The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program)

• 1. Introduction

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  Das Erfurter Programm, the 1892 book by Karl Kautsky, had been translated into sixteen languages by 1914. Historian Donald Sassoon observed that popular works by Kautsky and August Bebel circulated more widely among socialist activists than Marx's own writings. The book that socialists across Europe treated as a kind of new Manifesto was, in fact, a commentary on a German party platform. How a single explanation of a party program achieved that reach is a story about a particular moment in European politics. It raises questions the book itself could not settle. Can revolution be both inevitable and chosen? Is organized political action the path to socialism, or a substitute for it? And what did it mean for a work championing the proletariat to become the cornerstone of a parliamentary political party?

• 2. A Task Expands

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  At the SPD's 1891 party congress in Erfurt, delegates adopted a new party platform to replace what had come before. The Anti-Socialist Laws, which had suppressed the party's activities, were repealed the year before, in 1890. That change gave the SPD room to articulate its principles openly. Kautsky drafted the theoretical section of the new program; Eduard Bernstein wrote the practical section detailing the party's legislative demands. At the program commission, Kautsky's draft was chosen as the working basis over a competing draft submitted by Wilhelm Liebknecht. Following the congress, the SPD's executive committee commissioned Kautsky to write a popular explanation of the platform for a broader audience. That assignment grew beyond its original scope. What resulted was Das Erfurter Programm, a full-length book published in 1892. It was the first major work Kautsky had completed without the direct guidance of his mentor, Friedrich Engels. His biographer Gary P. Steenson marked this independence as significant in understanding the book's particular synthesis of Marxist theory.

• 3. Five Sections, One Synthesis

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  The first three of the book's five sections covered material Kautsky had previously laid out in The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Drawing on the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, these sections traced the logic of capitalist development. Kautsky described capitalism's "necessary" tendency toward the concentration of wealth in the hands of a dwindling number of capitalists and large landlords. Alongside this concentration came intensifying exploitation of the proletariat and what he called the "decaying middle layers." The result, Kautsky wrote, was "an ever more bitter class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." He argued that capitalism's own recurring crises provided the objective basis for the eventual socialization of the means of production.

  The fourth section, titled "The Commonwealth of the Future," was unusual territory for Kautsky. He generally avoided speculating about the nature of post-capitalist society, finding such predictions difficult. Here he ventured several concrete suggestions. He predicted the decay of the traditional family and the confiscation of large-scale private property. Small artisans and peasants would keep their own holdings. He also foresaw a trend toward the equalization of wages. He spoke of achieving "freedom from labor" rather than merely "freedom of labor." The fifth section addressed tactics: the economic organization and political participation needed to advance the working class. Connecting all five sections was a question Kautsky never fully resolved. If economic laws made capitalist collapse inevitable, how much depended on what workers themselves chose to do?

• 4. Inevitable Yet Chosen

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  The central philosophical problem in The Class Struggle was one Karl Marx himself had not resolved. How could history be governed by economic laws and also depend on human decision? Kautsky's answer was to treat the two as mutually reinforcing. He wrote that the inevitability of social revolution "presupposes that men are men and not puppets; that they are beings endowed with certain wants and impulses... which they will seek to use in their own interest." Objective conditions set the stage; organized political struggle by the proletariat would convert possibility into reality. His biographer Gary P. Steenson described this as Kautsky's attempt to reconcile the deterministic and voluntaristic strands within Marx's own writing.

  Kautsky wrote that "Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalistic production." He declared that "Capitalist society has failed. Its dissolution is now only a matter of time." He also insisted that the creation of a new social order "has become inevitable." Paired with these declarations was an equally firm insistence on organized political work. Revolution did not have to come through "violence and bloodshed." He characterized it as a long-term process, not a single event. If the ruling classes proved "clever enough or weak and craven enough," they might yield voluntarily. But he also observed that "never yet was any revolution accomplished without vigorous action on the part of those who suffered most under existing conditions." What Kautsky had in mind was not spontaneous uprising. He advocated a form of organized political action that worked through existing state institutions.

• 5. Parliament as Revolution

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  Kautsky's political recommendations in The Class Struggle centered on a single institution: the parliament. He argued that a "great modern state" could only be administered through a representative assembly. Direct legislation by popular referendum, he wrote, was technically unworkable and politically sterile. The SPD's path to power, in Kautsky's view, ran through winning a parliamentary majority. He equated that conquest with what Marx had called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." A phrase long associated with violent seizure of power was reframed as a program of electoral politics.

  The book also revealed the pressures Kautsky was managing within the SPD during the 1890s. His biographer Gary P. Steenson noted that Kautsky's prose showed the "moderating impact of internal party and external governmental pressures." The SPD had a reformist wing focused on incremental gains in parliament and a more radical tendency committed to revolutionary rupture. Kautsky tried to satisfy both. He endorsed parliamentary participation as the essential arena of class struggle while insisting that no reform could prevent the eventual revolution. The party must retain its exclusively working-class character and resist merging with bourgeois political forces. Despite this careful balancing, both party members and bourgeois critics read the book as a revolutionary document in 1892.

• 6. A Contested Classic

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  Vladimir Lenin, writing in 1899, cited the Erfurt Program as a model for socialist parties beyond Germany to emulate. That endorsement reflected the book's standing in the years before 1914. The English translation appeared in 1910, produced by W. E. Bohn. Kautsky's biographer Gary P. Steenson noted that Bohn's title, The Class Struggle, was somewhat misleading. It took its name from the book's fifth section alone and gave a narrow impression of the work's actual scope. A 1971 reissue of that translation appeared with a new introduction by scholar Robert C. Tucker. Tucker described the book as "one of the minor classics of Marxist thought."

  Eduard Bernstein's revisionist movement, which challenged orthodox Marxism from within the SPD, mounted the most sustained critique of the book. Bernstein attacked what he characterized as a "collapse theory" and a "pauperization thesis" embedded in Kautsky's argument. Kautsky's response was direct: the Erfurt Program contained "not a single word on the theory of collapse." He explained that Marxists did not mean a mechanical economic breakdown. They meant the political and organizational maturing of the proletariat that would, in time, bring bourgeois society to an end. Whether Bernstein's reading was right or wrong, the debate he sparked kept Kautsky's 1892 book at the center of socialist argument for decades. Kautsky's position as the leading theoretician of the Second International rested largely on that single volume.