“Labor's Way”: A Response to David Abraham

Abstract

In Labor's Way David Abraham successfully pinpoints some of the central dilemmas of social-democracy, and especially of the German Social Demo cratic Party, in society. A central problem is the failure of Kautsky's demographic calculation: the manual working-class has not come to form any thing like a majority of the electorate in advanced industrial society, and thus desire for structural social change has to be reconciled with the electoral mobil isation of nonproletarian strata. There is a need to reconcile the defense and advocacy of specifically working-class interests with a more broadly based national interest. The more particular problems faced by the SPD's inter war strategy of democracy and its adoption after 1959 of a wel farist/Keynesian growth strategy are exposed equally well by Abraham. Neither have liberated the worker from the logic of commodity production, the imperatives of international capitalism, or the entrenched economic power of the domestic capitalist, which can often render abortive the best-laid and most well-meaning initiatives of social-democratic governments. Both strate gies arguably were insufficiently participatory at the grass-roots level, though whether most electors are seriously interested in this issue is somewhat dubious in an age of privatized and commercialized leisure, and one in which the at tainment of material survival or betterment counts for far more. (Significantly the groups with high levels of membership participation outside the realm of sport and hobbies are overwhelmingly middle-class in their social composi tion.) I should also add here that Abraham's view of even the pre-1914 SPD as overly bureaucratized, a view widely popularized by the assertions of Robert Michels, cannot be accepted without question.1 To return to the main argument, however, Abraham is correct in contend ing that the aforementioned strategies of the SPD tended to involve a state within society rather than a capitalist state; and that the prob lems of their successful implementation stemmed precisely from this. Both democracy and the program of Bad Godesberg were to become equally problematical in periods of economic crisis and depression, when cer