Notes

Chapter 1

1. “The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundations of bourgeois society. From the ones it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from social to political emancipation.” Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969), 1:235–236.

2. See Frederick Engels, “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany,” in Selected Works, 1:300ff. On the revolutions of 1848, see E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York, 1962), and The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York, 1979), pp. 3–27; Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism: A Contribution to the Political History of the Past 150 Years, trans. George Rosen (New York, 1939), pp. 59–133; see also Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton, 1952); Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et la revolution de 1848 (Paris, 1948).

3. The revolutions of 1848 ultimately produced a situation in which by “stigmatising as ‘socialistic’ what it had previously extolled as ‘liberal,’ the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that, in order to restore tranquillity in the country, its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like a political nullity; that in order to save its purse, it must forget the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.” Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Selected Works, 1:436.

4. “The conflict revolving around natural law and the whole revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie was based on the assumption that the formal equality and universality of the law (and hence its rationality) was able at the same time to determine its content. This was expressed in the assault on the varied and picturesque medley of privileges dating back to the Middle Ages and also in the attack on the Divine Right of Kings. The revolutionary bourgeois class refused to admit that a legal relationship has a valid foundation merely because it existed in fact. ‘Burn your laws and make new ones!’ Voltaire counseled; ‘Whence can new laws be obtained? From Reason!’” Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 107. See also Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Divinity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 36–44, 66–75, 131–208.

5. “If force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London, 1983), p. 168.

6. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 54ff.

7. Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law, trans. Marc A. LePain and Jeffrey C. Cohen (Princeton, 1995); Ulrich Preuss, Constitutional Revolution: The Link Between Constitutionalism and Progress, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995).

8. Note the insightful analysis, which emphasizes the concern with democracy, of Karl Korsch, “Marx’ Stellung in der europaischen Revolution von 1848” in Politische Texte, ed. Erich Gerlach und Jürgen Seifert (Frankfurt/Main, 1974), pp. 371ff.

9. “Reason has always existed, but not always in rational form. The critic, therefore, can start with any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop the true actuality out of the forms inherent in existing actuality as its ought-to-be and goal. As far as actual life is concerned, the political state especially contains in all its modern forms the demands of reason, even where the political state is not yet conscious of socialistic demands. And the political state does not stop here. Everywhere it claims reason as realized. Equally, however, it everywhere gets into the contradiction between its ideal character and its real presuppositions.” Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge September 1843,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York, 1967), p. 213.

10. A compilation of Marx’s writings on the French Revolution, along with a tendentious commentary, appears in Francois Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, trans. Deborah Kan Furet (Chicago, 1988).

11. This is the foundation for Marx’s critique of Hegel’s view of bureaucracy as incarnating the “universal” interest of the state. In this vein, he can write: “Bureaucracy considers itself the finite purpose of the state. Since bureaucracy converts its ‘formal’ purposes into its contents, it everywhere comes in conflict with ‘real’ purposes. It is, therefore, compelled to pass off what is formal for the content and the content for what is formal. Hence everything has a double meaning, a real and a bureaucratic meaning.” Karl Marx, “Civil Society and Bureaucracy,” in Writings of the Young Marx, pp. 185–186. For more on the implications Marx draws from the contradiction between the universalist interests of a formally rational democratic state and the selfish concerns promulgated by the civil society that it protects, see Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in ibid, pp. 224–225, 235–237, 240–291.

12. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (New York, 1968), pp. 46–47.

13. “Socialism originated as a workers’ protest movement, not only against the system of capitalist exploitation to which they were subjected, but also against the social injustice which the system embodied and the notorious spirit of ruthless greed by which it was governed. It was the ethos of Socialism—its promise of a world of social justice and human solidarity—which had aroused the enthusiasm within the movement.” Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford and Kenneth Mitchell (New York and Boulder, 1980), 3:509.

14. Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843,” in Writings of the Young Marx, pp. 214–215.

15. For the classic argument, see Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1970), and especially Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans, by Ben Brewster (New York, 1970).

16. Georg Lukács, Der junge Marx: Seine philosophische Entwicklung von 1840 bis 1844 (Pfüllingen, 1965), and Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London, 1970), pp. 217ff.

17. The most intelligent way to approach this manifesto, the whole of which can fit on a single, normal-sized wall poster, is to begin by noting that it “erred not in its appreciation of class struggle under capitalism, but in its belief that such conflict would culminate quickly in revolutionary socialism. As Marx wrote to Engels in 1863, practical as well as scientific doubts soon crept in. Marx eventually qualified every one of the basic tendencies of capitalism and took note of opposing economic or political forces that might abate a common European revolutionary storm.” Alan Gilbert, Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981), p. 132.

18. Frederick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Selected Works, 3:115ff.

19. In this regard, see the first chapter of Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London, 1988).

20. Frederick Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Selected Works, 3:335ff.

21. This is important given the misunderstanding over the distinction between the economic “base” and the political/ideological “superstructure.” Usually this distinction is seen as real rather than merely heuristic. Indeed, it is incorrect to claim that “economic relations are to be strictly separated from the rest, or that they can be, even in a purely conceptual sense. The unity of social life is so strong that the only possible distinction is a methodological one, for the purpose of throwing light on any particular one of the fundamental relationships. It is a complete mistake to think that Marx’s differentiation between base and superstruc ture was an absolute distinction between two different, overlapping spheres.” Franz Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, trans. Anne Booth (London, 1978), p. 37. On the concept of “totality,” see the outstanding intellectual history by Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1985).

22. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Selected Works, 1:111.

23. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” Ibid., p. 113.

24. “Nothing distinguishes authentic from vulgar Marxism so much as its relation to the problems resulting from the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel…. Idealist philosophy, in its Kantian form, had shown that the intuitively given world of experience was not something ultimate, but rather the result of the shaping and unifying activities of the Subject. As a result, Marx was aware that a materialist critique must avoid falling back into a primitive objectivism. He therefore had to undertake a nonidealist reconstruction of the problem of the possible coexistence of an objective world of experience and a unified consciousness of it, instead of abstractly denying the idealist view as such.” Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London, 1971), p. 113.

25. In that same famous letter to Ruge of September 1843, Marx claims that the need to engage in a “relentless criticism of all existing conditions” starts with “criticism of politics, with taking sides in politics, hence with actual struggles, and identifying ourselves with them.” Writings of the Young Marx, pp. 211ff.

26. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 108.

27. For an analysis of the primacy of production, as constitutive of the totality in which the production, distribution, and consumption of particular commodities are moments, see Karl Marx The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1973), pp. 83–109.

28. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 116.

29. See Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Selected Works, 1:13–14, #1 and #3. It is quite possible to turn this vision of the proletariat, as the “subject-object” of history, into a full-blown metaphysic as Georg Lukács did in History and Class Consciousness. Nevertheless, it is also possible to emphasize the constitutive role of consciousness without resorting to metaphysical or overt teleological claims. In this regard, see Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York, 1963 ed.), pp. 186ff.

30. Thus, precisely at the time when almost everyone was identifying the working class with the industrial proletariat, Engels added the following note to the work he and his friend had written forty years earlier: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.” Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 108.

31. This category of “labor power” was first proposed in 1847, when Marx entered into his heated controversy with Proudhon. Here is the introduction to the concept of “reification” and the famous discussion of “the fetishism of commodities” that would appear in Capital more than twenty years later. “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day.” Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1963), p. 54.

32. Similarly, capital is not identifiable with empirical capitalists or their interests. Capitalist property is defined by an accumulation process in which it can historically take different forms. Thus, in one period, property and capital can be defined in terms of an individual’s ownings, whereas in another it can separate itself entirely from the individual and take a social form as in the case of the corporation. Note the discussion by Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, ed. Tom Bottomore and trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon (London, 1981), pp. 107ff.

33. “The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” Marx and Engels “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 120.

34. The Communist League was a small group of individuals who, in Jacobin fashion, wished to play the role of a revolutionary “vanguard.” But in contrast to Lenin’s vision, Marx and Engels maintained that the communists “do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.” Ibid., p. 119. For the background, see Max Nettlau, “Londoner kommunistische Diskussionen, 1845: Nach dem Protokollbuch des C.A.B.V.” in Archiv fur die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin, 1922), 10:362–391; see also Ernst Schraeplers, “Der Bund der Gerechten. Seine Tatigkeit in London 1840–1847,” in Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte (Hannover, 1962), pp. 5–29.

35. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” pp. 404–406.

36. Ibid., pp. 478–482.

37. Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” p. 219 and passim.

38. The defeat of 1848 left Marx and Engels with a bitter taste. They would advise the Communist League that in the next bourgeois revolution the proletariat must seize the initiative, push the revolution beyond any mere commitment to formal parliamentarism, and make it “permanent” until a successful proletarian seizure of power could take place. Less than eight months later, however, they abandoned this “ultra-left” standpoint and so brought their relations with the Communist League to a stormy end. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League,” in Selected Works, 1:175–185. For the minutes of the last meeting of the Communist League’s Central Committee, see International Review of Social History 1 (1956), 248–252.

39. Because liberal rights were seen as intrinsically connected to the maintenance of private property and class society, Marx later reiterated an old line from “The Communist Manifesto” as he implored the new German Social Democratic Party not to remain content with bourgeois civil rights but to cross “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right … in its entirety and [let] society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Selected Works, 3:18–19.

40. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850,” p. 224.

41. John Ehrenberg, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism’s Theory of Socialist Democracy (New York, 1992).

42. Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J. Stenning (Ann Arbor, 1971), pp. 42–58. See also Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, 1970), pp. 391–394.

43. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 126.

44. In this sense, Marx and Engels’s notion of the “communist Utopia,” with its emphasis on abolishing those exploitative interests that distort communication and channel knowledge in particular directions, provides a basis for the notion of “undistorted communication.” See Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge of Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1971), pp. 187ff.

45. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 127.

46. Uncritically accepting a neo-Aristotelian view of “real” politics as separate from economic “necessity,” and ignoring the entire history of the working class movement, some of the most seminal works of American political theory view Marx as “antipolitical” and as a thinker who breaks with the “great tradition” of political theory. See Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, 1960), pp. 414–419; and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York, 1959), pp. 163ff, 177–196.

47. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 137.

48. Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal (Minneapolis, 1995).

49. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 1:9–13.

50. From then on, “every revolution in any European country, no matter whether it had liberal, democratic, or general national aims, had to reckon with the armed intervention of the conservative major powers. Consequently the international European counter-revolution spontaneously produced a revolutionary International.” Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 71.

51. “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.” Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” p. 118.

52. “But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence…. Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter…. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims.” Engels, “Preface” to the 1893 Italian edition of “The Communist Manifesto,” in Selected Works, 1:107.

53. “After the failure of the Revolution of 1848, all party organisations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasme, and political reaction.” Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” in Selected Works, 2:15.

54. Franz Mehring, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1960), 2:7–156.

55. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, pp. 156–162.

56. Braunthal, History of the International, 1:86.

57. Note the classic work by David Rjazanov, “Zur Geschichte der ersten Internationale,” in Marx-Engels-Archiv (Frankfurt/Main, 1925), pp. 119–202; and G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism, 1859–1890 (London, 1960). See also L. E. Mins, ed., Founding of the First International: A Documentary Record (New York, 1937); and Hans Gerth, ed., The First International: Minutes of the Hague Congress of 1872 (Madison, 1958).

58. Karl Marx, “General Rules of the International Working Men’s Association,” in Selected Works, 2:19.

59. Ibid., p. 17.

60. The link between theory and practice can also be seen more literally. In the same way that “The Communist Manifesto” was tied to the revolutions of 1848, it is interesting to note that the most radical and emancipatory working-class movement to that point in time should have emerged precisely in the period that Marx was finishing the first volume of Das Kapital. See Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (London, 1970), pp. 51–52, 154ff.

61. Note the discussion in Michael Forman, Internationalism and the Labor Movement (University park, Pa.: 1998).

62. For an excellent discussion of Marx and his opponents within the First International, see Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London, 1980); and Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor, 1969), pp. 317–356, 387–500.

63. See John Ehrenberg, Proudhon and His Age (Atlantic Highlands, 1996).

64. “The historian is certainly free to postulate what would have happened if the General Council had not hardened its line on the sections, for this hardening undoubtedly hastened the end. It is quite possible that flexible tactics would have postponed the demise of the First International. But the end was unavoidable; the ‘Old International’ was doomed to disappear sooner or later.” Jaques Freymond and Miklos Molnar, “The Rise and Fall of the First International,” in The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864–1943, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, 1966), pp. 31–32.

65. Braunthal, History of the International, 1:191–194.

66. Karl Marx’s letter to Abraham Lincoln and also his “Address to the National Labor Union of the United States,” in Selected Works, 2:22, 156–157.

67. Braunthal, History of the International, 1:145.

68. For a dramatic rendering of this revolutionary experiment, see Prosper Lissagary, Histoire de la Kommune de 1871 (Paris, 1929 ed.); and Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca, 1973). See also, Karl Korsch, “Der Pariser Kommuneaufstand 1871—Die Russiche Revolution 1926,” in Politische Texte, pp. 128ff.

69. Before his death in 1895 at the age of seventy-five, Engels concluded that the barricade had become anachronistic and he threw his support to a social democratic movement committed to parliamentarism. But still he could close his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s The Civil War in France with the words: “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Selected Works, 2:189).

70. See the admiring description and homage to Blanqui in the autobiography of Jules Vallés, The Insurrectionist, trans. Sandy Petrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 119ff.

71. Note Engels’s controversial introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s The Civil War in France, 2:186.

72. It is correct to maintain that “no Rousseauist overtones of direct democracy can be traced in Marx’s description of the commune.” Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 211.

73. Here Marx and Engels differed from their followers in the Second and the Third Internationals. Both would later turn the Paris Commune into the final Utopian product of their respective “transitional” theories of the state—which involved parliamentary republicanism on the one hand and party dictatorship on the other. In neither case did this putative end bear any relation to the means that were to bring it about.

74. Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 452–453.

75. The radical democratic role of Robespierre and the thermidorian reaction that followed his fall are explored in the classic studies by Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, trans, by Catherine Alison Phillips (New York, 1964 ed.) and After Robespierre: The Thermidorian Reaction, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New York, 1965 ed.).

76. On the formation of the Third Republic, see Daniel Halevy, The End of the Notables, ed. Alain Silvera (Middletown, Conn.: 1974).

77. Thus, it becomes possible to advance a conception of Marxism that is “un-dogmatic and antidogmatic, historical and critical, and which is therefore materialist in the strictest sense of the word. In contrast to the orthodox critics, this conception involves the application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of history itself.” Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, p. 92.

78. Braunthal, History of the International, 1:156–164.

79. Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, pp. 217–218.

80. Terrorism became a worldwide phenomenon but proved particularly strong in the Russian Empire. That is reflected in literary works of the time, such as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons as well as Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.

81. Turning Marxism from a “critical theory” of society into a science was irrelevant with respect to its “antipolitical” potential. Instead the “transformation of Marxism into a ‘scientific’ doctrine emptied of any genuine philosophic content—and hence powerless to stem the inrush of romantic irrationalism which began in the 1890’s and reached a disastrous climax in the 1930’s—was destined to be a factor of crucial importance, though negatively: it helped to bring about that cleavage between the democratic labour movement and the traditional idealist outlook of the middle class intelligentsia which Fascism was later to exploit with such fatal results.” George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York, 1973 ed.), p. 243.

82. Henry Pachter, “The Idea of Progress in Marxism,” in Socialism in History: Political Essays of Henry Pachter, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New York, 1984), pp. 65ff.

83. S. H. Rigby, “Engels After Marx: History,” and Lawrence Wilde, “Engels and the Contradictions of Revolutionary Strategy” in Engels after Marx, eds. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park, Pa., 1999), pp. 109ff, 197ff.

84. Regardless of how his statement was used by the various factions of the German movement, Engels was justified in 1895 when he claimed that his rejection of the barricades was no rejection of Marxism’s revolutionary character. Quite the opposite. He saw that the enemy remained the same: the aristocratic opponents of political democracy and the bourgeois opponents of substantive equality. He never agreed with the “revisionist” current of the Second International, which opposed the notion of revolution tout court and argued that the proletariat should employ only legal means on the road to power. Nevertheless, he knew that the empirical basis as well as the meaning of “revolution” had changed from the Jacobin vision of 1848. Engels “Introduction,” in The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, 1:196–200.

85. Here it is important to remember that the political purpose behind Engels’s Anti-Dühring, a core work of “scientific” materialism that posited the four “laws” of dialectics operative in nature and society, was to attack a burgeoning anti-Semitic and irrationalist tendency within the SPD led by Eugen Dühring, who claimed that history was the product of violence. See Dieter Döwe and Klaus Tenfelde, “Zur Rezeption Eugen Dührings in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung in den l870er Jahren,” in Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus und Arbeiterbewegung: Begriffsgeschichte und Dühring-Rezeption, Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus #24 (Trier, 1980).

86. “The main question—one which history never resolved because it cannot be resolved once and for all—was whether the bourgeoisie would respect its own legal order in case of an electoral triumph of socialism. If socialists were to use the institution of suffrage—established by the bourgeoisie in its struggle against absolutism—to win elections and to legislate society toward socialism, would the bourgeoisie not revert to illegal means to defend its interests? This is what had happened in France in 1851, and it seemed likely that it would happen again.” Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1985), p. 9.

87. For an interesting discussion, see Carl Landauer, European Socialism, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1959), 1:132ff.

88. See Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York, 1968), pp. 167ff.

89. “When the International was formed in 1864, the principle of political equality for the working class on a democratic basis had by no means been recognized in a majority of European states. The working classes had as yet gained no measure of political emancipation. While it is true that, to a certain extent they had a share in the achievements of bourgeois democracy and its hard-won area of freedom—freedom of thought, of conscience and civic rights—they were allowed no participation in governmental power; excluded from the franchise, they were subjected to the political regime of the property owning classes. The struggle for the universal right to vote as a means of liberating the working classes from the political rule of the middle class had been one of the leading objectives in the fight of the Socialist parties during the period of the First and Second Internationals. Parliamentary democracy, founded on universal suffrage and today accepted un-questioningly as a standard requirement for any political system, indeed represents one of the achievements of the Socialist movement.” Braunthal, History of the International, 3:503. See also Susanne Miller, Das Problem der Freiheit im Sozialismus (Frankfurt, 1964).

90. cf. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950), pp. 274ff.

91. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri (New York, 1969), p. 139.

Chapter 2

1. Werner Blumenberg, Karl Kautskys literarisches Werk: Eine bibliographische Übersicht (Gravenhage, 1960).

2. A corrective is provided in the excellent biography by Gary P. Steenson, Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (Pittsburgh, 1978). Also see John H. Kautsky, Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution and Democracy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994) and Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880–1938, trans. John Rothschild (London, 1979).

3. See V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1964), 3:65–150; Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor, 1961); Karl Korsch, Die materialistisc Geschichtsauffassung: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Karl Kautsky (Leipzig, 1929); Paul Mattick, “Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler,” in Anti-Bolshevik Communism (New York, 1978), pp. 1–17.

4. On the reception of Marxism in the young SPD, see Karl Brockschmidt (Georg Brandis), Die Deutsche Sozialdemokratie bis zum Fall des Sozialistengesetzes (Leipzig, 1931).

5. Nicholas Sargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 75.

6. Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia (London, 1979), p. 161.

7. This view can be characterized in the following manner: “For vulgar Marxism there are three degrees of reality: 1) the economy which, in the last instance, is the only objective and totally non-ideological reality, 2) Law and the State which are already somewhat less real because they are clad in ideology, and 3) pure ideology which is objectless and totally unreal (‘pure rubbish’).” Karl Korsch. Marxism and Philosophy. trans. Fred Halliday (London, 1970), p. 73.

8. The most sophisticated version of this critique is provided by Korsch, Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, pp. 3ff and 81ff.

9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), pp. 155ff.

10. James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York, 1966), p. 65.

11. Susanne Miller, “Sozialdemokratie und Liberalismus: Ein historisches Bundnis?” in Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt politischer Herrschaft in Deutschland und Europa, ed. Manfred Funke et al. (Bonn, 1987), p. 68.

12. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (New York, 1955), p. 7.

13. Note the monograph by Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco, 1999), pp. 157ff.

14. Rudolf Walther,… aber nach der Sündflut kommen wir, und nur wir: ‘Zusammenbruchstheorie,’ Marxismus und politisches Deftzit in der SPD 1890–1914 (Frankfurt, 1981), pp. 95–100.

15. Karl Kautsky, Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (Stuttgart, 1906), p. 142.

16. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, pp. 108ff.

17. cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford, 1978), 2:35ff.

18. “In the Hohenzollern state, social democracy was always the speaker for any group with democratic demands emanating from the revolutionary years whose interests, under the influence of any number of factors, were occasionally or continually dampened by the left-liberal parties.” Miller, “Sozialdemokratie und Liberalismus,” p. 62.

19. All major figures of the Second International were intensely interested in these revolutions. In this respect, Kautsky contributed his Die Klassengegensätze von 1789: Zum hundert jährigen Gedenktag der grossen Revolution (Stuttgart, 1889), while Eduard Bernstein actually influenced Max Weber and other scholars with his Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York, 1963).

20. Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution, trans. A. M. Wood and May Wood (Chicago, 1910), p. 17.

21. “What is the use of the growth of our influence, our power in the Reichstag, if the Reichstag itself has no influence and power…. The resistance to the establishment of a truly parliamentary regime must be overcome; the government of the Reich must be made a committee of the Reichstag.” Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power: Reflections on Growing into the Revolution, ed. John H. Kautsky and trans. Raymond Meyer (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992), p. 69.

22. See Gusta Esping-Anderson, Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton, 1985), pp. 17ff.

23. Helga Grebing, History of the German Labour Movement: A Survey, trans. Edith Koerner (Leamington Spa, 1985), p. 79.

24. See Homer Rogers, “Before the Revisionist Controversy: Kautsky, Bernstein, and the Meaning of Marxism, 1895–1898.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1984.

25. George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York, 1965), p. 263.

26. The SPD “Left” was not dogmatically opposed to reform in general or parliamentarism in particular. “Marx and Engels concluded The Communist Manifesto with a list of undramatic reforms deemed desirable from a socialist perspective. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky paid tribute to the ‘social,’ or ‘political,’ wage as a necessary precondition for uplifting the politically dangerous slum proletariat and for strengthening working class unity under conditions of unemployment and poverty.” Esping-Anderson, Politics Against Markets, p. 146.

27. Kautsky saw the council, or “soviet,” as an instrument of mobilization rather than as an alternative to state power and the mass strike merely as a “defensive” maneuver to maintain existing liberties. See Karl Kautsky, Der politische Massenstreik (Berlin, 1914), and Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, pp. 228ff.

28. “The political goal inscribed on the flag of the SPD, and for which it had fought for so long, was to substitute a parliamentary democracy for the constitutional monarchy of wilhelmine Germany…. The parliamentary state was not a tactical calculation for the socialists, but rather a matter of principle and the primary political goal.” Ernst Wolfgang Bockenforde, “Der Zusammenbruch der Monarchie und die Entstehung der Weimarer Republik,” in Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933: Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher et al. (Bonn, 1987), p. 30. See also Heinrich August Winkler, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Revolution 1918/19 (Berlin and Bonn, 1979), p. 54ff.

29. “Kautsky developed two central themes: the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government … and the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as a fundamental strategic avenue of the labor movement…. In his commentary on the Erfurt Programme, the democratic republic, the conquest of a parliamentary majority through the strength and influence won by the Social Democracy in its political and social struggles, and the use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constitute the very content of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’” Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, p. 35.

30. “It is impossible to understand the theory building in the SPD if one assumes a fixed, unchanging view of those theories including, especially, the breakdown theory. Theory building was much more a process of continual adaptation to the real historical process itself, and the particular claims and responses regarding the new situations must be seen and comprehended in their specific contexts.” Rudolf Walther, … aber nach der Sündflut kommen wir und nur win p. 28. With regard to the Erfurt Program, see pp. 59–95.

31. Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm. In seinem grundsätzlichen Teil erlaütert (Hannover, 1964), p. 101.

32. “I do not believe that the German ruling class will allow Social Democracy to develop indefinitely along legal lines…. The more it increases its political power, the more certain it is that its adversaries will overthrow the constitution and replace it with a regime in which the workers are violently oppressed, their organizations broken up by force—a regime based on brute force which will require the most vigorous countermeasures.” Kautsky, Der politische Massenstreik, pp. 81–83.

33. The idea of an “iron law” regarding the increasing impoverishment of the working class is a Lassallean legacy, though a certain justification for it may be found in Marx’s writings. A thorough discussion stands outside the present context, but Kautsky always understood immiseration (Verelendung) in terms of increasing “insecurity”—which obviously gives the concept a political twist. Indeed, he was logically consistent on the issue, although, against Bernstein, Kautsky somewhat disingenuously maintained that the Erfurt Programm contained not a word on the objective “breakdown” of capitalism, which is directly related to the immiseration thesis. Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik (Stuttgart, 1899), p. 43.

34. Salvadori puts the matter in an intelligent way: “Of course, the possibility that a gap could arise between the theoretical section of the program, with its socialist objectives, and the practical section, with its struggle for democratic reforms within the existing order, certainly existed. But such a possibility was not automatically inherent in the program itself. A contradiction could emerge in the concrete case of the growth of the workers’ movement not being accompanied by an equivalent crisis of capitalism as a dominant social system—in other words, if capitalism conserved sufficient strength to assure the development of the forces of production while simultaneously maintaining effective control over the proletariat. In that event, the category of historical ‘necessity,’ understood as the guarantee that the struggle for democracy would be transformed into a crisis of the dominant system, would inevitably lose its utility and potency. The result would then be an impasse for Social Democracy.” Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution p. 32.

35. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 trans. Kim Trayner (Leamington Spa, 1985), pp. 115ff.

36. Eduard David and Georg von Vollmar provided the first hints of what would become the “revisionism debate” through their claim that the peasantry would not succumb to proletarianization and that it would follow an independent road of development. Kautsky’s incisive arguments are formulated in his Die Agrarfrage Eine Übersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart, 1902); also note the excellent discussion by Rogers, “Before the Revisionist Controversy,” pp. 132–214.

37. Kautsky, The Road to Power, p. 26.

38. Cited by Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford, and Kenneth Mitchell (New York, 1980), 1:260.

39. “The myth of the party, which its later development could not undermine, derived from the time of the antisocialist laws. For twelve years, the party combated the strongest governmental force in the Europe of that time. But, even after the repeal of those laws, the party remained a pariah and, even for many left liberals, a threat to civilization [Bürgerschreck]…. Nonetheless, the growth of a tendency which called for entry into the given state framework could not be denied, and the more that the party found its function within the existing order the stronger the divisions within the party that would make their appearance.” Erich Matthias, Marxismusstudien (Tübingen, 1957), p. 173.

40. In contrast to the weak beginnings of the trade union movement in Germany, “the ratio between Social Democratic votes and trade union members changed in favor of the latter. Eight to one in 1893, it reached almost four to one in 1898, three to one in 1903. By the time of the elections of 1907, the ratio was about two to one and one quarter; it remained the same in the elections of 1912, where the party had 4,250,000 votes, the trade unions, 2,530,000 members. Trade union members constituted an ever-increasing proportion of the party’s voters.” Schorske, German Social Democracy, p. 13.

41. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, pp. 133ff.

42. Kautsky, The Road to Power, p. 34.

43. Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism, p. 85.

44. The SPD would justify its decision to support the granting of war credits to the kaiser by arguing that the Russian czar was the principle opponent of democracy and progress. Its leaders even liked to quote Marx, Engels, and Bebel to that effect. Choosing to proclaim a “civil truce” in the domestic class struggle, emphasizing their concern for Germany’s “national interest,” they threw internationalism overboard. For a devastating critique of the SPD’s stance on the war, see Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy,” in Mary-Alice Waters, ed., Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York, 1970), pp. 257ff.

45. In his Sozialisten und Krieg (Prague, 1937), Kautsky claimed that the proletarian membership of the SPD was far more enthusiastic at the thought of war than the leadership. Stefan Zweig, among others, also confirms this generally accepted position in his beautiful memoir The World of Yesterday (New York, 1943). For a revisionist argument that disputes this claim, see John Zerzan, “Origins and Meaning of World War I,” Telos 49 (Fall 1981), pp. 97–116.

46. Toward the end of his life, Kautsky would show an affinity for what would come to be known as the “ultra-imperialism” thesis. Formulated by Rudolf Hilferding, this argument suggests that in a projected new phase of imperialism dominant states under the sway of international trusts would divide the world. In principle this would enable capitalism to survive forever—despite the repression that it engendered. It is thus useful to consider Kautsky’s earlier, oft-stated view that imperialism is not endemic to capitalism but merely a matter of policy. See the interpretation, which compares Kautsky’s views with those of Joseph Schumpeter, by John H. Kautsky, Karl Kautsky, pp. 131ff.

47. For more on this, see the chapter entitled “In the Cradle of Modernity: Social Democracy and the First World War,” in Stephen Eric Bronner, Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crises of Radicalism (New York, 1992), pp. 13ff.

48. Schorske, German Social Democracy, pp. 299–300.

49. Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–1919, trans. George Rapp (Chicago, 1986), pp. 51ff.

50. Rudolf Wissel, the Social Democratic Minister for Economic Affairs in the Weimar coalition government, put the matter bluntly: “Despite the revolution, the people’s hopes have been disappointed. What the people expected from the government has not been fulfilled. We have certainly created formal political democracy, but we have done nothing else…. We have not been able to influence the revolution so that Germany might be filled with a new spirit. The inner essence of German culture, social life, seems to have changed little. And certainly not for the better. The people think that the results of the revolution have been basically negative; that one military and bureaucratic ruling class has merely been replaced by another, and that the methods of government are, essentially, no different from those of the old regime.” Quoted in Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik, hrsg. Kurt Kersten (Frankfurt, 1961), p. 89.

