ABSTRACT
In 1875, German socialists created the German Social-Democratic Party. The central problem facing social-democracy was the relation between the two parts of this program: between the expectation of inevitable socialist revolution and the day-by-day attempts to reform parts of the system to make it more livable and just. The sociologist Max Weber had argued that in capitalism, the centralized power of a modern, rationalized, state administration and bureaucracy is kept in check by countervailing forces of independent concentrations of wealth. Karl Marx supposed that under socialism no countervailing force is necessary, for there will be homogeneity of social life based on the homogeneity of class. Rosa Luxemburg emigrated from Poland to Germany in 1898 and devoted her life to socialism and to radicalizing the SPD’s perspective on daily political struggles. Since Karl Marx death, numerous political parties, international organizations, and governments have claimed that they were putting his ideas into practice.
