S.JONES BERNSTEIN, EDUARD (1850–1932)

H.S.JONES BERNSTEIN, EDUARD (1850–1932)

Eduard Bernstein, the main figure in the German socialist revision of Marxism, was the son of a train driver. While still working as a bank clerk he joined the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, the more left wing of the two German socialist groupings and the first Marxist party in any country. However in 1878 Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law made it necessary for him to flee to Switzerland. From there he edited Der Sozialde- mokrat (The Social Democrat), the official news-paper of the German Social Democrats. Exile, however, did not produce security, for in 1887 pressure from Bismarck led the Swiss authorities to close the party offices. So, like Marx (see MARX AND MARXISM) and Engels before him, Bernstein moved to London where he continued his journalistic activities. Marx had died 4 years earlier but Bernstein worked closely with Friedrich Engels and also made contact with the Fabians and with Henry Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation.

Meanwhile in Germany the Anti-Socialist Law (1878–90) served to push the Social Democratic Party in a Marxist direction, for it seemed to validate the supposition that liberal freedoms would be annulled if they threatened to facilitate a transition to socialism. Thus the first congress of the re-legalized party laid down a policy perspective in broadly Marxist terms. This Erfurt Programme of 1891 remained the party orthodoxy for decades to come. Bernstein had played his part in its drafting and was at that time a

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convinced Marxist, so it posed no immediate problem for him. However, during the course of the decade the shift was to occur that made him the most vilified man in world socialism.

In 1896 Bernstein began a dispute with the English Marxist ERNEST BELFORT BAX on colonialism. Both shared the prevailing analysis that graded societies at various stages along the path from barbarism to civilization but took a different stance on the plight of those they termed savage and barbarian. Bax thought such peoples should not be subjugated; Bernstein that they should, in order to bring them up to the norms of a higher civilization. The clear intimation of later disputes was already evident, for Bax despised modern civilization and wanted it replaced; whereas Bernstein admired it and wanted it further developed. In the course of this exchange Bax became the first person to pronounce on Bernstein’s breach with Marxism. Such a charge must have appeared extraordinary at the time. Bax was a minnow, a member of a small British Marxist group; Bernstein was a big fish in the largest socialist party in the world. He also enjoyed the immense prestige of being the executor of Engels’s estate and his joint literary executor. Yet, as we shall see, Bax led where more famous socialist theoreticians were soon to follow.

In the same year Bernstein published a number of articles in Die neue Zeit (The New Time), edited by Karl Kautsky, the leading Marxist theoretician of the age. Here Bernstein attempted to situate the party within the prevailing socio-economic context. In view of later developments it needs stressing that no challenge to Marxism was originally intended or perceived. Bernstein, through his link with Engels and his senior position within the party, seemed in many ways an embodiment of ideological rectitude. However, his positing of Marxist presuppositions against current realities revealed some significant anomalies; for example although there had been no major economic downturn for about a quarter of a century, the official party theory declared capitalism prone to recurrent crises. Furthermore it seemed that the working-class population was not yet qualified to meet socialist assumptions concerning participation in administration. The level of public knowledge still made it inevitable that decisions would be taken by trained specialists. Bernstein thought it quite wrong to attribute revolutionary attributes, participatory inclinations or administrative capabilities to the working people. He also noted that the working classes were not solidifying into one homogeneous mass with similar interests. On the contrary, they were becoming ever more differentiated and stratified. Over the 1890s, then, Bernstein slowly came to the conclusion that Marx and Engels’s analysis was of its time; that its time was over, and that the socialist movement’s analyses and aspirations were, consequently, implausible. This he viewed not as a breach with Marxism but as an updating that embodied the open-minded approach of the founders themselves. Editor Kautsky must have been getting increasingly uncomfortable for in 1898 he wrote of Bernstein’s regression in theory and doubted whether they could go on working together. In the same year Kautsky was among the majority who rejected revisionism at the party’s Stuttgart conference. Kautsky and LIEBKNECHT joined many others in suggesting that Bernstein’s views derived from the conditions of his English exile. In their opinion English circumstances were unique and so no general conclusions could be drawn from them. This point certainly had credibility, for the gradualist approach clearly had a better chance in Britain’s parliamentary system than in Germany’s more authoritarian and monarchical regime.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 64 In 1899 Bernstein responded to pressure to present his views in systematic form and

produced The Preconditions of Socialism, which has become the classic statement of parliamentary socialism. Bernstein’s fundamental point was that the situation Marx and Engels had described decades earlier, and which furnished the basis for their proposals, no longer applied. For Marx and Engels the anarchy of capitalist production made the economy inherently unstable; the swings of the trade cycle would result in dislocation and collapse. This Bernstein rejected on the basis that the growth of trusts and cartels had stabilized capitalism and so had overcome its anarchy of production. Marx and Engels, unsurprisingly, had been overinfluenced by the large-scale economic crises of 1825, 1836, 1847, 1857 and 1873. These were unlikely to recur. Consequently capitalism was not obviously approaching its terminal phase; it might have its crises, its stops and starts, but none of them looked like being fatal to the whole system.

