Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation

In taking these positions Bernstein was doing little more than describing and approving the actual behavior, as distinct from the programmatic declarations, of the German Social Democratic movement and other Western socialist parties. But in demythologizing the socialist outlook, in pointing to the disparities between its holiday rhetoric and daily practice, in calling for greater empirical sobriety and less terminological pieties, Bernstein was criticizing not only the trappings of faith but its substance as well. He seemed unaware that the more effectively reformist the Social Democratic Party was, the more important for its members was the ideology of apocalypse and the hope for total solutions. Nonetheless, the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War — and despite the shadow of excommunication poised over Bernstein's head — continued along the revisionist path. When the War broke out Bernstein himself wished the Party to take a firm stand against approval of the war budget. After the War his prestige soared and, until Hitler destroyed political democracy in Germany, his point XV XV of view, even doctrinally, was acceptable to the German Social Democratic Party. The presence of a Communist movement, completely controlled by the Soviet Union, facilitated the triumph of Bernstein's perspective. After the downfall of Hitler, when the German Social Democratic Party was reconstituted, Bernstein's ideas became the reigning orthodoxy. Perhaps he would have found them even too revisionist on strictly economic matters.