Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein (6 January 1850 – 18 December 1932) was a German social-democratic Marxist theorist and politician. A member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Bernstein had held close association to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he saw flaws in Marxist thinking and began to criticize views held by Marxism when he investigated and challenged the Marxist materialist theory of history. He rejected significant parts of Marxist theory that were based upon Hegelian metaphysics and rejected the Hegelian dialectical perspective.Bernstein distinguished between early and mature Marxism. The former, exemplified by Marx and Engels's 1848 The Communist Manifesto, he opposed for what he regarded as its violent Blanquist tendencies, embracing the later holding that socialism could be achieved by peaceful means through incremental legislative reform in democratic societies.