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WorkRosa Luxemburg

Reform or Revolution

Reform and revolution are not two roads to one destination: the pamphlet that answered Eduard Bernstein, point by point.

by Rosa Luxemburg183 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Sozialreform oder Revolution?
First published
(aged 28)
Original language
German

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Overview

Eduard Bernstein, a senior Social Democrat living in exile in London, had been arguing since 1896 that Marx's forecast was failing. In Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical weekly of the German Social Democrats, he wrote that capitalism was not heading for collapse: credit, cartels and faster communications were smoothing out its crises, and trade unions and parliament were winning workers a growing share. The party should stop talking about a final goal and call itself what it had become, a party of reform. Rosa Luxemburg had moved to Berlin in May 1898. That September, aged twenty-seven, she began her answer in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a Social Democratic daily; a second series followed in April 1899, after Bernstein had put his case in a book. The pamphlet joins the two; in 1899 it also carried her polemic against Max Schippel, a Social Democratic Reichstag deputy who had defended the standing army against the party's demand for a citizens' militia. Her reply is that reform and revolution are not two routes to the same place. Credit and cartels, she argues, make crises sharper. Unions can defend wages within limits the market sets, but they cannot abolish the wage system: she calls their work a labour of Sisyphus, necessary and never finished. A party that gives up the aim of taking political power does not reach socialism more slowly; it has chosen a different aim, a repaired capitalism. Party congresses at Hanover in 1899 and at Dresden in 1903 condemned Bernstein's revision of Marx. He was not expelled, and in 1902 he entered the Reichstag as a Social Democrat.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg mean by the final goal?

The final goal is the taking of political power by the working class and, through it, the replacement of capitalism by a socialist order. In this pamphlet it is what makes the party's everyday work socialist at all, since liberals and professors also support trade unions, social legislation and democratic rights. Bernstein had declared the goal nothing and the movement everything. Luxemburg answers that without the goal the movement becomes a different one, working to repair capitalism.

What is the theory of adaptation that Luxemburg attacks?

It is Bernstein's claim that capitalism has grown means of adapting itself, so that it will not break down. He names credit, cartels, faster communications and the rising position of workers, and holds that they blunt the system's conflicts and make general crises a thing of the past. Luxemburg examines each in turn and argues the reverse. Credit and cartels heighten the clash between what industry can produce and what the market can buy.

What is opportunism in Reform or Revolution?

Opportunism is Luxemburg's name for the current in her party that trades principle for whatever can be had at once. Her examples are practical: Social Democrats in Bavaria voting for the state budget, offers to approve military spending in exchange for political concessions, Schippel's defence of the standing army. For years this current simply ignored theory. Bernstein's book matters, she argues, because it is the first attempt to give that practice a theory of its own.

How are lawmaking and revolution related, according to Luxemburg?

They are two phases of one history and cannot be swapped for each other. Luxemburg says they are not items to choose from the buffet of history like hot or cold sausages. A revolution is the creative act in which a new class takes power and sets a new frame. Legislation then works inside that frame and carries its results into detail. Every constitution in force is, on this account, the product of a revolution.

What is the capitalist law of wages in this pamphlet?

It is the rule that a wage is a price, set like other prices by supply and demand on the market for labour. A trade union lets workers obtain the full rate the market allows at a given moment, and that is its use. It cannot change the things that fix the rate: how many people are looking for work, how productive labour has become, how much industry is expanding. Hence Luxemburg's image of Sisyphus.

What is a militia, and why did the party demand one?

A militia is an army of the whole people: every citizen trained to arms and armed, in place of a permanent force kept in barracks under professional officers. German Social Democracy had long demanded it in its programme. In the appendix Luxemburg defends the demand against Max Schippel. A standing army, she argues, serves the government against its own population as well as against foreign enemies, and soldiers are used to break strikes.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why reform and revolution are not two roads

Can a party reach socialism by adding one reform to the next, only more slowly? Luxemburg answers that whoever settles for reform alone has not picked a calmer road but a different destination.

Bernstein had written that the final goal was nothing to him and the movement everything. Luxemburg replies that the daily struggle is socialist only through its tie to that goal, the taking of political power. Laws, she argues, are the product of earlier revolutions and work inside their frame. No statute forces anyone to work for a wage, need does, so no statute can abolish the wage system. Reforms and democracy make the wall between the two societies firmer, and only what she calls the hammer blow of revolution brings it down. Workers, she adds, can only ever seize power too early.

