2. Reform or Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
In her 1899 polemic Reform or Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg systematically dismantled the theoretical foundations of Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, arguing that his proposals did not merely adjust Marxist tactics but constituted a complete break with revolutionary socialism. Bernstein had claimed that capitalism’s internal contradictions were being softened by credit, cartels, and trusts, that the middle class was expanding, and that the working class sought only immediate reforms. He concluded that socialism could be introduced gradually through legislative reform, rendering revolution unnecessary.
Luxemburg countered that these adaptations did not resolve capitalism’s contradictions but intensified them. Credit artificially expanded markets while reproducing the fundamental contradiction between socialised production and private ownership on a higher level. Cartels and trusts increased anarchy and sharpened contradictions, bursting during crises. The only resolution, she insisted, was socialist revolution. She dismissed Bernstein’s proposal for cooperatives as utopian, since they remained subject to market competition.
Luxemburg further argued that trade unions could not overthrow capitalism. Their function was limited to enforcing the current market price of labour power, securing wages around its value, but they could not suppress exploitation itself. She described union work as a “Sisyphean labour”—necessary for defending workers’ conditions, but incapable of abolishing wage labour. For Luxemburg, the struggle for reforms and the struggle for revolution were inseparable, with reforms subordinate to revolution. Bernstein falsely presented them as a choice of speed; in reality, legislative reform modified the old society, while revolution created a new one. Reforms were the means; socialist transformation was the end. Abandoning the goal of revolution led not to socialism but to the reform of capitalism.
The SPD leadership, including Kautsky and Bebel, initially evaded the debate, treating it as a matter of temperament. Luxemburg demanded the revisionists’ expulsion, arguing that the class struggle itself could not be subject to “free criticism”. The party was a tool, not a debating society. Though Bernstein’s ideas were voted down at congresses, the leadership increasingly practised reformism despite formally rejecting his ideas. Party secretary Ignaz Auer wrote privately to Bernstein that such things are not formally decided but simply done. Luxemburg’s struggle continued Marx and Engels’ earlier criticism of SPD reformism. When Engels wrote an introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, the party leadership pressured him to water it down. After his death, Vorwärts published only the censored version as Engels’ supposed testament condemning revolution. Luxemburg, unaware of Engels’ protest, instinctively rejected the censored version and argued that the ‘parliamentarism-only’ tactic led to the SPD’s betrayal on 4 August 1914 when it voted for war credits. Internationally, Alexandre Millerand entered a bourgeois French government in 1899 alongside General Gallifet, who had massacred Communards. Luxemburg argued that a socialist entering a bourgeois government does not transform the state but transforms the socialist into a bourgeois minister; reforms won through class struggle are socialist, but those granted by a minister serve bourgeois interests.