Becoming the Third Pillar of Socialism: Consumer Cooperatives and German Social Democracy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract This article shows how the German Social Democratic Party renegotiated its political convictions and aspirations at a time of rapid social change before the First World War. Early German social democrats had rejected cooperative institutions of self-help for workers, and party leaders and theorists had initially distanced themselves from the cooperative movement. With the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, however, the nature of the SPD changed. Additionally, since the founding of the German Empire, workers had been enjoying better living conditions, higher wages and reduced working hours. Social Democrats were themselves members of consumer associations, and in many places they founded new cooperatives or took over existing organizations. The political realignment of the party in relation to cooperative associations was discussed in party-affiliated newspapers, in particular by the ‘revisionist’ Eduard Bernstein and the cooperative activist and trade unionist Adolph von Elm, who coined the theory of the ‘three pillars of socialism’. The article examines this debate between 1890 and 1910 based on publications in Vorwärts, Neue Welt and the Sozialistische Monatshefte.