Katheder-Socialism

(German, Kathedersozialismus; from Katheder, “academic chair” [department]), a school of bourgeois socialism.

The movement originated in Germany during the 1860’s and 1870’s as a reaction of representatives of official German bourgeois scholarship (mostly in political economy) to the growth of social conciousness in the working class. In 1872 they joined together in the League of Social Policy for the purpose of combating Marxism and lecturing from their university podiums on the necessity of state intervention in economic and social relations, allegedly in order to introduce “socialism” from above. The ideological sources of Katheder-socialism lie in the concept of “social monarchy” advanced by L. von Stein of Germany. Katheder-socialism was “the natural and inevitable expression of the theoretical cowardice and political perplexity of the bourgeoisie there” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 2, p. 479). The Katheder-socialists (G. Schmoller, L. Brentano, A. Wagner, H. Herkner, and A. Schaffle) argued in defense of the state capitalism that had been implanted in Germany. They characterized the Prussian-Junker state as a “people’s state” and the officials and the monarchical authority as “the only neutral elements in the class struggle,” capable of ensuring improvement of the workers’ conditions and a “just distribution of capital.” They also demonstrated the possibility of a social solution to the workers’ question by means of police regulation of labor, revival of the customs of the medieval guilds, and so forth.

The Katheder-Socialist interpretation of a number of the theses of Marxist political economy in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism laid the ground for revisionism in the German Social Democratic movement. K. Marx and F. Engels were critical of Katheder-socialism and of opportunists who embraced it. V. I. Lenin revealed the connections linking Katheder-socialism, “legal Marxism” in Russia, and international revisionism. At the turn of the 20th century the influence of Katheder-socialism declined considerably. Some of its ideas were later adopted by the ideologists of reformism and political reaction. In 1948 the League of Social Policy was reestablished in the Federal Republic of Germany. (Since 1956 it has been known as the Society of Economic and Social Sciences.)