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 again in this week’s
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
Menshevik 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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