Eduard Bernstein: Evolutionary Socialism

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Preface

The present work is substantially devoted to the establishment of ideas which the writer unfolded in a letter to the German Social Democratic 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 discussed in Socialist papers and meetings, and a request has been made that the Party of German 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 significant 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.

It has been maintained in a certain quarter that the practical deductions from my treatises would be the abandonment of the conquest of political power by the proletariat organised politically and economically. That is quite an arbitrary deduction, the accuracy of which I altogether deny.

I set myself against the notion that we have to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy, and that social democracy should be induced by the prospect of such an imminent, great, social catastrophe to adapt its tactics to that assumption. That I maintain most emphatically.

The adherents of this theory of a catastrophe base it especially on the conclusions of the Communist Manifesto. This is a mistake in every respect.

The theory which the Communist Manifesto sets forth of the evolution of modern society was correct as far as it characterised the general tendencies of that evolution. But it was mistaken in several special deductions, above all in the estimate of the time the evolution would take. The last has been unreservedly acknowledged by Friedrich Engels, the joint author with Marx of the Manifesto, in his preface to the Class War in France. But it is evident that if social evolution takes a much greater period of time than was assumed, it must also take upon itself forms and lead to forms that were not foreseen and could not be foreseen then.

Social conditions have not developed to such an acute opposition of things and classes as is depicted in the Manifesto. It is not only useless, it is the greatest folly to attempt to conceal this from ourselves. The number of members of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character but they do not disappear from the social scale.

The concentration in productive industry is not being accomplished even to day in all its departments with equal thoroughness and at an equal rate. In a great many branches of production it certainly justifies the forecasts of the socialist critic of society; but in other branches it lags even to-day behind them. The process of concentration in agriculture proceeds still more slowly. Trade statistics show an extraordinarily elaborated graduation of enterprises in regard to size. No rung of the ladder is disappearing from it. The significant changes in the inner structure of these enterprises and their inter-relationship cannot do away with this fact.

In all advanced countries we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations. Under the influence of this, and driven by the movement of the working classes which is daily becoming stronger, a social reaction has set in against the exploiting tendencies of capital, a counteraction which, although it still proceeds timidly and feebly, yet does exist, and is always drawing more departments of economic life under its influence. Factory legislation, the democratising of local government, and the extension of its area of work, the freeing of trade unions and systems of co-operative trading from legal restrictions, the consideration of standard conditions of labour in the work undertaken by public authorities—all these characterise this phase of the evolution.

But the more the political organisations of modern nations are democratised the more the needs and opportunities of great political catastrophes are diminished. He who holds firmly to the catastrophic theory of evolution must, with all his power, withstand and hinder the evolution described above, which, indeed, the logical defenders of that theory formerly did. But is the conquest of political power by the proletariat simply to be by a political catastrophe? Is it to be the appropriation and utilisation of the power of the State by the proletariat exclusively against the whole non-proletarian world?

He who replies in the affirmative must be reminded of two things. In 1872 Marx and Engels announced in the preface to the new edition of the Communist Manifesto that the Paris Commune had exhibited a proof that “the working classes cannot simply take possession of the ready-made State machine and set it in motion for their own aims.” And in 1895 Friedrich Engels stated in detail in the preface to War of the Classes that the time of political surprises, of the “revolutions of small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses” was to-day at an end, that a collision on a large scale with the military would be the means of checking the steady growth of social democracy and of even throwing it back for a time in short; that social democracy would flourish far better by lawful than by unlawful means and by violent revolution. And, he points out in conformity with this opinion that the next task of the party should be “to work for an uninterrupted increase of its votes” or to carry on a slow propaganda of parliamentary activity.

Thus Engels, who, nevertheless, as his numerical examples show, still somewhat overestimated the rate of process of the evolution! Shall we be told that he abandoned the conquest of political power by the working classes, because he wished to avoid the steady growth of social democracy secured by lawful means being interrupted by a political revolution?

If not, and if one subscribes to his conclusions, one cannot reasonably take any offence if it is declared that for a long time yet the task of social democracy is, instead of speculating on a great economic crash, “to organise the working classes politically and develop them as a democracy and to fight for all reforms in the State which are adapted to raise the working classes and transform the State in the direction of democracy.”

