Social Democracy and the Aristocracy

John H. Kautsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138514652
• eBook ISBN: 9781351325349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ever since the rise of mass labor movements in the late nineteenth century, socialism has been seen as an inevi- table and antagonistic response to capitalism and the spread of industrialization. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, socialism's failure to gain ground in the United States and most of the non-Western world exposed the limited, Eurocentric views of socialist theorists, and also the inadequacy of the theory as it applied to Europe as well. John Kautsky argues that a key factor in the development of social democratic labor movements was the persistence of powerful remnants of aristocratic institutions and ideologies whose survival into the industrial age preserved exclusionary hierarchies. These led, in turn, to radicalism and class consciousness among workers.Kautsky traces the evolution of socialist labor movements in Europe and Japan where aristocratic elements were still strong, detailing the survival of aristocratic privilege and the concomitants of worker class consciousness and demands for equality. He shows how social democratic reliance on free elections was primarily a weapon against the aristocracy rather than capitalism. Contradicting socialist theory, working-class growth came to an end, class lines became blurred, and a considerable degree of equality was achieved through the welfare state. Kautsky turns to those countries that were sufficiently industrialized to have large numbers of workers, but also had reasonably free elections, civil liberties, and less repression of trade unions. Though the United States, Canada, post-Soviet Russia, Mexico, and India have very different histories and societies, their workers have not confronted a powerful aristocracy. Great Britain, the first and for long the most advanced industrial country, was virtually the last to develop a socialist labor movement. In contrast, socialist movements in Canada and the United States, where egalitarian traditions were strong, found little support. Kautsky's concluding chapters treat the spread of corruption, the rise of new oligarchies in Russia, and the position of workers no longer honored and politically weak. In its innovative perspective on long-held theories and its currency for contemporary problems, Social Democracy and Aristocracy is an important contribution to political thought in the post-Marxist world. Its global approach makes it uniquely valuable for the comparative study of labor history and economic development.

Part 1
The Aristocracy and Social Democracy: The Growth and Decline of Class Consciousness

1

Aristocratic Class Consciousness and Survival

For a class party to be formed and to persist, a certain degree of class consciousness must prevail or be capable of being implanted among those to be organized. In turn, class parties, by organizing their members as members of a class, foster the growth and perpetuation of class consciousness. Let me, therefore, begin with a few words on class consciousness and on the class divisions in societies which give rise to class consciousness and which are reinforced by it.

In societies dominated by aristocracies, class, class consciousness, and class divisions are not mere analytical devices chosen by the analyst; they are historical facts that cannot be denied. That aristocrats and peasants in medieval Europe lived different and separate lives, as I shall now emphasize; that society in Tokugawa Japan was officially divided into the four categories of aristocrats, peasants, craftsmen, and merchants; that in Britain’s House of Lords certain aristocrats hold seats by right of inheritance are facts that can hardly be explained without reference to class. Technically, it may be more accurate to call the aristocracy an estate as long as its membership was clearly defined and conferred specific civil and political rights, as is not true of classes in modern industrial society. But as the aristocracy becomes a class in modern society, I shall refer to it as such throughout.

The aristocracy has always been a relatively clearly defined class, highly class-conscious and intent on dividing society into classes with itself at the top. Where such a class wields some power, others react to it, sometimes by becoming class-conscious themselves. The following pages, then, are to lay the basis for an explanation of the fact that workers developed class consciousness where, as they entered a society being industrialized, they confronted not only their capitalist employers but also strong aristocratic elements in the political environment. Where they confronted only capitalism but no aristocracy, they did not develop class consciousness. This simple and both crucial and widely ignored point will be elaborated throughout this essay, but the conclusion seems obvious and can be anticipated: Workers’ class consciousness is a response to aristocratic elements in the society, which themselves rest on aristocrats’ own class consciousness.

The concept of class consciousness may first have been popularized by socialist thinkers and politicians, who moreover implied that the class-conscious worker was historically more advanced than and perhaps morally superior to the non-class-conscious worker. But the fact of class consciousness is centuries and millennia older than socialism and the working class. No group of people more class-conscious than aristocrats can be imagined. They seem obsessed with the need to distinguish themselves and keep themselves separate from non-aristocrats, as by their titles, their language, their customs, their values, and the restrictions they place on their choice of professions and even of marital partners.

