I.5. Practical Consequences and General Character of Revisionism

In the first chapter we tried to show that Bernstein’s theory lifts the socialist programme off its material ground and sets it on an idealist basis. That concerns its theoretical foundation. But what does the theory look like when it is translated into practice? At first, and formally, it does not differ at all from the practice of Social-Democratic struggle that has been usual hitherto. Trade unions, the struggle for social reform and for the democratisation of political institutions: that is the very same thing that otherwise makes up the formal content of the activity of the Social-Democratic party. The difference therefore lies not in the What but in the How. As things stand now, the trade-union and parliamentary struggles are understood as means of gradually leading and educating the proletariat to take possession of political power. According to the revisionist view, given the impossibility and pointlessness of taking possession of it, they are to be waged only with an eye to immediate results, that is, the raising of the material condition of the workers, the step-by-step limitation of capitalist exploitation and the extension of social control. If we leave aside the aim of immediately raising the condition of the workers, since it is common to both views, the one hitherto usual in the party and the revisionist one, the whole difference, briefly put, is this: according to the customary view, the socialist significance of the trade-union and political struggle lies in its preparing the proletariat, that is, the subjective factor of the socialist transformation, to carry that transformation out. According to Bernstein it lies in the trade-union and political struggle being supposed to limit capitalist exploitation itself step by step, to take its capitalist character away from capitalist society more and more and stamp the socialist character upon it, in a word, to bring about the socialist transformation in an objective sense. If one looks at the matter more closely, the two views are in fact directly opposed. In the view usual in the party, the proletariat arrives through the trade-union and political struggle at the conviction that it is impossible to transform its situation from the ground up by this struggle, and that a final taking possession of the political instruments of power is inevitable. In Bernstein’s view one starts from the impossibility of seizing political power as a premise, in order to introduce the socialist order by mere trade-union and political struggle.

For Bernstein, then, the socialist character of the trade-union and parliamentary struggle lies in the belief in its gradually socialising effect on the capitalist economy. Such an effect, however, is in fact — as we tried to show — mere imagination. The capitalist institutions of property and of the state develop in the opposite direction. With that, however, the practical day-to-day struggle of Social Democracy ultimately loses all ⟨connection⟩ with socialism. The great socialist significance of the trade-union and political struggle lies in the fact that it socialises the knowledge, the consciousness of the proletariat, and organises it as a class. If they are understood as means of directly socialising the capitalist economy, they not only fail to have this effect ascribed to them but at the same time lose their other significance as well: they cease to be means of educating the working class for the proletarian seizure of power.

It rests therefore on a complete misunderstanding when Eduard Bernstein and Konrad Schmidt reassure themselves that the final goal will not be lost to the labour movement even if the whole struggle is confined to social reform and trade unions, because every step along this road leads beyond itself and the socialist goal is thus inherent in the movement itself as a tendency. This is certainly fully the case with the present tactics of German Social Democracy, that is, when the conscious and firm striving for the conquest of political power goes ahead of the trade-union and social-reform struggle as its guiding star. If, however, this striving, given in advance, is detached from the movement and social reform is set up first as an end in itself, then it not only does not lead to the realisation of the socialist final goal but rather the reverse. Konrad Schmidt relies simply on the, so to speak, mechanical motion which, once set going, cannot stop of itself, on the strength of the simple proposition that appetite comes with eating, and that the working class can never be satisfied with reforms as long as the socialist transformation has not been completed. The latter premise is correct enough, and the inadequacy of capitalist social reform itself guarantees it. But the conclusion drawn from it could be true only if an unbroken chain of continuous and ever-growing social reforms could be constructed leading directly from the present social order to the socialist one. That, however, is a fantasy; in the nature of things the chain soon breaks off, and the roads that the movement can take from that point are many.

