Eduard Bernstein
| Eduard Bernstein | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
6 January 1850 Schöneberg, Germany |
| Died | 18 December 1932 (aged 82) Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation | Politician |
| Known for | Founder of evolutionary socialism (democratic socialism), social democracy and revisionism (reformism) |
Eduard Bernstein (6 January 1850 – 18 December 1932) was a German social democratic political theorist and politician, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and the founder of evolutionary socialism, social democracy, and revisionism. Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he saw flaws in Marxist thinking and began to criticize views held by Marxism when he investigated and challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history. He rejected significant parts of Marxist theory that were based upon Hegelian metaphysics; he rejected the Hegelian dialectical perspective.
Bernstein distinguished between early Marxism as being its immature form, as exemplified by The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in their youth, that he opposed for what he regarded as its violent Blanquist tendencies; and later Marxism as being its mature form that he supported. This mature form of Marxism refers to Marx in his later life acknowledging that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means through legislative reform in democratic societies.
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 in 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 in 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.
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