Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein was a German social democratic politician and socialist theorist, known for the reformist challenge to Marxism called evolutionary socialism or revisionism. Born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, he lived in exile in Switzerland and London under the Anti-Socialist Laws and became a close associate of Friedrich Engels. In Evolutionary Socialism (1899) he disputed Marx's predictions of the collapse of capitalism and argued for gradual reform through democratic institutions. The SPD condemned his views but largely followed them in practice. He co-founded the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) during World War I, and later sat in the Reichstag.