Luxemburg – Reform or Revolution?

[robbo203]

Hi all

 

This is just a brief query and I  would be grateful for any  help on the matter. 

 

I'm in the process of writing something and, at this point in the project, I am looking at the vexed question of "reform or revolution".  That, in fact, is the title of Rosa Luxemburg's work  (1900) , a scathing indictment of Bernstein's revisionism and the unfounded belief that capitalism could be induced by piecemeal measures to transform itself into something other than what it is and will ever remain

 

However I am a little puzzled by Luxemburg's own attitude to reforms.  Notwithstanding the very title of her pamphlet she states in the "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. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.

 

It was Bernstein, she seems to be suggesting, who set up this false dichotomy by recommending that the SDP abandon revolution for reform.  Criticising, Bernstein's fellow revisionist,  Konrad Schmidt for his suggestion that the appetite for reform  "grows with the eating,” and  will ultimately end up in the the socialist transformation of society as a consequence of an "apparently mechanical movement". Luxemburg  sought instead to emphasise the importance of the subjective factor in this socialist transformation. It was not true, she contended, that "socialism will arise automatically from the daily struggle of the working class".  Rather, it was the growing awareness of  "very insufficiency of capitalist reforms"  that would help produce this outcome (Ch 5) .  For Luxemburg, the peculiar character of the proletarian  movement:

resides precisely in the fact that here, for the first time in history, the popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will but they must effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society. This will the masses can only form in a constant struggle against the existing order. The union of the broad popular masses with an aim reaching beyond the existing social order, the union of the daily struggle with the great world transformation, that is the task of the Social-Democratic movement, which must logically grope on its road of development between the following two rocks: abandoning the mass character of the party or abandoning its final aim falling into bourgeois reformism or into sectarianism, anarchism or opportunism. (Ch 10)

 

Now, unless I have seriously misread what Luxemburg is saying,  this  whole argument seems to echo Trotsky's balmy concept of "transitional demands" (i.e. unrealisable reforms)   I suppose the difference is that Luxemburg would not flinch at being forthright about declaring her commitment to the revolutionary objective and stating in no uncertain terms what that meant  – as opposed to paying mere lip service to and soft peddling that objective for fear of coming across as "utopian" and "unrealistic" to a still non revolutionary working class

 

Anyway, can anyone here enlighten me on this point or point me in the direction where enlightenment awaits

 

Many thanks 

 

Robin

 

[ALB]

By coincidence I re-read her pamphlet the other day to prepare a talk on "Revolution the only solution". I too noticed that in the opening paragraphs she goes out of her way to emphasise that, although she stands for revolution (the capture of political power by the working class) she is not against the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) or the working class struggling for reforms (measures aimed at bettering the condition of workers within capitalism) as well. In other words, that she didn't take up the same position on this question as us, but that she held the classic SPD position of a socialist party having a maximum (socialism) and a mimumum (reforms under capitalism) programme. On the other hand, she put a powerful case against the idea that capitalism can be gradually reformed into socialism; which is why we have liked her pamphlet.But I don't think she can be found guilty of advocating Trotsky's dishonest and stupid policy of advocating reforms they know can't be achieved under capitalism in the expectation that workers will turn to "revolution" (insurrection under the leadership of a vanguard party) after the struggle for the unrealisable reforms inevitably failed. This assumes that the reforms struggled for can't be achieved, but there is no evidence that Luxemburg thought that the reforms she favoured the SPD advocating and struggling for were unrealisable. She merely says that they would be "inadequate", which is not the same as "unrealisable".I think her position was that if the working class struggled for reforms on a class basis this would help prepare them for the final and more important struggle for political power (and that this wouldn't happen unless there was a body of socialists consciously advocating this, so it's not going to happen on its own).The irony is that Bernstein could see that the emperor had no clothes, that the SPD was in practice a reformist party which had a rhetoric of revolution and that it should drop the pretence of being revolutionary and come out openly as a democratic, reformist party. Which it eventually did after WWI. Bertrand Russell, incidentally, had reached a similar conclusion about the SPD in his rather good book on German Social Democracy that had come out in 1896, i.e 4 years before Luxemburg's pamphlet.