To understand aristocrats’ class consciousness, one must understand the division of society into classes. The origins of that division coincide with the origins of the aristocracy. In some cases, aristocracies developed out of village elites, but more often they grew out of nomadic tribes who came to regularize their raids on agrarian villages, leaving the agriculturalists alive and periodically depriving them of part of their crops. Whatever the origin of such raiders, if they could subject a sufficient number of villages to this relationship, having replaced robbery by taxation, they could live entirely off the labor of peasants; they became aristocrats.

The peasants continued to be preoccupied with their agricultural labor and to be economically and socially, intellectually and emotionally completely limited by their village boundaries. Aristocrats, however, developed a wholly different way of life. To continue as aristocrats, they had to tax villages and had to maintain their ability to do so against other aristocrats or nomads. To increase their wealth, they had to expand the territory under their control in order to subject additional villages to taxation.

Of the two prime functions of the aristocracy, taxation and warfare, the former is relatively simple, takes little time out of the year, and can eventually be left to tax collectors. Warfare, however, is difficult and dangerous, and at least the threat of war is continuous. Aristocrats became preoccupied with warfare, as nomads had often been, and, apart from a few who may have specialized as chiefly tax-collecting bureaucrats or as priests, the typical aristocrats were warriors. The prevailing ideology among them was appropriate to warriors engaged in a form of warfare where individual performance is important. Values like the display of courage and steadfastness under pressure, the acquisition of glory, the preservation of honor, the rendering of service, the performance of duty, and the maintenance of loyalty came to dominate aristocrats’ lives. That peasants’ lives and concerns, their ideology and values were utterly different is obvious and does not have to be elaborated in our context.

If class consciousness is an awareness of class differences, it is hardly surprising that it would grow out of real, deep differences. Aristocrats and peasants were, of course, aware of the differences between them. But the differences were so obvious and seemed to those involved so natural, unchangeable, and unbridgeable that aristocrats and peasants did not think much about them and, in this sense, were not “conscious” of them.

Peasants were not even dimly aware of the existence of most other peasants, not even those taxed by their “own” aristocrats, and hence did not know they were members of a class of peasants. Aristocrats taxing a set of villages that constituted their empire, on the other hand, were likely to have contacts with aristocrats in other empires, they fought each other, they negotiated with each other, they even intermarried. Thus aristocrats in one empire knew they had much in common with aristocrats in other empires. In this sense, they were class-conscious, that is, conscious of forming one distinct class of aristocrats, but they were not class-conscious in relation to another class, the peasants.

In time, however, groups of people emerged who were neither aristocrats nor peasants. As some aristocracies acquired more villages and hence more wealth, they surrounded themselves with more and more servants and workers, artists and entertainers, craftsmen and traders, and some of the latter became part-time or even full-time money lenders or bankers. Unlike peasants, craftsmen and especially traders and bankers could acquire wealth, they could resist losing it as taxes to the aristocracy, they could organize and gain some measure of independence for the towns they dominated. Aristocrats were forced to negotiate with them, to make concessions to them, they were no longer all-powerful and could even become financially dependent on some bankers.

Aristocrats bitterly resented these changes and threats to their hitherto unchallengeable status. It was probably only then that aristocratic class consciousness developed in response. There had been no need to assert and prove aristocratic superiority over peasants. It was, by the standards of the aristocracy, obvious with respect to the way they lived and worked, they behaved and talked, their values and beliefs, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the dwellings they lived in. The upper strata of the new townspeople, however, could have wealth, in some cases greater than that of relatively poor aristocrats. It could be displayed, like that of aristocrats, in the form of elaborate clothing, jewelry, and expensive housing, and it empowered them even to talk back to aristocrats. This posed a threat that the formerly unbridgeable gulf separating the aristocracy from other mortals could be bridged, which evoked a new aristocratic response that can be accurately described as class consciousness.

