II.4. The Collapse

Bernstein began his revision of the Social-Democratic programme by giving up the theory of capitalist collapse. But since the collapse of bourgeois society is a cornerstone of scientific socialism, the removal of this cornerstone had logically to lead to the collapse of Bernstein’s whole socialist conception. In the course of the debate, in order to maintain his first assertion, he gives up one position of socialism after another.

Without the collapse of capitalism the expropriation of the capitalist class is impossible: Bernstein renounces expropriation and sets up as the aim of the labour movement the gradual realisation of the “principle of co-operation”.

But co-operation cannot be realised in the midst of capitalist production: Bernstein renounces the socialisation of production and arrives at the reform of commerce, at the consumers’ co-operative.

But the transformation of society by consumers’ co-operatives, even together with trade unions, is incompatible with the actual material development of capitalist society: Bernstein gives up the materialist conception of history.

But his conception of the course of economic development is incompatible with Marx’s law of surplus value: Bernstein gives up the law of surplus value and the law of value, and with them the whole economic theory of Karl Marx.

But without a definite final goal and without an economic foundation in present-day society the proletarian class struggle cannot be waged: Bernstein gives up the class struggle and proclaims reconciliation with bourgeois liberalism.

But in a class society the class struggle is a quite natural, unavoidable phenomenon: Bernstein, as a further consequence, disputes even the existence of classes in our society. The working class is for him merely a heap of individuals, fragmented not only politically and intellectually but also economically. And the bourgeoisie, too, according to him, is held together politically not by inner economic interests but merely by outside pressure, from above or from below.

But if there is no economic foundation for the class struggle and, at bottom, no classes either, then not only the future struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie appears impossible, but also the struggle so far, and Social Democracy itself, with its successes, appears incomprehensible. Or else it too becomes comprehensible only as a result of political pressure from the government: not as the lawful result of historical development but as a chance product of the Hohenzollern course, not as the legitimate child of capitalist society but as the bastard of reaction. Thus Bernstein leads with compelling logic from the materialist conception of history to that of the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Vossische Zeitung.

All that remains, once one has abjured the whole socialist critique of capitalist society, is to find the existing order, at least by and large, satisfactory as well. And from this too Bernstein does not shrink. He now finds reaction in Germany not so strong; “in the states of western Europe there is not much political reaction to be seen”; in almost all the countries of the West “the attitude of the bourgeois classes towards the socialist movement is at most one of defence, not of oppression” (Vorwärts, 26 March 1899). The workers are not becoming impoverished but, on the contrary, ever more prosperous; the bourgeoisie is politically progressive and even morally sound; of reaction and oppression nothing is to be seen; and all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. So Bernstein comes quite logically and consistently all the way down from A to Z. He began by giving up the final goal for the sake of the movement. But since there can in fact be no Social-Democratic movement without the socialist final goal, he ends necessarily by giving up the movement itself.

Bernstein’s whole socialist conception has thus collapsed. The proud, symmetrical, wonderful edifice of the Marxian system has become in his hands a great heap of rubble, in which the fragments of all systems and the splinters of thought of all minds great and small have found a common grave. Marx and Proudhon, Leo von Buch and Franz Oppenheimer, Friedrich Albert Lange and Kant, Herr Prokopovich and Dr Ritter von Neupauer, Herkner and Schulze-Gävernitz, Lassalle and Professor Julius Wolf: all have contributed their mite to Bernstein’s system, and he has gone to school with them all. And no wonder! In abandoning the class standpoint he lost his political compass; in giving up scientific socialism he lost the intellectual axis of crystallisation around which individual facts group themselves into the organic whole of a consistent world-view.

This theory, thrown together indiscriminately from every possible scrap of system, appears at first sight to be quite free of prejudice. Bernstein, too, will hear nothing of a “party science”, or more correctly of a class science, nor of a class liberalism or a class morality. He thinks he represents a universal human, abstract science, an abstract liberalism, an abstract morality. But since real society consists of classes with diametrically opposed interests, aspirations and views, a universal human science in social questions, an abstract liberalism, an abstract morality, are for the time being a fantasy, a self-deception. What Bernstein takes for his universal human science, democracy and morality is merely the dominant, that is, bourgeois science, bourgeois democracy, bourgeois morality.

Indeed! When he abjures Marx’s economic system in order to swear by the teachings of Brentano, Böhm-Jevons, Say and Julius Wolf, what is he doing but exchanging the scientific foundation of the emancipation of the working class for the apologetics of the bourgeoisie? When he speaks of the universally human character of liberalism and turns socialism into a variety of it, what is he doing but taking from socialism its class character, and so its historical content, and so any content at all, and thereby, conversely, making the historical bearer of liberalism, the bourgeoisie, into the representative of universal human interests?

And when he takes the field against “the raising of material factors into omnipotent (all-powerful) forces of development”, against the “contempt for the ideal” in Social Democracy; when he speaks up for idealism and morality, but at the same time rails against the only source of the moral regeneration of the proletariat, the revolutionary class struggle, what is he doing at bottom but preaching to the working class the quintessence of bourgeois morality: reconciliation with the existing order and the transfer of hopes to the beyond of the world of ethical ideas?

When, finally, he directs his sharpest arrows against dialectics, what is he doing but fighting against the specific mode of thought of the rising, class-conscious proletariat? Fighting against the sword that has helped the proletariat to cut through the darkness of its historical future, against the intellectual weapon with which, while still materially under the yoke, it defeats the bourgeoisie, because it convicts it of its transience, has proved to it the inevitability of its own victory, and has already accomplished the revolution in the realm of the mind! In taking leave of dialectics and adopting the see-saw of thought of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, yes-but, although-nevertheless, more-or-less, Bernstein falls quite logically into the historically conditioned mode of thought of the declining bourgeoisie, a mode of thought that is the faithful intellectual reflection of its social existence and its political conduct. The political on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, the ifs and buts, of the present-day bourgeoisie look exactly like Bernstein’s mode of thought, and Bernstein’s mode of thought is the finest and surest symptom of his bourgeois world-view.

But for Bernstein the word “bürgerlich” is now no longer a class term but a general social concept. This means only that, consistent to the dot on the i, he has exchanged the historical language of the proletariat for that of the bourgeoisie, along with its science, politics, morality and mode of thought. When Bernstein understands by “Bürger” without distinction the bourgeois and the proletarian, that is, man as such, then man as such has in fact become for him the bourgeois, and human society identical with bourgeois society.