That is what I have said in my impugned article and what I still maintain in its full import. As far as concerns the question propounded above it is equivalent to Engel’s dictum, for democracy is, at any given time, as much government by the working classes as these are capable of practising according to their intellectual ripeness and the degree of social development they have attained. Engels, indeed, refers at the place just mentioned to the fact that the Communist Manifesto has “proclaimed the conquest of the democracy as one of the first and important tasks of the fighting proletariat.”

In short, Engels is so thoroughly convinced that the tactics based on the presumption of a catastrophe have had their day, that he even considers a revision of them necessary in the Latin countries where tradition is much more favourable to them than in Germany. “If the conditions of war between nations have altered,” he writes, “no less have those for the war between classes.” Has this already been forgotten?

No one has questioned the necessity for the working classes to gain the control of government. The point at issue is between the theory of a social cataclysm and the question whether with the given social development in Germany and the present advanced state of its working classes in the towns and the country, a sudden catastrophe would be desirable in the interest of the social democracy. I have denied it and deny it again, because in my judgment a greater security for lasting success lies in a steady advance than in the possibilities offered by a catastrophic crash.

And as I am firmly convinced that important periods in the development of nations cannot be leapt over I lay the greatest value on the next tasks of social democracy, on the struggle for the political rights of the working man, on the political activity of working men in town and country for the interests of their class, as well as on the work of the industrial organisation of the workers.

In this sense I wrote the sentence that the movement means everything for me and that what is usually called “the final aim of socialism” is nothing; and in this sense I write it down again to-day. Even if the word “usually” had not shown that the proposition was only to be understood conditionally, it was obvious that it could not express indifference concerning the final carrying out of socialist principles, but only indifference—or, as it would be better expressed, carelessness—as to the form of the final arrangement of things. I have at no time had an excessive interest in the future, beyond general principles; I have not been able to read to the end any picture of the future. My thoughts and efforts are concerned with the duties of the present and the nearest future, and I only busy myself with the perspectives beyond so far as they give me a line of conduct for suitable action now.

The conquest of political power by the working classes, the expropriation of capitalists, are no ends in themselves but only means for the accomplishment of certain aims and endeavours. As such they are demands in the programme of social democracy and are not attacked by me. Nothing can be said beforehand as to the circumstances of their accomplishment; we can only fight for their realisation. But the conquest of political power necessitates the possession of political rights; and the most important problem of tactics which German social democracy has at the present time to solve, appears to me to be to devise the best ways for the extension of the political and economic rights of the German working classes.”

The following work has been composed in the sense of these conclusions.

I am fully conscious that it differs in several important points from the ideas to be found in the theory of Karl Marx and Engels—men whose writings have exercised the greatest influence on my socialist line of thought, and one of whom, Engels, honoured me with his personal friendship not only till his death but who showed beyond the grave, in his testamentary arrangements, a proof of his confidence in me.

This deviation in the manner of looking at things certainly is not of recent date; it is the product of an inner struggle of years and I hold in my hand a proof that this was no secret to Friedrich Engels, and moreover I must guard Engels from the suspicion that he was so narrow-minded as to exact from his friends an unconditional adherence to his views. Nevertheless, it will be understood from the foregoing why I have till now avoided as much as possible giving to my deviating points of view the form of a systematic and detailed criticism of the Marx-Engels doctrine. This could the more easily be avoided up till now because as regards the practical questions with which we were concerned Marx and Engels in the course of time considerably modified their views.

All that is now altered. I have now a controversy with socialists who, like me, have sprung from the Marx-Engels school; and I am obliged, if I am to maintain my opinions, to show them the points where the Marx-Engels theory appears to me especially mistaken or to be self-contradictory.

I have not shirked this task, but, owing to the personal grounds already mentioned, it has not been easy to me. I acknowledge this openly so that the reader may not deduce uncertainty in the subject matter from the hesitating, clumsy form of the first chapters. I stand by what I have written with firm conviction; but I have not always succeeded in choosing the form and the arguments by means of which my thoughts would have gained the clearest expression. In this respect my work is far behind many a work published by others on the same subject. I have rectified in the last chapter some omissions in the first chapters. Further, as the publication of the work was somewhat delayed, the chapter on “Co-operation” has undergone some additions in which repetitions could not wholly be avoided.

