Abstract

The structure of the theory-practice relation in social democracy proves to be the social foundation of the various interpretations of Marxism in the Second International. The two main trends, centrist orthodoxy and revisionism, were profoundly unsatisfying to Lukács precisely because they reflected this theory-practice relation. At the theoretical level the split between theory and practice had increasingly differentiated and fragmented the original unity of Marxist thought in a plethora of antinomial oppositions. Thus where Marx himself had seen no contradiction between value and fact, subject and object, freedom and necessity, theory and class spontaneity, leadership and mass, under the Second International it became impossible to preserve his classical synthesis.