  • revisionism
  • reformism
  • social reform
  • revolution
  • political power
  • opportunism
  • socialism
  • democracy
  • state
  • class consciousness

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Whether capitalism can cure its own crises

Bernstein saw credit, cartels and trade unions taming the market year by year. What if each of them sharpens the very conflict it was supposed to smooth?

Credit, Luxemburg argues, stretches production beyond what the market can absorb and shrinks at the first sign of a slump, so it helps to bring crises on and then deepens them. Cartels protect profit in one branch at the cost of the others and turn rivalry between firms into tariff wars between states. A trade union can secure the wage the market allows at a given moment, but the law that sets it lies outside its reach, which is why she calls union work a labour of Sisyphus. Workers in a co-operative factory must play the employer against themselves. Nothing here adapts capitalism. Each device shows production outgrowing private ownership.

  • capitalism
  • economic crises
  • credit
  • cartels
  • trade unions
  • wages
  • competition
  • protectionism
  • political economy
  • labor movement

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A standing army, and for whom it is indispensable

A deputy of her own party called the standing army technically necessary and an economic relief. Luxemburg asks one question back: necessary for whom, and a relief to whom?

Max Schippel had defended the army against the party's old demand for a citizens' militia, the arming of the whole people. In the appendix Luxemburg grants each of his points and changes its owner. A standing army is indeed indispensable, to the present governments and ruling classes. Military spending does bring relief, to capital, which finds in it one of its most profitable investments. The worker pays taxes to keep a rival for his job in uniform, and the state then uses that soldier to put down strikes. A socialist who sees the army with the government's eyes, she concludes, has taken the opponent's standpoint on everything else as well.

  • militarism
  • state
  • opportunism
  • class struggle

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Within this work

passages held
183
distinct concepts
239
by passages held, corpus-wide
#371

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “capitalism” and “economic crises”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
capitalismeconomic crises18
capitalismsocialism12
class strugglerevolution8
class strugglesocialism8
capitalismmilitarism7
democracysocialism7
militarismopportunism7
capitalismdemocracy6
revolutionsocialism5
class struggleopportunism3
democracyrevolution3
economic crisesmilitarism3
opportunismrevolution3
opportunismsocialism3
capitalismclass struggle2
capitalismrevolution2
class strugglemilitarism2
democracymilitarism1
economic crisesopportunism1
economic crisesrevolution1
militarismrevolution1
militarismsocialism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1899 Reform or Revolution (Sozialreform oder Revolution?) you are here DE
  2. 1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie)

    Written against Lenin's plan for a party, this is her sustained piece on how one should be organised. The prison manuscript on the Russian Revolution took the argument up again fourteen years later.

     DE
  3. 1905 Socialism and the Churches (Kościół a socjalizm)

    The Polish side of her work: a pamphlet for the party she helped to lead in Russian Poland, written in the revolutionary year that she analysed afterwards in The Mass Strike.

     DE
  4. 1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften)

    The fullest statement of her view that mass action cannot be scheduled by leaders. The dispute it opened with the trade unions came back in 1910 as her break with Karl Kautsky, the party's leading theorist.

     DE
  5. 1913 The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals)

    Among pamphlets and articles, this is the one full-length treatise she finished. It supplies the economic basis for the account of war she gave three years later in the Junius Pamphlet.

     DE
  6. 1916 The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet) (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie)

    The account of imperialism from The Accumulation of Capital, applied three years later to an actual war and to the party that had voted for it.

     DE
  7. 1919 Aufsätze und Artikel

    Newspaper and journal pieces from 1893 to 1919, the running record beside the books. They include the 1910 polemics against Karl Kautsky and her last articles for Die Rote Fahne.

     DE
  8. 1919 Reden

    What she said aloud, on the questions her articles and pamphlets argue in print, from her first months in Germany in 1898 to the last weeks of her life.

     DE
  9. 1922 The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution)

    She left it unfinished in Breslau prison in 1918, and Paul Levi printed it four years later. It returns to the objection she had made to Lenin in 1904, now that his party held a state.

     DE
  10. 1925 Introduction to Political Economy (Einführung in die Nationalökonomie)

    Her economics as she taught it: plainer than The Accumulation of Capital, which grew out of it, and the place where her reading on communal societies before capitalism is set out.

     DE
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