Marx's Legacy: Reformist, Leninist, and Critical Readings

After Marx's death in 1883 and Engels's in 1895, the Marxist movement split into several major, mutually contesting interpretive traditions. Within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then the world's largest Marxist party, Eduard Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, 1899) inaugurated the "revisionist" controversy, arguing from empirical observation that capitalism was not, in fact, polarizing into ever more acute crises and immiseration as the Manifesto had predicted, and that socialism could therefore be achieved through gradual parliamentary reform rather than revolutionary rupture — a position sharply attacked by orthodox Marxists such as Karl Kautsky and, from the party's revolutionary left wing, Rosa Luxemburg, whose pamphlet Reform or Revolution (1900) insisted that reformist gains within capitalism could never, by themselves, add up to a qualitative transcendence of the capitalist system as such.