Sky
28th December 2007, 23:34
Eduard Bernstein was a leader of the opportunist wing of German social democracy and an ideologist for revisionism.
In the late 1870s, Bernstein called for a renunciation of revolutionary struggle and adaptation to Bismarcks regime. He broke completely with Marxism in the mid 1890s. In his articles Problems of Socialism and in the book Problems of Socialism and Tasks of Social Democracy Bernstein advanced a program revising all the fundamental propositions of Marxs doctrine as allegedly obsolete. Replacing revolutionary Marxism by reformism, he defended the ideasborrowed from bourgeois economists and philosophersof peaceful evolution and social harmony; he exalted bourgeois democracy and disputed Marxs thesis on socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the way to socialism. Denying Marxs theory on the impoverishment of the proletariat, he contended that under capitalism the process of concentration of production in industry slows down and in agriculture does not take place, that monopolies eliminate anarchy of production and lead to the disappearance of economic crises, and that the development of joint-stock companies meant the democratization of capital. Bernsteins book became literally a code for renegades betraying the interests of the working class. His action was an attempt to subordinate the workers movement to bourgeois ideology, to corrupt the consciousness of the working class, and to divert the proletariat from the revolutionary struggle. The ideas of Bernstein were severely condemned by revolutionary Marxists (Lenin, Mehring, Luxemburg, and others). During World War I, Bernstein was a centrist. In 1917, along with Kautsky, he took part in the creation of the Independent Social Democratic Party, but as early as 1919, he openly passed to the side of the rightists. He was extremely hostile to the international workers movement and to Soviet Russia.
Bernsteins writings were an attempt to disarm the proletariat ideologically. He tried to replace dialectical materialism with neo-Kantian idealism, the economic teaching of Marx by a vulgar apologetics of capitalism and dogmas borrowed from Katheder-Socialists and other liberal economists, and revolutionary socialism by the theory that capitalism would grow gradually into a socialist society. Bernstein advocated the implementation of small reforms as the task of the workers movement and parliamentary activity as the basic means of struggle. In the words of Lenin, Bernstein and his followers denied too many important points: denied was the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history; denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarization, and intensification of capitalist contradictions; the very concept ultimate aim was declared to be unsound and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was completely rejected; denied was the theory of the class struggle on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority.
In the late 1870s, Bernstein called for a renunciation of revolutionary struggle and adaptation to Bismarcks regime. He broke completely with Marxism in the mid 1890s. In his articles Problems of Socialism and in the book Problems of Socialism and Tasks of Social Democracy Bernstein advanced a program revising all the fundamental propositions of Marxs doctrine as allegedly obsolete. Replacing revolutionary Marxism by reformism, he defended the ideasborrowed from bourgeois economists and philosophersof peaceful evolution and social harmony; he exalted bourgeois democracy and disputed Marxs thesis on socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the way to socialism. Denying Marxs theory on the impoverishment of the proletariat, he contended that under capitalism the process of concentration of production in industry slows down and in agriculture does not take place, that monopolies eliminate anarchy of production and lead to the disappearance of economic crises, and that the development of joint-stock companies meant the democratization of capital. Bernsteins book became literally a code for renegades betraying the interests of the working class. His action was an attempt to subordinate the workers movement to bourgeois ideology, to corrupt the consciousness of the working class, and to divert the proletariat from the revolutionary struggle. The ideas of Bernstein were severely condemned by revolutionary Marxists (Lenin, Mehring, Luxemburg, and others). During World War I, Bernstein was a centrist. In 1917, along with Kautsky, he took part in the creation of the Independent Social Democratic Party, but as early as 1919, he openly passed to the side of the rightists. He was extremely hostile to the international workers movement and to Soviet Russia.
Bernsteins writings were an attempt to disarm the proletariat ideologically. He tried to replace dialectical materialism with neo-Kantian idealism, the economic teaching of Marx by a vulgar apologetics of capitalism and dogmas borrowed from Katheder-Socialists and other liberal economists, and revolutionary socialism by the theory that capitalism would grow gradually into a socialist society. Bernstein advocated the implementation of small reforms as the task of the workers movement and parliamentary activity as the basic means of struggle. In the words of Lenin, Bernstein and his followers denied too many important points: denied was the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history; denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarization, and intensification of capitalist contradictions; the very concept ultimate aim was declared to be unsound and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was completely rejected; denied was the theory of the class struggle on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority.