(1900) - Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg, a political theorist, argues in her 1900 pamphlet, Reform or Revolution, that the popular ideal of steady, negotiated progress toward a fairer society isn't what it claims to be. Too often, she notes, reform-minded leaders celebrate each new concession while treating the underlying arrangement that made those concessions necessary in the first place as untouchable. She argues that reform and revolution aren't the same goal reached by different speeds, but two different goals entirely: one aims to make the existing arrangement more livable, the latter aims to replace it — so pursuing reform doesn't gradually add up to reinvention, it can actually crowd it out by making the existing arrangement easier to defend. Luxemburg asks: what does it mean to call incremental gains progress while leaving the arrangement that made them necessary fully intact?