ABSTRACT
It has been my hypothesis that in the months from Friedrich Engels's death in August 1895 until the "Final-Goal Article" in January 1898, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein engaged in a series of polemical battles, rejecting various interpretations of Marxism while defending and applying their own understanding, and that in the context of these polemics many issues of the Revisionist Controversy surfaced. Their opponents were often Wilhelm Liebknecht, H. M. Hyndman, and Ernest Belfort Bax; but other people were involved as well; and some of the contested ideas were popular among social democrats. The battle lines were most clearly drawn over the Eastern Question and cooperation with bourgeois parties--with Liebknecht and the SDF on one side, Kautsky and Bernstein on the other. The agrarian question led Kautsky to explore why small-scale production was not declining as expected. In controversy with the SDF in Englanc;l, Bernstein found allies in the Fabians, yet remained critical of them. Polemics on South Africa and on the Ottoman Empire raised the question of colonialism, which Bax then tied to the expectation of imminent collapse. Bernstein's answer was that the continued existence of small-scale production indicated that a collapse was not desirable since the economy was not ready for general socialization. The debate on the Eastern Question and the one on Poland raised the possibilities of specific earlier positions of Marx once being mistaken or later becoming outdated. In a series of articles, Bax and Kautsky debated the meaning of Marxism. Kautsky and Bernstein emphasized the need to study actual material conditions, and they criticized socialists who thought in a utopian way or used only slogans. Bernstein's revisionism began in a critique of what he considered non-Marxist ideas. And Kautsky supported Bernstein because they basically agreed, at first.
