Luxemburg’s Revolutionary Wager

The collection represents a distinctive contribution to the growing literature by and about Luxemburg, contending that she made “a unique and precious contribution to theory of history, political philosophy, and Marxist epistemology.” This is because she was the first post-Marx Marxist to explicitly deny that socialism is the inevitable outcome of historical necessity. Luxemburg expressed this viewpoint most famously in “The Crisis in Social Democracy” of 1915 (also known as the Junius Pamphlet), declaring that the choice facing humanity is “socialism or barbarism.”

In holding that the revolutionary project is a kind of wager rather than a predetermined result, Luxemburg broke from the economic determinism and unilinear evolutionism that characterized the Marxism of her time. Social revolution, she held, involves “a choice between diverse objective possibilities [which] depends on the consciousness, on the will, and on the actions of human beings.” For Löwy, this challenged the “socialist variant of the ideology of inevitable progress that has dominated western thought since the Enlightenment.” He argues that Luxemburg’s position marked an original contribution to Marxian dialectics, even though she never engaged in a formal study of philosophy.

Löwy acknowledges that although Luxemburg “has the merit of being one of the few in the workers and socialist movements to challenge the ideology of Progress,” in the period before 1915, she also upheld the notion that capitalism will “inevitably” give way to socialism due to its objective contradictions. There were powerful reasons for this.

The Marxists of the time viewed the “anarchy of the market” as a defining principle of capitalism and socialism as the rational allocation of goods and services in a socially planned economy. Since the immanent laws of capitalist production promote the centralization of capital in fewer and fewer hands, they maintained, it follows that capitalism’s very trajectory provides the material basis for overcoming private ownership of the means of production and market anarchy.

Moreover, since the concentration and centralization of capital augments the socialization of labor, as massive numbers of workers are brought together in cooperative production, the laws of motion of capital itself engenders its dialectical negation — the resistance of a disenfranchised proletariat. Both reformist and revolutionary Marxists, to one degree or another, held that history was inexorably moving in a socialist direction. At issue was the question of how best to organize the proletariat for the seizure of power once the immanent contradictions of capitalism reached maturity.

False Binary

As Löwy shows, Luxemburg firmly held to this perspective before 1915. Her early work, such as Reform or Revolution, reiterated the view that “the anarchy of the capitalist system leads inevitably to its ruin.” And she often referred to social democracy as a “stimulant” that “hastens” the rise of socialism, which is ordained by historical necessity.

She had grounds for doing so, since her object of critique in Reform or Revolution — the “Revisionist” ideas of Eduard Bernstein — held that capitalism had overcome its proclivity for endemic crises. For Bernstein, this means that the case for socialism depends on a Kantian ought or ethical choice. This threatened to reduce socialism to a merely subjective or utopian wish, as it had been for radicals prior to Karl Marx.

Löwy correctly shows that Luxemburg never accepted the false binary that socialism is either the inevitable product of economically determined historical development or a moral or ethical choice. This is because she emphasized the “socioeconomic conditions that determine, in the last instance . . . socialism as an objective possibility.” Among these conditions is the class consciousness of the proletariat. In emphasizing the importance of the latter, Luxemburg’s pre-1915 writings went beyond the rigid determinism of many Marxists of the time, even though she still adhered to the view of a socialist future as an objective necessity.

This is especially evident from her writings on the Russian Revolution of 1905, all of which are now available in Volumes Three and Four of her Complete Works. As she wrote in 1906:

Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered . . . the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.

At the 1907 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, at a time when the Revolution seemed headed for defeat, she made the following argument:

I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever­ broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances. . . . But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat.

The notion that the Russian proletariat in economically “backward” Russia would serve as the vanguard force for the German (and indeed West European) workers’ movement was central to one of her most important works, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. While Karl Kautsky initially endorsed her approach, they had parted ways by 1910, when he decided the risk of losing votes in upcoming Reichstag elections meant that Luxemburg’s call to extend the mass strike from Russia to Germany had to be placed on the backburner.

Socialism or Barbarism

Löwy sees her break with Kautsky as an indication that “if one accepts the Kautskyan premise of the inevitability of socialism, it is difficult to escape a ‘waiting’ and passive political logic.” He defines Kautsky’s “entire worldview as the product of a marvelously successful fusion between the illuminist metaphysic of progress, social Darwinian evolutionism, and pseudo ‘orthodox Marxist’ determinism.’”

Nevertheless, for Löwy, “the definitive methodological rupture between Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky only produces itself in 1915, through the phrase ‘socialism or barbarism.’” Luxemburg experiences an intellectual crisis with the outbreak of World War I and the Second International’s capitulation to the national bourgeoisie. Her “optimistic fatalism,” Löwy observes, was “obviously quite shaken by the collapse of the Second International.”

