Between Bernstein and Lenin

Workers' Liberty

Author: Rayner Lysaght

 19 November, 2025 

This section takes the story of the first three workers’ Internationals from the 1890s to 1905. Though idiosyncratic in its slant on some points, the account (abridged from a pamphlet, The First Three Internationals, published in 1989), gives important elements of history.

The French Possibilists abandoned their attempts to form an International and affiliated to the Marxist body [in 1891]. That did not mean that they abandoned their politics. In fact, these were restated by one of their leaders, Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943) as being the aims of gradual reform within the nation state. This emphasised the fact that, even without the Anarchists, the International was far from being an homogeneous Marxist body.

Most French Socialists were influenced by Possibilist views. Most British Socialists were similarly inclined. The comparative seniority of the latter’s working class, which had caused its union leaders’ opportunism in the 1860s and which had since delayed the appearance of its own independent party, was now ensuring that the one party that made the breakthrough into parliament was the Possibilist Independent Labour Party. Of the genuinely mass affiliates, those of what were then the separate colonies of Australia were similar.

Only the mass German Social Democratic Party seemed to provide a bastion of Marxist politics, and this appearance was itself being challenged.

The party was based mainly in the new Empire’s industrial north: the states of Prussia and Saxony. The country was organised federally, with each state maintaining its own electoral laws. In Prussia, the system was loaded to give extra representation to the landlords (junkers) and hardly any to the workers. The southern states had more nearly democratic franchises but were less industrialised so that the party had a weaker base. These two factors made it seem both possible and necessary for the South German Social Democrats to proceed by collaborating with sections of their class opponents.

In 1891, those in Württemburg voted with the Liberal State Government to pass its budget. In 1894, this practice was accepted by the Party’s National Congress as being justified by local conditions, despite a protest from old Friedrich Engels.

The next year, the South German tendency suffered a setback. The Party Congress defeated its members’ proposal to adopt a land policy aimed at winning small farmers. This defeat was significant, less in itself than in its revelation of forces far more important to advancing reformism than were the south Germans. For the proposal was not defeated only on its merits, though these were few enough. The Party Leader, the Marxist, Bebel, supported it. It was defeated by the vote of officials from the new Social-Democratic trade unions, who preferred to allow the small farmers to be proletarianised (and hopefully, members of their trade unions) rather than make a political effort to win them.

They were supported in this, and their assumptions rationalised, by the party’s leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky (1854-1938).

Kautsky’s fatalistic approach would not be strong enough to keep him allied to the developing Social Democratic bureaucracy without disagreement. In any case, that bureaucracy did not need him. On the other hand, German Social Democracy had come to need the bureaucracy to organise it.

A further complication was that it was only since 1890 that the Party had been able to develop legally; the German Anti-Socialist Laws were a recent memory and a standing threat against too radical political action. And the reformists could argue that they were facing problems that orthodox Marxists ignored. However inadequately, they recognised the political problem of the need to win the small farmer.

Defeat

A year after their defeat on this, they could claim a further justification of their class-collaborationism. In Saxony, the advance of independent Social Democracy was answered by the capitalist parties uniting to replace the comparatively democratic franchise with a form of the Prussian system. The South Germans argued that intelligent class collaboration could have avoided this: the Party’s majority had no answer.

The time was ripe for German reformism to be given a theoretical dignity that would make it appear more than a system of surrender to events by alleged Marxists. In Britain, the Fabian Society was providing such a rationalisation but it was not yet part of the working-class movement, nor was it trying to be. Nonetheless, its members’ writings did influence Engels’ former secretary, Edward Bernstein (1850-1932).

Between 1896 and 1898, Bernstein published a series of articles that defended the practice of most Socialist Parties and counterposed it to the stated Marxist aim of the Socialist Society. He summarised his approach better than he realised in his comment that, for him, the aim is nothing... the movement everything. He reduced Marxism’s value to one of historical analysis of economic pressures and class struggles. He denied the possibility of capitalist economic collapse, whether general (for society as a whole), or individual (small concern liquidating into monopoly). He substituted for the Marxist dialectic a combination of empirical investigation and moral purpose. For him a Socialist Party’s chief role was to produce a series of piecemeal reforms through Parliament. His proposals were a revision of Marxism: Revisionism.

