Welcome, friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the

economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

Today's program is devoted to a very old, a very perennial, and a very urgent topic for

right now. I'm talking about the debate, the struggle between reform and revolution.

Whenever societies are in stress, when basic problems have risen to the level of crises,

like now, but has often happened also in the past, this issue called, do we respond by

reform or do we respond by revolution comes to the fore.

About a hundred years ago, the leader of the German socialist movement, very strong

at that time as a movement, a Polish woman named Rosa Luxembourg wrote a famous pamphlet written, titled Reform

versus Revolution, because that was the issue in front of the socialists of her time, right after

the First World War in particular.

And it has resurfaced over and over again, and I'm talking about it with you because by

looking at how it's been in the past, we can understand how it has become yet again, right

now, the issue for us, you and me.

One place to start, and we could at many points, is American slavery.

You know, at the time of the American Civil War, middle of the 19th century. We had had a growing debate over the question

of slavery. The southern states allowed, provoked, paid for, embraced, endorsed slavery. And the northern states did not. And so the issue became

for everybody, what is our relationship to slavery? Now, of course, those who liked it, loved it,

particularly those in the South, who

eventually fought a civil war about it, were happy with slavery, wanted to keep slavery. I put

them to one side. They weren't involved in the debate over reform versus revolution because

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