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There is a well-known
saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests attempts would
certainly be made to refute them. Theories of natural history which conflicted
with the old prejudices of theology provoked, and still provoke, the most rabid
opposition. No wonder, therefore, that the Marxian doctrine, which directly
serves to enlighten and organise the advanced class in modern society, indicates
the tasks facing this class and demonstrates the inevitable replacement (by
virtue of economic development) of the present system by a new order—no wonder
that this doctrine has had to fight for every step forward in the course of its
life.
Needless to say, this
applies to bourgeois science and philosophy, officially taught by official
professors in order to befuddle the rising generation of the propertied classes
and to "coach" it against internal and foreign enemies. This science will not
even hear of Marxism, declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx
is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by
refuting socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of
all kinds of outworn "systems". The progress of Marxism, the fact that its ideas
are spreading and taking firm hold among the working class, inevitably increase
the frequency and intensity of these bourgeois attacks on Marxism, which becomes
stronger, more hardened and more vigorous every time it is "annihilated" by
official science.
But even among
doctrines connected with the struggle of the working class, and current mainly
among the proletariat, Marxism by no means consolidated its position all at
once. In the first half-century of its existence (from the 1840s on)
Marxism was engaged in combating theories fundamentally hostile to it. In the
early forties Marx and Engels settled accounts with the radical Young Hegelians
whose viewpoint was that of philosophical idealism. At the end of the forties
the struggle began in the field of economic doctrine, against Proudhonism. The
fifties saw the completion of this struggle in criticism of the parties and
doctrines which manifested themselves in the stormy year of 1848. In the sixties
the struggle shifted from the field of general theory to one closer to the
direct labour movement: the ejection of Bakuninism from the International. In
the early seventies the stage in Germany was occupied for a short while by the
Proudhonist Mühlberger, and in the late seventies by the positivist Dühring. But
the influence of both on the proletariat was already absolutely insignificant.
Marxism was already gaining an unquestionable victory over all other ideologies
in the labour movement.
By the nineties this
victory was in the main completed. Even in the Latin countries, where the
traditions of Proudhonism held their ground longest of all, the workers’ parties
in effect built their programmes and their tactics on Marxist foundations. The
revived international organisation of the labour movement—in the shape of
periodical international congresses—from the outset, and almost without a
struggle, adopted the Marxist standpoint in all essentials. But after Marxism
had ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the tendencies
expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels. The forms and causes
of the struggle changed, but the struggle continued. And the second half-century
of the existence of Marxism began (in the nineties) with the struggle of a trend
hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself.
Bernstein, a one-time
orthodox Marxist, gave his name to this trend by coming forward with the most
noise and with the most purposeful expression of amendments to Marx, revision of
Marx, revisionism. Even in Russia where—owing to the economic backwardness of
the country and the preponderance of a peasant population weighed down by the
relics of serfdom—non-Marxist socialism has naturally held its ground longest of
all, it is plainly passing into revisionism before our very eyes.
Both in the agrarian question (the programme of the municipalisation of all
land) and in general questions of programme and tactics, our Social-Narodniks
are more and more substituting "amendments" to Marx for the moribund and
obsolescent remnants of their old system, which in its own way was integral and
fundamentally hostile to Marxism.
Pre-Marxist socialism
has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own
independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism. Let
us, then, examine the ideological content of revisionism.
In the sphere of
philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial "science".
The professors went "back to Kant"—and revisionism dragged along after the
neo-Kantians. The professors repeated the platitudes that priests have uttered a
thousand times against philosophical materialism—and the revisionists, smiling
indulgently, mumbled (word for word after the latest Handbuch) that
materialism had been "refuted" long ago. The professors treated Hegel as a "dead
dog",[2] and while themselves preaching
idealism, only an idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s,
contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics—and the revisionists
floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science,
replacing "artful" (and revolutionary) dialectics by "simple" (and tranquil)
"evolution". The professors earned their official salaries by adjusting both
their idealist and their "critical" systems to the dominant medieval
"philosophy" (i.e., to theology)—and the revisionists drew close to them, trying
to make religion a "private affair", not in relation to the modern state, but in
relation to the party of the advanced class.
