Classical Social Democracy: Difference between revisions

[[File:Centmarxf.png]] The Centrists were a major faction within the SPD, which theory is mainly based on the works of [[File:Kautsky.png]] Karl Kautsky. While embracing revolution, they support parliamentarianism (as a tactic to get more popular). A fundamental belief of theirs is the concept of the merger formula, which emphasizes the role of intellectuals in creating socialist consciousness and theory. However, these intellectuals, having no material need for liberation, cannot be the subject of social revolution. A quote from the newspaper Die Neue Zeit written in 1902 by Karl Kautsky illustrates this concept "Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.". It should be said, however, that Centrists believe that the main vehicle for social change should be the mass movement of the proletariat, instead of something like the vanguard party and such.