From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy.

Even in Marx's and Engels' writings, the strive for popular legislation in the political sphere increasingly became a focal point - be it that Marx lauded the laws that limited the working day as "magna carta" (Marx, [56], 306 f.) or that Engels argued that the "rebellions of the old-style" should be replaced by new-style ones. Marx and Engels argued that the French insurrectionist circles undermined the "process of revolutionary development" because they envisaged launching "a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution" (Marx & Engels, [61], p. 318). One can say that Luxemburg proceeded from a left-populism - understood as invoking the people in order to further certain political objectives and advance in the struggle for political power - to a transformative populism: it should establish a process of collective learning "from below" and overcome the Jacobin flaws that Luxemburg saw - again - resurfacing in the Russian Revolution of 1917: "The Bolsheviks are the historical heirs of the English Levelers and the French Jacobins" (Luxemburg, [51], p. 342). In the established landscape of research in the social sciences, populism is seen as a type of politics that chiefly revolves around the distinction between the "people" and the "elite".[1] Within this, different forms of populism can be distinguished - ranging from right-wing and authoritarian to liberal-centrist and religious varieties. This was the unifying thread of European Social Democracy that spread from the works of Marx and Engels to very different activists and intellectuals, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.[6] It needs to be noted that the Second International was a broad political movement. [Extracted from the article]