Eduard Bernstein on Social Democracy and International Politics

Essays and Other Writings

Eduard Bernstein, Marius S. Ostrowski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319707808
• eBook ISBN: 9783319707815
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents three later works by the German social-democratic thinker and politician Eduard Bernstein, translated into English in full for the first time: Social Democracy and International Politics: Social Democracy and the European Question; League of Nations or League of States; and International Law and International Politics: The Nature, Questions, and Future of International Law. Written at the height of WW1, they address the abrupt collapse of international socialist cooperation after its outbreak, and outline a vision for peace in Europe and beyond. Bernstein argues for an ethical, democratic approach to international relations, governed by a corpus of international law, and safeguarded by an international union dedicated to preserving peoples' right to self-determination. He is sceptical of the state-centrism of early-20th-century liberal proposals for developing strong international institutions, while also deeply critical of militarist and imperialist political leaders and thinkers for preventing even these limited proposals from being realised. Instead, in these works, Bernstein urges social democrats to campaign for a system of international economic, legal, and cultural relations that he calls the 'republic of peoples', and he explores themes of patriotism, class struggle, diplomacy, and free trade that still carry resonance today.

© The Author(s) 2018

Marius S. OstrowskiEduard Bernstein on Social Democracy and International Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70781-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marius S. Ostrowski¹

(1)

All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

End Abstract

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) is arguably one of the most significant, and unjustly neglected, thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A self-taught theorist, sometime journalist, lifelong socialist campaigner, and in later years a parliamentary deputy for the Social -Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Bernstein rose to prominence first as Friedrich Engels’ designated successor as the “guardian” of the hard-won Marxian hegemony within German socialist thought, and then as the architect of the revisionist tendency within the socialist tradition that—albeit largely unintentionally—brought that same hegemony to an end. It is this theoretical volte-face that overwhelmingly defines Bernstein’s reputation, since at the time it represented one of the first—and by far the most prominent—new responses to a specific and widely acknowledged problem within socialism , namely, how to deal with the growing gulf that was emerging between the demands of Marxian theory and social-democratic practice towards the end of the nineteenth century. In light of the failure of the much-heralded imminent collapse of capitalism to materialise, despite the economic depression of the 1870s and 1880s, SPD parliamentarians—who, despite the best efforts of Bismarck’s repression, had won representation (however disproportionately meagre) in the Reichstag throughout the Reich’s existence—and trade unionists sought to use their positions to achieve more immediate improvements in the conditions of the working class , including increased wages, maximum working hours, more democratic industrial employment laws, and less restrictive enfranchisement.¹ But this was anathema to socialist theory in its Marxian conception, which viewed all such incremental ameliorations as inadequate partial mitigations of the worst effects of capitalism —and poor imitations of bourgeois liberal welfarist and charitable programmes—that merely postponed the moment where these effects would become so extreme as to provoke the socialist revolution that would completely remove them.

Bernstein initially developed what has become known as the “revisionist” position over the course of the 1890s in a series of articles, notably in the SPD’s most important theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit under the title “Problems of Socialism ”, as an attempt—unprecedented at the time—to overcome this impasse.² In comparison, most of Bernstein’s contemporaries were content either to entrench resolutely around “scientific” orthodox Marxian precepts regarding the determinant primacy of economic conditions, the internal contradictions of capitalism , and the need for social revolution led by the proletarian class to bring about a transition to socialism —such as Bernstein’s long-time colleague and sparring partner Karl Kautsky or his most acerbic critic Rosa Luxemburg—or to quietly abandon all but the most outward commitment to the conceptual niceties of a calcified and decreasingly relevant Marxism in favour of a more pragmatic, even anti-theoretical approach to solving immediately pressing questions of the working class , especially on issues of cooperating with other parties and ideologies —such as the so-called SPD (and trade unionist) Praktiker, including luminaries of the later Weimar-era party like Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann , Otto Landsberg, and Hermann Müller. In other words, although they too recognised the problem, they were content to let it lie. Bernstein, however, uniquely sought to bridge the theory-practice divide. In Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (The Preconditions of Socialism ), easily his best-known work , in which he summarised and elaborated his emergent revisionist position, Bernstein argued that socialism should steer away from what he perceived as the traps of Hegelian dialectics—especially its stubborn historicism and naïve eschatology—and towards a greater appreciation of a Kantian ethical framework of rights , justice , and humanity , which also meant a greater preparedness to learn from liberal strands of thought, especially in its then-emerging social liberal form.³ On this basis, Bernstein suggested that socialists embrace parliamentary reformism not merely on an instrumental basis—that is, as a mechanism to elevate class consciousness , or an incidental prelude to more comprehensive social revolution , characterised by a strategy of oppositional, isolationist attentisme—but as a significant political good in its own right.⁴

