For very, very personal reasons (happy ones)... but here's something to put down; not a match for something like this, but what is...?
Rosa Luxemburg's argument with Eduard Bernstein, known as Reform or Revolution, is rightly celebrated. There are two obstacles to even roughly applying her arguments today, one is contemporary to her time, one to ours.
The first one is well rehearsed. Luxemburg's argument was with the figurehead of the revisionist movement within the SPD at the end of the 19th century. It was an intra-party argument. Rosa Luxemburg won, in argument. The trouble is arguments are won in practice, to the extent that honest champions of one set of ideas can end up bringing another set to life. The ideology of the SPD was revolutionary, the day to day practice of the SPD was strictly legal.
Her revolutionary career is negative proof of the old argument, you need a revolutionary organisation (however you might see it) to test and win revolutionary ideas.
But the second difficulty, our difficulty is this, who are the reformists? If there was one lesson the last decade has taught us all it is the modern system of government is impervious to the people's will. The next time a Labour left tries to assert how realistic and serious they are, compared to your (simultaneously) utopian and dangerous designs, it's worth parrying them with this. Who honestly still thinks you can change the world for the better through parliament (let alone bring about something like socialism)? Social democrats are the true believers. In this age revolutionaries are the realists, social democrats are utopian.
But, back to the first point, reformism does not arise out of a collective mind, but a social body. Reformism is not a bourgeois minority sport but the formalised version of the general mixture of impressions working class people gain in ordinary life. It is part of life. Who is trying to practice it these days?
Autonomists are often suggested to be the new reformists. One striking connection is the famous aphorism of Bernstein's, “the movement is everything, the final goal nothing”. A modern (and rather sectarian, if I may say so) version is “we are the demands”.
Another connection I believe is the rejection of violent confrontation. This can just be a tactical question. If you are outnumbered and outmatched by an opponent it would be wise to duck battle. This was of course the origin of the SPD's tactics, building a party in a semi-absolutist state. But if this is worked up into a strategic point trouble begins. The problem is obvious; you may reject violence but will violence reject you?
Lets not go too far, neither autonomists nor socialists think the system can be used to bring about communal democracy. Both favour encouraging ordinary people into direct activity, rather than passively engaging them through voting and lobbying etc. Many autonomists would regard themselves as revolutionaries, and who's going to stop them from doing so?
It's worth adding though, there's a difference between revolutionary activity and revolution. Autonomists often see socialists as waiting for a revolution for their cue to spring into action. Any who cares to notice knows this is hardly the case. There is also a link between modern autonomism and the sixties counter-culture, through the slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out”; drop out being the key element, you have to abandon bourgeois society in order to fight it. The sectarian streak in autonomism tends to see autonomist activity as revolution and everything else as missing the mark; “we are the demands”.
So autonomism is not reformism, but is related. There is call for a fraternal, reasoned critique of autonomist ideas, as distinct from traditional points made in the dialogue with reformists. A start may be that autonomism has a strong ethical dimension but no political economy (what it has is borrowed from neo-liberal theory).
