Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided the set of ideas that informed much of the European socialist movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. Organized in various national parties and joined together in international organizations as well, socialists usually referred to themselves as social democrats, for they were seeking to extend the principles of democracy from the political arena (voting rights, for example) into the realm of the economy and society. By the 1890s, however, some of them had begun to question at least part of Marx’s teachings, especially the need for violent revolution. The chief spokesperson for this group of socialists, known as “revisionists,” was Eduard Bernstein (1850–
EDUARD BERNSTEIN
Evolutionary Socialism
1899
It has been maintained in a certain quarter that the practical deductions from my treatises would be the abandonment of the conquest of political power by the proletariat organized politically and economically. That [idea] … I altogether deny.
I set myself against the notion that we have to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy….
The adherents of this theory of a catastrophe base it especially on the conclusions of the Communist Manifesto. This is a mistake….
Social conditions have not developed to such an acute opposition of things and classes as is depicted in the Manifesto. It is not only useless, it is the greatest folly to attempt to conceal this from ourselves. The number of members of the possessing classes is today not smaller but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character but they do not disappear from the social scale.
The concentration in productive industry is not being accomplished even today in all its departments with equal thoroughness and at an equal rate…. Trade statistics show an extraordinarily elaborated graduation of enterprises in regard to size….
In all advanced countries we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organizations. Under the influence of this, and driven by the movement of the working classes which is daily becoming stronger, a social reaction has set in against the exploiting tendencies of capital…. Factory legislation, the democratizing of local government, and the extension of its area of work, the freeing of trade unions and systems of cooperative trading from legal restrictions, the consideration of standard conditions of labor in the work undertaken by public authorities—
But the more the political organizations of modern nations are democratized, the more the needs and opportunities of great political catastrophes are diminished….
[Engels] points out in conformity with this opinion that the next task of the party should be “to work for an uninterrupted increase of its votes” or to carry on a slow propaganda of parliamentary activity….
Shall we be told that he [Engels] abandoned the conquest of political power by the working classes … ?
[F]or a long time yet the task of social democracy is, instead of speculating on a great economic crash, “to organize the working classes politically and develop them as a democracy and to fight for all reforms in the State which are adapted to raise the working classes and transform the State in the direction of democracy.” …
[T]he movement means everything for me and that what is usually called “the final aim of socialism” is nothing….
The conquest of political power by the working classes, the expropriation of capitalists, are not ends themselves but only means for the accomplishment of certain aims and endeavors…. But the conquest of political power necessitates the possession of political rights; German social democracy [must] devise the best ways for the extension of the political and economic rights of the German working classes.
Source: Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, translated by Edith C. Harvey (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), xxiv–