Vol. 78/No. 20       May 26, 2014

Rosa left Switzerland, where she had recently completed her doctorate, and moved to Berlin in May 1898. Immediately she became embroiled in the growing battle over revisionism in the SPD.

During 1897–98, Eduard Bernstein published a series of articles in Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the SPD, in which he attempted to refute the basic tenets of scientific socialism, particularly the Marxist assertion that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, that it cannot maintain itself forever. He denied the materialist conception of history, the growing acuteness of capitalist contradictions, and the theory of class struggle. He concluded that revolution was not necessary, that socialism could be achieved by gradual reform of the capitalist system, through mechanisms like consumers’ cooperatives, trade unions, and the gradual extension of political democracy. The SPD, he asserted, should be transformed from a party of social revolution into a party of social reforms. These ideas were further elaborated in his book, published in English under the title Evolutionary Socialism.

When Bernstein’s articles began appearing, the leadership of the SPD did not take the controversy seriously. Bern-stein was a close friend of the entire leadership of the party — August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Ignaz Auer, and others. He was one of the literary executors of Engels’s estate, and a former editor of one of the SPD papers. Kautsky, the editor of Neue Zeit, thought highly of the articles and accepted them for publication. …

The position held by the South Germans within the SPD was particularly significant. The SPD itself was formed in 1875 and outlawed by the government in 1878. Despite its illegal status it continued to grow rapidly and when the antisocialist laws were repealed in 1890, the party emerged as an important, legal, political force with a significant representation in the federal Reichstag and various provincial legislatures. Under its leadership a powerful trade-union movement was built. In the International, the SPD was the unquestioned “great” party, the model looked up to by the whole International.

But the reformist current for which Bernstein became the theoretician began to develop early. During the prolonged period of European peace and relative prosperity at the end of the nineteenth century it found fertile soil in which to grow. One of its first overt manifestations was the policy of “South German exceptionalism.”

The official SPD policy of “not a man nor a farthing for this system” was always translated into legislative action, on a federal level, by unconditional refusal to vote for any budgets which would tax the workers and peasants to sustain the tyranny of the German capitalist state, and maintain the courts, police and army of the rulers. But as early as 1891, SPD deputies in the provincial legislatures of Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, and Baden, pleading special conditions in southern Germany, voted for provincial budgets, arguing that since their vote was often decisive, they were thus able to use their political weight to force concessions and obtain a “better” budget to maintain capitalism. While this practice was roundly condemned within the SPD, the myth of southern exceptionalism was maintained, and motions to forbid SPD delegates to vote for any budgets, whether federal, provincial, or local, were defeated at national congresses in 1894 and 1895. …

The discussion continued within the party and Second International for a number of years. The SPD executive at first encouraged a theoretical discussion, maintaining an ambivalent position, but the practical implications of Bernstein’s abandonment of a revolutionary perspective could not be ignored for long. One by one most of the major German and International leaders entered the battle against revisionism. The debate spread throughout the entire International.

At the party Congresses of 1901 and 1903, and at the International Congress of 1904, resolutions condemning the theoretical basis of revisionism were adopted. However, Bernstein, Vollmar and the other proponents of revisionism remained securely within the SPD; and the extent to which the defeat of revisionism remained a hollow victory, even at that early date, was indicated by the fact that Bernstein, who had not altered his views, himself voted for the resolutions condemning revisionism.

As Ignaz Auer, SPD secretary, wrote to Bernstein in 1899, “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them.”

Auer’s formula was unwittingly followed by the majority of the SPD, as was demonstrated fifteen years later for all the world to see when the party formally voted to support its own imperialist government in World War I, a betrayal of the most elementary principles of proletarian internationalism and revolutionary Marxism.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, the Bernstein controversy posed the question of “the very existence of the social democratic movement.”

That she was among the first to realize this and sound the alarm would be sufficient to place Rosa Luxemburg in the revolutionary hall of fame, even if she had done nothing more of importance for the rest of her life.  
 
 
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