However, the Bernsteinian and 'critical' tendency, to which the majority of the 'legal Marxists' turned, deprived the Socialists of this liberty and corrupted socialist consciousness by vulgarizing Marxism, by preaching the toning down of social antagonisms, by declaring the idea of the social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd, by restricting the labor movement and the class struggle to narrow trade unionism and to a 'realistic' struggle for petty, gradual reforms.