THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY OF EDUARD BERNSTEIN

...not as a consequence of increasing repression, of misery and humiliations, but as a result of its increasing influence and of the improvements for which it has fought...

...but within less than a year thereafter he began to publish articles in which he attacked Marxist philosophy and the theory of revolution...

...instead of transforming capitalism labor had to "save" it...

...By doing so, he prevented disillusionment from turning into panic...

...To criticize Marxism did not mean simply to revise this or that judgment in the light of recent developments...

...it preached a sobriety of which we may now have too much...

...In November 1918 he tried to prevent "hasty" socializations that might have disrupted production...

...Important among them were Jean Jaures and Kurt Eisner (as a fellow Independent and martyr), and also the philosophers Hermann Cohen, Franz Staudinger, Karl Vorlander, Paul Natorp...

...Coercion must give more freedom to more people than it takes away...

...It is Marxism that needs to be explained...

...Democracy as a formal system of government, especially if it is defined as legalism, will usually not inflame the spirit, no matter how worthy it is of being defended with one's life...

...In this sense Bernstein spoke the word that made him famous: "The ultimate goal [Endziel] is nothing to me...

...Certainly, in absolutist or semifeudal countries, the state machinery had to be broken before any democratic development could be expected...

...the latter were 214 all members of the Neo-Kantian school, and since they were the only professional philosophers writing on socialism, it has often been suggested that an affinity exists between revisionism and Kantianism...

...He would occasionally warn the workers not to trust their May Day speakers, but he accepted machine rule when its decisions went his way...

...Marxists were convinced that the workers could not rise in the same fashion since they did not own the means of production and had not developed a characteristic economic system...

...Marx's idea of revolution foresees a break in time, a sudden change of direction from the day before to the day after...

...it became the driving force in the revolutionary events of 1918-19...

...They require a larger horizon than is usually acquired in trade union schools...

...Karl Renner (the first president of the Austrian Republic) provided a far more cogent analysis of the new trends in capitalism, using Marx's methods of investigation and yet vindicating reform policies...

...Bernstein envisaged a movement of the whole people...

...Bernstein was censured at the party's congress and would have been expelled, but for his personal friendship with many leaders...

...On the contrary, he was very much a man of the movement, and he hoped to formulate a theory that fitted the practice of its leaders...

...A closer look will always show that any coercion that is required must increase the total sum of freedom in the society...

...Evolutionary Socialism, p. 35...

...What Bernstein abandoned was the myth, Marx's claim that a comprehensive philosophy exists, which guarantees (a) that capitalism is necessarily followed by socialism...

...Unfortunately, what had been postulated as a unity in lofty thought became an ugly dichotomy when theory was translated into reality...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that after the eclipse of the popular Willy Brandt and his replacement by the efficient Helmut Schmidt, the German Social-Democratic party (SPD) should have scanned its history in search of an ancestor...

...Its function for the labor movement was to make its victory appear inevitable, as if it were a law of nature...

...Bernstein came closest to an answer...

...It was prospering...

...Ethical Socialism IT Is TRUE, as we have said, that militants need a faith, a symbolism or myth...

...Bernstein did not feel that Marxism could make good any such claim or that it could be both scientific and tied to any particular class or party...

...A word often used (though not by Bernstein 210 himself) spoke of the possibility of organic transformation (Hineinwachsen), where it was not quite clear whether capitalism was imperceptibly "changing into" some sort of welfare state or the workers were acclimatizing to capitalism...

...But his positive attitude to patriotism and his "nonideological approach" may appear to some of his new admirers as legitimation of their own desire to keep the Eastern option open and to minimize the difference between the two German states...

...The determinist philosophy of Marx's immediate followers has been a source of embarrassment to many young Marxists, and Marx himself had observed (in "The First Thesis on Feuerbach") that idealism rather than materialism had developed the theory of action...

...Soon he found out, however, that the German war aims were no less execrable than the Czar's and he seceded from both the magazine and, more important, from the parliamentary SPD, which continued to vote for the Kaiser's war appropriations...

...The pragmatic, nonideological approach to politics also relieves the individual member of the "totalizing" tendency that inheres in every party...

...Then Bernstein could foresee that no bloody revolution, perhaps no violence at all was required to conquer power: with the ballot the socialists would gain ascendancy step by step, and through legislation they would transform capitalism into a more humane system...

...Just as his optimistic prognosis for capitalism was based on the survival of small business rather than on the really new features of monopoly and finance capitalism, so he missed altogether the meaning of the Boer War, of the Fashoda crisis, of Germany's frantic plunge into world politics, and of other signs indicating that the world was becoming too small for national capitalism...

...The Independents had favored the parliamentary Republic in which the Councils would have a legitimate place...

...Insofar as the acquisition of Kiaochow is a means to secure Germany's right to a voice of protest [against the partitioning of China], and it will be difficult to gainsay that it does contribute to it, there is no reason to cry out against it...

...As Lenin saw clearly, revolution was not in the immediate interest of the workers...

...He was apprenticed to a banker, but his interest in socialism was awakened early...

...In his main work, Evolutionary Socialism, he later qualified this to say that obviously the movement must have a direction, but that goals would develop apace with the movement's progress...

...They rarely talked about them in theory, because they were too busy fighting for them, and no one in the socialist camp had yet questioned them...

...the image of a founder bestows historical perspective to routine practices...

...It is true, of course, that his residual Marxism was strong enough to make the socialist goal and even more the socialist attitude matter...

...a party that wishes to rule must not tie its hands with ideological fetters, especially if the ideology in question is as obsolete as Marxism...

...Like other socialists of his generation he tended to confuse political and economic democracy, participatory and representative democracy, democracy as a way of life and democracy as a system of government, democracy as government by the people and democracy as the assurance of due process, peaceful settlement of conflicts, law and order...

...Workers now found opportunities to rise or to find accommodations with the system, and socialists therefore found it more difficult to preach the total break that is revolution...