What such
"amendments" to Marx really meant in class terms need not be stated: it is
self-evident. We shall simply note that the only Marxist in the international
Social-Democratic movement to criticise the incredible platitudes of the
revisionists from the standpoint of consistent dialectical materialism was
Plekhanov. This must be stressed. all the more emphatically since profoundly
mistaken attempts are being made at the present time to smuggle in
old and reactionary philosophical rubbish disguised as a criticism of
Plekhanov’s tactical opportunism.[1]
Passing to political
economy, it must be noted first of all that in this sphere the "amendments" of
the revisionists were much more comprehensive and circumstantial; attempts were
made to influence the public by "new data on economic development". It was said
that concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale
production do not occur in agriculture at all, while they proceed very slowly in
commerce and industry. It was said that crises had now become rarer and weaker,
and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital to eliminate them
altogether. It was said that the "theory of collapse" to which capitalism is
heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class antagonisms to become milder
and less acute. It was said, finally, that it would not be amiss to correct
Marx’s theory of value, too, in accordance with Böhm-Bawerk.[3]
The fight against the
revisionists on these questions resulted in as fruitful a revival of the
theoretical thought in international socialism as did Engels’s controversy with
Dühring twenty years earlier. The arguments of the revisionists were analysed
with the help of facts and figures. It was proved that the revisionists were
systematically painting a rose-coloured picture of modern small-scale
production. The technical and commercial superiority of large-scale
production over small-scale production not only in industry, but also in
agriculture, is proved by irrefutable facts. But commodity production is far
less developed in agriculture, and modern statisticians and economists are, as a
rule, not very skilful in picking out the special branches (sometimes even the
operations) in agriculture which indicate that agriculture is being
progressively drawn into the process of exchange in world economy.
Small-scale production maintains itself on the ruins of natural
economy by constant worsening of diet, by chronic starvation, by lengthening of
the working day, by deterioration in the quality and the care of cattle, in a
word, by the very methods whereby handicraft production maintained itself
against capitalist manufacture. Every advance in science and technology
inevitably and relentlessly undermines the foundations of small-scale production
in capitalist society; and it is the task of socialist political economy to
investigate this process in all its forms, often complicated and intricate, and
to demonstrate to the small producer the impossibility of his holding his own
under capitalism, the hopelessness of peasant farming under capitalism, and the
necessity for the peasant to adopt the standpoint of the proletarian. On this
question the revisionists sinned, in the scientific sense, by superficial
generalisations based on facts selected one-sidedly and without reference to the
system of capitalism as a whole. From the political point of view, they sinned
by the fact that they inevitably, whether they wanted to or not, invited or
urged the peasant to adopt the attitude of a small proprietor (i.e., the
attitude of the bourgeoisie) instead of urging him to adopt the point of view of
the revolutionary proletarian.
The position of
revisionism was even worse as regards the theory of crises and the theory of
collapse. Only for a very short time could people, and then only the most
short-sighted, think of refashioning the foundations of Marx’s theory under the
influence of a few years of industrial boom and prosperity. Realities very soon
made it clear to the revisionists that crises were not a thing of the past:
prosperity was followed by a crisis. The forms, the sequence, the picture of
particular crises changed, but crises remained an inevitable component of the
capitalist system. While uniting production, the cartels and trusts at the same
time, and in a way that was obvious to all, aggravated the anarchy of
production, the insecurity of existence of the proletariat and the oppression of
capital, thereby intensifying class antagonisms to an unprecedented degree. That
capitalism is heading for a break-down—in the sense both of individual political
and economic crises and of the complete collapse of the entire capitalist
system—has been made particularly clear, and on a particularly large
scale, precisely by the new giant trusts. The recent financial crisis in America
and the appalling increase of unemployment all over Europe, to say nothing of
the impending industrial crisis to which many symptoms are pointing—all this has
resulted in the recent "theories" of the revisionists having been forgotten by
everybody, including, apparently, many of the revisionists themselves. But the
lessons which this instability of the intellectuals had given the working class
must not be forgotten.
