Evolutionary socialism

Evolutionary socialism

Bernstein's evolutionary socialism, a form of revisionist Marxism, developed from a series of articles he wrote for the SPD's theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, between 1896 and 1898, under the title Probleme des Sozialismus ("Problems of Socialism"). These culminated in his landmark book, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, 1899), which was translated into English as Evolutionary Socialism but incompletely or partly, by Edith C. Harvey in 1909, and complete translation has come as The Preconditions of Socialism, in 1993 by Henry Tudor. The book created an immediate storm of controversy within the international socialist movement. It provided a new conceptual scheme for socialists to comprehend contemporary developments and offered an alternative to the orthodox Marxist framework.