THE LAWFUL HEIR OF KARL MARX

He was a man whom virtually nobody knows. He is ignored in Shapiro's authoritative list of 100 Most Influential Jews of History. Yet, modern European social-democracy flows from him. Without him, somebody else had to invent modern Europe. But there was nobody else to steal his laurels, as he was it. The worst thing to happen to him was to be forgotten, together with his historical parental credit.

It must be exceedingly strange for me to call the German-born Jew Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) a philosopher… A political writer, an accomplished political theorist, social critic, even a clever propagandist, yes, but not really a philosopher! Therefore the standard question Why Bernstein? is all the more pertinent here. And here is my answer.

This man had the nerve-- or the courage-- to tinker with the titanic philosophical system of Marxism, to the chagrin of his fellow Social Democrats, and evoking Lenin’s vitriolic ire, and, perhaps, more than the good fortune of being world-historically successful with it. Curiously, the SPD (German Social-Democratic Party) the modern powerhouse of German politics, previously wary of Bernstein’s political ideas, although he was its longtime member, was totally rebuilt after World War II in West Germany virtually along the Bernsteinian lines, and follows them up to this day.

In his extremely influential work Evolutionary Socialism (1899) he elaborated on his previous ideas about the course which the development of capitalism had taken, and proposed that the violent revolution, which Karl Marx had predicted, was unnecessary, as the dramatic pauperization of the proletariat was unlikely to occur, and socialism, seen by him of course as a superior to capitalism socio-economic formation, could be successfully achieved via trade union activity and social reforms.

In 1902 his prestige stood so high that he was elected a member of the German Reichstag, where he would remain, with a short interruption, up to the year 1928, when he retired from active politics. To his credit, he was consistently anti-war, and during World War I he was (wisely) opposed to his party’s support of Germany’s participation in the war, siding with the radicals, but switching back to his old comrades, when the radicals wished to turn the war into a domestic revolutionary upheaval. After the war he joined the Ebert Republican Government as Secretary of State for economy and finance.

Bernstein was perhaps the most likeable personage among the Social-Democratic crowd. I consider him to be what Karl Marx wanted to become but couldn’t afford to: a kinder, gentler Socialist rather than a radical blood-thirsty “Communist.” Befriending Engels in London and establishing cordial ties with the members of the Fabian Society, advocating a gradual, non-violent approach to Socialism, he would become the voice of the so-called “revisionist” movement. He believed that Socialism was the ultimate product of liberal reforms within the capitalist society, and thus became a much-better fulfilled prophet of Euro-Socialism, as it exists today, than poor Karl Marx had been allowed to become despite all his exertions to tread the same path. He, Bernstein, was thus a person of much greater impact on history than he has ever been given credit for, so let my brief mention of him restore at least some measure of historical justice.