Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein was born in Berlin to a Jewish family and joined the social democratic movement in the 1870s. Forced into exile by Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws, he edited the party newspaper from Zürich and later lived in London, where he worked closely with Friedrich Engels. In The Preconditions of Socialism (1899), translated as Evolutionary Socialism, he argued that capitalism was not heading for collapse and that socialists should pursue reform through parliament, trade unions and cooperatives. He returned to Germany in 1901 and served several terms in the Reichstag. During the Weimar Republic he rejoined the SPD, helped draft its 1921 Görlitz Program and remained active as a writer until his death in Berlin in 1932.

Bernstein's revisionism was formally rejected by the SPD and criticized by Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, who saw it as abandoning class struggle. Many historians see the SPD's later turn to reformist social democracy, and especially its 1959 Godesberg Program, as a vindication of his approach. Supporters regard him as a founder of modern democratic social democracy, while Marxist critics argue his ideas led socialist parties to accommodate capitalism. Some liberals saw him as moving toward liberalism, and his views on colonialism remain debated. He is also remembered for criticizing the war policies of imperial Germany after 1915 and for openly discussing German responsibility for the war, an unpopular position in the early Weimar years.