The Social Democratic Party

The development of Social Democracy is rather interesting since during the time, there were "reformed" radicals, men and women who supported universal suffrage, improved work conditions, and the public ownership of property, that decided to push for their cause in the parliament rather than on the streets. In Germany since the industrial revolution was in full force, affecting the urban and rural society, both the aristocrats and the peasants alike, new political development to give the masses more democracy was intensely debated. The German Workers Association and the Social Democratic Party more or less did adopt tactics such as advancing socialism through parliamentary means rather than initiating a revolution. In the beginning there were two groups, the General German Workers' Association led by Ferdinand Lassalle and and the Social Democratic Labor Party led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel. The SDLP party was influenced by Marxism while the former was established to bind socialism with democracy. When the Reich was established in 1871, the two parties came close together and both merged to form the Socialist Labor Party of Germany. The new party decided above everything else to improve workers' rights by abolishing private property and establishing state sponsored cooperatives that would be publicly owned. The new party planned to implement their plans through parliamentary means which betrayed Marxist's goal of creating a violent revolution. The idea of starting revolution became popular when the Socialist party was persecuted by Bismarck between 1878 and 1890. During that time, the party once again embraced Marxism. This time the German Socialist Labor Party came up with a two-part plan that would appeal to the workers. The first plan was long term, social democrats envisioned the evolution of captilism, one from private ownership to public ownership held and owned by the common people. Property included, land, mines, raw materials, machines, and transportation that would be eventually owned collectively by the workers. The second part was short changes needed to be made while a capitalist economy prevailed. The Socialist Party proposed widespread political reforms but also economic reforms such as an eight hour work shift, a social insurance system, the rights of labor unions, and a law to ban child labor.

Many of the ideas and goals that the Social Democrats advocated were part of the Erfurt program. Clearly the Erfurt program was vague in whether these political and economic ideas should be implemented through revolutionary means. Rather, the Social Democrats made their voices heard by opposing every policy that Bismarck's government proposed including boycotting the vote for a national budget in the Reichstag or in the state assembly, the Prussian Landstag.