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

But I don't think she can be found guilty of advocating Trotsky's dishonest and stupid policy of advocating reforms they know can't be achieved under capitalism in the expectation that workers will turn to "revolution" (insurrection under the leadership of a vanguard party) after the struggle for the unrealisable reforms inevitably failed. This assumes that the reforms struggled for can't be achieved, but there is no evidence that Luxemburg thought that the reforms she favoured the SPD advocating and struggling for were unrealisable. She merely says that they would be "inadequate", which is not the same as "unrealisable".I think her position was that if the working class struggled for reforms on a class basis this would help prepare them for the final and more important struggle for political power (and that this wouldn't happen unless there was a body of socialists consciously advocating this, so it's not going to happen on its own). 

 Thanks for your explanation, Adam.  It certainly does seem that the title of Luxemburg's pamphlet was somewhat misleading.    However,  I am not fully convinced that the distinction between Luxemburg's advocacy of reforms and Trotsky's transitional demands is quite so stark as you suggest though there is a formal sense in which they differ as you point out.  Where Luxemburg thought reforms would prove "inadequate",  Trotsky thought they would be "unrealisable"  in the case of so called  transitional demands (although it has to be remembered that Trotsky also advocated mere reforms along the lines of the SDPs minimum programme).  Nevertheless,  in substantive terms the outcome is basically  the same.  In both cases,  the needs of the workers would not be met  and, in both cases,  such reforms were to be  advocated in the full knowledge that such needs would remain unmet.  One might be forgiven for inferring a certain degree of cynicism in both cases – although, no doubt, Luxemburg was honest about  admitting the inadequacy of her reforms where Trotsky was deceitful in concealing the unrealisability of his.   There is also a certain structural similarity between Trotsky's metaphor of a  "bridge" and Luxemburg's idea of the Party steering a middle course between two "rocks" – the reformist aspirations of the working class and the revolutionary  intentions of the hardline  politicised revolutionariesThere is something else that occurs to me as well – what exactly did Luxemburg mean by reforms and reformism?I have always taken the view that reformism essentially entails the enactment of measures by the state operating in political field or domain that have as their focus issues arising in economic field or domain.  This seems to follow from our conceptualisation of capitalism as a fundamentally economic construct and reformism is an attempt (classically so in the case of Bernstein) to modify the economic behaviour of capitalism itself.  Trade unionism, for example, is not to be equated with reformism since in this  case, the field in which trade unions ideally  operate is the economic field and not the political field  – even if trade unionism has the same focus as reformism being the economic field or domainThese two conceptual categories of FIELD  and FOCUS are, I suggest,  vital analytical tools to distinguish  between different kinds of activities – like  reformism and trade unionism – in terms of the particular kind of configuration applying to each. I realise in practice  the political field and the economic field are thoroughly intermeshed.   So for example what is called  the "labour movement" stereotypically  comprises two wings – the political and the economic – having an overlapping membership and is (supposedly) represent respectively  by the social democratic-cum-labour parties,  on the one hand, and the trade unions on the other. Nevertheless we are talking here of ideal types and for the purposes of analytical clarity, it is sometimes necessary to resort to ideal types to get a better grasp of the subject under discussion.Which brings me to the point  Could it be be that by reforms, Luxemburg meant something different to measures enacted by the state?  You say that she held the classic SPD position of a socialist party having a maximum (socialism) and a minimum (reforms under capitalism) programme and the latter would certainly be classed as a measure to be enacted by a state but is there any possibility that she might have meant by reforms something more vague and having to do with the day to day struggles of workers to improve their pay and working conditions?  In other words could she possibly have been conflating the economic struggle and the political struggle in the guise of advocating reforms as a "means" to social revolution?The answer to that question might have a bearing on the legacy of Luxemburg who, to this day, remains a significant political icon to the revolutionary Left.

[ALB]

robbo203 wrote:

It certainly does seem that the title of Luxemburg's pamphlet was somewhat misleading.

I agree that the title doesn't properly convey the content as she wasn't opposed to reforms. The original German title was Sozialreform oder Revolution?  But a better one might have been "Reformism or Revolution?" or "Gradualism or Revolution?" or even "Possibilism or Revolution?" We, too, are not opposed to reforms that really do benefit workers, but rather to the policy of reformism, of trying to gradually reform capitalism into something else, which is what she was effectively criticising and refuting.I think it is clear that she did distinguish between "social reform" (state intervention to try to improve the lot of the workers), trade union action, co-operatives and political democracy, which were the four things that Bernstein thought made a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism possible.For instance, she writes in Chapter 3 on "The Realisation of Socialism through Social Reforms":

Quote:

Therefore trade unions, social reforms and, adds Bernstein, the political democratisation of the State are the means of the progressive realisation of socialism.

