The Classics, Part 7
Reform or
Revolution?
Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?”
(attached) is a great classic. In the first place it is a thorough polemical
rejection of Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 “Evolutionary Socialism”,
which book Luxemburg deals with comprehensively, to the point where she
concludes:
“It was
enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say. In the
history of our party that is the only importance of Bernstein’s book.”
This was true. The
reformists have never made any advance on Bernstein. But they keep coming.
“Reform or
Revolution?” at once became the beginning of an even more crucial polemic, this
time between Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, which generated further “classics”,
and which we will follow in this part of our course on the classics.
Luxemburg demolishes
Bernstein, but then contradicts Lenin and is in turn corrected by Lenin’s final
reply. In the process of these two successive polemics (first Bernstein versus Luxemburg and Lenin, then
Luxemburg versus Lenin), the modern
communist parties were defined sharply for the first time, and irreversibly
differentiated from the reformists, and from the reformist mass organisations
such as trade unions.
Lenin published “What is to be Done?”
in 1902 in response to the same book of Eduard Bernstein’s and the consequent
outbreak of “economism”, also called “opportunism”, or “reformism”, or
“syndicalism”, (or in South Africa, “workerism”). Lenin went further than
Luxemburg. Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” is regarded as the defining blueprint
of the communist parties as they are now. The communist parties have no
compromise with reformism.
By 1919 the Communist
International (also called Third International, or Comintern) had been formed
and by 1921 the CPSA (now SACP) had been admitted to it as a recognised
Communist Party.
Some other notable
events of this period include the founding Congress of the Russian
Social-Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) in Minsk in 1898. Lenin was a
member, and was the editor of the journal “Iskra”,
which he founded in 1900.
The German Social
Democrats were the most numerous, well-established and long-standing of the
supposedly revolutionary parties at the time. Rosa Luxemburg, though originally
Polish, was a senior member of the German party.
In 1903 the Second
Congress of the RSDLP took place in Brussels and London. The consequence was
the split between the Bolshevik majority and the Mensheviks minority, in the
course of which the Mensheviks blackmailed the majority and consequently got
away with most of the spoils, including the magazine “Iskra”. Hence Lenin’s detailed 1904 report of this Congress is
called “One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back”. It is this document that prompted Rosa Luxemburg to
raise objections in the form of her 1904 work known as “Leninism or Marxism?”.
Lenin’s reply (1904) to Rosa Luxemburg was conclusive. It settled
all the open questions.
In 1905 a revolution
broke out in Russia, which resolved into a bourgeois-democratic advance and the
establishment of the “Duma” (parliament) in Russia. The RSDLP held its Third
Congress in that year, and Lenin wrote “Two Tactics of
Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, a full differentiation
of the revolutionaries from the reformists, which we will come to.
In 1914 at the
outbreak of war between the main Imperialist powers most of the
Social-Democrats of the Second International, including the German
Social-Democrats led by Karl Kautsky, abandoned their internationalism and sided
with their separate bourgeois ruling classes. The RSDLP held out against this
collapse, while Luxemburg founded the anti-war Spartacist League in Germany. In
February, 1917 a second bourgeois revolution in Russia overthrew the Tsar, and
in October the Great October (proletarian) revolution was successfully carried
out under Lenin’s leadership.
In January 1919, Rosa
Luxemburg was murdered in Berlin by the proto-fascist “Freikorps” organisation.
The attached
document, also linked below, is a redacted (shortened) version of “Reform or
Revolution?” prepared for discussion purposes. Two more points can usefully be
picked out at this stage. The first is the direct statement of the matter at
issue in the opening lines of Luxemburg’s Introduction:
‘Can the
Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution,
the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms?
Certainly not… It is in Eduard Bernstein's theory… that we find, for the first
time, the opposition of the two factors of the labour movement. His theory
tends to counsel us to renounce the social transformation, the final goal of
Social-Democracy and, inversely, to make of social reforms, the means of the
class struggle, its aim… 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 the question: "To be or not to be?"’
The second comes
within the text where Luxemburg describes the “Sisyphus”-like
situation of the small enterprises under monopoly capitalism, so typical of
South Africa today, as follows:
“The struggle
of the average size enterprise against big Capital… should be rather regarded
as a periodic mowing down of the
small enterprises, which rapidly grow up again, only to be mowed down once more
by large industry.”
·
The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Reform or
Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg, 1900, Part 1 and Part 2.
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