Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [274]
The implication for “Millerandism” was clear. If capitalism and Socialism were not, after all, to be a stark choice of one or the other, if society was to continue with some of this and some of that, then there was no further point in Socialists excluding themselves from a role in government.
Revision meant in effect abandonment of the class struggle. It was a stake plunged into the heart of Socialism. Bernstein did not shrink. The workers, he brazenly suggested, were not, as Marx assumed, a coherent, homogeneous “class,” conscious of themselves as “the proletariat” or likely to become so. They were divided between rural and urban, skilled and unskilled, factory and home, with different interests and different levels of earning power. Many were hostile or indifferent to Socialism and tended to share bourgeois morals and habits rather than sharing Socialist contempt for the bourgeois.
If class was not, after all the primary loyalty of the worker, then it followed that his interests like those of any citizen were bound up with the national interests of his country. Here was the terrible horizon of Revision. Bernstein even banished the cruel edict of the Communist Manifesto: “the worker has no Fatherland.” When every workingman had the vote, he said, as in Germany, he acquired political rights and responsibilities and must therefore think in terms of the national interest.
Revision tore Socialism apart. Bernstein’s open formulation of the case rallied adherents long troubled by their own doubts. Party leaders rushed to attack the heretic. He was accused of being “English.” Kautsky refuted every argument in a book, Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Program, which was intended to dispose of him but somehow did not. Dispute swelled and penetrated every meeting, newspaper and policy committee. Charged with ignoring the final goal of Socialism, Bernstein made the shocking reply, “I confess openly I have little interest in what is generally called ‘the final goal of Socialism.’ This goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement [for social progress] everything.” He decided to come home to defend himself in person. Friends interceded for him with the Government, and Chancellor von Bülow, calculating that he would be a disruptive influence, allowed the indictment against him to lapse. Returning in 1901, Bernstein was elected to the Reichstag in a by-election in 1902. He became the editor of a Revisionist journal and the oracle of a Revisionist faction which sprang up within the party and continued to grow.
The appeal of Revision was that it offered an end to Socialist isolation, opened the door to participation and also to ambition. It allowed Socialists to feel themselves part of their country, however contrary the feeling was to the command of the prophet. It recognized another reality: that imperceptibly, in a way Marx had not foreseen, a transfer of power between classes was in fact taking place, like water seeping through a dam.
Revision had a fault which Viktor Adler noted. It was said of Adler that like Montaigne he should have adopted a pair of scales for his emblem and the motto “Que sais-je?” because he always looked for some evil in anything good and some good in anything evil. In a letter to Bernstein he wrote that he had brought into the open doubts which all Socialists felt at one time or another but that in the end Adler himself would side with the Revolutionaries because Revision carried the mortal danger that “Socialists would lose sight of Socialism.