p The second period of Marxism’s development begins at the close of the nineties. It is characterised by the rapid spread of Marxism on the European continent, the transition from the narrow parochialism of sects among individual revolutionaries and theoreticians to the formation of mass Social-Democratic parties, and first attempts to combine the theory of scientific communism with the workers’ movement. In Russia, for example, the initial steps towards such a transition were made by the first Marxist group—the Emancipation of Labour Group headed by Plekhanov (1883). Fifteen years later the first congress of the Russian SocialDemocratic Labour Party was held, which proclaimed the constitution of that party. The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class founded by Lenin in 1895 was the first nucleus of the Marxist party of a new type. Eight years later the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was held at which the Bolshevik Party was founded. It was this party that developed tremendous theoretical and practical activities in working out a socialist ideology and planting it in’ the minds of the working class and other sections of the working people.

p Together with this healthy revolutionary process a second counteractive trend became more and more manifest aimed at deflecting the labour movement from the proper revolutionary path. Flushed with the success of its efforts in corrupting the co-operative and trade union movements, the bourgeoisie hoped, by similar methods of struggle against the growing proletarian ideology, to achieve the same success in corrupting the political parties of the working class as well. Therefore the bourgeoisie shifted the centre of the fight against Marxism from the outer arena to the interior of the Marxist movement: it tried to blow it up from within through its infiltrated agents and to make use of inconsistent, wavering, careerist and suchlike elements within the Marxist parties to “correct” Marxism in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism.

p Lenin often pointed out that the bourgeoisie was a clever and very experienced class and that assessment of its activities was not to be oversimplified. It had passed through different historical periods in its development, had skilfully managed to get on with the most diverse classes and strata and contrived to adapt to its own uses the most diverse social forces operating in one or another epoch. The bourgeoisie, as we know, succeeded in making use for its own ends of all known forms of the exploiting state: the absolute monarchy, the constitutional monarchy, the parliamentary republic, fascist dictatorship, parliamentary struggle, military coups, and so on.

p The bourgeoisie, by its very class nature, is extremely unpatriotic. At any moment when danger threatens its rule or loss of its ill-gotten wealth it sinks to treachery of the national interest, betrays the working class and the people of its own country and makes common cause with the foreign conquerors and oppressors. A multitude of facts both from history and from contemporary life could be cited to bear this out. Marx was absolutely right when he said that under the rule of capitalism the workers have no fatherland. The working classes under the bourgeois system are constantly haunted by the threat of being hurled at any moment into the holocaust of a fratricidal war and finding themselves betrayed by the bourgeoisie for the sake of preserving its class privileges.

p The whole vast and varied experience, which has become flesh and blood of the bourgeoisie, has now been mobilised 56 by it to the ultimate limit. And it acts with all the greater resourcefulness, subtlety and ruthlessness the more clearly it realises the danger that threatens it. Today the bourgeoisie is staking on undermining and weakening the world system of socialism, using every trick in the book to penetrate into the ruling parties of the socialist countries, split their unity and then deal with them piecemeal. And here again it makes skilful use of the renegades of every stripe and brand. But we shall speak of this further on.

p Thus, in readjusting the strategy of its struggle against Marxism, the bourgeoisie fell back on the great political experience of its well-trained cadres of reformists and renegades, who had received an excellent schooling in the art of corrupting the revolutionary workers’ movement. And when the bourgeoisie saw the spectre of communism unfolding into a sweeping Marxist workers’ movement it rushed its forces into this movement. It had already been prepared for this to some extent and got down to work.

p To begin with it chose as its object the German SocialDemocratic Party, as being the strongest and most influential among the parties of Western Europe. The bourgeoisie was quick to find this Party’s vulnerable spots: first, the theoretical weakness and ideological instability of its leadership, which became particularly evident during the drafting and adoption of the Gotha and Erfurt programmes; second, the divergent views of the two political groups (the Eisenachists and Lassalleans) united within this party; third, the dominance in it of petty-bourgeois and intellectualist elements far removed from the interests of the working class and incapable of sustained class struggle in a proletarian spirit.

p True, the bourgeoisie was compelled at the beginning to act with great caution, for it knew only too well that Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific communism, devoted especially great attention to this Party, the largest in Europe. Therefore, during their lifetime, the first open sallies of the bourgeois agents within the Party yielded no tangible results. Although the Party made great mistakes it still remained at that time a militant, revolutionary workers’ party. As for its programmatic and tactical weaknesses, which appeared later, we shall deal with this elsewhere. Here we would stress that the party’s most tragic mistake was overlooking the way the bourgeois agents in the person of venerable 57 renegades had penetrated within its ranks and built their hornets’ nest in it. Therefore, after the death of Engels, this flock of carrion-crows immediately began to tear at the living revolutionary body of the once largest and most militant workers’ party.

