If You Liked the Gotha Program, You'll Like the Erfurt Program Even Better

I’m back to the ups and downs of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), prior to the first world war. I’m convinced the history of this formation, which is the genesis of socialism in Germany, illuminates current politics.

The German SPD was the largest, most successful socialist organization in history, unless you want to compare it with the Bolsheviks, a subject for another day. It was a stew of different tendencies, including devoted followers and associates of national celebrity Karl Marx. Its internal diversity reflected its democratic character. It boasted millions of followers and was able to ascend to state power.

I’ve previously written about the Gotha Program, an SPD founding platform statement that provoked a bitter literary assault from Karl Marx himself. Decades later, the SPD’s more advanced Erfurt Program in 1891 attracted a critical statement from Friedrich Engels. (Marx died in 1883.)

Erfurt begins with a discussion about the disappearance of independent artisans that would result in a well-defined gulf between propertyless proletarians and the wealthy. This proved to be bad economics. There is a critical take on this position by Edward Bernstein in his Evolutionary Socialism with the benefit of actual data.

I have no problem with anti-trust advocacy. It tends to discount the alternative of social ownership. Its political juicyness is also open to question. Lack of competition in certain commodity markets is obvious. If you want to buy a can of mushrooms, for instance, how many choices do you have? I recall no more than two options at my local grocery. There is a literature to the effect that if a market is easily entered by additional sellers, in other words it is “contestable,” the lack of competition does not prevent prices from converging to their efficient, correct (sic) level. Who cares? I can buy all the damn mushrooms I want.

We did have a problem with lack of competition, also known to economists as “thin markets,” during the seizing up of production during the pandemic. Remember the great baby formula scandal? I don’t want to downplay it because I wasn’t a baby, so I don’t want to say anti-trust is nothing.

To me the more conspicuous problem regarding monopoly is not the extent of concentration in product markets, but the rise of the big tech monopolies. (Though here again, I could be biased as a consumer of tech.) A related, substantial concern (again including to my old ass, with nine prescriptions daily) is the patents afforded to vitally-needed pharmaceutical products.

With regard to the tech monopolies, the issues are social, not a matter of product prices. The big monopolies flout privacy considerations, pollute public discourse with bigotry and misinformation, and enthrall the political process to a clutch of spoiled, amoral, craven plutocrats with juvenile, depraved philosophies. They push our politics into a Lord of the Flies setting. They even disrupt disaster relief, for Christ’s sakes.

Getting back to Erfurt, once it gets past the labored diatribe against the dispossession of workmen from their little stocks of capital (tools, mainly), it gets to the most pressing reforms in Germany at the end of the 19th Century. Foremost was universal suffrage (in those days, meaning for men only). The SPD made an important contribution to the political advance of suffrage. The suffrage bit aside, Erfurt also made a stab at equal rights for women.

We could use universal suffrage right here in the good old U.S.A. It’s not that anyone can’t vote, though that is increasingly a problem that attests to our retrograde path. It’s that the votes of many count for much less than the votes of a few. For that we can blame the sainted Founders, who gave us the infernal Electoral College and that millionaire’s club known as the U.S. Senate. At some point the disenfranchised in the populous states will need to rise up against this and kick some ass. I don’t expect the good people of Wyoming will sit up and admit, yes, we have more say in your life than you, ha-ha, and we will happily surrender it.

Erfurt has something for everyone. Point #3 would make the NRA happy, though defense contractors, not so much.

There is much more there that I won’t rehash, except to point out that it reflects objectives from which the U.S. is in retreat. It is amusing to note that all the screaming from the Right about the Marxist infusions into liberalism have a lot of merit. Modern liberalism, or progressivism if you like, owes its core to the New Deal policies of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR could be said to have adopted the program of the U.S. Socialist Party, though SP leader Norman Thomas liked to say FDR “carried out socialist policies on a stretcher.”

In its heyday the German SPD was quite a thing, and not only because it ascended to power. As I’ve previously written, its Gotha and Erfurt platforms embodied the core interests of all socialisms to come, including the U.S. variant. As mixed up as Marx was with the original Germany SPD, so too does his thought permeate all left-of-center politics to follow.

Aspersions on Marx’s democratic allegiances have been due to the Marxist ‘brand’ being captured by the Russian Bolsheviks, and ultimately by Stalin and Stalinism. (Stalin’s rival Trotsky was no democratic hero either, as the anarchists of Kronstadt would learn.) This not only soiled Marx’s reputation for all time, it distracts from Marx’s arguable roots in the SPD. We’d be much better off referring to that source. Marx would be less transgressive, and possibly more popular for that.