 The merger formula holds that social democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement. It was an idea embraced by Karl Kalski, Lenin and others, who believed in a world historical mission of the workers to take power and introduce socialism, and the mission of the social democrats to merge socialism and the worker movement. Here we explain what the merger formula is and where it comes from. What the merger formula is is clear enough. Karl Kalski wrote that for the socialist and the labour movement to be reconciled with each other and to merge into one, it was necessary for socialism to raise itself above the sphere of utopianism. The accomplishment of these feet is the historic work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who in 1847 laid through the communist manifesto the scientific foundation of what is known as modern socialism. In what is to be done Lenin concurs, quoting a later article by Kalski at length. Socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other. Each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia. It was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated. And it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who in their turn introduced it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without. People sometimes think we find this idea in Marx or Engels' writings about how socialism or communism is brought into the workers movement from the outside. As far as I can tell, this is not quite correct. There are three main discussions that get misinterpreted in this way. First, in the condition of the working class in England, Engels writes about a merger not with any Marxists, but between Chartists and Socialists in general, including especially, though not only, Overnight Utopians. Neither of these were specifically Marxist, or had the kind of Marxist theory that Kalski and Lenin talk about bringing to the workers movement from without. Second, there's an article by Engels called Socialism in Germany discussing the merger of two different communist strands, a working class movement connected to Weidling, and a theoretical one dominated by Marx. Rather than one of them bringing communism or social democracy to the other, both of these are described as already communist. Third, Marx's own discussion of workers' movements are clear that communism is already one particular part of the workers movement, does not limit the communists only to what later people call scientific socialists, like himself Engels and their followers, and don't really talk about theory being brought to the working class from the outside, but instead calls communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Marx does have some ideas that sound a little bit like a merger thesis that articulates before he becomes a communist when he's still a radical democrat, but the later Marx does not. Of course, the fact that Marx and Engels didn't come up with a merger formula doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad or wrong. Not every important piece of socialist theory needs to be traced back to some founding fathers. Instead, we should ask ourselves two things. Which concrete conditions made the idea make sense to the thinkers who developed it, and when and where does the idea become part of certain relations and struggles? To this end, let's first look at the seeds of the merger formula that enter into Marxism, followed by the social and historical soil they grew within. As far as I've been able to discover, the first version can be found in Ferdinand Lassalle, who had his own version of the merger formula. In Science and the Working Man, Lassalle writes that the great destiny of our age is precisely this, the dissemination of scientific knowledge among the body of the people. The union of these two polar opposites of modern society, Science and the Working Man, when these two join forces they will crush all obstacles to advancement with an iron hand. The lens scholar Lars Lee writes that what Lassalle means by science here is essentially his popularized version of Marx's historical materialism. According to Lee, Lassalle continued to be remembered because he showed the path, that is, he set out the fundamentals of the party's political strategy, emphasizing the importance of organizing their own independent political party and agitating for universal suffrage. One aspect of his idea of organization, Lee reminds us, was a rather dictatorial cult of personality mode of inner party organization, which many later Marxists were critical of. While the seeds of the merger formula are Lassallean, they grew up in the soil of German Marxism, indeed a common justification of the merger formula is that it articulates and makes sense of their lived experiences. For decades, the guiding light of all of Marxism was the party initially known as the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, later known as the Social Democratic Party of Germany. This was a result of the merger between the General Workers' Association founded and led by Ferdinand Lassalle until his death by dual in 1864 and the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, led by Bebel and Diebknecht, both followers of Marx. Their union took place at a conference in Gotha, resulting in the famous Gotha program. In his 1875 critique of the Gotha program, Marx strongly criticized this document for its Lassallean ideas and strategy of taking over the existing state and using it to fund cooperatives. Marx ridicules this as faith-healing and calls the idea that we can build a new society with state loans just as easily as a new railway is a fantasy worthy of Lassalle, exclamation mark. He also points out the origins of this idea in reactionary Christian socialism concocted under King Louis Philippe in opposition to the French socialists and argues that the new cooperative relations that workers are struggling for have nothing in common with establishing cooperative societies with state aid, writing that existing cooperatives are only of value if they are independent creations of the workers and not creatures of the government or the bourgeoisie. As we all know, Marx's now famous critique was suppressed several years until 1891 when the SPD officially embraced a more Marxist line with its airfield program formulated by Bebel, Karl Kautzky and the famous revisionist Edward Bernstein and its Kautzky's reflections on this program that we quoted from earlier on. The airfield program became one of the leading documents of second international Marxism, deeply influencing later Marxists like Lenin. Marx being dead, Engels kept tradition alive by accusing the airfield program of essentially being opportunist and insufficiently Marxist in a letter to Karl Kautzky that, much like Marx's critique of the Gotha program, was long kept from publication. It's often pointed out that German second international Marxist intellectuals were part of a workers movement at political party that was, in its day-to-day practice and increasingly in its theory as well, de facto reformist, and the merger formula to Groot because it helped German Marxists to make sense of their lived experiences of this. Similarly, the merger formula is often argued to reflect the experiences of Russian Marxists, which began as groups of bourgeois or petty bourgeois intellectuals dedicated to spreading Kautzky's Marxist theory to workers, as Lenin scholars like Neal Harding and Lars Lee show in detail. Interestingly, these ideas differ from those of many left Marxist and council communists as well as the ideas of the vast majority of the revolutionary workers movement during the late 1800s and early 1900s. During this time, the Marxist historian Benedict Andersen writes that anarchism and syndicalism were the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism and imperialism. This continued into the early 1900s, to the extent that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum writes that from 1905 to 1914, the bulk of the revolutionary left was an archo-syndicalist. These movements thought very differently about their ideas. For example, in the 1926 organizational platform of the libertarian communist draft, that Yellow Truda, workers' cause group, write that anarchism does not derive from the abstract reflections of an intellectual or a philosopher, but from the direct struggle of workers against capitalism, from the needs and necessities of the workers, from their aspirations to liberty and equality. While anarchist thinkers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it in the masses, simply helped by the strength of their thought and knowledge to specify and spread it. Like any Marxist idea, the merger formula has been subjected to critical debate, especially by other Marxists. As such, Marxists like Carl Kors have argued that it reflects a gap developed between his highly articulated revolutionary Marxist theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory, in some respects directly contradicted it, so that it didn't operate as a general expression of the real historical movement, but instead as an ideology that had been adopted from outside in a pre-established form. It was thus argued to make a permanent virtue out of what should have been a temporary necessity. The merger formula has also been argued to embody too much of the educator-educated model of social change that Marx associates with not only Feuerbach, but also utopian socialists like Robert Owen, who wanted enlightened bourgeois intellectuals to teach and bring socialism to workers from the outside. For Marx, this forgets that circumstances are changed by men, and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must therefore divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. To sum, the merger formula sounds a lot like saying that their Marxism is a bourgeois ideology that doesn't arise from workers' own struggles and consciousness, but must instead be made and given to them by benevolent bourgeois intellectuals. Whatever your view on it, the merger formula was an important and contested component of a lot of second and third international Marxism that I think is interesting and worth knowing more about. We are Red Plateaus, we now also exist as a podcast, we're on Twitter and we have a Discord, for info see the description. We'd like to thank our friends who helped with the script and our patrons, we love you all comrades, if you like our work and you think it's important, please send us a money on Patreon, if you have any questions about the video, things you'd like us to talk more about in the future or anything else, please let us know in the comments. 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