p Characteristically, the first to raise the revisionist sword against Marxism were those politicos who considered themselves faithful disciples of Marx and Engels, namely, Eduard Bernstein, Georg Vollmar, Rudolf Stammler and others. These were subsequently joined by Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Viktor Adler and Otto Bauer, thus forming a galaxy of revisionist theoreticians. During Marx’s and Engels’s lifetime they jesuitically swore allegiance to Marxism and undeviating continuation of their teachings. Thus, after seeing “his” teacher laid to rest, Bernstein wrote: "Engels .. . honoured me with his personal friendship not only till his death, but he showed beyond the grave, in his testamentary arrangements, a proof of his confidence in me.”  [57•*  But shortly afterwards these faithful pupils took to revising and vulgarising Marxism. It was none other than Bernstein who, to everyone’s surprise, called for a revision of the doctrinal principles of Marxism, arguing that Marxism was out- ofdate and dogmatic and had become deformed. This mistheorist, proclaiming himself the sole successor of Marxism, called for this revolutionary doctrine to be disclaimed.

p In the sphere of philosophy it was "back to Kant", with dialectical and historical materialism jettisoned. Bernstein found distasteful the Marxist method of materialist interpretation of the history of development of human society, its theoretical substantiation of capitalism’s inevitable doom. It was these circumstances, he writes, that led me to believe that "social democracy required a Kant who should judge the received opinion and examine it critically with deep acuteness, who should show where its apparent materialism is the highest—and is therefore the most easily misleading—ideology, and warn it that the contempt of the ideal, the magnifying of material factors until they become omnipotent forces of evolution, is a self-deception, which has been and will be exposed as such at every opportunity by the action of those who 58 proclaim it”.  [58•*  In all his writings Bernstein does not miss a chance to take a kick at the main pivot of Marxist philosophy, at its "revolutionary soul"—dialectics. "With it," he writes, "Marxism stands or falls in principle." Dialectics is "the traitor within Marx’s doctrine, a pitfall in the path towards a correct judgement of things”.  [58•**  This is the source from which the present-day revisionists of the Garaudy and Fischer type obtain their rotten copy, vying with the anticommunists in shouting "Back to Kant!", "We want Kant!”

p In the sphere of economic teachings it was back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, with the jettisoning of Marxist political economy. The sole argument here was that Marx had not gone beyond these thinkers. "In the Marxist system," writes Bernstein, "it is not otherwise in principle." As for the theory of surplus value, the cornerstone of political economy, he proposes that it be ignored. "Whether the Marxist theory of value is correct or not is quite immaterial to the proof of surplus labour." And as though for the edification of revisionist posterity, he warns against too great an interest being taken in the concept of surplus value and makes it clear that "this key (surplus value] refuses service over and above a certain point, and therefore it has become disastrous to nearly every disciple of Marx”.  [58•***  It goes without saying that modern revisionists of the Sik type undeviatingly follow the instructions of their preceptor and studiously avoid all mention of surplus value in their writings. Indeed, why focus attention on it when their spiritual minister taught them that Marx’s Capital was "a highly tendentious work”.

p In the sphere of socialist teachings it was back to Utopian socialism and the jettisoning of the Marxist theory of scientific communism. Bernstein pays his full mead of sympathy and tribute to the ideologues of Utopian socialism, who, he says, had long ago solved the problem of society’s future development. And “poor” "Marx had accepted the solution of the Utopians in essentials, but had recognised their means and proofs as inadequate”.  [58•****  The Utopian Socialists, it appears, had prognosticated and modelled the framework 59 of the future humane, peaceful society. "Owen, one of the great Utopian Socialists of the nineteenth century," wrote Bernstein, "worked out his plan of the future society to the minutest detail to prove its practicability, while another— Fourier, analysed with great psychological insight the human motives and passions to give all of them a place in the phalanstery and lay them into the foundations of the future society.”  [59•*  Obviously, after this there was nothing left for Marx to do but merely accept in essentials the solution of the Utopian Socialists, and ipso facto, that "great scholarly mind in the long run was a prisoner of doctrine". Do not the modern revisionists write approximately the same thing? Have they retreated a single step from the precepts of their revisionist teacher?

p After having thus worked dilettante-fashion the flanks of all the component parts of Marxism, Bernstein began to introduce his professorial amendments into revolutionary phraseology to which he imparted a patently revisionist flavour. In lieu of the word “revolution” the revisionist corrector suggested using "socialist reform"; in lieu of revolutionary struggle—"revolutionary process"; in lieu of the dictatorship of the proletariat—"ideal democracy", a " humane, just society" and so on. All these ravings of the once “orthodox” Marxist were rightly qualified by Rosa Luxemburg as "a science for the digestion”.

