  The debate centred around the question of whether democracy and capitalism were compatible. The starting point for Bernstein’s critique was the Marxist claim that capitalism was a social system with a tendency to collapse under the pressure of its own contradictions. In the pages of Capital, Marx had written eloquently about how capitalist economies faced the prospect of ever more destructive crises due to the twin pressures of technological modernisation and the tendency of the rate of profits to fall. At the time of Bernstein’s contribution, this methodological commitment to understanding capital as a system with an inherent propensity towards crisis was widely shared among the main theorists of the Second International. To suggest that the argument was false was to strike at the core of Marxist political economy. But what made the attack particularly uncomfortable, and difficult to dismiss, was that Bernstein presented his argument not as a break with Marxist methodological assumptions but as an internal development of its normative and empirical requirements. He began by insisting that dialectics was nothing other than the methodological commitment to match one’s theory to new developments in practice. The history of capitalist development in the 19th century showed not a cumulative series of ever sharper failures but a resilient system with a surprising capacity for adaptation. From an economic perspective there were a number of new developments with which the Marxist analysis had to reckon: the intensification of foreign trade, the expansion of the banking and financial sector, the development of the credit system, and the emergence of cartels and trusts. From a political perspective, the consolidation of middle classes, the rise of property owners, and the expansion of the franchise meant that liberal representation could no longer be identified with the perpetuation of oppression by ruling elites. There was now reasonable hope that the gap between the private and the public sphere, between the ethos of the bourgeois and that of the citoyen could be bridged. On the one hand, the extension of the right to vote to previously disenfranchised categories of people; on the other hand the strengthening of workers’ unions and cooperatives as well as the prospects of electoral successes for mass social-democratic parties across Western Europe made it hard to equate representative democracy with the consolidation of class rule.  Citizenship emerged as the new concept through which capital could be put to the service of the democratic state. Representative democracy and political emancipation were part of the same project, a project that social-democrats could develop regardless of “the final goal.”