The revisionist controversy

Karl Kautsky

pp. 15-31

in: Karl Kautsky, Selected political writings, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Abstract

This began in earnest with a series of articles by Eduard Bernstein, published rather accommodatingly by Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit, from November 1896 to the summer of 1899, and in book form as Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus.¹Bernstein attacked the fundamental positions of Marxism all along the line. It was mistaken "to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy";²and, repeating Vollmar's argument in more general terms, that instead of a decreasing number of large capitalists there is "an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character but they do not disappear from the social scale".³Bernstein drew the political conclusion that "the conquest of the democracy, the formation of political and social organs of the democracy, is the indispensable preliminary condition to the realisation of socialism".⁴

Cited authors

Marx Karl