Historically, “Revisionism” was the name given to
the main heresy which arose in European, and particu-
larly German, Marxism and Social Democracy in the
time of the Second International (1889-1914). Its origi-
nator was Eduard Bernstein, who also gave the most
systematic exposition of its theoretical content. The
main thesis of this theory was that the catastrophic
collapse of capitalist society, predicted by Marx, was
unlikely to take place; from this it followed that Social
Democrats should alter their political strategy away
from revolutionary and towards evolutionary methods.
After the October Revolution and the emergence of
Moscow as the center of World Communism, Revi-
sionism lost most of its original content, degenerated
into a term of abuse, and was largely superseded by
other pejorative labels. Only after the Second World
War, with the appearance of new divisions in the
World Communist Movement, did Revisionism regain
any consistent meaning. Still remaining a term of
abuse, it was used by the soi-disant “orthodox” Marxists
to qualify those of their opponents who could at all
plausibly (if sometimes unjustly) be embarrassed by the
accusation of accommodation with bourgeois society
or its extension, imperialism. Even here, however,
consistency was not long maintained. With the emer-
gence of Sino-Soviet differences into a full-scale politi-
cal and ideological dispute, not only did the Chinese
accuse the Russians of “Revisionism” on the grounds
of compromise with imperialism, but Soviet ideologists,
who normally accepted this meaning of the word
(without, of course, admitting that it could apply to
themselves), also described the doctrines of Mao Tse-
tung and his followers as “left” Revisionism.
By the 1890's German Social Democracy was in a
position to offer both the institutional stability and the
ideological rigidity which are the necessary soil on
which any heresy must be bred. These two aspects of
German Social Democracy were closely linked. As an
institution, it had grown inside, but isolated from,
German society of the time; the revolutionary ideology
maintained and justified the isolation. Bernstein's per-
ception that certain points of the analysis of society
contained in the ideology were apparently at variance
with reality therefore had serious implications for the
German Party as a whole. In 1890 the adoption of the
Erfurt Program by the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands) crystallized its ideology as revolutionary
Marxism, and provided a canon of theoretical ortho-
doxy. At the same time the Party's organizational suc-
cess in a generally prosperous economy enabled its
leaders to forget the contradiction between their revo-
lutionary doctrine and their increasingly reformist
practice. It took a man as uncomfortably honest and
persistent as Eduard Bernstein to remind them of this
contradiction. His views first reached the public in a
series of articles in the Neue Zeit in 1896-98, and were
presented in book form under the title Die Voraus-
setzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozi-
aldemokratie in 1899 (trans. as Evolutionary Socialism,
1909). Although the systematization of these views
possibly owes more to Bernstein's critics than to him-
self, they may conveniently be considered under the
headings of social development, economics, philoso-
phy, and politics.