51. Note the study by William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Chicago, 1999).

52. See Karl Kautsky, Der Heidelberger Programm (Berlin, 1925).

53. Note the discussion by Karl Korsch, “The Passing of Marxian Orthodoxy: Bernstein—Kautsky—Luxemburg—Lenin” in Revolutionary Theory ed. Douglas Kellner (Austin, Texas, 1977), pp. 176ff.

54. Kautsky would ultimately write five different full-length criticisms of the Russian Revolution; his general view was consistent, principled, and prophetic. He was, from the start, appalled by the communist abolition of the democratic “provisional government” headed by Alexander Kerensky in February 1917. His materialism also made him skeptical regarding the emancipatory prospects of a proletarian revolution undertaken in an economically underdeveloped nation. At the core of his critique, however, was his ethical commitment to majority rule, representative government, and the maintenance of civil liberties. In particular, see Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (New York, 1971).

55. Kautsky had already been critical of the socialist movement in Russia prior to World War I. He was aghast at their contentiousness, and, generally, he extended support to the different factions of Russian social democracy at different times. But this changed following the Russian Revolution. By the late 1920s, Kautsky had reached the conclusion that the Bolsheviks were no better than fascists. He had no enthusiasm for their industrialization plans, and he found it both incredible and naive that the Stalinist leadership should be willing to impose five years of utter misery on the population in order to attain perfect abundance in the future. Note the discussion by Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 55–56, 166ff.

56. Cited in Weikart, Socialist Darwinism, p. 161.

57. Kautsky, The Road to Power, p. 15.

Chapter 3

1. In his provocative dissertation Homer Jones suggested that Bernstein’s original argument stemmed from a Marxist attack upon the political policies pursued by the followers of Wilhelm Liebknecht in England. These he saw as Blanquist deviations and a variant of Utopian socialism, which only later he came to see as defining Marxism itself. Homer Jones, “Before the Revisionist Controversy: Kautsky, Bernstein, and the Meaning of Marxism 1895–1898,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1984, pp. 523ff, 538–539, and passim.

2. Karl Korsch, “The Passing of Marxian Orthodoxy,” in Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner (Austin, Tx., 1977), pp. 176ff. See also Georg Lukács, “Bernstein’s Triumph: Notes on the Essays Written in Honour of Karl Kautsky’s Seventieth Birthday,” in Political Writings, 1919–1929: The Question of Parliamentarism and Other Essays ed. Rodney Livingstone and trans. Michael McColgan (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 127ff.

3. Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York, 1930).

4. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap into the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, 1995), p. 202.

5. Eduard Bernstein, “To My Socialist Critics” (1900) in Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900–1921, ed. and trans. Manfred Steger (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1996), p. 33.

6. Henry Pachter, “The Ambiguous Legacy of Eduard Bernstein,” in Socialism in History, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New York, 1984), pp. 256–258.

7. Manfred B. Steger, “Freidrich Engels and the Origins of German Revisionism: Another Look,” in Engels after Marx, ed. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park, Pa., 1999), p. 186.

8. cf. Predeg Vranicki, Geschichte des Marxismus, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 2:290ff.

9. Bernstein, “Revisionism in Social Democracy” (1909), in Selected Writings, pp. 72ff.

10. Note the excellent anthology edited by H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–1898 (London, 1988). Also, see E. Rikli, Der Revisionismus der deutschen marxistischen Theorie: 1890–1914 (Zurich, 1936).

11. For Lukács, Marxism is fundamentally a method that stands beyond any specific empirical predictions. Beginning from a Hegelian stance, Lukács places the concept of “totality” at the center of Marxist inquiry. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 27–45.

12. Christian Gneuss, “Um den Einklang von Theorie und Praxis: Eduard Bernstein und der Revisionismus,” in Marxismusstudien (Tübingen, 1957), p. 216. Also, note Bernstein’s own characterization of materialism in Evolutionary Socialism, trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York, 1961), pp. 6ff.

13. Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco, 1999), pp. 195ff.

14. Eduard Bernstein, “How Is Scientific Socialism Possible?” in Selected Writings, pp. 89ff.

15. This was what Kautsky meant when he wrote that: “if Bernstein means that we must first have democracy for social democracy to move step by step toward its victory, so I say the situation for us is reversed, the triumph of democracy for us is determined by the victory of the proletariat.” Cited in Rudolf Walther, … aber nach der Sündflut kommen wir und nur wir. Zusammerbruchstheorie: Marxismus und politisches Defizit in der SPD 1890–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 140.

16. Eduard Bernstein, “The Bolshevist Brand of Socialism” (1921), in Selected Writings, pp. 179ff.

17. It is even legitimate to claim that the orthodoxy of Kautsky and the revisionism of Bernstein lead to the same practical result. Lukács “Bernstein’s Triumph,” pp. 127–133.

18. It is in this context that Ignaz Auer’s famous cynical rebuke to Bernstein must be understood: “My dear Ede, what you want is not something which one decides upon, not something that one talks about, but something that one does [in practice].” Eduard Bernstein, Ignaz Auer (Berlin, 1907), p. 63.

19. Friedrich Adler, ed., Viktor Adlers Briefwechsel mit August Bebel und Karl Kautsky (Vienna, 1954), p. 259.

20. The literal rendering of Eduard Bernstein’s original title reads very differently. Bernstein was seeking to immanently question what the SPD had taken for granted. In general, Harvey’s translation is so unreliable—and the editing so arbitrary—that the English version of Bernstein’s classic has been seriously compromised. Since the original publication of Socialism Unbound, a far better translation of Bernstein’s work has appeared under the title The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. and trans. Henry Tudor (Cambridge, 1993).

21. Eduard Bernstein, “The Marx Cult and the Right to Revise” (1903) in Selected Writings, p. 46.

22. Posing the alternatives in this way is crucial to the interpretations presented by Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York, 1952) and Pierre Angel, Eduard Bernstein et l’Evolution du Socialisme Allemand (Paris, 1961).

23. The leader of Austrian Social Democracy, Viktor Adler, put the matter this way: “Theory is not my field, work that out with Karl Kautsky. What irritates me the most is the tactical side. You construct your conception of revolution, in which not a soul believes any longer outside of a few ancient policemen, and then emphatically claim: we are not a party of ‘revolution,’ but rather a party of reform.” Adler, Briefwechsel, p. 298.

24. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, p. xxii.

25. Walther, … aber nach der Sundflut kommen wir und nur wir, pp. 120ff.

26. See Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik (Stuttgart, 1899).

27. Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich (Berlin Dahlem, 1963), pp. 187ff.

28. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, p. 255.

29. Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 265, 269.

30. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford, and Kenneth Mitchell (New York, 1980), 2:8.

31. That was not the case everywhere. In Scandinavia, where family farming induced the formation of cooperative associations, the peasantry and important sectors of the petty bourgeoisie showed a liberal and democratic bent that made an alliance with social democracy possible. This alliance was crucial in differentiating the path of Scandinavian socialism from the rest of Europe. See Gosta Esping-Anderson, Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton, 1985), p. 29 and passim.

32. Braunthal, History of the International, 1:265–271.

33. Bernstein, “Revisionism in Social Democracy,” p. 67.

34. For an early critique of this position, see Hendrik de Man, Le socialisme constructif (Paris, 1933), pp. 21ff.

35. See Marxismus und Ethik: Texte zum neukantischen Sozialarmus, hrsq. Rafael de la Vega and Hans Jorg Sandkühler (Frankfurt am Main, 1970).

36. Bernstein and his philosophical supporters were connected to the empiricist Marburg school, rather than the subjectivist Swabian branch, of neo-Kantianism. See Andrew Arato, “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity” in Telos 21 (Fall 1974), pp. 108–161. Also note the contribution by Barbara Drygulski Wright, “Sublime Ambition: Art, Politics, and Ethical Idealism in the Cultural Journals of German Expressionism,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York, 1988), pp. 82–112.

37. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, pp. 222–223.

38. Manfred Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 115ff.

39. See Lucio Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” in From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White (New York, 1972), pp. 45–108.

40. Eduard Bernstein, “Idealism, Theory of Struggle, and Science” (1901), in Selected Writings, p. 106.

41. See Walther, … aber nach der Sündflut kommen wir und nur wir, pp. 131ff.

42. A situation results in which “the frame of reference according to which we evaluate facts vanishes and we are left with a series of events all equal as far as their inner significance is concerned.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, pp. 192ff. and 253.

43. Eduard Bernstein, “Class and Class Struggle” (1905), in Selected Writings, p. 126.

44. Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, 1978), 1:302–307, 2:926–939.

45. “The vulgar materialists, even in the modern guise donned by Bernstein and others, do not go beyond the reproduction of the immediate simple determinants of social life…. They take the facts in abstract isolation, explaining them only in terms of abstract laws related to the concrete totality.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 9, 47–55, 61–67.

46. Eduard Bernstein, “What Is Socialism?” in Selected Writings, p. 158.

47. Eduard Bernstein, “The Socialist Conception of Democracy” (1916), in Selected Writings, p. 145.

48. “A particular version of history-cum-development, with liberal resonances, came to play a key role in revisionist socialism. Evolutionism was both the continuation of the more traditional unilinear view of progress already evident in the eighteenth century and an alternative attempt to legitimate social processes scientifically by an appeal to the new findings of biologists, rather than philosophers, logicians, or historians.” Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996), p. 436.

49. It is quite possible that the attempt to garner support from every imaginable constituency will produce a trade-off resulting in loss of support from working people. See Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (New York, 1987).

50. Helmut Schmidt, “Bedingungen des sozialen Friedens,” in Demokratischer Sozialismus in den achtziger Jahren, ed. Richard Löwenthal (Frankfurt, 1979), p. 52.

51. Esping-Anderson, Politics Against Markets, pp. 147–148.

52. “Empiricist epistemology is intrinsically ideological since it implicitly denies the existence of any historical alternatives: while the proposition that deradicalization coincided historically with embourgeoisement is capable of being judged true or false, the proposition that workers became deradicalized because their material conditions improved is not subject to such a test unless the other possibilities are explicitly denied.” Adam Przeworski, “Material Interests, Class Compromise, and the Transition to Socialism,” Politics and Society 10 (1980) 129–30.