For the rest, the work may speak for itself. I am not so ingenuous as to expect that it will forthwith convert those who have disagreed with my previous essays, nor am I foolish enough to wish that those who agree with me in principle should subscribe to everything I have said in it. In fact, the most doubtful side of the work is that it embraces too much. When I came to speak of the tasks of the present time I was obliged, unless I wished to flounder into generalities, to enter on all kinds of isolated questions over which differences of opinion are unavoidable even among those who otherwise think alike. And yet the want of space compelled me to lay stress on some principal points by implication rather than by establishing them. But I repeat I am not concerned that others should agree with me in every single question. That which concerns me, that which forms the chief aim of this work, is, by opposing what is left of the utopian mode of thought in the socialist theory, to strengthen equally the realistic and the idealistic element in the socialist movement. …

Chapter III: The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy

(a) The political and economic preliminary conditions of socialism

If we asked a number of men belonging to any class or party to give in a concise formula a definition of socialism, most of them would be somewhat confused. He who does not repeat at random some phrase he has heard must first make clear to himself whether he has to characterise a state, a movement, a perception, or an aim. If we consult the literature of socialism itself, we shall come across very various explanations of its concept according as they fall into one or other of the categories designated above from the derivation of the concept from juridical notions (equality, justice) or its summary characterisation as social science, up to its identification with the class struggle of the workers in modern society and the explanation that socialism means co-operative economics. In some cases conceptions founded on entirely different principles are the grounds for this variety of explanations; but they are mostly only the results of observing or representing one and the same thing from different points of view.

The most exact characterisation of socialism will in any case be that which starts from the concept of association because by it an economical as well as—in the widest sense of the word—a juridical relation is expressed at the same time. It needs no long-winded deduction to show that the indication of the juridical nature of socialism is just as important as that of its economic nature. Quite apart from the question whether or in what sense law is a primary or secondary factor in the life of a community, the nature of its law undoubtedly in each case gives the most concentrated idea of its character. We characterise forms of communities, not according to their technological or economic foundations, but according to the fundamental principle of their legal institutions. We speak, indeed, of an age of stone, bronze, machinery, electricity, etc., but of a feudal, capitalistic, bourgeois, etc., order of society. To this would correspond the definition of socialism as a movement towards—or the state of—an order of society based on the principle of association. In this sense, which also corresponds with the etymology of the word (socius—a partner), the word is used in what follows.

Now what are the preliminary conditions of the realisation of socialism? Historical materialism sees them first in the modern development of production. With the spread of the capitalistic large enterprises in industry and agriculture there is assumed to be a lasting and steadily increasing material cause for the impetus to a socialistic transformation of society. In these undertakings production 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. The active worker is separated from the possession of his instruments of production, he is in the dependent condition of a wage-earner, from which he does not escape as long as he lives, and the pressure of it is rendered sharper by the uncertainty which is joined with this dependence both on the employer and on the fluctuations in the state of trade. Like production itself, the conditions of existence for the producers press towards the socialisation and the co-operative organisation of production and exchange. As soon as this development is sufficiently advanced the realisation of socialism becomes an imperative necessity for the further development of the community. To carry it out is the task of the proletariat organised as a class party which for this purpose must take possession of the political government.

According to that, we have as the first condition of the general realisation of socialism a definite degree of capitalist development, and as the second the exercise of political sovereignty by the class party of the workers, i.e., social democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat is, according to Marx, the form of the exercise of this power in the transition period.

As regards the first condition, it has already been shown in the section on the “Classes of Establishments in Production and Distribution” that if the large undertaking in industry predominates to-day, yet it, including the businesses dependent on it, even in such an advanced country as Prussia, represents at the most only half the population engaged in production. The picture is not different if we take the statistics for the whole of Germany, and it is very little different in England, the most industrial country of Europe. In other foreign lands, perhaps with the exception of Belgium, the relation of the large enterprise to the small and medium business is still more unfavourable. But in agriculture we see everywhere the small and medium holding, as compared with the large one, not only greatly predominating, but also strengthening its position. In commerce and distribution the relation of the groups of undertakings is similar.

That the picture which the summarised figures of trade statistics give receives many corrections on a more recent examination of separate divisions, I have myself shown in my article on the Catastrophic Theory, after I had already expressly referred, in an earlier article of the series, Problems of Socialism, to the fact that the number of employees in an undertaking was no safe indication as to the degree of its capitalist nature.