I'll have to read yet again her pamphlet to see if did think that the SPD should offer workers "inadequate" reforms so that, after they got them, they would realise this and turn to socialism. I don't think so, if only because she thought the SPD was the working class organised politically and that it was natural for workers to struggle to try to improve their lot within capitalism (as it probably is, thankfully).I don't think either than she would accept the distinction between "political" and "economic" that we've traditionally made. After all, one of the reason she is so popular in leftist circles is that she advocated the "mass strike" (as opposed to parliamentary bargaining or alliances with bourgeois democrats) as a way to get both political democracy and social reforms.And of course, although we don't advocate them (so as not to suffer the fate of the SPD and become a reformist party), we ourselves are not opposed to all reforms. Wouldn't we too describe any favourable reforms obtained as "indequate"? We do regard some proposed reforms as "unrealisable" but say this openly and that workers are wasting their time pursuing them. Which of course is the basis of our criticism of Trotskyist "transitional demands".

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

And of course, although we don't advocate them (so as not to suffer the fate of the SPD and become a reformist party), we ourselves are not opposed to all reforms. Wouldn't we too describe any favourable reforms obtained as "inadequate"? We do regard some proposed reforms as "unrealisable" but say this openly and that workers are wasting their time pursuing them. Which of course is the basis of our criticism of Trotskyist "transitional demands".

 Yes  exactly.  And the nonsensical thing about Trotsky's crackpot theory of transitional demands  (so called) is a that it commits its proponents to maintaining the illusion that such reforms are not only achievable under capitalism but are of such a nature as to fully satisfy the needs of workers – that is to say are adequate should they be achieved  That being the case,  it cuts from under their feet the very grounds upon which they might want to advocate socialism to replace capitalism – namely . that capitalism cannot possibly be operated in the interests of workers  and adequately meet their needs.  This is why the Trots are almost driven by the very logic of their own thinking to play down the case for socialism for  fear of being lambasted as  " impractical dreamers"  (and is also why they criticise socialists for being "utopians"). To argue that socialism is the only answer is to imply that capitalism cannot be reformed to adequately meet the needs of workers which in turn directly runs counter to the illusion they are intent upon fostering for the purpose of recruiting workers to their cause – that transitional demands are indeed both achievable and fit for the purpose. In private, of course, they know otherwise but for the purpose of public consumption and political influence they are obliged to conceal this discomforting  fact.  Only the select few that comprise the vanguard can be trusted to safely digest this fact  and rationalise it away in terms a dialectical sleight of hand.  The theory of transitional demands requires them to make these demands to serve as a "bridge" to revolutionary consciousness.   According to the theory,  it is when workers realise the impossibility of such demands in capitalism they will turn to socialism. The truly laughable thing about such a deplorably manipulative and cynical tactic is that probably most workers already know well enough that such demands as,  say, a doubling of the minimum wage or reducing the pensionable age to 55, is just a pipe dream under capitalism .  But you don't see them flocking to the socialist cause, do you now? . To the contrary many of them will happily endorse Mrs T's old mantra that we must all live within our means  and give the likes of her the thumbs up when it comes to elections. For all the frantic efforts of the Trots to come across as pragmatic  realists, thoroughly grounded in the concrete day to day struggles of workers they are the very ones who end up looking the impractical dreamers in the eyes of most workers On the question "opposing reforms" and "opposing reformism " there is the interesting case of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of labour circa  late 19th century. Gompers' rather tortured  reasoning for opposing reforms and not merely opposing reformism was a sort of dogmatic rendition/extension of a kind of  quasi Marxian stance . Since the state represented the interests of the ruling class, all legislation emanating from the state  would ipso facto  be bound to further the interests of that class and so work against interests of the workers.  On these spurious grounds, Gompers actively campaigned against reforms such as the eight hour day in certain states on the West coast of America. Gompers seemed to have subscribed to a purely voluntaristic concept of working class activism  which restricted itself to the economic field alone i..e  in the  trade union movement  – lest it be tainted by politics and hence the influence of ruling class ideas.  His ideas find some echoes in the thinking of the so called Economists (not to be confused with the practitioners of economics) who Lenin savaged in  "What is to be Done" (1902). The Economist movement  published a document entitled Credo (1899) in which it was argued  that it was to the liberal bourgeoisie to which the workers should defer to take up the political struggle against tsardom  and that the workers should confine themselves to such matters as fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. Here we see, once again,  the distinction being made the economic domain and the political domain  to which I earlier alluded. It was not the distinction as such that was invalid but how it was applied and in the case of  the two examples cited it was applied quite inappropriately , I would suggest

