Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/98

88 On the following day, Wolfgang Heine, candidate at Berlin, expressed his belief that for the present and the immediate future the attitude of the party would be the same as formerly, but he did not perceive in the refusal of military credits a question of principle and thought the time would come when the party might grant them in return for definite political concessions.

Was the German Social Democracy, in gaining two million voters, losing its own Marxian soul? A certain group of its adherents hoped so; to them a Lassallean opportunism appeared more substantially spiritual (if the expression may be used) than the dogmas of Marx. They would not repudiate the gospel according to Marx or deny their own Marxian profession of faith made at the Congress of Erfurt; they would simply "interpret" and "revise" the gospel; they would merely apply the principles of private judgment and modernistic reason to the proper understanding of the Erfurt symbol. This tendency, inchoate in the early 'nineties, reached fruition in the influential sect of "Revisionism" largely through the writings of Eduard Bernstein, especially his Probleme des Sozialismus, which appeared in serial form in Die Neue Zeit in 1896–1897, and his Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, published in book form in 1899. Without pausing to indicate the manifold changes in tactics which Revisionism involved, it may be remarked that the essence of the new movement was the denial of the "catastrophic" doctrine of Marxism.

I confess freely [wrote Bernstein] that I have extremely little feeling for, or interest in, what is commonly spoken of as "the ultimate goal of Socialism". This goal, whatever it may be, is for me absolutely nothing; the movement itself is everything. And I mean by the movement as much the general movement of society, that is, social progress,