Eduard Bernstein Quotes

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.

The proletariat too needs democratic forms for the seizure of political power but they are for it, like all political forms, mere means. [Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein in Zurich, 24 March, 1884]

The method of this great philosopher [Kant] can serve as a pointer to the satisfying solution to our problem. Of course we don’t have to slavishly adhere to Kant's form, but we must match his method to the nature of our own subject [socialism], displaying the same critical spirit. Our critique must be direct against both a scepticism that undermines all theoretical thought, and a dogmatism that relies on ready-made formulas