A former bank clerk told Marxists capitalism was not about to collapse
Eduard Bernstein, once Friedrich Engels's close associate, watched Victorian capitalism stay stubbornly stable from London and concluded Marx's predictions were wrong. His answer, reform through parliaments rather than revolution, was officially condemned by his own party, which then quietly practised much of it. Social democracy owes a great deal to him.
Bernstein arrived on 6 January 1850 in Schöneberg, since swallowed by Berlin, the seventh of fifteen children of a railway engine driver. The family was of Polish-Jewish origin but secular for two generations, keeping Christmas as a German rather than religious holiday, and lived in what has been called genteel poverty. An uncle, Aaron Bernstein, was a well-known liberal journalist. Money troubles forced Eduard out of school at sixteen into a bank apprenticeship, and he worked as a clerk from 1869 to 1878 while educating himself in theatre, poetry and philosophy.
The Franco-Prussian War radicalised him. Starting as a patriot, he came to sympathise with August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht after they were charged with treason for opposing the war, and in 1872 he joined the Eisenacher socialists, quickly becoming a forceful speaker. Under Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws he lived in exile in Switzerland and London, where contact with the Fabian Society reinforced his doubts.
He waited until Engels died in 1895 to go public. Evolutionary Socialism, published in 1899, rejected Hegelian dialectics and denied that capitalism was bound to collapse, that the middle class would vanish or that workers would grow ever poorer. Socialists, he argued, should win reforms step by step through democratic institutions. His slogan put it bluntly: the goal is nothing, the movement everything.
The Social Democratic Party formally clung to its Marxist Erfurt Program, and Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg led the attack on him, yet the party behaved largely as he described. A pacifist in the First World War, he broke with the pro-war majority to co-found the Independent Social Democrats, later rejoining the SPD and sitting in the Weimar Reichstag. He died in Berlin in December 1932, weeks before the Nazis took power.
Source: Eduard Bernstein
