Revisionism in Other Countries. In no other country
were the basic conditions for the emergence of Revi-
sionism reproduced as they existed in Germany. What
was needed was a single democratic mass labor party,
doctrinally committed to revolutionary Marxism, but
faced with a prima facie increasingly viable capitalist
society in which it had to exist. What emerges there-
fore is not so much parallel manifestations of Revision-
ism as refractions of the German controversy, which
did indeed echo through the Second International. The
nearest approach to the German situation came in
Austria, but the Austrian party was much preoccupied
with the problems of national groups within the Habs-
burg Empire, and soon adopted a quasi-federal struc-
ture. Moreover, although Karl Renner and Max Adler,
both leaders of the Austro-Marxist school, adopted
Revisionist positions on such issues as gradualism and
Kantianism respectively, the coincidental impact of
serious academic criticism of Marxism, in the person
of Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, shifted the lines of demarca-
tion to the right and prevented the development of
a Revisionist debate or a Revisionist movement in the
Austrian party (Lichtheim [1964], pp. 278-306).
Otherwise only in Russia had Marxism become, or
was becoming, the accepted doctrine of the Social-
Democratic movement; and in Russia there was no
mass party, nor was it a question of explaining the
unexpected viability of mature capitalism. On the con-
trary, Russian Marxism appeared in the 1890's almost
simultaneously with Russian capitalism, and the con-
cern of its early protagonists was to win adherents from
the Populists by stressing the extent and persistence
of capitalism, and indeed its ultimate beneficence. But
Russian Revisionism also appeared at the same time
as Russian Marxism. It was not a revolt against an
established and institutionalized orthodoxy, but an ini-
tial acceptance. of Marxism only with reservations.
Indeed, as befitted a movement confined to the intelli-
gentsia and represented by a pleiad of outstanding
intellectuals, philosophical doubt played a greater part
in Russian than in German Revisionism; several years
before Bernstein, Peter Struve, the most prominent and
versatile of the Russian Revisionists, considered it nec-
essary to “supplement Marxism” with Neo-Kantian
philosophy, which was then becoming popular in
Russia as elsewhere (Kindersley [1962], pp. 48, 112f.).
For the most part, however, German Revisionism
affected the Russian Social-Democratic movement by
providing an object lesson for Lenin and other radicals
to point to, and a pejorative label to attach to party
opponents even when there was no close parallel to
the German situation.
In Italy, as in Russia, there was an important intel-
lectual Marxist movement, headed by Antonio Labriola
and an equally powerful movement of criticism of
Marxism, of which Vilfredo Pareto and Benedetto
Croce were the most distinguished representatives. But
the Italian Socialist Party was never fully committed
to Marxist ideology; nor was it a mass party such as
the SPD, aiming de facto at mobilizing an enfranchised
membership for the parliamentary conquest of power.
The German Revisionist controversy was observed with
interest in the Italian socialist press, but it had little
relevance to Italian conditions.
Lastly, neither in Britain nor in France was there
a serious Revisionist controversy. In British Socialism,
the ascendancy of the Fabians meant that Marxism
never became the dominant ideology; it was not until
1917, or even later, that Marxism was taken at all
seriously by British socialists. In France, the party
situation was far more fluid and complex than in
Germany: a united French Socialist party was formed
only in 1905. The issue of reformism versus revolu-
tionism was debated in France not within a single
Marxist party but between rival socialist parties. Pre-
cipitated in the extreme form of “ministerialism” when
the socialist Alexandre Millerand accepted a post in
the Radical cabinet of 1899, the discussion was nar-
rowed to the political question of cooperation with
bourgeois organizations, and avoided ideological con-
frontation. The Marxist Jules Guesde's resolution con-
demning French Revisionism in orthodox German
terms, at the Amsterdam Congress of the International
in 1904, was a tactical move aimed at the ideologically
eclectic leader, Jean Jaurès, not against a dissident
Marxist like Bernstein, for whom there was no French
equivalent. In any event, French socialism remained
under Jaurès' domination until his death in 1914. There
was no ruling orthodoxy, and therefore no Revisionism.
