Eduard Bernstein
German politician and theorist (1850-1932) · Germany · Politicians · Died at 82
Eduard Bernstein is read about 447 times a day, in 56 languages.
Counted to 16 September 2026, not since.
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Something wrong?He told European Marxists the revolution wasn't coming and they should stop waiting for capitalism to collapse on its own. Instead: vote, reform, nudge the system inch by inch. The heresy had a name - revisionism - and it split the left for a generation.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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Bernstein Eduard 1895
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Bernstein c.1930
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Bernstein vs. Kautsky - Revisionism vs. Orthodoxy
Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-P050144, Berlin, Flugblatt der SPD, Bernstein zur Sozialisierung
Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der SozialdemokratieIn their own words 5
, The increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a diminishing number of capitalist magnates, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees.
Democracy is in principle the suppression of class government, though it is not yet the actual suppression of classes.
Democracy is the high school of compromise.
Awards
In their orbit
About this person
Born to a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1850, Eduard Bernstein came to socialism in his twenties and spent years in exile under Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws, first in Switzerland, then London, where he grew close to Friedrich Engels. After Engels died in 1895, Bernstein began publishing the doubts that exile had seeded: late Victorian capitalism wasn't crumbling, the middle class wasn't vanishing, workers weren't getting poorer. In Evolutionary Socialism (1899) he dispensed with dialectics and revolution alike, arguing socialists should work through parliaments and unions - "the goal is nothing, the movement everything." The SPD condemned him officially but followed his method in practice. During World War I his pacifism drove him out of the party; he co-founded the anti-war USPD, rejoined the SPD after the armistice, and served in the Weimar Reichstag. He died in Berlin in December 1932, weeks before the Republic fell.
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