Introduction

Abstract

Part 2 shifts the discussion from late nineteenth-century Germany to Russia between 1890 and 1930. Whereas German Social Democracy has become associated with the economism and reformism of the Second International, Russian Social Democracy found its realisation in the Revolution of 1917 and came to represent revolutionary socialism. It has been argued in Part 1 that this schema opposing the revolutionary practice of the Russian party to the reformist practice of the German party is largely a construct of a history which ignores the political and economic conditions within which the respective organisations worked. In particular, arguments have been advanced which demonstrate the fallacy of treating the theoretical work of German socialists as the elaboration ofa ‘Classical Marxism’ laid down in the writings of Marx and Engels.