Jewish Biography: Eduard Bernstein, Socialist Reformer

By Alex Gordon

HAIFA, Israel — According to Karl Marx, the proletariat is a revolutionary class that transforms the world. The personal examples of many outstanding socialists refute Marx’s teaching, for they were not proletarians, but came from bourgeois, materially prosperous, often rich families, and were not exploited.

However, they had complexes of remorse for their good life and were attracted to socialist activity to transform the world, in which workers, often illiterate, uneducated and lacking the knowledge and skills to reform the world, would become the vanguard of society. Famous socialists from bourgeois families became radical socialists and revolutionaries. Such were Ludwig Börne, Ludwig Bamberger, Ferdinand Lassalle, Alexander Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Blum, Lev Trotsky, Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, Erich Musam, Eugene Levine, Karl Radek, György Lukács, Egon Erwin Kisch, Bela Kun.

I list only Jews whose desire to build a world without oppressors was reinforced by a conscious or subconscious desire to liberate also Jews from oppression. Affluence and material well-being did not deter their radicalism, but perhaps intensified it, because it created a sense of shame for their well-being against the background of the disadvantage and oppression of the workers. Socialist activity for the benefit of the workers allowed the Jewish socialists to hide the “narrow,” “selfish” interests of Jewry behind the curtain of the struggle for the rights of all workers.

However, there are no rules without exceptions: one prominent Jewish socialist, Eduard Bernstein, was born into a poor family. Perhaps this circumstance made him the “black sheep” among fellow socialists: Bernstein did not have to be ashamed of himself or his family, and he did not become a radical.

Eduard Bernstein was born in 1850 into the Jewish family of a steam engine driver in Berlin. His parents belonged to the community of Reform Judaism. Despite the lack of money in the family, he attended gymnasium, but had to leave it at the age of 16 for financial reasons. From 1866 to 1878 he worked as a bank clerk. His socialist views were shaped by Wilhelm Liebknecht’s and August Bebel’s speeches against the Franco-Prussian War and Karl Marx’s work The French Civil War on the Paris Commune. In 1872 he became a member of the Social Democratic Party. From 1878 to 1881 he was secretary to the wealthy philanthropist, radical and utopian socialist Karl Höchberg, founder of a number of socialist publications.

In 1878, Bernstein read Friedrich Engels’ just-published book Anti-Dühring, under the influence of which he became a Marxist and entered into correspondence with the author of the book, who later became his friend. Engels accused the philosopher Eugene Dühring of “Judophobia exaggerated to the point of caricature.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of Dühring: “In the most sacred places of science one could hear the hoarse, indignant barking of pathologically unhealthy dogs, the mendacity and rage of the ‘noble’ Pharisees. Once again I remind my readers who have ears to hear that Berlin apostle of vengeance, Eugene Dühring, who in today’s Germany employs the most obscene and disgusting clamor for morality. Dühring is the foremost cutthroat of those who are today among his equal antisemites.” Engels’ criticism of antisemitism may also have positioned Bernstein to the teachings of Marx and Engels.

After the introduction of the Exclusionary Law against Socialists in 1878, Bernstein was forced to leave Germany, traveling first to Switzerland and, after being expelled from there under pressure from the German authorities, to Great Britain. In 1881-1890 he was the editor of the Zurich edition of the Social Democrat, the central organ of the banned Socialist German Labor Party (later renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). At the time, he was a representative of the extreme, most radical wing of German Social Democracy and was considered one of its strongest theorists.

In 1887 Bernstein married Regina Zadek (1849-1923).

In 1888 he settled in London, where he became a close friend of Engels, who bequeathed to him and Bebel papers, his own and Marx’s. In 1891 the SPD adopted the Marxist Erfurt Program, which had been drafted by Karl Kautsky and Bernstein. However, Bernstein soon moved to the right flank of Social Democracy, advocating ideas of reformism and revisionism.

He was prosecuted by the German prosecutor’s office for insulting Majesty in a newspaper article; this prevented Bernstein from returning to his homeland until 1901, when the charge was finally extinguished due to statute of limitations. In 1901 he settled in Berlin and in the same year became a contributor to the journal Socialist Monthly, which became primarily an organ of Bernstein’s teachings. In the pamphlet Is Scientific Socialism Possible? (Berlin, 1901) he denied the possibility of scientific socialism. A passionate struggle ensued around the book, which split the whole of German Social Democracy into two wings: the Bernsteinian or revisionist wing and the orthodox wing. It was waged at every Congress of the SPD and ended with the adoption of resolutions against Bernstein, but at each subsequent Congress it resumed with renewed vigor.

In 1902-1907, 1912-1918 he was a member of the Reichstag, but withdrew from political activity for health reasons. In 1920-1928 he was again a deputy of the Reichstag, after which he left political life, having been a member of the Reichstag for 18 years.

The chain reaction of world revolution seemed to confirm Marx’s teachings. In 1905-1919, socialist revolutions took place in a number of European countries. Socialist revolutionaries came off the pages of Marx’s and Engels’ books to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through bloody “class struggle.” But in the depths of the Doctrine lurked the seeds of revisionism. A democratic anomaly appeared in socialism. Three or four years after Engels’ death, his close friend and executor, Eduard Bernstein, became the main theorist of anti-Marxist revisionism and a popular target of criticism of most Social-Democrats, including the Bolsheviks.

