2. Reform or Revolution
In 1897, Rosa Luxemburg received a doctorate degree in law and graduated from university. Her thesis was titled ‘The Industrial Development of Poland’. Following a marriage of convenience to secure herself a residence permit in Germany, in May 1898 she moved to Berlin. She immediately began her work in the SPD, which was the largest party in the Second International. It possessed an enormous authority on a world scale and was hailed by many, including Lenin, as a model. Luxemburg had barely set foot on German soil when she flung herself into the theoretical struggles then raging inside the party. One of the first of these was the struggle against the attempt to revise the SPD’s Marxist foundations.
The History of Revisionism
The Second International was made up of parties whose programmes were based on revolutionary Marxist ideas. The SPD – the party of Karl Marx’s country of origin and whose leadership was in direct contact with Friedrich Engels – was widely recognised as a party that defended the Marxist doctrine. On the surface of things, everything looked fine. In the various party programmes, resolutions, speeches, and articles, the German leaders spoke of class struggle, internationalism, and socialism. But Marx and Engels had already criticised the leaders of the SPD for their lack of theoretical sharpness and their opportunism. The founders of scientific socialism had identified in the SPD leaders a tendency to sacrifice their principles for short-sighted, ‘practical’ victories. Since its foundation, Marx and Engels had therefore engaged in internal criticism of the party leadership’s policies. After many years of the SPD leadership trying to hush up this criticism, Friedrich Engels finally decided to publish a selection of their criticisms in the famous 1891 text, Critique of the Gotha Program. But despite all of this, it seemed to most people that the party was fundamentally healthy and headed in the right direction.
The industrialisation of Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century had enlarged the working class enormously, drawing in new, fresh layers. When Germany was hit by an economic crisis in the 1870s, the SPD grew immensely. In an attempt to curb this growth, the German chancellor, Bismarck, introduced the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, which banned all social-democratic activity outside the Reichstag and the Landtage (regional assemblies) of the federal states. But even under the Anti-Socialist Laws, the party grew. By 1890 the SPD emerged from semi-legality with about 100,000 to 150,000 members and triple the number of voters it previously had. The party won about 20 per cent of the votes cast in the elections that followed its legalisation.
Thereafter, the party continued to grow steadily in both membership and votes. In 1903, the party received more than 30 per cent of the votes.[1] By 1906, the party had 384,327 members; and by 1912, its membership ballooned to 907,112.[2]
However, the period of semi-legality had left its mark. Part of the SPD leadership, and particularly the intellectuals of the party, used the threat of being banned as an excuse to water down the revolutionary, socialist essence of the party’s programme.
The SPD was formed in a period where capitalism across Europe was experiencing a vigorous economic upswing. During the crisis of 1873-1882 the economy had grown by a mere 3 per cent over the whole decade. Conversely, between 1887-1896, the economy grew by 36 per cent. This served to sow illusions in capitalism. Some reforms were carried out and, for a layer of the working class, living conditions improved. All of this served to soften class contradictions, which in turn conditioned the psychology of the leading layer of the SPD. They began to believe that capitalism had in fact solved its internal contradictions. These were the social and economic prerequisites for the emergence of a reformist tendency in the SPD, and indeed the rest of the Second International.
With the party’s growth in membership and votes, its apparatus expanded enormously. In 1914, the party published ninety daily newspapers and had roughly 3,500 employees working for the party and the party press, as well as about 3,000 employees working for the trade unions and other associated organisations.[3] Every apparatus has its conservative side. In order for an organisation to function, a certain routine is required. Meetings have to be organised; money has to be collected; newspapers have to be sold; budgets have to be worked out; alongside a thousand and one other day-to-day tasks. Completion of these routine tasks is indispensable. But they can also end up overshadowing the political tasks of the organisation. That is to say, routinism can set in.
The growth of the working-class movement in Germany and several other European countries in these years created an entirely new layer of party and trade union employees. The lives and social circles, and with it the political outlook of this layer, bit by bit became further and further divorced from those they were supposed to represent: the working class. This apparatus began to reflect the pressures of capitalist society that surrounded it, and thus a bureaucracy crystallised.
On the national level, the SPD was excluded from participating in government at this time. But on the federal level, especially in southern Germany, the party came under huge pressure from the ruling class to participate in budget negotiations and in the government. This pressure increasingly had its effect on the local party leaders. The trade union leaders also bowed to this pressure from the employers and the state to focus on the day-to-day work of negotiating within the framework of the system and to shelve its ‘utopian’ socialist politics. To the SPD’s trade union leaders, talk of ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’ was seen as simply a source of unnecessary chaos and unrest, which detracted from what, in their view, was the more important routine side of the work. This layer, which became relatively wealthy and which had illusions in capitalism’s success, formed the social base of revisionism.[4]
It was Eduard Bernstein[5] who gave this pressure its theoretical expression within the party when he opened what came to be known as the ‘revisionism’ debate. Bernstein was one of the party’s leaders and held great authority. This was not least because he had been appointed as one the literary executors of Engels’ posthumous works, which had been left in the care of the International after his death in 1895.
Bernstein believed that Marxism required revision on a number of points. He laid out his ideas in an article titled ‘Problems of Socialism’, published in the party’s theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, in 1897-8, and in his book, The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy.[6] Bernstein himself believed that he was simply describing the world as it was, and that the facts showed that some of Marxism’s basic postulates needed revising, not least of which was its insistence on the necessity of socialist revolution. In other words, Marxism needed ‘updating’.
