Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [273]
The following year, as if restraint had been lifted by Engels’ death, Bernstein’s first heretical articles appeared. He was forty-six in 1896, an outwardly decent, respectable figure with rimless glasses and thinning hair who looked as if he might have been a bank teller all his life, rising perhaps to branch manager. His only noticeable feature was a long flaring independent nose. Acquainted with the Fabians—in fact, a good friend of Graham Wallas—he had for a long time felt a prejudice against them for their willingness to work within the capitalist order. At the same time the workings of democratic government in England impressed him and he could not resist the surrounding evidence that capitalism was somehow not approaching imminent collapse. Despite glaring inequalities of wealth and the “increasing misery” Marx had predicted, paradoxically the system was undeniably strong, even aggressive. The world seemed unfairly caught in a relentless spiral of prosperity, with results which seeped down to counteract the “increasing misery” in the form of increased employment. In London and in exile Bernstein suffered the disadvantages of independent thought and became increasingly prey to the suspicion that history was not following the path that Marx had charted. She had disobeyed the German diktat. Hegel had laid it down; Marx had hardened it; but history, with a Mona Lisa smile, had gone her own way, eluding the categorical imperative.
Like a man beginning to doubt the Biblical story of Creation, Bernstein was assailed by the agonies of failing faith. He became moody and irritable and at one point even applied for a job in a bank in the Transvaal. Eleanor Marx wrote to Kautsky that Bernstein was in bad spirits and making enemies. But intellectual courage won. From 1896 to 1898 he submitted a series of articles on “Problems of Socialism” to the Neue Zeit which instantly provoked outcries and tirades. The German Socialist world was thrown into an orgy of controversy, heightened when Bernstein embodied his ideas in an address which he sent to the German party’s Congress at Stuttgart in October, 1898, and subsequently enlarged into a book, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (The Evolution of Socialism), published in March, 1899.
It set forth the facts contrary to Marx: the middle class was not disappearing; the number of propertied persons was increasing, not decreasing. In Germany the working class was not sinking in progressive impoverishment but slowly making gains. Capital was not accumulating among a diminishing number of capitalists but was rather being diffused over a wider ownership through the medium of stocks and shares. Increased production was not all being consumed by capitalists but was spreading into increased consumption by the middle class and even, as they earned more, by the proletariat. In Germany the consumption of sugar, meat and beer was going up. The wider the spread of money, the less chance of any single economic crisis bringing about a final crash. If Socialists waited for that, Bernstein warned, they might wait indefinitely. In short, the grim twins, Verelendung and Zusammenbruch, were shadows.
In place of the Marxian dialectic, Bernstein suggested a capitalist economy