After the victory of the Tories in the 1983 general election, and the defeat of the miners' strike, these ideas have increasingly been taken up by former 'lefts' in the Labour Party. They have seen the cause of these defeats not in the role played by right wing Labour Party and trade union leaders, but have blamed the working class, echoing Hobsbawm's 'theory' of the 'right turn' of the working class.

These ideas, which represent the abandonment of the struggle for socialism, have not been put forward as such, but have been dressed up as 'new' and 'modern'. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. These ideas are nothing more than a regurgitation on a far lower level of the debates that took place first in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and then in the labor movement internationally at the turn of the century.

The SPD had been founded in 1875 through the merger of two earlier parties. Despite repression under Bismark's "Anti-Socialist laws" between 1878 and 1890 the SPD enjoyed rapid growth and at the same time clarified its program.

Despite illegality, SPD candidates increased their vote from 311,961 in 1881 to 1,427,298 in 1890. The 1883 SPD Congress, held in exile in Copenhagen, declared that the SPD was a revolutionary party with no illusions in reforming the capitalist system. At its first Congress after legalization, held in Erfurt, the SPD adopted a clearly Marxist program to replace the somewhat confused 1875 Gotha Program which Marx and Engels had criticized at the time it was accepted.

However a year after Engels' death in 1895 one of the main SPD leaders, Eduard Bernstein, published a series of articles in the SPD's theoretical review, Neue Zeit, under the title Problems of Socialism which challenged the whole basis of the SPD's program and perspectives. In 1899 Bernstein published The Prerequisites of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, which further developed his views. It was in reply to these articles and the later book that Luxemburg wrote the first (The Opportunist Method through The Consequences of Social Reformism and General Nature of Reformism) and second (Economic Development and Socialism through Opportunism in Theory and Practice) parts of this pamphlet respectively.

Social Reform or Revolution was the first major work which Rosa Luxemburg produced after beginning her activity in the SPD in the middle of 1898 when she began to live in Berlin.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in the small Polish town of Zamosc which was then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. While at school in Warsaw she joined the small Proletariat Party, which was linked to the Narodnik terrorist movement in Russia. At the age of 18, facing arrest, she left Poland and at the end of 1889 arrived in Zurich where she began studying at Zurich University.

During the eight years that she lived in Switzerland Rosa Luxemburg was primarily involved with Polish politics although participating in discussions with other exiles, notably Russians, and later with the leaders of the Second International. In 1892 she was one of the founding members of the Polish Socialist Party but rapidly developed differences with, and in 1894 split from, the Party's leadership over whether or not they should fight for Polish independence and build links with the Russian working class. Luxemburg held that to support Polish independence would mean subordinating the working class to the Polish capitalists. Luxemburg's group formed the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland which, after the 1917 Russian revolution, became the Communist Party of Poland.

It was during this period that she developed her ideas on the national question which were to be a source of continuing debate between Lenin and herself. Fundamentally Luxemberg held that as Marxists stood for the unity of the workers of all the lands, support for the right of self-determination would undermine that unity by giving capitalists the opportunity to use nationalism to divert the mass movement. Furthermore the development of imperialism meant that newly emerging states would not be able to enjoy the same type of development as the older nation states. While agreeing with Luxemburg's opposition to nationalism, Lenin argued that workers in a dominant country could only win the trust of, and build unity with, workers of an oppressed nationality by clearly showing they had nothing at all in common with the oppressor class. This is why the Bolsheviks had in their program support for the right to self-determination, while fighting against any hint of nationalism within the workers' movement.

However Rosa Luxemburg is mainly remembered today as a leading representative of the Marxist wing of the German workers' movement who was murdered by counter-revolutionaries acting with the connivance of the extreme right wing SPD minister, Noske, in 1919 during the German revolution.

How was it that a party could move from the position of proclaiming itself Marxist to having leaders who organized the murder of Marxists within the space of 30 years?

The answers are on the one hand the development of the objective situation and on the other the political weakness of the SPD leaders. The period before the First World War saw an enormous development of the German economy which resulted in the growth of both living standards for some sections of the working class and reformist illusions, especially within the leadership of the SPD and trade unions. Despite repeated strike waves, growing signs of a slow down in economic growth and the obvious approach of war, the majority of the workers' leaders in practice adopted the strategy of working within capitalism, confident that things would continue to improve.

The very growth of the SPD membership from 38,000 in 1876 to 384,327 in 1909 and a peak of 1,085,905 in 1913 reinforced this view of continual, gradual progress. During the same period its votes rose from 20 per cent (1.4 million) in 1890 to 36 per cent (4.2 million) in 1912. Many SPD leaders assumed that the Party's progress would continue automatically until it won a majority, not understanding that capitalism would not continue its steady development and that the ruling class would not surrender its power to the working class without resistance. The division of the 1891 Erfurt Program into minimum and maximum parts (i.e. immediate demands for reforms and the long term policy of socialist revolution) led many SPD leaders to effectively postpone socialism to the distant future, thereby not preparing themselves or the Party for the struggles which lay ahead.

When Bernstein first put forward his ideas the majority of the SPD (and later the Second International) rejected them. The 1899 Congress of the SPD held in Hanover reaffirmed the Erfurt program, the class struggle and rejected "any attempt ... to alter or obscure ... the Party's antagonistic attitude towards the existing state and social order and towards the bourgeois parties." The 1901 congress in Lübeck confirmed this position and the 1903 Dresden Congress, after discussing whether to so-operate with the Liberals in the Reichstag (German parliament), denounced "revisionist efforts ... to supplant the policy of a conquest of power by overcoming our enemies with a policy of accommodation to the existing order" and rejected the SPD participation in any capitalist government.

During a period of capitalist upswing the policy of Marxists, as Luxemburg explains in The Consequences of Social Reformism, is to fight for immediate reforms and to seek to politically prepare the working class for the upheavals which inevitably will develop. But, despite the ringing objections of Bernstein's ideas at Party Congresses, the SPD leaders adapted themselves to the day fight for reforms and in practice rejected any revolutionary perspectives.

Rosa Luxemburg was, in the years before 1914, the leading opponent of the growth of reformist ideas within the SPD. By the time of the outbreak of war the Part had become divided into three tendencies; the openly reformist wing, the so-called Centre (led by Kautsky) and the Radicals (i.e. the Marxists). But, unlike the Bolsheviks in their struggle between 1903 and 1912 in the Russian Social Democracy, Luxemburg did not draw together the Marxist wing into a coherent opposition and this contributed to their weakness at the beginning of the German revolution in 1918.

It was the First World War which openly revealed the degeneration of both the SPD and the entire Second International. On August 4 1914 the SPD members of the Reichstag voted for the government's war budget and both the French and Belgian socialists supported their own governments in the war. Of the major parties of the Second International only the Bolsheviks in Russia firmly opposed the war on a class basis and remained loyal to the International's previous anti-war decisions. It was then, in order to demonstrate their complete break from the ole opportunist leaders, that Lenin, Luxemburg and others stopped calling themselves 'social democrats'. This is why in this pamphlet, written long before 1914, that Luxemburg still used the term 'social democratic' to describe the Marxist approach.

At first Luxemburg and other Marxists opposing the war were reduced to a small handful of activists but over a period of time managed to build their support. Luxemburg and other internationalists like Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring published the first issue of their paper Die Internationale in the spring of 1915 and at the beginning of 1916 the Gruppe Internationale was formed. Later the Gruppe became the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League) and the core of the Communist Party of Germany when it was formed at the end of December 1918.

Luxemburg was imprisoned from February 1915 to January 1916 and July 1916 to November 1918 for her anti-war activities. It was only the November resolution, toppling the Kaiser that released Luxemburg from prison. The November revolution in Germany was very similar to the February 1917 revolution in Russia. It brought down the old regime, paralyzed the capitalist state and saw the creation of workers' and soldiers' councils (in Russian soviets). Furthermore just as in Russia where the soviets had at first been dominated by the reformist Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties so the German councils were dominated by the SPD. It was an illustration of the historical law that when the masses first move into activity they generally support the old traditional organizations.

But Despite electing SPD members to leading positions within the councils it was clear that the working masses wanted to carry through a fundamental change of society. Even the SPD leaders saw this and called the first cabinet they formed after the collapse of the old government a 'Council of People's Commissars', the same name that the Bolsheviks used after they came to power. But the difference was that the SPD leaders wanted to use a revolutionary sounding name as a cover for moving as quickly as possible to re-establish a stable capitalist regime.

For a few months in Germany a situation of dual power existed. But the SPD leaders, in co-operation with the military leaders, worked to undermine and crush the revolutionary movement. They had learnt from the Russian revolution the urgency of doing this in order to prevent the masses moving over from supporting the SPD government to leaders like Luxemburg. Thus at the beginning of January 1919 they organized a provocation in Berlin which was calculated to lure left wing workers into a premature offensive. Then the government moved counter-revolutionary troops into Berlin who crushed the workers and, on January 15 arrested and immediately murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

Today there are still attempts to remove the revolutionary essence from Rosa Luxemburg's life and work. Some try to use her prison notes on the Russian Revolution, unpublished in her lifetime, to show that she opposed the general policy of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. Nothing could be further from the truth! Her notes end by saying "Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world ... But in Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved there. In this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism."

Other sources including the film Rosa Luxemburg have, by selective quotations, attempted to portray her as a romantic pacifist. Yet Peace Utopias, written in 1911 could have had these latter day distortions in mind as Rosa clearly shows that her opposition to capitalist militarism was class based: "The friends of peace in the bourgeoisie circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realized within the framework of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialist conception of history, and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the abolition of the capitalist class state."

Some in the labor movement seek to use Rosa Luxemburg, basing themselves on this or that quotation; on the national question, some of her unpublished prison notes on the Russian Revolution, or her delay in drawing together the Marxist opposition in the SPD as a unified grouping, as a justification for their own erroneous positions.

In contrast, Marxism remembers Rosa Luxemburg for her lifelong struggle against opportunism and reformism and for the international unity of the working class in struggle. It was as a consequence of this life-long struggle that she played a leading role in the revolutionary events of 1918-19 until her brutal murder.

After the Second World War the labor movement in the advanced capitalist countries passed through a similar period as occurred before the First World War. The long post-war capitalist upswing from the late 1940s to the early 1970s sowed renewed illusions in reformism. The SPD went so far as to remove even the objective of socialism (and all references to Marxism) from its program in the 1959 Bad Godesgerg Congress.

However today with world capitalism in an unsettled period of sharp booms and deeper slumps the labor movement has begun to reawaken and rediscover its socialist roots. This year the SPD adopted a new program which once again pledges the Party, in words, to create a socialist society and makes a passing reference to Marx. Of course this will not develop in a straight line, as we see the British Labour Party's current retreat from the 'left' positions it adopted in the 1970s. But capitalism will not allow reformist ideas much room for survival now. Reformist policies will rapidly be put to the test and found incapable of maintaining, let alone improving, workers conditions. And in this situation the ideas of Marxism, which Rosa Luxemburg fought for, will become the program of the working class in the struggle to transform society.

James Long, October 1986