ABSTRACT
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) in its day-to-day propaganda and agitation tended to concentrate on the concrete and the pragmatic. Rudolf Breitscheid, one of the leaders of the USPD who had rejoined the majority party, spoke in Heidelberg of the fact that it was today no longer sufficient to say ‘A Drummer drumming with all his might will make all men see the light’. The argument that the SPD was essentially the party of skilled workers, if not of the very aristocracy of labour, and hence strongly influenced by attitudes of caution and self-interested pursuit of limited gains, must be rejected as an oversimplification on both counts. As the origins of the SPD antedate the process of rapid industrialisation in Germany, many of its followers and the majority of its leaders were, of course, artisans or men who worked in small or medium-sized enterprises, many of which still brought into play the exercise of personal skill and individual responsibility.
