Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
Rosa Luxemburg opens this polemical introduction by confronting the apparent paradox of her title: can Social-Democracy be against reforms? She immediately resolves the question on principle. The daily struggle for reforms—ameliorating workers’ conditions within capitalism, winning democratic institutions—is not opposed to revolution but is the only means by which the proletariat engages in class war and advances toward the final goal: the conquest of political power and the abolition of wage labour. For orthodox Marxism, reform and revolution form an indissoluble unity: reform is the means, revolution the end.
The target is Eduard Bernstein, whose recent articles and book Die Voraussetzungen des Socialismus (1898) have, for the first time, set these two factors against each other. Bernstein’s theory, Luxemburg argues, effectively counsels renouncing the final goal and elevating the means—social reforms—into the aim itself. She cites his notorious formulation: “The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything.” This, she insists, is not a tactical disagreement but an existential threat to Social-Democracy. The final goal of socialism is the sole factor distinguishing the movement from bourgeois democracy and radicalism; without it, the labour movement collapses into a vain effort to repair capitalism rather than a class struggle to overthrow it. The question “Reform or Revolution?” as Bernstein poses it is for Social-Democracy the question “To be or not to be?”
Luxemburg anticipates the objection that Bernstein still professes socialist aims. She counters with a historical-materialist observation about ideological development: every new movement, even one in direct contradiction with its predecessor, initially clothes itself in the forms and language of what came before. To expect Bernstein to openly and bluntly deny the theoretical basis of Marxism would be to underestimate the power of scientific socialism. Instead, he must begin with involuntary esteem for Marx, pose as his disciple, and seek points of support within Marx’s own teachings for an attack presented as a further development. The task, therefore, is to strip away the outer forms and extract the sheathed kernel of Bernstein’s theory—a task of urgent necessity for the broad layers of the industrial proletariat.
The introduction concludes with a sharp polemical turn against those who would dismiss such theoretical controversy as mere academic squabbling. Luxemburg invokes Lassalle: only when science and the workers unite will they crush all obstacles to culture. The entire strength of the modern labour movement rests on theoretic knowledge, and doubly so here, because it is the workers themselves whose skin is being brought to market. Bernstein’s opportunist theory is nothing but an unconscious attempt to assure the predominance of the petty-bourgeois elements that have entered the Party, to change its policy and aims in their direction. The question of reform or revolution, of the final goal versus the movement, is fundamentally—in another form—the question of the petty-bourgeois or proletarian character of the labour movement. Only when the great mass of workers take the keen weapons of scientific socialism into their own hands will all opportunistic currents come to naught.