Lenin describes this period as follows, "The West entered a phase of ‘peaceful’ preparation for the era of future change. Socialist parties, basically proletarian, were formed everywhere and learned to make use of bourgeois parliamentarism and to create their own daily press, their educational institutions, their trade unions and their co-operative societies. The Marxist doctrine gained complete victory and spread widely. The process of the selection and gathering of the forces of the proletariat and of the preparation of the proletariat for the impending battles made slow but steady progress.

The roots of this opportunism were however in the economic situation, with the creation of a labour aristocracy, whose upper stratum and labour leaders it was possible to bribe through the super-profits earned by industry in its colonies. Passing from its period of free competition, capitalism had now entered its monopoly phase and was changing into imperialism.

As Lenin later was to bring out in great detail, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from the Depression of 1873, was marked by the development of many great industrial and financial cartels, syndicates, and trusts in all the leading capitalist countries. While new countries like Japan and Russia were speedily industrialising, the process of concentration and centralisation of capital and the growth of finance capital was marching ahead at a new pace in the older capitalist countries. The United States (which by 1900 had outstripped England in industrial development) and Germany were the leaders in this process. When concentration itself could not solve the problem created by the Depression of a drop in profitability, the monopolists resorted to the export of capital to areas where super profits were to be obtained. In this Britain was the leader and accounted for almost half the world’s overseas investments. This was also because Britain controlled the largest number of colonies where it could easily place its capital. As the other capitalist countries too realised the absolute necessity of colonies for their own growth, a wild scramble started to grab those undeveloped parts of the world which had not been colonised. Thus in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Africa and Polynesia were taken over almost completely by the marauding states of the advanced capitalist countries. From 1884 to 1900, England grabbed 3.7 million square miles of territory with a population of 57 million; France got 3.6 million square miles with 36.5 million people, Germany one million square miles with 17 million people, Belgium 900,000 square miles with 30 million people, and Portugal 800,000 with 9 million people. This process of capitalism entering the stage of imperialism was however marked by extreme unevenness in the development. This change in the relation of forces was bound to sharpen the conflicts between the various imperialist powers. In this period the Spanish-American war of 1898 where the United States took over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and the Anglo-Boer war of 1899 where Britain put down the Dutch origin settlers of South Africa, were the initial conflicts leading up to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 which was the first major imperialist conflict that broke the 35 year long interval of peace on the European continent.

The other significant aspect of the rise of imperialism was the consolidation of a labour aristocracy with an increase in the disparity in wages between the skilled and unskilled workers in the principal capitalist countries. This was also accomplished by the decline of out-migration and the increase of in-migration from poorer countries to work in the poorer paid sectors. The last quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of intense industrial expansion and increasing exploitation of labour, was a time of slowly rising real wages in the major capitalist lands. In the pattern of English employers generally, the capitalists used a portion of the super-profits wrung from the colonies to favour the skilled workers at home, with the objective of thus weakening the militancy and solidarity of the working class as a whole. Thus whereas in Germany the real wages of the working class (generally at poverty levels) went up from point 100 in 1887 to 105 in 1909, those of the labour aristocracy increased to 113 in the same period. Similar conditions obtained in other capitalist countries. They had profound effects upon labour policy, the right opportunist Social-Democrats basing their revisionist theories and class collaboration policies relied upon the relatively more prosperous labour aristocracy, at the cost of the broad labour movement.

A few months after the Gotha critique, Engels brought out another critique (Anti-Duhring). This contained a polemical presentation of the Marxist position on philosophy, natural science and the social sciences. It was an exposure of the essentially bourgeois views of a certain Professor Duhring who after joining the Social Democrat Party was attempting to rewrite the entire party programme in a bourgeois direction. This critique, which was published in the party’s organ in 1877, however met with a storm of criticism from the opportunists in the official circles of the party. Later, in 1880, Engels extracted three of the chapters from this book in the form of a pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which presents in a very clear and easy style, the basic ideas of scientific socialism.

