Bernsteinism

The earliest revisionist current that emerged in the Second International. Its founder was Eduard Bernstein, the right-wing leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

The influence of Bernsteinism surged at the end of the 19th century, after Engels’ death. As Lenin said, “after Marxism had ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the tendencies expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels”, “it is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism”. In 1899, Bernstein published the book The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of the Social Democracy (published in English as Evolutionary Socialism) which systematically elaborated the main points of revising Marxist scientific theory, marking the official formation of revisionism.

Bernstein revised the three component parts of Marxism. First, in Marxist philosophy, Bernstein revised Marx and Engels’ dialectical and historical materialism with Kant’s idealism, and replaced revolutionary dialectics with the serene theory of evolution and eclecticism. Bernstein pointed out that “there are no leaps in the important periods of the development of peoples”, “the point of economic development attained to-day leaves the ideological, and especially the ethical elements greater space for independent activity than was formerly the case”, and that Marx’s dialectics was “the most fatal point of Marx’s theories” which hindered people’s correct thinking and exploration of things, thus advocated revising Marxist theory with Kantianism and eclecticism, leading to a vulgarization of Marxism. Second, in political economy, Bernstein denied Marx’s theory of surplus-value, described the labor theory of value as a “pure abstract concept”, accused the theory of surplus-value as a “formula which rests on a hypothesis”, advocated replacing Marx’s labor theory of value with Böhm-Bawerk’s utility theory of value, and sought to deny the exclusion of the class small producers by monopoly and concentration, to deny the workers’ increasing poverty, and to glorify capitalist monopoly with so-called “new materials”, and held that cartels can help capitalism out of crisis and that with the development of concentration and monopoly, the capitalist economic crisis will cease to exist. Therefore, Bernstein asserted that Marx’s prediction of the inevitable downfall of capitalism had failed. Finally, in politics, Bernstein opposed the violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, holding that the dictatorship of the proletariat belongs to a “lower civilization” and implies “terrorist dictatorship”, and the violent revolution was “insane experimentalizing and aimless violence, and viciously attacked the Paris Commune. He preached class cooperation and peaceful transition, believing that with the spread and popularization of universal suffrage, the proletariat would truly assume power.

In the short period of years from 1898 to 1903, revolutionary thinkers and activists such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg often criticized Bernsteinism. In particular, Lenin fought resolutely against Bernsteinism and its proponents in Russia, namely, economism and Menshevism. Lenin pointed out that the correct and healthy development of the Russian workers’ movement and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party could only be guaranteed through direct and open polemic and opposition to narrow-minded economism and against the increasingly spreading Bernstein revisionism within Russia.