Socialism can be defined as the social or community-based control over the means of production for public benefit rather than private profit. Various types of socialism emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, including revolutionary, reformist, and anarchist. Socialists conflicted over the role of state. Marx and Engels defined the state as the organized power of one class (the bourgeoisie) for oppressing another (the proletariat). By contrast, socialists and communists before Marx believed the state was the supreme moral agent of the society as a whole. The rule of law, and with it, the expansion of the state, was the best hope of the people against rule by the predatory interests of tyrants.
Liberal idealism is the doctrine regarding the state as the expression of the general will contrary to the Marxist concept of the state as the executive arm of the ruling class. Liberal idealism naturally contradicted every other important Marxist principle. It denied that class struggle and violent revolution were necessary or desirable, that the proletariat occupied a privileged place in history, and that any class commanded higher loyalty than the general will of the nation. The German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, as spokesman for German labor in the 1860’s, hailed the democratic state as the unity of the nation and the proletariat. In Britain Fabian Socialism was founded in 1884, vowing kinship with liberalism and belief in slow change, i.e., reform. France’s Alexandre Millerand led a reform socialist movement very similar to Fabianism. Eduard Bernstein was a founder of evolutionary socialism, saw flaws in Marxist thinking, rejected the materialist theory of history, and the Hegelian dialectical perspective (the basis of Marxist historical theory).
In the two decades before World War I European socialism, though apparently immersed in Marxist ideology, was working its way toward an accommodation with liberalism, whether it cared to admit it or not. Russia’s founder of Marxism was Georgi Plekhanov who said Russia would have to go through a long capitalist incubation before socialism was possible. Socialists therefore would have to wait patiently before constructing a democratic party. His disciple, Vladimir Lenin, grew to oppose this and proceeded to build his own elite organization of dedicated and disciplined revolutionaries. Orthodox Marxist Karl Kautsky explained the the absurdity of the Bolshevik claim that the bourgeois stage of history had been accomplished between February and October 1917 as Russia remained industrially backward. The false claim bolstered Lenin’s dictatorial rule as expressing the public will. Lenin and his Bolshevik cohorts believed they had mastered history and could be saved from the fate to which all previous dictatorships had succumbed. Thus assured, they rendered the party omnipotent over all of society. Whoever controlled the party inherited greater power than any Czar had ever possessed. By 1924 the Bolshevik Leviathan came under Joseph Stalin’s domination, the Communist Party secretary, who became one of history’s worst tyrants.
In the decades following Marx’s death in 1883 industrialism relentlessly moved across Europe, polarizing society into bourgeois and proletariat classes. Marxist parties sprang up in every country, including those where anarchism was strong. The German Social Democratic Party emerged as the colossus of European reformist (parliamentary) socialism, and its growth kept pace with the phenomenal industrial growth of the country after German unification in 1871. As the dominant party in the Second International, created in 1889, it was the premier socialist organization of the world. Yet, socialism was not making headway in the U.S. or Britain in the form of organized parties. Britain’s socialist Fabian Society began to grow within the middle class, akin to radical liberalism and firmly anti-revolutionary. French Socialism also fell to a moderate reformist position. It became apparent that wherever political democracy showed strength it tended either to neutralize the appeal of a revolution via liberal democracy or thwart its development altogether. Conflict emerged in Germany between orthodox Karl Kautsky and revisionist (reformist) Eduard Bernstein who maintained that class conflict was diminishing, that capitalism was proving supple and strong and that socialism should be approached by piecemeal and parliamentary means.
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863 which eventually evolved into the Social Democratic Party. His version of socialism, later termed “revisionism”, borrowed from German idealist philosophers Kant and Hegel and French socialists Blanc and Proudhon. Lassalle advocated universal suffrage (voting rights) as the means by which the workers would force the state to grant to them the whole fruits of their production. The working class, he believed, embodied the spirit of the people whose higher will was manifest in the state. Until it captured the state, the working class could expect little from independent trade union activity. It was on this point that Lassalle, or rather the Lassalleans, and Marx vehemently disagreed (Marx outlived Lasssalle by 19 years). Lassalle, like Marx, assumed the existence of an Iron Law of Wages, whereby labor was inevitably driven down to the lowest level necessary to maintain life. Lassalle found that labor could free itself only though the invincible power of the state. Marx believed the Iron Law could only be broken by the power of labor itself. He had little faith in the power of the state unless it directly responded to the interests of the working class, and had no faith whatsoever in the German state.
