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    Reform or Revolution
    Reform or Revolution
    Reform or Revolution
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Reform or Revolution

    By Rosa Luxemburg

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    Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most important figures in the history of the international workers’ movement. Together with Lenin and Trotsky she was the outstanding representative of Marxism in the 20th century. Reform or Revolution was one of the most important of her early writings. Written in 1899, it provides a devastating demolition of the theoretical and practical basis of reformism. It was completely valid at the time when it was written and it remains completely valid today.

    It seems astonishing that she was only 28-years-old when she wrote it. And it placed herself amongst the foremost leaders of the left of Social Democracy internationally, a role she was to occupy until her assassination in 1919. It remains today one of the classic texts of Marxism.

    With an introduction by Alan Woods to a 2014 Mexican edition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWellred
    Release dateJan 31, 2021
    ISBN9781005620561
    Author

    Rosa Luxemburg

    Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher and economist. One of the most brilliant minds drawn to the revolutionary socialist movement, she was a dedicated political activist, she proved willing to go to prison and even give her life for her beliefs. Her selected works are collected in Rosa Luxemburg: Socialism or Barbarism (Pluto, 2010).

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      Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg

      Introduction by Alan Woods

      Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most important figures in the history of the international workers’ movement. Together with Lenin and Trotsky she was the outstanding representative of Marxism in the 20th century. Reform or Revolution was one of the most important of her early writings. Written in 1899, it provides a devastating demolition of the theoretical and practical basis of reformism. It was completely valid at the time when it was written and it remains completely valid today.

      It seems astonishing that she was only 28-years-old when she wrote it. And it placed herself amongst the foremost leaders of the left of Social Democracy internationally, a role she was to occupy until her assassination in 1919. It remains today one of the classic texts of Marxism.

      The German Social Democracy

      In order to understand the significance of this work it is necessary to explain the evolution of the German Social Democracy (as the socialist movement was known internationally before 1914). The German Social Democratic Party was by far the largest and most influential party of the Second (Socialist) International. It was regarded as the model party of the International. It had emerged successfully from the repressive period of the 1880s (the period of the Anti-Socialist Laws) and by 1898 become the most popular party in Germany.

      Furthermore, thanks to its historic links to Marx and Engels, the SPD was considered to be the most authentic representative of ‘orthodox’ Marxism in the International. Its leaders enjoyed enormous authority in the eyes of Socialists everywhere. The course of development of the German Social Democratic Party therefore exercised an enormous influence on the development of the whole of the Second International and Social Democrats from around the world paid close attention to the development of the Party and the discussions inside it. This included the Russian Social Democrats who looked up to the German Party.

      On paper, everything seemed to be in order. In the Party press and in speeches on the First of May, the German leaders spoke in solemn terms about socialism, the class struggle and internationalism. And if they strayed from the line of revolutionary socialism and internationalism, Karl Kautsky, the leader of the ‘official’ Left of the German SPD, was sure to correct them. Until 1914 Lenin considered himself an orthodox ‘Kautskyite’. Only in 1914 did Lenin understand the real role of Kautsky as a ‘left’ cover for the right wing reformist bureaucracy of the SPD.

      However, behind this impressive facade not all was what it seemed. From the very beginning Marx and Engels made a series of sharp criticisms of the opportunist tendencies of the leaders of the German Social Democracy, their ideological weakness, their tendency to sacrifice principles for short-term ‘practical’ gains and their tendency to compromise. The Critique of the Gotha Programme is the most well-known example of the critical attitude of the founders of scientific socialism but in the correspondence of Marx and Engels we find far sharper criticisms.

      In Germany the rapid industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century had created a militant, fresh working class, unburdened by traditions of anarchism or English trade unionism. The economic crisis of the 1870s gave a huge boost to the Social Democratic Party. Bismarck tried to block its advance through the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878, which banned the Party. But the Party thrived in semi-legal existence. After the anti-socialist laws expired in January 1890 (and Bismarck was forced to resign), it won 20% of the popular vote in the February elections.

