Rosa Luxemburg on "Premature" Revolution

“[I]t is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act. To consider that as possible is, again, to lend color to conceptions that are clearly Blanquist. The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once so that for the first time, from the viewpoint of the final outcome of the struggle, it will have necessarily come to power ‘too early.’

“In the second place, it will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of State power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions of the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution.”

-- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1900, seventeen years before the Russian Revolution of 1917