[pgb]

Hi Robbo In the Introduction to her pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg refers to "the daily struggle for reforms, the amelioration of conditions of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions…." So she's identifying reforms with anything that ameliorates workers' conditions, which seems to me to be wide enough to include strictly trade union activity (eg. wage demands) as well as state or government activity (eg. welfare legislation). On this reading, "the daily struggle for democratic institutions" is treated separately from "the daily struggle for reforms". However, further on she refers more generally to "the struggle for reforms" and it is clear she is referring to both . But does it matter? The important thing is that she treats both as part of the class struggle, as a means for engaging in the "proletarian class war". And from this she takes the orthodox Marxist line, that the "struggle for reforms" provided the proletariat with the necessary practice to undertake the final battle which was of course the socialist revolution. The struggle for reforms was a means to the revolutionary end. This goes to the heart of her dispute with Bernstein. While for Bernstein and other revisionists the struggle for reforms was an end in itself, for Luxemburg this meant turning their backs on the ultimate goal – socialism. When Luxemburg said that reforms would fail, she meant that reformism (a la Bernstein et al) would fail to bring about socialism. I agree with ALB here. I don't think she ever believed that reforms of the kind fought for by workers and the SPD were necessarily "unrealisable" in themselves; only that they were "inadequate" as a means to the ultimate goal of socialism. Only in this sense would they "fail". In the same sense, she said that reforms on their own would be "meaningless" – if they were not a means to the conquest of power. As for comparison with Trotsky's transitional demands, I don't see that there's a total incompatibility. As I understand it, a transitional demand is one made in the knowledge that it would be unrealisable under normal capitalist conditions, like. eg. the demand: "Jobs for All!" I've heard demands like that made over many years by trade unionists in May Day marches! Whether they work or not is an empirical question. I don't think you can argue that they are inherently "unrealisable". Lenin's slogan "Peace, Land and Bread" is an example of a highly successful transitional demand. Given Rosa Luxemburg's strong belief in the role of the mass strike as the most effective weapon of working class revolt, I doubt that she would have rejected demands that she might have believed were unrealisable if they nonetheless had the promise of energising workers to deepen their struggle against capitalism.

[alanjjohnstone]

“The circumstance which divides socialist politics from bourgeois politics is that the socialists are opponents of the entire existing order and must function in a bourgeois parliament fundamentally as an opposition. The most important aim of socialist activity in a parliament, the education of the working class, is achieved by a systematic criticism of the ruling party and its politics. The socialists are too far removed from the bourgeois order to be able to achieve practical and thorough-going reforms of a progressive character. Therefore, principled opposition to the ruling party becomes, for every minority party and above all for the socialists, the only feasible method with which to achieve practical results. Not having the possibility of carrying their own policies with a parliamentary majority, the Socialists are forced to wring concessions from the bourgeois majority by constant struggle. They achieve this through their critical opposition in three ways. 1.Their demands are the most advanced, so that when they compete with the bourgeois parties at the polls, they bring to bear the pressure of the voting masses.2.They constantly expose the government before the people and arouse public opinion.3. Their agitation in and out of parliament attracts ever greater masses about them and they thus grow to become a power with which the government and the entire bourgeoisie must reckon.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1901/socialist-crisis-france/ch03.htm

[alanjjohnstone]

"However, the legal eight-hour day is one of the demands on our minimal program. i.e., it is the very least minimum of social reform which we, as representatives of the workers’ interests, must demand and expect from the present state. The fragmentation of even these minimal demands into still smaller morsels goes against all our tactics. We must make our minimum demands in unamended form. Even if we are ready to accept any installment, we must leave it to the bourgeois parties themselves to whittle down our demands to fit their interests." http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1902/09/19.htm

[alanjjohnstone]

' Our minimal program has a very specific meaning. We know that socialism cannot be introduced all at once, as if it were shot from a pistol, but only if we force small reforms from the existing order by leading a sharp class struggle on an economic and political basis in order to increase our economic and political strength, to take power, and finally to wring the neck of today’s society. To that end our minimal demands are tailored to the present. We will take everything they give us, but we must demand the entire political program. But instead of point three, which explicitly contains a demand for the militia, the comrade in Munich put forth a demand for the reduction in the length of military service as the party’s practical demand. If we were, in this fashion, to make a small fraction of our minimal program into the real practical minimal program, then what we now see as our minimal program would become out ultimate goal, and true ultimate goal would be entirely cut off from reality and would indeed become merely “revolutionary sloganeering” ' http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1899/10/11.htm From the same article i found this quote quite insightful and wonder why i never ever heard it before. "In its struggle, the working class has no greater enemy than its own illusions."

