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Understanding of Karl Marx
The economic conditions of Europe at the turn of the century together with the peculiar ‘science’ of Marxism conspired to make the Social-Democracy a liberal reform group whose tactics bore no relation to their principles. And yet this did not prevent the intellectual leaders of the movement from mouthing the revolutionary phrases of Marx’s early days. It was this dualism between the prosaic, class-collaborative activity of the organisation on the one hand, and the lofty revolutionary tones of its holiday Versammlungsredner on the other, which gave Bernstein, the student of Engels and the teacher of Kautsky, his great opportunity. In his Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie – the Das Kapital of all subsequent revisionism – he declared to the mortification of his comrades that the Social-Democracy ought ‘to find the courage to emancipate itself from a phraseology which in fact had long been outmoded and to be willing to appear what in reality it already is today: a democratic, socialistic party of reform’. [1] Bernstein did not disapprove of the practice of Social-Democracy; he was intent, however, upon showing that the logical, theoretical counterpart of that practice was in flat contradiction with the theory which Marxists were professing. It was the effort to justify what the Social-Democracy was actually doing which led Bernstein to utter that memorable sentence: ‘What is generally taken as the goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything.’ [2] In its colonial policy and agrarian programme, in its political collaboration with liberal parties and its trade-union activity, the true philosophy of the socialist movement was expressed. Why not make that philosophy explicit? To talk big was merely cant. And against this cant Bernstein opposed Kant. (Kant wider cant. The pun is Bernstein’s.)
It is in Bernstein’s neo-Kantianism and in the conditions which made for the revival of the ethical and political doctrines of Kant that the theoretical source of Marxian revisionism is to be found. With characteristic short-sightedness, the ‘orthodox’ opposition restricted itself for the most part to a bitter criticism of Bernstein’s economic deviations from Marx. Bernstein had challenged the accuracy of some of Marx’s analyses which despite the fact that they did not treat of exact quantitative correlations or specific time coefficients, the ‘scientific’ socialists regarded as literal predictions valid at any time: notably, disappearance of the middle class, the increasing severity of the business cycle and its corollary, the rate and quality of mass impoverishment. As a matter of fact, however, Bernstein’s economic views were a form of immanent criticism. Allowing for the time factor, the development of finance capitalism and the rise of new industries, the ‘inconvenient’ facts he cited could all be properly interpreted within the framework of the Marxian position. But it was Bernstein’s ethical Kantianism which introduced the irreconcilable element in his discussion. For from it there followed as a matter of principle what the Social-Democracy claimed to be doing as a mere matter of expediency.
The subdued Kantian tones of his original work became progressively stronger in subsequent publications – of which his Wie ist wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus möglich? (1901) is representative. [3] Socialism as a science has as its object the understanding of the socialist movement. It gives us knowledge of the causes and conditions of that movement. But it can never justify that movement, for at its heart there are socialist claims, demands, strivings. It is these ideal motives (moralische Interessen) telling us what ought to be which gives strength to the movement, not the knowledge of what is. In fact, a conflict between scientific theory and ethical practice is always possible. Not only may ‘what is’ be opposed to ‘what ought to be’, but one ‘ought’ may be opposed to another ‘ought’. To resolve these conflicts an objective ethical theory of the right and reasonable is necessary. Bernstein maintained that such an objective theory must necessarily eschew naturalism and embrace some form of the Kantian philosophy. That was behind his oft-repeated reproach that the Social-Democracy was too naturalistic. With such an ethical doctrine the socialist movement could now speak of one’s ‘ethical duties’ to mankind, could now make explicit its ‘natural rights’ doctrine already hidden in such words as Aus-beut-ung (exploitation, Beute, originally meaning booty). The writings of F.A. Lange and Hermann Cohen, together with those of other neo-Kantians like Natorp, Staudinger and Vorländer, who were developing socialism as an ethics and religion, strengthened Bernstein in his views. When Bernstein wrote, ‘The Social-Democracy is in need of a Kant’, it was not so much because of his interest in critical method as in ethical consciousness.