This was a period of intense theoretical work by Marx and Engels. In 1875-76 Engels worked on the book Dialectics of Nature, which demonstrated how the then latest discoveries in the natural sciences also confirmed that the same dialectical laws which operate in human society operate also in nature. This work however remained unfinished and was only published in 1927. Its Chapter IX The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, gives a classical exposition of the Marxist view of human nature and its development. In 1884 was published Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Written at a time when bourgeois ideas were becoming rife in the German Social-Democratic Party, it was aimed at winning the workers away from reformist illusions to a scientific and revolutionary conception of history, past and present. In 1888, Engels brought out his book on Feuerbach (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy). This showed how the advance was made from Hegelian idealist dialectics to materialist dialectics, and from mechanical to dialectical materialism.

By 1883 proletarian socialist parties had been established in Germany (1869), Holland (1870), Denmark (1871), Bohemia(1872), United States (1876), France (1879), Spain (1879), England-group (1880), and Russia-group (1883). This process continued even after Marx’s death with parties being set up in Norway (1887) and Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden in 1889. Most of these got together to form the Second International in 1889. This led to further spread of socialist thought and parties were formed in Australia and Finland (1890), Poland and Italy (1892), Bulgaria, Hungary and Chile (1894), Argentina (1896), Japan (1901), Serbia (1903) and Canada (1904). Thus Marxism which emerged victorious as a theory at the beginning of this period (1872), had by the end of this period (1904), spread its organisations throughout the capitalist world.

However as Marxism spread organisationally, its principal enemy emerged from within the socialist parties themselves. As pointed out earlier, opportunism and revisionism became the principal threat to the proletarian movement in this period. And as this threat grew its main centre was to become the Second International itself.

The basic orientation at the time of the formation of the Second International in 1889, was Marxist. Yet the right trend succeeded in seeing that no formal international centre of the organisation was set up. This continued for twelve years, thus allowing rightist trends in the member parties to continue unchecked. Engels, till his death on August 5, 1895, tried to fill in this gap by maintaining a regular correspondence, giving guidance to parties in various corners of the globe. Despite his age, he, till the last led the fight of the left elements against various opportunist deviations. At the same time he also completed the monumental task of editing and publishing the unfinished second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital.

The opportunist trends which were getting entrenched in the various national parties at that time had their base in the growing labour aristocracy and the large number of petty bourgeois intellectuals who sought to make careers by leading the political organisations of the workers. Particularly in countries like Great Britain, which became the leading imperialist power, and which therefore had the best ability to bribe the upper sections of the workers and create a labour aristocracy, these trends were the strongest. Fabianism, was one such opportunist reformist ideology, which through the Fabian League, established in 1884, extended its influence on trade union bureaucrats. It preached a vague form of evolutionary socialism, and attacked every principle of revolutionary Marxism. Similar opportunist trends, though not that developed, also existed in the United States and France. In Germany however the relatively weaker capitalist system and underground conditions of the party till 1890 restricted the growth of opportunism till much later. The German party therefore provided the left leadership consisting of Bebel, Kautsky and others, that Engels relied upon, and which was the principal leadership to the Second International.

But these left elements themselves (or orthodox Marxists as they were then called) were actually centrists, who in the later period, when the class struggle sharpened, also moved away from revolutionary Marxism. Thus, even at this time, though they basically upheld Marxist positions, they were unable to effectively combat the new forms of opportunism that consolidated themselves after the death of Engels. The principal form of such opportunism that raised its head within the International was Bernstein’s attempt to ‘revise’ Marxism.

Bernstein, first placed his revisionist views in October 1898, in a letter to the German Social Democratic Party convention, and later followed it up in 1899 with a book Evolutionary Socialism. This system of opportunism was directly a product of the rise of imperialism in general and of German imperialism in particular. On the basis of characteristic features of the early imperialist period, Bernstein arrived at the conclusion that Marxism was all wrong. In his book he challenged the Marxist theory of surplus value, repudiated the theories of the class struggle and of the materialist conception of history, and especially attacked the theory of the relative and absolute impoverishment of the working class. He supported bourgeois patriotism, and ridiculed the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, declaring that a revolution was both unnecessary and impossible. For this he especially made use of an Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, written by Engels in 1895, which had been distorted to appear as if Engels, in later times, was not in favour of revolutionary means of struggle. Thus Bernstein even attempted to use Engels’ authority for his class collaborationist theory. He preached a ‘gradualist’ approach to ‘socialism’, and proposed that the ‘flexible institutions’ of capitalism needed ‘only to be further developed’-unlike the rigid institutions of feudalism which had had to be destroyed by violence.