53. Kurt Tucholsky, “Das Lied vom Kompromiss,” in Gesammelte Werke 1919–1920 (Reinbek, 1989), 2:57–58.

54. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, p. 107.

55. Interestingly enough, prior to 1898, Bernstein anticipated certain arguments of Rosa Luxemburg in a debate with Ernest Belfort Bax who, in turn, voiced some of the claims that would underpin Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Jones, “Before the Revisionist Controversy,” pp. 291ff.

56. Thus, in revisionist terms, it made perfect sense for Max Schippel to support strengthening Germany’s navy in 1899 since such a policy would provide jobs and also for Bernstein himself to see certain “practical” virtues in German imperialism. Naturally, neither thought that he was contributing to those forces that would lead Europe into World War I. Many other examples could be brought to bear. See Rosa Luxemburg, “Militia and Militarism,” in Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York, 1971), pp. 135ff.

57. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 118.

58. George Bernard Shaw told Bernstein that he hoped the Fabians would become “the Jesuits of Socialism.” Eduard Bernstein, My Years in Exile (London, 1920), p. 226.

59. “The juristic administrative mentality constructs only closed static systems of thought and is always faced with the paradoxical task of having to incorporate into its system new laws, which arise out of the unsystematized interaction of living forces as if they were only a further elaboration of the original system.” Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 119.

60. For an overview on the reception of Marxism in France, with particular emphasis on Jules Guesde, see E. H. Posses, Der Marxismus in Frankreich 1871–1905 (Berlin, 1932).

61. Alexandre Zevaes, Historie du socialisme et du communisme en France (Paris, 1947); Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1959), 1:318ff.

62. “Stubborn attachment to splendid isolation actually could endanger the party by sacrificing its natural obligation to administer thoughtfully and well the well-being of all. Holding power entails heightened responsibility. That is why I have always voted against resolutions that tended to lock the party into a rigid position well in advance of elections. The only difference I see between ‘revisionism’ and ‘radicalism’ lies in the former’s emphasis on maintaining openness and freedom of choice while the latter places more weight on retaining its separate status vis-a-vis all nonsocialist parties.” Bernstein, “From Someone Pronounced Dead” (1905) in Selected Writings, p. 63.

63. Jaurès, the great leader of French socialism, supported Millerand in the controversy because he believed that any democratic means should be employed in furthering the concerns of a working class clear about its goals and responsibilities. For an interesting discussion, Leszek Kolakoswki, Main Currents of Marxism: The Golden Age trans. P.S. Falla (New York, 1978), 2:l36ff.

64. Rosa Luxemburg, “Socialist Crisis in France,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, 1970), p. 101.

65. Bernstein, “From Someone Pronounced Dead,” p. 63.

66. Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1999), pp. 322ff.

67. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Oxford, 1998), pp. 27ff.

68. Note the fine overview of this idea provided in John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York, 1999).

69. For a critical appraisal, see Stephen Eric Bronner, “Ecology, Politics, and Risk: The Social Theory of Ulrich Beck,” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 6(1) (March 1995), pp. 67ff.

70. Marx had prophetically warned the SPD not to “take over from the bourgeois economists the consideration of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence present socialism as turning principally on distribution.” Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Writings, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969), 3:20. Also, for a more theoretical account, see Karl Marx’s “Introduction” in Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1973), pp. 83–111.

71. For a telling critique of this position, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York, 1986).

72. It was really reformists who, sharing the same empiricist assumptions as Bernstein, engaged in the strongest forms of economic reductionism by claiming that the capitalist state serves the interests of various capitalists or what would come to be called a “power elite.” Note the classic study by C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956).

73. Christopher Pierson, Marxist Theory and Democratic Politics (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 31ff.

74. It is always a question, naturally, of what is meant by “relative”? The Weimar Republic was principally undermined by its economic elites with support from the military, and its reactionary legal bureaucracy was anything but evenhanded in punishing malfeasants of the left and the right. Note the discussion in Stephen Eric Bronner, “Working Class Politics and the Nazi Triumph,” in Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crises of Radicalism (New York, 1994), pp. 33ff.

75. This speaks to the logic of the system, including the welfare apparatus that is based on tax revenues: “There must be production for employment. There must be investment for production. And there must be an expectation of profit for investment. The requirement of profitable accumulation is not eliminated by the welfare state.” Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (New York, 1983), pp. 52–53.

76. The lack of public control over investment makes it difficult to assure compliance with the original bargain. Cohen and Rogers are correct in claiming that “workers are agreeing to something they are doing now, namely, restraining wages. Capitalists are agreeing to do something in the future, namely, invest a certain share of profits.” Ibid., pp. 59–60.

77. Giddens, The Third Way, p. 16.

78. Walther, … aber nach der Sündflut kommen wir und nur wir, pp. 142ff.

79. A purely objective notion of crisis is as politically worthless as a purely empirical notion of class. A subject, in the form of an organized and conscious movement, is always necessary to view a crisis as such rather than as a mere fluctuation in the economy. See Russell Jacoby, “The Politics of the Crisis Theory,” Telos 23 (Spring 1975), and “The Political Economy of Class Unconsciousness,” Theory and Society 5(1) (January 1978).

Chapter 4

1. George Lichtheim, “Stalinism,” in Collected Essays (New York, 1973), pp. 280–281.

2. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans. Nicolas Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 11.

3. A critique of the “reflection theory” of knowledge, which played such a dominant role in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, is provided by Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (London, 1970), pp. 89–126. Also note Anton Pannekoek, Lenin as Philosopher (London, 1975), pp. 66–91.

4. V. I. Lenin, “Conspectus of Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” in Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow, 1963), 38:276.

5. See Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (London, 1962).

6. Contrary to legend, however, “the dictatorial climax of the French Revolution was not, and could not be, a party dictatorship of the Jacobins, because the Jacobin Club never was the kind of disciplined, centralized, and ideologically homogeneous party that could have played that role…. But while the French Revolution never produced the reality of a party dictatorship, it did produce the idea. That idea arose among the defeated extremists in the prisons of the Thermidor; the concept of a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ was born as a dream of the defeated rearguard of revolutionary extremism.” It was precisely in order to overcome the “weaknesses” of the Jacobins and of Robespierre that Buonarroti, a survivor of the Babeuf conspiracy, launched the “legend that Robespierre and the Jacobins had themselves set the example for that attempt.” From Buonarroti, the idea of an “educational dictatorship” passed to Blanqui over Peter Tkachev and finally to Lenin. Richard Lowenthal, Model or Ally? The Communist Powers and the Developing Countries (Oxford, 1977), pp. 52–54.

7. Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 81.

8. The proletariat must first ally itself with the peasantry against the autocracy in order to carry through a “democratic revolution.” Only then, in order to accomplish the “socialist revolution,” should workers ally themselves with other classes in such a way that “the instability of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie” would be countered. V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy,” in Selected Works, 1:459ff.

9. See V. I. Lenin, “Marxism and Revisionism,” in Selected Works, 1:70–78. Intellectually, this piece cannot compare with Luxemburg’s “Social Reform or Revolution” and Kautsky’s “Bernstein and the Social Democratic Program: An Anti-Critique.” The important point for Lenin was “how Russian Bernsteinism has manifested itself and what particular fruits it has borne” (p. 131). That is what Lenin elaborates in “What Is To Be Done?” in Selected Works, 1:121–270.

10. Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” p. 143.

11. Kautsky already suggested that “socialist consciousness is something introduced to the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.” Carmen Claudin-Urondo, Lenin and the Cultural Revolution (London, 1977), p. 70.

12. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 46–83.

13. Cited by Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (New York, 1965), p. 90.

14. Henry Pachter, “Communism and Class,” in Socialism in History, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New York, 1984), pp. 89–109; Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, pp. 66–84.

15. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York, 1978), p. xxi.

16. Georg Lukács sought to develop it in “Tactics and Ethics,” which appears in his Political Writings, 1919–1929, ed. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1972), pp. 3–18.

17. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 256ff.

18. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York, 1962), p. 116.

19. Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, pp. 148ff.

20. Otto Kirchheimer, “Marxism, Dictatorship, and Proletariat,” in Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer, ed. Frederic S. Burin and Kurt L. Shell (New York, 1969), pp. 27ff.

21. “The current, widespread, popular, if one may say so, conception of the ‘withering away’ of the state undoubtedly means obscuring, if not repudiating revolution … in favor of a vague notion of a slow, even, gradual change, of absence, of leaps and storms, of absence of revolution.” V. I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in Selected Works, 2:298.

22. Turning to the left wing of his party, Lenin employed for his purposes a work by Nikolai Bukharin that he had previously criticized as “semi-anarchist” in its views. See Nikolai Bukharin, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State,” in Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, trans, and ed. Richard B. Day (Armonk, N.Y., 1982).

23. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” p. 371.

24. “The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic system…. By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.” Ibid., p. 304.

25. This equation would soon permeate official party literature. For example, in what would become perhaps the most popular rendition of communist philosophy, the matter would already be put bluntly in 1918: “The foundation of our whole policy must be the widest possible development of productivity … everything else must be subordinated to this one task.” Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the Communist Party in Russia (Ann Arbor, 1967), p. 74.

26. V. I. Lenin, “Report to the Eighth Party Congress” (December 22–29, 1920) in Selected Works, 3:519.

27. Ulysses Santamaria and Alain Manville, “Lenin und das Problem der Über-gangsgesellschaft,” in Jahrbuch der Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Claudio Pozzoli (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 5:57.

28. Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against ‘Capital’,” in Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, ed. Quinton Hoare, trans. John Mathews (New York, 1977), pp. 34ff.

29. “Under socialism much of ‘primitive’ democracy will inevitably be revived, since for the first time in the history of civilized society, the mass of the population will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” pp. 372–373.

30. Ibid., p. 361.

31. “It has never entered the head of any socialist to ‘promise’ that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the great socialists’ forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present productivity of labour and not the present ordinary run of people…. Until the ‘higher’ phase of communism arrives, socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption.” Ibid., p. 357–58.

32. Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democrats after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 82–83.

33. Cited in Augustin Souchy, Erich Mühsam: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Martyrium (Karlsruhe, 1984), pp. 43–44. Also see the relevant sections in Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941, trans. Peter Sedgwick (London, 1963).