According to Bernstein, capitalism’s internal contradictions – through adaptations like credit, the stock market, cartels, and trusts, would tend to become softened – and capitalism would cease to tend towards crisis. The middle class would grow, and with the rise of this buffer, class contradictions would also soften. According to Bernstein, the growth of capitalism had no limits, and whilst economic crises might still come to pass, there was no necessity for them to become increasingly acute. Capitalism could be regulated and controlled. This, he contended, was the task of Social Democracy.
As for the working class, Bernstein argued that they were only interested in bettering their immediate living conditions, and as such the “movement was everything, the goal nothing”. The socialist revolution was not something the Social Democratic Party should concern itself with. The party and the unions should instead focus on the practical, daily struggle for reforms. Through their implementation, socialism would be introduced gradually.
Despite the fact that his articles were a direct attack on the party’s Marxist foundations, at first, the party leadership allowed Bernstein’s ideas to go completely unchallenged. None of the leaders of the party commented on this revisionism. Neither, initially, did the editor of Die Neue Zeit itself, Karl Kautsky.[7] This was despite the fact that Kautsky, who had been given the moniker ‘the pope of Marxism’, was regarded as one of the leading theoreticians of the SPD and the defender of the party’s Marxist doctrine. Instead of criticising Bernstein’s revisionism, Kautsky described his articles as “extremely attractive”. Parvus[8] was one of the first to raise criticism of these ideas, causing Bernstein to interrupt his series of articles to respond to the critique. Meanwhile, Kautsky accompanied Bernstein’s article in Die Neue Zeit with an editorial note explaining that he had received “a number of polemical comments on Bernstein’s articles which we have to turn down for publication because they are based on a mistaken conception of Bernstein’s intentions”.[9]
But pressure on Kautsky was building up. The leading Russian Marxist, Plekhanov, wrote an article titled ‘What Should We Thank Him For?’ in which he not only attacked Bernstein but also criticised Kautsky for his failure to respond. Plekhanov wrote to Kautsky:
You say your readers have no interest in philosophy… then you must force them to take an interest… If you want me to write against Bernstein you must give me full freedom of speech. Bernstein must be destroyed and I will gladly undertake this task if you let me.[10]
The answer from the SPD leadership was vague and evasive. Above all, they wished to avoid jeopardising the ‘unity’ of the party with what they saw as merely an abstract, theoretical discussion. The official newspaper of the party, Vorwärts, also welcomed Bernstein’s writings, although they claimed they could lead to “misunderstandings”. But as the debate developed even Kautsky, the party’s chairman August Bebel,[11] and other party leaders, could see that Bernstein had gone too far. And yet their attitude remained evasive, as they hoped that the issue would resolve itself.
Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, threw herself into the debate with a number of articles that comprehensively responded to Bernstein, and which were collected in the book, Reform or Revolution? In it she explained that what was at stake were not harmless, minor revisions but that, if accepted by the party, they would amount to a complete break with Marxism. Luxemburg showed that even though Bernstein dressed his writing in Marxist terminology, the content was, at its very core, in direct opposition to Marxism: “On this account,” she wrote, “we must, unconcerned by its outer forms, pick out the sheathed kernel of Bernstein’s theory”.[12]
In Reform or Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg pierces Bernstein’s arguments one by one and launches a fierce attack against his “doing away” with the necessity of the socialist revolution. To Rosa Luxemburg, it was clear that what was at stake in the revisionism debate was nothing less than the raison d’etre of the Social Democratic Party, its very right to exist:
But since the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order – the question, “Reform or revolution?” as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the social democracy equal to the question: “To be or not to be?” In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the social democratic movement.[13]
To Rosa Luxemburg, the polemic was no mere academic exercise. Theory was a direct guide to action, and the foundation of the party’s tactics and strategies.
Bernstein’s book was of tremendous significance for the German and international labour movement, as it was the first attempt to give a theoretical basis for opportunist currents that had become widespread in social democracy.
What appears to characterise this practice [reformism] above all? A certain hostility to ‘theory’. This is quite natural, for our ‘theory’, that is, the principles of scientific socialism, impose clearly marked limitations to practical activity – insofar as it concerns the aims of this activity, the means used in attaining these aims, and the method employed in this activity. It is quite natural for people who run after immediate ‘practical’ results to want to free themselves from such limitations and to render their practice independent of our ‘theory’.[14]
The same attitude to theory as a guide to revolutionary action can be found in the writings of Lenin and his attacks on Bernstein’s Russian counterparts, known as the ‘Economists’:
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.[15]
Capitalist Adaptation
At the time that Bernstein was writing his articles, capitalism was experiencing an upswing that lasted for twenty years. From this, he and others concluded that the cyclical crises could be overcome. Marx had said, after all, that crises would return about once every ten years, but now the period of boom had been somewhat longer. But Luxemburg had no time for this empiricism, and Bernstein’s hopes that capitalism had resolved its contradictions were dashed shortly after. In the year 1900, capitalism was once again hit by crisis, and then again in 1907.
Marx explained that the crises of capitalism are crises of overproduction. In this, they are quite unlike anything that had hit earlier modes of production. In pre-capitalist societies, crises occurred as a result of scarcity, such as when harvests failed or as a result of the dislocation of war. But the crises of capitalism are different. Here, crises occur because there is ‘too much’. Of course, there is no excess with respect to social needs; but rather, with respect to what the market can actually profitably absorb. These crises of overproduction occur fundamentally because the working class produces more value than it is paid in wages. The value that the working class creates beyond the value that covers its wages, Marx termed surplus value. This surplus value is the source of profit, which is appropriated by the capitalists who own the means of production (factories, machines, land etc.). As workers are paid less than the value they create, as consumers, they are unable to buy back all of the commodities that they produce. This is the fundamental reason for recurring crises of overproduction.
