• Political Theorist and Member of the Social Democratic Party Eduard Bernstein, 1850
  

Bernstein was born in Schöneberg (now part of Berlin) to Jewish parents, who were active in the Reform Temple on the Johannistrasse where services were performed on Sunday. His father was a locomotive driver. From 1866 to 1878, after leaving school, he was employed in banks as a banker's clerk. His political career began during 1872, when he joined a socialist party with Marxist tendencies, known formally as the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Eisenacher Programms -- a proponent of the Eisenach (named after the German town Eisenach) type of German socialism -- and soon became known as an activist. Bernstein's party contested two elections against a rival socialist party, the Lassalleans (Ferdinand Lassalle's Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), but in both elections neither party was able to win a significant majority of the leftist vote. Consequently Bernstein , together with August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, prepared the Einigungsparteitag ("unification party congress") with the Lassalleans in Gotha during 1875. Karl Marx's famous Critique of the Gotha Program criticized what he saw as a Lassallean victory over the Eisenachers whom he favored; interestingly, Bernstein later noted that it was Liebknecht, considered by many to be the strongest Marxist advocate within the Eisenacher faction, who proposed the inclusion of many of the ideas which so thoroughly irritated Marx.

By the Reichstag elections of 1877, the German Social Democratic Party gained 493,000 votes. However, two assassination attempts on the Kaiser the next year provided Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with a pretext for introducing a law banning all socialist organizations, assemblies, and publications. There had not been any Social Democratic involvement with either assassination attempt, but the popular reaction against "enemies of the Reich" induced a compliant Reichstag to approve Bismarck's "Socialist Law."

Bismarck's strict anti - Socialist legislation was passed on 12 October 1878. For nearly all practical purposes, the Social Democratic Party was outlawed and, throughout Germany, it was suppressed actively. However, it was still possible for Social Democrats to campaign as individuals for election to the Reichstag, and this they did. Indeed, despite the severe persecution to which it was subjected, the party actually increased its electoral success, gaining 550,000 votes during 1884 and 763,000 during 1887.

The vehemence of Bernstein's opposition to the government of Bismarck made it desirable for him to leave Germany. Shortly before the "Socialist Law" came into effect, he went into exile in Zurich, accepting a position as private secretary for social democratic patron Karl Höchberg, a wealthy endorser of Social Democracy. A warrant subsequently issued for his arrest ruled out any possibility of his returning to Germany, and he was to remain in exile for more than twenty years. During 1888, Bismarck convinced the Swiss government to expel a number of important members of German social democratism from its country, and so Bernstein relocated to London, where he associated with Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. It was soon after his arrival in Switzerland that he began to think of himself as a Marxist. During 1880, he accompanied Bebel to London in order to end a misunderstanding concerning his involvement with an article published by Höchberg and denounced by Marx and Engels as being "chock - full of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideas." The visit was a success. Engels in particular was impressed by Bernstein's zeal and his ideas.

Back in Zurich, Bernstein became increasingly active in working for Der Sozialdemokrat ("Social Democrat"), and later succeeded Georg von Vollmar as the paper's editor, a job he was to have for the next ten years. It was during these years between 1880 and 1890 that Bernstein established his reputation as a major party theoretician and a Marxist of impeccable orthodoxy. In this he was helped by the close personal and professional relationship he established with Engels. This relationship owed much to the fact that he shared Engels's strategic ideas and accepted most of the particular policies which, in Engels's opinion, those ideas entailed. During 1887, the German government persuaded the Swiss authorities to ban Der Sozialdemokrat. Bernstein relocated to London where he resumed publication from premises in Kentish Town. His relationship with Engels soon developed into friendship. He also communicated with various English socialist organizations, notably the Fabian Society and Henry Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation. Indeed, during later years, his opponents routinely claimed that his "revisionism" was due to his having come to see the world "through English spectacles." It is, of course, impossible to determine how far the charge was justified. Bernstein himself denied it.

During 1891, he was one of the authors of the Erfurt Program, and from 1896 to 1898, he published a series of articles entitled Probleme des Sozialismus ("Problems of Socialism") that resulted in the revisionism debate in the SPD. He also published a book titled Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie ("The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy") during 1899. The book was in great contrast to the positions of August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Rosa Luxemburg's 1900 essay Reform or Revolution? was also a polemic against Bernstein's position. During 1900, Berstein published Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Sozialismus ("The history and theory of socialism," 1900).

During 1901, he returned to Germany, after the end of a ban that had kept him from entering the country. He became an editor of the newspaper Vorwärts that year, and a member of the Reichstag from 1902 to 1918. He voted against the armament tabling during 1913, together with the SPD fraction's left wing. Although he had voted for war credits during August 1914, from July 1915 he opposed World War I and during 1917 he was among the initiators of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which united anti - war socialists (including reformists like Bernstein, "centrists" like Kautsky and revolutionary Marxists like Karl Liebknecht). He was a member of the USDP until 1919, when he rejoined the SPD. From 1920 to 1928 Bernstein was again a member of the Reichstag. He retired from political life during 1928.

Bernstein died on 18 December 1932 in Berlin. A commemorative plaque is placed in his memory at Bozener Straße 18, Berlin - Schöneberg, where he lived from 1918 until his death.

Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (1899) was Bernstein's most significant work. Bernstein was principally concerned with refuting Marx's predictions about the imminent and inevitable demise of capitalism, and Marx's consequent laissez faire policy which opposed ameliorative social interventions before the demise. Bernstein indicated simple facts that he considered to be evidence that Marx's predictions were not being borne out: he noted that the centralization of capitalist industry, while significant, was not becoming wholescale and that the ownership of capital was becoming more, and not less, diffuse.

As to Marx's belief in the disappearance of the middleman, Bernstein declared that the entrepreneur class was being steadily recruited from the proletariat class, and therefore all compromise measures, such as the state regulation of the hours of labor, provisions for old-age pensions, and so on, should be encouraged. For this reason, Bernstein urged the laboring classes to take an active interest in politics. Bernstein also indicated what he considered to be some of the flaws in Marx's labor theory of value.

In its totality, Bernstein's analysis formed a powerful critique of Marxism, and this caused to his vilification among many orthodox Marxists. Bernstein remained, however, very much a socialist, albeit an unorthodox one: he believed that socialism would be achieved by capitalism, not by capitalism's destruction (as rights were gradually won by workers, their cause for grievance would be diminished, and consequently, so too would the motivation for revolution). During the intra - party debates about his ideas, Bernstein explained that, for him, the final goal of socialism was nothing; progress toward that goal was everything.

Although Marx would argue that free trade would be the quickest fulfillment of the capitalist system, and thus its end, Bernstein considered protectionism as helping only a selective few, being fortschrittsfeindlich (anti - progressive), for its negative effects on the masses. Germany's protectionism, Bernstein argued, was based only on political expediency, isolating Germany from the world (especially from Britain), creating an autarky that would only result in conflict between Germany and the rest of the world.

He is also noted for being "one of the first socialists to deal sympathetically with the issue of homosexuality."