Eduard Bernstein was – and remains – one of the most controversial figures in the history of European Marxism and socialism. For most partisans of the left, he was regarded as the father of “revisionism”, ill-fated and ill-reputed. According to Leninist and orthodox Marxist mythology, he poisoned the minds and souls of the proletariat with illusions of reformism, diverting them from the revolutionary path. According to some of his later admirers, Bernstein paved the way for – and even created new prospects for – a genuine social-democratic view and a consistently reformist policy within the labour movement. His legacy, although widely unknown, remains contested to this day. Unfortunately, much of his vast corpus has never been translated, and little of it is known in the English-speaking world. Bernstein was one of the most prolific writers among the socialist intellectuals of his time. A complete-works edition, including his extensive journalistic output and unpublished manuscripts, would comprise at least twenty-five sizeable volumes. Such an edition remains a desideratum.

In this monumental new biography, Klaus Leesch challenges the many legends and myths surrounding Bernstein’s life and work. He presents the historical facts concerning the life and work of his subject in more than 1,000 pages, across two volumes. The author has scrutinized all the available material on Bernstein, visited all the archives, examined all the publications by and about Bernstein, and studied his written legacy, including his unpublished papers and extensive correspondence. In sixteen chapters and one excursus, he follows the main stages of Bernstein’s long life, beginning with his childhood and youth in Berlin and ending with his final years as a respected elder statesman of German social democracy. He concludes with a chapter on Bernstein’s legacy and its impact on the international socialist movement and Marxist tradition.

Bernstein’s career started from humble origins. However, as the son of a large Jewish family of modest means, he nonetheless enjoyed a good school education, although he had to leave the gymnasium without getting his high school diploma. For three years, he trained as a bank clerk and afterwards worked as a banker in the S&L Rothschild Bank in Berlin, for several years, learning a great deal about banking and the day-to-day business of the booming and rapidly developing capitalist economy in Germany during the 1870s, the period known as the Gründerzeit. During this time, he came into contact with radical students and working-class socialists. As early as 1872, at the age of twenty-two, he became a member of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP, Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany).

He soon became acquainted with August Bebel, Ignaz Auer, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and other leading SDAP members. Before long, he became a seasoned and widely known agitator for the party. At the same time, he began to publish regularly in party journals and newspapers.

As a young man, he became personally acquainted with both Marx and Engels, whom he visited for a longer stay in London in 1880. Apparently, Marx thought more of him than of Karl Kautsky. And Engels became a close friend during his long years of exile, first in Zurich and then in London. Engels appreciated his work and praised him several times as a “fantastic fellow, in mind as in character”.Footnote ¹ In Engels’s view, Ede, as he called Bernstein in private, had the distinct advantage of being neither an “academic” nor a “writer by profession”, but rather a fighter and a “businessman” – and, not least, a Jew – already, in his eyes, superior to Kautsky.Footnote ² It was no accident that Engels chose him and August Bebel as literary executors of Marx’s vast written legacy, including a large number of unpublished manuscripts and notebooks. However, although Bernstein was involved in the first publication of parts of the correspondence of Marx and Engels, Marxist philology was not his favourite pastime. In his own journal, Dokumente des Sozialismus [Documents of Socialism], which existed only from 1901 to 1905, Bernstein published only from 1901 to 1905, Bernstein included just a few pieces of Marx’s and Engels’s unpublished work. During the 1890s, he worked with Kautsky on the translation of some of Marx’s work into German – in particular the anti-Proudhon Misère de la Philosophie, published in French in 1847. Eventually, he became the sole custodian of the Marx and Engels papers. Only Kautsky, however, engaged in some serious editorial work, publishing a large selection of Marx’s unpublished economic manuscripts of 1861–1863 between 1905 and 1910, under the now familiar title Theories of Surplus Value.Footnote ³

Bernstein’s work as a Marxist and socialist thinker cannot be easily pigeonholed because he covered a vast intellectual terrain. Today, he is mostly remembered as a theoretician of socialism. One of his most renowned contributions was his 1901 public lecture “How is Scientific Socialism Possible?”; another was his seminal 1899 book, first published in English in 1907 as Evolutionary Socialism. Leesch devotes a large subchapter to Bernstein’s work as a historian, and rightly so, because Bernstein contributed original historical studies to the body of Marxist literature. His work on the communist and democratic-socialist currents during the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, first published in 1895, was widely acclaimed by historians and continues to be highly regarded.Footnote ⁴ Bernstein’s three-volume book on the history of the labour movement in Berlin, published in 1907–1910, is still highly appreciated as a classic and path-breaking work, virtually creating the history of the labour movement as a new sub-discipline of historiography. In 1921, he became one of the first to write a history of the German November Revolution of 1918–1919, focusing on the origins and the initial years of the German Republic, a book historians regard as an exceptional primary source, since it was written by someone who was not only a contemporary witness but also a historical actor of that period. It is a relatively unknown fact that Max Weber not only referred to Bernstein's work approvingly, but also contacted him. Indeed, Weber even invited Bernstein to discuss his work, which he found inspiring, and he referred to Bernstein’s work several times, praising his insights (pp. 827–828).

