quote of the issue

Reform or Revolution

In 1899 Rosa Luxemburg, then a youthful Jewish revolutionary émigré from Poland, took up the fight against eminent socialist theoretician Eduard Bernstein in the powerful German Social Democratic Party. Bernstein, backed by the growing trade-union bureaucracy, sought to reconcile workers to the bourgeois order with the lie of piecemeal, democratic reforms as the path to socialism, rejecting the Marxist program of proletarian revolution. Luxemburg’s polemic eloquently exposes the fraud of reformism in phrases that still apply to Bernstein’s successors of today in the NDP and its various pseudo-Marxist satellites.

Legal reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress that can be picked out at pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. They are different moments in the development of class society which condition and complement each other, and at the same time exclude each other reciprocally as, e.g., the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In effect, 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 legal reforms does not itself contain its own driving force independent from revolution. During every historical period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given it by the impetus of the last revolution, and continues as long as that impulsion continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, it is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Precisely here is the kernel of the problem.

It is absolutely false and totally unhistorical to represent work for reforms as a 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 essence. The whole secret of historical transformations through the utilization of political power consists precisely in the change of simple quantitative modification into a new quality, or to speak more concretely, in the transition from one historical period, one social order, to another.

He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not really choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for surface modifications of the old order. Thus, the political views of revisionism lead to the same conclusion as the economic theories of revisionism: not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism; not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself.

Perhaps what we have just said about the function of legal reform and revolution is true only of the class struggles of the past? Perhaps now, as a result of the development of the bourgeois juridical system, it is legal reform which will lead society from one historical phase to another, and the seizure of state power by the proletariat has “become an empty phrase,” as Bernstein puts it on page 183 of his book?

Exactly and precisely the opposite is the case. What distinguishes bourgeois society from earlier class societies–from ancient society and that of the Middle Ages? Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on “acquired rights” but on real economic relations, that wage labor is not a juridical relation but a pure economic relation….

No law obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of capitalism. Need, the lack of means of production, are responsible for this submission. And, within the framework of bourgeois society, no law in the world can give to the proletariat these means, for not laws but economic development have stolen them.

—Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Reform or Revolution” (1899, revised second edition, 1908), reprinted in Selected Political Writings (Monthly Review Press, 1971)