Revisionism

What did Bernstein claim?

Bernstein, executor of Engels's papers, argued in articles from 1896 and in The Preconditions of Socialism (1899) that several Marxist predictions had come apart from reality: capital was not concentrating into ever fewer hands, joint-stock companies and intermediate strata were multiplying, the condition of the workers was not absolutely worsening, and crises were moderating rather than heading for catastrophe. The conclusion was a revision of strategy. Socialism would be achieved not by leaping through a collapse but by the accumulation of reforms through universal suffrage, trade unions and cooperatives; hence 'the movement is everything, the final goal nothing'. He called this not an abandonment of Marxism but its revision in a scientific spirit.

How did the controversy run?

The reply was led by Kautsky, guardian of orthodoxy, and the young Luxemburg. In Social Reform or Revolution she answered that reform and revolution stand as means to end, so that a reformism which drops the final goal sinks into the administration of capitalism. The German party rejected revisionism at Hanover (1899) and Dresden (1903), the Second International at Amsterdam (1904). But resolutions and practice moved separately: the daily work of party and unions already revolved around parliament and wage struggles, and the gap exploded in the war-credits vote of 1914. This is why the revisionism debate reads as the theoretical preview of the split between social democracy and communism.

The word becomes a curse

After the October Revolution, 'revisionism' in the communist movement began to serve not as the name of a theoretical position but as a verdict of departure from orthodoxy. Yugoslavia's separate road and Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence received the name in turn. The greatest case was the Sino-Soviet dispute: the Chinese party defined the Soviet line as 'modern revisionism', and the Soviet side answered with charges of dogmatism and left adventurism. In the same years in Western Europe, currents claiming an open re-reading of Marxism sometimes took the word as their own.

How should it be weighed?

Judgements divide with the standpoint. In the social democratic tradition Bernstein is the pioneer who faced facts, and the German party's Godesberg Programme of 1959 reads as his posthumous victory. In the communist tradition he is the theorist of class compromise, and 1914 the conclusion of his line. Scholarship largely grants two things: that many of the empirical discrepancies Bernstein pointed to were real, and that the peaceful democratic development his optimism assumed did not arrive in the following half-century of European history. Distinguishing the political epithet from the debate in the history of theory is the first step in handling the word. The broader current that takes reform itself as the goal is treated in the entry on reformism.