Reform versus Revolution

Reform versus Revolution

By the time of Marx's deathin 1883, history was
already casting doubt on his predictions. The
concentration and centralization of capital, the
emergence of joint stock companies, cartels and
trusts did not spell the end of capitalism but only
of competitive capitalism. Nor was the working
class demonstrating the revolutionary fervor Marx
expected. In England, the most advanced capitalist
country, the working class largely surrendered
its radical goals after 1850. In France the
early upsurge of the working class in 1848 was a
forerunner of the Paris Commune of 187 1, but
with its collapse the center of the working class
movement shifted to Germany. There the Social
Democratic Party was moving from strength to
strength in the electoral arena (Schorske 1955)
and it was in Germany that Marxism added a
new belt of theory around the implications of
capitalist democracy for socialist strategy.
Engels had hardly been buried when Eduard
Bemstein, his disciple and the executor of his
will, began to revise the hard core of Marxism to
suit the new historical circumstances ([I8991
1961; see also Gay, 1952, Tudor and Tudor,
1988). In violation of P3 and P4, Bemstein argued
that the expansion of the forces of production
was not being fettered by capitalist relations
of production. On the contrary trusts, credit, and

the persistence of small scale entrepreneurs were
reducing the severity of crises and allowing capitalism
to slowly evolve into socialism. Far from
liberating human beings through the collective
direction of society, his vision of socialism violated
P7 by going no further than a modified
capitalism based on collective bargaining, labor
legislation and the redistribution of wealth. He
viewed socialism as the fulfillment of the ideals
of the bourgeois revolution. In proposing a law
of increasing democratization that would spread
of its own accord from political to economic
realms, Bemstein was also contradicting P2.
Revisionism, by definition, is revision of the
core to absorb anomalies. It follows Popper's
principle of rejecting a theory when it is falsified.
Lakatos, however, would advocate building a new
belt of theory which would turn an anomaly into
a corroboration of the core. From a methodological
standpoint he would have to endorse Luxemburg's
reassertion that socialism requires the
suppression of capitalism (W), that capitalist relations
of production sow the seeds of their own
destruction by fettering the forces of production
(P3), and that class struggle will determine
whether capitalism is followed by socialism or
barbarism (P4).