The only reason there isn’t a constant crisis of overproduction is that the capitalists must reinvest the majority of their profits in new means of production if they wish to remain competitive on the free market. This process is what Marx termed the accumulation of capital. The creation of new means of production provides jobs for workers, who receive wages and thus continue to consume in an upward spiral. But instead of abolishing the contradiction between the production of the working class and its purchasing power as consumers, it simply reproduces this contradiction on a higher level. New means of production and an expanded production capacity must result in even more commodities being produced, which, in the end, also have to be sold on a market that remains constricted.
This is where credit enters the picture. It serves as a means of artificially expanding the market. With credit, workers can purchase more with borrowed money, and the capitalists can make larger and more frequent investments. Credit affects the market in manifold ways, but its most important role, besides speeding up the turnover of capital, is to temporarily expand the market beyond the limits it would otherwise meet. Thus, for a time, it can counteract the tendency for production to outstrip demand.
Bernstein believed that this way of understanding the dynamics of capitalism was outdated and that, through a number of “adaptations” such as modern credit institutions, capitalism had solved its internal contradictions. Luxemburg ruthlessly criticised Bernstein’s logic. According to Luxemburg, credit was not a “means of adapting” that averts crises, but rather a means of delaying crises. The expansion of credit moreover means that crises tend to be far bigger when they do hit. This is because, far from removing the obstacle of overproduction, it allows it to operate for much longer:
But credit strikes from two sides. After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created.[16]
In the same considered manner, Luxemburg also addressed another of capitalism’s “adaptations” as hailed by Bernstein: the rise of cartels and trusts. It was, she explained, a matter that had yet to be sufficiently investigated. Lenin later thoroughly explored this very question in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. But despite the fact that a thorough analysis of the rise of monopolies remained to be undertaken when Luxemburg wrote Reform or Revolution?, she was able to answer Bernstein’s argument that they would be able to solve the anarchy of capitalism, and thus its crises, firmly in the negative. According to Luxemburg, for this to happen, cartels and trusts were to become the predominant form of production. But this was itself impossible. First of all, since cartels and trusts make extraordinarily high rates of profit in one industry, this naturally has to be offset by an opposing tendency in other sectors. Secondly, this association of capitalists would only last until a crisis hit. When the crisis comes, the cartels and trusts would “burst like soap bubbles and give way to aggravated competition.”[17] For this reason, cartels and trusts, according to Luxemburg, were not a way to counteract crises. On the contrary, they increased the anarchy of capitalism and sharpened its inner contradictions.
Luxemburg showed that Bernstein’s “means of adaptation” were unable to do away with the fact that production existed on a capitalist foundation. On the contrary, Luxemburg explained that they would only increase the inner contradictions of capitalism, the contradiction between socialised production and private acquisition. Under capitalism, the means of production are privately owned by the capitalists, and production occurs for a market, over which the capitalists compete for the purpose of creating profits. But production takes place on an ever-increasing scale, involving more and more workers in a widening division of labour. In the words of Marx, production has been socialised under capitalism.
Luxemburg argued that credit (and the stock market) increasingly socialise the character of production by combining smaller capitals into larger ones, without changing the fact that the means of production remain in private hands. Credit therefore simply serves to accentuate the contradictions of the capitalist economy between large-scale, socialised production, and private ownership of the means of production. The only way to ensure that socialised production actually benefits the great majority of people would be to abolish private ownership of the means of production. That is to say: a socialist revolution is necessary. What Bernstein saw as “means of adaptation”, Luxemburg saw as the opposite. Far from having rendered socialist revolution obsolete, for Rosa Luxemburg they had, on the contrary, made it an even greater necessity.
Bernstein’s way of thinking is not uniquely his own. His reasoning has been reproduced by thousands of left reformists that came after him. For Bernstein, the question of socialism was not a question of production but one of distribution. The struggle was not one of classes, arising from the mode of production itself and the question of who owns the means of production. Bernstein failed to recognise that this is the key question that must be asked if a serious change is to be brought about in the sphere of distribution.
Among other things, Bernstein proposed the establishment of cooperatives as a means of ameliorating inequality. Luxemburg plainly showed why this was utopian. She called the cooperatives “a hybrid form in the midst of capitalism.”[18] All production under capitalism is subject to competition. This means that workers in cooperatives are forced to act as their own employers. They cannot simply choose to avoid the market. According to Luxemburg, there could only be one result:
Labour is intensified. The workday is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labour is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a cooperative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur […][19]
Luxemburg’s conclusion was unequivocal: either the cooperatives would become capitalist enterprises; or else they would end up dissolving. No islands of socialism can exist in a sea of capitalism – all production is subjugated to the market’s ruthless law of competition.
The Inevitable Collapse of Capitalism?
In her arguments against Bernstein on the question of whether the regulation of capitalism can be used to evade crises, Rosa Luxemburg was as sharp as a razor. However, as is often the case in polemics, she ended up bending the stick a bit too far in the other direction. Her main criticism of Bernstein was that he, with his “means of adaptation”, denied that capitalism would collapse:
And to this he replies: “With the growing development of society a complete and almost general collapse of the present system of production becomes more and more improbable, because capitalist development increases on the one hand the capacity of adaptation and, on the other – that is, at the same time – the differentiation of industry.”[20]
Luxemburg further developed the idea of a final collapse of capitalism or, to use her own words, a “the period of the final crises of capitalism”,[21] in her book, The Accumulation of Capital, which we will deal with in chapter five. Her argument was that, if one abandons the idea of a final collapse of capitalism, one must also surrender the idea of the objective necessity of socialism:
According to scientific socialism, the historic necessity of the socialist revolution manifests itself above all in the growing anarchy of capitalism, which drives the system into an impasse. But if one admits with Bernstein that capitalist development does not move in the direction of its own ruin, then socialism ceases to be objectively necessary.[22]
It is hard to guess exactly what Rosa Luxemburg meant by the phrase “general collapse”. Her prediction that the choice before humanity was one of “socialism or barbarism” was certainly correct. If capitalism is allowed to exist for a sufficiently long time, it will threaten civilisation itself with destruction. Two World Wars, which claimed the lives of some 60 million people, came dangerously close to realising this perspective. Viewed from our own time, we can again see how human civilisation might meet its end, either in the form of nuclear war or of man-made environmental destruction.
