Bavarian Social Democracy and the Peasant Question

Abstract

Social Democracy entered into existence from the point of view of practical politics as a movement of industrial workers. Its main field of activity naturally had to be a branch of production in which capitalist development had found its sharpest expression, in which the corrupting results of capitalism were at their most visible and tangible, in which social relations were at their most acute and provided the strongest impulse towards a transformation in the sense of socialism, and in which capitalism had unwillingly and in ever greater measure to provide for the Party its elite troops. And Social Democracy always has to speak up for wage-labourers of all kinds, first and foremost, in the Reichstag, the Diets, the Press, because they are the most dependent on the assistance of legislation and no other party assists them to obtain it, and because they have already been thrown to the lowest level of society by the capitalist process of expropriation. These facts are now interpreted by our opponents, with a view to leading the peasants astray, in the sense that Social Democracy is absolutely unconcerned with the rural population. Nay more, it is actually hostile to the peasantry, they allege, and exerts all its strength to ruin them. According to the assertion of one of the leaders of the clerical party, ‘one of the focal points of the programme of social democracy is the removal of the peasantry from this world’ because without this they cannot attain their objectives.