...Class differences would gradually be reduced, eventually to disappear completely...

...216...

...Bernstein justified this confidence by publishing a series of Dokumente des Sozialismus (among which was part of The German Ideology...

...What mattered was not righteousness but a progress whose inevitability neither the orthodox nor the revisionists nor anyone else around 1900 ever doubted...

...Today the economy must and can be shaped to fit the vision of social planners...

...He died in 1932, at a time when history was shattering the liberal-labor ideologies and the pseudorepublican illusions of the SPD...

...It now became clear that Bernstein's plea for "democracy" had really been a plea to compromise with the status quo in Germany instead of dispossessing it...

...Bernstein himself had written the second, practical part of that program, with demands ranging from a universal, equal, and secret ballot to progressive income tax and "free burial"—none of which was as explosive or "transcendent" as the famous "ten demands" at the end of the Communist Manifesto...

...The great mass strikes in most countries were political: not for economic gains, but for civil rights, for the ballot...

...It is mostly this undogmatic attitude that 203 recommends Bernstein to modern socialists, but here again we must add a caveat: whereas the labor movement today needs an ideology, it was Bernstein's aim 70 years ago to deideologize labor action...

...He declared decentralization a lovely idea, but in practical instances he came out for central organization and strong leadership...

...Not the councils, the militias, the independent unions, not the unreliable local formations, but the well-established central organizations of labor were to determine the fate of the Republic...

...Sidney and Beatrice Webb had just published Industrial Democracy (the classic that Lenin translated and then quoted to show that by themselves workers can develop only a "trade union consciousness...

...in 1903 it received onethird of all votes, and one day it would receive 51 percent...

...Conceivably, a mass social democratic party, devoted to both democratic principles and reformist tactics, could nevertheless be dynamic, decisive, and militant...

...He proposed to adjust the theory to the real conditions of class conflict—but would not the militants then have lost courage...

...Or walk out defiantly...

...the attitude in Bernstein and others (one thinks of Ramsey MacDonald in England, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria) during World War I suggests otherwise, and Bernstein always understood the movement to be a community of militants sharing humanitarian and laborite values...

...To his surprise, however, the union leaders were not interested in being vindicated...

...The right to vote in a democracy makes its members virtually partners in the community, and this virtual partnership must in the end lead to real partnership...

...but the party's life, its trade union halls, its May Day festivals, its social and cultural clubs were proletarian in speech, in manner, in dress, in habits and outlook...

...Should socialists support the "petty bourgeois" cause of Captain Dreyfus...

...it forced the Reichstag to sign the Treaty of Versailles...

...The safeguarding of civil liberties has always enjoyed precedence over the fulfillment of economic postulates...

...He defended the conduct of the SPD leaders during the revolution of 1918-19 and therefore must share responsibility for the defeat of the democratic aspirations...

...The man who had said that "the movement is everything" was now concerned with writing a constitution conceived no longer as an instrument of socialist policies but as an end in itself...

...So he waited until Engels died in 1895...

...The party expected that somehow...

...Where do they come from...

...How was one to attract middle-class voters when the program condemned them to be "ground down" between the historical millstones of Capital and Labor...

...When Bernstein proposed to purge Marxism of its Hegelian and Blanquist heritage, he meant to be doing nothing more than bring the theory into harmony with the practice...

...The answer is ethical socialism, and many revisionists have indeed found the source of their socialist faith in ethical philosophy or religion...

...Socialist congresses, therefore, were filled with curious debates about the relationship between socialist conscience and the need to win votes: Should socialists agitate for farm loans when Marx had predicted the doom of the family farm...

...Ibid., p. 173.1 But "protest" against colonialism is not the only purpose of acquisitions abroad...

...In its first part it summarizes the essential tenets of Marxism...

...it had to be the midwife of "the new society that had been spawned in the womb of the old"—Marx was extremely fond of this simile he had inherited from Hegel...

...He may have been right...

...The militants were annoyed with the "quarrels of intellectuals," which they feared might weaken the movement, and the party was in an uproar...

...The most advanced concept of that time was Hilferding's "the political wage...

...In the hottest days of the revolution (in Was ist Sozialismus...

...Instead of hurrying toward its doom, capitalism was developing tools to handle crisis management and organization —through cartels, credit facilities, farm support, social policies...

...he described the labor movement as it was...

...Reform policies in the first half of the century were essentially redistributive: one fought over the share of the product that was to fall to each class...

...The Theory of Democracy THE PRICE of abandoning the myth is too high, unless something else can take its place...

...He was an able journalist who could handle facts and statistics well enough, but he was uncomfortable with ideas and often mistook "for instance" for an argument...

...Bernstein, by contrast, was genuinely attached to the daily reality of trade union activities, the practice of class struggle rather than technocratic planning...

...They, too, thought of revolution as an ongoing process, a movement rather than a unique event, and like Bernstein, they felt that the power of the movement mattered more than the form of government under which it was progressing...

...under the more liberal constitutions of the South German states they occasionally provided the necessary votes to form a majority, and even orthodox Marxists were no longer suspicious of social reform...

...The socialist society will emerge not from chaos but from an alliance of creative organizations in the field of economics and of creative innovations of militant democracy in the states and communities...

...Lassalle, by contrast, had taught that once the workers had won the ballot, they would enlist the state's services in their fight against the liberal bourgeoisie...

...Revisionism, which aimed to create room for maneuver for the labor movement, had no use for a deterministic philosophy...

...Bernstein gave his lecture an ambitiously Kantian title: "How Is Scientific Socialism Possible...

...it knew no Millerand, no Briand, no Viviani, no Laval, no Ramsay MacDonald, no Mussolini...

...Perhaps the explanation is psychological rather than political: what is needed is not so much an ideology as an attitude, a style "nonideological yet principled" (as Irving Howe has said), realistic yet not opportunistic, loyal to the party without surrendering to the bosses...

...Historians who assume that revolution should be on every proletarian's mind therefore ask the wrong questions: Why revisionism...