However, Luxemburg writes of the collapse of capitalism more specifically as the direct product of its inner economic contradictions, which in the end she claims must bring about a final crisis and a final economic collapse. In a word, this approach is fatalistic. Nevertheless, the practical conclusions that she drew contained no trace of passivity. As regards both theory and practice, she insisted on the necessary role of the working class, and of a party armed with revolutionary tactics and strategy, as an essential factor in the conscious and organised overthrow of the capitalist system. This makes up precisely the subject matter of the remaining parts of Reform or Revolution? For Rosa Luxemburg, socialism was not something that spontaneously springs from the collapse of capitalism. This does then leave ambiguity over exactly what was meant by the collapse of capitalism.
With this argument of a “final crisis of capitalism”, Rosa Luxemburg unnecessarily shot herself in the foot. It was not for nothing that Marx never spoke of this, nor of the system collapsing of its own accord. The history of capitalism has shown that it can continue until it is consciously overthrown by the working class. Crises serve to destroy ‘excess’ production and means of production, and thus pave the way for a new upturn. Capitalism can overcome its crises, but only at an enormous cost for the working class and the poorest people on the planet. We saw this in the Second World War, the ‘solution’ to the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s.
Where Luxemburg was right however – and this is essential in the discussion of Reform or Revolution? – was in pointing out that socialism is not simply a question of morality, but an objective necessity. As capitalism expands, its internal contradictions increase. As such, capitalism itself becomes an ever-larger barrier to the development of the productive forces. The gravity of each new crisis therefore tends to multiply, increasingly expressing itself as a systemic crisis.
Whether one accepts the theory of collapse or not, Luxemburg showed in her polemic with Bernstein that it is impossible to ‘regulate’ capitalism’s crises out of existence, and thus that socialist revolution is a necessity. To Bernstein, the necessity of socialism was not something that originated from the inner material contradictions of capitalism, but rather an abstract idealistic ‘principle’. To him, the question of whether socialism was a necessity was a moral question.
Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, defended historical materialism. She understood that capitalism was simply one stage of historical development, and that its internal contradictions would become increasingly evident as it became more of a barrier to the development of society. Socialism for Luxemburg was – as it was for Marx before her – an objective necessity, and the germ of socialism had already developed under capitalism in the form of large-scale production. Once private ownership of the means of production is done away with, and these tremendous productive forces are brought under a democratic plan, production on the scale created by capitalism would allow society to eliminate scarcity, classes and inequality.
The Role of the Trade Unions
According to Bernstein, the growing role of the trade unions was capitalism’s final means of adaptation. The Bernsteinian, gradualist road to socialism was to occur by means of the regulation of capitalism by “trade unions, social reforms, and […] the political democratisation of the state”.[23] Rosa Luxemburg firmly opposed this argument.
Marx explained that labour power is a commodity which, under capitalism, is sold on the market like any other commodity. The value of labour power is determined by the socially necessary cost of its production and reproduction, i.e., of the commodities needed to support the workers and their family including housing, food, clothes, education, the raising of the next generation, etc. How much value this amounts to is determined by historical and social factors, one of which is the strength of the trade union movement. But wages (the price of labour power) fluctuate around this value according to the law of supply and demand. For example, when unemployment is high, the capitalists have more leverage, which allows them to push wages to below their value.
Luxemburg pointed out that, in his articles, Bernstein himself described the most important function of the trade unions as, “providing the workers with a means of realising the capitalist law of wages, that is to say, the sale of their labour power at current market prices.”[24] In other words, the trade unions can help “realise the law of wages” by making sure wages stay around the value of labour power also in times of crisis. But, Rosa Luxemburg explained, the trade unions had no influence on the overall economic configuration and changed nothing fundamental about the relationship between the owners of capital on the one hand, and wage labourers on the other. Thus, the trade unions were unable to overthrow the law of wages.
Under the most favourable circumstances, the best they can do is to impose on capitalist exploitation the ‘normal’ limit of the moment. They have not, however, the power to suppress exploitation itself, not even gradually.[25]
In the end, they fight within the framework of the capitalist economy and cannot change this.
Furthermore, Luxemburg pointed out that trade unions, with their narrow focus on labour struggles, often end up resisting technological developments. This is despite the fact that improved technology, objectively speaking, is in the interest of the workers, when we consider the end goal of a socialist society. The trade unions however are forced to fight the consequences of the introduction of technology under capitalism, such as layoffs or increased workload. The task of Social Democracy was, according to Rosa Luxemburg, to emphasise the interests of the whole of the working class. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
The Communists […] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. […] In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.[26]
Luxemburg concluded that the task of the unions was limited to regulating capitalist exploitation, but that they themselves could not abolish it. Luxemburg described the work of the unions as a “Sisyphean labour”, with reference to Sisyphus, who, according to Greek mythology, was doomed to roll a rock up a mountaintop, after which it would always roll down again. Despite the fact that she emphasised the necessity of this “Sisyphean labour”, as it secured the wages and living conditions of the workers, she won the eternal enmity of the trade union leadership due to this particular choice of words, and due to her more general critique of their opportunistic practices.