But this is of no particularly great consequence for us at present. Whether of the hundreds of thousands of small undertakings, a good number are of capitalistic character and others are wholly or partly dependent on large capitalist undertakings, this can alter very little the total result which the statistics of undertakings offer. The great and growing variety of undertakings, the graduated character of the structure of industrial enterprises, is not thereby disproved. If we strike out of the list a quarter or even a half of all small establishments as dependencies of medium and large enterprises, there remain in Germany almost a million undertakings from capitalist giant enterprises, downward in ever broadening classes to the hundred thousands of small enterprises worked in handicraft fashion, which may, indeed, pay tribute by-and-by to the process of concentration, but on that account show no indication of disappearing from the scene.

It follows that as far as centralised enterprise forms a preliminary condition for the socialisation of production and distribution, this is only a partial condition in even the most advanced countries of Europe, so that if in Germany in the near future the state wished to expropriate all undertakings, say of twenty persons and upwards, be it for state management altogether or for partly managing and partly leasing them, there would still remain in commerce and industry hundreds of thousands of undertakings with over four millions of workers which would be excluded and be carried on under private management. In agriculture there would remain, if all holdings of over 20 hectares were nationalized—of which no one dreams—several millions of holdings under private management with a total of 9,000,000 workers. One can form an idea of the magnitude of the task which would be borne by the state, or the states, by taking over even the larger undertakings. It would be a question, in industry and commerce together, of about a hundred thousand businesses with five to six million employees, and in agriculture of over 300,000 holdings with over five million workers. What abundance of judgment, practical knowledge, talent for administration, must a government or a national assembly have at its disposal to be even equal to the supreme management or managing control of such a gigantic organism!

But let us leave this question on one side for a time, and let us keep first of all firmly to the fact that the material preliminary condition for the socialisation of production and distribution—advanced centralisation of enterprises—is at present only partly achieved.

The second preliminary condition, according to the theory of Marx, is the conquest of the political power by the proletariat. One can think of this conquest in various ways: by the path of parliamentary struggle, turning the right to vote to good account, or by the path of force by means of a revolution.

It is known that Marx and Engels, until pretty recently, considered the latter as nearly everywhere absolutely inevitable, and it seems unavoidable to various adherents of the Marxist doctrine to-day. Often it is also considered the shorter way.

To this, people are led before all else by the idea that the working class is the most numerous and also the most energetic class of the community. Once in possession of power, it would not rest until it had substituted for the foundations of the present system such arrangements as would make its restoration impossible.

It has already been mentioned that Marx and Engels, in the establishment of their theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, had before their eyes as a typical example terror of the French Revolution. Even in Anti-Dühring Engels declares that St. Simon in 1792, by regarding the reign of terror as the reign of the masses without means, made a discovery worthy of a genius. That is probably an over-estimation, but however highly one may esteem the discovery, the result of the rule of the men without property does not thrive much better with St. Simon than with Schiller, decried to-day as “a philistine.” The men without property in 1793 were only capable of fighting the battles of others. They could only “govern” as long as the terror lasted. When itself, as it was bound to do, it had exhausted their government was quite at an end. According to the Marx-Engels point of view, this danger would not exist with the modern proletariat. But what is the modern proletariat?

If one counts in it all persons 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. But this “proletariat” would be a mixture of extraordinarily different elements, of classes which have more differences among themselves than had the “people” of 1789, who certainly as long as the present conditions of property are maintained have more common—or, at least, similar—interests than contrary ones; but the different nature of their needs and interests would quickly become known to them as soon as the propertied and governing classes are removed from, or deprived of, their position.

On an earlier occasion I made the remark that the modern wage-earners are not of the homogeneous mass, devoid in an equal degree of property, family, etc., as the Communist Manifesto foresees; that it is just in the most advanced of the manufacturing industries that a whole hierarchy of differentiated workmen are to be found between whose groups only a moderate feeling of solidarity exists. In this remark, a well-known socialist writer, H. Cunow, sees a confirmation of the fact that even when I was speaking generally, I had in my mind specially English conditions. In Germany and the other continental civilised lands he says no such separation from the revolutionary movement of the workmen in better positions is to be found as in England. In contrast to England the best-paid workmen stand at the head of the class war. The English caste feeling, he adds, is not a consequence of the social differentiation of to-day but an after-effect of the earlier system of guilds and companies and the older trade union movement based on them.

