ABSTRACT
A link between socialism and the earlier bourgeois Revolution was recognized throughout the socialist movement. The German revisionist socialist Eduard Bernstein agreed; he declared socialism simply “democracy brought to its logical conclusion” (Przeworski and Sprague 1986: 21). Literary executor to Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky was the Second International’s leading theoretician and founding editor for thirty-four years after 1883 of Die Neue Zeit, the world’s leading journal of Marxist theory.2 Speaking for the orthodox center of the modern Labor Movement, Kautsky emphasized the close tie between socialism, labor, and “bourgeois democracy” or a regime with democratic political forms but where private property in the means of production left economic power in the hands of capitalists. The proletariat must do all it can to advance “bourgeois democracy,” including strengthening the powers of parliament, because “[m]odern Socialism is not merely social organization of production, but the democratic organization of society as well” (Kautsky 1971b: 6). The working class needs “democracy no less than Socialism” (Kautsky 1946: 116). Socialism:
must represent the realization of the slogan of the French Revolution, which was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. . . . Socialist parties fight not only for shorter working hours and higher wages, unemployment insurance and shop councils, but also for the liberty, equality, fraternity of all human beings, regardless of race, color, or creed.
