Revisionism (Marxism)
Revisionism in Marxism refers to a reinterpretation of Karl Marx's original theories, particularly concerning the nature and path of social change. Prominent figures in this movement include Eduard Bernstein, who advocated for a reformist approach within the Social Democratic Party in Germany, suggesting that social justice could be achieved through gradual reforms and existing democratic processes, rather than through a violent revolution as Marx had proposed. Bernstein believed that labor movements could successfully push for better working conditions and wages while participating in parliamentary politics.
In contrast, Vladimir Lenin also revised Marx's ideas but maintained a strong revolutionary stance. He faced the challenge of Russia's predominantly agricultural economy and debated whether to promote industrialization or skip directly to socialism. This ideological split among Russian Marxists gave rise to the Bolsheviks, who ultimately succeeded in establishing a socialist state after the 1917 revolution. The impact of revisionism has been significant, leading to splits within socialist movements and shaping the trajectory of socialism in both Germany and Russia.
While Leninist socialism emphasized the overthrow of capitalism and the elimination of private property, the practical outcomes often diverged from the promised ideals of equality and abundance. Today, Bernstein's revisionist ideas about the role of state power and economic justice are seen as more relevant, especially in discussions about capitalism's inequalities, influencing various modern adaptations of Marxist thought.
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Revisionism (Marxism)
In the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–83), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that human beings are divided into social classes, that membership in a social class is defined by one's relationship to the means by which goods are produced in a given historical era, and that social classes are in perpetual struggle with one another over control of an era's predominant means of production. Marx thought that economic value was created by workers (the proletariat) who were, therefore, the rightful owners of the means of production; he thus concluded that a workers' revolution against the owning class (the bourgeoisie) was inevitable. The proletariat would take control of the factories and erase the institution of private property: economic justice would finally be achieved. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) in Germany and Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) in Russia reconsidered Marx's original ideas, and between them they sketched out the essential features of "revisionism."
Brief History
By the late 1890s, Germany's Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest socialist party in Europe. Bernstein proposed that the SPD modify its revolutionary Marxism, working also for reform of existing institutions. This reformist perspective involved organizing labor to agitate for improved workplace safety and higher wages. German workers could use the ballot box to vote SPD politicians into the Reichstag (parliament). These two projects would lead to the overthrow of capitalism Marx had envisioned. However, the idea that it was possible to make a capitalist economy more just, and that it was possible to achieve this through existing democratic processes, marked a departure from Marx's view that workers' lives in a capitalist economy would grow steadily worse until a revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie took place.
Lenin, too, substantially revised Marx's ideas. Unlike Bernstein, Lenin was an uncompromising proponent of revolution. Instead, what Lenin modified was Marx's thesis that history had to proceed through a feudal agricultural phase, where class conflict was between the landowners and the peasants, then through a capitalist industrial phase, with class conflict between factory owners and the proletariat. In the late nineteenth century, Russia's economy was still largely agricultural, though some industry was emerging. Russian Marxists were split: should they promote industrialization, remaining true to Marx's idea that socialism was the result of class conflict in the capitalist stage of history? Or, would it be possible to skip an entire stage, and catapult Russia directly from history's agricultural phase to the socialist one?
This disagreement split the Russian Marxists into two main factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks advocated promoting capitalist industrial development, the Bolsheviks, for immediate overthrow of the Russian monarchy and implementation of communism. The Bolshevik view triumphed, and so Lenin's revision of Marx became a key ideological foundation of the Soviet Union that emerged from the Bolshevik overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917. So, where Bernstein had kept Marx's historical stages but revised his view as to the necessity of revolution, Lenin did the reverse.
Impact
The historical significances of revisionism are many and varied. In the German case, Bernstein's revision of Marxism helped split the SPD into warring factions, one arguing for reform, the other for revolution. This ideological rift was deepened by the advent of World War I (1914–19) and the difficult choices it presented to socialist members of the German legislature. Membership in the Reichstag offered socialists the chance to work within the system, as Bernstein advocated, but presented an insoluble dilemma. A vote to fund the war effort meant betraying the internationalist ideals of socialism: after all, Marx's last words read, "Workers of all countries, unite!" Eventually, German socialism formally splintered into the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the German Communist Party (KPD), and this reality eventually assisted the seizure of power by Hitler's National Socialists. Due to their rejection of Bernstein-type reform, and the influence of the Russian revolutionary Marxists under Lenin and Stalin, the KPD spent much of their time in the 1920s and 1930s equating the revisionists with Hitler's fascists, instead of presenting a united opposition to the forces of radical German nationalism. Ultimately, the drive for a revolutionary Marxist purity helped pave the way for the Nazi dictatorship of Germany, with all of the tragic consequences that followed. Though temporarily ousted by Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party, the reemergence of social democracy after World War II owed much to Bernstein's idea that state power could be used to rein in the excesses of unfettered capitalism, to common benefit of society.
In post-1917 Russia, Leninist socialism meant the elimination of private property, the running of factories by workers' committees, and the eventual collectivization of farming, where large numbers of former smallholding peasants would be grouped together into large, communal farming enterprises. However, the promised socialist future of material plenitude and universal equality never quite materialized. Josef Stalin's crash industrialization programs of the late 1920s and 1930s made the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) an industrial powerhouse, by any measure. Without this greatly expanded industrial capacity, the Soviet Union could not have repulsed the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, during World War II. However, the revolutionary impulse that Lenin retained from Marx tended to result in an endless search for counterrevolutionaries. While so divided, German socialists were unable to prevent Hitler's ascension to power and the labor and death camps, Russian socialism actively fostered its own labor camp system, to which tens of thousands of real and imagined enemies of the Marxist revolution were exiled.
In the contemporary world, Bernstein's version of revisionism has outlasted Lenin's. The USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, and China—a comparable case of revolutionary Marxism applied to an agricultural society—has largely joined the capitalist world economy. However, Bernstein's notion that economic justice involves asking hard questions about private property and the inevitable inequalities generated by the free market retains a great deal of traction in the contemporary world, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Some scholars evaluate modern political reform using adapted forms of revisionist Marxism, such as post-modernist Marxism, geographical Marxism, Polanyian Marxism, and analytical Marxism.
Bibliography
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