During the years that the German Social Democratic party organization was legally suppressed by the Socialist Law, the movement underwent a fundamental transformation in its relationship to the traditions of political democracy and socialist theory with which it began in the 1860's. This history shows how, gradually adopting Marxian economic and political theory, the Party could not abandon parliamentary participation under the Socialist Law without closing its one open legal door. Thus the Social Democrats became both ambivalent parliamentarians and ambivalent revolutionaries.
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