ABSTRACT
The Godesberg program of 1959—with its emphasis on doctrinal revisionism, an end to the class struggle, a mixed economic system, internal pluralism, and making the Social Democratic Party (SPD) a people’s party—had defused the Marxist programmatic orientation of earlier decades. On the positive side, SPD leaders and writers, especially those in the left-center camp, attempted to work out a theory of democratic socialism that would fill the ideological void existent since 1959 and break the monopoly on theoretical discussion in Juso hands since 1969. The new generation of reformist SPD leaders pursued a pragmatic course that rejected ideology as the basis for action. Reformist-oriented SPD leaders and publicists tried to defuse the bias against socialism, which implicitly included democratic socialism, by launching a well-orchestrated campaign against Juso-supported Marxist theory. A brief survey of the views of left-center leaders and authors also shows their acceptance of Bernstein revisionism, but modernized and updated to deal with the problems of the 1970s.
