Has anybody actually read Bernstein?

[blake 3:17]

I was reading a fairly decent article in New Left Review recently, and the author accused someone of being a modern Bernstein. It struck me that the accusation was a kind of 'eff you haha you stink sellout scum' slam that many Marxists use with a sense that they've won the argument.

Anyways.... Has anybody actually read him?

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Yeah, I have read Evolutionary Socialism

Well...more like skimmed some and read some. It, honestly, is exactly how everyone characterizes the book and Bernstein around here. It really is pretty class-collaborationist, reformist, etc. and the arguments in the book are very weak, honestly. Actually, I have seen many modern day "reformist socialists" (if there even is such a thing) make better arguments than Bernstein did in the book.

Again, this is mainly my opinion here.

[Book O'Dead]

I was reading a fairly decent article in New Left Review recently, and the author accused someone of being a modern Bernstein. It struck me that the accusation was a kind of 'eff you haha you stink sellout scum' slam that many Marxists use with a sense that they've won the argument.

Anyways.... Has anybody actually read him?

About a century ago I read "Evolutionary Socialism". It was an awful translation by Eastman, I think, that rendered it almost incomprehensible.

What I did draw from it was essentially the argument that as capitalism developed and improved the conditions of the working classes, the class struggle would be mitigated, society would achieve a stable state and the need for the socialist reconstruction of society by revolutionary means would cease to exist. Bernstein concluded that the only hope for achieving socialism was through a slow process of reform.

Bernstein, I believe, was seduced by the mistaken notion--prevalent at the time--of Darwinian gradualism.

Of course, the history of the class struggle and its intensification has proved Bernstein wrong and Marx and Engels right, just as Darwin was proved wrong in his conception of gradualism by the fossil record that points to the better hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Yeah, I have read Evolutionary Socialism

Well...more like skimmed some and read some. It, honestly, is exactly how everyone characterizes the book and Bernstein around here. It really is pretty class-collaborationist, reformist, etc. and the arguments in the book are very weak, honestly. Actually, I have seen many modern day "reformist socialists" (if there even is such a thing) make better arguments than Bernstein did in the book.

Again, this is mainly my opinion here.

I share your opinion, but in terms of reading-reading Bernstein, I've read his Ferdinand Lassalle. Now that particular work was actually very good, otherwise I wouldn't have started this thread at all: http://www.revleft.com/vb/labour-monarchy-strawmani-t172753/index.html