“What do you mean ‘or’ revolution? Surely we want to have both?”
The Spring Toronto West branch book club just finished reading Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, and had an interesting time discussing this very question.
Luxemburg was a Polish-German revolutionary socialist active in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, mainly in Germany. At that time, the German Social Democratic Party was a mass organization, in which a sharp debate emerged about whether socialism could be achieved through reforms to capitalism, or whether a full-scale socialist revolution and overthrow of capitalism were needed. The reformist position was most clearly articulated by an influential party leader Eduard Bernstein, and Luxemburg led the charge arguing for socialist revolution — hence the title of her 1899 book.
She covers several important themes — all of which have great relevance for socialists today — including: the crises built into capitalism; the limits of trade union militancy; and the limits of parliamentary change.
Capitalism’s built-in crises
One of the main reasons Bernstein argued for continuous reformism is because German workers had been able to win a number of reforms from the state, which, in turn, was possible because there had been a twenty-year period of economic stability or growth. But this proved to be only a momentary phenomenon. As Luxemburg later wrote:
“Hardly had Bernstein rejected, in 1898, Marx’s theory of crises, when a profound general crisis broke out in 1900, while seven years later, a new crisis, beginning in the United States, hit the world market. Facts proved the theory of ‘adaptation’ to be false[…] The description of the cycle of modern capitalist industry as a ten-year period was to Marx and Engels[…] only a simple statement of facts. It was not based on a natural law but on a series of given historic circumstances…”
In more recent history, we witnessed the state provide a number of reforms demanded by trade unions and mass movements, largely as a result of the economic boom following World War II. But capitalism returned to its normal “boom and bust” cycles beginning in 1970, with one of the most far-reaching occurring in 2008. Luxemburg saw such speculation crises as probable when she wrote against Bernstein’s praise of credit as a way of “adapting” to capitalism:
“[Credit] stimulates at the same time the bold and unscrupulous utilization of the property of others. That is, it leads to speculation[…] We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises.”
Trade unions and power
Another theoretician for reformism was Konrad Schmidt, who argued that union struggles around wages and hours would lead to more control over the conditions of production and, in that way, socialism would be achieved. However, Luxemburg pointed out:
“But the fact is that the principal function of trade unions consists in providing the workers with a means of realizing the capitalism law of wages, that is to say, the sale of their labor power at current market prices[…] They [trade unions] have not, however, the power to suppress exploitation itself, not even gradually.”
This is because trade union struggles do not address taking over the power of the capitalist state.
On a related note, she talked about the system’s need for war:
“For the (capitalist class) militarism has become indispensable. First, as a means of struggle for the defense of ‘national’ interests in competition against other ‘national’ groups. Second, as a method of placement for financial and industrial capital. Third, as an instrument of class domination over the laboring population inside the country.”
Today we see NATO countries agreeing to spend 5% of their GDP on military expenditures, at a time when the cost of living continues to spiral (currently accentuated by the US/Israeli bombing of Iran), and when public services are strained beyond their limits.
Against such state power, it is easy to see why Luxemburg argued that trade union struggles, while necessary, were insufficient to bring about socialism. She would write more on this in 1906 in her brilliant booklet “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions” where she described how some general strikes begin with economic demands but then spread to political demands on the state. We have seen this take place around the world including the Arab Spring, in Sudan and other countries.
The limits of Parliament
Bernstein regarded parliament as expressing the will of the people, not based on the capitalist class and, therefore, would be the instrument for achieving socialism. But Luxemburg strongly disagreed:
“[…] the present State is not ‘society’ representing ‘the working class.’ It is itself the representative of capitalist society.”
She went on to point out that capitalism does not necessarily need what we would call “liberal democracy” and will dispense with it when needed. As a result:
“[…]democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation, but that, on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy.”
The need for revolution
Luxemburg quite rightly worried that the arguments made by reformists like Bernstein would be a tragic dead end for workers:
“If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the system of wage labour, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”
And in the last fifty years we have not even seen the “diminution of exploitation”; instead we witness the growth of precarious employment, wage theft, trampling of immigrant labour, and ongoing ruination of the environment.
It is worth remembering some of the closing words of “Reform or Revolution”:
“The peculiar character of this (proletariat) movement resides precisely in the fact that here, for the first time in history, the popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will, but they must effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society. This ‘will’ the masses can only form in a constant struggle against the existing order. The union of the broad popular masses with an aim reaching beyond the existing social order, the union of the daily struggle with the great world transformation, this is the task of the social democratic movement[…]”
Suggested readings
By Rosa Luxemburg
- Reform or Revolution
- The Accumulation of Capital
- The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions
Related readings
- Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, 1939
- Tony Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg, 1959
And, if you have a chance, watch the 1986 movie “Rosa Luxemburg” by German director Margarethe von Trotta.
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