The merger formula also reveals the logic that drove the creation of the party-led alternative culture. The fantastic array of newspapers, the sporting clubs, the socialist hymns, all under the leadership of a highly organised national political party - this entire innovative panoply was meant to merge in the most profound way possible the new socialist outlook with the outlook of each worker.
Social Democracy's self-proclaimed mission of bringing the good news of socialism to the workers meant that it had a profound stake in political democracy and particularly in political liberties such as freedom of speech, press and assembly. Political liberties were only a means - but they were an absolutely essential means. In an image that profoundly influenced Russian Social Democracy, Kautsky asserted that political liberties were 'light and air for the proletariat'.[353] The vital importance of political liberties was a key sector in the two-front polemical war against both isolated trade-union activists and isolated revolutionaries, both of whom tended to ignore or even scorn the need for fighting absolutism and broadening political liberties.
Indeed, Social Democracy pictured itself, accurately enough, as one of the principal forces sustaining political democracy in turn-of-the-century Europe. The reasoning behind this claim is the basis for the political strategy to which the Russian Social Democrats gave the name of 'hegemony in the democratic revolution'. The bourgeoisie does indeed have a class interest in full parliamentary democracy and political liberties, but as time goes by, the bourgeoisie is less and less ready to act on this interest. The same reason that makes Social Democracy eager for democracy (political liberties make the merger of socialism and the worker movement possible and therefore inevitable) douses the enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie. Thus Social Democracy becomes the only consistent fighter for democracy. In fact, some major democratic reforms will probably have to wait until the dictatorship of the proletariat and the era of socialist transformation. In the meantime, bourgeois democracy is much too important to be left to the bourgeoisie.
The defence of democracy was a national task in which Social Democracy saw itself as a fighter for the here-and-now interests of all the non-elite classes. In the Social Democratic narrative, the proletariat did not look on all the other labouring classes with 'contempt' (as is often stated). The proletariat was rather pictured as the inspiring leader of what might be called follower classes. As Kautsky explained in a section of The Erfurt Programme entitled Die Sozialdemokratie und das Volk, the leadership role of the proletariat had two aspects. In the long run, peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie would see that their own deepest aspiration - to assert control over their productive activity - could only be attained through the 'proletarian socialism' of centralised social control and not through individual ownership. In the short run, the non-elite classes would realise - sooner rather than later - that nationally organised and militant Social Democracy was the only effective defender of their current perceived interests. In the Marxist texts that most influenced Lenin, the dominant note is not pessimism and fear of, say, the peasants but rather an unrealistic optimism that they would soon accept the leadership of the organised workers.
Russian Social Democracy
From the point of view of a young Russian revolutionary in the 1890s choosing a political identity, what was the greatest obstacle to choosing to be a revolutionary Social Democrat? A Social Democrat had to reject the pessimistic horror that capitalist industrialisation had inspired in earlier Russian revolutionaries, but this rejection was hardly an obstacle - on the contrary, it was an impetus for optimistic energy in the face of what seemed by the 1890s to be inevitable economic processes. The minuscule dimensions of the new Russian industrial working class also hardly constituted an obstacle, since organising and propagandising even the relatively few Russian workers offered plenty of scope for activity.
The greatest obstacle - the crucial distinction between Russia and the countries where Social Democracy flourished - was the lack of political liberties. The tsarist autocracy seemed to make 'Russian Social Democrat' something of an oxymoron. The whole meaning of Social Democracy revolved around propaganda and agitation on a national level. What then was the point of even talking about Social Democracy in a country where even prominent and loyal members of the elite were prohibited from publicly speaking their mind?
Accordingly, many revolutionaries adopted severely modified forms of Social Democratic ideas. Some accepted the importance of achieving political liberty but concluded that a mass movement was a non-starter as a way of overthrowing tsarism. Others accepted the importance of organising the working class but felt that political liberties were not so fundamental that overthrowing the autocracy should be a top priority task for the workers.
The central strand of Russian Social Democracy - the strand that ran from the Liberation of Labour group (Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Aksel'rod and Vera Zasulich) in the early 1880s through the Iskra organisation of 1900-3 and then through both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions that emerged from Iskra - tried to be as close to Western-style Social Democracy as circumstances would allow. The guiding principle of Russian Social Democracy can be summed up as: Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under absolutist conditions so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the political liberties that we need to make the party even more like the SPD!
As worked out by the polemics of the underground newspaper Iskra at the turn of the century, this basic principle led to the following assertions. The Russian working class can be organised by revolutionaries working in underground conditions. The workers can understand the imperative of political liberty both for the sake of immediate economic interests and for the long-run prospects of socialism. Their militant support of a democratic anti-tsarist revolution will instigate other non-elite classes and even the progressive parts of the elite to press home their own revolutionary demands. Thanks primarily to the militancy of the working class, the coming Russian democratic revolution will have a more satisfactory outcome than, say, the half-baked German revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, since it will attain the greatest possible amount of political liberty. And these political liberties will allow the education and organisation of the Russian working class on an SPD scale, thus creating the fundamental prerequisite of socialist revolution, a class ready and able to take political power.
Compared to the trends they were combating, the Iskra team stands out by its optimism about the potential of the Russian working class to organise and become an effective and indeed leading national political force under tsarism. Iskra believed that this potential could only be realised given the existence of a well-organised and highly motivated Social Democracy - a lesson they learned from the astounding success of German Social Democracy. Many readers of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? have concluded that Lenin wanted a nationally organised party of disciplined activists because he had pessimistically given up on the revolutionary inclinations of the workers. In reality, Lenin wanted an SPD-type party - one with a national centre and a full-time corps of activists - because of his optimistic confidence that even the relatively backward Russian proletariat living under tsarist repression would enthusiastically respond to the Social Democratic message. Lenin's opponents were the sceptical ones on this crucial issue.