[May, 1997]
A stark but pertinant fact is that not a single advanced capitalist country has experienced a socialist revolution in the hundred years since the death of Karl Marx. Revolutions have occurred, but in those less economically advanced parts of the world characterised by a relative dominance of rural populations and little—if any—experience or history of parliamentary democracy. In the ‘first world’ of north America, western Europe, Australasia and Japan, the only form of socialism that has ‘come to power’ (to use a question-begging phrase) has been that voted in: that is, in the form of reformist social democratic parties. Moreover, the inability—or unwillingness—of any of these parties to effect an actual transition to some form of ‘socialism’ is manifest.
Many of the present-day European social democratic parties still claim formal allegiance to the Second (Socialist) International, founded in 1889: indeed, the emergence of a distinct reformist working class current in its own right can be dated back with some precision to the decision of the great majority of the parties of the Second International to support the military ambitions of their own bourgeoisies at the outbreak of the First World War. It is natural, therefore, that the search for the genesis of modern-day reformist socialism begins with the pre-1914 Second International, and as a consequence that our attention is drawn to the politically and organisationally predominant force within it: the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Prominent within the German Party at this time was the figure of Eduard Bernstein: ‘evolutionary’ socialist, the first in a long line of Marxist ‘revisionists’, and whose dictum: ‘What is generally referred to as the ultimate aim of socialism means nothing to me; it is the movement itself which means everything’, [1] expresses for many the concerns of modern-day social democracy. While the degree to which we can assign to Bernstein the role of midwife to the birth of reformist socialism will be addressed below, an explanation and examination of the roots of this political current will need to concern itself with matters additional to merely the theoretical differences between Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’ and the Marxism that he sought to revise: it is salient that although the SPD leadership formally opposed Bernstein’s positions, and the SPD congresses of 1901 and 1903 passed resolutions condemning revisionism, German Social Democracy was still in a position to precipitate the split in the international
working class movement between its ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ camps when its ninety six Reichstag deputies supported the special government ‘war-credits’ in August 1914 (an action which Lenin—a great admire of the German party—apparently initially refused to accept as true, believing that the edition of the SPD journal which reported the vote to be forgery). Thus any evaluation of Bernstein’s place in history will also have to accommodate a judgement on the nature of the party which could so decisively reject his positions only to subsequently put them into practice.
In May 1875, at Gotha, 130 delegates representing a membership of around 25,000, ratified the formation of the German Socialist Workers’ Party (SAPD). [2] This new party, the direct forerunner to the SPD (which was to emerge in 1890), was the fruition of the union of two antecedent organisations: the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) of Bebel and Liebknecht, and the Lassallean All German Workers’ Association (ADAV). These two organisations exhibited differences in their approach to the working-class movement and to the other political currents existing at the time, particularly with regard to the middle-class liberal movement. Bebel and Leibknecht’s SDAP, which was centred in southern Germany, and particularly in Saxony, had developed from a tradition which had attempted to position itself as a champion of labour interests within the broader liberal movement. The ADAV, on the other hand, while incorporating much of the idiosyncratic legacy of Ferdinand Lassalle, was the more ‘political’ and centralist of the two: based in northern Germany, especially in the Prussian Rhineland and in Hamburg, it had sought to channel the concerns of the artisan-dominated labour movement into the form of an independent political party.
In the new party the different contributions of these two forerunner organisations were clearly visible. In political terms, the ADAV was the victor, and the programme adopted at the unification congress strongly reflected Lassalle’s posthumous influence. [3] This programme was distinctly not ‘Marxist’, and it attracted the opprobrium of both Marx and Engels, [4] who attacked it as ‘state-socialistic’, confused, and too great a concession to make for the sake of unity. Organisationally, however, the new party was almost identical in structure to the SDAP: gone was the centralised autocratic regime of the ADAV, to be replaced by a central executive counter-balanced by a strong degree of autonomy for local party units and an annual congress whose ultimate authority was supreme. It was this latter consideration that was key for Bebel and Leibknecht: although they shared Marx’s and Engels’ concern with regard to the new party’s programme, they believed that under this organisational regime they would be able to win the political arguments with the Lassalleans.