Furthermore the class polarization presumed in the 1848 Communist Manifesto was not verified by later developments. The possessing classes were actually increasing in number. Middle-sized firms were not declining; they survived easily alongside large undertakings. Furthermore large industry actually gave life to smaller and medium trades. Consequently the middle class was not getting smaller. The presumed proletarianization, which should so fundamentally fortify the social base of the revolutionary class, was not occurring. In Marxist theory the revolutionary force was that of the immense majority. This democratic credential now seemed unlikely to accrue.

Marxist theory was first formulated at a time when the working classes had not got the vote and when their trade union activity was either illegal or severely circumscribed. In this context workers had only very limited means of furthering their aims and so revolutionary tactics seemed the only realistic possibility. By the 1890s, however, this situation no longer prevailed. In the major countries of Europe democratic advance was evident. In Germany the 1871 constitution granted the vote to all men over the age of 25. In this situation the need for revolution had to be re-examined. The idea of revolution had

a central place in the ideology of German socialism. The movement was seen by both friends and foes as culturally outside of its society: ‘vagabonds without a fatherland’ in the eyes of their opponents. Opposition, then, was total, so transformation should be total. To Bernstein this mentality was myopic. Revolution seemed a purely negative act. It removed the barriers to social improvement but, in itself, did nothing to ensure that better arrangements would be forthcoming. Furthermore the Marxist recommendation of proletarian revolution was based on a false historical analogy. The Marxist system was one that attempted to tidy up history into neat patterns of change. Thus, just as the rising bourgeoisie had needed to rise up against feudal encumbrances, so would the proletariat have to revolt against the constraints of the capitalist system. This is what Bernstein rejected. He acknowledged that feudalism had to be brought down by revolution because its unbending structures allowed no alternative. LIBERALISM, however, was not like this. Its flexible arrangements facilitated reforms and provided opportunities for participation. These opportunities should be taken. Liberalism, seen by Marx and Engels as the ideology of the exploiters, was viewed by Bernstein as a doctrine that could lead in

a socialistic direction. The task, then, was not to oust liberalism but extend it. Its theories of consent and participation should be utilized to place workers into positions of influence. Revolution for Marxists was part of the neo-Hegelian dialectic of history; encrypted into the socio-genetic code of social advancement. Bernstein rejected both the

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determinism and the economic materialism of this approach, which he replaced with a neo-Kantian moral imperative. Individuals were now to be seen as the creators of their own destinies in their own ways. For this reason Bernstein can be classified with the more usual nineteenth-century progressive doctrines of linear development.

A further impediment to revolution and its presumed socialist aftermath was the nature of the working class. Not even in England (where he was living), let alone in Germany and France, did this class seem capable of planning, regulating and administering their respective societies. By and large workers were poor and uneducated, lived in squalid and overcrowded conditions, and were almost entirely bereft of the cultural standards that socialism required. At their current stage the working class seemed quite incapable of taking over the economy, let along the state. They still had a long way to go and Bernstein recommended that they make a start, but not in the way that most Marxists presumed. Their task was not to man the barricades and produce a dictatorship of the proletariat but to get elected into trade union, co-operative and local government positions. In this way the working class would develop administrative expertise and experience, and so socialism would be achieved gradually and peacefully.

This, for Bernstein, was socialism: a society in which workers ran their own affairs. In contrast not only to Marx and Engels, but also to such contemporaries as BEBEL and Kautsky, he had scant focus on the new society that socialism should introduce. He declared himself not concerned with the distant future but only with the present and immediate future. For him socialism was not the delivery of a plan or a blueprint but just the implementation of a principle. This refusal to envisage and explicate the ‘final aim’ was contrary to the whole culture and social psychology of German Marxism, which held before the workers an appealing vision of a liberated society.

