10. Opportunism and Theory in Practice¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist text represents the first systematic attempt to provide a theoretical foundation for the opportunist currents that had been developing within German Social-Democracy since the repeal of the anti-Socialist laws in 1890. The author identifies a clear pattern of opportunist practice in the preceding decade: Vollmar’s advocacy of ‘State Socialism’, votes on the Bavarian budget, the ‘agrarian socialism’ of the south German wing, Heine’s policy of compensation, and Schippel’s position on tariffs and militarism. What unites these episodes, the chapter contends, is a hostility to theory itself—a desire to free practical activity from the limitations imposed by the principles of scientific socialism. Yet every attempt to apply this outlook in practice, from state socialism to the army question, ended in defeat. Opportunism therefore required its own theoretical legitimation, and Bernstein’s book supplied it.
The chapter’s central polemic is directed against the claim that opportunism can produce a coherent positive theory. The author insists that Bernstein’s system amounts to nothing more than an attack on isolated theses of Marxism, hoping to shake the entire edifice by targeting its parts. The result is a return to pre-Marxist socialist ideas—basing socialism on moral notions of justice, on struggles over distribution rather than production, on the opposition of rich and poor rather than of classes, on grafting co-operative principles onto capitalism. These notions, the chapter argues, were once effective theories for the proletariat in its childhood, but to revive them now is not to return to the seven-league boots of the movement’s youth but to the worn-out slippers of the bourgeoisie. Bernstein’s theory is therefore both the first and the last attempt to give opportunism a theoretical base, because it has exhausted every possible confusion and renunciation.
The chapter draws on Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to frame the peculiar character of the proletarian movement: it constantly criticises itself, interrupts its own course, recoils before the magnitude of its own objects. This dialectical understanding explains why opportunism appears not as a surprise but as a necessary phase, and why its theoretical expression is so feeble. The author concludes that opportunism, having finally spoken in Bernstein’s book, has proved it has nothing to say. Only the magnanimity of dialectics and historical materialism could treat Bernstein as an unconscious instrument through which the rising working class expresses its momentary weakness before throwing it aside.