In the 1877 Reichstag elections the Social Democratic vote rose to a high of nine per cent; alarmed at this, Bismarck made moves to ban the party, using two recent assassination attempts on the Kaiser as a pretext. The anti-socialist legislation which ensued was not to be repealed until 1890, and resulted in the banning of practically all Social Democratic organisations, publications and literature. The years of illegality had important—if contradictory—formative effects on the SPD: in the first place it radicalised the party, and, by discrediting Lasallean illusions in the beneficence of the state, made it receptive to the influence of a more orthodox Marxism. But in addition, and conversely, because the state repression was not applied evenly to all sections of the SPD, it tended to reinforce its more conservative elements. The anti-socialist law was harshly enforced in Prussia, for
example, but it was less rigorously enacted in the more rural south (where the local Social Democrats, continuing the SDAP tradition, were less inclined to centralisation and pure ‘political’ organisation). Importantly, the legislation did not outlaw Social Democratic participation in elections. As a consequence, not only was the Reichstag Fraktion the predominant domestic public face of the party, [5] but participation in parliamentary politics was the only legal form of socialist political activity. Significantly, this period of illegality coincided with the implementation of the first Bismarckian social insurance measures, which not only appeared to mitigate the worst excesses of state authoritarianism, but also tended to legitimise actual parliamentary activity itself. The effects of these experiences of illegality will become evident when we examine the course of the German Social Democracy during its pre-1914 heyday.
The experience of these years of sweeping moves on behalf of the state against trade unions, co-operatives and workers’ social clubs—often bodies with only tangential connections with Social Democracy—taught many thousands of German workers that the Social Democrats were their only friends. Although the SAPD suffered electoral setbacks during the 1880s, in 1890 it won a million and a half votes in the Reichstag elections—the largest vote of all the parties. At the same election Bismarck lost not only his Reichstag majority but also the Chancellorship. That same year saw the lapse of the anti-socialist legislation: it was not to be reinforced prior to the war.
1890 thus marked something of a turning point for German Social Democracy: Bernstein himself noted the transformation that occurred around this point with the phrase ‘from sect to party’, which he chose as a title for a collection of his writings. [6] The sheer scale of the transformation that was to follow is indicated by the fact that while in 1890, at the point of the lifting of the anti-socialist legislation, the Social Democrats had practically no formal organisation in existence bar the Reichstag Fraktion and the underground distribution network, by 1914 the party had 4,100 paid functionaries and 11,000 salaried employees, and nearly a million paid up members. In 1891, the SPD (as it was now called) held a congress at Erfut at which it adopted a new programme within which all trace of the old Lassallean doctrine of identification with the national state had vanished. [7] This new programme was in two parts: the first—and apparently ‘Marxist’ section—was drafted by Kautsky, and expressed the irreconcilable antagonism between the working class and the existing state apparatus, stressed the international character of the class struggle, and posed the necessity of the socialist transformation of society. The second, drafted by Bernstein, consisted of a list of demands for reforms, including universal suffrage, freedom of speech and assembly, abolition of the army and the eight-hour day. The tension between the two parts of the programme reflected the pressure that Social Democracy had undergone during its period of illegality, during which it had been restricted to the distribution of propaganda on the one hand and parliamentary politics on the other: it was not evident how the socialistic ‘maximum’ section of the programme related to the more immediate—‘minimum’—list of reforms. This was a feature of the programme that Engels criticised strongly: although he regarded the programme as differing ‘very favourably’ with respect to that passed at Gotha, he noted that:
If all the ten demands were granted we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved. [...] This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all. [8]
This prefiguring of the terms of the future debate in the party involving Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’ should be evident.
Emergence from the conditions of illegality prompted the party to develop anew its organisational structure: a consequence of this was an increasing tendency in German Social Democracy towards conservatism and bureaucracy, although paradoxically the pressure towards a more centralised structure came initially from party radicals as a measure against the reformist practices of the socialist deputies serving in southern German Landtagen (such as voting for state-level budgets, for example). In addition to this, and as a consequence of its increasingly unmanageable electoral efforts, the party moved towards a form of organisation based on state-determined electoral districts. Since the redrawing of these districts was long overdue, they did not reflect the demographic shifts that had occurred through industrialisation (in particular under-representing the industrial working class in the north), so that this shift in party organisation itself led to the over-representation of the more conservative southern Social Democrats at party congresses and in the ranks of the intermediate paid party functionaries.
Parallel to these developments in the party itself, a significant degree of bureaucratisation was also taking place in the party—associated trade unions: between 1902 and 1913, for example, trade union membership (which itself was, apart from the skilled artisan layers, a very ‘transient’ membership exhibiting a high degree of turnover) increased by around three and a half times; over the same period the number of paid trade union officials increased some nineteen times. ‘For most of this bureaucracy the movement truly was everything, the end nothing’. [9] Increasing influence of this trade union bureaucracy in the party also helped to increase the tendency towards conservatism, since the trade unions typically had ‘tended to see the party as a source of financial support and political clout, but they also tended to see their relationship as a simple separation
of function rather than as hierarchical.’ [10] Paradoxically, therefore, while centralisation in the party increased conservative tendencies, this process was reinforced by the semi-autonomous position of the trade unions, whose concern was typically focused more on economics and the workplace rather than on wider politics.