It is obvious that an objective classless morality furnished a beautiful premise for piecemeal social reform. The proletariat as the banner-bearer of the ethics of the community could formulate demands and proposals which included its class opponents as part of the wider social whole. It could claim to be integrating not separatist; characterising itself, as the occasion demanded, as the fulfilment of the prophets, of Christianity, of the French Enlightenment. Struggle was not for a class right but for a common right. The growth of ethical self-consciousness in the community is gradual. Consequently the methods of Social-Democracy must be evolutionary. Class violence involves the negation of the fundamental rights of other classes as human beings. Consequently, Social-Democracy must be peaceful. Phrasemongery about force and dictatorship of the proletariat was worthy of the followers of Blanqui and Bakunin, not of Marx. Class dictatorship means not social progress but a relapse into barbarism. Once more the Volksstaat of Lassalle (who had derived his conception of the state from Hegel – a conception excoriated by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme) reappeared as an undertone in the discussion, especially in Bernstein’s defence of the worker’s Vaterland.
Marx had written in the Communist Manifesto: ‘The proletariat has no fatherland’, meaning that not the workers but the landlords and industrialists owned the country and that it was the task of the proletariat to expropriate them of it. Bernstein understood this to mean, however, that the worker had no nationality and that he was only a member of the international of have-nots. He protested that since the worker had become enfranchised as a citizen, this was no longer true. His duties as a citizen, his duties to the nation, were distinct from his duties as a member of a particular class. And so there began this blurring between the concept of class and country, class and public, class and people, which later on was to prove so fateful to the cause of the international working class. Economic classes were regarded as a species within the genus of the nation. Since the worker was a member of the nation before he was a member of an economic class, his duties as a citizen took precedence over his class interests. As a citizen, of course, he was free to agitate for the existence of a ‘people’s state’. And it was, indeed, with a heavy consciousness of their duties as citizens of the state that the German Social-Democracy, which had come so close to expelling Bernstein and his followers from its ranks as heretics, voted the war-budget in 1914 for the defence of the potential Volksstaat in the actual Vaterland. This was not a capitulation to Bernstein but a logical fulfilment of the party’s reformist past. When Wilhelm II proclaimed from the balcony of his palace in Berlin: ‘Ich kenne keine Partein mehr; ich kenne nur noch Deutsche’, the Social-Democrats, together with all other parties, applauded him to the echo. Before long the party and trade-union theoreticians were grinding out apologetics which Bernstein himself (who had been opposed in the fraction caucus to the approval of the war credits) courageously opposed. A representative passage which strikes the new note with utter frankness, follows:
The masses know and feel that the fate of the nation and of its organised expression – the state – is also their fate. They feel themselves economically, politically and culturally bound to it through participation in the life of the community under the leadership of the state. Their economic welfare and future depends upon the state of the national economy which needs freedom of movement in order to develop. Trade unions can successfully negotiate conditions of work and wages only when trade and exchange are in full bloom. In this way the masses of workers are interested in the fate of the national economy and in the political validation of the state community. That is why they feel such an inner solidarity with the rest of the population in fighting off the dangers which threaten from without. [4]
The revisionists in their time were quite consistent – and honest. They were justified in reproaching the ‘orthodox’ for acting in one way (always with the revisionists) and speaking in another (always against the revisionists). The hue and cry that went up against them in the party was an expression of intellectual confusion and troubled conscience as well. Auer, a member of the Central Committee, wrote to Bernstein confidentially: ‘Mein Lieber Ede, so etwas tut man, aber sagt man nicht.’ [5] In no important respect was Bernstein at odds with his party except in calling a dogma by its right name. It was Kautsky himself, the man who led the theoretical onslaught against Bernstein, who confessed on the occasion of Bernstein’s eightieth anniversary:
Since 1880 in political party affairs we have been Siamese twins. On occasions even Siamese twins quarrel with one another. And at times we did plenty. But even at those moments you could not speak of one without the other. [6]
There can be no question but that Kautsky in essence is right. He and Bernstein were the Siamese twins of Marxian revisionism who differed only concerning the manner in which the practice of reformism could find adequate theoretical expression.
