50 Years Ago: The German Social Democratic Party
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.