These proposals seemed like an immense shift of focus for the movement. For Bernstein, in contrast, it was only a change in their ideology but not in their practice. He thought the two had come into contradiction. The theory was one thing and the practice another. The platform rhetoric was of revolution but the everyday activity was of reform and compromise. Social democrats talked of revolution but actually they had made electoral alliances with the middle class and had co-operated with employers. From this perspective Bernstein was merely raising the practice of Social Democrats to a theoretical level and asking them to abandon a theory that no longer conformed either to prevailing conditions or to the realities of their behaviour. German social democracy, in short, should emancipate itself from an outworn phraseology and recognize itself for what it really was, a democratic, constitutionalist movement of gradual, incremental reform.

Bernstein, then, told the German socialists what they were really like rather than what they imagined they were like; to some of them this was unforgivable. During these years the German Social Democratic Party was not merely over-whelmingly the largest socialist party in the world; it was also regarded as the most revolutionary. Its proceedings were not only closely monitored by supporters within the country, but also watched from afar by socialists everywhere. The charge that the Social Democratic Party had never really acted as a revolutionary force was not something its leading intellectuals wished to hear. There was particular hostility to Bernstein’s idea that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing. This cut deeply into the utopian optimism of the party, which significantly based its appeal on its supposed ability to lead the working class into a transformed and superior existence.

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The crusade of polemics against Bernstein began with the Russian journalist Parvus (Alexander Helphand) and with ROSA LUXEMBURG. For the latter Bernstein had abandoned Marxism rather than updating it. In ‘Social Reform or Revolution?’ she argued that the essential core of Marxism included the presumption of an inevitable capitalist crisis that made socialism objectively necessary. Bernstein’s Kantian ethics placed him entirely outside of this framework. Soon most of the major figures of European socialism joined in the attack; Kautsky, Plekhanov, Bebel, LABRIOLA, Jaurès, Adler and Clara Zetkin all voiced their disapproval. The issues Bernstein raised cut deeply into the movement’s self-image and would not go away in a hurry. At the 1903 party conference in Dresden a resolution condemning the attempt to change the policy based on class struggle was passed by 288 votes to a mere eleven. In 1917, 18 years after the publication of Preconditions, LENIN, in State and Revolution, still felt it necessary to voice his anger, denouncing Bernstein as a philistine, opportunist, renegade and ex-Social Democrat.

Presumably, if Bernstein was so wrong, he could have been safely ignored. That he wasn’t indicates that he had touched a raw nerve. The party, and even more the trade union movement, was engaged in piecemeal adjustments and compromises to a greater extent than they liked to acknowledge. Furthermore if Bernstein’s revisionism was anti- Marxist he could certainly find Marxists who showed similar tendencies. This started with the founders themselves. Though clear advocates of revolution, Marx and Engels never fully rejected the parliamentary path. They never criticized the parliamentary focus of the English Chartists, nor that of the German Social Democratic Party. In an 1872 speech Marx imagined that England, the USA and possibly Holland might achieve socialism peacefully. In the years after Marx’s death, and on the basis of a male working- class franchise, Engels clearly shifted in a constitutionalist direction. In a sense that his detractors were loath to recognize, Engels opened the door for Bernstein, as the latter was pleased to demonstrate in the foreword to Preconditions. Of the later leaders of German socialism, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht had also moved towards gradualism, combining their declared hostility to constitutionalism with active parliamentary work. The Preconditions of Socialism made Bernstein immediately notorious rather than simply famous throughout world socialism. The polemical responses to his work are now almost forgotten. Preconditions itself is not nearly as well known as it deserves to be, for it can now be seen as the basic theoretical statement of the parliamentary socialism that for over

a century was characteristic of Western liberal democratic societies. Any supposition that Preconditions marked Bernstein’s departure from the political left is not borne out by his later actions. In 1901 he was allowed to return to Germany for, on the basis of the revisionism dispute, the authorities believed his presence would do more to divide than to fortify German socialism. He became a Social Democrat deputy in the Reichstag from 1902–6 and 1912–18, and then a member of the parliament of the Weimar Republic between 1920 and 1928. In 1914 he opposed the First World War and a year later voted against the war credits. In 1917 he left the Social Democratic Party to join its more left-wing offshoot, the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany). After the war he rejoined the main party and argued strongly against turning the German revolution of 1918–19 in a Bolshevik direction. Bernstein lived just long enough to witness the Wall Street crash of 1929. The consequent global economic crisis

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brought Germany Nazism rather than socialism. He died just six weeks before Hitler seized power. Nazi thugs destroyed the urn that contained his ashes.