Again I must reply that what my opponent tells me is in no way new to me. If a certain guild-like feature is to be found in the English working-class movement, it is far less a heritage from the old guild system, which, indeed, existed much longer in Germany than in England, than one of the chief products of Anglo-Saxon freedom—of the fact that the English workman never, not even at the time of the suppression of the right of association, stood under the scourge of a state ruled by police. The sense of individuality is developed in freedom, or, to speak for once with Stirner, the sense of own. It does not exclude the recognition of what is of a different nature and of general interest, but it easily becomes the cause of a little angularity which even appears as hard and narrow-minded when it is only one-sided in form. I do not want to wrong the German workmen, and I know how fully to honour the idealism which, for example, moved the Hamburg workmen for decades to sacrifices for the common cause of the proletarian struggle for freedom which have not their equal in the working-class movement; but so far as I have opportunity of knowing and following the German working-class movement, the reactions of the trade differentiation described have asserted themselves. Special circumstances, such as the preponderance of the political movement, the long artificial suppression of trade unions, and the fact that on the whole the differences in rates of wages and hours of labour are generally less in Germany than in England, prevent their manifesting themselves in a peculiarly striking manner. But any one who follows attentively the organs of the German trade union movement will come across enough facts to confirm what I have said.

The trade unions do not create that phenomenon, they only bring it into prominence as an unavoidable result of actual differences. It cannot be otherwise than that vital differences in manner of work and amount of income finally produce different conduct and demands of life. The highly-skilled fine instrument-maker and the collier, the skilled house decorator and the porter, the sculptor or modeller and the stoker, lead, as a rule, a very different kind of life and have very different kinds of wants. Where the struggles for their standards of life lead to no collision between them, the fact that they are all wage-earners may efface these differences from their ideas, and the consciousness that they are carrying on the same kind of struggle against capital may produce a lively, mutual sympathy. Such sympathy is not wanting in England; the most aristocratic of aristocratic trade unionists have often enough shown it to workmen in worse conditions, as many of them are very good democrats in politics, if they are not socialists. But there is a great difference between such political or social political sympathy and economic solidarity which a stronger political and economic pressure may neutralise, but which, according as this pressure diminishes, will make itself finally noticeable in one way or another. It is a great mistake to assume that England makes an exception here on principle. The same phenomenon is shown in France in another form. Similarly in Switzerland, the United States, and, as I have said, to a certain degree in Germany also.

But even if we assume that this differentiation does not exist in the industrial working classes or that it exercises no effect on the mode of thinking of the workmen concerned, yet the industrial workers are everywhere the minority of the population. In Germany, together with industrial home-workers, some 7,000,000 out of 19,000,000 people earning incomes are industrial wage-earners. We have besides the technical civil service, the shop employees, the agricultural labourers.

Here the differentiation is everywhere more marked, of which no clearer evidence is given than the painful history of the movements towards the organisation of these classes of labour in industrial unions like trade unions. It is quite impossible to say that the five or six millions employed in agriculture (which the German trade statistics register after deducting the higher staff of assistants, stewards, etc.) will strive to better themselves with the same force as the industrial workers.

Only with quite a small number can one propose or expect serious inclination for, and understanding of, endeavours which go beyond the mere amelioration of conditions of labour. To by far the greatest number of them the socialisation of agricultural production cannot be much more than empty words. Their ideal is in the meantime to get their own land.

Meanwhile, the desire of the industrial working classes for socialistic production is for the most part more a matter of assumption than of certainty. From the growth of the number of socialist votes in public elections one can certainly deduce a steady increase of adherents of socialistic strivings, but no one would maintain that all votes given to socialists come from socialists. Even if we assumed that all these voters would greet with joy a revolution which brought the socialists to the helm, little would even then be done towards the solution of the main problem.

I think I can take it as being generally admitted that there would be no question of an immediate taking over by the state of the total manufacture and distribution of products. The state could not even take over the whole amount of medium and large enterprises. The local authorities, too, as connecting links, could not do so very much. They could socialise at most those businesses which produce, or which perform services, locally for that locality, and they would get therewith quite a nice little task. But can one imagine that undertakings which until then had worked for the great outside market could be suddenly municipalised?

Let us take an industrial town of only medium size, say Augsburg, Barmen, Dortmund, Hanau, Mannheim. Is anyone so foolish as to imagine that the communes there could, in a political crisis or at some other occasion, take over all the different manufacturing and commercial businesses of these places into their own management and carry them on with success? They would either have 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.

The question in all these cases would resolve itself into the question of the economic power of associations—i.e., of co-operation.

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Source: Eduard Bernstein. Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation. Translated by Edith C. Harvey. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911.