It was into this party that Eduard Bernstein launched the ‘revisionism’ debate. Bernstein himself had emigrated to Switzerland in 1878, and then to London in 1888; in 1879 he had founded the Sozialdemokrat, which was to be the de facto official organ of the illegal Social Democrats, and from 1881, with the blessing of Marx and Engels, he operated as its editor-in-chief (Bernstein was not to return to Germany until 1901, since he was under threat of arrest until that year for his political activities). Between 1896 and 1898, he published a series of articles in the SDP journal Die Neue Zeit entitled ‘Problems of Socialism’, and in 1899 he published a systematisation of his ideas in the form of the book Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy). [11]
Although claiming to be still a ‘Marxist’, Bernstein began to challenge a number of the key ideas associated with orthodox Marxism. The essence of his case was founded on a rejection of Marx’s labour theory of value: for Bernstein, capitalism evinced important progressive tendencies, and was unlikely spontaneously to break down. Rather, it showed an unexpected vitality with regard to curing its own ills: capitalist crises were not becoming more frequent and deeper, the working class was not experiencing greater degrees of immiseration, and society was not undergoing the expected polarisation between proletariat and bourgeoisie. As a consequence of this, far from having anything to gain from insurrection and class struggle, the working masses could and should achieve emancipation only through a widening application of the democratic principle. Socialism, rather than being seen as irreconcilable with capitalism, was viewed more as an advanced twin of liberalism, and as synonymous with the extension of democracy. Proletarian power was not on the order of the day: not only was it unnecessary, but the working class itself was neither mature enough to take power nor fit to wield it. Finally, in opposition to Marx’s and Engels’ materialist dialectic, Bernstein proffered instead an alternative neo-Kantian system of ethics. [12]
Now, the first point to be made is that Bernstein did not construct a rounded alternative theoretical system to that of Marx and Engels: in the words of one commentator, what characterised his revisionist writings was a sense of ‘scepticism and a very limited common sense outlook. While both of these qualities are [...] useful, together they do not often yield the sort of gratifying, self-contained system that he hoped to provide.’[13] What Bernstein did succeed in doing was to score some ‘direct hits’ on some of the more obvious fallacies in Marxism as he perceived it; however, the Marxism that Bernstein attacked (that is, the Marxism as practised and understood within German Social Democracy), and the Marxism of Marx and Engels, were not always the same thing.
It is certainly the case that there is much in Marx and Engels which implies an inevitable breakdown of capitalism and an inability for the proletariat, once the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its historically ‘necessary’ functions, to win significant and lasting reforms within the framework of capitalist society; but there is also much in addition which implies the opposite if one cares to look for it. It has been argued that Marx himself never resolved the relative emphasis between the ‘objective’ conditions of economic and social development and the ‘subjective’ role of a politically pro-active proletariat: a preponderant emphasis of the former over the latter would imply a degree of inevitability about the prospect for socialist change (with which Bernstein, in emphasising the ‘movement’ over the ‘aim’, appears to coincide, notwithstanding his critical position vis-à-vis Marxist ‘catastrophism’), while a concentration on the latter over the former opens up the perspective of a kind of ‘voluntaristic spontanaeism’ (as evidenced by Bernstein’s contemporary and arch-political opponent Rosa Luxemburg). [14]
But it was not an investigation into this problem that concerned Bernstein: his differences were not in practice with Marx and Engels themselves, but with the Marxism that was practised by the German Social Democrats, which had been for some time evolving into a somewhat ‘peculiar’ Marxism. It should by now be evident that for German Social Democracy Marxism was rather held at one step remove from day-to-day concerns: confined to ‘part one’ of the programme, or limited to the pages of a theoretical journal. Marxism in the German party had, as we have seen, arrived late, and it was never fully incorporated into its consciousness or activity: it remained ‘a radical creed that did not demand active preparation for a revolution since it relied on the “objective” forces of history; it provided a convenient defence for parliamentary activity if this was desired, but it could also be comfortably combined with a reformist practice.’ [15] It was this conception of Marxism that Bernstein was attacking: and it is for this reason that the party so decisively rejected his positions. The party had already incorporated the practical conclusions of Bernsteinism before he himself had even entered the debate: it did not look to revise its Marxism because it did not need to. Marxist theory had already become an irrelevance for the SPD: reduced to the status of totemic shibboleth rather than—as it was intended by its founders—acting as a guide to action.
