Introduction

The title of the present work may be surprising at first sight. Social reform or revolution? Can Social Democracy then be against social reform? Or can it set the social revolution, the overturning of the existing order, which is its final goal, against social reform? Certainly not. For Social Democracy, on the contrary, the daily practical struggle for social reforms, for the improvement of the condition of the working people even on the basis of the existing order, and for democratic institutions, is the only way of conducting the proletarian class struggle and of working towards the final goal: the seizure of political power and the abolition of the wage system. For Social Democracy there is an indissoluble connection between social reform and social revolution, in that the struggle for social reform is its means, while the social revolution is its aim.

We first find these two moments of the labour movement set against each other in the theory of Ed. Bernstein, as he has set it out in his articles Problems of Socialism in the Neue Zeit of 1897/98, and above all in his book The Preconditions of Socialism. In practice this whole theory amounts to nothing other than the advice to give up the social revolution, the final goal of Social Democracy, and, conversely, to turn social reform from a means of the class struggle into its aim. Bernstein himself formulated his views most aptly and most sharply when he wrote: “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement is everything.” But since the socialist final goal is the only decisive factor that distinguishes the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism, the only factor that transforms the whole labour movement from an idle patching-up to save the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the abolition of this order, the question “Social reform or revolution?” in Bernstein’s sense is for Social Democracy at the same time the question: to be or not to be? In the debate with Bernstein and his followers what is ultimately at stake is not this or that method of struggle, not this or that tactic, but the whole existence of the Social-Democratic movement.

This recognition is doubly important for the workers, because what is at stake here is precisely they themselves and their influence in the movement, because it is their own skin that is being carried to market. The opportunist current in the party, formulated theoretically by Bernstein, is nothing other than an unconscious striving to secure the upper hand for the petty-bourgeois elements that have come over to the party, and to remould the practice and the aims of the party in their spirit. The question of social reform and revolution, of the final goal and the movement, is, seen from another side, the question of the petty-bourgeois or proletarian character of the labour movement.