Evolutionary Socialism

Contents

1. Preface 16 min 15

   Bernstein reprints his letter to the Stuttgart congress of October 1898, which defended his “Problems of Socialism” articles. He rejects the expectation of an imminent collapse of capitalism, argues that the middle classes and the propertied are growing rather than vanishing, and cites Engels’s 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France for legal, parliamentary tactics. He explains his notorious sentence that the movement is everything and the final aim nothing, acknowledges his debt to Marx and Engels, and states his purpose: to purge socialist theory of its remaining utopianism.

2. Extracts from the Preface to the Last German Edition 1 min 2

   A short extract from Bernstein’s German preface of January 1902, written in Berlin, listing the book’s translations and disowning the unauthorised Russian editions, including one printed in London by the Russian Free Press Fund.

3. Preface to the English Edition 3 min 6

   Bernstein’s preface of 1909 recalls the stir the book caused, Kautsky’s attack and the Hanover congress of 1899 that rejected its views, and accepts the name “Revisionism.” He restates its aim: to value the everyday work of the party and to replace belief in a final goal with belief in the movement.

4. I (a) The Scientific Elements of Marxism 8 min 4

   Bernstein divides Marxism into a “pure” science of permanent principles and an “applied” science of changeable propositions about particular conditions. The pure core is historical materialism, the theory of class struggle and the theory of surplus value; applied propositions can fall without bringing down the system. The materialist conception of history is the foundation on which Marxism stands or falls, so his examination must begin there.

5. I (b) The Materialist Interpretation of History and Historic Necessity 20 min 14

   Bernstein argues that strict materialism means mechanical determinism, and that Marx’s 1859 preface and the 1867 preface to Capital read that way. He traces how Engels’s later letters, to Bloch, Conrad Schmidt and Borgius, give law, politics, ideas and tradition real influence. Modern society, he claims, gains increasing control over economic forces and leaves ethics more independent room, so historical necessity is limited. He would rather call the theory the “economic interpretation of history.”

6. I (c) The Marxist Doctrine of Class War and of the Evolution of Capital 15 min 11

   Bernstein summarises the orthodox doctrine of class struggle and of capital: surplus value, the organic composition of capital, prices of production, the falling rate of profit, concentration, crises, growing misery and the final expropriation of the expropriators, ending in the state’s dying out. He then argues that Marx and Engels revised many positions without reconciling them, so one can prove anything from their writings; criticism is the disciples’ duty, so that Marx may prevail against Marx.

7. II (a) On the Meaning of the Marxist Theory of Value 20 min 13

   Bernstein argues that Marx’s value, after its many reductions and the transformation into prices of production in Volume III, becomes a pure abstraction, comparable to the marginal utility of Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk. Engels’s historical defence of the law of value is unconvincing. Surplus labour, however, is an empirical fact visible in income statistics and needs no value theory. Value is a key to analysis, not a measure of exploitation or of justice, and socialism cannot rest on it.

8. II (b) The Distribution of Wealth in the Modern Community 22 min 27

   Bernstein grants that Marx’s laws of falling profit, crisis and concentration hold as tendencies, but says the counteracting forces are underrated. Using share registers of British trusts and income-tax statistics from Britain, France, Prussia and Saxony, he argues that the number of people with property and comfortable incomes is rising both absolutely and relatively. Mass production must be consumed somewhere, so a numerous middle class is a necessary result of modern industry. He answers Kautsky’s Stuttgart objection by distinguishing persons from enterprises, and insists that the shareholder is a capitalist, so socialism must rest on the growth of wealth, not its concentration.

9. II (c) The Classes of Establishments in the Production and Distribution of Social Wealth 30 min 26

   A survey of enterprise statistics. In Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and the United States, large industry grows fastest but small and medium firms survive and multiply, kept alive by trades suited to small scale, by nearness to customers, and by large industry itself, which cheapens materials and creates new demand. Commerce shows the same pattern despite department stores. In agriculture, from Germany and Holland to Belgium, France and Britain, small and medium holdings are gaining while large ones decline, as farming intensifies. Bernstein concludes that the middle ranks are growing, so a collapse that depends on their disappearance is no nearer than before.

10. II (d) The Crises and Possibilities of Adjustment in Modern Economy 34 min 28

    Bernstein reviews Marx and Engels on crises: their rejection of underconsumption theory, Marx’s contrary sentence in Volume III, the link between the ten-year cycle and fixed capital, and Engels’s late notes on cartels and a possible chronic depression. He asks whether world markets, communications, credit and cartels now make general crises improbable, and answers Rosa Luxemburg’s articles point by point: credit has a constructive as well as a destructive side, postponing the crisis until the world market is complete is untestable, and cartels can moderate crises, though they also threaten workers with monopoly. Cheap food has done much to soften crises.

11. III (a) The Political and Economic Preliminary Conditions of Socialism 20 min 17

    Bernstein defines socialism as a movement towards an order based on association, then tests the two Marxist preconditions. Economically, large enterprises employ at most half the producing population, and nationalising them would pose immense administrative problems. Politically, the conquest of power by revolution assumes a united proletariat, but wage-earners are divided by skill, income and ways of life, industrial workers are a minority, farm labourers want land of their own, and socialist votes are not all socialist. Towns could not take over firms producing for world markets, so the question becomes the economic capacity of co-operatives.

12. III (b) The Economic Capacities of Co-operative Associations 41 min 38

    Bernstein asks what co-operatives can actually do. Marx and the International, he says, preferred producers’ co-operatives as a direct challenge to capital, but these have nearly all failed or turned into ordinary companies, because workplace equality cannot survive growth. Following Beatrice Webb and Franz Oppenheimer, he argues that associations of buyers grow and stay democratic while associations of sellers close themselves off. The British consumers’ societies, by contrast, have become a real economic power. He also defends agricultural co-operation as a support for small peasants, and warns that co-operative production cannot be improvised in a revolution.

13. III (c) Democracy and Socialism 45 min 36

    Bernstein treats trade unions as the democratic element in industry, able to press on profits but dangerous if they become monopolies. He defines democracy as the absence of class government and calls universal suffrage the alternative to violent revolution, citing its effect on Bismarck. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” is dismissed as political atavism, and socialism is presented as the heir of liberalism, “organising liberalism”. He reads Marx’s account of the Paris Commune as close to Proudhon’s federalism, and concludes that building democratic and self-governing institutions is the precondition of socialism.

14. III (d) The Most Pressing Problems of Social Democracy 53 min 40

    Bernstein turns to the party’s practical tasks. Tactics must follow national conditions, and democracy is the substance as well as the means of socialism. He defends national interests in foreign policy, approves in principle the lease of Kiaochow, and argues that colonisation is a question of “how,” not “whether,” claiming a “higher right” for higher civilisation. He backs measures for peasants, agricultural labourers and workers’ co-operatives, sets out a municipal programme, and doubts that the Reichstag franchise alone will carry the party forward. He ends by asking the party to appear as what it already is: “a democratic, socialistic party of reform.”

15. Conclusion: Ultimate Aim and Tendency—Kant against Cant 40 min 28

    Under the subtitle “Kant against Cant,” Bernstein defends criticism against party tradition and its phrases. He explains his sentence that the ultimate aim is nothing and the movement everything, citing Marx on the Commune, and quotes Capital on the Factory Acts against Plekhanov’s charge that he denies the workers’ plight is hopeless. He finds in Marx a “dualism” between science and a preconceived revolutionary scheme, weighs legislation against revolution, warns that a dictatorship of the proletariat without mature workers’ organisations means rule by orators and writers, and calls for a socialist Kant or Lange to sift what is living in Marxism.