As Luxemburg states in the Junius Pamphlet:

Friedrich Engels once said, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism” . . . Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. . . . Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization . . . or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.

For many years, readers of Luxemburg have searched for the source of Engels’s phrase “socialism or barbarism” (she did not provide one herself). Löwy takes its source to be Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which contains the following line: “If the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place.” However, this passage does not actually mention a choice between “socialism or barbarism” directly. Löwy suggests that, while Engels may have inspired Luxemburg, she was the first to take the concept seriously rather than deploy it as a rhetorical flourish.

Thanks to the work of Ian Angus, we now know the phrase does not come from Engels at all. It comes from Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Program (1892), which became one of the most widely read texts in the socialist movement of the time:

If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then humanity would be cut off from all further economic development. . . . As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or back into barbarism.

Since Luxemburg wrote the Junius Pamphlet from prison, it is understandable that her memory did not serve her well in recalling the source. But it is hardly insignificant that she refers to it as what “we have all probably read and repeated.”

If it is the case, as Angus notes, that “concepts and formulations in Kautsky’s book had become common currency in socialist circles,” how much of a break from the established orthodoxy did Luxemburg’s evocation of “socialism or barbarism” really represent? Since Kautsky first used the phrase and (according to Löwy) was the leading purveyor of “pseudo ‘orthodox Marxist’ determinism,” does it not follow that one can proclaim the choice between “socialism or barbarism” without fully breaking with historical or economic determinism?

Luxemburg on the Non-Western World

A particularly important aspect of this collection is that Löwy does not separate Luxemburg’s political writings from her economic ones — an approach that is all too rare in the secondary literature. The chapter on “Western Imperialism Against Primitive Communism: A New Reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s Economic Writings,” is an outstanding exploration of her appreciation of precapitalist indigenous communal formations and support for the “fierce resistance” waged by colonized peoples against colonialism and imperialism.

While Luxemburg famously opposed calls for national self-determination by subjected nationalities in Europe as a diversion from proletarian internationalism, she was a fervent opponent of colonialism and imperialism and supported the struggles of colonized peoples against it in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. In doing so, she engaged in extensive anthropological and ethnographic studies of indigenous communal formations in the non-Western world, praising them as superior in many respects to what characterizes capitalist modernity.

As Löwy observes:

According to her, the struggle of the indigenous populations against the imperial metropolis admirably manifests the tenacious resistance of the old communist traditions against the avid quest for profits brutally imposed by “Europeanization”. . . . Reading between the lines, one can discern here the idea of an alliance between the anticolonial struggle of the colonized peoples and the anticapitalist struggle of the modern proletariat as a revolutionary convergence between the old and the new communism.

This is further confirmed by a discovery made shortly after Löwy’s book went to press: an extensive number of articles by Luxemburg supporting anti-colonial struggles in sub-Saharan Africa. These appeared anonymously in 1904 in a Polish-language newspaper that she edited in Poznan, an area of predominantly Polish speakers that had been annexed to the German Empire.

While it has long been known that Luxemburg attacked Germany’s genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples of southwest Africa in The Accumulation of Capital and the Junius Pamphlet, it has only been recently discovered that virtually every issue of Gazeta Ludowa between January and June 1904 contained articles by her in support of the ongoing Nama and Herero revolt against German imperialism and revolts in Malawi, the Congo, and South Africa. The amount of material on Africa comes to about seventy-five book-length pages. Luxemburg clearly wanted the Polish proletarian to know about what was happening in Africa — and wanted them to extend solidarity to the victims of German colonialism.

Marx and Luxemburg

This perspective was inseparable from Luxemburg’s studies of the positive contributions of non-commodified and collective forms found in many precapitalist societies as well as noncapitalist societies of her day. Löwy points to her emphasis on the “resilience” of precapitalist communal formations as a “break with linear evolutionism, positivist progressivism, and all the banally ‘modernizing’ interpretations of Marxism that prevailed in her day.” He sees her as going further than Marx in this regard, since she placed greater emphasis on the harmful consequences of British colonization of India than Marx did in his writings of the early 1850s, which praised its modernizing tendencies.

Luxemburg did not know of Marx’s writings from the 1870s and ’80s on the non-Western world, so she was unaware that he had broken during this phase of his thinking with the unilinear evolutionism that marked the Communist Manifesto and his writings on India in the 1850s. Luxemburg studied some of the same writers as Marx in her research on non-Western societies (such as Lewis Morgan, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, and Maksim Kovalevsky), but she drew different conclusions than Marx from her reading of them.

