"On the night of Jan. 15, 1919, a group of the Freikorps—hastily formed militias made up mostly of right-wing veterans of World War I—escorted Rosa Luxemburg, a petite, 50-year-old with a slight limp, to the Eden Hotel in Berlin, the headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division.
“Are you Frau Rosa Luxemburg?” Capt. Waldemar Pabst asked when she arrived at his office upstairs.
“You decide for yourself,” she answered.
“According to the photograph, you must be,” he said.
“If you say so,” she said softly.
Pabst told her she would be taken to Moabit Prison. On the way out of the hotel, a waiting crowd, which had shouted insults like “whore” as she was brought in under arrest, whistled and spat. A soldier, Otto Runge, was allegedly paid 50 marks to be the first to hit her. Shouting, “She’s not getting out alive,” he slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of her head. Luxemburg collapsed. Blood poured from her nose and mouth. Runge struck a second time. Someone said, “That’s enough.” Soldiers dragged Luxemburg to a waiting car. One of her shoes was left behind. A soldier hit her again. As the car sped away, Lt. Kurt Vogel fired his pistol into her head. The soldiers tossed Luxemburg’s corpse into the Landwehr Canal."
The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.
Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, along with the systems of entertainment and news, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Electoral politics are elaborate puppet shows. Wall Street and the militarists, whether Trump or Clinton, win.
“Capitalist accumulation requires for its movement to be surrounded by non-capitalist areas,” Luxemburg wrote. And capitalism “can continue only so long as it is provided with such a milieu.”
Luxemburg, in another understanding important to those caught up in the pressures of a single election cycle, viewed electoral campaigns, like union organizing, as a process of educating the public about the nature of capitalism. These activities, divorced from “revolutionary consciousness”—from the ultimate goal of overthrowing capitalism—were, she said, “a labor of Sisyphus.”
We who seek to build radical third-party movements must recognize that it is not about taking power now. It is about taking power, at best, a decade from now. Revolutions, Luxemburg reminded us, take time.
In an understanding that eludes many Bernie Sanders supporters, Luxemburg also grasped that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. She would have excoriated Sanders’ ostrichlike refusal to confront American imperialism. Imperialism, she understood, not only empowers a war machine and enriches arms merchants and global capitalists. It is accompanied by a poisonous ideology—what social critic Dwight Macdonald called the “psychosis of permanent war”—that makes socialism impossible.
A population finally rises up against a decayed system not because of revolutionary consciousness, but because, as Luxemburg pointed out, it has no other choice. It is the obtuseness of the old regime, not the work of revolutionaries, that triggers revolt. And, as she pointed out, all revolutions are in some sense failures, events that begin, rather than culminate, a process of social transformation.
“Revolutions,” she continued, “cannot be made at command. Nor is this at all the task of the party. Our duty is only at all times to speak out plainly without fear or trembling; that is, to hold clearly before the masses their tasks in the given historical moment, and to proclaim the political program of action and the slogans which result from the situation. The concern with whether and when the revolutionary mass movement takes up with them must be left confidently to history itself. Even though socialism may at first appear as a voice crying in the wilderness, it yet provides for itself a moral and political position the fruits of which it later, when the hour of historical fulfillment strikes, garners with compound interest.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/reform_or_revolution_20160522.
Hannah Arendt also covers some of this ground and the last themes--although from a greater historical distance than Luxemburg and less overtly engaged stance than Hedges. Still her contrast of reform (bureaucratic)/revolution sticks to many US voters today.