| Party or Faction. | 1881 | 1884 | 1887 | 1890 | 1893 | 1898 | 1900 | 1903 | 1906 | 1907 | 1911 | 1912 | |||||||||
| Conservatives | 50 | 76 | 80 | 72 | 67 | 53 | 51 | 52 | 52 | 58 | 59 | 43 | ||||||||
| German or Imperial Conservatives | 27 | 28 | 41 | 20 | 28 | 22 | 20 | 19 | 22 | 22 | 25 | 14 | |||||||||
| "Wild" Conservatives | 1 | 2 | — | 1 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | |||||||||
| Anti-Semites | — | — | 1 | 5 | 16 | 14 | 13 | 11 | 14 | 20 |
| 13 | |||||||||
| League of Landowners | — | — | — | — | — | 5 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 7 | |||||||||||
| Bavarian Land League | — | — | — | — | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | — | 2 | |||||||||
| Center | 98 | 99 | 98 | 106 | 96 | 102 | 102 | 100 | 100 | 104 | 103 | 90 | ||||||||
| Poles | 18 | 16 | 13 | 16 | 19 | 15 | 14 | 16 | 16 | 20 | 20 | 18 | |||||||||
| Guelphs | 10 | 11 | 4 | 11 | 7 | 9 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 5 | |||||||||
| Alsatians | 15 | 15 | 15 | 10 | 8 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 9 | |||||||||
| Danes | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||||||||
| "Wild" Clericals | 2 | — | — | — | — | — | 1 | — | 1 | — | — | 1 | |||||||||
| National Liberals | 45 | 51 | 98 | 41 | 53 | 48 | 53 | 50 | 51 | 54 | 51 | 45 | ||||||||
| United Progressives (Radicals) |
| 47 |
| 32 |
| 14 | 13 | 15 | 9 | 10 | 14 |
| 42 | ||||||||
| Other Progressive groups (Radicals) | 59 | 23 | 29 | 28 | 21 | 20 | 28 | ||||||||||||||
| People's Party | 8 | 7 | — | 10 | 11 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 7 | |||||||||||
| "Wild" Liberals | 3 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | — | 4 | 4 | 2 | |||||||||
| Social Democrats* | 12 | 24 | 11 | 35 | 44 | 56 | 58 | 81 | 79 | 43 | 53 | 110 | |||||||||
| * They form the extreme Radical Left. (These groups are those given in Kürchner's Deutscher Reichstag, p. 398.) | |||||||||||||||||||||
4. PROGRAM OF THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Adopted at Erfurt, 1891
The economic development of bourgeois society leads by natural necessity to the downfall of the small industry, whose foundation is formed by the worker's private ownership of his means of production. It separates the worker from his means of production, and converts him into a propertyless proletarian, while the means of production become the monopoly of a relatively small number of capitalists and large landowners.
Hand-in-hand with this monopolization of the means of production goes the displacement of the dispersed small industries by colossal great industries, the development of the tool into the machine, and a gigantic growth in the productivity of human labor. But all the advantages of this transformation are monopolized by capitalists and large landowners. For the proletariat and the declining intermediate classes—petty bourgoisie and peasants—it means a growing augmentation of the insecurity of their existence, of misery, oppression, enslavement, debasement, and exploitation.
Ever greater grows the number of proletarians, ever more enormous the army of surplus workers, ever sharper the opposition between exploiters and exploited, ever bitterer the class-war between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which divides modern society into two hostile camps, and is the common hall-mark of all industrial countries.
The gulf between the propertied and the propertyless is further widened through the crises, founded in the essence of the capitalistic method of production, which constantly become more comprehensive and more devastating, which elevate general insecurity to the normal condition of society, and which prove that the powers of production of contemporary society have grown beyond measure, and that private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their application to their objects and their full development.
Private ownership of the means of production, which was formerly the means of securing to the producer the ownership of his product, has to-day become the means of expropriating peasants, manual workers, and small traders, and enabling the non-workers—capitalists and large landowners—to own the product of the workers. Only the transformation of capitalistic private ownership of the means of production—the soil, mines, raw materials, tools, machines, and means of transport—into social ownership and the transformation of production of goods for sale into Socialistic production managed for and through society, can bring it about, that the great industry and the steadily growing productive capacity of social labor shall for the hitherto exploited classes be changed from a source of misery and oppression to a source of the highest welfare and of all-round harmonious perfection.
This social transformation means the emancipation not only of the proletariat, but of the whole human race which suffers under the conditions of to-day. But it can only be the work of the working-class, because all the other classes, in spite of mutually conflicting interests, take their stand on the basis of private ownership of the means of production, and have as their common object the preservation of the principles of contemporary society.
The battle of the working-class against capitalistic exploitation is necessarily a political battle. The working-class cannot carry on its economic battles or develop its economic organization without political rights. It cannot effect the passing of the means of production into the ownership of the community without acquiring political power.