politics and of the bourgeois desertion. That whoever wishes to strengthen democracy must also wish to strengthen, and not to weaken, the socialist movement; and that in giving up socialist aims one gives up the labour movement and democracy alike.