Bernstein, Eduard

« acknowledge that it was now a democratic socialist party of reform. Bernstein developed these views, in part in a series of articles published in Die Neue Zeit under the title 'Problems of Socialism' and in part in a polemical exchange with the English socialist Ernest Belfort Bax (Tudor and Tudor 1988: 168-9 ).

The consequent uproar within the party culminated in the rejection of Bernstein's 'revisionism' at the party conference at Stuttgart in 1898.

Early in the following year Bernstein published his Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Preconditions of Socialism ).

In it, he commended Marx and Engels for their open-ended, scientific approach.

Their own investigations had, he argued, quite rightly led them to revise and qualify the initial formulations of their theories.

They had, for instance, been the first to recognize the abstract nature (and therefore limited usefulness) of the theory of surplus value.

They had, in their later years, amplified the materialist conception of history to allow political and ideological factors greater autonomy in effecting historical change.

And they had modified their analysis of capitalist development in ways that made it less deterministic. In Bernstein's view, these scientific advances pointed towards an evolutionary interpretation of the transition from capitalism to socialism.

However, it was undeniable that Marx and Engels had drawn a different conclusion.

They had never abandoned their revolutionary expectations.

The reason for this, according to Bernstein, was that, to the very end, their thinking had been confined within the straightjacket of Hegelian dialectics.

It was Hegelian dialectics, not their painstaking scientific work, that ultimately dictated their conclusions.

Scientific socialists should, Bernstein argued, emulate Marx the scientist, not Marx the dialectician. Bernstein's own philosophical predilections were ill-defined.

His view of science and knowledge was vaguely positivist in character, and in ethics he was much influenced by the neo-Kantians, particularly Friedrich Albert Lange (see Neo-Kantianism ).

However, he was not a professional philosopher.

Apart from the opening chapters of Preconditions , the nearest he came to stating his philosophical position was in his 1901 lecture, 'How is Scientific Socialism Possible? ' (1976).

Here he argued that science, by its nature, is disinterested; it is mere cognition and cannot move men to action.

Socialism, however, is a movement with aims and objectives, and these embody, not the results of scientific investigation, but the interests of the working class.

In short, socialism does move men to action, it is not disinterested, and it therefore cannot be scientific. The controversy provoked by Bernstein's views lasted for many years.

His opponents included luminaries such as Georgii Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg and, above all, his old friend Karl Kautsky (see Plekhanov, G.

§2) .

The party conferences at Hanover (1899) and Dresden (1903) were devoted mainly to Bernstein and the 'revisionist' question.

Bernstein himself returned to Germany in 1901 where he continued his literary activity and, for most of the rest of his life, served as Reichstag deputy.

After various political vicissitudes, he died in 1932.. »