      However, the period of illegality and semi-illegality did not pass without leaving some negative traces. A section of the leadership, especially the intellectuals and academics whom Engels contemptuously branded as the ‘Katheder Sozialisten’ (armchair socialists) used the restrictions caused by the laws to water down the Party’s socialist programme and hide its goals on the grounds of expediency. From London, the elderly Engels castigated these opportunists ceaselessly and put pressure on Bebel and Kautsky to keep the Party on the right road.

      These differences remained unknown, or else poorly understood, by the membership of the SPD, and that was even truer for the overwhelming majority of Socialists internationally. That is why the betrayal of the German Social Democratic leaders in 1914 dealt such a crushing blow to the morale of the international Socialist movement. Lenin himself was taken by surprise, as Trotsky explained in an article about the role of Rosa Luxemburg:

      The capitulation of German Social Democracy on August 4, 1914, was entirely unexpected by Lenin. It is well known that the issue of the Vorwärts with the patriotic declaration of the Social Democratic faction was taken by Lenin to be a forgery by the German general staff. Only after he was absolutely convinced of the awful truth did he subject to revision his evaluation of the basic tendencies of the German Social Democracy, and while so doing he performed that task in the Leninist manner, i.e. he finished it off once for all. (Trotsky, Hands off Rosa Luxemburg!)

      Rosa Luxemburg understood the role of Kautsky long before Lenin, a fact that he acknowledged in October 1914, when he wrote to Shlyapnikov:

      I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy … Rosa Luxemburg was right when she wrote, long ago, that Kautsky has the ‘subservience of a theoretician’ – servility, in plainer language, servility to the majority of the Party, to opportunism.

      Lenin’s previous illusions in Kautsky can be explained by the fact that for most of the time he was following the German Party from a distance. The reason why Rosa was able to see through Kautsky and the other SPD leaders (including the ‘Lefts’) was that she had had direct experience of their activities for a long time and could see more clearly than Lenin what their ‘Marxism’ amounted to in practice.

      Reformist Degeneration

      The tragedy of the Socialist International was that it was formed at a period when capitalism in Europe was in the course of a colossal upswing. The economic expansion of this period which preceded the First World War is ultimately the explanation of the national-reformist degeneration of the SPD and the entire Second International. It brought with it an amelioration of the lot of a section of the masses in Germany, Britain France and Belgium, including concessions and reforms, and the consequent softening of relations between the classes. It conditioned the psychology of the leading layer of the parties of the Social Democracy and gave rise to the illusion that capitalism was well on the way to solving its fundamental contradictions. It was the social and economic premise for the rise of Bernsteinite revisionism.

      The rapid growth in power and influence of the workers’ parties and trade unions also spawned a new caste of union officials, parliamentarians, town councillors and party bureaucrats who, in their living conditions and outlook, became progressively removed from the people they were supposed to represent. This stratum, reasonably well-off and lulled by the apparent success of capitalism, provided the social base for revisionism, a petty bourgeois reaction against the storm and stress of the class struggle, a yearning for the creature comforts and the desire for a peaceful and harmonious transition to socialism – in the dim and distant future.

      The German Social Democratic Party emerged out of illegality with some 100-150,000 members and it grew steadily throughout the 1890s both in membership and votes. The rapid growth of the Party also brought new problems in the form of increasing pressures from bourgeois society. Although on a national level, they were effectively excluded from all government involvement, on a state level, particularly in the South, the Party was invited to support the liberals in government. This was a deliberate attempt to get the SPD to take responsibility for the running of capitalist society, to incorporate the party into the regime after repression had failed.

      By 1905 the SPD had 385,000 members and 27% of the vote. The Party press had a massive readership, with 90 papers and magazines with a circulation of 1.4 million in 1913. The Party and its press had around 3,500 full-timers, to which must be added more than 3,000 trade union officials. All organizations have a conservative side. That is particularly true of the apparatus. The soul of the apparatus is routine: organizing meetings, collecting funds, selling papers, administrating finances, bookkeeping and a thousand and one small tasks that are absolutely necessary, but which can lead to habits of routine. The same is true of trade union work. This consists to a great extent of a series of mundane

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