Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/15

 towards "obsolete doctrinaire" Marxism represents, has been stated with sufficient precision by Bernstein, and demonstrated by Millerand.

Social-Democracy must change from a party of the social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms. Bernstein has surrounded this political demand by a whole battery of symmetrically arranged "new" arguments and reasonings. The possibility of putting Socialism on a scientific basis and of proving that it is necessary and inevitable from the point of view of the materialist conception of history was denied; the fact of increasing poverty, proletarianisation, the growing acuteness of capitalist contradictions, were also denied. The very conception of "ultimate aim" was declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was absolutely rejected. It was denied that there is any difference in principle between liberalism and Socialism. The theory of the class struggle was rejected on the grounds that it could not be applied to strictly democratic society, governed according to the will of the majority, etc.

Thus, the demand for a decided change from revolutionary Social-Democracy to bourgeois reformism, was accompanied by a no less decided turn towards bourgeois criticism. of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. As this criticism of Marxism has been going on for a long time now, from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets, and in a number of scientific works, as the younger generation of the educational classes have been systematically trained for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the "new, critical" tendency in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. This new tendency did not have to grow and develop, it was transferred bodily from bourgeois literature to Socialist literature.

If Bernstein's theoretical criticism and political yearnings are still obscure to any one, the trouble the French have taken to demonstrate the "new method" should remove all ambiguities. In this instance, also, France has justified its old reputation as the country in which "more than anywhere else the historical class struggles were always fought to a finish" [Engels, in his introduction to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire]. The French Socialists have commenced, not to theorise, but to act. The :more developed democratic political conditions in France have permitted them to put