IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

In the Eisenach Social Program of 1869, we see emerging from the very dark, dull spiritual depths of the proletariat the demand for, as it was put, “a fairer wage for manual labor within the social society.” But then, after a relatively short time, as early as 1875 in the so-called Gotha Program, these demands took on a completely different, I might say actually communist form. At least in so far as they were openly expressed, they no longer dealt with the fair remuneration of labor, but with the equitable distribution and equalization of goods according to human needs. Then we saw how, nevertheless, the basic tenor of a political program remained alive in the proletarian movement. Until the beginning of the 1890s, the proletarian demands more or less clearly expressed the aspiration to a balancing out of social inequalities and, above all, to overcoming the principle of wages. Then we see how this political color of the program, I might say, strangely recedes, and how a purely economic program, the socialization of the means of production, the wholly cooperative nature of the work, becomes the theme. And one could go further. I am only hinting at the fundamentals. But anyone who really engages with this development of the modern social movement must also look at the other side. They must ask themselves: What has not been done to the detriment of humanity in the face of what has emerged! What could have been done? What I am about to say is not meant as a criticism of historical developments, for I know as well as anyone, of course, in what sense historical developments are necessary, and how nonsensical it is to send a moral or other condemning criticism into the past. But it is another matter to learn from the present for the future. What should have happened cannot be said otherwise: We have had guiding, leading personalities within the upper stratum of the human social order – these guiding, leading strata, have they shown themselves inclined to understand more deeply, from what they have brought forth as social experience, as social science on the basis of their class preference in more recent times, what the proletariat wants, than this proletariat itself?