Though this theory was presented in its most developed form in the German party (which was the leading party of the International at that time), yet there were leading members in various important parties who in essence preached and practised the same revisionism, either wholly or in parts. Thus in Germany itself there was Vollmar, in France- Jaures, in Russia-Martov, in England-MacDonald, and in the United States- Gompers. They were fought against by the comrades then taking a revolutionary line — Bebel , Kautsky and Rosa Luxembourg in Germany, Guesde in France, Plekhanov and Lenin in Russia, Hyndman in England, and De Leon in the United States. The struggle which was waged independently, to varying degrees, in the various national parties, was then centralised in the Amsterdam Congress of the International. After an intense struggle in which the German party took the lead to defend the Marxist line, the Congress passed a resolution which repudiated "to the fullest extent possible the efforts of the revisionists who have for their object the modification of our tried and victorious policy based on the class war, and the substitution, for the conquest of political power by an unceasing attack on the bourgeoisie, of a policy of concession to the established order of society.

This resolution was passed by a vote of 25 to 5, with 12 abstentions, Another cleverly worded resolution which used class struggle phraseology, while failing to specifically condemn revisionism, narrowly escaped being passed because of a tie vote of 21 to 21. This narrow escape, as well as the large number of abstentions on the main resolution, were thus ominous indicators of the depth of opportunism at the highest level in the International. Though Bernsteinism had temporarily been beaten back, it was clear in 1904 itself that the Second International did not have the strength to achieve final victory over revisionism.

The theoretical and organisational centre for this struggle was however being built by Marxism at another place– Russia. Though Lenin at that time was not a very noted figure in the International, he had already started becoming the key figure in the rapid growth of the proletarian socialist movement in Russia. Through a series of struggles against wrong trends in the Russian revolutionary movement, the foundations of the Leninist party were being laid. Though these struggles were then primarily centred on the problems of the Russian revolution, they had immense significance for the international revolutionary struggle and the struggle against revisionism. It was the turn of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, and Marxism was, in the hands of Lenin, developing its theoretical and practical weapons in the changing conditions of the new era – Leninism was taking birth.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born on April 22, 1870, in the city of Simbirsk in Russia. His father, by birth a peasant, had become a school teacher, and his mother was also of modest origin. His elder brother Alexander, one of the most active organisers of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), a terrorist organisation, was hanged by the tsar’s government in 1887. The same year Lenin joined the Kazan university, because he as the brother of an executed revolutionary, was barred from the universities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In Kazan he joined a Marxist circle, and took part in the revolutionary student movement, for which he was soon arrested and expelled from the university. He later moved to Samara where a Marxist circle was formed with Lenin as the central figure. On the basis of self-study he finally got a degree in law from St. Petersburg, but he never practised the profession. From 1893 Lenin concentrated his activities in St. Petersburg, where by 1895 he had united all the Marxist workers’ circles into a single League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. This was the first body that began to unite Socialism with the working class movement. Lenin thus prepared the way for the founding of a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party.

From the very beginning Lenin launched a struggle against all alien trends that were attempting to lead the revolutionary movement astray. His first major work, brought out in 1894, was an exposure of the Narodism of the eighteen nineties — What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight Against the Social-Democrats. Though Plekhanov had earlier itself dealt the chief blow to this petty bourgeois form of socialism, yet Lenin’s work served to completely expose it before the sections of revolutionary youth who still sympathised with it. In it, Lenin for the first time advanced the idea of a revolutionary alliance of the workers and peasants as the principal means of overthrowing tsardom, the landlords and the bourgeoisie. He also outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. Along with the struggle against Narodism, Lenin also led the struggle against the ‘legal Marxists’ who were basically bourgeois intellectuals in Marxist garb. Lenin’s intensive revolutionary activities in this period however led to him being arrested for a long period in St. Petersburg and then banished to Siberia for three years from 1897.

While in Siberia, Lenin continued his attack on the Narodniks, with his important scientific work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. This gave a detailed exposition of the advance of capitalist relations and completed the ideological destruction of Narodism, which repeatedly asserted that capitalism was an accident which would not develop in Russia. From exile he also wrote his well-known pamphlet, The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats which summed up the experience of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle, and presented the political programme and tactics of the Russian Social-Democrats.

The most significant battle of this period however was that waged by Lenin against ‘Economism’, a brand of opportunism very closely related to Bernsteinian revisionism. It first arose in Russia in the form of a manifesto, issued in 1899, which opposed revolutionary Marxism, and insisted that the idea of an independent political party of the proletariat and of independent political demands by the working class be renounced. Lenin immediately, along with other Marxist political exiles in Siberia, issued a protest against this manifesto which was circulated among Marxist organisations throughout the country. As soon as Lenin returned from exile, he continued a vigorous struggle against Economism, which he saw as a principal obstacle in the path of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, and the building of its revolutionary party. In this battle an important weapon was Iskra, the first newspaper of the revolutionary Marxists on an all-Russian scale. From December 1900 onwards this newspaper was brought out from abroad by Lenin, as an instrument to unite and link together the separate Marxist organisations into a single party. This plan for building the party was elaborated by him in an important article in Iskra in May 1901, entitled Where to Begin However within the Party itself, the Economists, centred around the Rabochaya Mysl (Workers’ Thought) and Rabochaya Deylo (Workers’ Cause), were trying to justify on theoretical grounds the lack of organisational cohesion and ideological confusion. Before a united political party could be created, the Economists had to be defeated. Thus Lenin, through the columns of Iskra and especially in his great work What Is To Be Done?– published in March 1902 – launched a severe attack against the opportunist philosophy of the Economists. He exposed the Economists’ attempt to restrict the working class to the economic struggle, their bowing to spontaneity and tailism, their opportunist belittling of theory, and showed how they were not an accidental phenomenon in Russia, but followers of the revisionist Bernstein and allies of the other opportunists in the West European Social-Democratic parties. The sharp polemic of this classic work ideologically demolished Economism and by the time of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in July 1903, the majority of party members regarded it an insult to be called an ‘Economist’. This work also represented a significant advance in Marxist theory, which proved later to be the foundation of the ideology of the Bolshevik Party.

However almost as soon as the Economists (old opportunists) were beaten, their place was taken by the Mensheviks (new opportunists). This new opportunist trend arose from within the Iskra editorial board itself under the leadership of Martov and consolidated itself during the party’s Second Congress. At the Congress this trend consisting of Axelrod, Trotsky and others rallied around Martov’s formulation of party rules which envisaged a party membership consisting of anyone agreeing with the programme and aiding the party financially, irrespective of whether he did any party work or not. This was thus a conception of an extremely loose and amorphous party, in other words, a party incapable of leading the class struggle. The Mensheviks trend got their name from ‘menshinstvo’(meaning minority), as they were in a minority at the time of the election to the party posts for the Central Committee and the Central Organ’s Editorial Board. The Bolsheviks (from the word ‘bolshinstvo’ meaning majority), led by Lenin, were then in a majority. However soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, not satisfied with their minority position, started splitting activities. In the words of Martov, they "broke into revolt against Leninism". They won over Plekhanov and two Central Committee members, and thus gained control of both the Iskra Editorial Board and the C.C. They then launched a campaign through Iskra and by other means which was aimed at dragging the party back from the Second Congress decisions into the old mess of organisational disunity and confusion.

In order to hit back, Lenin, in May 1904, brought out his famous book, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. In this book, Lenin made a detailed analysis of the intra-party struggle both during and after the Congress, and on that basis expounded the main organisational principles which later came to form the organisational foundations of the Bolshevik party. It represented a major advance in Marxist theory regarding the building of the revolutionary proletarian party.

Through the circulation of this book the majority of the local organisations of the party rallied to the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but the Mensheviks continued ahead with their plans to split the party. With the loss of the party organ Iskra and the C.C. into the hands of elements who were bent on destroying the decisions of the Second Party Congress, it became absolutely necessary for the Bolsheviks to set up bodies that would uphold the Congress direction. Lenin therefore in August 1904 called a Bolshevik conference. Soon a Bureau of Committees of the Majority was set up to undertake practical preparations for the Third Party Congress; and by January 4, 1905, the first issue of a separate Bolshevik journal Forward came out. The split in the party was complete.