Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein , 1850-1932, German socialist. From 1872 he was actively associated with the Social Democratic party. In 1878, antisocialist legislation sent him into exile. In 1898, he aroused controversy among German socialists by critiquing Marxism, denying that the collapse of capitalism was imminent, and maintaining that the bourgeoisie was not wholly parasitic. He saw socialism as the final result of liberalism, not revolution. Returning from England to Berlin in 1901 he became the leader of revisionism, opposed by Karl Johann Kautsky . Bernstein protested his party's support for war by resigning in 1914. He rejoined the party after World War I, leading it as a popular reformist party. He served briefly in the government (1919), and later opposed the Nazis. His most important book setting forth criticisms of Marxism is Evolutionary Socialism (1898, tr. 1909).

Bibliography: See his reminiscences, My Years of Exile (1921); P. Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (1954); J. W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London (1970).

Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932) As the leading revisionist thinker of the German Social Democratic Party, Bernstein sought to cleanse the party's ideology of what he regarded as its anachronistic Marxist assumptions and ideas. At the philosophical level and on the basis of a newly assertive neo-Kantianism, he rejected the positivism and evolutionism, as well as the residual Hegelianism that he detected in orthodox Marxism. Consequently, at the political level he challenged the immiseration and proletarianization theses as applied to capitalist societies, as well as the amorality, fatalism, and pessimism that underpinned them. For Bernstein, then, socialism represented not just a distant goal, but also an ethical ideal that possessed far more than mere inspirational significance in the present. In sum, despite his often misread statement ‘the movement is everything, the goal nothing’, Bernstein came to stand for a socialist gradualism that should be distinguished from mere reformism (see P. Gay 's book about ‘Bernstein's challenge to Marx’, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 1952
). See also KAUTSKY, KARL.