More than a century ago, Eduard Bernstein claimed that it was time for
socialists to abandon their revolutionary goal of overthrowing
capitalism. He argued that the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
should adopt a reformist approach that strictly relied on legal
channels, such as elections in which socialism could slowly be voted
into power. To support his position, Bernstein cited the authority of
Friedrich Engels, who had allegedly reached similar conclusions in one
of his last works. Citing Engels’s introduction to Marx’s/Class
Struggles in France,/Bernstein argued, “Engels is so thoroughly
convinced that tactics geared to a catastrophe have had their day that
he considers a revision to abandon them to be due even in the Latin
countries where tradition is much more favourable to them than in
Germany.”^1 Bernstein is not alone in claiming Engels for reformism; he
was later joined by others such as Karl Kautsky, Ralph Miliband, and
Santiago Carrillo.^2 Even the American democratic socialist Michael
Harrington, who otherwise viewed Engels as a “distorter” of Marxism, had
no problem using him to vindicate a democratic socialist strategy: “In
his 1895 Preface to a new edition of Marx’s/Class Struggles in France/,
Engels summarized the democratic strategy in sweeping historical terms….
Engels’s turn toward what can only be called democratic socialism was a
critically important deepening of the idea of socialism itself.”^3
https://www.leftvoice.org/engels-against-reformism-in-germany-and-france
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