The Workers' Movement: Between Orthodoxy and Revolutionary Practice
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Second International: Orthodoxy, Revisionism, and Revolutionary Dialectic
The Second International (1889–1914) was the high point of the organized workers’ movement in Europe. Within it, three fundamental positions crystallized, each implying a different relationship between theory and practice.
Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) represented revisionism. His slogan — “The final goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything” — called for abandoning the revolutionary claim of Marxism and concentrating on concrete reforms. Bernstein’s relation to Hegel: he saw in dialectic a metaphysical relic that had to be overcome. Scientific analysis was to orient itself by the empirical social sciences, not by speculative philosophy.
Bernstein’s position contained a legitimate objection to deterministic ossification. If revolution is guaranteed by objective laws, why keep fighting at all? But his solution — abandoning the systematic claim altogether — threw out the baby with the bathwater. Without dialectical method, all that remained was pragmatic muddling-through, without theoretical orientation.
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) represented orthodoxy. As the “pope of Marxism,” he defended the revolutionary perspective against Bernstein’s reformism. But his orthodoxy was oddly rigid. Kautsky stressed the inevitability of revolution as the result of capitalist contradictions. The party’s task was not to make the revolution, but to prepare the working class for its historically necessary victory.
Kautsky’s relation to dialectic: he held on to it, but understood it mechanically. For him, the dialectical “laws” were objective natural laws that assert themselves with necessity. The mediation of necessity and freedom, of objective logic and subjective practice, did not succeed. The result was a fatalistic evolutionism: one need only wait until the contradictions of capitalism force its own self-sublation.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), by contrast, developed a revolutionary dialectic that came closer to the Hegelian method than either of the other two positions. Her writings — above all Reform or Revolution (1899) and The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions (1906) — combined theoretical analysis with practical engagement.
Luxemburg’s central insight: reform and revolution are not external opposites but are dialectically mediated. Concrete reforms are necessary, but they gain their meaning only within the horizon of the revolutionary perspective. The movement is not “everything” (Bernstein), but neither is it merely a means to a fixed final goal (Kautsky). The movement develops the conditions under which the goal first becomes concrete at all.
Luxemburg’s relation to dialectic: she practiced dialectical thinking without systematically reflecting on it. Her analyses show the self-movement of social contradictions, the productive power of negativity, the mediation of spontaneity and organization. But she did not have the logical means to ground these insights systematically.
The tragic dimension: Luxemburg’s life and death demonstrated the limits of practice without adequate theory. Her murder in January 1919 was not merely a political assassination, but the expression of the failure of a revolutionary movement that had not sufficiently thought through its own conditions.
Lenin: Dialectic as Practice-Theory
Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924) recognized in his Philosophical Notebooks (1914–16) the practical dimension of Hegelian logic. His central formula — “Dialectics = Logic + Epistemology” — meant: logic is not abstract theory but the structure of cognition, and cognition is itself practice.[1]
This insight enabled Lenin’s dialectical analysis of imperialism and his recognition of the “favorable moment” for the October Revolution of 1917. The revolution was neither the mechanical result of objective laws nor a voluntarist leap, but a dialectical mediation of necessity and freedom.
The limit: Lenin’s practical successes concealed theoretical deficits. His materialist “inversion” of logic remained external — he overlooked the fact that Hegel’s logic already explicates the structure of any practice whatsoever, independently of idealist or materialist interpretation.
The tension between the subtle Philosophical Notebooks (1914–16) and the dogmatic Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) was never resolved. Revolutionary practice left no time for theoretical completion — with devastating consequences for Soviet philosophy after Lenin’s death in 1924.
On the Russian reception of Hegel, see Chapter 17; for a detailed philosophical assessment of the Philosophical Notebooks, see Chapter 21.1.
V. I. Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks (1914–1916), in: Collected Works, vol. 38, p. 165. ↩︎