Eduard Bernstein: Evolutionary Socialism

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), the author of Evolutionary Socialism and a prominent German Socialist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party, originally formed as a left-wing worker’s party. Under the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the party was banned from 1878 to 1890, but after the ban on Socialist parties was lifted, the Social Democratic Party became a force in German politics. Bernstein was a proponent of Evolutionary Socialism, sometimes called Democratic Socialism. While definitions of Evolutionary Socialism vary, in general they emphasize rejection of authoritarian rule and violent revolution. Rather, Evolutionary Socialists believed that in time the capitalist system would wither away and that the people, through democratically elected representatives, would replace the capitalist social and economic system with a Socialist one. Thus, Evolutionary Socialism was a reformist movement, not a revolutionary one.

The excerpts from Evolutionary Socialism reproduced here include a letter Bernstein wrote to the German Social Democratic Party, which met in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1898. His purpose in the letter was to clarify his positions on the development of Socialism and to counter charges that he had abandoned the principles of Marxism. Other excerpts from the book’s preface and from chapter III (“The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy”) continue to outline his views on the nature and future of Socialism.