Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie ("The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy"), published in 1899. The SPD leadership did not officially support or reject Bernstein's views. Revolutionary activist Alexander Parvus responded with a series of vehement criticisms in early 1898 that led the issue into open debate within the party. Writing Leadership of the efforts by revolutionaries within the SPD to tackle Bernstein's views fell to Luxemburg. She responded to Bernstein with two series of articles in Leipziger Volkszeitung in September 1898 and April 1899, which were collected as Part I of Social Reform or Revolution in 1899. Part II consisted of a response to Bernstein's book. The two parts were first published together in 1908. Themes While a detailed critique of the thinking of Eduard Bernstein it includes a short critique of marginalism and identifies credit and the stock market as things that will exacerbate capitalism's periodic crises—not, as Bernstein had argued, measures that gradually remove the tendency towards crisis. Luxemburg pointed out that Bernstein was little more than a utopian if he believed that socialism could be reformed into existence, comparing his arguments to those of French utopian Charles Fourier. The importance of trade unions, she argued, is not that they could end bourgeois ownership of capital, but that they are the body by which workers come together and understand that they are part of a class. Through struggles for reforms, they realize their class power. Luxemburg likened union struggles to the "labor of Sisyphus"—the mythical figure who was condemned to push a stone up a hill over and over again. The same applied to reforms won through the ballot box. In the end, Luxemburg concluded that Bernstein was not simply arguing for a "more realistic" way to socialism, but had thrown out the prospect of socialism: That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage labor system but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself. Rather than diminish the importance of the struggle for reforms, Luxemburg