Eduard Bernstein: Evolutionary Socialism

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Bernstein writes that he has been wrongly characterized as advocating “abandonment of the conquest of political power by the proletariat” (that is, by the working class). Instead, he writes, it is a mistake to “expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy” (bourgeois referring to the middle class, with implications of materialism and conventional attitudes). He argues that adherents of the “theory of a catastrophe,” who base their support for it on their reading of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, are simply mistaken. The Manifesto was “mistaken in several special deductions, above all in the estimate of the time the evolution would take.” In Bernstein's view, popular opposition to the existing social and economic order is not as great as the Manifesto predicted. Increasing social wealth has not been accompanied by a reduction in the number of large capitalists but by “an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees.” The middle classes “change their character” but do not disappear. The process of “concentration in productive industry” is uneven.

Bernstein argues that revolutionary Socialism is impracticable and that the best course is to pursue Socialist aims through parliamentary means. Social Democrats, instead of “speculating on a great economic crash,” should “organise the working classes politically and develop them as a democracy.” They should fight for all reforms that benefit the working classes and that make the state more democratic. He is aware that he parts company with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and with those who have adopted Marxist thought. He says that his central concern is to oppose utopian Socialist theory with the goal of strengthening both the “realistic” and “idealistic” elements of Socialism. In his view, “socialism means co-operative economics” and starts with the concept of association. Production, he notes, “is already socially organised, only the management is individualistic and the profit is appropriated by individuals, not on the ground of their labour, but of their share of capital.” He thus calls for social democracy, in which the working class exercises political sovereignty. At present, he says, the socialization of production and distribution, and the centralization of business enterprises, has been only partly achieved.

Bernstein turns to the issue of defining the “proletariat.” He acknowledges that if one includes everyone “without property, all those who have no income from property or from a privileged position, then they certainly form the absolute majority of the population of advanced countries.” Modern wage earners, though, are not the “homogeneous mass” the Manifesto foresaw but “a whole hierarchy of differentiated workmen … between whose groups only a moderate feeling of solidarity exists.” Bernstein sees the growing number of Socialist votes at the time he is writing as indicating growing support for “socialistic strivings”—but no one would claim that all votes for Socialists are cast by Socialists.

Bernstein concludes that the state cannot simply take over the manufacture and distribution of products or of all medium and large enterprises. It does not have the capacity and thus has to “leave them in the hands of the former proprietors, or, if they wanted to expropriate these absolutely, they would be obliged to give them over to associations of workmen on some leasing conditions.” In all these cases, he writes, the question “would resolve itself into the question of the economic power of associations—i.e. of co-operation.” That is the key to Socialism as he understands it.