[alanjjohnstone]

Another article bt Luxemburg for your reading listhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1903/02/proletariat-party.htm “That which separates the Social Democratic position from those of other socialist movements is, above all, its conception of the transformation of the modern society into a socialist society. In other words, its conception of the relationship between the immediate tasks of socialism and its final goals. From the standpoint of Social Democracy, which bases its views on the theory of scientific socialism, the transition to a socialist society can only be the result of a phase of development, of greater or lesser duration. This development, to be sure, does not preclude the necessity for the final conversion of society by means of a violent political overthrow, that is, by what is usually called revolution. However, this resolution is impossible if the bourgeois society has not previously passed through the necessary phases of development. This development must take place in the objective factor of the socialist overthrow, the capitalist society itself, as well as in the subjective factor, the working class. Beginning with the principle of scientific socialism that the “liberation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself.” Social Democracy recognizes that only the working class as such can carry out the overthrow, that is, the revolution for the realization of the socialist transformation. By working class, it means the truly broad mass of the workers, above all the industrial proletariat. Thus a prerequisite for the conversion to socialism must be the conquest of political power by the working class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessary step for the institution of transitional measures. But in order to be able to fulfill this task, the working masses must be fully aware of their goal and become a class-organized mass. On the other hand, the bourgeois society must have already reached a state of economic as well as political development which allows the introduction of socialist institutions. These prerequisites are dependent on one another and influence each other reciprocally. The working class cannot attain to any organization or consciousness without specific political conditions which allow an open class struggle, that is, without democratic institutions within the framework of the state. And conversely, the attaining of democratic institutions in the state and their spread into the working class is – at a certain historical moment, in a certain phase in the development of class antagonism – impossible without the active struggle of a conscious and organized proletariat. The solution to this apparent paradox lies in the dialectical process of the class struggle of the proletariat fighting for democratic conditions in the state and at the same time organizing itself and gaining class consciousness. Because it gains this class consciousness and organizes itself in the course of the struggle, it achieves a democratization of the bourgeois state and, in the measure that it itself ripens, makes the bourgeois state ripe for a socialist revolution. Elementary principles for the practical activity of Social Democracy depend on the above conception: the socialist struggle must be a mass struggle of the proletariat. It must be a daily struggle for the democratization of the institutions of the state, for the raising of the intellectual and material level of the working class, and at the same time, for the organization of the working masses into a particular political party which consciously sets itself against the entire bourgeois society in its struggle for a socialist revolution….. ….. the parallel formulation of the demands which form the content of the socialist revolution: “1) that the land and the means of production cease to be the property of the individual and become the common property of the workers, that is, the property of the socialist state, 2) that wage labor be converted into communal work, etc.”; on the other hand, the formulation of the political demands which, at first glance, have the content of parliamentary-democratic institutions designed for the bourgeois state: “1)complete autonomy of political groups, 2) the participation of all citizens in the making of laws, 3) direct election of all public officials, 4) complete freedom of speech, press, assembly, organizations etc. 5) completely equal rights for women, 6) completely equal rights for all religions and nationalities, 7) international solidarity as a guarantee of the common peace”. It is almost impossible to say to what category this program actually belongs. Upon close examination, two different interpretations are possible. The political demands listed here, with the exception of the first, which is not entirely clear, remind one of the usual minimal program of Social Democratic parties. But just this placing of these demands as coordinates of the demands for a socialist revolution awakens the suspicion that they were not related to the actual bourgeois social order. At the same time, it is doubtful whether they were supposed to deal with the socialist society. since they take so strongly into account the actual social order based on inequality of classes, sexes, and nationalities. Perhaps we have here not a minimal program but a program which is aimed at the transitional period after the seizure of power by the proletariat, and which has as its goal the kindling of the socialist transformation. The pattern of a similar program, which also puts political-democratic demands and socialist reforms on the same level and which aims directly for the transitional phase after the revolution, is found, for example, in the demands of the “Communist Party of Germany” formulated by the central committee of the Communist League in Paris in 1848, and carrying, among others, the signatures of Marx and Engels….”