The most important period in Bernstein’s life as a politician and Marxist theorist, the phase that defined his standing in both the German and the wider international socialist movement, was the years of the so-called debate on “revisionism”. Leesch presents the events extensively and in meticulous detail. For example, he describes Bernstein’s extensive and very polite response to Rosa Luxemburg’s sharp polemic against him in much detail. Much was published during this long-running controversy, with Bernstein usually responding to criticism in a sober and matter-of-fact manner. Eventually, the debates that took place during two party conferences turned into a full-scale reckoning and ended with a formal condemnation of Bernstein’s views. Due to the quarrels between them, the long-standing friendship between Bernstein and Kautsky ended, as did Bernstein’s personal relationship with August Bebel. Bebel was eager to prevent any public debates on party strategy and to subdue what he saw as a danger to the party’s unity, notwithstanding his long-standing acquaintance with and respect for Bernstein. What was actually at stake in Bernstein’s eyes was the entire outlook on capitalism and its future shared by the majority of the party’s members. His quarrel with Kautsky, his co-author of the Erfurter Programm of 1891, was not about philosophy, dialectics, or materialism, nor about the meaning of the concept of “scientific socialism” in general, but about the tendencies of development at play in contemporary capitalism, transforming its very fabric. When the first Great Depression in the history of capitalism ended in 1895, and a new long period of prosperity began – which was to last until 1914, interrupted only by two crises, one in 1901 and the next one in 1907 – the Marxist conviction of the imminent collapse of capitalism, announced and precipitated by ever larger and ever deeper economic crises, was put to a serious test. Kautsky responded, repeating and affirming his previous views on the dominant tendencies at work in capitalism, while others, like the young Rosa Luxemburg, made their names attacking Bernstein for his alleged denial of the final goal of the socialist movement and the iron “historical necessity” of socialism. What Bernstein did contest was the attitude of the party majority in putting their trust in historical necessity and relying on the inevitable collapse of capitalism, an event that was becoming ever more unlikely in his view, given the real changes in the capitalist world. Much of Bernstein’s critique still holds, as false prophecies of capitalism’s imminent decay and downfall abound in our times too.

Although a disciple of both Marx and Engels, and a personal friend of the latter, Bernstein had a mind of his own. He was the first to write a long review of Volume III of Marx’s Capital upon its publication in 1894. Engels found his review rather confused and excused him as “overworked” and under time pressure.Footnote ⁵ In later years, Bernstein admitted that the long-awaited concluding volume of Marx’s Capital had been a disappointment for him. In contrast to Volume I, he saw it as an “anticlimax” given the expectations previously raised. Marx had already struggled with the first volume. In the unfinished manuscripts of Volume III, edited by Engels, Bernstein saw Marx, the socialist, tragically struggling with his scientific conscience, as none of the formulas he had found could meet his own requirements.Footnote ⁶ That is what Bernstein had already told Kautsky in a private letter in 1897. The third volume of Capital had been “an anticlimax”, both in the “form of its elaboration” and in its “conceptual content”. Marx had been aware of this. The most interesting chapters had remained unfinished, and so “his work remained a torso”.Footnote ⁷ Hence, it was inevitable for readers to “figure out, where Marx is still right and where he is not”.Footnote ⁸ As he wrote to his old friend and adversary Karl Kautsky, “we have to be critical of Marx and Engels”, precisely “because we are their disciples”. For my part, he continued, “I am endeavouring to continue working on the basis of the method they developed, but I can only partially accept their results”.Footnote ⁹ In his book of 1899, he hinted several times at the need to correct the views of Marx and Engels. Any further development of Marxist doctrine had to start with a critique of the errors committed by its founding fathers. As early as 1896, Bernstein wrote to Kautsky that he was attracted by the idea of writing an article entitled “Was Marx a Marxist?” in which he wanted to show that there was a vast difference “between taking up a theory and continuing to work on its basis and parroting it or superficially nitpicking it”.Footnote ¹⁰ In his 1899 book, he reaffirmed his view that any serious effort to develop Marxist theory further had to begin with a thorough critique of Marxist tenets, including those erroneous views once held by Marx and Engels themselves.

