Eduard Berstein

[what's left?]

I'm curious to hear this community's take on Berstein and social democracy. Is it good for the overall cause or is it simply reactionary?

[Gustav HK]

Bernstein was the founder of "marxist" reformism. He took the ideas of Marx & Engels and removed everything revolutionary. So he is negative for the struggle of the international proletariat.

[redasheville]

Hm, I'm always a little bothered by posts on this forum that say things like "such and such is a poison to our glorious cause of international communism!", enough with the hyperbole...lets actually discuss stuff and dispense with the needless dogmatic responses?

Anyway, Bernstein argued that capitalism was no longer prone to crisis (because of cartels, credit etc), which, if true, negates the historical necessity of revolutionary socialism. Of course, mechanisms such as credit played a central role in the current economic crisis, so his argument is proven false by subsequent events (not to mention the 1930s, two world wars etc). It didn't need to be proven by subsequent events, however. This is because Rosa Luxemburg decimated his argument in her pamphlet "Reform or Revolution", which is a must read.

An interesting foot note to the Bernstein episode is that the SPD passed resolutions against reformism at three of their national conventions, because of Luxemburg's polemics. Her arguments were so persuasive and Bernstein's so erroneous that eventually Bernstein himself voted against his own position!

[Die Neue Zeit]

While it is usually said that Bernstein was the leading reformist, his particular brand of reformism was in the minority to something worse. He belonged to the pacifistic tendency in the global worker movement, a tendency which included Jean Jaures in France and the Fabians in the UK. This tendency was in fact more left-wing than the scab tendency of right-syndicalists / tred-iunionisty like Frederich Ebert in the SPD and even whole political parties like the Christian Social Party, as seen by their differing positions on the inter-imperialist bloodbath that was WWI.

BTW, Bernstein wrote some interesting stuff on Lassalle, homosexuality, and the necessity of political demands in action platforms such as the right to bear arms and form militias.

[cb9's_unity]

Bernstein sometimes gets characterized as the father of reformism. The problem with that is he was simply trying to give theoretical justification for the reformist movement that already existed within the SPD. Luxemburg beat him down on the theoretical level but the reformers still existed and quietly grew in rank.

Its a reminder that theoretical debate only means so much in revolutionary party's.