Eduard Bernstein EVOLUTIONARY EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM EDUARD BERNSTEIN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM A Criticism and Affirmation INTRODUCTION BY SIDNEY HOOK SCHOCKEN BOOKS • NEW YORK Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie Translated by Edith C. Harvey First schocken Paperback Edition 196 Fourth printing, 1967 HX BS53 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-16649 Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Introduction by Sidney Hook vii Preface to English Edition - - - xxi Preface - xxiii I. The Fundamental Doctrines of Marxist (a) The Scientific Elements of Marxism - i (6) The Materialist Interpretation of History and Historic Necessity 6 (c) The Marxist Doctrine of Class War and of the Evolution of Capital - - - 18 II. The Economic Development of Modern Society 28 (a) On the Meaning of the Marxist Theory of Value 28 (6) The Distribution of Wealth in the Modern Community 40 (c) The Classes of Enterprises in the Production and Distribution of Wealth - - 54 (d) Crises and Possibilities of Adjustment in Modern Economy 73 III. The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy 95 (a) The Political and Economic Preliminary (6) The Economic Capacities of Co-operative (d) The Most Pressing Problems of Social Conclusion: Ultimate Aim and Tendency — Kant against Cant...- 200 INTRODUCTION Eduard Bernstein is the father of socialist "revision- ism." The term "revisionism," however, is almost as ambiguous as the term "socialism." Particularly today, when the political ties of the communist world are being fractured by charges of "revisionism," it becomes necessary to distinguish the various move- ments and families of doctrine which are encompassed by the name.
Bernstein's "revisionism" was a strong current in the pre- World War I socialist movement. Latter-day "revisionism" is a series of turbulent eddies in con- temporary communism. Both have their source in Marxism. Before expatiating on their differences, something should be said about this common origin. It speaks worlds about the nature of Marxism as a movement and body of doctrine that the term "revisionism" should be so largely employed in Marxist circles as an epithet of abuse. Indeed, its connotations of disparagement, deviation, incipient betrayal, and apostasy are the only common elements one can find in the wide variety of meanings the term has in the literature of Marxism. In Marxist circles to pin the label of "revisionist" on the ideas of a socialist thinker is comparable to exposing a Christian writer as a "heretic" or "atheist" during the heyday of Western religious faith.
It was characteristic of Eduard Bernstein that he frankly called himself a "revisionist." Without re- nouncing his allegiance to the socialist movement Vlll and its ideals, he pointed to those developments in history and economics which invalidated some of Marx's analyses and predictions. He thus made the revision of Marx an intellectual necessity for those who wanted their scientific professions to square with experience. Unfortunately, they were not as numerous as Bernstein had expected. The reaction of "the true believers" to Bernstein's criticisms and the venomous nature of their attack upon him indicates that Bernstein was somewhat naive about the nature of mass movements. His position was rendered more uncomfortable by the fact that his criticisms of orthodox Marxism were highly praised in quarters that were hostile to all varieties of socialism. But Bernstein's intellectual courage measured up to his intellectual honesty. He stood his ground despite official condemnation of his criti- cisms and excited calls for his exclusion from the German Social Democratic Party. He restated and defended his position, never denying that he was a revisionist even when he protested against the misunderstandings of his revisionist views and the erroneous implications drawn from them by friend and foe.
After Bernstein — and probably because of the intensity of the anti-Bernstein jeremiad — none of the bold reinterpreters of Marx's work, whether they read Kant into his social thought or Blanqui into his theory of revolution, proclaimed themselves "revisionists." They repudiated suggestions that they were revising or modifying Marx's views. They insisted that they were merely restoring his thought, purifying it of its corruptions, and presenting it in its pristine form. The process of revising Marx by IX rediscovering him still continues. One modern ex- positor finds in Marx an anticipation of Freud; another that he is really a Zen-Buddhist, perhaps more accurately a Zen-Judaist. It may not be long before voices among the cultural avant-garde pro- claim— on the basis of Marx's early writings, re- pudiated in his maturity — that what Marx really meant by his doctrine of "alienation" is what Kierke- gaard and Heidegger have darkly expressed in the scriptural writings of existentialism.
