Eduard Bernstein
German Social Democratic political theorist and statesman (1850–1932), born in Berlin into an assimilated Jewish family, a close intellectual disciple of Friedrich Engels during his long London exile and an editor and executor designated by Engels himself for his posthumous writings, factors that initially conferred on him considerable theoretical authority within the German Social Democratic movement before he himself undertook the most influential and controversial critical revision of orthodox Marxism in the entire Second International. His fundamental work, The Preconditions of Socialism (1899), published as a synthesis of a series of earlier articles that had already caused great upheaval within the party, argued with empirical data and detailed economic analysis that several central predictions of classical Marxism were not being borne out in practice: capitalism showed no signs of growing class polarisation or ever more extreme business concentration, the middle class was expanding rather than shrinking, and the material conditions of the working class were gradually improving through unionisation and social legislation rather than worsening toward an inevitable final revolutionary crisis. From this empirical revision, Bernstein derived his most famous and, for orthodox Marxists of the time — led by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, who harshly accused him of theoretical betrayal — most scandalous theoretical and practical conclusion, expressed in his maxim 'the movement is everything, the final goal is nothing': socialism should abandon the goal of violent revolution and catastrophic rupture with capitalism to focus instead on gradual, democratic and legal reform of the existing system, through trade unions, parliaments and cooperatives, a position that gave rise to the current known as 'revisionism' or reformist social democracy. A Reichstag deputy across several terms, his vision, although formally defeated at the party congresses of his time, ultimately prevailed de facto in the actual political practice of twentieth-century European social democracy, making him one of the decisive intellectual fathers of contemporary reformist social democracy.