For instance, she held that Indian society was feudalist, which Marx denied on the grounds that it is wrong to impose European categories onto a non-European context. And whereas Marx emphasized the persistence of indigenous communal formations in the face of colonial intrusion, she insisted that capitalism had an immediate destructive impact: “The encounter is deadly for the old society universally and without exception . . . tearing apart all traditional bonds and transforming the society in a short period of time into a shapeless pile of rubble.”

Marx states in his 1881 letters to Vera Zasulich and his 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto that Russia’s communal forms of working and owning the land, such as the mir and obshchina, could serve as the basis for a transition to communism that bypasses the capitalist stage of development. As Löwy notes, “On the topic of the Russian rural commune, Luxemburg’s view is much more critical than Marx.”

Luxemburg was surely familiar with Marx’s 1882 Preface, yet she never mentions it. She held to the end of her life that Russia needed to experience an extended period of capitalist development before it could arrive at socialism. As late as April 1917, at the very time when Vladimir Lenin posed a very different perspective in his April Theses, Luxemburg offered the following view:

Thus, the revolution in Russia has today defeated bureaucratic absolutism at the first attempt. However, this victory is not the end, but only a weak beginning . . . the once-awakened revolutionary energy of the Russian proletariat must, with equally inevitable historical logic, regain the path of radical democratic and social action and resume the program of 1905: a democratic republic, the eight-hour day, expropriation of large estates, etc.

In fact, nowhere does Luxemburg suggest that a precapitalist society can achieve a transition to socialism without undergoing the capitalist stage of development. In this sense, she held to aspects of the unilinear evolutionist and modernist progressivism that characterized the Marxism of her day.

Luxemburg and Organization

Löwy makes the intriguing claim that Luxemburg’s view “of the subjective factor, will, and consciousness” in the Junius Pamphlet led to a “real rapprochement” between her and Lenin on the question of organization after 1915, “in practice as in theory.” He attributes their earlier differences to Luxemburg “misunderstanding the Leninist theory of the party,” since in the period before 1914, she believed that “the fall of capitalism was inevitable and that the victory of the proletariat would be irresistible.”

This argument is questionable on two counts. First, in addition to her work in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Luxemburg was a leader of two highly disciplined parties, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, from 1893 to 1900 and the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), from 1900 to 1919; the latter group sought to affiliate with Lenin’s party in 1903. Hence, she can hardly be accused of underestimating the subjective factor of will and consciousness prior to 1915.

Second, since Löwy maintains that Luxemburg was the first to break with the notion of the inevitability of socialism in 1915, how could she have made “a real rapprochement” with Lenin’s concept of organization? By Löwy’s own reasoning, the Bolshevik leader formulated that concept in 1903 at a time when he adhered to the notion of the inevitability of socialism. Luxemburg did not need Lenin to know that a disciplined, pro-active, interventionist organization was needed to provide direction for mass struggles — that point was a given within the radical movements of the time.

This does not mean that Löwy is uncritical of Lenin. He underlines Luxemburg’s sharp differences with Lenin and Leon Trotsky over their suppression of democracy following the 1917 Revolution. He describes her critique of their suppression of freedom of the press, association, and assembly as

prophetic . . . without democratic liberties, the revolutionary praxis of the masses, popular self-education through experience, the self-emancipation of the oppressed, and the exercise of power by the working class are impossible.

He concludes that the Bolshevik leaders “involuntarily helped to create the golem that was to destroy them.” Clearly, the monopolization of state power by a single party (which by 1921 even banned internal factions) had a lot to do with that.

This is the critical issue, for the option of “socialism or barbarism” becomes all the more frightening if the effort to create socialism can itself bring forth a kind of barbarism, as did many a revolution in the twentieth century. The legacy of the many aborted and unfinished revolutions of the past century makes it vital to rethink the question of organization, rather than relying on concepts of organization that belong to a different era.

Luxemburg was of course deeply invested in such matters. She did not downplay the importance of organization in the name of spontaneity. This is clear from her tireless work on behalf of the SPD as well as her role as a leader of parties such as the SDKPiL in Poland. The latter was in some respects even more “Leninist” and centralist than Lenin’s party, but this was not because she opposed democratic forms of organization.

Rather, like the Bolsheviks, her party had to operate in an autocratic tsarist state, which necessitated illegal work, an underground existence, and centralized structures. However, she did not hold up that form of organization as a universal model that could apply to Western bourgeois democracies in which very different conditions prevailed. Nor did she presume that such a form would be adequate upon obtaining state power.

The problem of organization remains an unfinished one in the Marxist tradition, in large part because the wider task of rethinking what socialism means for today also remains unfinished. Hopefully, this remarkable collection of essays by a remarkable thinker will aid us with the rethinking needed to find our way out of the present contradictions we find ourselves in.