...he admired the civility of their discussions, so different from the German manner...

...But in the most advanced countries—the Netherlands, England, the United States—Engels had thought it quite conceivable that a parliamentary majority might become the lever of the revolution...

...Just as the bourgeoisie had been able to use the state for its purposes even before the symbols of power had fallen into its hands, so the workers might acquire influence and power piecemeal while class struggle continued in the arenas of industry, parliament, culture, and law...

...Strangely, he shared this way of thinking with some on the far left, the French syndicalists and Rosa Luxemburg, not his allies in any other respect...

...His father sent him to high school—then unusual for workers—but he left at the age of 14 with the certificate enabling middle-class boys to cut their military service from three years to one...

...The historical significance of revisionism, hence, is to have reinstated the second half of the party's name, Social Democracy: "democratic" was not to qualify "socialism," but "socialism" was to qualify "democracy...

...Even in his two historical works on the Chartists and the Puritans, the emphasis had been on self-organization and action by the masses...

...The Dresden congress (1903) rejected "revisionism" by an overwhelming majority...

...He belonged to the generation of great humanitarian socialists, which also included Jean Jaures, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, and Norman Thomas...

...Nor did it help his reputation with the workers when he * Unfortunately this English version is unreliable and often incomprehensible to readers not familiar with the German text...

...Did Bernstein suggest an alternative...

...And Marx's famous law of value seemed to him sheer metaphysics: "That the worker never gets the full product of his labor is an empirical fact that does not need any deductive proof...

...Thus Bernstein was temporarily united with former antagonists, the orthodox Marxists, the old left—Kautsky, Hilferding, Ledebour, Haase—and radicals like Daumig and Liebknecht (who were later to form the Communist party...

...In all these matters, practical measures of progress required acquiescence in the symbolism of the old regime, which offended the 209 ethics and esthetics of proletarian class consciousness...

...So some younger Social Democrats have recently staged a renascence of Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), the critic of Marxism and father of "revisionism," well remembered by the pre-Hitler generation as "Old Ede Bernstein" and well suited, with his benevolent, bearded physiognomy, to play the role of ancestor...

...What the professors considered a necessary, perhaps healthy adjustment of capitalism was for him merely the first mile on the long road toward a new social order...

...If there was a better way to ward off the Nazi threat then support of Hindenburg, Bernstein did not 207 know it...

...This is no small feat if we consider what was being abandoned...

...Bernstein considered all this an unfortunate heritage of the generation of 1848, when all radicals had looked back to the Jacobins, and German radicals in particular were ensnared in "the tripwires of Hegelian dialectics" (the chapter so entitled is missing in the English version of Evolutionary Socialism...

...Although Gustave LeBon (1895) and Robert Michels (1911) had attacked the spirit of mass movements, bossism, and the "iron law of organization," Bernstein did not use their arguments, and while he criticized Marx and others, he never criticized the party...

...They must govern to make the system work, not to transform it—for transformations now are likely to come from other forces, including transnational corporations, nonsocialist governments, national revolutions, and international organizations...

...Nevertheless, there were Neo-Kantians who were not revisionists, such as Max Adler, who made his political home at the extreme left of the Austrian SP, and there were ethical socialists who were not Kantians...

...the Movement is everything...

...In his book Zur Geschichte and Theorie des Sozialismus (1901) he repeated the term "piecemeal socialism" but later on denied that the Fabians had been decisive in his intellectual development...

...Should Social Democrats at the end of a traditional Reichstag session, when the Speaker brought out the customary "Hurrah for the Kaiser" rise politely but silently...

...In London Bernstein met George Bernard Shaw and attended meetings of the Fabian Society...

...all his life he was part of it and shared the experience of its members...

...Now all depended on maintaining this democracy so that the labor movement would be able to act as the pressure group of the working class, without inhibitions...

...It would have to mean a protracted struggle, over many legislative periods, for the transformation of a private enterprise economy into a mixed system where private and cooperative, municipal and state enterprises might compete but all would undergo a process of democratization...

...in its second part it shows that these no longer apply in the modern world...

...Yet though he has not spelled it out himself, or in a philosophical manner, I think that the query about the sources of Bernstein's socialism can be answered...

...sharp refutations were published in the Neue Zeit and in various daily papers...

...He used his long sojourn to study the 17thcentury revolution and wrote a remarkable book on the radical Puritans, which Max Weber recognized as a major contribution, in fact as an anticipation of his own studies on the affinity between capitalism and Puritanism...

...Bernstein's work Evolutionary Socialism is really about this discrepancy...

...Whether the Marxist theory of value is correct or not is quite immaterial to the proof of surplus labor...

...Instead of becoming more polarized, the class differences were becoming more finely shaded...

...But, in contrast to Sorel, he did not think that the movement was so much a value-in-itself that it did not need to show material successes and achievements...

...Were not, by his own account in 208 Das Kapital, the workers winning daily battles for "the political economy of the proletariat" —such as the ten-hour day, and social security insurance—through trade union and legislative action, wielding ballots rather than bullets...

...Bernstein's friend Ignaz Auer, who sympathized with his views, observed dryly: "My dear Ede, such things may be done, but one does not brag about them...

...In 1875 he took part in the Gotha congress where the two German workers' parties merged, forming the SPD (SocialDemocratic party of Germany...

...But for all his sterling qualities, highly praised even by the cross-grained Marx, Bebel was not a thinker and perhaps too much of a boss...

...In either case, the conditions of class struggle had been changed decisively since the Communist Manifesto, which still was the basis and source of the theoretical part of the program the SPD had adopted at Erfurt in 1891...

...THESE DEVELOPMENTS gave Ferdinand Lassalle, the meteoric initiator of German socialism, a posthumous victory over Marx...

...Students who hope to become government-paid professors and researchers can only look with sympathy to the wise old man who taught the workers to forget the symbols of the police state and to make themselves at home in the enemy's house...

...in 1922...

