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Max Shachtman
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 1, 7 January 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
It is interesting to note that at the outset, the party fathers and the official theorists – Liebknecht the elder, Kautsky, Schoenlank and others included – attached no fundamental significance to Bernstein’s views. The party press even wrote at the outset that there is something healthy in the idea to submit the party program to periodic revision on the basis of new developments. That the socialist movement would split on this rock which Bernstein threw into its midst, did not occur to most of the leaders at the beginning.
The credit for the first shot in the counter-offensive seems to go to Parvus (Dr. Helphand), the brilliant Russian Marxist who was then active in the German movement. He was promptly followed by Rosa Luxemburg, whose comparative youth in the German movement did not diminish the effectiveness of the blows she continued to strike for the Left wing throughout her life, down to the very day when she was assassinated in Berlin by Bernstein’s comrades-in-arms. Fighting on their side were also Klara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, Karl Kautsky – always a little belatedly, appearing on the battleground at the very end, as Rosa put it, like the Napoleonic Old Guard! – and the father of Russian Marxism Plechanov.
With such an array of intellectual giants massed against him, it is no wonder that Bernstein suffered defeat after defeat. But these defeats were of a formal nature and left him and his movement unimpeded. In 1899, at the Hanover party congress, the party adopted Bebel’s resolution against the revisionists:
“The party stands as before on the foundation of the class struggle ... there is no reason for the party to change either its fundamental principles and demands, its tactics, or its name, that is, to become a democratic-socialist reform party in place of a social democratic party ...”
In Dresden, four years later, the radical wing gained another paper triumph when the revisionist attempts to change the class struggle tactic of the party were condemned. Only 11 delegates voted against this resolution; some were Left wingers, not wholly satisfied with it, the rest were at the extreme Right. As for most of the revisionists, they mockingly voted for the resolution amidst considerable merriment. They knew better than most of the radicals that the resolution would remain on paper, whereas the practise of the party was swinging more definitely in their direction. So prominent a party father as Auer, who carefully refrained from voting for Bernstein at the party congress, is said to have written him: “Lieber Ede, so was tut man, aber man sagt es nicht” – “My dear Eddie, that’s the sort of thing you do, but you don’t talk about it”! This classic formula contains more than cynicism; it sums up the ideas of the party leaders, on the road to their August 4, 1914, but prudent enough to conceal the fact under the old watchwords and banners.
The genuine Marxist wing of the movement was even then in favor of expelling Bernstein from the party. In 1901, Plechanov wrote:
“In Bernstein’s views there are now left only feeble traces of socialism. In reality he stands much closer to the petty bourgeois adherents of ‘social reform’ than to the revolutionary social democracy. Yet he is still called ‘party comrade’ and he is not requested to leave the party”.
Rosa Luxemberg also presented a proposal for his expulsion, but the very idea of such a ruthless measure horrified the party leaders and, for that matter most of the Left wingers. It was never even taken up by the party congress. Kautsky, at that time still engaged in polemizing against Bernstein in that dry, pedantic, lifeless manner which proved to be no obstacle to their eventual reconciliation, opposed his expulsion. He stood for preserving that peculiar sort of “freedom of opinion in the party” which has always served to shield the Right wing from the attacks of the Left.
The discussion around Bernstein’s views was not, of course, confined to the German movement. His writings not only gave a decisive impetus to a whole series of revisionist attacks upon the body of Marxian doctrine by petty bourgeois economists and sociologists, but formed the line of demarcation between the two principal tendencies in the international socialist movement.
In practise, and not infrequently in theory, the whole Second International was dominated by the revisionist school, as was shown most strikingly and fatally at the crucial moment when the world war broke out. The rise of imperialism in the most important countries of the two continents had reared a labor aristocracy that merged or almost merged with the lower middle class which was being attracted everywhere to the socialist movement. Their interests became bound up with the destinies of their respective imperialist fatherlands. Allegiance to socialism became a “practical ideal” which was reconciled without great difficulty with the frightful exploitation of those tens of millions of black, brown and yellow colonial peoples who never figured in the Bernsteinian scheme, and for good cause.
The upper strata of the working class, swelled by an influx of the petty bourgeoisie from town and country, fortified by a powerful trade union and party bureaucracy, bolstered up by well-established institutions and interests, recoiled from the prospect of social revolution. With the gradual improvement of their own conditions, and with every apparent prospect of steadily “growing into” socialism by the parliamentary process (the German socialist vote in 1912 reached 4,250,000; elsewhere it rose correspondingly), the criticism of the Left wing lost much of its vigor and effectiveness and the standpoint of Bernstein appeared to be justified by the facts of social evolution.
