Reform or Revolution

Contents

1. Publishers’ Foreword (1908) 1 min 2

   The Leipzig publishers reissue the long out-of-print pamphlet in 1908, citing the party’s revived interest in theory. Luxemburg has made small corrections to bring it up to date, and the edition adds some of her related essays on wages, crises, trade unions, co-operatives and social reform (not translated here).

2. Introduction 3 min 8

   Social Democracy is not against reform: the daily struggle for reforms is its means, the social revolution its aim. Bernstein’s theory reverses this, making reform the aim and dropping the final goal (“the movement is everything”). Since the final goal is what distinguishes socialism from bourgeois radicalism, the question is one of to be or not to be for the party, and of whether the labour movement keeps its proletarian or takes on a petty-bourgeois character.

3. I.1 The Opportunist Method 11 min 10

   Bernstein claims capitalism is adapting through credit, employers’ organisations, a resilient middle class and rising workers’ conditions, so that collapse becomes ever less likely and socialism must come by gradual reform. Luxemburg replies that this removes the first pillar of scientific socialism, capitalism’s growing anarchy, and leaves socialism only an idealist foundation. Either capitalism’s contradictions grow and some collapse is inevitable, or socialism becomes a utopia.

4. I.2 The Adaptation of Capitalism 22 min 18

   Credit, far from easing crises, extends production beyond the market and then collapses exchange, intensifying every capitalist contradiction. Cartels can raise profits in one branch only at others’ expense, dump surpluses abroad and sharpen tariff wars; they are a passing phase that will burst. The crises of 1900 and 1907 refuted Bernstein; the ten-year cycle was a historical detail. Small capitals are not vanishing but are constantly renewed and cut down as pioneers of technical change.

5. I.3 The Introduction of Socialism through Social Reforms 16 min 17

   Following Konrad Schmidt, revisionism expects trade unions, social reform and democracy to introduce socialism gradually. Luxemburg answers that unions can only secure the market price of labour-power and will face growing difficulties; attempts to regulate production would make them cartels against consumers. State social reform is control by the class state, protecting exploitation, not limiting it. Capitalist property is becoming purer, not divided, so there is as much socialism in a factory law as in street lighting.

6. I.4 Tariff Policy and Militarism 14 min 16

   Bernstein’s second support for gradual socialism is the state’s evolution into society. Luxemburg grants that the state takes on ever more social functions, but argues that its class character is sharpening too: protective tariffs now serve cartels and landowners, and militarism serves investment, rivalry and class rule, so that war between developed powers is approaching. Parliamentary democracy expresses capitalist society and is sacrificed when it threatens it. Reforms and democracy therefore raise the wall between capitalism and socialism, which only revolution can break.

7. I.5 Practical Consequences and General Character of Revisionism 19 min 20

   In practice revisionism does what the party already does, but gives it another meaning: reforms are to build socialism directly rather than prepare the workers to take power. Cut off from that goal, Luxemburg argues, the movement slides into horse-trading, disillusion and mere trade unionism. Revisionism seeks to blunt capitalism’s contradictions, which presupposes a standstill in capitalist development; its view of credit, cartels and crises is that of the individual capitalist and of vulgar economics. It is a theory of socialist stagnation founded on a theory of capitalist stagnation.

8. II.1 Economic Development and Socialism 20 min 23

   Reviewing Bernstein’s book, Luxemburg rejects his evidence that capital is not concentrating. The spread of joint-stock companies socialises production and makes the capitalist a collective person; counting shareholders confuses property with production and turns socialism into a question of rich and poor. Comparing enterprise sizes across countries proves nothing about trends. Bernstein’s admission of “a little” anarchy, and his treatment of labour value as a mere abstraction like marginal utility, show that he has lost Marx’s key: capitalism as a historical, transitory system, whose study leads to the socialist goal.

9. II.2 Trade Unions, Co-operatives and Political Democracy 23 min 22

   Bernstein’s two roads to socialism fail. Producers’ co-operatives must exploit themselves to compete, survive only as appendages of consumers’ co-operatives and so attack only commercial capital. Trade unions are the workers’ defence, a necessary labour of Sisyphus within the law of wages, not a means of abolishing profit. Fighting distribution rather than production, Bernstein needs an idealist grounding in justice, like Weitling’s. Nor is democracy a law of history: world politics and the rise of the workers turn the bourgeoisie against it, so that the socialist movement is now democracy’s only support.

10. II.3 The Conquest of Political Power 23 min 17

    Reform and revolution are not alternative methods to choose between but different moments of class history: legislation works only within the order created by the last revolution. Because capitalist exploitation rests on economic relations, not laws, it cannot be legislated away, and the conquest of political power remains necessary. Democracy matters because it makes that conquest possible; Engels’s 1895 preface concerned daily tactics. The proletariat will inevitably take power “too early” at first, and those premature attempts are themselves what ripens it for final victory.

11. II.4 The Collapse 10 min 9

    Having given up the theory of collapse, Bernstein is forced to give up one position after another: expropriation, socialised production, the materialist conception of history, the theory of value and surplus value, the class struggle and finally classes themselves. His system is a heap of fragments from every school, and his supposedly universal science, morality and liberalism are bourgeois ones. In abandoning dialectics he adopts the “on the one hand, on the other” thinking of the declining bourgeoisie.

12. II.5 Opportunism in Theory and Practice 13 min 11

    Bernstein’s book was the first and last attempt to give opportunism a theory, and it showed that opportunism is incompatible with Marxism and with socialism itself. Opportunism arises naturally in a mass movement that must struggle daily within the existing order for an aim beyond it, steering between sect and reformism. Marx foresaw such wavering in proletarian revolutions. Once it spoke, opportunism proved it had nothing new to say.