Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932)

Propagandist and agitator of the Social Democratic Party of Germany; founder and representative figure of the revisionist theory in Second International, known as “forefather of revisionism”.

Bernstein was born on January 6, 1850, in Berlin, Germany, into a family of a locomotive driver of Jewish descent. After dropping out of high school in 1866, Bernstein was an apprenticeship for a period of time, then worked as a clerk in a bank until 1878. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, he took part in the Social Democratic movement, and in 1872, he joined Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and became its member, and was deeply influenced by the thoughts of Lassalle and Dühring. In 1878, Bernstein resigned from his position as a bank clerk and went to Switzerland to serve as Karl Höchberg’s private secretary. In 1879, together with Höchberg and Schramm, he published in the Yearbook for Socialist Science and Politics an article entitled The Socialist Movement in Germany in Retrospect, which publicly advocated a change in the nature of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAP) to become a party of “all men filled with true love of humanity”, and called for abandoning the revolutionary struggle and adopting a line of compromise with the bourgeoisie, which was criticized by Marx and Engels. In 1880, he met Marx and Engels and became a proponent of scientific socialism under the influence of Engels. From 1881 to 1890, Bernstein served as editor of the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Der Sozialdemokrat.

From 1896 to 1898, Bernstein published six articles in Die Neue Zeit under the general title “Problems of Socialism” attempted to revise Marxism, and became the founder of revisionist theory. His revisionist viewpoints find a concentrated embodiment in two articles: “General Remarks on Utopianism and Eclecticism” and “The Realistic and the Ideological Moments in Socialism”. In 1899, he published the book The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of the Social Democracy (published in English as Evolutionary Socialism), in which he expounded on his revisionist and social-reformist theories in a concentrated manner. In this book, Bernstein called into question Marx’s predictions of continuous concentration of industries and continuous deepening of economic crises as well as Marx’s theory of the pauperization of the proletariat, opposed violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and put forward the reformist tactic of reshaping the state through the continuous expansion of the political and economic rights of the working class in a gradual movement towards democracy, attempted to change Marxism into a reformist theory and had a bad impact on the international communist movement.

In February 1901, Bernstein returned to Germany and continued to attack Marxism and preach revisionism. In 1902, he was elected to the Reichstag and served to the end of World War I. During World War I, he took a chauvinist stance and supported the imperialist war. After the German November Revolution of 1918, Bernstein served as Assistant Secretary to the Reich Treasury for the German bourgeois government and became an accomplice to Scheidemann and his ilk. In the spring of 1921, Bernstein gave a lecture at the University of Berlin on “Historical and Contemporary Disputes within Socialism” at the University of Berlin, the manuscripts of which were published under the title Socialism Past and Present at the end of 1921. The book systematically revised and distorted Marxism and continued to advocate that capitalism could peacefully grow into socialism, and opposed the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On December 18, 1932, Bernstein died in Berlin.