THE GREAT SCHISMS

The argument. Both wanted capitalism dead. Marx insisted the working class must first seize state power and wield it — a workers' dictatorship — before the state withers. Bakunin answered that any state, "red" or otherwise, breeds a new ruling class: "when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick." Beneath the theory ran a personal war of pamphlets, faction-packing and accusations of conspiracy.

The fallout. At the 1872 Hague Congress, Marx's faction expelled Bakunin and moved the International's seat to New York, effectively killing it. The anarchist wing regrouped at St. Imier. From this point on, the anti-capitalist world has two permanent, mutually excommunicated lineages — and every Marxist state that later shot its anarchists (Kronstadt 1921, Barcelona 1937) was, for anarchists, Bakunin's prophecy arriving on schedule.

STAKES: THE STATE — WEAPON OR ENEMY!

The argument. Eduard Bernstein looked at rising wages, spreading suffrage and resilient capitalism and said the quiet part aloud: the collapse isn't coming, so socialism should be an evolutionary, ethical project — "the movement is everything, the final goal nothing." Kautsky defended the orthodox catechism; Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution delivered the killing line: reformism doesn't choose a slower road to the same goal, it chooses a different goal.

The fallout. The SPD formally condemned revisionism and practiced it anyway. The debate created the permanent reform/revolution fault line that would later split every socialist party on earth — and made "revisionist" the movement's favourite insult for the next century.

STAKES: REFORM OR REVOLUTION

The argument. At the Russian party's Second Congress — held in a Brussels flour warehouse, then a London chapel — the delegates split over who counts as a member: anyone who "renders regular personal assistance" (Lenin) or merely "regular cooperation" (Martov). Trivial words, total stakes: a narrow combat organization of professionals versus a broad European-style party.

The fallout. Lenin's faction won one key vote and took the name Bolshevik ("majority-ite") forever, though it was usually the minority. The two factions hardened into separate parties; in 1917 one of them seized a state. Every vanguard party since is a descendant of Lenin's side of the room.

STAKES: WHAT IS A PARTY?

The argument. On 4 August 1914 the SPD — the largest socialist party on earth, formally committed to opposing imperialist war — voted for the Kaiser's war credits. Nearly every party of the Second International followed its own flag into the trenches. A small minority (Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht) called it the greatest betrayal in the movement's history.

The fallout. The Second International died as a revolutionary body. The internationalists regrouped at Zimmerwald in 1915, and out of that rump came the Comintern, the communist/social-democrat divorce, and the permanent communist conviction that social democracy will always, at the decisive hour, side with its own bourgeoisie.

STAKES: CLASS OR NATION

The argument. The pope of orthodox Marxism examined the Bolshevik state and pronounced it a dictatorship over the proletariat: socialism without democracy, he argued, is not socialism. Lenin's reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, is mostly remembered for its title and its thesis that parliamentary democracy is a bourgeois shell around class rule.

The fallout. Marxism's founding generation split into two irreconcilable readings of its own scripture — democratic socialism and communism — each holding the other responsible for what came next: fascism's rise on one side, the Gulag on the other.

STAKES: CAN SOCIALISM EXIST WITHOUT DEMOCRACY?

The argument. Lenin's own left flank — Dutch-German council communists, Bordiga's Italian abstentionists, Pankhurst in Britain — refused parliaments, official trade unions and compromise, insisting the workers' councils were the revolution. Lenin's 1920 pamphlet branded it all an "infantile disorder": revolutionaries must fight inside every reactionary institution.

The fallout. The lefts were marginalized inside the Comintern and expelled or broken by 1922. When the Kronstadt sailors rose in 1921 demanding soviets without party dictatorship and were shot for it, the communist left concluded the revolution had died at Bolshevik hands — a verdict it has spent a century elaborating from very small rooms.

STAKES: COUNCILS OR PARTY

The argument. Could socialism be completed in one backward country? Stalin said yes — "socialism in one country" — and built the fortress. Trotsky said no: the revolution survives only by spreading ("permanent revolution"), and the bureaucracy strangling it was a new caste betraying October. Beneath the theory: a raw succession fight for Lenin's mantle.

The fallout. Trotsky was expelled (1927), exiled (1929), written out of the photographs, and murdered in Mexico with an ice axe (1940). His followers were annihilated in the purges; abroad they built the Fourth International, which split, and split, and split. "Trotskyist" became the Stalinist word for anyone about to be shot.

STAKES: ONE COUNTRY OR WORLD REVOLUTION

The argument. Yugoslavia's partisans had liberated their own country and saw no reason to run it from Moscow. Stalin expected obedience on foreign policy, economics and everything else. Tito declined; Stalin reportedly boasted "I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito," then sent assassins instead. Tito's alleged reply: "Stop sending people to kill me… If you don't, I will send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."

The fallout. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, survived the blockade, and invented its own ideology to justify the divorce: workers' self-management, market socialism, non-alignment. The precedent — a ruling party defying Moscow and living — made every later split thinkable.

STAKES: NATIONAL ROADS TO SOCIALISM

The argument. At a closed session of the 20th Congress, Khrushchev read four hours of Stalin's crimes into the record: the cult, the torture, the fabricated confessions. Delegates fainted. The speech leaked within weeks, and every communist on earth had to decide what they had been defending for thirty years.

The fallout. Hungary rose within months and was crushed by Soviet tanks — as Budapest's workers' councils were, briefly, everything the books had promised. Western parties hemorrhaged members. Mao and Hoxha read de-Stalinization as betrayal; Togliatti began drafting "polycentrism." Nearly every schism after 1956 — Maoist, Hoxhaist, Eurocommunist — starts from this speech.

STAKES: WHAT WAS STALINISM?

The argument. Khrushchev preached peaceful coexistence with the West and aid with strings; Mao called that capitulation and Moscow's new course "revisionism," while the Soviets called people's war "adventurism" and pulled every technician out of China. Polemics escalated from coded pamphlets to open letters to, in 1969, actual artillery on the Ussuri River border.

The fallout. The world movement split into two rival Romes, each with its own aligned parties, guerrillas and summits. Albania went with Beijing; most of Latin America's insurgents eventually did too. The split drove China toward Nixon in 1972 — communism's schism helping decide the Cold War.

STAKES: WHO INHERITS LENIN?

The argument. When Mao shook Nixon's hand and unveiled the Three Worlds Theory — align with anyone against Soviet "social-imperialism" — Enver Hoxha declared that China, too, had gone revisionist. Only Albania, he concluded, still upheld Marxism–Leninism as Stalin had left it.

The fallout. China cut off aid in 1978; Albania answered with 170,000 concrete bunkers and total autarky. A small international of "Hoxhaist" parties split off from the Maoist movement. The purest church in the schism ledger was also the loneliest: by 1990 it had outlived its own state.

STAKES: THE LAST ORTHODOXY

The argument. After watching Chile's democratic road end in Pinochet's coup — and Prague's reform end under Soviet tanks — Berlinguer, Carrillo and Marchais concluded that Western communism must permanently accept pluralism, elections and even NATO. Carrillo's "Eurocommunism" and the State drew Moscow's formal anathema in return.

The fallout. The Italian party reached a third of the vote and the edge of government; then the compromise collapsed, Afghanistan and Poland finished the divorce, and 1989 dissolved the question. Eurocommunism's DNA survives in Europe's post-communist left parties — which is either its vindication or its obituary, depending on which file you read first.

STAKES: BALLOTS, TANKS, OR NEITHER

The argument. With Mao dead and the Gang of Four arrested, the party had to judge its own founder. Deng's formula: Mao was "70% correct, 30% wrong" — keep the portrait on the gate, bury the Cultural Revolution, and declare that "practice is the sole criterion of truth." Orthodox Maoists, at home and worldwide, called the reforms capitalist restoration outright.

The fallout. China kept the Leninist party-state and married it to markets — the most consequential ideological pivot since 1917. Maoism proper emigrated: to Peru's Sendero Luminoso, Nepal's people's war, India's Naxalites, all fighting under the banner of a China that no longer exists.

STAKES: WHAT COUNTS AS SOCIALISM?