Summary and Critique. The main elements of Ger-
man Revisionist thought may now clearly be seen: in
economics, a confrontation of the Marxist theory of
social development by dialectical struggle and revolu-
tion with the facts as Bernstein saw them; the assertion
that these facts belied the Marxist analysis and the
predictions based on it; in economic theory, the relega-
tion of the labor theory of value to the status of an
abstract tool of analysis, and as such compatible with
marginalist theories; in philosophy, the substitution of
the principle of “organic evolution” for the dialectic,
and of ethics for determinism; in politics, reformism
instead of revolution. What is the common thread in
these different strands? More than anything, it is a shift
from the remote to the proximate, a shortening of the
time-scale, not indeed the time-scale for the achieve-
ment of socialism, but, on the one hand, the scale
against which predictive theory should be tested and,
on the other, the scale within which constructive social
and political action was possible; a shift, that is, from
the remoteness of theory to the immediacy of praxis.
It was this shift which enabled Bernstein's opponents
to accuse him of opportunism, and which led Karl
Johann Kautsky, the orthodox “center” ideologist, to
characterize both Bernstein's Revisionism and Luxem-
burg's revolutionary radicalism as different forms of
“impatience.”
We need not here pursue in any detail the impact
and aftermath of the Revisionist controversy within the
SPD. For some years, after the electoral setback of
1907 prompted the leadership to adopt and justify
Revisionist attitudes to Parliament, it seemed that
Revisionism might gradually prevail. But two major
events extrinsic to the main lines of debate, the First
World War and the Russian Revolution, so altered the
terms of discussion that not only Bernstein but later
also Kautsky became largely irrelevant. On these two
issues, in fact, Bernstein and Kautsky saw eye to eye.
Old alignments were swept away: most Revisionists,
and some radicals, supported the war, but Bernstein
soon came out against it. The splitting of the Social
Democratic body by the formation first of the antiwar
Independent Party (USPD, Unabhängige Sozialdemo-
kratische Partei Deutschlands) and later of the German
Communist Party altered the conditions necessary for
the existence of a substantial Revisionist heresy. The
SPD became what Bernstein had urged it should
become—an admittedly reformist party; and Revi-
sionism ceased to have any raison d'être.
These major changes make it less easy to judge
Bernstein's Revisionism on its merits. In many ways
it proved over-optimistic. If his contention that the
middle classes did not disappear was broadly justified,
the Great Depression of the 1930's disproved his belief
that the era of major crises was past. In politics it is,
to say the least, unlikely that the class and legal struc-
ture of the German Empire would ever have permitted
the peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism
which Bernstein envisaged, however relevant such
ideas may be in countries with genuine parliamentary
institutions. Nor is it certain that, even if the Social
Democrats had adopted a reformist program (as they
did—too late—at Görlitz in 1921) the radical-liberal
bourgeoisie would have agreed to the alliance with
them that Bernstein's strategy required. In a speech
of 1925, which smacks of special pleading, Bernstein
argued Weimar Germany could not be called a “capi-
talist republic” (Bernstein archives, quoted by Gay,
p. 215). But events were soon to prove that Weimar's
road away from capitalism led not to socialism but to
something else. Although the aged Bernstein, loved and
respected but quite uninfluential, warned repeatedly
against the danger of right-wing subversion of the
Republic, the middle classes failed to be the allies of
the proletariat which he hoped they would be, and
even the proletariat turned readily enough to Nazism
as a creed of salvation. Paradoxically, perhaps, in phi-
losophy, where Bernstein was least serious and pro-
found, Revisionist ideas have proved most durable.
Ethical socialism, as an opposition movement, whether
reformist or revolutionary, never amounted to any-
thing; but the injection of ethics (of a different kind:
existentialist as much as Kantian) into socialism in
power has, as will be seen, played a major part in
Revisionist thought in eastern Europe after World
War II.