What makes this hostility to the term "revisionism," and to the processes of critical examination of the cluster of ideas associated with Marxism, all the more paradoxical is the fierce insistence by those who regard themselves as the watchdogs of orthodoxy upon the "scientific" character of Marxism. For the very nature of a scientific statement requires that it be held tentatively, subject to the self-corrective procedures of the methods by which it is confirmed. One would have thought that to be scientific is to be committed to an attitude of revisionism. Bernstein himself never lost an opportunity to remind his critics that Marx and Engels had been the chief revisionists of the socialist thought of their day. Ever since Charles Peirce developed his theory of "critical fallibilism" in the latter half of the 19th century, it has become a commonplace that, in principle, every scientific statement can be challenged and withdrawn in the light of the evidence and in the interests of the systematic simplicity and fruitfulness of the body of knowledge of which it is a part. But to most socialists science was merely a set of doctrines which substi- tuted for religion as a support of moral faith.
Bernstein was no revisionist in the sense in which most men and movements have recently been labelled revisionist in Communist satellite countries. For he was primarily concerned with the truth of Marxism, while the latter, in order to avoid declaring Marx's judgments false, have sought to reconstruct his meaning. They have done this to some extent out of a misguided piety, to make Marx's thought immune to the refutation of events, but mainly to combat, in the name of Marxism, the absurd notions and abominable practices of the Communist regimes imposed on them under the banner of Marxism.
Nor has Bernstein's revisionism anything to do with the charges of revisionism hurled by the Chinese Communists against Tito and Khrushchev. The latter involves a struggle for the mantle of Lenin who was in important ways a more radical revisionist of Marx than was Bernstein. Lenin believed that the inevitable triumph of Communism on a world scale would be ushered in by inevitable war. Khrushchev, finally convinced that war with nuclear weapons might destroy both Communism and the free world, has proclaimed that the victory of Communism is still inevitable but not necessarily by inevitable war. He also believes that Communists may come to power in democratic countries by infiltration and guile, as in Czechoslovakia, rather than by armed insurrection. For these and allied reasons the Chinese Communists now regard Khrushchev as a "revisionist."
II Eduard Bernstein was born in Berlin on January 6, 1850 into a family of modest means. His formal education was limited. At the age of sixteen he began his apprenticeship in a bank. A few years later he XI became a bank clerk, a post which he retained until he left Germany for Switzerland in 1878. Six years before that he had joined the Eisenacher socialist group which merged with the Lassallean socialist group in 1875 to form the German Social Democratic Party. In Switzerland, where Bernstein remained in consequence of Bismarck's anti- Socialist Laws, he edited the official Party newspaper. It was distributed clandestinely in Germany. In 1888, under pressure from Bismarck, Bernstein and the newspaper he edited were banished by the Swiss government. He then moved to London where he worked closely with Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Marx. Indeed both Marx and Engels had thought highly of his editorial talents. Upon Engels' death, it was dis- covered that he had named Bernstein an executor of his estate and, together with Kautsky, his 'literary executor.* Eduard Bernstein first presented some of his revisionist ideas in a series of articles on the problems of socialism in Die Neue Zeit, an official periodical. They precipitated a succession of political squalls in the German Social Democratic Party. To clarify and defend his position, Bernstein was induced to write the present work whose title, rendered literally, is The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy. Its publication transformed what had been mere squalls into a major political storm in both the German party and other European socialist parties — a storm which blew itself out only with the advent of the First World War.
* The best study in English of Bernstein's life and work is Peter Gay's The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1952.
Xll Three things account for the startling, and to the orthodox, terrifying impact of Bernstein's book. First, it broke sharply with the apocalyptic conception that capitalism would collapse by virtue of inherent economic tendencies which would cause such wide- spread misery among the working classes that they would rise in revolutionary wrath, destroy the exist- ing state, and introduce collective ownership of all major means of production, distribution, and ex- change. Bernstein argued that the economic tenden- cies, upon which Marx predicated the collapse of capitalism, had not been fulfilled. The poor were not becoming poorer and the rich, richer. The doctrines of the increasing misery of the working class, the constant growth in size of the mass army of unemployed, the uninterrupted development of monopolies defying all social regulation, were not established by the facts. On the contrary, history had falsified them. Bernstein's explanation for the failure of Marx's predictions to materialize is that Marx had underestimated the economic and social consequences of the operation of a free political system upon its mode of production.
