Democrats' (8)
Inside the SPD there now broke out a debate which was to shape its whole future — the debate over revisionism'. In 1898 in Die Neue Zeit Bernstein published a series of articles challenging fundamentals of MarxESELE He accused the SPD leadership, not without reason, of having an increasingly reformist practice, maintaining a formally revolutionary rhetoric which was out of keeping with this practice.
Bernstein argued that capitalist crises were getung tess severe, class differences were evening out and not deepening and that the masses were not being impoverished. growth of capitalist Carters monopolies meant that the capitalist system was becoming more ordered and rational, not more 'anarchic.
Bernstein therefore argued that the fight for socialism was one of evolutionary gradual advance, not of revolution. Things would gradually get better for the working class, with a little bit of help from the SPD. This kind of thinking was of course a product of the relative capitalist stability and economic growth between 1890 and 1914.
Push Bernstein's ideas, in a different context, pretigured many of the ideas formulated by the Labour Party revisionist" thinkers in the 1950s and 1960s - that class differences would gradually disappear and the system automatically become more rational with a little social democratic push.
These predictions of people like Crosland and Douglas Jay crashing down with the onset of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. Berns•The "moderate'.
Role
but of gresses. that The and The EVOLEOR ties based on a winning clections expense of membership which Bernstein future let ving o lea wing -tions.
came Footnotes 1. Marx, vative force. They tried to win sup'middle strata' which Engels had referred by curbing any "extremism' and by appearing ever Zinoviev, in his book The War and ine ersm bociansmiy snowed how the middle class and better off workers came to play a disproportionate role in the party, consistently being over-represented at party conThe supreme representative of the social democratic bureaucracy was Friedrich Ebert, who became parLY SCOTCETY INDECKEE by the right wing trade union leaders, he challenged Haase in a run off for the presidency of the party. In 1913 he won the post against Bebel himself.
of SPD typical of the social democratic parlarge but mostly passive membership; concerned with by appearing "moderate; and elevating to positions of authority the functionaries, in particular the trade union bureaucrats, at working class In the debate over revisionism, in was soundly defeated, the Kautsky-Bebel "centre' alongside led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Only towards the end of the decade did the fight break out between the centre and the left wing - precisely on the issue of mass struggle versus exclusive reliance on the "tried and tested tactic" of elecI'LL HAND IT to Channel 4, whatever their motivation, they're trying! True, most of the decent stuff is on at some unearthly hour when most people are only semi-conscious for one reason or another, but what's new?
Viewing figures by well worth staying awake for.
Eastern Eye, a programme aimed at the ture "hard hitting off-beat ones'. Well, the light off-beat element - ie film star's wives being asked how they felt while their hulk husband cavorted on set with attractive young women wasn't so interesting. but the hard hitting politics were worth a watch Over half the hour long programme was used to the vehement racism in the police force.
It was based around Hendon police training school John Fernandes, wnere head of a multi-cultural studies i course set up wake of Scarman pacify people, asked his police cadet pupils to write an essay on their attitudes to blacks in Britain - - it really was asking for trouble!
'All blacks are a pain and should be ejected from our society' and the blacks must accept that if
----- pull-quotes -----
n the 7V Times as a mix tuitical stories and light