34. Leon Trotsky, 1905 (New York, 1971 ed.), p. 259.

35. “It cannot be forgotten that the October uprising of the Bolsheviks was not directed against a legal parliamentary democratic regime but rather against rulers who had anointed themselves.” Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, p. 135.

36. “By the summer of 1918 effective administration had all but vanished from Russian industry, and the country was moving towards the brink of economic collapse. The Bolsheviks, who had encouraged workers’ control in 1917 as a means of undermining the Provisional Government, were now compelled to act lest they themselves should be engulfed by the same elemental tide which had swept away their predecessors.” Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (New York, 1974), p. 28.

37. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp. 168ff.

38. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” p. 311.

39. See V. I. Lenin, “The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power,” in Selected Works, 2:377–379.

40. “The ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie … must be replaced by a ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the bourgeoisie…. This is precisely what is meant by ‘abolition of the state as state.’ This is precisely the ‘act’ of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society. And it is self-evident that such a replacement of one (bourgeois) ‘special force’ by another (proletarian) ‘special force’ cannot possibly take place in the form of ‘withering away.’” Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” p. 299.

41. Note the discussion in Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1999), pp. 281ff.

42. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor, 1971), pp. 257ff.

43. Note the fine biography by F. Peter Wagner, Rudolf Hilferding: Theory and Politics of Democratic Socialism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1996).

44. See Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital, trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon (London, 1981).

45. The concept of “unequal development” essentially suggests that different sectors of the world capitalist economy develop at different rates to the point where the balance of forces will never achieve real equilibrium. Lenin believed that this made a “peaceful” division of the underdeveloped world impossible. It indeed becomes possible to envision one state assuming “hegemony” over the world system. A critique of this position is provided by George Lichtheim, Imperialism, (New York, 1971), p. 107.

46. Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy (New York, 1929). See also Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 25ff.

47. It has even been suggested that “Lenin’s hypothesis has since been substantiated in as much as students of diplomatic history prior to the Great War now almost unanimously hold that Germany was the real aggressor in the summer of 1914.” Gerd Hardach, The First World War; 1914–1918 (Berkeley, 1977), p. 8.

48. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford, and Kenneth Mitchell (New York, 1980), 2:45.

49. Henry Pachter, “The Problem of Imperialism,” in Socialism in History, pp. 161ff.

50. V. I. Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” in National Liberation, Socialism, and Imperialism: Selected Writings (New York, 1968), p. 27.

51. Ibid.

52. “The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism; on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the tie between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations. To act differently means siding with reactionary nationalist philistinism,” Ibid., p. 28.

53. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, 1970), pp. 378ff.

54. It was Stalin’s ruthlessness in dealing with Georgian desires for autonomy that led to a clash with Lenin just before the latter’s death. Carl A. Landauer, European Socialism, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1959), 2:1190ff.

55. Helmut Gruber, ed., Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern (New York, 1974), pp. 247ff. and 299ff.

56. Lowenthal, Model or Ally? pp. 48ff.

57. Ibid., pp. 176ff.

58. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1966), 3:60ff; see also, Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 346ff.

59. Thus, even a staunchly anti-Soviet critic can claim: “One of the reasons why the Bolsheviks won the civil war was that their terror, though cruel enough, was less so than that of the Whites.” Landauer, European Socialism, 2:1215.

60. Lenin’s ultimate decision to abolish the debt seriously undermined his attempts to garner foreign investment, and it was used to help justify the creation of an economic cordon sanitaire around the young Soviet nation. See Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Middlesex, 1969), pp. 68–69.

61. “If the Bolsheviks had a real complaint against the Allied governments, it was not on the score of the direct Allied military interference, which was confused, halfhearted, and pathetic, but rather on the score of the military aid, particularly in stores and munitions, given to the Russian Whites. Here it was particularly the British government which had the responsibility. It was officially stated in London that the total contributions of this nature amounted to something close to one hundred million pounds in the money of that day. The Communists are right in charging that this huge expenditure was incurred largely with a view to overthrowing Soviet power; and they can, of course, take satisfaction from the fact that this effort was unsuccessful.” George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (New York, 1961), p. 115.

62. Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, pp. 151–152.

63. Ibid., pp. 13–18, 135–156, and passim.

64. Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, pp. 162–166.

65. “It is important, above all, to examine the conflicting motives of the insurgents and their Bolshevik adversaries. The sailors, on the one hand, were revolutionary zealots, and like zealots throughout history they longed to recapture a past era before the purity of their ideals had been defiled by the exigencies of power. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, having emerged victorious from a bloody Civil War, were not prepared to tolerate any new challenge to their authority. Throughout the conflict each side behaved in accordance with its own particular goals and aspirations. To say this is not to deny the necessity of moral judgment. Yet, Kronstadt presents a situation in which the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them. To recognize this, indeed, is to grasp the full tragedy of Kronstadt.” Ibid., p. 6.

66. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1994), p. 369.

67. Lichtheim, “Stalinism,” p. 283.

68. Nove, Economic History, pp. 93ff.

69. Among the noteworthy new works see Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London, 1991); Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (London, 1990); and Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (London, 1991).

70. Much has been written about the disaffection of revolutionaries and various Leftists from the Bolshevik movement. Much less has been written about those who were drawn to the movement as a representative of authority and sovereignty. In this regard, it is important to consider the technocrats, scientists, and bureaucratic specialists of every sort. See Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, 1978), pp. 44ff.

71. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, p. 389ff.

72. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), p. 119.

73. Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, pp. 188–189, 202–203.

74. Kirchheimer, “The Socialist and Bolshevik Theory of the State,” in Politics, Law, and Social Change, p. 11.

75. Note the classic discussion in the celebrated collection, The God that Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York, 1949).

76. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1967).

77. Roy A. Medvedyev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York, 1972).

78. Note the essay of 1913 that essentially summarized Lenin’s arguments on nationalism and met with his approval. Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Works (Moscow, 1953), vol. 2.

79. A fine short sketch of his mercurial personality was provided by the former Commissar of Education under Lenin, Antoly V. Lunarcharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, trans. Michael Glenny (New York, 1967), pp. 59–73.

80. “Trotskyism” was actually an artificial construct employed by the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin clique in its machinations against Trotsky following Lenin’s death. Boris Souveraine, “Stalinism,” in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, 1965), p. 93.

81. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 (New York, 1973), pp. 173ff.

82. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor, 1961), and Their Morals and Ours (New York, 1973).

83. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla (New York, 1978) 3:1ff.

84. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, trans. Benjamin Sher (New Haven, 1999), p. 582.

85. Louis Fischer could write that while “some form of industrial revolution had to take place in the Soviet Union for a whole variety of reasons … I see no valid reason for assuming that it had to take place at the time and in the manner which Stalin determined, other than the reason that Stalin so determined it and was able to put his determination into effect.” Louis Fischer, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1971), p. xii.

86. Lenin admittedly tried to give the early terror a legal basis. Still, its “temporary” character was taken for granted as a necessary response to the Whites and the Entente. See Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics—the Dilemma of Power (New York, 1965 ed.), pp. 124ff.

87. Revenge as a principal motive in the elimination of the old Bolsheviks is stressed by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1973).

88. “The importance of other than elective principles in the selection of the top Party leadership is disclosed by certain events that took place between the Seventeenth Congress in 1934 and the Eighteenth Congress in 1939. It has been computed that out of the seventy-one individuals elected to the Central Committee at the Seventeenth Congress, nine were executed, twelve declared ‘enemies of the people’ (and probably executed), and twenty-four had disappeared, accounting for forty-five out of the seventy-one. By 1939, of the sixty-eight candidates (or alternates for membership) in the 1934 Central Committee, fourteen had been executed, two had committed suicide, nine had been declared enemies of the people, and thirty-four had disappeared.” Moore, Soviet Politics, p. 248.

89. This is nicely portrayed through the characters of Ivanov and Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (New York, 1969).

90. This development is charted, and assumes particularly graphic form, in the extraordinary trilogy by Manès Sperber, Wie eine Träne im Ozean (Munich, 1980).

91. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, p.958.

92. Bukharin was a friend of many avant-gardists, who tried to intercede on behalf of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, while Trotsky sided with them publicly. Nadezheda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Haywood (New York, 1999), pp. 113ff. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor, 1972).

93. “Marxism under Stalin cannot be defined by any collection of statements, ideas or concepts: it was not a question of propositions as such but of the fact that there existed an all-powerful authority competent to declare at any given moment what marxism was and what it was not. ‘Marxism’ meant nothing more or less than the current pronouncement of the authority in question, i.e., Stalin himself.” Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3:4. See also Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York, 1961).

94. For an analysis of the concept, see the excellent work by Abram Tertz, The Trial Begins/On Socialist Realism (New York, 1960).

95. “Our policy in art, during a transitional period, can and must be to help the various groups and schools of art which have come over to the Revolution to grasp correctly the historic meaning of the Revolution, and to allow them complete freedom of self-determination in the field of art, after putting before them the categorical standard of being for or against the Revolution.” Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 14.

96. “Stalin arbitrarily deprived the Soviet Union of almost the whole of its military leadership—between thirty and forty thousand of its ablest and most experienced offers—when it was faced with the danger of war; that he refused to listen to the evidence from a variety of sources that Germany was preparing to attack the Soviet Union, so allowing Hitler the great advantage of surprise; and that he created such an atmosphere of terror that those who realized the extent of the danger were unable either to represent the real situation to him or to take measures themselves to meet it.” Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, pp. 717, 787, 902.

97. Stalin probably did not have a fully worked out economic program before his assumption of power and, as the decision was initially presented, collectivization was to be carried out without force. The crude response of the peasants, along with the even cruder responses of the party to their opposition, let loose the floodgates for the “revolution from above.” Nove, Economic History, pp. 122ff.

98. This notion of “planning,” which served as a prototype for Eastern European communism, has come to be identified with socialist planning as such. In fact, however, “these models, which have given a bad name to socialism, are not the poorly managed samples of a basically sound structure, but monstrosities in their very conception.” Henry Pachter, “Three Economic Models,” in Socialism in History, p. 43.

