II.5. Opportunism in Theory and Practice

Bernstein’s book has had a great historical significance for the German and the international labour movement: it was the first attempt to give the opportunist currents in Social Democracy a theoretical foundation.

Opportunist currents in our movement date back a long time, if one takes into account their sporadic manifestations, as in the well-known question of the steamship subsidies. But a pronounced, unified current of this kind dates only from the beginning of the nineties, from the fall of the Anti-Socialist Law and the reconquest of legal ground. Vollmar’s state socialism, the Bavarian vote for the budget, the south German agrarian socialism, Heine’s proposals for compensation, Schippel’s positions on tariffs and the militia: these are the milestones in the development of opportunist practice.

What characterised it above all outwardly? Hostility towards “theory”. And this is quite natural, for our “theory”, that is, the principles of scientific socialism, sets very firm limits to practical activity, as regards the aims pursued as well as the means of struggle to be used and, finally, even the manner of struggle. Hence those who want only to chase after practical successes show the natural endeavour to free their hands, that is, to separate our practice from “theory”, to make it independent of theory.

But this same theory struck them on the head at every practical attempt: state socialism, agrarian socialism, the policy of compensation and the militia question were so many defeats for opportunism. It is clear that this current, if it wanted to assert itself against our principles, had logically to come to the point of venturing upon theory itself, upon the principles; instead of ignoring them, to try to shake them and to fashion a theory of its own. Bernstein’s theory was just such an attempt, and that is why at the party congress in Stuttgart we saw all the opportunist elements group themselves at once around Bernstein’s banner. If on the one hand the opportunist currents in practice are a quite natural phenomenon, explicable by the conditions of our struggle and its growth, on the other hand Bernstein’s theory is an equally natural attempt to sum up these currents in a general theoretical expression, to find their own theoretical premises and to settle accounts with scientific socialism. Bernstein’s theory was therefore from the outset the theoretical ordeal by fire for opportunism, its first scientific legitimation.

How did this test turn out? We have seen. Opportunism is not capable of setting up a positive theory that can at all withstand criticism. All it can do is to combat Marx’s teaching first in various individual principles and, in the end, since this teaching forms a firmly joined edifice, to destroy the whole system from the top storey to the foundations. This proves that opportunist practice is in its essence, in its foundations, incompatible with the Marxian system.

But it further proves that opportunism is also incompatible with socialism in general, that its inner tendency is to push the labour movement over into bourgeois paths, that is, to paralyse the proletarian class struggle completely. Proletarian class struggle, to be sure, is not, historically speaking, identical with the Marxian system. Before Marx and independently of him there was a labour movement, and there were various socialist systems, each of which in its own way was a theoretical expression, corresponding to the conditions of its time, of the working class’s strivings for emancipation. The grounding of socialism on moral concepts of justice, the struggle against the mode of distribution instead of against the mode of production, the conception of class antagonisms as an antagonism of poor and rich, the endeavour to graft “co-operation” on to the capitalist economy: everything we find in Bernstein’s system has existed once before. And these theories, in their time, for all their inadequacy, were real theories of the proletarian class struggle; they were the giant’s children’s shoes in which the proletariat learned to walk on the stage of history.

But once the development of the class struggle itself and of its social conditions has led to the casting off of these theories and to the formulation of the principles of scientific socialism, there can be, at least in Germany, no socialism other than Marxian socialism, no socialist class struggle outside Social Democracy. From now on socialism and Marxism, the proletarian struggle for emancipation and Social Democracy, are identical. To go back to pre-Marxian theories of socialism today, therefore, does not even mean a relapse into the giant’s children’s shoes of the proletariat; no, it is a relapse into the dwarfish, worn-out slippers of the bourgeoisie.

Bernstein’s theory was the first, but at the same time also the last, attempt to give opportunism a theoretical foundation. We say the last, because in Bernstein’s system opportunism has gone so far, negatively in abjuring scientific socialism and positively in throwing together all the theoretical confusion available, that nothing more is left for it to do. With Bernstein’s book opportunism has completed its development in theory and drawn its final consequences.

And Marx’s teaching is not only able to refute it theoretically; it alone is in a position also to explain opportunism as a historical phenomenon in the evolution of the party. The world-historical advance of the proletariat to its victory is indeed “no such simple matter”. The whole peculiarity of this movement lies in the fact that here, for the first time in history, the masses of the people themselves, and against all the ruling classes, are to carry through their will, but must set this will beyond present-day society, above and outside it. This will, in turn, the masses can form only in constant struggle with the existing order, only within its framework. The union of the great mass of the people with an aim that goes beyond the whole existing order, of the daily struggle with the great reform of the world: that is the great problem of the Social-Democratic movement, which must accordingly work its way forward along the whole course of its development between two reefs, between giving up its mass character and giving up its final goal, between relapse into the sect and collapse into the bourgeois reform movement, between anarchism and opportunism.

Marx’s teaching, it is true, supplied from its theoretical arsenal half a century ago devastating weapons against the one extreme as against the other. But since our movement is precisely a mass movement, and the dangers that threaten it spring not from human heads but from social conditions, the anarchist and the opportunist side-leaps could not be prevented once and for all in advance by Marx’s theory. They must be overcome by the movement itself, only after they have become flesh in practice, though only with the help of the weapons supplied by Marx. The lesser danger, the anarchist measles of childhood, Social Democracy has already overcome with the “Independents’ movement”. The greater danger, the opportunist dropsy, it is overcoming at present.

With the enormous growth of the movement in breadth in recent years, with the complexity of the conditions in which, and of the tasks for which, the struggle must now be waged, the moment had to come when scepticism about the attainment of the great final goals, and wavering about the ideal element of the movement, made themselves felt in it. So, and not otherwise, can and must the great proletarian movement proceed; and the moments of wavering and hesitation, far from being a surprise for Marx’s teaching, were long ago foreseen and foretold by Marx. “Bourgeois revolutions,” Marx wrote half a century ago in his Eighteenth Brumaire, “like those of the eighteenth century, rush onward rapidly from success to success, their stage effects outbid one another, men and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy is the spirit of every day; but they are short-lived, they soon reach their climax, and a long fit of nervous reaction seizes society before it learns soberly to appropriate the results of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, come back to what seems to have been accomplished in order to start over anew, scorn with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth and rise again against them in more gigantic stature, constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monstrous magnitude of their own aims, until the situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:

This has remained true even after the teaching of scientific socialism was built up. The proletarian movement has not thereby become Social-Democratic all at once, not even in Germany; it becomes Social-Democratic every day, and it becomes so also during and by constantly overcoming the extreme side-leaps into anarchism and into opportunism, both merely moments in the movement of Social Democracy conceived as a process.

In view of this, what is surprising is not the emergence of the opportunist current but rather its weakness. So long as it broke through only in individual cases of party practice, one could still suppose some serious theoretical foundation behind it. But now that it has come to full expression in Bernstein’s book, everyone must exclaim in astonishment: What, is that all you have to say? Not a single splinter of a new thought! Not a single thought that was not trampled down, crushed, laughed at and reduced to nothing by Marxism decades ago.

It was enough for opportunism to speak to show that it had nothing to say. And therein lies the real significance of Bernstein’s book in the history of the party.

And so Bernstein, in taking leave of the mode of thought of the revolutionary proletariat, of dialectics and the materialist conception of history, can still thank them for the mitigating circumstances they grant his conversion. For only dialectics and the materialist conception of history, magnanimous as they are, let him appear as the appointed but unconscious instrument through which the onward-storming proletariat has given expression to its momentary wavering, in order, on closer inspection, to throw it far from itself with a scornful laugh and a toss of its head.