Before the Revisionist Controversy (RLE Marxism)

Kautsky, Bernstein, and the Meaning of Marxism, 1895-1898

H. Kendall Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138890985
• eBook ISBN: 9781317482505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, first published in 1992, the author examines the polemic fought by German Social-Democratic Party leaders and intellectuals Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein against what they perceived to be misunderstandings of Marxism propagated by members of the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF) in England and by the socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany. The debate raised basic questions of socialist theory, including whether the program of Marx and Engels called for scholarly study, parliamentary democracy, and gradual social evolution, or for Utopian speculation, economic collapse, and violent rebellion.

Chapter One: Introduction

A. The Legacy of Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels, the friend of Karl Marx and co-founder with him of scientific socialism, died on August 5, 1895. For weeks Engels had suffered from cancer of the esophagus. Nonetheless, he had tried to continue working, preparing an article on volume three of Capital and reading a letter from Karl Kautsky.¹

In accordance with Engels’s wishes, only a small group of associates assembled at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 10, for a memorial service in London. The gathering included Eleanor Marx; her sister Laura and brother-in-law Paul Lafargue; Edward Aveling; Louise Freyberger (Engels’s housekeeper and the former wife of Kautsky); August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Eduard Bernstein representing the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Sozial-demokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD); and Harry Quelch of the local Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Wreaths and flowers enshrouded the coffin. Then a special train carried the body to Rockwood for cremation. Engels’s testament named Bernstein as an executor and specified that he and Bebel were to care for Engels’s literary effects. Bernstein wrote Kautsky that Engels had known that Bernstein would not misinterpret his writings.²

Given Engels’s importance in the social-democratic movement, his death had a significant impact on its intellectual history. In a September 1895 letter to the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler, the German leader Ignaz Auer analyzed the dilemma accurately,

Where the Old Man is irreplaceable is the interpretation of scripture. With all respect for the younger Church Fathers, the rich experience and authority of Engels is absent even with Kautsky; Ede [Bernstein] is beginning to doubt himself; and Plekhanov is too foreign to the masses for him to exercise influence on them. Accordingly we shall have to get along for awhile without a “Source of Truth”; and this may often be noticed as uncomfortable.³

Thus there ensued a three-year search for Engels’s successor as the recognized authority on Marxism. The search ended in October 1898 when the SPD’s Stuttgart party congress turned to Kautsky for leadership against Bernstein in the Revisionist Controversy.

From early in the year Bernstein had been attacked repeatedly in the socialist press and praised in the bourgeois journals; and in September Clara Zetkin, the social-democratic women’s leader, had proposed that his revisionist ideas were responsible for the disappointing size of the party’s vote in the Reichstag elections the past spring. Bernstein had doubted whether the SPD could govern effectively if political power were suddenly thrust upon it following the economic collapse and general catastrophe which many social democrats assumed must precede the end of capitalism and the proletariat’s taking power. In place of this Zusammenbruch, Bernstein envisioned reforms within the existing social-economic system through cooperation with other political parties and classes. He acknowledged legitimate national interests and stressed the role of trade unions and cooperatives alongside legal parliamentary action. He questioned whether capital was concentrating or the proletariat maturing as quickly as some supposed. He had written openly that Marx and Engels had erred on important points. People were particularly troubled by his January 1898 statement in Neue Zeit that what was normally implied by “final goal of socialism” meant nothing to him, the “movement” everything.⁴

How could Eduard Bernstein, one of Marxism’s pre-eminent theoreticians and the colleague of Engels and Kautsky, come to say such things? And why did Karl Kautsky, the era’s foremost exponent of historical materialism after Engels, wait so long to reply? This is our story.

The story is an exciting one. The polemical battle which raged from Engels’s death in August 1895 to the beginning of the Revisionist Controversy in January 1898 touched on important questions in social theory: for example, the purpose of the state or how historical change occurs. Vital political issues were debated, some of relevance still today: colonialism, national self-determination, welfare capitalism, socialization of essential industries, the threat of war. The SPD wrestled with its position vis-à-vis the peasants, the bourgeoisie, and the government. Did the political program of Marx and Engels call for scholarly study, parliamentary democracy, and gradual social evolution; or rather for utopian speculation, economic collapse, and the sudden taking of power; or for some other combination of actions and events? The wider discussion involved many intellectual champions of the European left: in addition to Bebel, Bernstein, and Kautsky there were Rosa Luxemburg on the Continent and Fabian luminaries like George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, James Ramsay MacDonald, and a young Bertrand Russell in England. Fuel for the controversy was provided by significant events of the day--for example, the Jameson raid into the Transvaal, national aspirations in Poland, repression in Saxony and Prussia, and unrest in the Near East. For nearly a century European history and thought has been influenced by the ideas, issues, and intellectuals of the time between the death of Engels and the Revisionist Controversy.

