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Evolutionary Socialism Eduard Bernstein EVOLUTIONARY EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM EDUARD BERNSTEIN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM A Criticism and Affirmation INTRODUCTION BY SIDNEY HOOK SCHOCKEN BOOKS • NEW YORK Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie Translated by Edith C. Harvey First schocken Paperback Edition 196 Fourth printing, 1967 HX BS53 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-16649 Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Introduction by Sidney Hook vii Preface to English Edition - - - xxi Preface - xxiii I. The Fundamental Doctrines of Marxist Socialism - - - i (a) The Scientific Elements of Marxism - i (6) The Materialist Interpretation of History and Historic Necessity 6 (c) The Marxist Doctrine of Class War and of the Evolution of Capital - - - 18 II. The Economic Development of Modern Society 28 (a) On the Meaning of the Marxist Theory of Value 28 (6) The Distribution of Wealth in the Modern Community 40 (c) The Classes of Enterprises in the Produc- tion and Distribution of Wealth - - 54 (d) Crises and Possibilities of Adjustment in Modern Economy 73 III. The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy 95 (a) The Political and Economic Preliminary Conditions of Socialism - - - 95 (6) The Economic Capacities of Co-operative Associations - - - - - -109 (c) Democracy and Socialism - - - 135 (d) The Most Pressing Problems of Social Democracy - - - - - - 165 Conclusion : Ultimate Aim and Tendency— Kant against Cant ... - 200 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/evolutionarysociaOObern INTRODUCTION Eduard Bernstein is the father of socialist "revision- ism." The term "revisionism," however, is almost as ambiguous as the term "socialism." Particularly today, when the political ties of the communist world are being fractured by charges of "revisionism," it becomes necessary to distinguish the various move- ments and families of doctrine which are encompassed by the name. Bernstein's "revisionism" was a strong current in the pre-World War I socialist movement. Latter-day "revisionism" is a series of turbulent eddies in con- temporary communism. Both have their source in Marxism. Before expatiating on their differences, something should be said about this common origin. It speaks worlds about the nature of Marxism as a movement and body of doctrine that the term "revisionism" should be so largely employed in Marxist circles as an epithet of abuse. Indeed, its connotations of disparagement, deviation, incipient betrayal, and apostasy are the only common elements one can find in the wide variety of meanings the term has in the literature of Marxism. In Marxist circles to pin the label of "revisionist" on the ideas of a socialist thinker is comparable to exposing a Christian writer as a "heretic" or "atheist" during the heyday of Western religious faith. It was characteristic of Eduard Bernstein that he frankly called himself a "revisionist." Without re- nouncing his allegiance to the socialist movement Vlll and its ideals, he pointed to those developments in history and economics which invalidated some of Marx's analyses and predictions. He thus made the revision of Marx an intellectual necessity for those who wanted their scientific professions to square with experience. Unfortunately, they were not as numerous as Bernstein had expected. The reaction of "the true believers" to Bernstein's criticisms and the venomous nature of their attack upon him indicates that Bernstein was somewhat naive about the nature of mass movements. His position was rendered more uncomfortable by the fact that his criticisms of orthodox Marxism were highly praised in quarters that were hostile to all varieties of socialism. But Bernstein's intellectual courage measured up to his intellectual honesty. He stood his ground despite official condemnation of his criti- cisms and excited calls for his exclusion from the German Social Democratic Party. He restated and defended his position, never denying that he was a revisionist even when he protested against the misunderstandings of his revisionist views and the erroneous implications drawn from them by friend and foe. After Bernstein—and probably because of the intensity of the anti-Bernstein jeremiad—none of the bold reinterpreters of Marx's work, whether they read Kant into his social thought or Blanqui into his theory of revolution, proclaimed themselves "revisionists." They repudiated suggestions that they were revising or modifying Marx's views. They insisted that they were merely restoring his thought, purifying it of its corruptions, and presenting it in its pristine form. The process of revising Marx by IX rediscovering him still continues. One modern ex- positor finds in Marx an anticipation of Freud; another that he is really a Zen-Buddhist, perhaps more accurately a Zen-Judaist. It may not be long before voices among the cultural avant-garde pro- claim—on the basis of Marx's early writings, re- pudiated in his maturity—that what Marx really meant by his doctrine of "alienation" is what Kierke- gaard and Heidegger have darkly expressed in the scriptural writings of existentialism. What makes this hostility to the term "revisionism," and to the processes of critical examination of the cluster of ideas associated with Marxism, all the more paradoxical is the fierce insistence by those who regard themselves as the watchdogs of orthodoxy upon the "scientific" character of Marxism. For the very nature of a scientific statement requires that it be held tentatively, subject to the self-corrective procedures of the methods by which it is confirmed. One would have thought that to be scientific is to be committed to an attitude of revisionism. Bernstein himself never lost an opportunity to remind his critics that Marx and Engels had been the chief revisionists of the socialist thought of their day. Ever since Charles Peirce developed his theory of "critical fallibilism" in the latter half of the 19th century, it has become a commonplace that, in principle, every scientific statement can be challenged and withdrawn in the light of the evidence and in the interests of the systematic simplicity and fruitfulness of the body of knowledge of which it is a part. But to most socialists science was merely a set of doctrines which substi- tuted for religion as a support of moral faith. Bernstein was no revisionist in the sense in which most men and movements have recently been labelled revisionist in Communist satellite countries. For he was primarily concerned with the truth of Marxism, while the latter, in order to avoid declaring Marx's judgments false, have sought to reconstruct his meaning. They have done this to some extent out of a misguided piety, to make Marx's thought immune to the refutation of events, but mainly to combat, in the name of Marxism, the absurd notions and abominable practices of the Communist regimes imposed on them under the banner of Marxism. Nor has Bernstein's revisionism anything to do with the charges of revisionism hurled by the Chinese Communists against Tito and Khrushchev. The latter involves a struggle for the mantle of Lenin who was in important ways a more radical revisionist of Marx than was Bernstein. Lenin believed that the inevitable triumph of Communism on a world scale would be ushered in by inevitable war. Khrushchev, finally convinced that war with nuclear weapons might destroy both Communism and the free world, has proclaimed that the victory of Communism is still inevitable but not necessarily by inevitable war. He also believes that Communists may come to power in democratic countries by infiltration and guile, as in Czechoslovakia, rather than by armed insurrection. For these and allied reasons the Chinese Communists now regard Khrushchev as a "revisionist." II Eduard Bernstein was born in Berlin on January 6, 1850 into a family of modest means. His formal education was limited. At the age of sixteen he began his apprenticeship in a bank. A few years later he XI became a bank clerk, a post which he retained until he left Germany for Switzerland in 1878. Six years before that he had joined the Eisenacher socialist group which merged with the Lassallean socialist group in 1875 to form the German Social Democratic Party. In Switzerland, where Bernstein remained in consequence of Bismarck's anti- Socialist Laws, he edited the official Party newspaper. It was distributed clandestinely in Germany. In 1888, under pressure from Bismarck, Bernstein and the newspaper he edited were banished by the Swiss government. He then moved to London where he worked closely with Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Marx. Indeed both Marx and Engels had thought highly of his editorial talents. Upon Engels' death, it was dis- covered that he had named Bernstein an executor of his estate and, together with Kautsky, his 'literary executor.* Eduard Bernstein first presented some of his revisionist ideas in a series of articles on the problems of socialism in Die Neue Zeit, an official periodical. They precipitated a succession of political squalls in the German Social Democratic Party. To clarify and defend his position, Bernstein was induced to write the present work whose title, rendered literally, is The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy. Its publication transformed what had been mere squalls into a major political storm in both the German party and other European socialist parties—a storm which blew itself out only with the advent of the First World War. * The best study in English of Bernstein's life and work is Peter Gay's The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1952. Xll Three things account for the startling, and to the orthodox, terrifying impact of Bernstein's book. First, it broke sharply with the apocalyptic conception that capitalism would collapse by virtue of inherent economic tendencies which would cause such wide- spread misery among the working classes that they would rise in revolutionary wrath, destroy the exist- ing state, and introduce collective ownership of all major means of production, distribution, and ex- change.
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