Secondly, Bernstein conceived of socialism as the fulfillment of the theory and practice of democracy in all social relations, the abolition of all class privi- leges', and the elimination of arbitrariness and un- reasonable discrimination and inequality in human relationships. This meant that socialism must eschew any form of political dictatorship in the name of class or party. It also meant that the Socialist parties of the world, although their active membership would largely be drawn from the ranks of workers, must regard themselves as representing the human interest Xlll Xlll or the interests of all groups in society. Socialists must seek to establish not a proletarian society in place of a bourgeois society, but a society of universal citizenship. To do this, it would be necessary to take certain broad measures to socialize industry and to frustrate the will of those who seek to use their proprietorship as a means of lording it over men. Limits must also be set on certain kinds of freedom, like that of testamentary disposition, in order to permit greater freedom for the development of the individual. In the process of carrying out all these reforms, strict allegiance to legal, moderate, and constitutional methods of change must be observed. So conceived, democracy is not merely "government by the people" or "rule of the majority." The idea of democracy must include respect for minority rights, a notion of justice as well as human welfare. Spelled out, the demand for justice implies "an equality of rights for all members of the community, and in that principle the rule of the majority, to which in every concrete case the rule of the people extends, finds its limits."
Thirdly, the socialist movement must, in the formu- lation of its program, purge itself of the remaining elements of Utopianism. It must stop conceiving of itself as fulfilling "a final goal," and constantly realize itself in the myriad daily tasks, small or large, which confront the movement towards greater democratization. Whatever the ends of socialism, the means to achieve them must be continuous with these ends. This interrelatedness of means and ends re- quires no belief in a predetermined goal to guide it, but only a sense of the direction in which the socialist movement is going. The sentence which infuriated XIV Bernstein's socialist colleagues most was the one in which he declared that the socialist movement meant everything to him and what was usually called the final aim of socialism, nothing. Unfortunately phrased, it made it easy for hostile critics to charge that without reference to the aims or ideals of social- ism one could not intelligently judge the direction of the movement. What Bernstein meant by his in- difference to the final aim of socialism was not to its ideals but to the eloquent descriptions of the institu- tional forms of those ideals which no one at the time could really know.
In taking these positions Bernstein was doing little more than describing and approving the actual behavior, as distinct from the programmatic declara- tions, of the German Social Democratic movement and other Western socialist parties. But in de- mythologizing the socialist outlook, in pointing to the disparities between its holiday rhetoric and daily practice, in calling for greater empirical sobriety and less terminological pieties, Bernstein was criti- cizing not only the trappings of faith but its substance as well. He seemed unaware that the more effectively reformist the Social Democratic Party was, the more important for its members was the ideology of apocalypse and the hope for total solutions.
Nonetheless, the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War — and despite the shadow of excommunication poised over Bernstein's head — continued along the revisionist path. When the War broke out Bernstein himself wished the Party to take a firm stand against approval of the war budget. After the War his prestige soared and, until Hitler destroyed political democracy in Germany, his point XV XV of view, even doctrinally, was acceptable to the German Social Democratic Party. The presence of a Communist movement, completely controlled by the Soviet Union, facilitated the triumph of Bernstein's perspective. After the downfall of Hitler, when the German Social Democratic Party was reconstituted, Bernstein's ideas became the reigning orthodoxy. Perhaps he would have found them even too revi- sionist on strictly economic matters.
The organization of the Communist International at the close of the First World War drew off from the socialist movement the most dogmatic of the Marx- ists. Under the leadership of Lenin, the Communists revised Marxism so radically that in effect Marxism became a voluntaristic social philosophy which rationalized the seizure of political power anywhere on the globe. Through the dictatorship of the Com- munist Party, which was identified with the dictator- ship of the proletariat, (even in countries in which the proletariat was of minuscular size), the Commu- nists attempted by ruthless use of force to lay the economic foundations of socialism. Bernstein himself had been critical of the simplistic interpretation of the Marxist theory of historical materialism. He denied that economic forces uniquely determined politics and culture, and stressed the importance of ethical ideals and factors as well as the clash of economic interests in history. On some issues he was prepared to move more vigorously than his Social Democratic comrades who relied upon the working out of the underlying forces of history. But he saw in Bolshevik-Leninism, the theoretical foundation of Soviet Communism, a reversion to the extreme ideas of Blanqui and Bakunin which glorified force and XVI XVI violence under misleading formulas about historical necessity and the laws of the class struggle. When I saw him in 1929, a few years before his death in 1932, he was full of indignation over Communist immoral- ism, both in the Soviet Union and without. In speak- ing of his early years he added, with a touch of reminiscent asperity, that Marx had a Bolshevik streak in him apparent in his political relations to others. Bernstein insisted that with respect to doc- trine, especially in its orientation towards democracy, cultural and intellectual freedom, Bolshevik-Leninism was little more than Asiatic despotism in modern dress.