99. “The key characteristic of the Stalinist model of economic growth was its lack of economic self-generating, self-regulating, and adjusting features. To run at all, let alone to perform well, it required an enormous political edifice to provide the regulation, supervision, and coordination. In fact, the Soviet political system was developed largely to run the economy and was shaped by running the economy in line with the chosen growth strategy.” Sweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 19.

100. Nove, Economic History, pp. 192–200.

101. The simple fact is that “neither the survival of the system twenty years after the revolution nor the effectiveness of the system in mobilizing resources after virtual completion of the revolutions from above required the unleashing and persistence of terror. However, the establishment and continuation of Stalin’s absolute dictatorship would have been impossible without it.” Bialer, Stalin’s Successors, p. 27.

102. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), pp. 427, 465.

103. Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (London, 1989).

104. For the fascinating transcript, see Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York, 1965).

105. Henry Pachter draws a link between the purge of Bukharin and his suspected opposition to the Hitler-Stalin pact in “Bukharin: History and Legend,” in Dissent (Fall 1974), 572–579. See also Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 337ff.

106. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, pp. 910ff.

107. Ibid., p. 953.

108. Chilling accounts are provided by scores of memoirs and novels. Among the most important are Natalia Ginsburg, Into the Whirlwind; Anatoli Rybakov, Children of the Arbat, trans. Harold Shukman (Boston, 1988); Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1968); and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York, 1968).

109. See Andrezej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, 1995).

110. Ian Kershaw, “‘Working towards the Fuhrer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, eds. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge, 1997), p. 95.

111. The Second International had passed numerous pacifistic, antiwar resolutions before 1914, including the most famous, which was jointly sponsored in Stuttgart by Lenin, Luxemburg, and Martov in 1907. But they simply assumed compliance by its members and the organization lacked any means to enforce its decisions. For a discussion of the Stuttgart conference, see Braunthal, History of the International, 1:334–338; 361–363.

112. Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolschewismus, p. 208.

113. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 458ff.

114. The best general overview is provided by F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe: 1918–1919 (Berkeley, 1972). For a critique of the international policy advocated by the Soviet leadership following the Spartacus revolt, see Paul Levi, Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie: Schriften, Aufsätze, Reden, und Briefe, ed. Charlotte Beradt (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 22–94, 136–147.

115. V. I. Lenin, ‘“Left-Wing Communism—an Infantile Disorder,” in Selected Works, 3:345ff.

116. See the discussion “NEP in Foreign Policy,” Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 3:272–304.

117. V. I. Lenin, “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to the First Congress of the Communist International,” in Selected Works, 3:150ff.

118. “The present-day concept of a tightly disciplined Communist Party blindly following detailed instructions from Moscow … certainly does not apply to these early attempts to extend the Soviet system to other lands. At this time, the leaders of the Russian Revolution served as inspirers, and as contributors of occasional advice and assistance, but not as directors. Although they often claimed they were riding the wave of the future, they were scarcely able to direct it into the channels they chose.” Moore, Soviet Politics, p. 197.

119. Note the outstanding description of party-life in Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines lrrweges (Frankfurt am Main, 1990).

120. Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, 2 vols., trans. Brian Pierce (New York, 1975), 1:103ff.

121. David Fernbach, “Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Heir: An Appreciation of Paul Levi,” New Left Review 238 (November-December, 1999), pp. 3–25.

122. Note the classic essay by Richard Lowenthal, “The Bolshevization of the Spartacus League,” in International Communism, St. Anthony’s Papers, No. 9 ed. David Footman (London, 1960), pp. 23–71.

123. Claudin, The Communist Movement.

124. Henry Pachter, Weltmacht Russland: Aussenpolitische Strategie in Drei Jahrhunderten (Oldenburg, 1968).

125. Note the discussion on the popular front in Stephen Eric Bronner, Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crises of Radicalism (New York, 1992), pp. 57ff.

126. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 277ff.

127. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 433–455 and passim.

128. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, pp. 687ff.

129. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 80–81.

130. Braunthal, History of the International, 3:144ff; Claudin, The Communist Movement, 2:307ff.

131. Heinz Timmermann, The Decline of the World Communist Movement: Moscow, Beijing, and Communist Parties in the West, trans. Julius W. Friend (Boulder, 1987).

132. Pachter, Weltmacht Russland, pp. 8–9.

133. Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, trans. Andrew R. Durkin (New York, 1978), and Michel Tatu, Le Pouvoir en URSS (Paris, 1967).

134. This becomes evident in a story about the Twentieth Party Congress. Apparently, after hearing the revelations of Stalin’s crimes, one of the delegates mumbled under his breath: “Why hadn’t Khrushchev said any of this while Stalin was alive?” The Soviet leader responded angrily: “Who said that?” Silence. He asked a second time, and then a third. Finally Khrushchev said: “That’s why I didn’t say anything while he was alive.” Quoted in Der Spiegel, July 4, 1988, pp. 118ff.

135. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom, pp. 514ff.

136. Bialer, Stalin’s Successors, pp. 147ff.

137. Chris Harmon, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe (London, 1974), pp. 49–66.

138. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom, p.522.

139. “In some respects, the break between mature Stalinism and its Leninist past was more clear-cut, more profound than between the present system and its Stalinist past. The Stalinist system was established through a series of deep revolutionary convulsions and transformations. The present system came into being in a process of incremental evolutionary change. The Stalinist system acquired its shape by crushing established institutions; the present authoritarian system was molded by the process of their adjustment.” Bialer, Stalin’s Successors, p. 59.

140. See Baruch A. Hazan, From Brezhnev to Gorbachev: Infighting in the Kremlin (Boulder, 1987).

141. John Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power (New York, 1993); Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution (London, 1991).

142. Richard Pipes, Communism: The Vanished Specter (New York, 1994), p. 25.

143. An expanded version of this section was written during the events of August 1991 and published as a postscript in Moments of Decision, Given its description of the dismal end of communism and its anticipation of certain developments “beyond” Leninism, however, this revised version seems particularly appropriate for inclusion here.

144. Note the “Letter from an Old Bolshevik” in Boris Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: ‘The Letter of an Old Bolshevik’ and Other Essays, ed. Janet D. Zagoria (New York, 1965).

Chapter 5

1. A broader treatment of the themes in this chapter is provided in Stephen Eric Bronner, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (University Park, Pa., 1997 [3rd printing]).

2. Annelies Laschitza, Im Lebensrausch, trotz alledem Rosa Luxemburg: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1996).

3. Note the letters published by Sonja Liebknecht in a little volume entitled Briefe aus dem Gefangnis (Berlin, 1920), as well as those by Luise Kautsky in Briefe an Karl und Luise Kautsky (Berlin, 1923). In the same vein, see Luise Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg: Ein Gedenkbuch (Berlin, 1929) and the biography by Henriette Roland-Hoist, Rosa Luxemburg: Ihr Leben und Wirken (Zurich, 1937).

4. See Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (Cambridge, 1989).

5. Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. and trans. Stephen Eric Bronner (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1993 [rev. ed.]), p. 147.

6. See Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey, 1981).

7. Rosa Luxemburg, “Stagnation and Progress of Marxism” (1903), in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, 1970), pp. 106–113.

8. Laschitza, Im Lebensrauch …, p. 29.

9. Rosa Luxemburg, “The National Question and Autonomy,” in The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, ed. H. B. Davis (New York, 1976), p. 135.

10. Rosa Luxemburg, “Der Partei ‘Proletariat’ zum Gedächtnis,” in Politische Schriften, 3 vols., ed. Ossip K. Flechtheim (Frankfurt, 1968), 3:23ff.

11. Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters to Leo Jogiches, ed. Elzbieta Ettinger (London, 1981).

12. Rosa Luxemburg, “Strömungen in der polnischen sozialistischen Bewegung,” and “Der Sozialpatriotismus in Polen,” in Gesammelte Werke 1(1), pp. 18 and 50.

13. Given that Luxemburg helped with parts of the manuscript, especially those dealing with political economy, note the discussion by Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 161–163.

14. Note Luxemburg’s forward to the anthology entitled “The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement,” in The National Question, p. 85.

15. “By failing to analyze Poland and Russia as class societies bearing economic and political contradictions in their bosoms, by viewing them not from the point of view of historical development but as if they were in a fixed absolute condition as homogeneous, undifferentiated units, this view ran counter to the very essence of Marxism.” Ibid., p. 63.

16. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 307ff.

17. “What is especially striking about this formula is the fact that it doesn’t represent anything specifically connected with socialism or with the politics of the working class. It is at first glance a paraphrase of the old slogan of bourgeois nationalism put forth in all countries at all times: ‘the right of nations to freedom and independence.’” Luxemburg, “The National Question and Autonomy,” p. 102.

18. Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London, 1976), p. 16.

19. Georg Lukács, “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 27ff.

20. Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 39.

21. Ibid., p. 65.

22. Ibid., p. 41.

23. Ibid., p. 74.

24. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 60.

25. Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” p. 83.

26. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 104.

27. Thus, when Bernstein “abandoned scientific socialism he lost the axis of intellectual crystallization around which isolated facts groups themselves in the organic whole of a coherent conception of the world.” Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, p. 85.

28. Ibid., pp. 88–89.

29. “What appears to characterize this revisionist practice above all? A certain hostility to ‘theory.’ This is quite natural, for our ‘theory,’ that is, the principles of scientific socialism, impose clearly marked limitations to practical activity—insofar as it concerns the aims of this activity, the means used in attaining these aims, and the method employed in this activity. It is quite natural for people who run after immediate ‘practical’ results to want to free themselves from such limitations and to render their practice independent of our ‘theory.’” Ibid., p. 87.

30. Rosa Luxemburg, “Militia and Militarism,” in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York, 1971), pp. 135ff.

31. Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” p. 59.

32. Oskar Negt, “Zur materialistischen Dialektik von Spontaneität und Organisation: Rosa Luxemburg,” in Keine Demokratie ohne Sozialismus: Über den Zusammenhang von Politik, Geschichte und Moral (Frankfurt, 1976), pp. 182ff.

33. Paul Frohlich, Rösa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work, trans. Johanna Hoorweg (New York, 1972), pp. 80–94.

34. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 294.

35. Ibid., p. 306.

36. Ibid., p. 289.

37. Georg Lukács, “Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Critique of the Russian Revolution,”’ in History and Class Consciousness, p. 292.

38. Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” p. 300.

39. Luxemburg would formulate her thoughts on these events more than ten years later in an article concerned with the ten-day long general strike to secure universal suffrage in “The Belgian Experiment” (1913). Note the discussion by Laschitza, Im Lebensrauch …, pp. 427ff.

40. Laschitza, Im Lebensrauch …, pp. 174ff.

41. On the intellectual connections between Luxemburg and the theorists of the permanent revolution, see Geras, Legacy, pp. 43ff; Dunayvskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 165ff. On Parvus, see Z.A.B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (London, 1965), pp. 20–35 and passim.

42. Rosa Luxemburg, “Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions,” in Selected Political Writings, p. 227.

43. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York, 1965), pp. 131, 117–144. On the Russian soviets in general, see also the classic work by Oskar Anweiler, Die Rate in Russland, 1905–1921 (Leiden, 1958).

44. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 114.

45. Luxemburg, “Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions,” p. 252.

46. “It is completely absurd to think of the mass strike as an act, an isolated action. The mass strike is rather the sign, the totality-concept of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps decades.” Ibid., p. 237.

47. Luxemburg was not some fanatic and her faith in the mass never took a “mystical” form. A retreat into the fine shadings of her theory in order to dismiss its romantic elements, however, is tendentious. It also misses the context in which her theory was formed no less than the reasons for its impact. See F. L. Carsten, “Freedom and Revolution,” in Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, ed. Leopold Labedz (New York, 1962), pp. 55ff; and E. H. Carr, 1917: Before and After (London, 1969), pp. 56ff. For the second position, see Geras, Legacy, pp. 113ff.

48. Laschitza, Im Lebensrauch …, p. 459.

49. Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 315.

50. Ibid., p. 316.

51. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 172.

52. Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet,” p. 324.

53. Ibid., p. 319.

54. Ibid., p. 329.

55. Paul Levi, Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie: Schriften, Aufsätze, Reden, und Briefe, ed. Charlotte Beradt (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 11–138 and passim; Charlotte Beradt, Paul Levi: Ein demokratischer Sozialist in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 40–62. See also Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 151ff; Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford, and Kenneth Mitchell (New York., 1980), 2:224ff.

56. Laschitza, Im Lebensrauch …, p. 571.

57. The best refutation is offered by Lukács, “Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Critique of the Russian Revolution.’”

58. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 378.

59. Ibid., p. 380.

60. Admittedly, while immersed in the German Spartacus uprising of 1919, Luxemburg retracted some of her earlier criticisms—including her support for convening a constituent assembly. Note the discussion by Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:717–719. See also Clara Zetkin, “Um Rosa Luxemburgs Stellung zur russichen Revolution,” in Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften (Berlin, 1957), 2:385.

61. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” pp. 391, 390.

62. Ibid., p. 394.

63. Ibid., p. 389.

64. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 258.

65. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 87ff.

66. Note the remarks by her secretary, Mathilde Jacob, “Von Rosa Luxemburg und ihren Freunden in Krieg und Revolution 1914–1919,” hrsg. Sybille Quack und Rudiger Zimmerman in Internationale Wissenshaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Berlin (West), Heft 4, 1988, pp. 435ff.

67. Klaus Gietinger, Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal: Die Ermordung der Rosa L. (Mainz, 1993).

68. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston, 1973). An alternative perspective is provided by Russell Jacoby, The Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (New York, 1981); see also Bronner, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 96ff.

Chapter 6

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), pp. 120ff.

2. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernbach (London, 1978), pp. 17–48, 123–183, 235–250.

3. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon, 1964), pp. 1–120.

4. Frederick Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969), 3:340, 339.

5. Karl Marx, “Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York, 1967), p. 250.

6. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Points of Departure: Sketches for a Critical Theory with Public Aims,” in Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (Oxford, 1994), pp. 321ff.

7. Benjamin Barber, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton, 1988), p. 199.

8. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975), p. 113.

9. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Jurgen Habermas and the Language of Politics,” in Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, pp. 293ff.

10. Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action (Lanham, Md., 1999), pp. 41ff.

11. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Moral and Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York, 1949), p. 136.

12. The best attempt to deal with this matter is provided by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (New York, 1983). Also see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (New York, 1987), pp. 64ff.

13. Niklas Luhmann, “Das Konzept des Politischen,” in Archimedes und wir: Interviews, ed. Dirk Baecker and Georg Stanitzek (Berlin, 1987), p. 11.

14. Note the famous analysis of “commodity fetishism” in Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York, 1967), 1:71ff.

15. T. W. Adorno, “Society,” in Critical Theory and Society ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York, 1989), p. 271.

16. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy trans. Martin Nicholaus (New York, 1973), pp. 83ff.

17. Marx, Capital, 1:38ff.

18. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, 1963), p. 63.

19. Marx, Capital, 3:799.

20. Ibid., 3:800.

21. Note the classic essay by Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 83ff.

22. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), p. 112.

23. Cohen and Rogers, On Democracy, p. 68; Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1972), pp. 191–300.

24. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock (London, 1968), pp. 129–130.

25. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, pp. 36ff.

26. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1987), 2:374ff.

27. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York, 1996); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

28. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New York, 1997), pp. 267ff.

29. Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (New York, 1997).

30. George Lichtheim, “The Concept of Social Class,” in Collected Essays (New York, 1973), p. 253.

31. Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford, 1989).

32. John McDermott, Corporate Society (Boulder, 1990).

33. “It is not only the past but the future as well which has virtual existence in the present. A weighing of each of the factors existing in the present, and an insight into the tendencies latent in these forces, can be obtained only if the present is understood in the light of its concrete fulfillment in the future.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936), p. 246.

34. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Organizational Question of Social Democracy,” in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York, 1971), pp. 303–304.

35. Henry Pachter, “Aphorisms on Socialism,” in Socialism in History: Political Essays of Henry Pachter, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (New York, 1984), p. 323.

36. See John Ehrenberg, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism’s Theory of Socialist Democracy (New York, 1992).

37. An interesting attempt to solidify the Utopian conception of Marx from various scattered references within his works is provided by Bertell Oilman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism: A Reconstruction,” Critique 8 (Summer 1977), pp. 7ff.

38. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston, 1969), pp. 282–283.

39. Henry Pachter, “Freedom, Authority, and Participation,” in Socialism in History, p. 59.

40. There is a rich literature on councils, soviets, and decentralized forms of self-management. On the history, see Günther Hillmann, ed., Die Rätebewegung, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1972). On the general political perspective, see Paul Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Armonk, N.Y., 1978). On the theory, see Karl Korsch, Schriften zur Sozialisierung, ed. Erich Gerlach (Frankfurt, 1969); Otto Rühle, Baupläne for eine neue Gesellschaft (Hamburg, 1971); and Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism: A Marxist Social Theory (Armonk, N.Y., 1982), pp. 235–371. Note the futuristic discussion of councils by Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (University Park, Pa., 1991), pp. 95ff. Also Bertell Oilman, ed., Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists (New York, 1998).

41. Because councils sought to combat bureaucratic alienation and the division of labor by unifying administrative, judicial, and economic forms of decisionmaking, it misses the point to simply recommend the creation of an independent judiciary: such a suggestion runs counter to the purposes of the entire enterprise. See William Connolly, Appearance and Reality (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 188ff.

42. Note the critique of localism offered by John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York, 1999), pp. 224–250.

43. Wlodzimierz Brus, “Commodity Fetishism and Socialism,” in The Economics and Politics of Socialism: Collected Essays (London, 1973), pp. 66–67. See also Svetozar Stojanovic, “Between Ideals and Reality,” in Self-Governing Socialism, ed. Branko Horvat et al. (White Plains, N.Y., 1975).

44. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, Associations and Democracy (New York, 1995).

45. Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (Cambridge, 1989), p. 214. Also note Kellner’s Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder, 1990).

46. “Most problems of the natural and social environments are bigger problems from the standpoint of the poor, including the working poor, than for the salariat and the well-to-do. In other words, issues pertaining to production conditions are class issues, even though they are also more than class issues.” James O’Connor, “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 1 (Fall 1988), p. 37.

47. The situation has actually gotten worse since the publication of the important work by Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York, 1991).

48. André Gorz, Adieux au proletariat: Au déla du socialisme (Paris, 1980), and Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work (Boston, 1985). See also the provocative set of essays by Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

49. Note the essay, which builds upon the famous pamphlet of Paul Lafargue, by Henry Pachter “The Right to Be Lazy,” in Socialism in History, pp. 3–16.

50. Georges Gurvitch, “La sociologie du jeune Marx,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 3 (1948), pp. 4 and passim.

51. Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism: A Contribution to the Political History of the Past 150 Years, trans. George Rosen (New York, 1939).

52. Bronner, Ideas in Action, pp. 206ff.

53. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Munzer: Als Theologe der Revolution (Frankfurt am Main, 1972).

54. Note the concern with this theme expressed in the Socialist Register 2000, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London, 2000).

55. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), pp. 21–23.

56. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisations analyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 87.

57. “It is necessary to make a distinction between the critique of reformism as a political practice and the critique of a political practice on the grounds that it might give rise to reform. This latter… critique is frequent in left-wing groups.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1977), p. 143.

58. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York, 1971), p. 344.

59. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 3 vols., trans. Henry Collins, Peter Ford, and Kenneth Mitchell (New York, 1980), 3:510.

60. André Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, trans. Norman Denny (New York, 1973), pp. 135ff.

61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, 1973) p. 206.

62. See Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? trans. Bobbye Ortiz (New York, 1967).

63. Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939 (New York, 1964 ed.), pp. 60, 53.

64. Stephen Eric Bronner, “The New Right in the United States and Abroad,” in Neonationalismus-Neokonservatismus: Sondierungen und Analysen, ed. Michael Kessler, et al. (Tuebingen, 1997), pp. 9–21.

65. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 190ff.

66. See Fölker Frobel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, Die neue Internationale Arbietsteilung: Strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieländern und die Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsländer (Hamburg, 1977).

67. Henry Pachter, The Fall and Rise of Europe: A Political, Social, and Cultural History of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1975), pp. 450ff.