Lassalle settled in Berlin in 1859 and soon believed that the revolutionary phase had come to an end and that only a legal and evolutionary approach could hold hopes of success. With this goal in mind he held discussions with the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck in 1863–64. Stuck in a difficult political situation, Bismarck was seeking allies in his struggle against the majority liberal opposition, while Lassalle was pondering a monarchical welfare state. This was to be based on extending voting rights to all classes, not just the aristocracy (upper social echelons). He thus hoped to integrate the working class into politics and move from a bourgeois state based on private property to a democratic constitutional state. Eventually Bismarck created the first modern welfare state by incorporating these ideas into social programs which provided to German citizens all the following: health insurance, accident insurance (workman’s compensation), disability insurance and an old-age retirement pension.
In Britain Fabian Socialism determined that laissez faire capitalism was destroying the social and cultural life. Like Marx, the Fabians assumed the logic of capitalism necessarily led to socialism. They lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917. Fabian socialists were in favor of reforming Britain’s imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform, and were in favor of a welfare state modelled on the Bismarckian German model.
Orthodox Marxist, Karl Kautsky, advocated the democratic method as essential for socialism, democracy with parliamentarism, poltical and social liberties, and the socialization of the means of production. By contrast, the Bolsheviks were a despotically organized minority that annulled the meaning socialism acquired in combination with democracy. To maintain that non-democratic methods adopted in the name of socialism was to introduce uncontrolled abuses of power. Kautsky felt that modern socialism required the democratic organization of society. His socialism was indissolubly linked to democracy. He asserted that the Bolsheviks concept of dictatorship was actually contrary to Marxist theory, which posed a historically necessary link between proletarian development and socialism. Bolshevism did not provide for a healthy gestation of the proletariat’s maturation via capitalist development and the experience of struggle seasoned by the exercise of political and civil liberties. Without this development there is no proletariat strong enough and intelligent enough to build a socialist state.
Lenin divided the social democratic movement from 1903 onward, using all the instruments of czarist repression to set up an authoritarian capitalist state. The term “communism” served to merely separate his Bolsheviks from social democrats. Lenin was in Switzerland during the March 1917 Revolution. Much to his chagrin there was an all-Russian conference of Soviets with much agreement between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. A joint meeting of these two factions began discussing of uniting. Lenin stopped these negotiations. His aim in the Russian Revolution was to destroy not only all organs of self-administration, but also all other parties and organizations except his own (the Bolsheviks). To this end, he employed falsehood, slander, and brutal force against all opponents, among whom he counted all Socialists except those subservient to him. He finally succeeded in smashing all his opponents through his coup d’etat of November 7, 1917. At this time, Zinoviev, Rykov, Rjazanov, Lozowski, and other prominent Bolsheviks demanded the formation of a Socialist government composed of all Soviet parties. They declared that the formation of a purely Bolshevist government would lead to a regime of terror and to the destruction of the revolution and the country. Lenin hoped that the elections to the All Russian Constituent Assembly would bring the Bolsheviks a majority. These elections proved contrary to his wishes, as the Bolsheviks were far from a majority with only 9 million votes. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionists had the overwhelming majority with 23 million votes. Bourgeois parties had 4 million votes. The Bolsheviks had the opportunity to form a United Socialist Front or coalition to form a government supported by the overwhelming majority of the people, but they formed instead a dictatorial regime, rule by a minority party over a disorganized majority that Kautsky called “Bonapartism”, which was based on the Bolsheviks’ superior armed forces.
World War I was the historical impetus big enough to sharpen the divide between the reformist and revolutionary wings. Within hours of declaration of war, nearly all socialist nations announced their support for the war
SOURCES
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ferdinand-Lassalle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_German_Workers%27_Association
Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938