If one examines the heritage of Bernstein, it seems fair to say that it is his ideas rather than those of his orthodox critics, Karl Kautsky and George Plekhanov, which have won the day, in the sense that they are reflected in the working beliefs of democratic socialist movements in the Western world. This is evidenced in various ways. First, democratic socialists today are aware that socialism and capitalism as systems of economy are neither exhaustive of all possibilities nor exclusive of each other. Few socialists believe in the collectivization of all means of production. They are aware that there is a totalitarian potential in a completely collectivized economy which, if political democracy is ever lost, may become a tremendous engine of oppression and tyranny. Secondly, they deny there- fore that the chief issue of our time is between socialism and capitalism, a rationally controlled versus a free enterprise economy. Rather the struggle is between democracy, on the one hand, conceived not only politically but as a way of life, and totali- XV11 tarianism on the other. The experience of Fascism and Communism has taught socialists, or reinforced what they once knew, that freedom comes first — the freedom to choose the economy, the religion, the cultural and artistic forms of existence under which one prefers to live. Instead of interpreting democracy merely as a means of achieving socialism, and therefore abandoning democracy, when it is slow or inefficient, for direct action or dictatorship or benevo- lent despotism, socialism becomes the institutional means by which the values of democracy are furthered. Thirdly, this implies that the socialist economy or the mode of production is not an end in itself, but is to be regarded as a means to a more abundant and a more just life. It then becomes an empirical matter, and not one of doctrinaire first principles, whether or not private ownership or public ownership or public corporate ownership — consisting of management, labor and consumers — is desirable in this or that particular sector of the economy. Fourthly, and perhaps most important, individual persons (not, of course, individualism as a theory) move into the forefront of concern in socialist philosophy. If, as Marx put it, "the free development of all (should) become the condition for the free development of each," then the ethical ideals of socialism are reinstated as the criteria for judging all existing institutions and all proposals for change. The content of morality goes beyond a set of abstract, categorical imperatives which cannot be applied to specific situations, even when they enjoy universal acceptance. It derives from the study of man in this particular time and society, of the alternatives of development open to him, their prob- XV1U able consequences, and reflective choice among them. This choice is guided by the ideals of equality or justice, joy or human welfare, and justified, to the extent that moral judgment can be justified, by intelligence. Although Bernstein spoke in another idiom — and few democratic socialists today are aware of the nature of the intellectual debt they owe him — by shattering the mo^noHthjof Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy, he prepared the way for the pluralism, tKeTpersonalism, the orientation towards democracy asa way °f M* tnvrhich 'they are ^resentTy committed.
The democratic socialism for which Bernstein stood was not a milk and water doctrine of accom- modation or adjustment to regnant power. Personally, Bernstein was fearless, both in following a sound argument no matter where it led and in struggling against aggression and injustice. In contradistinction to his early teachers and their disciples, he was fair to a fault in considering the views of others, including those of his critics. What is true of his personal char- acter is true of his doctrine. He believed in vigorous action against those whose practices were hostile to democratic society, under no matter what colors they sailed. He did not fear far-reaching parliamentary reform and would personally have been willing to support stronger measures than those urged by the German Social Democrats after the First World War. In international affairs he was freer of chauvinism than most of his colleagues. He became, and re- mained, a good European from the very first days of his conversion to socialism. In the teeth of opposition from his own party, he laid the main burden of guilt for World War I at the door of Imperial Germany — XIX which reflected his moral passion against the official propaganda more than it did the actual weight of the evidence.
It is sometimes said of Bernstein's democratic so- cialism that it is viable only in a country already persuaded of the validity of his democratic ideals; that it is bankrupt when faced by the existence of such demonic social elements as those which cluster around men like Hitler or Lenin. This is a half truth. Bernstein would have agreed that democratic social- ism could only be introduced into a country which believes in democracy. If a country does not believe in democracy, the conditions for socialism are unripe. The task of socialists in such a situation is to work to introduce the conditions under which democracy can develop, and to carry on intense educational ac- tivity on behalf of socialism. Bernstein regarded the Communists as unfaithful to the elementary principles of Marxism, as well as contemptuous of moral de- cency, because of their willingness to make a bloody sacrifice of living generations for a problematic future. For him the means determine the end more surely than the end determines the means. What results tomorrow is always the consequence of the means used today — and there is no empirical warrant for believing that a dictatorship based on lying propa- ganda and "force without limit," to use Lenin's ex- pression, will eventuate in the brotherhood of man.