Aristocrats now asserted their superiority and developed elaborate justifications and proof of it. Any questioning of them was regarded as an attack on the divine and natural order, a politically powerful argument in societies that had for long been unchanging and were, in this sense, profoundly conservative. It was also a persuasive argument as it could point to the unquestioned superiority of the aristocracy through centuries and even millennia.

Peasants were, from an aristocratic perspective, uncultured, dull, and dumb, but among the new townspeople there were some superior to the most “cultured” aristocrats with respect to learning or certain technical skills or artistic achievement. To assert their superiority over them, aristocrats had to base it on something that only they had, and that was, by definition, true of aristocratic “blood.” In their ideology, their superiority did not rest on merit, on their intelligence, diligence, or experience, but simply on descent. A half-wit aristocrat was superior to the most brilliant non-aristocrat.

The maintenance of pure aristocratic blood, the ability to trace one’s descent through generations now became an obsession in aristocratic ideology. Intermarriage with non-aristocrats, always impossible with peasants, became an outrage resulting in the exclusion of the offspring of such a union from the aristocracy, for acceptance would undermine the aristocrats’ claim to superiority resting on their pure blood.

Another element added to the ideology of aristocrats was contempt for the values of their potential competitors among the new townspeople. As these were not engaged in the noble activity of warfare, they were regarded as cowardly, not brave and noble like aristocrats. As they were engaged in the business of enlarging their wealth, they were seen as greedy, not generous like aristocrats who, being assured of an income, spent their money freely.

It was not his wealth as such that distinguished the successful merchant and banker from the aristocrat but the mode of its acquisition, and this is what aristocratic ideology focused on. Acquisition through taxation and through warfare, as by robbery and raiding, pillaging and holding prisoners for ransom, was honorable. But acquiring wealth by trading and banking was considered contemptible and demeaning, profits from them were unnatural. Even the lowly peasant, being useful and productive, could be ranked as superior to the merchant.

By the nineteenth century, in which we are especially interested, the social and political position of aristocrats had of course changed considerably from earlier times. Still, there is a straight line from their origins as nomadic warriors in loincloths conquering land and peasants to their role as knightly warriors in armor fighting each other to their function as modern warriors in officers’ uniforms and as diplomats and administrators in suits and ties. Above all, aristocratic class consciousness with its claim to superiority has persisted through the ages until quite recently and has powerfully affected the institutions and values and hence the politics of great parts of mankind.

* * *

We must now turn to the changing role of the aristocracy in Western Europe, where it had to adapt to an increasingly unique situation when societies became not only commercialized, as had also happened elsewhere, but industrialized. Here we are particularly interested in the consequent development of an industrial working class and its relationship with the surviving aristocracy.

The modernization of Western Europe evolved from within in a slow and gradual process that had its beginnings in about the eleventh century with the growth of commerce, of towns and of townspeople and the expansion of the aristocracy’s taxing and war-making functions. There thus emerged more centralized armies and bureaucracies and what can now be thought of as governments and as states and societies encompassing a ruling aristocracy and the villages and towns under its taxing authority.

Western Europe was neither the first nor the last region to experience at least these early stages of modernization from within, for some degree of commercialization developed time and again in heretofore agrarian areas, especially in large aristocratic empires. What made Western Europe unique is that, aside from Japan, it was the only area where this process went on all the way to advanced industrialization. In all other cases, modernization from within was evidently substantially ended by intervention from without, as by nomadic invasions or conquest by aristocratic empires. Finally, modernization from without (to be discussed in Part 2 below), emanating from already industrialized Western Europe and also the United States and Japan, put an end to the possibility of any country still being modernized from within. Thus, Western Europe and also Japan, by being the first to industrialize, rendered themselves unique.

Modernization from within, being slow and gradual, offered plenty of time and opportunities to aristocrats to adapt to their changing positions. In Western Europe, where aristocrats fought many a losing battle against the forces of modernization from within, they were never totally defeated and eliminated. While the aristocracy has obviously declined in the thousand years from, say, 1,000 CE to 2,000 CE, such a generalization obscures the fact that strong aristocratic forces and institutions grew for a time during this period and that, even as these forces declined again, institutions and ideologies they had created proved to be mighty defensive weapons in the aristocratic struggles to retain power in the modern world.