It is evident that the conditions facing German Social Democracy from 1890 were both new and challenging: it constituted itself as a mass, (almost) legal party operating in something approaching a parliamentary democracy, with a state that sought to implement social reforms, and in a world in which, through the mechanisms of colonisation and imperialism, the major capitalist powers were enjoying an unprecedented source of economic fuel for their own domestic expansion. If Marx’s and Engels’ texts were treated as ‘holy dogma’, then they could have little to offer later generations, since these new conditions were neither experienced nor envisaged by the founders of scientific socialism. Bernstein’s attempted modification of Marxism to fit these new conditions fell short of the mark for the German Social Democrats since all he succeeded in elaborating was a theoretical codification of what the SPD was already engaged in actual fact at the time; and the party’s practice was one which had already relegated ‘theory’ to a subordinate position in relation to ‘practical’ reforms.
As to whether Bernstein’s theoretical elaborations themselves were superior to those of Marx and Engels, the evidence to the contrary would appear to be substantial: two ensuing world wars, the continental-wide experience of economic depression and fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, the present-day immiseration to a degree almost beyond description of millions in the ‘third world’. Even the unprecedented era of capitalist development in the west that followed the Korean War seems today to be coming to something of standstill. Thus even when capitalism does appear to be able to ameliorate its own ills it does so as a consequence of the continental-wide suffering of millions and even then only in temporary form.
Yet if the judgement of Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’ is a negative one, that is not the same as saying that Marxism was not in need of some kind of ‘revising’ in order to re-fashion itself as a weapon for change in the world of the twentieth century: where Bernstein failed, still others have ventured to tread. Theories of imperialism were produced by Hilferding, Luxemburg and Lenin; strategies of party and revolution by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, strategies of politics by Gramsci. Yet in the canon of twentieth-century Marxism there remains one stark, unanswered question: if capitalism is unable to mediate its own ill effects, and thus needs to be ‘overthrown’, how then do socialists organise for this in those countries that today have long-established and relatively popular democratic parliamentary systems? Practical evidence of a theoretical blockage in this respect has been the consistent failiure throughout our century for a Marxism of any order to achieve a degree of implantation in the two great imperialist powers in modern capitalism: Britain and the United States. And until a resolution to this problem is found, then Eduard Bernstein will perhaps continue to occupy a position in the history of the socialist movement that belies his actual contribution to ‘socialist’ thought: a position that results not from his success in addressing these great strategic questions, but rather from the ignominious fact that he was the first of many to fail.
[1] Cited in: Julius Braunthal, History of the International: 1864-1914 (London, 1966), 264-5.
[2] For an account of the formative period of German Social Democracy see: John Breuilly, ‘The Beginnings of German Social Democracy’, in: Roy Fletcher (ed.), Bernstein to Brandt: A Short History of German Social Democracy (London, 1987), 1-10; and Gary P. Steenson, ’Not One Man! Not One Penny!’ German Social Democracy 1863-1914 (Pittsburgh, 1981), 3-40.
[3] For the text of this programme, known as ‘The Gotha Programme’, see: Steenson, ibid., 245-247.
[4] For Marx’s and Engels’ critiques of the Gotha Programme see respectively: Karl Marx, ‘Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Workers’ Party’, in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (London, 1950), II, 17-34; and Frederick Engels, ‘Letter to August Bebel’ (March 18-28, 1875) in: ibid., II, 35-41.
[5] Successful attempts were made to distribute (illegal) Social Democratic literature: most notably the journal Sotzialdemokrat published from 1879 in Switzerland and London, edited by Bernstein, and smuggled into and around Germany though a sophisticated underground distribution network.
[6] ‘Von der Sekte zur Partie’, cited in: Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (New Jersey, 1963), 106.
[7] For the text of the ‘Erfut Programme’, see: Steenson, ibid., 247-250.
[8] Frederick Engels, ‘A Critique of the Draft Programme of 1891’, in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London, 1975), XXVII, 219, 225-7 (emphasis added).
[9] Steenson, ibid., 121.
[10] Steenson, ibid., 96.
[11] Published in English as: Evolutionary Socialism (New York, 1961).
[12] For the sake of brevity what is offered here is a summary account of Bernstein’s ideas; for the full scale of his attack on his view of Marxist orthodoxy see his Evolutionary Socialism (New York, 1961); alternatively a useful summary of his ideas can be found in Steenson, ibid., 209-13. The most powerful contemporary refutation of Bernstein is to be found in Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution (London, 1966), although, since Luxembourg’s argumentation is not always perfect, a useful corrective is Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London, 1983), which also deals with Bernstein’s ideas in some detail.
[13] Steenson, ibid., 212.
[14] Space does not permit anything more than a simple statement of this ‘tension’ within Marxist theory; for an elaboration of the point see: Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980), 55-6; In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, 1983), 34.
[15] Roth, ibid., 168.