Saturday, May 29, 2021

50 Years Ago: The German Social Democratic Party (1960)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Social Democratic Party in Germany occupies a similar position to the party similarly named here. Its programme (the Erfurter Programme) consists of the theoretical part, based on the teachings of Marx—the materialist conception of history, the surplus value theory and the class struggle—and the practical, consisting of reforms and palliatives; and we allege that the whole existence of the German S.D.P. has been spent in the advocacy of those reforms, to the detriment of Socialist propaganda. In the early days of our Party we held the erroneous view . . . that the German workers must obtain certain reforms because the revolution from feudalism to Capitalism was not complete. But we found that conditions there make a Socialist Party quite as possible as here.
From the
 Socialist Standard, May, 1910.


The German Social Democratic Party, reformed after the collapse of the Hitler regime, recently adopted a new programme from which the theoretical link with Marxism and also the commitment to wholesale nationalisation has been dropped.

1 comment:

Imposs1904 said...

". . . the party similarly named here."

Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation was known as the Social Democratic Party between 1907–11.