During these months the central issue for Kautsky and Bernstein was how to interpret Marxism correctly now that Engels was gone. Kautsky supported Bernstein for so long because they basically still agreed on this matter--that is, they agreed on the meaning of Marxism. Both understood historical materialism to be a method of analysis, not a collection of research results; they saw in it an approach to studying actual events, not a prescription for how history must occur. Both would have seconded Engels’s statement to Werner Sombart in March 1895:

But Marx’s entire manner of comprehending is not a doctrine, rather a method. It provides no finished dogmas, rather criteria for farther exploration and the method for this exploration.⁵

Both Kautsky and Bernstein thought that with Marx and Engels socialism had become scientific; Kautsky and Bernstein believed that an underlying process of social-economic development was moving toward socialism and also that social democrats should seek political actions and reforms appropriate to the current stage of evolution. Both Kautsky and Bernstein dismissed any utopianism ignoring material conditions or intending to realize the new order through an act of mere will. Both read Marx historically. They admitted that some of his accurate conclusions of a by-gone age might no longer apply and that Marx himself might have made some mistakes. In 1892, before Engels’s death, Bernstein insisted,

All results of research by Marx and Engels claim validity only so long as they have not been refuted by new scientific research. Some ultimately final truth is not recognized by Marxism, neither for itself nor for others.

In November 1898 Kautsky could still praise Bernstein’s critical approach, while not accepting his findings:

It is beyond doubt that our economic and political life in the last two decades has begun to develop tendencies which were still hidden at the time our basic texts were written, especially the Communist Manifesto and Capital. A new examination, a revision of our concepts has been made necessary by these new facts. Various comrades have emphasized this already, but no one has brought it so clearly to our awareness as has Bernstein. It is here that I see his greatest service ….⁶

My hypothesis is that in the two and one-half years before the Revisionist Controversy many of its key issues appeared while Kautsky and Bernstein labored hand-in-hand to defend against misinterpretation the mature understanding of Marxism which they had learned under Engels’s tutelage.⁷ The defense occurred on three levels: (a) explaining the SPD’s Erfurt Program, (b) interpreting the party’s program in such a way as to protect it from non-Marxist socialist ideas, and (c) correcting specific errors Marx allegedly made, but keeping his method. In late 1897 Bernstein explicitly questioned certain aspects of the method, opening the way for conflict with Kautsky. But at first, Bernstein’s controversial ideas appeared in criticism not of Marx and Engels but of alleged misunderstandings of their work, and accordingly much of Bernstein’s critique found Kautsky’s enthusiastic approval.

The ideas which Kautsky and Bernstein took to be misunderstandings of Marxism were often those of Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany or his admirers in the SDF, particularly Henry Mayers Hyndman and Ernest Belfort-Bax, in England. Liebknecht and Hyndman emphasized Marx’s conclusions, not his method, and sometimes made his ideas into absolutes. Among them Liebknecht, Hyndman, and Bax also retained non-Marxist socialist notions, some from Ferdinand Lassalle. Though Liebknecht and the SDF acknowledged each other’s work and though Kautsky and Bernstein recognized their collaboration, one should not assume that a particular idea would be shared by Liebknecht, Hyndman, and Bax. Differences existed among them. For example, Liebknecht rejected the notion of necessary proletarian impoverishment. In the early 1890’s this idea was still found among social democrats and commonly identified as Marxist, as were expectations of impending economic collapse and of intensifying overt class conflict.⁸

In the early 1890’s Kautsky and Bernstein had relied on Engels’s help. Engels disliked Hyndman and had repeatedly criticized the SDF. However, Engels’s illness from 1893 onward limited this assistance, as did conditions in his household. Bax visited there frequently. Louise Freyberger felt animosity toward her first husband, Karl Kautsky, of whom Bernstein was the close friend.⁹

In his struggle against Hyndman and Bax, Bernstein found allies in the Fabians, who had formulated their theory in conflict with the SDF leader. Because the Fabians emphasized the study of material conditions and because a Marxist analysis of English conditions could result in policies like certain ones of the Fabians, Bernstein came to see them as closer to Marxism than was the SDF.

However, these same policies would not have worked in the Second Reich. Too often Bernstein’s writings from exile in England were applied to Germany as well. In part Bernstein was to blame, for he wanted to criticize Liebknecht along with the SDF. And with time, perhaps he had forgotten the full extent of the differences between the two countries.

In 1898 intellectual disagreement between Kautsky and Bernstein arose primarily over two issues. First, Bernstein’s views seemed plausible in England after a successful bourgeois revolution but not in Germany before one. For Kautsky the essential difference between Bernstein and himself lay in the conviction that Germany still faced a violent political confrontation. Second, in the months from mid-1896 through August 1897, Bernstein slowly came to conclude that Marx and Engels had once believed social revolution might occur in a catastrophic manner.¹⁰ As Bernstein came to associate the term “Marxism” in this respect with the thought of Hyndman and Bax and as Kautsky grew in his expectation of a bitter confrontation with the Reich, the two friends separated. The legacy of Engels forced them apart even as it had once drawn them together.

B. Learning About Marxism

Only with Engels had historical materialism taken hold in the German labor movement. The writings of Marx were not well known in the 1870’s, while the influence of Lassalle was waning. In this time of intellectual transition appeared Eugen Dühring. The blind professor’s pro-socialist stance and his ske...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Bibliographical Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Agrarian Question (1895)
• Chapter Three: British Politics (Autumn 1895)
• Chapter Four: The Political Crises of 1896
• Chapter Five: The Theory Debates of 1896 (Summer and Fall)
• Chapter Six: The Turning Point (Winter 1897)
• Chapter Seven: Crete and Prussia (Spring and Summer 1897)
• Chapter Eight: The Last Months Before the Controversy
• Chapter Nine: Conclusion
• Appendix: Photographs
• Select Bibliography
• Index