Let's Make Bernstein Great Again

Not Jared. The other Bernstein.

I’ve been saying the German SPD was the largest, most successful socialist organization in history, unless you want to compare it with the Bolsheviks, a subject for another day. It was a stew of different tendencies, including devoted followers of Marx. Its internal diversity reflected its democratic character. It boasted millions of followers and was able to ascend to state power.

My main interest is the genesis and fate of the politics of SPD leader Edward Bernstein. He was the lead intellectual antagonist to Karl Kautsky, the latter for a good while a strict orthodox Marxist. Later, but only later, Kautsky was reviled by V. Lenin and written out of the Soviet-dictated Marxist pantheon. Future generations of aspiring Leninists would be steered away from both Kautsky and Bernstein, a political move that obscured Lenin’s debt to both and led to no end of future political malpractice.

I don’t want to get into the issue of SPD support for Germany’s involvement in the first world war. It is typically exploited by Leninists to attack the SPD for its other political commitments. Both Bernstein and Kautsky were critical of the war, though there are probably subtleties and details in this history that I am missing. In any case, I see no necessary connection.

To me the critical point is that out of all these personalities, it was Bernstein who would be proved to be correct on the biggest questions. Bernstein was deeply schooled in Marx and Engels but not bound by them. In his time prior to World War I, a formal allegiance to Marx was obligatory in the socialist movement, and especially in Germany. Bernstein’s “Evolutionary Socialism” duly pays its respects to Marx and Engels, but he does not kowtow.

Put simply, Bernstein rejected the twin theses of pauperization and catastrophism that have bent radical politics ever since.

No, capitalism would not cause ever-increasing immiserization of the working class, causing uprisings that would take down the capitalist state;

And no, capitalist economies would not inevitably crash to levels beyond remedy, promoting mass uprisings and, once again, the transition to socialism.

Where immiseration is going on is not where Marxists traditionally thought it would occur — where industrial development was most advanced. To the contrary, the immiserization on view most dramatically is in the Global South, where we are not seeing a wave of revolutionary changes. For its part, what is ordinarily thought of as the working class in the richest, democratic nations is decidedly not moving left.

What we do see is the flowering of socialism by legal, parliamentary means in South America, and the anomaly of the Peoples Republic of China. Neither of those very different cases fit well with the Leninist varieties of Marxism. South American socialism is evolutionary, where it is able to proceed free of violence from the Right, and Chinese socialism is a horse of another color altogether.

To put the best face on Marx and Engels, we should trace their stories from the German SPD.