Important Points from Rosa Luxemburg's 'Reform or Revolution?'
Rosa Luxemburg wrote 'Reform or Revolution?' as an article for the LVC party newspaper. The first part was printed in 1898 in response to another article by Edward Bernstein, and the second was printed in 1899 in response to Bernstein's book 'Evolutionary Socialism' (English title) published that same year. A description of the revisionist dispute is given in Paul Frölich's wonderful biography of Luxemburg: The Bernstein controversy revolved around the fundamental character of the socialist working-class movement. Disputes on this point had existed since the very beginning of the movement and were finally the reason for its disintegration into two camps. Bernstein's book ended with the advice to Social Democracy to summon up the courage 'to emancipate itself from an outworn phraseology and to display its true colours as a democratic-socialist reform party'. That raised the question: reform or revolution? Or more correctly, the question of the r...