Added to this was the fact that the official Marxist school, represented by Kautsky with whom Luxemburg broke long before the war, did not exclude the Bernsteinian conception; it rather supplemented it much in the manner that a left peg-leg assists a still vigorous right foot. While the official program of the German social democracy, adopted in Erfurt towards the end of the last century, was formally Marxian, it had wide gaps in it through which opportunist practise could enter with ease. The central criticism by Marx of the Gotha program – the omission of the dictatorship of the proletariat – was ignored at Erfurt too. At all events, the Kautskyan formulation was open to interpretations from both sides.
Plechanov, however, when the program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was being elaborated, did not fail to denounce the omission of a clear reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Erfurt program as theoretically incorrect and, in practise, a cowardly concession to the opportunists. Cowardly concessions of this sort, screened by formal adherence to the terminology of the class struggle, proved to be the essence of Kautsky’s fight against Bernstein. Plechanov’s aphorism in his Open Letter to Karl Kautsky that “Either the social democracy will be buried by Bernstein or Bernstein by the social democracy”, was verified with cruel exactitude at the decisive hour.
The world war was the catalytic agent which precipitated the “theoretical dispute” into two clearly defined sides of the class struggle. What started out as an “abstract discussion” ended by splitting the socialist movement wide open, with the representatives of the proletarian revolution on one side of the barricades and. the social-patriots, agents of imperialism, on the other. By and large, these two class camps were made up of the same elements who divided on the questions raised by Bernstein. The anti-Bernsteinians took their stand against the imperialist war; the revisionists supported the imperialist fatherland.
There were exceptions, it is true. Plechanov turned patriot; Leusch, who had played the radical before the war, volunteered for the front; Hyndman, with his arid pre-war orthodoxy, became a jingo. Bernstein on the other hand, turned Centrist and pacifist for the moment, and effected a touching reconciliation with his old friendly-enemy, Kautsky. But as a rule, the old pre-war divisions remained and became more rigid.
Bernstein had sowed the seed which yielded the fruits of social patriotism. One of his most insistent arguments had been directed against the Marxian idea that the workers have no fatherland. This may have been justified in an agitational sense, he argued, in 1847 when the workers had. no rights and unlimited absolutism reigned throughout Europe. Now that the workers had won universal suffrage, had partaken of the cultural achievements of society, had invaded the legislative bodies – the workers did have a fatherland. This idea became the theoretical basis for all the outspoken social-chauvinists from whom Bernstein separated himself for a short time during the war.
It goes without saying that he found no place at the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the war, any more than they were at his side in the two decades before the war. He did not stand with Liebknecht and his revolutionary opposition; nor did he ever reconcile himself with the other Spartacists – Luxemburg, Mehring, Zetkin – who continued their struggle against him with even greater vigor during the war. His anti-war position had almost everything in common with pacifism and, as in the past, nothing in common with socialism. He belonged to that group of 29 Reichstag deputies, led by Haase and Ledebour, who finally summoned up enough small courage to break the decision of the social democratic fraction and, on August 20, 1915, to leave the session during the vote on war credits. Seven months later, 18 of the deputies formed a fraction of their own which later became the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In the Centrist USPD, he shared leadership jointly with Kautsky, as a symbol of their essential reconcilability.
He did not wait for the split at the Halle Congress of the party where the majority of the membership joined the ranks of the Communist International. Just as he had pioneered the revisionist movement, he pioneered the most bitter anti-Bolshevik current in the social democracy. As early as 1918 he returned to the bosom of Scheidemann, Noske and Ebert, who were realizing in sanguinary practise the class collaboration theories of Bernstein. Here too he had not long to wait for Kautsky: both of them were active agents in re-cementing the ranks of the Majority socialists with the prodigal sons who had left it for a while under the pressure of discontented workers. Except for the very last years of his life, when old age would no longer permit it, he was drawn into all the special conferences of that particular faction which rules the party and regulates the antagonisms and ambitions of all the other factions: the group of Wels-Severing-Breitseheid-Stampfer-Loebe-Heilmann.
At the Heidelberg party congress in 1925, his signal services to reformism were generously acknowledged by the whole party in the formal programmatic repudiation of the class struggle. His coronation was also his vindication; but even more was it a vindication of Plechanov’s prediction. Bernstein had buried the social democracy. But by that time it could no longer be reincarnated into the democratic-socialist reform party of his early dreams. It already functioned not only as a bulwark against revolution, but also as an obstacle to social reform. It had betrayed the present of the movement as well as its future.
Bernstein triumphed not only over the Left wing in the social democracy (and that only formally, because the Left wing is today restored on a grander scale in the revolutionary Communist movement), but over the Centrist morass. His life’s work is a lesson and a warning which the Communist movement, split into three wings as was the social democracy a generation ago, will profit by heeding.
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