As merchants and then also bankers emerged and turned into an increasingly significant source of taxes and loans for aristocrats, they came to share some degree of power with the formerly all-powerful aristocrats. They allied themselves with the higher, “national” aristocracy and supported its centralizing policies, a process in which both the higher aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie gained power at the expense of the lower, locally based aristocracy. The higher aristocracy could thus subordinate the lower aristocracy on whom it had formerly been dependent for financial and military support. The land-owning lower aristocracy lost some of its independence and came to occupy the leading positions at the increasingly absolutist royal courts and in the increasingly centralized and powerful bureaucracies and armies.

Where the new bourgeoisie no longer needed the support of the aristocracy, it turned against the latter by questioning its claim to superiority and its right to rule and sometimes even by challenging it in outright revolutions. The aristocracies’ remaining strength then became evident, as in the English Civil War and the French Revolution, when they eventually regained some of the power they had lost and the monarchy was restored. In the Netherlands, too, the House of Orange returned three times after lengthy republican (and Bonapartist) interludes from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Aristocratic power was even more evident where anti-aristocratic revolutions fizzled and failed, like the 1848 revolutions in Germany and Austria, or never took place at all, as in Japan.

The aristocracy had been responding all along to bourgeois challenges by developing its own ideology justifying its privileged status and supporting it by references to tradition and religion. This conservative ideology with its emphasis on inequality and hierarchy proved attractive far beyond the ranks of the aristocracy and survived, often with the support of the established churches, into the twentieth century. It was a powerful force opposed to the bourgeois liberalism that emphasized either free markets and free enterprise or civil liberties and (more or less) equal representation. Eventually it also became a major opponent of laborite socialism, and some of its elements were absorbed by fascism in the interwar period. Similarly, the aristocratic institutions fashioned by royal absolutism—its bureaucracy, the military and also the state churches—proved strong enough to survive even the direct attacks of bourgeois revolutions.

Mostly in the course of the nineteenth century, aristocrats who had once been feudal landlords turned their big estates into capitalist enterprises producing for the market. Correspondingly, a political merger of aristocratic and capitalist interests also evolved to some degree, as conservative parties and a strongly aristocratic regime like the imperial German one came to represent both aristocratic and industrial interests. Thus, in the well-known German “marriage of iron and rye,” that is, of Ruhr industrialists and Prussian Junkers, protective tariffs served the interests of both makers of iron or, rather, steel and growers of rye.

As industrial monopolies grew and banks, historically close to the aristocracy, assumed a key role in the industrial economy, aristocrats came to join big business against the growing common socialist threat. Colonial and naval expansionism and militarism provided opportunities to arms manufacturers and positions for aristocratic officers and bureaucrats. These policies represented the values and the interests of aristocratic high bureaucrats and military men as much as those of capitalists who had opposed them when they were anti-aristocratic, free-enterprise liberals.

Thus, even the final phase of modernization from within, that of industrialization, which has by now put an end to virtually all aristocratic power in Europe, did not by any means do so for quite some time. Central aristocratic regimes often supported and even sponsored industrialization and industrialists, not only in Germany and Japan, but even in Britain before the rise of Manchester liberalism. At the same time, aristocrats sometimes opened their social circles, their schools, and even their families to rich industrialists.

In the course of merging with the top levels of the bourgeoisie economically, politically and even biologically, the aristocracy lost its purity. But while this is remarkable in view of its former exclusivity, for us it is important to note that in this process the character of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism was also affected. The society into which labor and eventually the labor movement grew was not, as in the post-Civil War United States, a pure capitalist one. Its institutions and widely prevalent ideology contained powerful aristocratic elements. It was in this kind of society that social democracy became a mass movement.

Through their merger with the top bourgeoisie, aristocrats once again adapted themselves to a threatening new situation. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Aristocracy and Social Democracy: The Growth and Decline of Class Consciousness
• Part 2 No Aristocracy—No Social Democracy
• 15 The Absence of Socialist Labor Parties
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index