Beyond “Reform or Revolution”: Notes on Political Education in Gramsci, Habermas and Arendt

The Western left has been and continues to be rent by a Luxemburgian "either/or" - reform or revolution - which produces less a confrontation than a mutual isolation of two self-enclosed dialogues. This division has become increasingly artificial and obfuscating in an era of complex technological societies, international interdependence, and nuclear weaponry. The best that can be said of the concept of revolution which is implied is that it is obsolete, at least for the West. For when Luxemburg used the term she meant essentially what Lenin meant by it and what it would come to mean in the lexicon of Soviet "Marxism-Leninism": the violent conquest of political power by the workers. Central to this view is the expectation that "objective historical forces" will produce a "crisis of capitalism" in which a well-organized working class can seize a momentary opportunity to gain control of the state, consolidate its power, and only then proceed to the creation of appropriate social relations. From this vantage point, "reform" appears as a polar opposite strategy, one which legitimates proletarian participation in the political arrangements of a state actually dominated by an alien class.