As the Occupy Movement begins the next stage of its development, it might be worth a moment to peek back a little over a century to Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist Rosa Luxemburg who reminds us of the complex relationship between reform and revolution and the indispensability of the goal of a completed social democracy.

The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim…

But…the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order.

…

[W]hen [one] presumes to talk for idealism, for morals, pronouncing himself at the same time against the only source of the moral rebirth of the proletariat, a revolutionary class struggle – he does no more than the following: preach to the working class the quintessence of the morality of the bourgeoisie, that is, reconciliation with the existing social order and the transfer of the hopes of the proletariat to the limbo of ethical simulacra.

~Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1900