ABSTRACT
Seemingly, little of significance could be said about the ‘right wing’ Marxists, except for adding a few more sobriquets to an already polemical-rich Marxist lexicon: Kautsky the ‘renegade’, Bernstein the ‘revisionist’ and the Mensheviks as ‘tailists’. Such epithets were not prompted by envy at their success: they were history’s losers. Not only were they denied the historical success of a Lenin, they did not possess the brio of a young Trotsky, or Luxemburg, or Gramsci. Indeed, they did not even ‘lose’ heroically. There was no tragic dimension to their sacrifice, the quick deaths by rifle-butt (Luxemburg) or ice-pick (Trotsky) or a slow death via imprisonment (Gramsci). Apart from rank and file Mensheviks who refused to go into exile in the early 1920s (Broido, 1987), they were an unheroic lot, many living to a ripe old age. They were the consummate masters of caution, which immobilized rather than inspired. Yet caution can just as easily spring from hard-headedness as from cowardice, and revolutionary risk-taking can court political disaster, either as defeat or as left-wing totalitarianism. And a modicum of logic tells us that we ought to distinguish between the motives prompting argument and analysis from their actual content. The twenty-first century may prove a little kinder to right-wing Marxist reputations than the twentieth. When glasnost within the Marxist tradition has fully run its course their contribution may be more fully recognized.