As to the theory of
value, it need only be said that apart from the vaguest of hints and sighs, à
la Böhm-Bawerk, the revisionists have contributed absolutely nothing, and
have therefore left no traces whatever on the development of scientific thought.
In the sphere of
politics, revisionism did really try to revise the foundation of Marxism,
namely, the doctrine of the class struggle. Political freedom, democracy and
universal suffrage remove the ground for the class struggle—we were told—and
render untrue the old proposition of the Communist Manifesto that the
working men have no country. For, they said, since the "will of the majority"
prevails in a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class
rule, nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie
against the reactionaries.
It cannot be disputed
that these arguments of the revisionists amounted to a fairly well-balanced
system of views, namely, the old and well-known liberal-bourgeois views. The
liberals have always said that bourgeois parliamentarism destroys classes and
class divisions, since the right to vote and the right to participate in the
government of the country are shared by all citizens without distinction. The
whole history of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the
whole history of the Russian revolution in the early twentieth, clearly show how
absurd such views are. Economic distinctions are not mitigated but aggravated
and intensified under the freedom of "democratic" capitalism. Parliamentarism
does not eliminate, but lays bare the innate character even of the most
democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression. A natural
complement to the economic and political tendencies of revisionism was its
attitude to the ultimate aim of the socialist movement. "The movement is
everything, the ultimate aim is nothing"—this catch-phrase of Bernstein’s
expresses the substance of revisionism better than many long disquisitions. To
determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the
day and to the chopping and changing of petty politics, to forget the primary
interests of the proletariat and the basic features of the whole capitalist
system, of all capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for
the real or assumed advantages of the moment—such is the policy of
revisionism. And it patently follows from the very nature of this policy that it
may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less "new"
question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even
though it change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree
and only for the briefest period, will always inevitably give rise to one
variety of revisionism or another.
The inevitability of
revisionism is determined by its class roots in modern society. Revisionism is
an international phenomenon. No thinking socialist who is in the least informed
can have the slightest doubt that the relation between the two trends in Marxism
Germany France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, and the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks in Russia, is everywhere essentially similar, notwithstanding the
immense variety of national conditions and historical factors in the present
state of all these countries. In reality, the "division" within the present
international socialist movement is now proceeding along the same lines
in all the various countries of the world, which testifies to a tremendous
advance compared with thirty or forty years ago, when heterogeneous trends in
the various countries were struggling within the one international socialist
movement. And that "revisionism from the left" which has taken shape in the
Latin countries as "revolutionary syndicalism",[4]
is also adapting itself to Marxism, "amending" it: Labriola in Italy and
Lagardelle in France frequently appeal from Marx who is understood wrongly to
Marx who is understood rightly.
Wherein lies its
inevitability in capitalist society? Why is it more profound than the
differences of national peculiarities and of degrees of capitalist development?
Because in every capitalist country, side by side with the proletariat, there
are always broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors. Capitalism
arose and is constantly arising out of small production. A number of new "middle
strata" are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism
(appendages to the factory, work at home, small workshops scattered all over the
country to meet the requirements of big industries, such as the bicycle and
automobile industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as inevitably
being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the
petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up in the ranks of the
broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this should be so and always
will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take place in the
proletarian revolution. For it would be a profound mistake to think that the
"complete" proletarianisation of the majority of the population is essential for
bringing about such a revolution. What we now frequently experience only in the
domain of ideology, namely, disputes over theoretical amendments to Marx; what
now crops up in practice only over individual side issues of the labour
movement, as tactical differences with the revisionists and splits on this
basis—is bound to be experienced by the working class on an incomparably larger
scale when the proletarian revolution will sharpen all disputed issues, will
focus all differences on points which are of the most immediate importance in
determining the conduct of the masses, and will make it necessary in the heat of
the fight to distinguish enemies from friends, and to cast out bad allies in
order to deal decisive blows at the enemy.
The ideological
struggle waged by revolutionary Marxism against revisionism at the end of the
nineteenth century is but the prelude to the great revolutionary battles of the
proletariat, which is marching forward to the complete victory of its cause
despite all the waverings and weaknesses of the petty bourgeoisie.
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