Dilemma Before seeking the proto-Nazi Freikorps’ support to crack down on the rising insurrectionary forces in Germany, Ebert reportedly declared “I hate revolution like a mortal sin.” But for Luxemburg reform and revolution had never been opposites: they complemented each other. At the age of twenty-seven, she had established herself as a major figure in the Second International by offering one of the most comprehensive, coherent, and devastating criticisms to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist call to prioritize the method of reform to that of revolution. A close friend and collaborator of Engels, a Marxist of impeccable credentials but also a pioneering advocate of gay rights, Bernstein was also the first to articulate a nonrevolutionary path to socialism in what is widely considered the founding text of modern social democracy: The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899). Bernstein’s position had been explicitly discussed (and rejected) at the Stuttgart Conference of the German Social Democratic Party (1898) and is succinctly captured by his famous statement: “the final goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything.” This, Luxemburg emphasized, was a false dilemma. “Can 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.” At stake in Bernstein’s dilemma, she argued, was not just a tactical choice, a mere discussion about this or that method of struggle; it was the “very existence of the Social Democratic movement” as a distinctive force in the struggle against capitalism. [...]
Bernstein insisted that dialectics demanded that scientific findings be reconsidered in light of new empirical results. And in the circumstances of the nineteenth century, capitalism had shown a surprising capacity for adaptation. From the perspective of economic theory there were a number of new developments with which Marxists had to reckon: the intensification of foreign trade, the expansion of the banking and financial sector, the development of the credit system, the consolidation of middle classes, the rise of property owners, and the emergence of cartels and trusts. Together, they meant that economic crises would no longer take the inevitably destructive form Marx had anticipated. [...]
Luxemburg’s core insight is that the expansion of capital in noncapitalist areas of the world by way of conquest, trade, violence, and deception provides precisely such outlet. Cheap mass-produced goods that struggle to be sold in the markets of developed capitalist states because of low patterns of consumption become available in other areas of the world. They create investment opportunities that displace traditional ways of organizing economic life and destroy predominantly agricultural forms of production. They also bring in technological innovations and modernizing projects that modify existing relations of authority and reshape forms of class conflict different from the capitalist one.[...]
It is important, however, to understand that Luxemburg did not oppose representation in parliament or the fight for trade union and democratic-type reforms. This is particularly clear if one considers her writings on women’s suffrage, which are also an important antidote to the received wisdom among feminists that, unlike her friend and collaborator Clara Zetkin, Luxemburg was largely uninterested in the question of women’s emancipation. Rather, her point was that both the demand for social rights obtained through parliamentary representation and the demand for women’s emancipation ought to be integrated in a more radical critique of capitalism where the key is access to political power and a radical transformation of both the economic and the political structures of society. Just as there could be no progressive national emancipation within capitalism, there could be no gender and racial emancipation either.
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