It was in the trade union wing of the SPD in particular that revisionism predominated. The labour leaders did not partake in the theoretical debates, but it was these people above all others who, in practice, were the torchbearers of the revisionist tendency. Rosa Luxemburg subjected this practice to a powerful critique: to her, it was obvious that the practical labour policies of the party had to be subordinated to its political line and goal. It was in the party that the long-term goal of the movement rested: the emancipation of the working class through a socialist revolution. All practical activity had to be subordinated to efforts for the realisation of this goal.
Rosa Luxemburg’s view was that it was as clear as day that the practice of the trade unions could not be separated from the political struggle of the party. It was also clear to her that the labour leaders of the SPD did not necessarily care for the long-term goal of their membership. To her, there was nothing ‘socialist’ whatsoever about extending the regulation of capitalism:
What functions today as ‘social control’ – labour legislation, the control of industrial organisations through share holding, etc. – has absolutely nothing to do with his ‘supreme ownership’. Far from being, as Schmidt believes, a reduction of capitalist ownership, his ‘social control’, is, on the contrary, a protection of such ownership. Or, expressed from the economic viewpoint, it is not a threat to capitalist exploitation, but simply the regulation of exploitation. When Bernstein asks if there is more or less of socialism in a labour protective law, we can assure him that, in the best of labour protective laws, there is no more ‘socialism’ than in a municipal ordinance regulating the cleaning of streets or the lighting of street lamps.[27]
The question, Rosa Luxemburg claimed, was not so much what the trade unions should do: they should fight for social reforms. The importance lay in the way in which it was done. The revisionists believed that the struggle for immediate material results gradually limited the power of capital, and thus made the seizure of power by the workers redundant. For Rosa Luxemburg, on the contrary, the struggle for reforms should form a preparatory school for the proletariat’s seizure of power, as they realise, through the struggle, the impossibility of fundamentally changing society through reforms.
Reform and/or Revolution?
From the title of her book “Reform or Revolution” a misunderstanding has arisen that Rosa Luxemburg saw the struggle for reforms and the struggle for revolution as opposites: that revolutionaries, according to her, had to reject the struggle for reforms. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To Rosa Luxemburg, the struggle for reforms and the struggle for revolution were inseparable. But there was also a clear hierarchy: the former was subordinate to the latter. According to her, it was Bernstein who artificially portrayed the struggle for reforms and the struggle for revolution as opposites. Luxemburg, on the contrary, argued that the daily, practical struggle of the Social Democracy for reforms – i.e., for improvements for workers within the framework of the existing society – was the only way the proletarian class struggle could lead to its final goal: the socialist revolution. According to Luxemburg, these two had to be connected. The struggle for reforms was the means, while the socialist transformation of society was the end.
Bernstein presented the relationship between revolution and reform as a question of the speed of development. According to him, it was unnecessary to conquer political power – society would be changed one law at a time and thus gradually shifted in a socialist direction.
Luxemburg, on the contrary, argued that the socialist revolution was not simply an unimportant, abstract goal lying far in the future with only the struggles of daily life for reforms achieving concrete results. Quite the opposite. She argued that if we were to abandon the goal of socialist revolution, it would have a very concrete effect. The movement would end up on a very different road, one that led away from socialism. Legislative changes fortify that which exists, while the conquest of power overturns it:
From the first appearance of class societies having the class struggle as the essential content of their history, the conquest of political power has been the aim of all rising classes. Here is the starting point and end of every historic period. This can be seen in the long struggle of the Latin peasantry against the financiers and nobility of ancient Rome, in the struggle of the medieval nobility against the bishops, and in the struggle of the artisans against the nobles in the cities of the Middle Ages. In modern times, we see it in the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.
Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force, independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion of the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem.
It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn-out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms. A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content. The secret of historic change through the utilisation of political power resides precisely in the transformation of simple quantitative modification into a new quality, or to speak more concretely, in the passage of an historic period from one given form of society to another.
That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and, slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. 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 realisation 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 suppression of capitalism itself.[28]
The struggle for democratic demands and reforms, such as the right to vote, an eight-hour working day, and the like, has thus always been essential for Marxists, but not in and of itself, as Luxemburg explained. Through such demands, the workers can be mobilised to fight. In the course of the struggle, the working class becomes increasingly conscious of the class divisions in society, of the character of the class struggle, and of its own strength. The limitations of capitalist society are brought into sharp relief, and the necessity of a socialist revolution impresses itself on the minds of workers. Where freer, more democratic conditions are won, their existence makes clear that the workers’ problems cannot be solved through this or that democratic reform. Rather, the system itself is further underlined as the real problem. The struggle for reforms is thus nothing in and of itself, but rather has to be integrated into the struggle for a socialist revolution.
The Debate
Rosa Luxemburg’s entry into the debate against Bernstein piled pressure onto the leaders of the SPD. Leading individuals such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel could no longer continue evading the debate. They too began criticising Bernstein. Their objections were not aimed at his ideas, however, but rather against the fact that the very debate itself threatened party unity.