In this haziness as to ends, Bernstein was arguably more honest — if less radical — than the reformist spokesman, the Bavarian Georg von Vollmar (1850-1922), who asserted that it would be possible and desirable to achieve a Socialist society within the State boundaries of one country.

Bernstein’s attack provoked a reaction from the Marxists who claimed the majority in German Social Democracy. Two foreign recruits, the Byelorussian Parvus (Alexander Helphand, 1869-1924) and the Pole Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919), published pamphlets defending Marxist principles. So too did Kautsky, another of Engels’ protégés and a far more prominent figure, but he did so only after persuasion by his Russian counterpart, George Plekhanov (1856-1918).

What was more, although Bernstein’s ideas were condemned at successive Party Congresses between 1899 and 1903 and at the International’s Amsterdam Congress in 1904, many known revisionists, including himself, on occasion voted for the condemnation. His political career flourished and he was elected to the German Parliament (Reichstag) for his Party in 1902.

The sun of mass political growth was nurturing bureaucratic interests in German Social Democracy. Their relationship to Bernstein’s Revisionism differed between the bureaucracies of the trade unions and that of the Party proper. Having trade unions organised by Party members had been expected to frustrate the opportunism that developed in Britain. In practice, their work’s necessary concentration on bread-and-butter issues with little political support and their own relative but increasing material privilege compared to their members made the German Social Democratic trade-union leaders the readiest to accept Revisionism.

The Party’s own bureaucracy was organised at a higher political level; it was concerned more directly with advancing the Programme passed originally at Gotha (1875) and renewed at Erfurt (1891). This theoretical base was made less effective by the Programme’s division into a minimum list of reforms compatible with capitalism and a maximum or full Socialist programme. Basing themselves on the latter, the majority leaders of German Social Democracy attacked the theory of Revisionism, without being able to offer any alternative to the Revisionists’ practical solutions to the short-term problems.

Strategy

Both theory (against the Anarchists) and practice tended to limit Social Democracy’s strategy to one of parliamentary means. Against the Anarchist demand to abolish the State it had asserted the need to take State power. But what did this mean? It was all too easy to interpret it as did the Revisionists: the electoral struggle every few years to win the right to administer the existing state machine. In itself this provided the reason for a major part of any Social Democratic activity, in Germany or elsewhere, at the time.

In most countries manhood suffrage, without which electoral victory was impossible, did not exist and women had no national vote. In Belgium and Austria, indeed, the workers struck for the right to vote. Bernstein himself supported such a means for an end, since democracy was a necessary pre-condition for achieving the greatest reform. He disagreed with the political strike for other causes and had the agreement of most trade union leaders. Eventually, it would be the workers of Russia who would bring back the revolutionary seizure of State power as, in effect, the missing and crucial part of any Socialist programme without which it would remain, at best, Marxist in theory and Revisionist in practice.

When Bernstein’s articles appeared first the Social Democratic Party Secretary, Ignaz Auer (1846-1907) wrote him: “My dear Ede, you don’t pass resolutions. You don’t talk about it (Revisionism). You just do it”.

Until 1899 the controversy over Revisionism remained centred in German Social Democracy. Although French Socialism seemed even more divided (organisationally as well as politically) between Possibilists and Impossibilists, the debate between the two was less developed and deemed likely to end in reconciliation as common (Reformist) practice tended to unite the participants. However, in 1899 the Possibilists broke even with that practice in a way that defied the basic principle of independent working-class political organisation even more definitely than the South German budget votes.

The Anti-Dreyfusards, a powerful antisemitic movement supported and used as a front by Monarchists, Clericalists and Militarists, had influenced successive French Governments and seemed to threaten the Republic itself. To defend it and to open the way for possible reforms, Alexandre Millerand did not only pledge support for a new Government but joined it as Minister for Commerce, with the support of his Possibilist colleagues.

The following year the matter was discussed at the International’s Fifth Congress, in Paris. After much debate, Kautsky drafted a compromise. It was passed, despite some opposition which included that of two united national delegations, those of Belgium and Ireland (the Irish Socialist Republican Party; this was the only Second International Congress at which Ireland was represented). It was agreed that, in future, no member of an affiliate of the International would be allowed to take office in a State Government without his party’s permission. The central political issue (the relationship of the Party to the capitalist state) and the central person (Millerand) were both ignored.