The nearest and most likely result is then a shift in tactics towards making the practical results of the struggle, the social reforms, possible by every means. The uncompromising, sharp class standpoint, which makes sense only with a view to an intended conquest of political power, becomes more and more a mere obstacle as soon as immediate practical successes become the main aim. The next step, therefore, is a “policy of compensation” — in plain German, a policy of horse-trading — and a conciliatory, statesmanlike, prudent attitude. But the movement cannot stand still there for long either. For since social reform in the capitalist world is and always remains an empty nut, whatever tactics one may use, the next logical step is disillusionment with social reform too, that is, the quiet harbour where Professors Schmoller and Co. have now dropped anchor, who after all also studied the great world and the little on the waters of social reform, only to let everything go at last as God pleases. Socialism, then, does not by any means arise of itself and under all circumstances from the daily struggle of the working class. It follows only from the ever sharper contradictions of the capitalist economy and from the working class’s recognition that they must be abolished by a social transformation. If one denies the first and rejects the second, as revisionism does, then the labour movement is reduced first to simple trade unionism and social reformism, and by its own gravity leads in the end to the abandonment of the class standpoint.

These consequences also become clear if one looks at the revisionist theory from yet another side and asks the question: what is the general character of this view? It is clear that revisionism does not stand on the ground of capitalist relations and does not, with the bourgeois economists, deny their contradictions. Rather, in its theory it too, like the Marxist view, starts from the existence of these contradictions as a premise. On the other hand, however — and this is both the core of its view in general and its basic difference from the Social-Democratic view usual hitherto — it does not base itself in its theory on the abolition of these contradictions through their own consistent development.

Its theory stands midway between the two extremes; it does not want the capitalist contradictions to reach full maturity and be abolished by a revolutionary overturn at their peak, but wants to break off their points, to blunt them. Thus the absence of crises and the employers’ organisations are to blunt the contradiction between production and exchange; the raising of the condition of the proletariat and the continued existence of the middle classes, the contradiction between capital and labour; and growing control and democracy, the contradiction between the class state and society.

To be sure, the customary Social-Democratic tactics do not consist in waiting until the capitalist contradictions have developed to their extreme point and only then for their overturn. On the contrary, we base ourselves only on the direction of development once it has been recognised, but then in the political struggle we drive its consequences to the extreme, and in this the essence of every revolutionary tactic consists. Thus Social Democracy, for example, fights tariffs and militarism at all times, and not only once their reactionary character has fully broken through. Bernstein, however, bases his tactics not on the further development and sharpening of the capitalist contradictions at all, but on their blunting. He himself described it most aptly when he spoke of an “adaptation” of the capitalist economy. When would such a view be correct? All the contradictions of present-day society are simple results of the capitalist mode of production. If we assume that this mode of production goes on developing in the direction it has taken so far, then all its consequences must inseparably develop further with it; the contradictions must grow sharper and more acute instead of being blunted. The latter, therefore, presupposes as its condition, on the contrary, that the capitalist mode of production itself is checked in its development. In a word, the most general premise of Bernstein’s theory is a standstill in capitalist development.

With that, however, the theory passes judgement on itself, and doubly so. For, first, it lays bare its utopian character with regard to the socialist final goal — it is clear from the outset that a capitalist development that has stagnated in the bog cannot lead to the socialist transformation — and here we have the confirmation of our account of the practical consequence of the theory. Secondly, it reveals its reactionary character with regard to the rapid capitalist development that is actually taking place. Now the question forces itself on us: how can Bernstein’s way of thinking be explained, or rather characterised, in the face of this actual capitalist development?

That the economic premises from which Bernstein starts in his analysis of present-day social conditions — his theory of capitalist “adaptation” — do not hold water, we believe we have shown in the first section. We saw that neither the credit system nor the cartels can be regarded as “means of adaptation” of the capitalist economy, nor the temporary absence of crises nor the survival of the middle classes as symptoms of capitalist adaptation. All the details of the adaptation theory just named have, however — apart from their being directly mistaken — another characteristic feature in common. This theory takes all the phenomena of economic life it deals with not in their organic connection with capitalist development as a whole and in their relation to the whole economic mechanism, but torn out of this connection, as having an independent existence, as disjecta membra (scattered parts) of a lifeless machine. Take, for example, the view of the adaptive effect of credit. If one considers credit as a higher stage of exchange that has grown up naturally, and in connection with all the contradictions inherent in capitalist exchange, one cannot possibly see in it some mechanical “means of adaptation” standing, as it were, outside the process of exchange, any more than one can regard money itself, the commodity or capital as a “means of adaptation” of capitalism. But credit, not one hair less than money, the commodity and capital, is an organic member of the capitalist economy at a certain stage of its development, and at that stage, again just like them, it forms both an indispensable intermediate link in its works and an instrument of destruction, since it heightens its internal contradictions.