[alanjjohnstone]

And another of Luxemburg discussing reforms. http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1898/09/30.htm The basic question of the socialist movement has always been how to bring its immediate practical activity into agreement with its ultimate goal. The various ‘schools’ and trends of socialism are differentiated according to their various solutions to this problem. And Social Democracy is the first socialist party that has understood how to harmonize its final revolutionary goal with its practical day-to-day activity, and in this way it has been able to draw broad masses into the struggle. Why then is this solution particularly harmonious? Stated briefly and in general terms, it is that the practical struggle has been shaped in accordance with the general principles of the party programme….Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. But if we begin to chase after what is ‘possible’ according to the principles of opportunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesmanlike barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process…"

[robbo203]

pgb wrote:

Hi Robbo In the Introduction to her pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg refers to "the daily struggle for reforms, the amelioration of conditions of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions…." So she's identifying reforms with anything that ameliorates workers' conditions, which seems to me to be wide enough to include strictly trade union activity (eg. wage demands) as well as state or government activity (eg. welfare legislation). On this reading, "the daily struggle for democratic institutions" is treated separately from "the daily struggle for reforms". However, further on she refers more generally to "the struggle for reforms" and it is clear she is referring to both . But does it matter? The important thing is that she treats both as part of the class struggle, as a means for engaging in the "proletarian class war". And from this she takes the orthodox Marxist line, that the "struggle for reforms" provided the proletariat with the necessary practice to undertake the final battle which was of course the socialist revolution. The struggle for reforms was a means to the revolutionary end. This goes to the heart of her dispute with Bernstein. While for Bernstein and other revisionists the struggle for reforms was an end in itself, for Luxemburg this meant turning their backs on the ultimate goal – socialism. When Luxemburg said that reforms would fail, she meant that reformism (a la Bernstein et al) would fail to bring about socialism. I agree with ALB here. I don't think she ever believed that reforms of the kind fought for by workers and the SPD were necessarily "unrealisable" in themselves; only that they were "inadequate" as a means to the ultimate goal of socialism. Only in this sense would they "fail". In the same sense, she said that reforms on their own would be "meaningless" – if they were not a means to the conquest of power. As for comparison with Trotsky's transitional demands, I don't see that there's a total incompatibility. As I understand it, a transitional demand is one made in the knowledge that it would be unrealisable under normal capitalist conditions, like. eg. the demand: "Jobs for All!" I've heard demands like that made over many years by trade unionists in May Day marches! Whether they work or not is an empirical question. I don't think you can argue that they are inherently "unrealisable". Lenin's slogan "Peace, Land and Bread" is an example of a highly successful transitional demand. Given Rosa Luxemburg's strong belief in the role of the mass strike as the most effective weapon of working class revolt, I doubt that she would have rejected demands that she might have believed were unrealisable if they nonetheless had the promise of energising workers to deepen their struggle against capitalism.

