The socialist parties, across Europe, however, have a different history, as a result of the later development of industrial capitalism and the industrial proletariat. By the time the labour movements in these countries have developed to a meaningful size, Marx and Engels had already formulated their ideas in The Communist Manifesto, and a range of other works. They built upon the political works and heritage of socialist and communist writers of the preceding period. The European socialist parties do not come out of an existing social-democratic party, or tradition, and are not limited by the bourgeois ideas of the trades unions, but are newly born out of the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels and their contemporaries. This division between socialists and social-democrats was highlighted in the revolutions of 1848. Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte notes,
“During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism.”
The social-democrats were one of the elements ranged against the proletarians.
“The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.”
The epitome of this social-democratic ideology is the Fabians. Although often cited as one of the forces that led to the creation of the Labour Party, the Fabians were, themselves, opposed to the split from the Liberals, and creation of a separate workers' party. As Lenin pointed out, by the end of the 19th century, the big industrial bourgeoisie, itself, had come to the conclusion that it was inevitable that capitalism was being transformed into something else, with the competition of the earlier period being replaced by an increasing role of the state in planning and regulating society.
“The socialisation of labour by capital has advanced so far that even bourgeois literature loudly proclaims the necessity of the “planned organisation of the national economy.””
(The Economic Content of Narodism, Chapter 3, p 445-6)
This reality, understood by Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin, unfortunately was not recognised by Luxemburg, leading her into a number of theoretical errors. For social-democrats this process leads automatically to a new society, in which the interests of capital and labour are harmoniously adjusted, and all that is required is for the machine to be properly managed by an enlightened elite. This idea runs like a thread through the ideas of the Fabians, and their fellow travellers such as Keynes, but also through the ideas of European socialists such as Bernstein. It was this ideology that Luxemburg polemicised against. As an elitist, top-down ideology, it has an immediate affinity with the state-socialist ideas of Lassalle.
Marx criticised those ideas in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and, in the following years, Engels took up the cudgels against those same ideas whenever they manifested themselves. But, as Draper sets out, in The Two Souls of Socialism, the reality is that the ideas that underpinned the socialist parties that formed the Second International, owe at least as much to the ideas of Lassalle and to Fabianism as they do to the ideas of Marx and Engels. Unlike the Labour Party, these European socialist parties begin by openly avowing an allegiance to Marxism, and to the idea of creating socialism, but the elements of social-democracy inherent in their ideology inevitably leads them towards a perspective of socialism that is brought about by a process of reform rather than revolution. The main lines of this argument were set out by Rosa Luxemburg in her polemic against Bernstein, Reform or Revolution.
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