The party leadership had hoped they could bury the problem. They attempted to suppress the discussion and were especially deaf to calls to move against the revisionists. Only under enormous pressure did they issue a response to Bernstein and even then, it remained worded in the vaguest terms. Kautsky had waited for more than one-and-a-half years before he answered Bernstein. He in no way shared Rosa Luxemburg’s view that this was a debate about principles and even the very right of the Social Democracy to exist. In a personal letter sent to Bernstein in advance of his official response, Kautsky wrote:
It seems to me that what divides us is not opinions and conclusions, but the tone with which we espouse them.[29]
When the debate was finally brought up at a party congress in 1898, Kautsky had soothing words:
Social Democracy will do everything possible to carry out democratic and economic reforms and to organise the proletariat. And Bernstein has a completely false idea of the party. He believes that we are contemplating a clash with armed authority, and that development will not be so rapid as many suppose. This is a question of temperament, not of viewpoints.[30]
The vague approach of the SPD leaders was in sharp contrast to that of Luxemburg. Her approach to revisionism was a declaration of war. She, and others of the left wing, demanded that the revisionists be expelled from the party – a demand they gave up after the congress in 1899, when the party leaders finally accepted the theoretical critique of revisionism without going as far as exclusion.
To Rosa Luxemburg, the party was a tool, not a debating society open to perpetual discussion and the ‘right to critique’:
As in every political party freedom to criticise our way of life must have a definite limit. That which is the very basis of our existence, the class struggle, cannot be the subject of ‘free criticism’. We cannot commit suicide in the name of freedom to criticise. Opportunism, as Bebel has said, breaks our backbone, nothing less.[31]
The ideas of Bernstein were voted down at a series of congresses. But Luxemburg’s intention, in raising the discussion, was not simply to ‘win’ the majority at the party congress. She intended first and foremost to educate the SPD membership; to raise their political level:
As long as theoretical knowledge remains the privilege of a handful of ‘academicians’ in the party, the latter will face the danger of going astray. Only when the great mass of workers take the keen and dependable weapons of scientific socialism in their own hands will all the petty-bourgeois inclinations, all the opportunistic currents, come to naught. The movement will then find itself on sure and firm ground. “Quantity will do it.”[32]
Although the ideas of Bernstein were voted down at the congress, reformist ideas had gained increasing ground at the top of the SPD, and were expressed in the practical activity of the party. Indeed, Bernstein himself was not arguing for a change in the party’s practice, but simply that the party should “dare to show itself for what it was: a democratic-socialist party of reform”.[33]
Ignaz Auer, party secretary of the SPD, expressed the thinking of many of the leaders and functionaries when he wrote personally to Bernstein: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them.”[34]
In the Footsteps of Marx and Engels
With her political struggle against Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg was picking up where Marx and Engels had left off. As mentioned, two decades earlier they had criticised the reformism in the SPD that was just then beginning to show itself. They saw numerous signs of an adaptation to capitalism and an excessive focus on the parliamentary struggle. When the Socialist Laws were annulled, a cherished argument of the party leadership was the need to make sure the Laws were not reintroduced and the party was once more made illegal.
The excuse of the possible reintroduction of the Socialist Laws was used against Friedrich Engels, who had written the introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France. The secretary of the executive committee of the SPD, Richard Fischer, asked Engels to water down the introduction, arguing that some of its formulations could be used by the government to reintroduce restrictions against the party. Engels acquiesced, omitting certain passages, mainly about the armed struggle of the working class. But he wasn’t wholly happy with the result. He wrote to Fischer:
I have taken as much account as possible of your grave objections although I cannot for the life of me see what is objectionable about, say, half of the instances you cite. For I cannot after all assume that you intend to subscribe heart and soul to absolute legality, legality under any circumstances, legality even vis-à-vis laws infringed by the promulgators, in short, to the policy of turning the left cheek to him, who has struck you on the right. True, the Vorwärts sometimes expends almost as much energy on repudiating revolution as once it did – and may soon do again – on advocating the same. I cannot regard that a criterion.
My view is that you have nothing to gain by advocating complete abstention from force. Nobody would believe you, nor would any party in any country go as far as to forfeit the right to resist illegality by force of arms.[35]
Without informing Engels, Vorwärts published only selected parts of the introduction, which caused Engels to protest his portrayal as a “peace-loving advocate for adherence to law no matter what”. He demanded that Vorwärts publish the complete text. Engels died that same year, and Vorwärts never did publish the full text. Instead, they presented the amputated edition as Engels’ testament and as a condemnation of any form of violence – and thus also of any kind of revolution. Instead, Engels was depicted as glorifying adherence to the law. The party tops consciously concealed Engels’ protest from the party membership and used the watered-down version to further their own ends. Only in 1924 was it rediscovered and published in its original wording.
Despite the fact that the complete manuscript only saw the light of day five years after her death, and she therefore could know nothing of Engels’ protests, Luxemburg instinctively refused to accept that the watered-down version was representative of Engels’ views. In her speech to the founding congress of the German Communist Party in 1918, she hypothesised that Engels might have written the preface under pressure from the Reichstag fraction of the party, and that he would have protested vehemently at how it had been used. This ‘parliamentarism-only’ tactic would lead to betrayal on 4 August 1914 when the SPD voted in favour of war credits in the Reichstag:
Engels died the same year, and had therefore no chance to see the practical results of this application of his theory.
I am certain that those who know the works of Marx and Engels, those who are familiar with the living, genuine revolutionary spirit that inspired all their teachings and their writings, will be convinced that Engels would have been the first to protest against the debauch of parliamentarism-only, against the corruption and degradation of the labour movement which was characteristic of Germany before 4 August. 4 August did not come like thunder out of a clear sky; what happened on 4 August was the logical outcome of all that we had been doing day after day for many years.[36]
Revisionism in Practice
The enormous growth of the SPD led to a large expansion of the party apparatus, which was sucked into countless daily issues and questions without being subjected to party control. In city councils, trade union offices, and so on, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of party functionaries who had never been educated in or even thought about Marxist ideas. The livelihoods of this layer increasingly depended upon the growth of the party itself, and upon conditions that guaranteed there wasn’t too much unrest or too fierce a class struggle that might disrupt their daily work. To these people, the party and their positions in the movement became a goal in itself. They didn’t defend revisionism in theory. They simply practised it on a daily basis.
