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Rosa Luxembourg

Reform or Revolution was Rosa Luxembourg's first major political work, and one of the most enduring contributions to socialist thought. When Rosa Luxembourg arrived in Berlin in 1898, she found the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) engulfed in a crisis of conscience provoked by Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein had spent long years in exile in Switzerland and England as a result of the anti-socialist laws. He attacked the very idea of revolutionary upheaval, the method, the basis of Marxist philosophy and the labor theory of value. He concluded that revolution was not necessary, that socialism could be achieved by gradual reform of the capitalist system, through mechanisms like consumers' cooperatives, trade unions and the gradual extension of political democracy. The SPD, he declared should be changed from a party of social revolution into a party of social reforms.

Rosa Luxembourg entered the growing battle over revisionism by publishing the articles, which first appeared in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in September 1898 and in April 1899 she published a second article. The two articles together were published in 1900 as Reform or Revolution. This was the most penetrating critique of Bernstein's


The first half of Social Reform or Revolution examines aspects of recent economic and social development, which Bernstein had cited in support of his view that revolutionary Marxism was outdated. She then restates Marxist orthodoxy, emphasizing for example, the literal scientific truth of the labor theory of value (in her view the only theory that satisfactorily explained money). The best part of Rosa Luxembourg's argument consisted in her insistence on the necessity of social revolution. "Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, could break down the barriers to socialism created by the political and juridicial relations of capitalist society." 4 Bernstein was guilty of a false antithesis. The struggle for reform educated people on the need for socialism, but only the threat of revolution ever produced real reforms from the ruling classes.

While serving a sentence in 1915 Rosa Luxembourg renewed her assault on the disintegration of international socialism by writing The Junius Pamphlet, as it came to be known. "The Crisis of the German Social Democracy" was the actual title of Rosa Luxembourg's pamphlet and junius was the alias under which she wrote it. The pamphlet is less about the actual crisis of the SPD than about the roots and the causes of the war. Aimed at the most class-conscious German workers, it is a careful explanation of the historical forces, which made the holocaust unavoidable. In it she explains how the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 had left the European powers polarized into rival armed camps, whose hostility became ever more intense as their opportunities for extra-European compensation declined. Thus, Japan had let down Russia's Far Eastern goals, forcing her to reassert her Balkan interests, while Germany's attempts to frustrate the French annexation of Morocco had re-ignited Franco-German enmity in Europe. The Junius Pamphlet described the German contribution to the catastrophe. It explains the range of myths, which the SPD used to justify its support for the war.

Throughout Rosa Luxembourg's work there is the reminder that imperialism cannot be overcome without an immediate attack upon its capitalism. She affirms the goal of socialism, which is of a freedom that is yet to be had "freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party, however numerous they may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." 16



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Approximate Word count = 2227
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)


  

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