Politics. In economics, Bernstein tested the received
schemata of Marxism against empirical fact, and found
them wanting; in philosophy he proved equally skepti-
cal of the sweeping claims of Marxian “science.” Either
way, theory yielded some ground to praxis. In politics,
even more so, Bernstein invited the SPD to discard
its revolutionary phrases and admit openly that it had
become a democratic reformist party. The politics of
German Revisionism were the politics of Social De-
mocracy called by their real name. Bernstein's aim was
that the party should encourage and extrapolate recent
trends; it should proceed by linear evolution rather
than dialectical conflicts. Electoral and parliamentary
success was worth having, he thought, not merely as
a school of revolution (the radical Marxist view) but
as a means towards the achievement of political power.
The development of “socialism-in-capitalism” (an idea
of which Marx's Vergesellschaftung [“socialization”] is
one forerunner, but which Bernstein took most directly
from the English Fabians) seemed to promise increasing
state intervention in the economy; the formation of
trusts and cartels, and the growth of municipal demo-
cratic institutions, seemed to portend “the piecemeal
realization of socialism” (Bernstein [1901], p. 233). For
Social Democrats, this strategy entailed the tactics of
alliance—alliance with trade unions, cooperatives, and
occasionally nonsocialist bodies. The trade unions, with
their built-in interest in partial, practical gains, were
natural allies for the Revisionists, though lacking any
bent for theory; and Bernstein, though a theorist of
praxis, was still a theorist. He therefore worked to shift
the SPD from its traditional view of the trade unions
as little more than recruiting-grounds for socialists,
with no prospect of contributing independently to the
achievement of socialism, and to persuade it that they
were worthy allies. Cooperatives, according to Bern-
stein, were also instruments of piecemeal progress to
socialism: not producer cooperatives—and here Bern-
stein parted company with Marx and joined Beatrice
Webb—but consumer cooperatives, which he saw as
fundamentally democratic and potentially socialistic
(Bernstein [1909], p. 118).
More important, and more controversial was the
Revisionist view of relations with nonsocialist orga-
nizations. Whether to legitimize the South German
provincial SPD's practice of parliamentary deals with
local nonsocialist parties; whether the Social
Democrats should claim, in 1903, the Vice-Presidency
of the Reichstag which was their due at the price of
a formal call on the Kaiser (wearing knee-breeches,
no less!); whether to allow Social Democrats to vote
for a (bourgeois) budget containing desirable conces-
sions to the labor movement; in each of these party
controversies, Bernstein fought for the obvious advan-
tages of reformist practice against the inhibitions of
revolutionary theory.
