1. Dogmatism And ‘Freedom of Criticism’¶
Core Argument¶
The slogan ‘freedom of criticism’ has become the most fashionable refrain in contemporary socialist-democratic controversies, but it masks a profound division within international Social-Democracy between revolutionary Marxism and a new opportunist trend. This tendency, exemplified by Bernstein and Millerand, demands the transformation of Social-Democracy from a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms. It denies the materialist conception of history, the inevitability of socialism, the intensification of capitalist contradictions, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the fundamental antithesis between liberalism and socialism. This so-called ‘criticism’ is transferred wholesale from bourgeois literature. Millerand’s entry into a bourgeois cabinet demonstrates practical Bernsteinism: accepting class collaboration even after workers are shot down. ‘Freedom of criticism’ thus means freedom for opportunism, to convert Social-Democracy into a reform party and introduce bourgeois ideas into socialism.
Rabocheye Dyelo demands this ‘freedom of criticism’ as a condition for unity, defending the opportunist trend in international Social-Democracy and demanding freedom for opportunism in Russian Social-Democracy. Its editor, Krichevsky, claims even the most pronounced Bernsteinians stand on the basis of the proletariat’s class struggle, offering no proof. He explains German party unity and French disunity by French ‘intolerance’ and German good behaviour, ignoring concrete historical conditions. In fact, the German party twice rejected Bernsteinism. Rabocheye Dyelo avoids naming any Russian critics or Bernsteinians, playing hide-and-seek, and proposes slavishly copying the German prescription for opportunism instead of analysing Russian manifestations.
The rupture with the ‘legal Marxists’ was necessary not because they were bourgeois democrats—natural allies for democratic tasks—but because the Bernsteinian trend vulgarised Marxism, advocated the blunting of social contradictions, dismissed social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and reduced the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism. This meant bourgeois democracy denying socialism’s right to independence. In Russia, the turn to ‘criticism’ was accompanied by an infatuation with Economism among practical workers. The Credo frankly formulated this connection: workers should carry on the economic struggle, while the Marxist intelligentsia merges with liberals for political struggle.
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. For Russian Social-Democracy, theory’s importance is enhanced because the Party is only forming, the movement is international and requires critical use of others’ experience, and its national tasks—emancipating the whole people from autocracy—are unprecedented. Engels recognised three forms of struggle: theoretical, political, and economic. The Russian proletariat faces immeasurably graver trials than the German workers, fighting a monster dwarfing anti-socialist laws in constitutional countries. History has confronted them with the most revolutionary immediate task of any proletariat: destroying the bulwark of European and Asiatic reaction. Success would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat, if they can inspire their movement with the same devoted determination as the revolutionaries of the 1870s.