Portal:Socialism/Selected quote/14

It is clear that in a situation such as that last mentioned, the ground is very favourable to the rapid growth of the Social-Democracy. Life provides material for its agitation which makes its general views comprehensible to the masses. In such a situation every economic struggle, even the smallest, becomes a school for the class struggle, if the party consistently illumines all its incidents from one point of view, if it flies its flag openly in the air. Then greater masses will rally each day round the Social-Democracy, and it becomes a political factor in public life, which the bourgeoisie and the Government have to take into account. But this growth cannot all at once get rid of the effects of previous development. If a Labour movement, on a bourgeois basis, has hitherto existed in the country where the new movement is awakening it will certainly not disappear all at once. Every social organisation which is rooted in life still lasts a long time, even after the conditions from which it drew its strength have changed in a manner unfavourable to it. And (this point we will return to) a bourgeois Labour movement is brought into existence by lasting, not passing, conditions. How is this movement influenced by the presence of a consistent Social-Democratic Party? The political action of the Social-Democracy, its criticism of the bourgeoisie and the Government and their allies in the working class, constitute, on the one hand, an element of disintegration for the bourgeois Labour movement, and, in the second place, urges the latter on the road of the struggle against capital, though, it must be noted, that struggle remains hesitating and full of contradictions. If there is one thing which renders it possible to strengthen the class-war element in the bourgeois Labour movement, and to embody parts of it in the Socialist movement, it is the ceaseless war against that movement. This applies, not only to various organisations founded by the bourgeois parties-for instance, in Germany to the Christian and Hirsch-Duncker trade unions – not only to those which are, like the trade unions in England, independent, but also to all those which appear in Socialist clothing, but are of bourgeois origin. This policy, which momentarily divides the proletariat, prepares for its subsequent unity under the banner of Social-Democracy, as the only lasting organisation. ...Archive