...his democratic modesty has created a tradition that is still alive in Western labor parties...

...The labor movement had been utopian as long as it was immature...

...Bernstein himself was fanatically anti-Communist, and he would be aghast at some young Socialists' inability to distinguish between the East and West German states...

...He probably was the only person without a high school diploma ever to receive this honor...

...A socialist revolution was not on the agenda, to be sure...

...In his Critique of the Gotha Program Marx had denied that the workers can "take over" the old state machinery...

...Even if historical materialism were proven correct and capitalism were of necessity to be followed by socialism—for which Bernstein saw no proof—it still would not follow that socialism is the only possible alternative, and if so, that it is the most desirable outcome...

...In the preceding half-century, the working class had fallen heir to the democratic aspirations the middle class had abandoned...

...How did that aberration insert itself into an otherwise revolutionary social democracy...

...It became the party's official organ...

...It is plausible that the leaders overvalued legality and respectability just as Bebel always wore a frock coat in the Reichstag and exhorted the younger deputees to dress properly...

...Since it was grand theory, Marxism had been able to project such an ideal and to endow it with the aura of philosophical and historical necessity, fusing what ought to be with what will be...

...It wrote contracts, it made political deals...

...he deprived the labor movement of its justifying ideology, and socialism of its function as a savior religion...

...Bernstein was a regular contributor until the World War revealed that the party had become much 206 more revisionist than he had intended...

...Bernstein charged that the party's revolutionary rhetoric was no longer in line with its daily practice—which was precisely what the party did not wish to hear...

...Neither the thought of Bernstein nor that of Jean Jaure s or any other socialist stands in relation to Kant as Marxism stands in relation to Hegel...

...any conflicts of interest or of conception must be negotiated and arbitrated rather than allowed to erupt in an open test of strength...

...The answer usually names one of several "villains"—the trade union bosses (Peter Gay), the party bosses (Robert Michels), the labor aristocrats (Lenin), the electoral laws and parliamentary customs, the "mass" society (Marcuse), or simply the lack of proper Marxist training (Trotsky...

...When dual membership was declared inadmissible, he chose the SPD but did not abandon his effort to reconcile the two parties until 1920...

...Its defense against critics from the left became Bernstein's major theme, and he handled it as though democracy was synonymous with law and order: demonstrators * Political theorists may note that Bernstein's formulation provides a bridge from Bentham to Rawls...

...it had a solid base in the "councils" (Raete) that were springing up in the construction and defense industries ; it hailed the Russian revolution when it broke out in 1917...

...Bernstein knew this from reading Friedrich Albert Lange's popular History of Materialism, a source frankly acknowledged...

...Social democrats now must try to make capitalism recession-proof, inflation-proof, accident-proof, old-age-proof, etc...

...Two Views of Revolution REVISIONISM ESSENTIALLY is the view that progress for social equality and power for the labor movement can be won without violent revolution...

...I shall return, at the end of this essay, to the relevance of this idea...

...Bernstein had adequately described the opportunities of successful class action in the world prior to World War I, but he would have to learn much in order to be at home in welfare-state economics and policies...

...He brought the majority that condemned him to repudiate Blanquist fantasies...

...The social democratic parties conducted pragmatic policies, tried to secure the most favorable institutional framework for those policies, and promised "socialism" only as a faraway ideal that might be approached asymptotically in the course of further history...

...Bernstein was isolated...

...His powers were waning and his later books are embarrassing...

...Had Marx not been trapped in the triadic schematism that requires the bloody qualitative leap, he might not have been blind to the chances of a more comfortable march into the future...

...Hochberg picked Bernstein to be 204 editor—did he sense even then that Bernstein was at heart a moderate...

...In spite of reactionary counterblows I see that class war assumes ever more civilized forms, and this is the best guarantee for the realization of socialism...

...Was revisionism to blame, or was the SPD's failure the result of personal failings and historical accidents...

...but Bernstein acquitted himself with skill, and when he paid the masters a visit in London, he won their confidence...

...My favorite villain, however, is inertia, and the question I find much easier to answer is: Why not revisionism...

...in 1918 the SPD by-passed socialism in order to erect a democracy—of sorts, for the militant democratic movement was frozen into a democratic order...

...After discussing the essential relationship between socialism and democracy, Bernstein comes to the question of patriotism...

...His early theories encouraged labor to seek reforms and to assume responsibilities even though the "system" was reactionary and in particular the state was antidemocratic...

...For it was still dangerous to walk a picket line, and no man risks his life for mere pennies...

...It is therefore ironical that just now young German socialists are trying to revive Bernstein's memory as that of an ideologist...

...Since socialists in Germany found it difficult to communicate with each other, the exile paper was soon the most important link between them...

...It has often been charged that revisionism leads to opportunism...

...Another reason for Bernstein's revival after three-quarters of a century is rather paradoxical...

...These are existential determinants of the working class organization...

...he was impressed by the gradual expansion of the public sphere in the supply of basic services and by the growth of democratic rights in industrial relations...

...Moreover, only a conditional right of natives to the land occupied by them can be recognized...

...but a school of "pragmatists" among the labor leaders was quite prepared to sacrifice ideology for real increases in power...

...its mechanics is in no way derived from the earlier thinker...

...Was it permissible for the party paper in a small principality to mourn the demise of the local sovereign...

...by the end of the century, Engels hoped to see socialism take power through democratic means...

...In history, post hoc is not always propter hoc, and revisionism must be understood on the basis of the conditions prevailing around 1900...

...I mention here only Tolstoy, Gustav Landauer, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Ramsey MacDonald, some more radical than the Marxists, some rather less...

...that revolution in the social sense (as opposed to "the sense of pitchforks," in Engels's words) must be understood as a long-drawnout process rather than a single act: Socialism will come, or rather is coming, not as the result of a great political showdown but as the result of a series of economic and political victories of the working-class movement in the various fields of its activities...

...The party was growing...