 Hi PGBThanks for your useful comments. You say that Luxemburg's definition of reform is wide enough to include anything that might ameliorate the workers' conditions.  This would mean lumping together trade union activity with government or state activity as in the case of welfare legislation. That is precisely what I would see as problematic; it is insufficiently nuanced as an approach and therefore fails to heed what follows from the necessary distinction that needs to be made between the economic domain of class struggle and the political domainTrade union struggle in the economic domain is of course necessary and desirable but is essentially only a defensive struggle against the downward pressure exerted by capital; it cannot leadof itself  to a revolution since as the saying goes starvation always works on the side of the capitalists.  The struggle for reforms via the state is different matter: it  locates  itself on the the very terrain in which the revolution is to be effected – the political domain ( and I would argue necessarily represents a preference for reform over revolution on that terrain)  You maintain that Luxemburg   took the "orthodox Marxist line, that the "struggle for reforms" provided the proletariat with the necessary practice to undertake the final battle which was of course the socialist revolution" . If that was the case then I would suggest that this supposed  "orthodox Marxist line" is very much  subject to a fundamental flaw.  The struggle for reforms ( or reformism) in the sense of  measures undertaken the the state   cannot possibly prepare the working class to undertake the final battle in the form if the socialist revolution.  On the contrary,  it can only make for the perpetual postponement and eventual abandonment of that revolutionary goal  As one prominent Trotskyist , Duncan Hallas of the International Socialism group (forerunner of the British "Socialist Workers Party"),  once put it:  "Socialism will not be on the agenda"  if " capitalism can concede, for an indefinite period, the demands and aspirations of working people then, of course, it will be enormously strengthened" .  (Duncan Hallas, "Controversy: Do we support reformist demands?, International Socialism (1st series), No.54, January 1973. On the other hand , if capitalism cannot concede to the demand  and aspirations of workers in the form of particular reforms then  how can struggling for such reforms possibly prepare workers  to undertake the final battle  in the form of socialist revolution.  It is only by realizing the futility of such struggling  and of going cap in hand to the ruling class that workers will properly begin to prepare themselves for  that battle.  Refomism is a treadmill going nowhere, a quagmire into which any hope of revolution will disappear completely.That is the basic problem,  you see, and I don't really see how it is logically possible to get round:it.  You cannot  both seek to reform , and inadvertently,  strengthen the very system you have  supposedly set your sights on overthrowing. That just does not make any sense however you look at it. Inevitably the former will crowd out the latter and the whole sorry history of Second International is clear evidence of the truth of  this claim.  No Labour or Social Democratic Party anywhere any longer pretends even to want to overthrow capitalism let alone establish a genuine socialist alternative . The struggle for reforms is not and cannot be a means to revolution as Luxemburg claimed and it was Bernstein paradoxically who grasped better than Luxemburg what that struggle was about: – that  the goal would become nothing and the movement , everythingThat aside, I question the whole premise on which reformism rests.  In my view, measures enacted by the state do not so much initiate improvements to the conditions of the workers as respond to pressures in the economic domain that call for such improvement.  Reformism in other words is based on  a Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy  – "after this, therefore because of this". In that sense that reforms are simply a ratification of what is happening on the ground. It is a fetishistic way of looking at things to hold  that it is a mere scrap of white paper over whose  contents a bunch of parliamentarians have debated that is in any way decisive in the matter.  What the matter really boils down is the relative share of the social product  going to the workers vis a vis the capitalists which as Marx put it, is a function of the relative strengths of the combatants in the class struggle – the practical organisation of the workers in the industrial field  – which would be weakened and compromised by reformism  and which is in turn influenced by such background factors as the state of the economy e.g. whether the economy is in a boom or a recession.  State enacted reforms are worth little more than the paper they are typed on and as we all know they can be widely ignored , more "honoured in the breach than in the observance",  watered down or even simply simply scrapped and consigned to the bin of history.On the question of Luxemburg's  attitude towards reforms I'm not sure you are correct in saying that when she observed that they were "inadequate" she meant from the point of view of obtaining socialism.  What I think she meant by inadequate or insufficient was from the point of view of meeting the needs of workers  under capitalism.  It was the realisation that they were inadequate from that point of view that would cause workers, in her view,  to turn to socialism insteadOn the question of transitional demand, well, I think that point  is that by definition such a reform is one that capitalism is meant to be structurally incapable of delivering or implementing and that consequently the implementation of such a reform would indicate that it could no longer  be considered a transitional demand. – something that was "unrealisable".  Trotsky as I said was not averse to supporting mere reforms.   More to the point he indicated that mere reforms could be converted into transitional demands should economic conditions render the former impracticable and unrealisable.  But the converse was equally true. You say of transitional demands that i I don't think you can argue that they are inherently "unrealisable".  But that is part of the very definition of a transitional demand – that they are unrelisable. If conditions changed that enable them to become  realisable  then this would indicate they were no longer transitional demands but had become "mere reforms"I m also not sure that the Bolshevik slogan "Peace, Land and Bread". is a good example of a " highly successful  transitional demand". Land reform for sure followed in the wake of the Bolshevik takeover but "peace" and "bread"? From what I understand the Russian working class in the early years of the revolution melted back into the countryside in large numbers  precisely because, amongst other things of the dire problem of food provision in the cities. And as for peace , well, one only has to mention the bitter civil war that ensued soon after the Bolshevik take over to put that particular claim to rest 

[colinskelly]

Luxemburg's pamphlet was part of the struggle then being fought between the 'orthodox' Marxists, (committed theoretically to revolution as the ultimate aim) in the German SPD against revisionists like Bernstein (who wanted to adopt a new theory – non-class, idealist and evolutionary). The defeat of revisionism within the SPD was of those who sought to reject what they saw as out-moded revolutionary theory in favour of a political theory that fitted with its actual reformist political practice. This is why Luxemburg's pamphlet defends reformism (after all, the day to day practice of the SPD) whilst advocating a commitment to revolution against theoretical revisionism. In the long run of course this strategic unity of reformism and revolution was destined to fracture, for which Luxemburg (who really was a revolutionary in a more than formal sense, unlike, say, Kautsky) paid with her life at the behest of her former reformist comrades in the then governing SPD.