Bernstein, as an exponent of enlightened common sense, attributed the intellectual confusion of his fellow socialists to their pretended use of the dialectical method. In his own thinking he reverted to the sharp and exclusive dichotomies of the ideologues of the French Revolution for whom he always professed great admiration. Bernstein’s conclusions can best be appraised in the light of his methodological starting-point, eighteenth-century rationalism with its ‘terrorism of reason’ mellowed by an acceptance of the theory of social evolution and a faith in human perfectibility. So blunted was the appreciation of Marx’s method on the part of his ‘orthodox’ followers that the discussion with Bernstein raged around his specific conclusions, often around the wording of those conclusions, instead of his superficial rationalism. [7]
Bernstein’s great merit lay in his intellectual honesty. He interpreted Marx and Engels as they appeared to him in their sober years – peace-loving, analytical, monocled scholars, devoted to the cause of social reform, with stirring memories of a revolutionary youth. The movement of which he was the literary head represented the strongest tendency in the alignment of socialist forces in Europe before 1918. It was Marxism as a liberal philosophy of social reform.
1. Eduard Bernstein, Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (first edition, Stuttgart 1899), p. 230, last edition. ‘But is Social-Democracy today anything beyond a party that strives after the socialist transformation of society by the means of democratic and economic reform? ... Bebel... has entered the most vigorous protests against the idea that Social-Democracy upholds a policy of force, and all the party organs have received these speeches with applause; nowhere has a protest against them been raised. Kautsky develops in his Agrarian Question the principles of the agrarian policy of Social-Democracy which represent a system of thoroughly democratic reform straight through. The Communal Programme adopted in Brandenburg is a democratic programme of reform. In the Reichstag, the party supports the extension of the powers and the compulsory establishment of courts of arbitration for trades disputes, which are organs for the furtherance of industrial peace. All the speeches of their representatives breathe reform. In the same Stuttgart where, according to Clara Zetkin, the “Bernstein-ade” received the finishing stroke, shortly after the congress the Social-Democrats entered into an alliance with the middle-class democracy for the municipal elections. Other towns in Württemberg followed their example. In the trade-union movement one union after another proceeds to establish unemployment funds, which practically means a surrender of the functions of a purely fighting trade union, and declares for municipal labour bureaus embracing equally employers and employees. In various large towns – Hamburg, Elberfeld – cooperative stores have been started by socialists and trade unions. Everywhere action for reform, action for social progress, action for democracy.’ (Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, pp. 231–32) [Full text of 1902 edition available here. – MIA]
2. ‘Was man gemeinhin Endziel des Sozialismus nennt, ist mir nichts, die Bewegung alles.’
3. Eduard Bernstein, Wie ist wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus möglich? (Berlin, 1901); full text available here. – MIA
4. Quoted by K. Korsch, in Kampf-Front, 11 January 1930.
5. A. Winnig, Der Krieg und die Arbeiterinternationale, in Friedrich Thimme and Karl Legien (eds.), Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland (Leipzig 1915), p. 37.
6. Der Kampf, 1930, p. 15.
7. In a conversation with me in the early summer of 1929, Bernstein (then seventy-nine) cheerfully admitted that he was, to use his own words, ‘a methodological reactionary’. ‘I am still an eighteenth-century rationalist’, he said, ‘and not at all ashamed of it. I believe that in essentials their approach was both valid and fruitful.’ Towards the close of the conversation when I asked him whether he regarded this method to be the method of Marx, he lowered his voice and in confidential tones, as if afraid of being overheard, said: ‘The Bolsheviks are not unjustified in claiming Marx as their own. Do you know? Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak in him!’
Last updated: 20 February 2020