...Since revisionism rejected the idea of committed science, or the confusion of scientific and moral judgments, it could not claim, as Marxism does, that its reading of the "facts" must lead to moral conclusions...

...Socialist parties should be open to believers of all faiths, their program should receive stimulation from all new developments in the arts and sciences, their tactics should be flexible...

...The welfare state requires much more cooperation between the "social partners" than was thought possible by even the most "reformist" labor representatives of Bernstein's generation...

...Originally he was attracted to the ideas of Lassalle rather than to those of Marx, but having found Lassalle's disciples sectarian, he joined the Marxist-populist Social-Democratic Workers' party...

...But to grow and to plan for the future, the labor movement had to strive not only for legal recognition and legal safeguards...

...nor were all his points well taken...

...Although the USPD represented only a minority of the old SPD, it embodied the best of the socialist traditions in Germany: it was revolutionary and pacifist...

...Throughout his writings one senses an underlying idea—a fundamental devotion to democracy and its values: If at any time [there was] an economic demand of the socialist program [that would] have to be realized under conditions that would seriously endanger the development toward freedom, Social Democrats have always rejected it...

...Nor did he alone make these observations...

...Although Bernstein had discussed Fabianism with Engels, its full significance may have become clear to him only later...

...To do that, however, they needed allies, above all the peasants and the intelligentsia...

...these coincided with its own interests and with the necessities of class conflict...

...Along with expanding capitalism, the trade unions were acquiring power, the parties gaining votes in every election...

...Beyond Revisionism IN THE DAYS OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC and still more so since World War II, social democracy lost much of its original moral impetus...

...they are neither a priori nor derived but are given with that Arbeiterwelt in which he lived...

...But these paternalistic advocates of "social policies" were really miles apart from Bernstein...

...All this was seen much more clearly by Renner who unfairly has been forgotten...

...they were not "torn between" the Charybdis of theory and the Scylla of practice because the labor movement represented an interest rather than an idea...

...For him there was no engaged science: "Just as there is no liberal chemistry, the notion of a socialist sociology makes no sense to me" (Sozialistische Monatshefte, 1901, p. 32...

...Where does socialist morality come from...

...All this more often 215 requires cooperation than confrontation...

...Its reviews of contemporary literature and art compare favorably with those of the Neue Zeit, which was hopelessly mired in the classical canons Marx had respected a generation ago...

...Bernstein's revisionism fitted the period of the Second International, roughly from the 1880s to 1914, when the proletariat was growing—physically, morally, politically...

...People don't think about revolution unless they have been grievously provoked, and even in a revolution they would rather leave its execution to the proper organizations...

...Soon after the revolution he rejoined the SPD, yet he also maintained his membership in the USPD...

...They also constitute principles that guide and direct action...

...The complete breakup of nations is no beautiful dream," and the German nation carries out "its honorable share in the civilizing work of the world," especially in China where the Kaiser had just appropriated the base of Kiaochow...

...I shall begin by discussing the significance of his "revision," after which I shall review some of the criticism leveled against it...

...Now the labor movement was split into dogmatic advocates of parliamentary government on the one side and equally dogmatic devotees of the Soviet system on the other...

...Here I begin with a review of Bernstein's life...

...The revolution had created an ideal framework for class struggle to proceed in a legal order: no more police at the command of the bosses, no more weighted suffrage, no more aristocrats at the top of the social hierarchy...

...It owes more to Keynes and the Fabians than to Marx or Bernstein...

...Predictions he had based on his alleged "laws" had failed to materialize...

...A leader with a human face lends personal warmth to the idea...

...In his day, labor policies had to adapt themselves to the vicissitudes of capitalist development...

...The workers, rather, could come to power only by turning society upside down, not through prosperity but through a general cataclysm...

...The development and safety of the individual [Personliehkeit] is the aim of all socialist measures, even those that may seem to be coercive...

...He overestimated the significance of the survival of small business and paid too little attention to significant changes in the structure of capitalism—the emergence of big business and monopolistic organizations, the collaboration of banking, industry, and government, the revival of the colonial drive—which were commented upon by writers in Kautsky's theoretical weekly, Die Neue Zeit, and elsewhere...

...Engels may not have been aware that, by embracing the ballot so enthusiastically, he was renouncing not only violence and dictatorship but also the entire either/ or philosophy that pervades Marxist thought from the theory of value to the theory of the state...

...If the term "revolution" was to be used at all, it had to be redefined...

...but even in an advanced country like Germany, the prophecy of a great cataclysmic revolution, a day of reckoning and renewal, helped to keep the militants' faith burning...

...The majority of the workers also understood the term in this sense, an insight that has been obstructed all to long by Leninist 213 historiography and that even non-Communist historians have been reluctant to accept: the Social Democrats could not "betray" any revolutionary principles because they had not prepared a revolution for 40 years...

...Marx retained this grandiose and suggestive vision of an apocalyptic leap: the social revolution of the bourgeoisie had been accomplished before it acquired the symbols of political power, but it had to be completed by the political act that overthrew the "superstructure" of the feudal state...

...Turati formed the Italian socialist party and expelled the revolutionary syndicalists...

...Yet Bernstein had not worked out a theory of democracy...

...They are essentially regulators, and therefore different from the labor leaders who fought with individual businessmen...

...Bernstein accepted the economic interpretation of history only with reservations: "Iron necessity [must be] modified in a way that increases the practice of social policy" (Evolutionary Socialism...

...But in their daily practice the mass parties concentrated on electoral policies and social legislation...

...Might the party paper serialize Zola's Germinal with its unflattering portraits of sturdy proletarians...

...Bernstein gave this Delphic definition: "Socialism is the sum of social demands and natural aspirations of those workers in modern capitalist society who have come to recognize their class situation and the task of their class...

...What they expected to be granted by the government, he saw as the movement's victories...

...Forty years later, at a commemorative function, Carlo Schmid was able to state that "Bernstein triumphed throughout...

...Or sullenly remain seated...

...Occupation by Europeans need not injure the natives in their enjoyment of life...

