German Marxism and the decline of the permanent revolution, 1870-1909

This article discusses the development of German Social Democratic Party strategy in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, as a result of the works of Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. It ties the evolution of Marxist orthodoxy to the emergence of parliamentary democracy in different European societies. In particular, it discusses the way parliamentary conditions impacted on how the proletarian revolution was imagined. Revolution was newly defined as the establishment through parliamentary means of a new government representing a new social class. Also, the early Marxist strategy of ‘permanent revolution’, which had allowed proletarian-socialist minority rule, was abandoned.