<HTML>Justin writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">I have never had any credentials as an orthodox Marxist. I rather doubt whether I am a Marxist, or whether there is any point in proclaiming that one is today. My point was that Bernstein thought he was an orthodox Marxist, which he did. So, indeed, did Kautsky, even after he was sidelined by 1914, the war, and the Russian revolution. B differed with Luxemburg and K with Lenin mainly about the means to achieve socialism and to keep it in power. And given the firm commitment of both thinkers _to_ socialism, understood as both of them understood it in classical Marxism terms (which _I_ reject), it is inconceivable that either of them would ever have supported a right wing bourgeois politician. Some historical counterfactuals are ludicrous or indecipherable. That one is not. --jks</BLOCKQUOTE> At the risk of becoming Yoshie the Lesser, let me post just one example of what an Internet search for Eduard Bernstein produces under the subject heading of "Revisionism." [If I was home, I would be happy to get out a copy of Bernstein's opus and provide all the exact quotes for the accurate summary of his politics below.] In Marxist thought, originally the late 19th-century effort of Eduard Bernstein to revise Marxist doctrine. Rejecting the labour theory of value, economic determinism, and the significance of the class struggle, Bernstein argued that by that time German society had disproved some of Marx's predictions: he asserted that capitalism was not on the verge of collapse, capital was not being amassed by fewer and fewer persons, the middle class was not disappearing, and the working class was not afflicted by "increasing misery."The revisionism of Bernstein aroused considerable controversy among the German Social Democrats of his day. Led by Karl Kautsky, they officially rejected it (Hanover Congress, 1889). Nevertheless, revisionism had a great impact on the party's practical policies. Now surely is there is any core to Marxism, it involves the primacy of 'class struggle,' and this was a theses which Bernstein clearly rejected. There was a reason why Kautsky, Luxemburg and Lenin went absolutely ballistic over Bernstein's "revisionism," and it most assuredly was not because of his fealty to Marxian socialism; the main thing that those three had in common was their claim to Marxist orthodoxy. Indeed, the notion that Bernstein was an "orthodox Marxian" is so unusual and strange a proposition that I can not think of any major interpreter of the Marxist and socialist traditions who would hold to it. This is probably only a question of the accuracy of interpretation, since the one point here that Justin and I agree on is that claims to Marxist orthodoxy are pretty much irrelevant in any practical political sense, but Justin is so far off base on it that I can't help but dissent, and hold to my position on Bernste! ! in. The problem with Justin's historical counterfactual, as virtually all other counterfactuals, is that it suggests that it is possible to take a figure out of a historically and nationally specific context, and determine what he would do in an altogether different setting. Here we are talking about a time frame of almost 125 years, and a shift from Germany to the US. But unless one's political analysis is entirely formulaic, the historical and national context of one's action are very much determinative. When I was in Canada, I was a member, an active supporter and on the left of the social democratic/labor party, the New Democratic Party, because in the Canadian context, one can have a significant impact upon the direction of Canadian politics through such a vehicle. But all that changes when one crosses one national border. One can not call those conditions into being in the US, and simply find a social democratic/labor party! ! which will have the same impact and efficacy. [And this does not even consider the ways in which one's views are formed by one's particular historical experience.] To suggest that because in late 19th century Germany, Bernstein was a leading Social Democrat, we can state with any certainty what he would have done in early 21st century United States, is to engage in a form of science fiction, with H. G. Wells' time machines, as far as I am concerned. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --</HTML>