Bernstein would have repudiated — as a preface to, or apologia for, a political dictatorship — the recent declaration of a self-styled "socialist" leader of an African state that "it is an illusion to think you can have a revolution without prisons." This is not be- cause Bernstein was a pacifist or opposed to the use XX XX of force, but because declarations of this kind are usually employed to justify repressive measures against democrats who think differently from the rev- olutionary junta in power. However, were a revolu- tion initiated or established by the normal processes of democracy, Bernstein would not have hesitated to use force against active counter-revolutionists, Fas- cist or Communist. Judging by the principles he ex- pressed, his first instincts would have been to intro- duce those measures of social reform which would remove legitimate grievances and therewith dissolve the mass base of totalitarian support. But he would not have hesitated to destroy a Hitler before Hitler succeeded in bringing down the whole structure of democracy into ruins. An impassioned believer in civil rights, Bernstein was not a ritualistic liberal, unable to distinguish between the heresy which a free society must tolerate and the conspiracy which it may not. Eduard Bernstein has not yet come into his own. It is not hazardous, however, to predict that in those regions of the world which remain free, his life and work will in time become better known, and the memory of his name kept green by those who wage the unending struggle to make society more humane and just.
Sidney Hook New York University August, 1963 PREFACE TO ENGLISH EDITION.
The present book has not only had its history, it has also in some way made a little history. Called forth by the circumstances described in the preface to the German edition, it created at its appearance a fair stir inside and outside German social democracy. Opponents of socialism declared it to be the most crushing testimony of the unsoundness of the socialist theory, and criticism of capitalist society and socialist writers. First of all Karl Kautsky denounced it as an abandonment of the funda- mental principles and conception of scientific socialism. Induced by all this the German social democratic party put the book on the agenda of its Hanover Congress (October, 1899), where it was discussed in a debate that lasted three days and a half and ended with the acceptance of a resolution that was meant to be a rejection of the views put forward by the author.
I could not at that time take part in the debate. For political reasons I had to stay away from German territory. But I declared then that I regarded the excitement of my comrades over the book as the outcome of a state of nervous irritation created by the deductions the opponents of socialism drew from some of its sentences, and by an over- estimation of the importance to socialism of the tenets fought by me. But I could with- draw nothing, and although ten years have lapsed since, and I have now had seven years' most intimate knowledge of German political and economical conditions, I cannot yield on XX11 any material point. Subsequently the views put forward in the book have received the bye-name of Revisionism, and although some of those who are called Revisionists in German social democracy hold on several points views different from mine, the book can, all in all, be regarded as an exposition of the theoretical and political tendencies of the German social democratic revisionists. It is widely read in Germany; only some weeks ago a new — the ninth — edition of it has been published.
For reasons explained in the preface to the first German edition the book is occasionally written in a rather hesitating way. But its principal aim will appear, I think, clear enough. It is the strong accentuation of what in Germany is called the Gegenwartrarbeit — the every-day work of the socialist party — that work in the furrows of the field which by many is regarded as mere stop-gap work compared with the great coming upheaval, and of which much has been done consequently in a half- hearted way only. Unable to believe in finalities at all, I cannot believe in a final aim of socialism. But I strongly believe in the socialist movement, in the march forward of the working classes, who step by step must work out their emancipation by changing society from the domain of a commercial land- holding oligarchy to a real democracy which in all its departments is guided by the interests of those who work and create.
Ed. Bernstein.
PREFACE.
The present work is substantially devoted to the establishment of ideas which the writer un- folded in a letter to the German Social Demo- cratic Party assembled at Stuttgart from October 3rd to October 8th, 1898.
This letter reads: — The views laid down by me in the series Problems of Socialism have lately been dis- cussed in Socialist papers and meetings, and a request has been made that the Party of Ger- man Social Democrats should state its position in regard to them. In case this happens and the Party agrees to the request, I am induced to make the following explanation.
The vote of an assembly, however signifi- cant it may be, naturally cannot disconcert me in my views, which have been gained from an examination of social phenomena. What I wrote in the Neue Zeit is the expression of a conviction from which I do not find myself induced to depart in any important particular.
But it is just as natural that a vote of the party should find me anything but indifferent. And, therefore, it will be understood if I feel the paramount necessity of guarding myself against misconstruction of my conclusions and false deductions from them. As I am prevented from attending the Congress I send this written communication.
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