Exactly the same applies to the cartels and to the improved means of communication.

The same mechanical and undialectical view lies, further, in the way Bernstein accepts the absence of crises as a symptom of the “adaptation” of the capitalist economy. For him crises are simply disturbances in the economic mechanism, and if they fail to appear, the mechanism can evidently function smoothly. But crises are in fact not “disturbances” in the proper sense, or rather, they are disturbances without which the capitalist economy as a whole cannot get along at all. If it is a fact that crises, put very briefly, are the only possible, and therefore entirely normal, method on a capitalist basis of periodically resolving the conflict between the unlimited capacity of production to expand and the narrow limits of the market, then crises too are inseparable organic phenomena of the capitalist economy as a whole. In an “undisturbed” progress of capitalist production there lie, rather, dangers for it that are greater than the crises themselves. This is the steady fall of the rate of profit, which results not from the contradiction between production and exchange but from the development of the productivity of labour itself, and which has the highly dangerous tendency of making production impossible for all the smaller and medium capitals and so of setting limits to the formation of new capitals and thereby to the progress of investment. It is precisely the crises, which result from the same process as its other consequence, that by the periodic depreciation of capital, by the cheapening of the means of production and by paralysing a part of the active capital, at the same time bring about a rise in profits and so make room for new investments and with them new advances in production. They thus appear as a means of stoking and kindling the fire of capitalist development again and again, and their absence — not at particular moments in the formation of the world market, as we assume, but absolutely — would soon have brought the capitalist economy not, as Bernstein thinks, to prosperity but straight into the swamp. With the mechanical way of thinking that marks the whole adaptation theory, Bernstein leaves out of account both the indispensability of crises and the indispensability of the new investments of small and medium capitals that keep springing up periodically, which is why, among other things, the constant rebirth of small capital appears to him as a sign of capitalist standstill instead of, as it actually is, of normal capitalist development.

There is, to be sure, a standpoint from which all the phenomena discussed really do appear as the “adaptation theory” sums them up: the standpoint of the individual capitalist, as the facts of economic life, distorted by the laws of competition, enter his consciousness. The individual capitalist does in fact see, above all, every organic member of the economic whole as an independent whole in itself; and he sees them, further, only from the side on which they act on him, the individual capitalist, and therefore as mere “disturbances” or mere “means of adaptation”. For the individual capitalist crises really are mere disturbances, and their absence grants him a longer lease of life; for him credit is likewise a means of “adapting” his inadequate productive forces to the demands of the market; for him a cartel he joins really does abolish the anarchy of production.

In a word, Bernstein’s adaptation theory is nothing but a theoretical generalisation of the way the individual capitalist sees things. But what is this way of seeing things, in its theoretical expression, if not what is essential and characteristic of bourgeois vulgar economics? All the economic errors of this school rest precisely on the misunderstanding that it takes phenomena of competition, seen through the eyes of the individual capital, for phenomena of the capitalist economy as a whole. And just as Bernstein regards credit, so vulgar economics also regards, for example, money as an ingenious “means of adaptation” to the needs of exchange; it too seeks in capitalist phenomena themselves the antidotes to capitalist ills; it believes, in agreement with Bernstein, in the possibility of regulating the capitalist economy; and finally it too, like Bernstein’s theory, always comes down in the last resort to blunting the capitalist contradictions and plastering over the capitalist wounds, in other words to a reactionary instead of a revolutionary procedure, and hence to a utopia.

Taken as a whole, then, the revisionist theory can be characterised as follows: it is a theory of socialist stagnation, grounded in vulgar economics on a theory of capitalist stagnation.