Erfurt party congress
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The Erfurt Party Congress was held from October 14 to October 20, 1891 by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the Erfurt Imperial Hall . The program adopted here is called the Erfurt program .
meaning
The Erfurt party congress headed by August Bebel is one of the most important program party conventions of the SPD. After the persecution by the Bismarck Socialist Law (1878–1890), the rising workers' party looked for a new strategy and tactics in the age of dynamic industrialization and social changes in Germany .
Program debate
The course of the program debate in the run-up to the Erfurt party congress indicated that there was no intensive discussion of the theories of Karl Marx . So all drafts tried to combine the main features of Marxist ideology with social democratic, pragmatism- oriented, realpolitik. In total there were four draft programs, an official one from the executive committee and three alternative drafts, which were submitted before the start of the party congress. To weigh up and analyze these alternative drafts, the party executive set up a program commission headed by Wilhelm Liebknecht . The designs by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein , which did not deviate from the board of directors in terms of their fundamental goals, met with particular interest . These two papers, a more theoretical one by Kautsky and a more practical one by Bernstein, met with great approval within the 21-member program committee, were merged and finally adopted unanimously with a few changes. Due to the position of the German labor movement, this new draft program had an international exemplary character and, in the tradition of the Gotha program, contained a theoretical and a practical part. In addition, the new name SPD was written into the Erfurt program. At the Erfurt party congress itself, the program was accepted without discussion by the 250 delegates.
Content of the Erfurt program
After the reformist approaches of the Gotha program (1875), the party program that became known as the Erfurt program found its way back in parts to Marxist theory and teaching and completely abandoned the Lasalle content of the Gotha program. Karl Kautsky himself declared that he had summarized parts of Marx's capital for the theoretical part . The parts he mentions most likely refer to the section Historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation . In stark contrast to Marx, however, the program did not contain any explicit demands for a proletarian revolution.
In contrast to the theoretical part, the practical, action-political part of the program contained numerous democratic and socio-political goals such as the right to vote , an eight-hour day or worker protection . This marked the beginning of the long conflict in the party between socialist theory and realpolitical practice, which was only overcome with the Godesberg program in 1959 in favor of realpolitik, turning away from Marxist content.
Exclusion of the opposition movement of the 'boys'
The opposition of the "boys" was a very diverse left-wing counter-stance within the SPD, the main representatives of which were excluded at the Erfurt party congress. The opposition movement had its main focus in Berlin and consisted of union representatives as well as writers close to the party such as Bruno Wille , who was involved in the 'Freie Volksbühne' association. The boys started their opposition shortly before the fall of the Socialist Law with a series of press articles and specified them up to the Erfurt party congress. They criticized the increase in power of the Reichstag faction and individual personalities within the party during the period of prohibition. In addition, they called for a stronger anti-parliamentary orientation on the part of the social democrats, which they assumed to be increasingly considerate of the demands of the middle classes. The reason for this was the Eldorado speeches by the Bavarian social democrat Georg von Vollmar . The consideration for the middle class led to a reformist orientation of the movement - the boys, on the other hand, recommended a return to Lassalle and the Gotha program, in which all fractions of the bourgeoisie were described as a single "reactionary mass".
The opposition of the boys uncovered contradictions in the tactics of the Reichstag faction and achieved that the Reichstag faction at the Erfurt party congress did not additionally receive the function of a control commission of the party. However, they did not manage to combine their criticism into a coherent catalog of demands. This was made more difficult on the one hand by massive threats of exclusion in the run-up to the party congress, in which every organized faction formation was assumed to have split intentions. Similar charges were not made against Vollmar and other reformist opposition figures. On the other hand, the boys in the party congress majority around Bebel made it easy to expel because they were inferior to it in tactical questions and often mixed political with personal criticism. Because of the accusations and counter-accusations triggered in this way, the actual political contradictions fell under the table. At the Erfurt party congress, most members of the loosely connected opposition left the party or were expelled. They continued their political activity in the Association of Independent Socialists and developed into anarchism .
literature
- Steffen Raßloff , Ulrich Seidel: The Erfurt Imperial Hall . Sutton, Erfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-86680-303-9 .
- Axel Kuhn: The German labor movement (= Reclams Universal Library , Volume 17042) Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 978-3-15-017042-7 .
- Alexander Wierzock: Proximity and Distance of an Intellectual to Social Democracy. A forgotten report by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies on the revision of the Erfurt program , in: Archive for Social History, 55th Volume, 2015, pages 321–342
Web links
- Text of the Erfurt program
- The Erfurt program explained in its basic part - program commentary by Karl Kautsky
- Erfurt party congress on erfurt-web.de
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Axel Kuhn: The German Labor Movement (2004)
- ↑ a b Axel Kuhn: The German Labor Movement (2004) , p. 99
- ^ Texts from the party archive
- ↑ Text of the entire Erfurt program ( memento of the original from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Dirk H. Müller: Idealism and Revolution - On the Opposition of Young People against the Social Democratic Party Executive (1975), p. 46ff