[alanjjohnstone]

Perhaps i should amalgamate and re-phrase the extracts i provided to offer a version of the  Luxemburg case….. “The most important aim of socialist activity in a parliament, the education of the working class, is achieved by a systematic criticism of the ruling party and its politics. The socialists are too far removed from the bourgeois order to be able to achieve practical and thorough-going reforms of a progressive character. Therefore, principled opposition to the ruling party becomes, for every minority party and above all for the socialists, the only feasible method with which to achieve practical results. Elementary principles for the practical activity of Social Democracy depend on the above conception: the socialist struggle must be a mass struggle of the proletariat. It must be a daily struggle for the democratization of the institutions of the state, for the raising of the intellectual and material level of the working class, and at the same time, for the organization of the working masses into a particular political party which consciously sets itself against the entire bourgeois society in its struggle for a socialist revolution. That which separates the Social Democratic position from those of other socialist movements is, above all, its conception of the transformation of the modern society into a socialist society. In other words, its conception of the relationship between the immediate tasks of socialism and its final goals. The basic question of the socialist movement has always been how to bring its immediate practical activity into agreement with its ultimate goal. Our minimal program has a very specific meaning. We know that socialism cannot be introduced all at once, as if it were shot from a pistol, but only if we force small reforms from the existing order by leading a sharp class struggle on an economic and political basis in order to increase our economic and political strength, to take power, and finally to wring the neck of today’s society. To that end our minimal demands are tailored to the present. We will take everything they give us, but we must demand the entire political program. Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. [If we demand the 8 hour day we do not negotiate in the meantime for the 10hour day]  The fragmentation of even these minimal demands into still smaller morsels goes against all our tactics. We must make our minimum demands in unamended form. Even if we are ready to accept any installment, we must leave it to the bourgeois parties themselves to whittle down our demands to fit their interests. Precisely because we do not yield one inch from our position, we force the government and the bourgeois parties to concede to us the few immediate successes that can be gained. But if we begin to chase after what is ‘possible’ according to the principles of opportunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesmanlike barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process.  If we were, in this fashion, to make a small fraction of our minimal program into the real practical minimal program, then what we now see as our minimal program would become our ultimate goal, and true ultimate goal would be entirely cut off from reality and would indeed become merely “revolutionary sloganeering”. Thus a prerequisite for the conversion to socialism must be the conquest of political power by the working class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessary step for the institution of transitional measures. But in order to be able to fulfill this task, the working masses must be fully aware of their goal and become a class-organized mass. On the other hand, the bourgeois society must have already reached a state of economic as well as political development which allows the introduction of socialist institutions.”  ……And that is merely from my selective quoting and presenting Luxemburg’s reformist approach in her own words. 

[ALB]

colinskelly wrote:

… Luxemburg's pamphlet defends reformism (after all, the day to day practice of the SPD) …

alanjjohnstone wrote:

presenting Luxemburg's reformist approach in her own words.

Certainly her pamphlet defends the day-to-day practice of the SPD of the time, i.e having a minimum programme of reforms as well as a maximum programme of the capture of political power for socialism. But is having or defending having a minimum programme automatically of itself reformist? I thought our position was more subtle, i.e that having a minumum programme runs the high risk of a party becoming reformist as its support will be built up on this basis rather than for socialism and eventually someone (like Bernstein) will come along and call for theory to be brought into line with practice. And the party become a reformist party.What I'm suggesting is that we restrict the word "reformist" to those who advocate that socialism can be established gradually by a long series of reform measures. But maybe this is too narrow as reformist (in this sense) parties go on to suffer a further degeneration and drop even the pretence that "socialism" is the long-term goal and end up just advocating reforms to capitalism as an end in itself. In other words, the link between "reformism" and "socialism" is completely broken. In practice we've more or less accepted this evoluion of the word "reformism" and apply it to parties such as the Tories, Liberals, Greens and Nationalists which have never even claimed to be socialist.Even when Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet (at the turn of the century) the SPD had become reformist (Bernstein was right).  Its voters and most of its members wanted social reforms and political democracy in Germany not socialism. Her mistake was to not realise this and to assume that it was a mass socialist party. On this assumption some of the things she says about reforms in the quotes Alan has given make more sense. A mass, genuinely socialist party would not neglect the position of workers under capitalism while this lasted. After all, even we can countenance Socialist MPs and local councillors when they are a minority voting for reforms or other pro-worker measures under some circumstances.

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