Philosophy. Bernstein's treatment of value theory
removed one of the central “scientific” tenets of Marx-
ism from the picture; to replace it he called in ethics
and empiricism. This ethical and empirical bent in
Bernstein is most clearly visible in his philosophical
views. Instead of the Hegelian dialectic (which Marx
claimed to have “stood on its feet”) with its revolu-
tionary implications, Bernstein believed that the true
philosophical kernel of Marxism was evolution. The
dialectic he described as a “snare” (Gay [1952], p. 135),
which had led Marx into “historical self-deception.”
Overemphasis on the dialectical struggle of opposites
had, in Bernstein's view, resulted in an unwarranted
insistence on violent revolution. Class antagonisms
would persist, but would diminish; the transition to
socialism would come as a result of work within the
State, rather than by intransigeant opposition to it (ibid.,
p. 137). A further departure from the “scientific” spirit
of Marxism is found in Bernstein's attempt to modify
Marx's determinism—an attempt which did little more
than suggest that Marx had been in some way too
determinist, and that Engels had later departed from
the previous extremism of his and Marx's earlier defini-
tion. Bernstein did not question that the economic
factor—the forces and relations of production—were
“an ever recurring decisive force, the cardinal point
of the great movements of history” (Bernstein [1909],
p. 17), and indeed proposed to replace the term “ma-
terialist conception of history” by “economic inter-
pretation of history”; but he tried to restore to ideol-
ogy, and hence to idealistic and ethical motives in men,
some of the independence of which they had been
deprived by Marxism. This meant no less than the
reintroduction of ethics into the causal chain leading
to socialism.
When Rosa Luxemburg, one of Bernstein's chief
critics in the SPD, accused him of surrendering the
“immanent economic necessity of the victory of so-
cialism” Bernstein accepted the charge: “I regard it
as neither possible nor desirable to give the triumph
of socialism a purely materialistic foundation” (Gay,
p. 141). Where, then, did Bernstein seek a basis for
his ethics? This was the time of the Neo-Kantian revival
in Germany, and some of the leading Neo-Kantians,
particularly F. A. Lange and Hermann Cohen, were
sympathetic to the political Left. Inevitably, the Re-
visionists looked to Kant. Bernstein's immediate in-
spiration came from Lange, with Conrad Schmidt and
Ludwig Woltmann—philosophers on the fringe of the
SPD—also contributing. But Bernstein's Kantianism
was of a strictly limited nature. It provided a sanction
for his reintroduction of morality into Social-
Democratic ideology; but his use of it was mainly
instrumental, to justify his criticism of established
dogmas. Setting the device “Kant against Cant” at the
head of the last chapter of his
Voraussetzungen, Bern-
stein appealed to “... the spirit of the great Königs-
berg philosopher... against the cant which sought
to get a hold on the working-class movement and to
which the Hegelian dialectic offers a comfortable ref-
uge” (Bernstein [1909], pp. 222f.). The cant to which
Bernstein referred was the “scientific” prediction of the
inevitable achievement of socialism through revolution.
“That which is generally called 'the final goal of so-
cialism'... is nothing to me
but the movement is
everything,” said Bernstein in a phrase much quoted
against him (Bernstein [1901], p. 234).
Socialism, for Bernstein, was not inevitable, but
desirable, based not on “science” but on demands,
interests, and desires—indeed he held that “no -ism
is a science” (Gay, p. 149). Further than this, or deeper
than this, Bernstein's Kantianism did not go. He used
it to buttress his skepticism, but he remained a “com-
mon-sense philosopher” (ibid., p. 151), and for him—
though not, as will be seen, for all later Revisionists—
philosophy was an afterthought, more illustrative than
formative in his general outlook.