Bernstein consistently emphasized to his critics that he had “never ceased to regard himself as a member of the school of Marx and Engels”.Footnote ¹¹ He believed the guiding principles and core concepts of Marxism were correct, but mistakes had to be corrected, and the remains of utopian ideas had to be rejected. Marxists were obliged to engage seriously with objections raised to some of Marx’s theories or their substantiations in his work. Wherever necessary, they should not shy away from criticizing Marx (or Engels). Bernstein himself continued to struggle with Marx’s theory of value, or rather with its convoluted manner of exposition. The “dialectical” mode of exposition that fascinates Marxists today disturbed him – as it did Rosa Luxemburg. Nonetheless, he continued working on the problems he saw in Marx’s theory of value as well as in his theory of wages in several articles and unpublished papers.Footnote ¹² In later years, he continued attacking what he regarded as a false orthodoxy in Marxism, supported by a regular Marx cult. He refused to be labelled a revisionist, which he saw as misleading, but kept insisting on the right, even the obligation, of all true disciples of Marx and Engels to criticize and correct, to complete and complement their work, wherever necessary – precisely because their words were not gospel but social science, and had to be treated as such.

In a very useful chapter (Chapter Nine), Leesch gives a summary and overview of the major insights that Bernstein had developed and confirmed during the years of the debate on revisionism. He successfully rectifies several major misunderstandings of Bernstein’s views, which still hold sway today – for instance, with respect to his ideas about the future development of capitalism – no immiseration, no collapse – about the state, about imperialism and the changing world order, and about the concept of a feasible socialism. This does not amount to a completely different socialist theory, but rather to a series of corrections to conventional socialist thought, based upon a partial critique of Marxist orthodoxy, which makes a lot of sense. Many have tried to convert Bernstein, posthumously, into a principal witness for a definitive farewell to Marxism. As Leesch shows in detail, Bernstein was nothing of the sort, nor did he intend to be.

As a politician, although he never held an office of any importance in the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, he had some impact before and during World War I, as well as during the years of the Weimar Republic. He served as a member of the Berlin city council, and, from 1902, as a member of the German Reichstag. After briefly losing his seat, in 1912, he returned to parliament and remained an MP throughout the war years. Bernstein was a well-known and widely respected MP at both the communal and national levels. However, he never occupied any formal position in the hierarchy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was a renowned specialist on matters of state finance and taxation, often acting on behalf of the social democratic faction in the Reichstag. He was one of the few MPs on the left who opposed the war politics of the German government from beginning to end. During the revolution of 1918–1919, he publicly criticized the wartime policies of the German Empire and collected evidence to support his critique. Together with Kautsky, he published documents proving the involvement of the German government during the crucial period of July and August 1914. Although this made him highly unpopular, he also openly criticized the attitude of the social democratic faction in the Reichstag for its attitude to the war and its financing, and he did not shrink from admitting Germany’s responsibility for the conflict. Although imperial Germany was not the only culprit, it was far from innocent. He insisted that it was the historical task of the German left to establish a completely different kind and style of international politics. It is among the many merits of Leesch’s biography that he directs our attention to Bernstein's many contributions to the analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and international politics in general.Footnote ¹³

Although he did not write much about it, Bernstein's stance regarding the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik rule was very similar to Kautsky’s. In this respect, the old friends found each other again. Against the German admirers and followers of Lenin and Trotsky, whom he regarded as maximalists and purveyors of a politics of violence, he argued – completely in accordance with Marx and Engels – that revolutions could not be made at the discretion of the revolutionaries. To build a socialist society by means of mass murder and state terrorism was sheer folly, and the belief in the miracle-working power of a dictatorship based on terrorism was a complete distortion of Marxist thought and a blatant mockery of the legacy of Marx and Engels.

Another subchapter of the book (a digression in Chapter Thirteen) is devoted to a rather neglected topic: Bernstein and his attitude to the Jewish labour movement, and to Jewish life in general. Although he was a secular Jew without any particular interest in Jewish religion, he did engage with anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He was sympathetic to and had links with the Jewish labour movement in eastern Europe and the Left Zionism of Poale Zion, which he supported by writing numerous articles for their journals. In the 1920s, he openly supported and took sides with the Jewish settlers’ movement in Palestine, becoming a member of several Jewish committees and organizations, such as the League for Working Palestine. In his view, socialist Zionism was part of the international socialist movement. He disagreed with Kautsky’s strong views on Zionism, defending it and standing up for a peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

This is a book not only for specialists. It shows us many hitherto neglected or ignored aspects of Bernstein’s life, his work, and his thought that deserve the attention of historians, whether they see themselves as Marxists, socialists, or otherwise. The book should be made available in English so that it can reach a wider audience.