ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Eduard Bernstein

Okay, imagine you and your friends have a really cool toy that you all love playing with. But one day, one of your friends starts to think that maybe there is a better, newer toy out there that you should all get instead. That friend is like Eduard Bernstein.

Eduard Bernstein was a man who had some ideas about how the world should work. He lived a long time ago, back when your parents or grandparents were kids, and he was interested in how people could work together to make the world a happier, more equal place.

Bernstein was part of a group of people called socialists, who believed that everyone should share things and work for the common good instead of just focusing on making themselves rich. But unlike some other socialists, Bernstein didn't think that they needed to completely change the way the world worked in order to build a better society.

Instead, he thought that they could make small changes over time that would gradually improve people's lives. He called this idea "evolutionary socialism," because it was like a slow, steady evolution of society towards a better future.

Some people disagreed with Bernstein's ideas, though. They thought that he was giving up on the idea of a big revolution that would change everything all at once. They were worried that if they didn't keep pushing for big changes, things would stay unfair and unequal forever.

So even though Bernstein was trying to come up with a new, more practical way of improving society, he still faced a lot of criticism and opposition from other socialists. But he believed in his ideas and kept working to spread them, hoping that one day people would see that they could make a difference without having to overthrow everything at once.