Bernstein, Eduard

(1850-1932)

As the leading revisionist thinker of the German Social Democratic Party, Bernstein sought to cleanse the party's ideology of what he regarded as its anachronistic Marxist assumptions and ideas. At the philosophical level and on the basis of a newly assertive neo-Kantianism , he rejected the positivism and evolutionism , as well as the residual Hegelianism that he detected in orthodox Marxism . Consequently, at the political level he challenged the immiseration and proletarianization theses as applied to capitalist societies, as well as the amorality, fatalism, and pessimism that underpinned them. For Bernstein, then, socialism represented not just a distant goal, but also an ethical ideal that possessed far more than mere inspirational significance in the present. In sum, despite his often misread statement ‘the movement is everything, the goal nothing’, Bernstein came to stand for a socialist gradualism that should be distinguished from mere reformism (see’s book about ‘Bernstein's challenge to Marx’, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 1952). See also Kautsky, Karl.