This was less than satisfactory, in that Millerand’s action was not even justified by political results. He and his Ministerial colleagues did break the influence of the Anti-Dreyfusards, get their victim, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) released from jail and begin a series of educational reforms, but they did little more over three years and ended by using the army against striking workers and colonial peoples. As would happen in all such future alliances, Millerand had not captured a bourgeois ministry but had been captured by the capitalist state.

Controversy

However, the controversy he had started reflected the fact that French Marxism was starting from a theoretical basis even less developed than that of Germany. Its leader, Jules Guesde (1845-1922) was far more influenced by Proudhon’s anti-political views than Bebel or Kautsky were by Lassalle. For Guesde, the Dreyfus case was irrelevant to the working class. French Socialism’s most able thinker, Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), was a Possibilist and a defender of Millerand. On the other hand, many genuinely revolutionary Socialists were abandoning Marxism or else trying to merge it with a new form of strategy that opposed the International’s definition of political action by action through industrial unions: Syndicalism.

In the English-speaking world, problems were even more acute. In Britain and the dominions the Marxists were still losing ground while honestly Reformist parties advanced. In Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party was organised by a genuine Marxist, James Connolly (1868-1916), but its rank and file were less conscious and, in 1903, he left them for the USA. In any case, more real electoral support was given to the Belfast Labour Party which was in the Independent Labour Party mould.

Connolly was not misguided in seeing the USA as more promising. It had produced Daniel de Leon (1852-1914), a theoretician whose writings were admired by Lenin and whose Socialist Labour Party became the centre of the Marxist tendency in the English-speaking world before 1914.

It had been founded by German-American Lassalleans and, far more than the Germans, upheld the Lassallean principle of close party control of its associated trade unions and their indoctrination with the Lassallean Iron Law of Wages and the resultant futility of strikes for wage rises. This weakened the Party against its country’s non-political union organisation, the American Federation of Labour. By 1901 it too had provoked Revisionists and genuine Marxists into joining to form a looser, less homogeneous (in effect less Marxist) Socialist Party of America, which would soon win more support than de Leon’s organisation.

The most effective opposition to Revisionism and to the more subtle degeneration of world Marxism was being developed in central and eastern Europe. Rosa Luxemburg was fighting for greater clarity in a revolutionary approach to the issues raised by Bernstein. In Russia, where the movement was less developed, Plekhanov and Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 1870-1924) were fighting to build a Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party with the norms they believed existed in the German Social Democracy.

This last body condemned Revisionism firmly at its 1903 Dresden Congress. At the same time it avoided accepting its practical challenge, as Luxemburg demanded. It sent the motion it had passed to the International, which itself passed it at its sixth Congress in Amsterdam the following year.

The Amsterdam Congress was to the Second International what the Basle Congress had been to the first. It was the organisational highpoint that preceded its highpoint in practice. Its affiliates were advancing everywhere. In the Commonwealth of Australia that year, the Labour Party formed a Government. In Belgium, Austria and the less democratic German states of Prussia and Saxony, the Social Democrats led the fight for the democratic franchise.

The chief achievement of the Amsterdam Congress was that it consolidated this growth by passing a motion to unite its national affiliates. On the theoretical side, its ratification of the Dresden motion made a gesture towards the idea that such unity should be on Marxist political lines. In fact, neither was really successful. The French united, though the right-wing Possibilists led by Millerand preferred to break altogether with Socialism. However, the Russians and Americans remained divided. More importantly, the Dresden motion remained a substitute for serious Marxist analysis.

Just as Basle had been followed by the Paris Commune, so, now, Amsterdam was followed even more swiftly by the Russian Revolution of 1905. Starting and continuing formally on a bourgeois-democratic programme, it stimulated the establishment of working-class councils or soviets in St Petersburg and Moscow which posed practically the seizure of state power by workers in a way not seen since and more radically than the Paris Commune. For a time it threatened to spread westward. The German and Austrian Emperors considered intervening to save Tsarism. Radicalised by the upsurge, the normally Revisionist German trade-union leaders threatened a general strike if this occurred.