p Nor is that all. Bernstein and those of like mind went further. They concentrated their fire on the Marxist teaching concerning the international cohesion of the labour movement, the unity of the workers’ parties. The SocialDemocratic press began to put over the bourgeois ideas of nationalism, chauvinism and pacifism, the idea that the social movement was integral and classless. Naturally, this had serious consequences. The voice of the renegades was widely re-echoed by the bourgeois press, the liberal intelligentsia, all kinds of professors, privat-dozents and other spokesmen of the so-called official social sciences. "Schools of the Social Ideal", "Schools of the Historical Ideal", etc., began to appear everywhere. You will notice that all this seems to have been copied by the present-day revisionist theoreticians.

p The main aim of each of these schools was to challenge and depose Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "All those good people who professionally earn their salary by waging a theoretical war against Social-Democracy from the eminence of their cathedras suddenly found themselves, to their own astonishment, in the midst of the Social- Democratic camp. Long gone sour and mouldy from futile mumbling, self-buried and forgotten, the cathedra-socialists suddenly came to life again in the theories of Bernstein and his followers; the ‘Subjectivists’ came to life; the Stammler ’social ideal’, elusive as a giddy butterfly, came to life (’the ultimate goal is nothing to me, the movement—the pursuit of an ideal—is every thing’). "  [60•* 

p Criticism of Marxism became the fashion. The challenging of Marxism became "a favourite pursuit of the German professoriate and a tested expedient for obtaining a privatdozentship in Germany”.  [60•**  And so the circle was completed. What took place was really odd and monstrous. The once faithful adherents and advocates of Marxism deserted to the camp of the bourgeoisie, followed by the unstable leaders of Social-Democracy who had long been vacillating. All this was not long in having its effect upon the whole Party, which year by year drew farther away from Marxism, and, in the person of many of its leaders, sank to the lowest depths of opportunism. Thus did a once big and once revolutionary workers’ party find itself destroyed from within because it was unable to stand up to the opportunist current that had formed within its own ranks. For the same reasons the Social-Democratic parties disintegrated in other countries too.

p The situation was extremely critical. Bernsteinianism passed the inner bounds of German Social-Democracy and spread throughout Europe, assuming a more and more perverted character. In the socialist movement of France there appeared Millerandism, in Russia legal Marxism, Economism and Menshevism. Lenin remarked that "the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international”.  [60•*** 

p This was the first most difficult moment within the Marxist movement. At times it seemed as if the scientific theory of Marxism had been dealt a crushing defeat from which it would take long to recover. But this was not to be. The great labour host of Marx, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, was not to show the white feather, but rally in serried ranks and throw all this garbage into the dust-bin. "Neither, of course, would the walls of Marxism fall," she said, "because the Social-Democratic volunteers are blowing their bourgeois trumpets.”  [61•* 

p This historic mission of fighting revisionism, defending Marxism and developing it further on the basis of the new historical experience fell to the lot of the Marxists of Russia headed by Lenin. They were determined opponents of revisionism. The service rendered by the Leninists was that they inflicted a crushing defeat on Bernsteinianism, then on Kautskyism, first and foremost in the theoretical field. Such threadbare harmful theories as Bernstein’s theory of "classless harmonious development" were demolished, as were also Kautsky’s theory of “ultraimperialism”, Hilferding’s theory of "organised capitalism" and similar unscientific figments of the so-called theorists of democratic and “ humane” socialism.

p But that was only a doctrinal, ideological struggle. The revisionists had to be beaten by practical, revolutionary deeds. The great service rendered by Lenin was that he created a truly revolutionary Marxist party whose law of life was unshakeable ideological and organisational unity. The ruthless expulsion from the party of opportunists of whatever trend was an essential demand of Leninism. "The Party," Lenin wrote, "is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating antiParty views.”  [61•**  On the basis of the entire experience of the international and Russian labour movement, he maintained that the party could not organise the victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie nor keep the power it had won unless it expelled revisionists and opportunists of every kind from its ranks.

p The Great October Socialist Revolution, prepared and carried out under the leadership of the Leninist party, was striking confirmation of Marxism’s trueness and the practical realisation of its revolutionary ideas. It dealt a crushing body-blow to revisionism and held it up to infamy in the eyes of the world, and the renegades suffered a smashing defeat that silenced them. Thus, Marxism triumphed in practice, in life. And this triumph of Marxism was bound up directly with the gigantic theoretical, political and organisational activities of Lenin and other genuine continuators of the cause of Marx and Engels.

Thus ended a lengthy period of reformism’s and opportunism’s ascendancy in the labour movement. Reformism was defeated and debunked by the new generation of revolutionaries, who amplified and developed Marxism. Summing up the results of this period’s struggle Lenin, prior to the October Revolution in Russia, predicted that "in recent years a third period has been making its appearance, a period in which the forces that have been prepared will achieve their goal in a series of crises".  [62•*  He said further: "In this first really international battle with socialist opportunism, international revolutionary Social-Democracy will perhaps become sufficiently strengthened to put an end to the political reaction that has long reigned in Europe?”  [62•**  This forecast of Lenin’s came true. The period in which revisionism had its back broken had arrived.