ABSTRACT
Nationalisation of the economy was feasible only in ‘industrially highly developed’ Germany and England. The new ‘orthodox Marxism’ can be regarded, quite simply, as an adaptation to the new, more advanced conditions emerging in Germany at the end of the late nineteenth century. Yet the new formula also emerged out of Karl Kautsky’s deception with, as he saw it, the counter-revolutionary development of the petty-bourgeois masses and political parties in Germany. Just like their Russian comrades, the German social democrats profoundly changed their understanding of the conditions of the proletarian revolution in the late nineteenth century. Fortunately for the German social democrats, the conclusion that proletarian revolution required highly developed, fully industrialised capitalism did not have the dramatic implications that it had for their Russian comrades. The bottom line of ‘orthodox Marxism’, German and Russian, was that the petty bourgeois and peasant masses were never socialists.