Ultimately, Bernstein’s attempt to reunite socialist theory and practice proved unsuccessful, and the growing gulf finally culminated in a series of acrimonious fragmentations of the German (and wider European ) socialist left in the late 1910s and 1920s—with Bernstein himself at the very centre of these fragmentations. Nevertheless, he never wavered in his commitment to the revisionist position he had carved out in Preconditions, and he spent the last three decades of his life defending and elaborating his ideas in parliamentary speeches, journal and newspaper articles, private correspondence , and a number of published works, including those presented here. Revisionist socialism itself came to be regarded only by a small and relatively powerless minority of Bernstein’s contemporaries as a long-overdue update to orthodox Marxian analysis—perhaps most prominently Eduard Heimann, Hermann Heller, Leonard Nelson , Hendrik de Man, and Emil Lederer—although he also found a few allies among the SPD Praktiker, including Eduard David , Konrad Schmidt, Wolfgang Heine , and Heinrich Peus.⁵ Instead, the overwhelming majority either condemned his views as the most supreme betrayal of the life’s work of “the founders” or seized on his challenge to the Marxian doctrinal monolith to catalyse a far more comprehensive shedding of socialist theoretical commitments than Bernstein had ever envisaged. Overall, the result of this was that, in his lifetime, Bernstein was easily one of the best-known figures within European socialist politics , but also at the same time one of the most misunderstood and most maligned. In the wake of the revisionist controversy within Marxian thought for which he is undoubtedly best known, his ideas were the subject of several successive SPD party congresses—at Stuttgart in 1898, Hannover in 1899, Lübeck in 1901, and Dresden in 1903—and later he was influential, even instrumental, in the drafting of the SPD’s noticeably revisionist 1921 Görlitz Programme.⁶ Yet paradoxically, Bernstein’s record in influencing social-democratic thought and practice , unrivalled except for Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , and Ferdinand Lassalle , fell quickly into unrecognition. The Görlitz programme was soon replaced by the far more orthodox 1925 Heidelberg Programme, and by the time this one came to be succeeded by the 1959 Bad Godesberg Programme, Bernstein’s legacy was so forgotten that only a few social-democratic intellectuals such as Carlo Schmid and Bruno Kreisky remained aware of the intimate connection between his revisionism and reformism and the SPD’s final rejection of Marxian socialism .⁷ Now, especially outside the German-speaking world , Bernstein’s name rarely meets with acknowledgement even in academic circles, and even when it does, it is usually only in passing within the somewhat confined context of debates over the core tenets of Marxian theory, typically with overtones of either disparaging hostility or the superficial interest generally reserved for historical curios.

Although it is difficult to pin down a clear reason for this dramatic decline in Bernstein’s fame, there are some clues to be found within the conventional wisdom surrounding his life and work . Firstly, the conventional wisdom is that Bernstein was a man caught between the extremes of his time. As a practice-oriented revisionist, he is deemed no longer Marxist enough to be read as a serious contributor to the Marxian tradition of thought or strategy on the same level as Antonio Gramsci, Vladimir Lenin, György Lukács, and the various critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. Yet he is also seen as still too Mar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II. League of Peoples or League of States: An Investigation
• Part III
• Back Matter