In The Conditions of the Possibility of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) he severely criticized both the philosophical and economic teachings of Marx. He argued that history does not lead to a deepening of the gulf between the magnates of capitalism and the proletariat, that the expectation of a cataclysm is unfounded and must be replaced by faith in a gradual evolution leading to the socialization of the social order. The political privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie in all advanced countries are step by step yielding to democratic institutions: the protest against capitalist exploitation is growing stronger and stronger in society. In Bernstein’s view, class struggle exists, but it is not the only content of history, since next to it there is also class cooperation. Bernstein, while remaining a Social Democrat, concludes that the entire program of the party must be revised; in particular, the thesis that the proletarian has no fatherland – and therefore internationalism – must be abandoned: “The total annihilation of nationalities is a dream, and an ugly one at that.”

The SPD, Bernstein believed, had in fact already become a party of social reform, although in theory it still stood as a party of social revolution: “It is time at last for Social Democracy to emancipate itself  from the power of the phrase and become openly what it already is in reality: a democratic-socialist reform party.” His phrase became widely known: “That socialism in general is called the final goal means nothing to me, the movement is everything.”

Bernstein wrote: “The ‘Communist Manifesto‘ was correct, but the capitalist bourgeoisie creates democratic organizations. In my judgment, success consists in constant [peaceful] progress rather than in a catastrophic clash.” While living in London, Bernstein gradually became convinced that the best way to achieve socialism in an industrialized country was through trade union struggle and parliamentary activity. In a series of articles, he argued that Marx’s predictions about the development of capitalism were wrong: workers’ real wages were rising and class polarization between the oppressed proletariat and the capitalists was not increasing.

Bernstein’s proposed path of development of bourgeois society – without revolutions, without violence and without the dictatorship of the proletariat – was sharply criticized by the Bolsheviks. In Evolutionary Socialism: Critique and Proof (1899), Bernstein rejected Marx’s theory of permanent revolution, replacing it with the theory of permanent evolution of socialism. He noticed the contradiction between Marx’s theory and the completely different development of society and capitalism from the latter predicted by it. At the end of his book on evolutionary socialism, Bernstein writes: “In getting rid of the sanctimony of Marxist propaganda, let us also free ourselves from its jargon.” He obviously had in mind the aggressive demands of the class struggle and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bernstein rejected not only the dictatorship of the proletariat but also the internationalism of the working masses. He decided, contrary to Marxism, that the proletarians must have a homeland, that the worker is increasingly becoming a citizen, which means: “The total annihilation of nationalities is a dream, and an ugly one at that.”

Eduard Bernstein was a revisionist not only in relation to Marx’s views, but also to his own. In 1877, he was one of the first Jews to leave the community under the new Reichstag law. He was far from being a Jew, but during World War I, of which he was a staunch opponent, he reflected on the fate of Jewry and published the book The Tasks of Jewry in the World War (1917). In this book, Bernstein argued that Jews were unique in their internationality and could more easily serve as opponents of wars than other nations. An overwhelming number of German Jews were fervent supporters of the German Empire’s war effort. Bernstein was one of a counted number of German Jews who opposed the war. In 1916 he declared that a Jew’s patriotism was bound to be cosmopolitan. He appealed to the Jews of Europe to pressure their governments to make peace.

Unlike many Jewish socialists, Bernstein believed that antisemitism had deep folk roots and that it could not simply be eliminated by the “magic of Marxism.” Trotsky believed that the socialist revolution would solve the Jewish question as well. Bernstein sensed the complexity of the Jewish question even in close contact with Marx and Engels. Marx spoke of Bernstein as “the little Jew Bernstein,” Lassalle for him was the representative of “the Polish Jews, multiplying like lice, who are the worst of the race.” Engels, who was not a Jew, wrote: “There is nothing to say about Heine and Börne, Marx was of the purest Jewish blood; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best men are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, currently in prison for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the Social Democrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag – people whose friendship I am proud of, all of them Jews.”

Bernstein admired Marx’s daughter Eleonora. In 1898, in the social-democratic newspaper New Time, Bernstein wrote of her: “At every opportunity she announced her Jewish origin with some defiance. ‘I am a Jew,’ as I often heard her say, although there was nothing Jewish religious about her and she had no contacts with representatives of Jewry – she shouted out proudly in front of the crowd from the podium. She felt in solidarity with the Jewish workers of the East End and showed increasing sympathy for them.”

Bernstein’s dispersion and universalism of Jews as the virtues of peacemakers was replaced by a nationalist point of view towards the end of his life: he became a proponent of the establishment of a Jewish national hearth in the Land of Israel. He spoke out in the Reichstag against the rise of right-wing extremists and delivered several impressive speeches against Hitler and the Nazi Party. Bernstein died his own death in Berlin in 1932, not living long enough to see the Nazis come to power.

Bernstein created a new reform-oriented theoretical current within Social Democracy. After the split within the SPD during World War I, this current became the theoretical basis of the majority SPD’s policy. In the Godesberg Program of 1959, the SPD definitively dissociated itself from the Marxist concept of socialism and made Bernstein’s reformist conception of socialism its program.

The former Austrian Chancellor, socialist Bruno Kreisky, assessed Bernstein’s role in this way: “German Social Democracy has become reformist, it has so rapidly taken the line of the social reformist Eduard Bernstein that the world has not even noticed it. It was even forgotten that Bernstein was no longer living at this time. He died quite quietly, without being given the honors he deserved.”
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and the author of 10 books. He has been published in 91 journals in 17 countries in Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.