National Democratic Revolution, Part 4b
Reform or Revolution?
Rosa
Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?”
is a great classic of revolutionary literature. 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 only keep
pushing the same busted case.
“Reform or
Revolution?”, first published in 1900, was the beginning of an even more
crucial polemic which we will summarise.
Lenin
published “What is to be Done?”
in 1902, in response to the same book of Eduard Bernstein’s, as well as to the
general outbreak of “economism”, also called “opportunism”, or “reformism”, or
“syndicalism”, or in South Africa, “workerism”. In this book, Lenin clarified
the basis for the vanguard communist party of professional revolutionaries of
the type that the SACP, for example, is.
Lenin went
further than Luxemburg, so that Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” is regarded today
as the defining blueprint of the communist parties as they have been for nearly
a century. The communist parties make no compromise with reformism.
Although
she had demolished Bernstein even before Lenin did, yet Luxemburg in 1904
sharply contradicted Lenin’s subsequent book, and was in turn corrected by
Lenin’s final reply. In the course of these polemics, the modern communist
parties were defined for the first time and irreversibly differentiated from
the reformists, and from the reformist mass organisations such as trade unions.
Let us look at this in a little more detail.
The German
Social Democrats were the most numerous, well-established and long-standing of
the supposedly revolutionary parties before the First World War. Luxemburg, although
she was originally Polish, was a senior member of that German party.
The
founding Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP)
took place in Minsk in 1898. Lenin was a member, and was the editor of the
party journal “Iskra”, which he founded
in 1900.
In 1903 the
Second Congress of the RSDLP took place in Brussels and London. The consequence
of this Second Congress was the split between the Bolsheviks (majority) and the
Mensheviks (minority), whereby the Mensheviks, though really a minority,
blackmailed the majority and consequently got away with most of the spoils,
including “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 “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”, or 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. The revolutionaries make class alliances
(unity-in-action) for strategic goals. The reformists capitulate, collaborate
and subordinate themselves to the ruling class.
In 1914, at
the outbreak of war between the main Imperialist powers, it was duly found that
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 ultimate in class
collaboration. The RSDLP held out against this collapse, while Rosa 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 executed
under Lenin’s leadership.
In January
1919, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered in Berlin by the proto-fascist “Freikorps”
organisation. In the same month, the anti-communist German Workers’ Party (DAP)
was founded by Anton Drexler. Adolf Hitler joined
it in September of that year. In the following year of 1920 the DAP was re-launched
as the NSDAP, better known as the Nazi
Party.
In the same
year of 1919 the Communist International (also called Third International, or
Comintern) was formed and by 1921 the CPSA (now SACP) had been admitted to it
as a recognised Communist Party.
The main
linked download, 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?"’
Special Relevance of this work in relation to
the National Democratic Revolution
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.” [see Chapter 2, page 10 of the attached Part 1]
Without a working-class
struggle against the capitalist order, for the suppression of that order, there
can only be “vain efforts to repair” it – for example, trying to make
capitalist work into “decent” work.
Meanwhile
the small (petty bourgeois) enterprises are periodically “mowed down” and hence can never come right under the monopoly power
of “big Capital”. These circumstances give the two repressed classes a strong
basis for unity-in-action against big Capital (e.g. in a National Democratic
Revolution) both nationally, and internationally.
An alliance
with anti-monopoly national capital against the monopoly bourgeoisie is a
revolutionary alliance in keeping with the National Democratic Revolution. But
a collaboration of all, that would include the monopolists, would be akin to
fascism and would not be revolutionary, or even democratic.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Reform or
Revolution Part 1, Intro, and C2, and Part 2, C7,
C9, C10, by Rosa Luxemburg.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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