It is only when the bourgeoisie is secure in its control of the state, including all of those other institutions of civil society, such as the universities, the churches, the schools, and the media, so that bourgeois ideas and culture become dominant and all pervasive, and when capital accumulation has proceeded to a sufficient degree, whereby surplus value begins to be extracted on the basis of rising productivity and relative surplus value, so that workers living standards can also rise, that this further contradiction, of society organised upon the principle of democracy, but without the majority of society having the right to vote can be addressed.
It on this basis that social democracy arises. It goes along with a further development of capital from being private capitalist property, to being socialised capital. Under the former, it is the individual, usually small, capitalist that is the personification of capital itself. But, under the latter, it is the functioning capitalists, the professional day to day managers, technicians and administrators who are the personification of capital, and increasingly, these functioning capitalists are drawn from the ranks of the workers themselves, and as public education is extended, and the potential supply of such workers increases, these functioning capitalist themselves obtain wages only like those of any other skilled worker. On the one hand, these functioning capitalists, are workers, paid wages as the value of their labour-power, or even less than the value of their labour-power; they live in workers' communities, members of their families will be ordinary workers, whether skilled or unskilled. On the other hand, their social function is to maximise the production of surplus value, and their position in the production process then leaves them needing to arbitrate the conflicts that then necessarily arise between the need of capital to maximise surplus value, so as to accumulate capital, and the needs of workers to raise their living standards etc.
This leads to the development of a petit-bourgeois world outlook. The same social function of mediating the interests of capital and labour is placed upon the trade union bureaucracy, and the social-democratic politicians. The aim is not to replace the capitalist system, but to facilitate its more rapid accumulation of capital as the best means of enhancing the position of the working-class. The ideological foundation of this can be found in Ricardo, as Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value. It was that the best conditions for workers arise with the accumulation of capital, which raises the demand for labour-power. But, what facilitates the accumulation of capital, it is lower wages. Marx refers to the situation also in “Wage Labour and Capital”, writing,
“And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production – the productive capital – increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer.”
The basis of social-democracy then becomes not the replacement of capitalism, and the system of wage slavery upon which it rests, but merely the most rapid and efficient development of capitalist production, as the best means of ameliorating the workers condition, by constant improvements in the standard of living, as the cost of producing increasing quantities and ranges of use values is continually reduced. This reflects also the changed nature of the economic basis of society away from the monopoly of private capital to the domination of socialised capital, and the needs of this large scale industrial capital as opposed to those of other class fractions, such as that of the money-lending capitalists (shareholders, bondholders, and other such rentiers) who then represent the vast majority of privately held capitalist wealth.
The interests of these private capitalists, who now hold their wealth in the form of fictitious capital (shares, bonds, mortgages) and of landed property is antagonistic to the interests of socialised capital. As Marx put, it,
“The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner — and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers.”
(Capital III, Chapter 33)
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