Eduard Bernstein

Who was Eduard Bernstein?

Eduard Bernstein was a German social democratic political theorist and politician, a member of the Social Democratic Party, and the founder of evolutionary socialism and revisionism. Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he saw flaws in Marxist thinking and began to criticize views held by Marxism when he investigated and challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history. He rejected significant parts of Marxist theory that were based upon Hegelian metaphysics; he rejected the Hegelian dialectical perspective.

Bernstein distinguished between early Marxism as being its immature form: as exemplified by The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in their youth, that he opposed for what he regarded as its violent Blanquist tendencies; and later Marxism as being its mature form that he supported. This mature form of Marxism refers to Marx in his later life acknowledging that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means through legislative reform in democratic societies. Without the need for a revolution, Bernstein stated that ethics could be restored to socialism in a capitalist system, with the state as a pivotal asset to the workers.