...By downgrading Marxism to a mere tool of social analysis, Bernstein not only deprived it of its attractiveness as a political philosophy...

...It no longer meant a military-political action that was to bring about a sudden change of regime...

...there also were radical war protesters on the left...

...but the revolution of 1918 did not even fulfill the program of 1848, and the republican policies the SPD pursued in the 14 years of the Weimar Republic were not even reformist...

...The SPD still gave courses in Marxism to its youth groups, but by the middle'20s it had exchanged class struggle for the defense of the Republic...

...But in the meantime the party behaved as though infinite progress, step by successive step, was possible under the Kaiser's regime...

...It was essential not to frighten them away by revolutionary gestures and fanatical programs...

...Only the enemies of socialism charged that public ownership would mean bureaucratic rule by bosses...

...At the Heidelberg congress in 1925 it adapted its program to the new tendencies of "organized capitalism" and dealt with the new problems of industrial democracy and crisis management...

...In a book so totally devoted to the brightening horizons of labor under an increasingly benign and benignly increasing capitalism, one does not expect to find an apprehension of impending crisis...

...It was fitting for a weak proletariat and therefore was adopted wholesale by Lenin...

...and (c) that socialism will necessarily be better, or rather a "higher stage of humanity...

...This doctrine certainly implies a profound faith in the equality between men and also in the injunction to use no man as a means toward some end...

...Who, for instance, would guess that "Bismarck's socialist laws" refers to his ban on socialist agitation...

...205 was invited by the University of Berlin to present his views to an academic audience...

...Lassalle did not mind allying himself with Bismarck for his purposes...

...Certainly, Bernstein did not claim he was offering a new theory...

...I shall therefore not make unfair use of hindsight in evaluating the historic significance of revisionism...

...The sources of socialist ethics are scattered over a wide spectrum, and though it is true that Marxists have dealt very unfairly with Kant, nothing permits us to assign to him a place in socialist history...

...Where we need new sources of inspiration, the socialists around the turn of the century were still feeding on the elan of a movement on the rise...

...To return once more to Marx's favorite simile—socialism is not brought into the world by caesarian section...

...The Austrian social democrats provide a case in point: their defeat in the'30s can clearly be attributed to external conditions...

...In Prussia, which now was the most advanced German state, social democrats were planning and expanding public ownership...

...Bernstein was a man with whom one can disagree without losing respect for his decency...

...212 were shot, divulgers of what generals considered military secrets were jailed, the press and theaters were gagged by censors, democratically elected state governments were deposed, the Republic's presidents ruled by emergency decree—all in the name of republican due process...

...He was convinced, like all social democrats, that socialism is unthinkable without democracy and that democracy implies socialism...

...On the other hand, he clearly saw that basic changes had occurred in the operating conditions of the labor movement and in the forms of its activity...

...Combining the traditions of Rousseau and Lassalle, he had an almost naive confidence in the goodness of the great majority and in abstract democracy...

...As we saw, even "pragmatic" socialist politicians felt that the party needed the fire-andbrimstone rhetoric of a revolutionary purgatory...

...Its historic mission would thereby suffer some changes...

...To conclude on a positive note: the implicit though unspoken commitment to an ethical foundation of socialism that can be ascribed to Bernstein may be cited to balance the alltoovisible drift toward technocracy in the Social Democratic party...

...he was not up-to-date even then...

...He watched the success of the "piecemeal revolution" they were advocating...

...Whatever Marx may have "really meant," the Marxism Bernstein knew was that of the late Engels and of Karl Kautsky, a Marxism that claimed to be "science" in the strict, deterministic sense of 19th-century materialism...

...b) that socialism will be totally different from capitalism...

...This formulation was prepared by Bernstein for the Stuttgart congress of the SPD in 1898 and reprinted in Was 1st Sozialismus...

...it speaks of socialist actions in this real world, and especially of its three main thrusts: trade unionism, cooperative enterprise, parliamentary process...

...Had not Engels (in the "Preface" to a new edition of Marx's Class Struggles in France) pointed out that modern city-planning, modern weapons, and modern police training had made the old tactics of insurrection obsolete...

...They took for granted that socialism proposed to expand the realm of freedom and to realize liberties that liberalism had failed to achieve...

...Contrary to Marx, he asserts that the workers have a fatherland and, since they are "partners," must defend it...

...Parliamentary tactics would mean that pieces of socialist legislation could be introduced gradually and that the balance of power may shift from one class to the other over a number of years...

...Willy Brandt himself would have liked to revive the memory of August Bebel, the venerable co-founder who led the party from 1869 to his death in 1912...

...This last is presented with great eloquence: Democracy is in principle the suppression of class government, though it is not yet the total suppression of classes...

...Two years later, on the occasion of Kautsky's 70th birthday, Kautsky and Bernstein restored the friendship of their early days in London and proclaimed their total agreement...

...His theories reflected the understanding of the movement by the workers...

...This preference for movement over ideology foreshadowed his later views...

...Then half the Independents merged with the Communists, while leaders of the old Marxist center (Kautsky, Hilferding) returned to the old party in 1922...

...In the united party, Marxist theory was still mouthed on solemn occasions but in practical, everyday dealings this staunch Puritanism was an impediment rather than a help...

...Marx and Engels were suspicious of both men...

...His values were solidarity, justice, equality, liberty, progress...

...Evolutionary Socialism, p. 149.] * Bernstein liked to quote Lassalle's words, "We are all citizens (Burger)," and he complained about comrades who spoke of abolishing the biirgerliche Gesellschaft (the German language cannot distinguish between "civil society" and "bourgeois society"), instead of the capitalist society...

...It would wake up one morning and, behold, the revolution had come (which was to happen in 1918...

...Rosa Luxemburg began her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, an eloquent polemic against Bernstein, by stating that these two terms ought not to be alternatives...

...they all met to form a new party, the Independent Social Democratic party of Germany (USPD...

...it has become a representation of interests and a school of management...

