The revival of revisionism

pp. 269-285

in: M. C. Howard, J. E. King, A history of Marxian economics I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 shattered the already precarious unity of the European socialist movement. A large majority in the Marxist parties of all the important combatant powers supported the war efforts of their respective states, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm. Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding, for example, joined the Austrian army as a matter of course, without apparently even considering any alternative course of action. In Germany the patriotic fervour of the SPD's right wing produced an appalling display of chauvinistic casuistry in which the military victory of the Hohenzollern Empire was invoked as a necessary step on the road to socialism.¹ At first, dissenting voices were few; only a small, resolutely internationalist group around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht identified with the revolutionary position of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. As the war dragged on, however, a pacifist tendency emerged, opposed to the belligerence of the German state but unwilling to call openly for its overthrow. Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, antagonists for so long, found themselves reunited in support for this centrist position.²