ABSTRACT
To understand what was involved in the great debate over Marxism which shook the European Socialist movement around 1900, it must be borne in mind that the challenge came from inside the fold. In the strict sense, 'revisionism' was confined to areas where Marxism had become the official doctrine of the Social-Democratic movement: principally Germany, Austria and Russia. If the greatest representative of French Socialism was, from the theoretical viewpoint, on the fringe of the discussion, the majority of West European Socialists hardly figured in it at all. The eclectic vulgar socialism to which the revisionists would like to reduce Marxism is something beyond which they have not even begun to advance. Vienna became a centre of Marxian Socialism and remained one even after 1918, when the majority of Central European Marxists went over to the Leninist faith. Orthodox Marxism, as interpreted by Kautsky or Plekhanov, was in tune with the scientific determinism of the age.