This practical revisionism was on open display among the elected political representatives of the SPD – both in the national Reichstag, and on a federal and local level. The orthodox social-democratic method of parliamentary work, which Luxemburg defended, was to use parliamentary seats to politically educate the masses and to take no responsibility for legislation in the bourgeois parliament. But, as discussed, there was pressure on local social-democratic representatives, which the latter transmitted into the party, especially in the south of Germany, to partake in negotiations and vote for local budgets, etc. This was against everything that the SPD had earlier stood for. Luxemburg fought this trend tooth and nail, despite the attempts of the southern German social democrats to remain aloof from the revisionism debate, claiming that special conditions justified their conduct in southern Germany.
Revisionism wasn’t simply a German phenomenon. It also manifested itself internationally. As early as 1899, the French socialist, Alexandre Millerand, had taken up a post in Waldeck-Rousseau’s[37] radical ministry. His step was welcomed by the leader of the French Socialist Party, Jean Jaurès. Millerand was made Minister of Trade in the very same government where General Gallifet served as minister of war. Gallifet was notorious for slaughtering 30,000 Communards when he crushed the Paris Commune of 1871. This was the first time that a socialist had participated in a bourgeois government, and it created shockwaves that provoked discussion throughout the International.
The events following the Dreyfus Affair provided the excuse for taking up a government ministry. It was claimed that the republic was under attack, and that socialists had to defend it through their participation in the government. Dreyfus was a French Jewish officer who was the victim of a miscarriage of justice and condemned for espionage. When the fact that he was falsely accused and condemned was uncovered, it blew up into a huge scandal. Waldeck-Rousseau led the government that would acquit Dreyfus for “defending the republic”, and which had sought to ward off the explosive situation that erupted following the Affair. The situation was so explosive that Lenin even believed that it had the potential to spark a revolutionary situation. According to Jaurès and the reformists of the International, it was no longer the bourgeoisie alone, but the bourgeoisie and the proletariat together, who ought to hold political power. They thus argued that Millerand’s entry into government was actually a step on the road to socialism. The revolutionary wing of the International, on the contrary, explained that the French socialists were only drawn into government to provide a cover for its reactionary politics, as evidenced by their acquittal of the masterminds of the Dreyfus Affair, their imperialist intervention in China and their support for the Russian Tsar.
This was precisely how events unfolded. As soon as the socialists had played their role and rendered assistance to the government, they were cast aside. The only thing the socialists got from their time in government was to discredit themselves in the eyes of the working class. A few years later, even Jaurès became disillusioned with this class collaboration, and so he broke with Millerand, as well as Briand and Vivani, who had also entered government. In the end, the latter three were expelled from the Socialist Party.
The revolutionary wing of the International denounced the entry of socialists into bourgeois governments. Lenin described it as the practical expression of Bernsteinism:
If Bernstein’s theoretical criticism and political yearnings were still unclear to anyone, the French took the trouble strikingly to demonstrate the ‘new method’… Millerand has furnished an excellent example of practical Bernsteinism…[38]
Luxemburg was among the harshest critics of this ‘ministerial-socialism’. She believed that the entry of the French socialists into government gave the latter a cover for its imperialist policies whilst reducing the French Socialist Party to a toothless opposition. A key plank of the argument for participating in government was the need to pry away practical results – reforms – from the government. But, as Luxemburg said, there are reforms and there are reforms. The way in which reforms are obtained is an essential question. Only those won through class struggle have a socialist character. Far from guiding the country towards socialism, participation in government turned the socialists into advocates of the bourgeois:
The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organisation of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister. The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realise have nothing, in themselves, of socialism; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle. But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government. While in parliament, or on the municipal council, we obtain useful reforms by combating the bourgeois government, while occupying a ministerial post we arrive at the same reforms by supporting the bourgeois state. The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as it is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state.[39]
In these lines, Luxemburg describes the entry of socialists into a bourgeois government. The bourgeois state – and thus the bourgeois government, which she refers to – has the defence of the interests of the capitalist class and the maintenance of bourgeois society at its core. The bourgeoisie brought Millerand in as a minister for the purpose of incorporating socialists into government so that they would assist in helping maintain capitalism and, in particular, in keeping the struggle of the working class in check.
In Luxemburg’s opinion, for socialists to accept to join a bourgeois government was a completely incorrect strategy. Instead, she argued, socialists ought to present a clear opposition in parliament and use their platform to educate the working class as to the class character of the bourgeois state:
The circumstance which divides socialist politics from bourgeois politics is that the socialists are opponents of the entire existing order and must function in a bourgeois parliament fundamentally as an opposition. The most important aim of socialist activity in a parliament, the education of the working class, is achieved by a systematic criticism of the ruling party and its politics. The socialists are too far removed from the bourgeois order to be able to achieve practical and thorough-going reforms of a progressive character. Therefore, principled opposition to the ruling party becomes, for every minority party and above all for the socialists, the only feasible method with which to achieve practical results.[40]
The Millerand incident proved that revisionism was no mere German phenomenon. The same process of political degeneration was under way in the other parties of the Second International. Opportunism was an international phenomenon. But the extent of that opportunism was not fully revealed until the outbreak of war in August 1914.