...Yet to make that success a certainty, the party needed the Marxist theory, which assured it that the outcome brooked no doubt, that "ultimately" there would be a fundamental change, that all the suffering and fighting would be rewarded by a day of reckoning and subsequent bliss...

...This is what the revisionists understood by democracy: if the establishment was to recognize the labor movement as a partner, the labor movement had to be responsible and law-abiding...

...Persecuted under Bismarck's antisocialist law, Bernstein fled to Zurich where one Karl Hochberg, a rich well-meaning philanthropist, sponsored a weekly paper, Der Sozialdemokrat, which was smuggled across the border...

...Moreover, important chapters have been left out...

...They seek to underpin Marxism with philosophical, anthropological, and psychological "groundings" that would make it into an all-encompassing, universal—in Lukacs's and Sartre's language: totalizing— Weltanschauung...

...My purpose here is to find out whether the claims made on behalf of Bernstein are indeed justified...

...And 20 years later, when the files were opened, the suspicion was proved justified: the Prussian minister of justice had squashed Bernstein's indictment because it was hoped he would split the SPD...

...Peter Gay, his biographer, has summarized "the dilemma of democratic socialism" as "between the Charybdis of impotence vis-a-vis the enemy and the Scylla of treason vis-a-vis the cause...

...That was done by others—Hilferding, Luxemburg, Cunow, Lenin—with the intention of sharpening the scientific tools of class struggle...

...But the new problems were of a new magnitude and nature he had not foreseen: labor was deeply involved in administrative and economic decision-making...

...Does a democratic conviction exclude militancy and decisiveness...

...Marx's propensity toward abstractions, however, had led him away from empirical reality...

...The Kantian form of the question indicates where Bernstein believed the answer might lie: in the categorical imperative...

...Once more—the movement is the message...

...In the audience were such liberal-social professors as Lujo Brentano, Werner Sombart, and Gerhard von SchulzeGaevernitz who were then known derisively as "socialists of the lectern...

...Revisions and Revisionism NOW TO A BRIEF ANALYSIS of Evolutionary Socialism, the work for which Bernstein is known...

...So would all public functions...

...In France, the Parti Ouvrier, led by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue wrote in its program: "The suffrage has been transformed, from a means of deception, which it once was, into a means of emancipation" (the relative clause is there to appease the ghost of Marx...

...Especially the Sozialistische Monatshefte waxed ultrapatriotic: in the hour of national danger, it argued, "Germany's poorest son is found to be its most faithful...

...I mentioned earlier that Bernstein's analysis of modern capitalism had missed the significance of large-scale enterprise and monopolistic organizations...

...Capitalism was not anywhere near the point of collapse, which Engels had set for the turn of the century...

...His enemies, and in particular the Communists, now were the advocates of the Council system...

...In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution suppressed democracy in order to let socialism "triumph...

...The SPD became legal again in 1890, but Bernstein was still under indictment in Prussia and could not leave England until 1901...

...A Life for Socialism" EDUARD BERNSTEIN was born in 1850, the son of a Jewish engine driver in Berlin...

...Bernstein, on the contrary, tried to strip Marxism of all those transcendental claims that are not warranted by empirical findings, and he felt free to treat it as just another branch of social science, subject to periodical revisions...

...they had no use for "revisionist" or any other "theory...

...Their orthodox disciples occupied the theoretical terrain, and instead of developing his own program, Bernstein had to present his views as deviations from established doctrine, sometimes exaggerating minor differences...

...They are not abstract philosophical notions...

...Strangely, he envisaged this same dialectic for the proletarian revolution, though with this difference: whereas in the bourgeois revolution, the social-economic and cultural changes had preceded the seizure of political power, in the proletarian revolution the social-economic and cultural transformation was to follow the political seizure of power...

...Indeed, one may cogently accuse the SPD of not being reformist enough...

...As Kautsky himself had written: the SPD is a revolutionary party that does not make revolutions...

...They have interpreted Bernstein's ideas in a syndicalist sense that permits them to coexist with the establishment without recognizing its legitimacy...

...his opponents on the socialist left were dedicated, no less than he, to democratic and humanist values...

...Denouncing the hypocrisy of Marxist propaganda, he exclaimed, away with this "cant," let us go back to Kant...

...This then is the ultimate reason why Bernstein was so anxious to overcome the revolutionary phraseology and why he opposed the spontaneous stirrings of the working class during the revolution...

...An English translation (by Edith Harvey, New York: Schocken, 1961) appeared under the title Evolutionary Socialism...

...In Germany, the SPD had won 1,200,000 votes and the next business slump surely would double this sum...

...But that admission forced him to answer the question he strove hard to avoid: Whence do you derive your socialist faith...

...As to the Neo-Kantian socialists I have named, they were trying to do precisely what was most repugnant to Bernstein: to deduce the necessity of socialism a priori from the categorical imperative, an endeavor at least as dangerous as the Hegelian dialectic...

...I must begin with a warning: Bernstein's revisionism of 1900 has almost nothing in common with today's search for a "socialism with a human face...

...The working class could not advance its principles within the old economy as its partner, rival, and successor...

...The programs that socialists now have to develop or to operate are also much more comprehensive than anything that was even thinkable at the time of Bernstein: national planning for industry and agriculture, operation of nationalized industries, redistribution of income, public health and housing and other public services, price regulation, workers' participation in the management of corporations...

...Bernstein noted in his diary: "Peasants don't sink, the middle class refuses to disappear, crises do not become ever more severe, nor do misery and slavery increase...

...Bernstein, too, had originally agreed that in a "war against the bloody Czar" no socialist can remain neutral (a judgment with which Marx and Engels would have heartily concurred...

...it is democratic though not necessarily socialist...

...only intellectuals indulging in utopias looked down on the "legalism" of the trade union leaders...

...Only a small band of intellectuals, parliamentarians, and trade union officials rallied around the revisionist magazine Sozialistische Monatshefte, which attracted progressive writers outside the party and dealt intelligently with modern poetry, drama, and the modern novel...

...in its third part...

...His exposition also was warped by his ambivalent position vis -a-vis the fathers of the movement...

...Bernstein was hardly the first to point out discrepancies between Marx's predictions and the development of capitalism...

...Moreover, Bernstein permitted himself a pun at the end of his major work...

...it was able to justify class war but not to direct it...

...Why, then, was the party so shocked by Bernstein's views...

...it also had to insist on its own legality...

...on the contrary, its expanding ranks gave strength to the economic structure and cushioned the business cycle...

...now it could afford no longer to reject or deprecate immediate improvements on the ground that they seemed deceptive or puny in the light of the faraway ideal...

...The trade unions were interested not only in material benefits but in security and a dependable body of laws...

...He promised that a more realistic ideology would attract millions of middle-class voters—but did the proletarians to whom Marx had promised the future want that...

...And this may be attributed to the existence of a revisionist theory, and also to the wisdom of Bebel who made room for the revisionists within the party, for those who could no longer follow 211 Marx but remained Social Democrats...

...More important, as a former Independent he was most useful to the party in arguing with the left: his pamphlets of the period are an apology for the SPD leaders' conduct during the revolution of 1918 and a defense of the parliamentary Republic...

...Revolution, therefore, would be a continuous process, not a once-for-all-times surgical intervention...

...Revolution or no revolution, it had achieved a dominant position in all modern countries where it had developed its characteristic economic system and industry...

...Returned to the fold, Bernstein was given a seat in the Reichstag and became the party's expert on taxation...

...But his other writings do not indicate that he had either read or understood Kant...

...Today, the New Left has adopted the strategy of "marching through the institutions," disregarding their hateful, alledgedly "fascist" nature...

...Far from being the seminal book that some pretend to see in it, Evolutionary Socialism is mostly a period piece— dated 1899...

...Even when better analyses of imperialism and colonialism became available—and they were soon an almost constant feature of the Neue Zeit—Bernstein failed to see their significance...

...In social legislation, the party still pursued policies along the lines of Bernstein's reform socialism...

...It is socialism that infuses the ardor of a transcendental goal into the political commitment...

...Bernstein, who had said that "a good piece of social legislation is worth more than a hundred nationalizations," had fallen behind the development...

...In his academic lecture How Is Scientific Socialism Possible...

...He, who was so averse to all ideologies, might have been much surprised...

...perhaps he also did not wish to sadden the old friend and mentor...

...He drew his ethical directives from the life of the party...

...But that precisely was the danger of his revisionism...

...already it was "the strongest of all parties" (as its hymn asserted...

...He merely presented his observations on the practice of politics and trade union action...

...With this important reservation, we must give Bernstein credit for closing the gap between social democratic theory and social democratic practice...

...Significantly, that majority included many who agreed with Bernstein on all practical matters but felt that the party could not abandon the ideology that had made it great...

...considerations of overall economic and social policy were still based on the assumption that the planning of production must be left to the enterprise, and that prices will be determined by the market...

...Today his kind of reformism is as obsolete as Marx's model of revolution...

...Social democracy before World War I was Marxist in name, but its actions were hardly guided by its program...

...that the goals cannot be achieved by a determined minority's actions but needs the support by the majority of the people...

...He was everything but a prophet...

...his social policies were not so much for workers as by the workers...

...The German labor movement was spared the experience of great defectors...

...and he was far from wishing to convert the labor movement into a mere pressure group...

...He was deeply committed to the movement...

...Our question must now be, Was this necessarily so...

...Bernstein's realism was not accommodating but flexible...

...Five pages later we are told: If it is not reprehensible to enjoy the products of tropical plantations, neither can it be to cultivate such plantations ourselves...

...Today's reformers cannot leave such important decisions to the blind forces of the market...

...His aim was not to reform capitalism but to transform it...

...It is also true that even in the West, socialist workers still thought of the revolution as "the day" (one of Kautsky's works was entitled: On the Day After the Revolution...

...This scheme was no foreign element in Marxism...

...In one respect, Bernstein's efforts aimed at exactly the opposite of what modern revisionists are trying to do...

...Although Engels, too, had rejected the idea that anything "followed" from the dialectic (for instance, in Anti-Diihring), it was Bernstein who asked, Why then talk about dialectics at all...

...He must have a flag, an ultimate goal, an idea, a future, a community to die for...

...Barricades might still serve as metaphors, and their memory might be celebrated in songs and on canvas...

...His answer, obviously, had to be that socialism is not a scientific necessity but a moral imperative...

...This conception had obviously been modeled on the rise of the middle class, which had grown in the interstices of the feudal society and acquired power under absolutism...

...The middle class did not disappear...

...let us study "the preconditions [prolegomena] of socialism," as Kant had written Prolegomena of any future Metaphysics...

...He was followed by a few ethical socialists...

...Meanwhile, similar developments had spread "reformism" in other parties of the International...

...In the Kantian spirit, too, Bernstein suggested that the social sciences may give socialists the tools to realize their goal but are unable to determine these goals...

...Marx, on the other hand, was out of the question...

...Although Bernstein cannot give guidance in this area, and although his thought was neither profound nor original, he radiates through his example as an honest, courageous socialist, devoted first of all to the movement, and conscious of the fact that socialism is first of all a movement of people...

...Its everyday politics were no longer revolutionary...

...Bernstein, however, never felt comfortable in this revolutionary ambiance...

...Fabian socialism was not a popular movement but addressed itself to civil servants and other well-meaning members of the managing class...

...If any socialization was proposed, let the Reichstag adopt a law—but beware of revolutionary intervention by the People's Commissars (the interim government that ruled until January 1919...

...This is not easy, because Bernstein was not a systematic thinker...

...In 1888 the paper was transferred to London, and there Bernstein became so intimate with Engels that the latter appointed him and Karl Kautsky (the high priest of orthodox Marxism) executors of his will...