Social-democracy
at the service of the ruling classes.
The struggle of the Communist
Party.
By Raúl Martínez & Ramón López*.
Source: International Communist Review, Issue 3, 2014.
Revisionism,
a historical phenomenon hostile to Marxism.
Since
the birth of the labour movement to this day, an intense struggle
between two tendencies has been waged within the movement: the
revolutionary one and the opportunist one. Over the history,
opportunism has adopted different and numerous expressions, diguised
under forms of "left wing" and right wing. This article
deals with the right wing opportunism or revisionism, initial source
of the political current that is nowadays known as social-democracy,
whose nature mutated along the twentieth century, from being a
current of the labour movement to a political movement which is an
uncompromising defender and the essential pillar of monopoly
capitalism.
Revisionism
emerged in the late nineteenth century when, after the passing away
of Frederick Engels, open warfare broke out within the socialist
movement led by the German Eduard Bernstein whose maxim “the
movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing [1”
became the banner of the followers of the revisionist theory and its
political practice, reformism. Lenin would argue about it: