The version of the successors

Like Marx, Bernstein also viewed the relationship between ideological thought and economic conditions in historical perspective. It was a very different perspective, though. Bernstein believed that in earlier epochs ideology served the purpose of concealing the economic motive through political arrangements of domination. Formerly, peasants and workers were kept, like primitive peoples, under the spell of ideologies which put men at the mercy of nature. Modern economic and technological development leaves a greater latitude to ethical and other ideological factors and determines social institutions in ever-diminishing degrees. Modern society has become ‘richer in ideology which is not determined by economics and nature as it manifests itself in economic power’. Such ‘free ideology’ has for the first time become relevant for the most numerous class in modem society. We witness here another un-Marxian application of Marxian principles and a very cogent one at that: the freedom to choose between ideologies is derived from economic developments within the capitalist structure. Evidently, only on the strength of such an assumption of the freedom of choice between ideologies could Lenin argue that ‘all belittling’ of the socialist ideology ‘means … strengthening the influence of the bourgeois ideology among the workers’ (SW, i, 175–6).