as the political and economic agitation and organization for the purpose of realizing this progress. … In securing a good factory law, Socialism can accomplish more than in the public ownership of a whole group of factories.[1]
Bernstein's Revisionism was at once championed by some of the party's ablest publicists, such as Dr. Conrad Schmidt, Dr. Woltmann, and Dr. Eduard David, and by such an astute political leader as Vollmar; and it proved powerfully attractive to the allied tradeunions.[2] Nevertheless it was denounced by Karl Kautsky,[3] the editor of Die Neue Zeit and premier theorist of the party, and also by Rosa Luxemburg,[4] the dominating personage in the women's Socialist movement; and, after acrid debates at the Hanover Congress of 1899 and at the Lübeck Congress of 1901, it was formally condemned at the latter congress as a "heresy". For a few years at the opening of the twentieth century it seemed as if the German Social Democracy was reacting strongly against Revisionism. It was the time when the party dallied with the idea of the "general strike" and contended vigorously against the imperialist policies of the government.
The main impetus to the dallying with "direct action" as opposed to orderly parliamentary agitation came from the putative success of the general strike in Russia which wrung from the Tsar the ambiguous constitution of October, 1905. Throughout western Europe there was a new impatience with parliamentary delays, and in Germany the impotence of the Social Democratic members of the Reichstag, in spite of the three million votes behind them, seemed intolerable. Why should not the German Socialists learn a lesson from their Russian comrades and seek to realize their political and economic aims, seek, moreover, to prevent international war, by utilizing the methods of revolutionary syndicalism? So queried Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht the Younger. It was the first serious attempt in thirty years to divert and subvert the Socialist movement by an anarchistic agitation from within.[5] And when rumor spread that the German government was concerting measures
- ↑ "Der Kampf der Sozialdemokratie und die Revolution der Gesellschaft. II. Die Zusammenbruchs-Theorie und die Kolonialpolitik", in Die Neue Zeit, vol. XVI., pt. I., p. 536. January 19, 1898.
- ↑ It is not without significance that Revisionism affected Socialist tradeunionism in Germany at about the same time as the British trade-unions were being drawn into a political alliance with Socialist groups to form the British "Labor Party", which put its emphasis upon practice rather than upon theory.
- ↑ Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm (1899).
- ↑ Sozialreform oder Revolution? (1899).
- ↑ Ensor, Modern Socialism (second ed., 1908), introd.
