Yekaterina Kuskova - Populism, Marxism and Revisionism

Populism, Marxism and Revisionism

Kuskova was born in Ufa (Ural province). Her father was a school teacher. As a child, she moved to Samara and then to Saratov. In the 1880s, she became involved in the revolutionary movement. In 1890, she went to study in Moscow and participated in clandestine Narodnik circles. She was affiliated with the party of the 'People's Right' of Mark Natanson and met the future Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov. She was arrested in 1893 and exiled to Nizhni Novgorod (Gorki).

Then, she converted to Marxism and joined a group of Social-Democratic exiles that included her future husband, Sergei Prokopovich, whom she married in 1895. After being released, the couple moving to Germany in 1897. There, they met George Plekhanov and became active in the Union of Russian Socil-Democrats Abroad. In 1898 they became members of the newly-created RSDRP. However, by the late 1890s, Kuskova and Prokopovich had become increasingly doubtful about orthodox Marxism. Kuskova, in particular, became a proponent of Eduard Bernstein's Revisionism, which she championed in her famous and highly controversial 1899 article Credo.

Kuskova believed that the orthodox Marxist theory of the inevitable collapse of capitalism was wrong, that the development of capitalism in Russia was beneficial, and that capitalism could develop into socialism by means of gradual reform. These views were labeled 'Economism' by her critics (a somewhat vague term the orthodox Marxists applied to a number of different heresies, from revolutionary syndicalism to revisionism). These critics included George Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, V.I. Lenin and many others. In the course of the controversy, Kuskova was expelled from the RSDRP. Her husband left the party as well. The Economism controversy also attracted attention from Western European socialists and became part of the larger battle between reformists and revolutionaries that raged in the late nineteenth century.