Luxemburg’s Work in the SPD
Luxemburg’s work in the party was not limited to her polemic against Bernstein. Before even arriving in Germany, she threw herself into the political work. One of the first tasks she undertook for the party was a campaign in the German-occupied part of Poland. Following tremendous successes in this highly industrialised region amongst some of the most oppressed layers of the German working class, she began to receive invitations to speak and to write regularly for several party magazines. During the Reichstag election in 1903, Luxemburg led a very successful campaign in German-occupied Poland, helping the party secure eighty-one seats.
However, she had a hard time finding her place in the party’s official structures. For a short while she was the editor of the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung in Dresden, but quickly withdrew. She then began regularly writing for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, of which she was made the editor for a short while. Besides these activities, she often wrote for the main newspaper of the party, Vorwärts, as well as its theoretical magazine, Die Neue Zeit.
Despite the fact that she could not find her own place in the party structures, she had personal contact with most of the leading members. She was, practically speaking, the neighbour of Karl Kautsky, and developed a close friendship with him and his wife Luise. She also met regularly with the party leader, August Bebel, among others, despite the fact that the party leadership would often complain of her “uncompromising tone” and revolutionary temper. Luxemburg had her own reservations about the party leadership in turn. One day in 1907, when she and Clara Zetkin were out for a morning walk, they lost track of time and managed to wander into a military rifle exercise, thereby arriving late for lunch with Bebel at Kautsky’s home. Amongst the amusement at the story, the guests began speculating about what Bebel would have had to write in their epitaph if they had been killed. With Bebel becoming “tangled in superlatives”, Luxemburg commented that he could “simply write ‘Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy’”.[41]
Luxemburg’s work soon drew the attention of the German state. When she returned to Germany following the world congress of the International in 1904, she was immediately condemned to three months imprisonment for insulting the German Emperor Wilhelm II.[42]
The German state had good reason to fear Rosa Luxemburg. From the day she arrived in Germany, she had placed herself on the revolutionary left wing, where she remained until her death. Although it wasn’t so clear at the time, we can see already from the revisionism debate how she and her former friend Karl Kautsky, who later placed himself in the centre of the party, had very different stances. Kautsky, along with the party leadership, attempted to smooth over disagreements. Rosa Luxemburg meanwhile, without fear of swimming against the stream, threw herself directly into the struggle, clearly outlining the disagreements in order to bring the greatest possible theoretical clarity to the party. She was convinced that the workers’ movement above all required a revolutionary Marxist foundation, and she threw everything into securing this. She was thus following in the footsteps of Marx and Engels. Her behaviour in the revisionism debate clearly showed who the real Rosa Luxemburg was. She would later show that same fighting spirit in her revolutionary practice.
If one has read Reform or Revolution?, one cannot, without arguing in bad faith, portray Rosa Luxemburg as a proponent of reformism, as we hear today from parts of the ‘soft’ left. To Rosa Luxemburg, the struggle for reforms was a means in the struggle for a socialist revolution. If the party gave up on the revolution it would, in reality, make itself redundant, reducing itself to a pillar of support for bourgeois society. This gloomy perspective was confirmed by history, not least on 4 August 1914, when the party leadership betrayed all its internationalist and revolutionary principles and threw its weight behind the German bourgeoisie in the First World War.
Endnotes
[1] C. E. Schorske, German Social Democracy: 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism, p. 7.
[2] Ibid., p. 267.
[3] A. Woods and N. Albin Svensson, ‘Rosa Luxemburg – Reform or Revolution’, In Defence of Marxism [website].
[4] Revisionism and reformism were used more or less synonymously at this time. Revisionism presented the need of a revision of Marxism in order to change it from a revolutionary theory and practice to a reformist one. Therefore, these two words will also be used more or less as synonyms here.
[5] Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) – leading member of the SPD. A member of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) for the party between 1902-1918.
[6] Die Voraussetzungen des Socialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie.
[7] Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) – worked together with Friedrich Engels in London in the 1880’s and then moved to Germany, where he became the leading theoretician of the SPD. Editor of Die Neue Zeit from 1883 to 1917.
[8] Parvus (1867-1924) – a pseudonym of Alexander Helphand, he was a Russian-German social democrat. After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905 he fled to Germany, where he settled.
[9] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 146.
[10] Quoted ibid., p. 202.
[11] August Bebel (1840-1913) – one of the founders of the SPD and its chairman from 1892 to 1913.
[12] R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 42.
[13] Ibid., p. 101.
[14] Ibid.
[15] V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?, p. 26.
[16] R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 48.
[17] Ibid., p. 51.
[18] Ibid., p. 80.
[19] Ibid., pp. 80-1.
[20] R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 40.
[21] R. Luxemburg, Sozialreform oder Revolution, p. 16, our translation.
[22] Ibid., p. 40.
[23] Ibid., p. 56.
[24] Ibid., p. 56.
[25] Ibid.
[26] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, The Classics of Marxism: Volume One, p. 15.
[27] R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 61.
[28] Ibid., pp. 89-90.
[29] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 31.
[30] Quoted ibid., p. 33 (emphasis by Sewell).
[31] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 235.
[32] R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, Essential Rosa Luxemburg, p. 43.
[33] R. Luxemburg, Sozialreform oder Revolution, p. 63, our translation.
[34] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 156.
[35] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 26.
[36] R. Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 384.
[37] Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau (1846-1904) – French Republican politician.
[38] V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?, p. 9.
[39] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].
[40] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Socialist Crisis in France’, Part 3, Marxist Internet Archive [website].
[41] P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 163.
[42] Ibid., p. 75