Precisely because revisionism was an onslaught of
praxis against a theoretical self-image, the ideological
foundation of revisionism was not articulated in any
great detail at the time. There is only Bernstein's writ-
ing and subsequent discussions by his supporters; and
these took on a fundamental character mainly because
they were challenged as such. Almost unintentionally
Bernstein found himself elaborating a whole philosophy
in order to defend his original, rather eclectic com-
ments; the series of articles in Neue Zeit between 1896
and 1898 were reinforced by the much more “thor-
ough”
Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (1899) which
became revisionism's chief theoretical text. Too much
should accordingly not be read into his writing in terms
of a consistent set of ideas with which to challenge
another equally consistent set of ideas. The revisionist
controversy differs from both the types of arguments
that Marx and Engels sometimes unleashed on their
opponents, and also from the later exegeses of revi-
sionism produced by the Bolsheviks and their German
supporters in order to specify their own diametrically
opposed position. The fact that revisionism has come
to be regarded as a consistent attack on Marxism may
be partially inherent in its original formulations, but
is primarily due to later efforts to characterize it as
such. Revisionism has no meaning except in the context
of a fundamental departure from accepted or “correct”
orthodoxy.
Hence, if anything, the articulation of a consistent
position was not the work of Bernstein and his sup-
porters but of his opponents, who provided the very
consistency and internal logic that his own work
lacked. In the work of Parvus and particularly Rosa
Luxemburg, we find an ideological systematization of
Bernstein's arguments which never ceased to surprise
the latter, and whose main purpose in turn was to give
a grounding to the orthodox interpretation of the
party's ideology. Once he had been stimulated into
awareness of the intellectual dangers of revisionism,
Kautsky too defended the orthodox position against the
revisionist “system” of ideas.
Bernstein challenged the accepted orthodoxy on two
fronts: the accuracy and relevance of the social philos-
ophy implicit in the party program—which in turn was
based largely on Marx's own philosophy—and the po-
litical implications which resulted from this challenge.
