8. Conquest of Political Power¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Luxemburg mounts a definitive theoretical refutation of Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist attempt to substitute legislative reform for revolutionary conquest of political power. She argues that Bernstein’s method—weighing the “good and bad sides” of reform versus revolution as if selecting commodities from a counter—fundamentally misunderstands the historical relationship between these two factors. Reform and revolution are not alternative speeds on the same road, but qualitatively different processes: revolution is the act of political creation that establishes a new social form, while legislation merely expresses the life of a society already constituted by revolution. Every legal constitution, she insists, is the product of a prior revolution, and reform work is only possible within the framework that revolution has created.
Luxemburg draws on the entire history of class society to substantiate her claim that conquest of political power has been the aim of every rising class—from the Latin peasantry against Roman financiers, through medieval artisans against nobles, to the bourgeoisie against feudalism. She then demonstrates why the proletariat’s situation is fundamentally different. In previous class societies, exploitation was encoded in explicit juridical relations (serfdom’s corvées and levies, guild restrictions), which could be partially reformed within the old order. But capitalist exploitation rests on purely economic relations—wage labour is not a legal status but a market relation. No law obliges the proletarian to sell labour power; poverty does. No legislative reform can give the proletariat the means of production while capitalism remains intact, because it is economic development, not law, that has separated them. Bernstein, she mocks, is like the policeman in Uspensky’s story who seizes a man by the collar only to find the fellow has no collar.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at Bernstein’s claim that the conquest of political power has become “an empty phrase.” Luxemburg counters that democracy is indispensable to the proletariat not because it makes revolution superfluous, but because it renders revolution both necessary and possible—necessary because capitalist development intensifies contradictions rather than resolving them, possible because democratic rights provide the fulcrum for organisation and class consciousness. She corrects Bernstein’s misreading of Engels’s 1895 preface, insisting Engels was prescribing tactics for the proletariat oppressed, not the proletariat victorious. As for Marx’s suggestion of buying out English landlords, this referred to the pacific exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not its replacement.
Finally, Luxemburg demolishes Bernstein’s warning against “premature” revolution. The seizure of power by a conscious popular mass, unlike a Blanquist coup, presupposes the maturity of economic and political relations. Moreover, socialist transformation is not a single act but a long struggle in which the proletariat will likely be repulsed more than once—and these “premature” attacks are themselves historically necessary, creating the political conditions for final victory. To oppose premature conquest is, in substance, to oppose any conquest at all. The revisionist programme, she concludes, is not the realisation of socialism but the reform of capitalism—the suppression of its abuses, not its existence.