Rosa Luxemburg & Marxist theory

Rosa Luxemburg: Barbarism and the Collapse of Capitalism

Norman Geras

‘Capitalism, by mightily furthering the development of the productive forces, and in virtue of its inherent contradictions, . . . provide(s) an excellent soil for the historical progress of society towards new economic and social forms.’ Rosa Luxemburg [1].

‘No medicinal herbs can grow in the dirt of capitalist society which can help cure capitalist anarchy.’ Rosa Luxemburg. [2]

‘In her work we see how the last flowering of capitalism is transformed into a ghastly dance of death.’ Georg Lukacs. [3]

Amongst the misconceptions by which Rosa Luxemburg’s thought has been deformed, the most widespread and tenacious is, without doubt, that which attributes to her a thesis going variously under the names of determinism, fatalism and spontaneism. [4] Any one of a number of her real or alleged views can be cited as the manifestation or consequence of this thesis: her emphasis on mass spontaneity; her underestimation of the importance of organization and of leadership; her belief that class consciousness is the simple and direct product of the class struggle of the masses. But what is generally regarded as its ultimate source and cited as definitive proof of its existence is her theory of capitalist breakdown, according to which the contradictions of capitalism must lead, eventually, but also automatically and inevitably, to its complete collapse. Now, there are problems about the very meaning of this notion of final collapse and these will be taken up later on. For the moment it suffices to record that its attribution to Luxemburg is perfectly well founded, for the notion is integral to her thought.

Thus, it is one of the major and recurring themes of her interventions in the great revisionist controversy at the turn of the century. During the ‘Bernstein debate’ which took place at the Hanover Congress of the spd in 1899, she argued that it was precisely ‘the concept of a breakdown, of a social catastrophe . . . a cataclysm’ that distinguished Marxism from reformist gradualism. [5] The same point was emphasized in her most important work of the period, Social Reform or Revolution, in which the theory of capitalist collapse was said to be ‘the cornerstone of scientific socialism’ and its meaning spelled out in the following terms: ‘Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible . . . the growing anarchy of capitalist economy lead(s) inevitably to its ruin.’ [6] All this was, of course, directed against the revisionist argument that capitalism had found, in such institutions as cartels, credit and democracy, the mechanisms of adaptation which, by mitigating capitalist contradictions, made revolution impossible and unnecessary. However, Luxemburg’s emphasis on inevitable capitalist breakdown cannot, on this account, be explained away as the result of polemical exaggeration on her part. A decade and a half later, in 1913, she published The Accumulation of Capital, her major contribution to Marxist political economy, and in it she tried to provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for the breakdown argument.

The Accumulation of Capital

The central contention of that work, briefly stated, is that in a closed capitalist economy, consisting of only capitalists and workers and without contact with non-capitalist social formations, the realization and capitalization of surplus-value, and hence the accumulation of capital, are impossible. The accumulation process demands access to the markets and the products of a non-capitalist environment, but the very same process progressively deprives itself of that environment by eroding all non-capitalist strata and forms and bringing them under the sway of purely capitalist relations. As Luxemburg puts it, ‘capitalism needs non-capitalist social organizations as the setting for its development, (but) it proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its own existence’. [7] The identification of this contradiction serves the double purpose of explaining the contemporary phenomenon of imperialism which is a ‘competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment’, [8] and of specifying the economic limit or term of capitalist society. The relentless logic of her position is that the accumulation of capital, and the attempt, by imperialism, to secure for it the non-capitalist consumers and products which make it possible, must lead eventually to a situation of ‘exclusive and universal domination of capitalist production in all countries and for all branches of industry’. Once this happens, there is no non-capitalist environment left: ‘Accumulation must come to a stop. The realization and capitalization of surplus value become impossible to accomplish . . . the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably, as an objective historical necessity.’ [9] Now, it is true that even in The Accumulation of Capital, where Luxemburg says almost nothing about the concrete forms of proletarian class struggle, this catastrophist vision is tempered by the qualification that the limit of capitalist accumulation is a theoretical one, which will never actually be reached; the revolt of the international working class against the rule of capital will pre-empt it. [10] Despite this qualification however, it remains the case for her that capitalist society has a purely economic limit in the specific sense that the dynamics of capitalist accumulation must lead to a point where it becomes an impossibility, where, with or without the revolt of the working class, it must inevitably collapse. As we shall see, there is no evidence to suggest that Luxemburg ever abandoned this view.

On the basis of it, and of an impermissible logical leap which simply equates the breakdown of capitalism with the creation of socialism, it is mere child’s play to construct a completely fatalist and allegedly Luxemburgist perspective on the revolutionary process. According to this, the laws of capitalist development inevitably issue in economic breakdown and socialist revolution, and the consequence and other face of this catastrophism is spontaneism, contempt for organization, contempt for leadership, and so on. The same inexorable economic laws which produce capitalist collapse also bring forth mass actions whose spontaneous power and dynamic are sufficient to solve all the political and tactical problems that arise. Taken strictly, this position amounts to the abolition of the need for theoretical work, for propaganda and agitation, for organization and for preparation for the conquest of political power. It amounts to the abolition, in short, of the political and ideological/theoretical dimensions of the struggle for socialism, since the activities (practices) specific to these are taken care of in the end by inexorable economic laws. The perspective, it is clear, is not only fatalist but also economist. That it was purveyed, as a representation of Luxemburg’s views, to the whole generation that witnessed the Stalinist destruction of revolutionary Marxism (and not only of that) is a fact which need not detain us for long. As early as 1925 it was quite clearly formulated by Ruth Fischer, whose contribution to the ‘Bolshevization’, i.e. Stalinization, of the Comintern included the attempt to eradicate from the German Communist Party the ‘syphilis bacillus’ that she took Luxemburg’s influence to be: ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation . . . is the fount of all errors, all theories of spontaneity, all erroneous conceptions of organizational problems.’ [11] What does require close attention, however, is the fact that though this kind of interpretation is the most grotesque caricature of Luxemburg’s views, as should be recognized by anyone with even passing familiarity with her work, it continues to lead a subterranean existence. It surfaces here and there with qualifications which are sometimes merely rhetorical and sometimes not, and it does so not only in contemporary socialist literature generally, but also in writing devoted specifically to the clarification of Luxemburg’s ideas—and even in the best of it. This indicates that the source of the misconception is located in a number of theoretical ambiguities and problems in her own work, and it can only be dispelled if these are resolved. At the same time, the attempt to resolve them is facilitated by a detailed scrutiny of the different forms of this misconception.

The Traditional Charge of Spontaneism

As a first approach, then, let us consider a few examples which cearly show the unhappy role which Luxemburg has been cast to play in socialist writing. In a recent critique of Luk`cs, Gareth Stedman Jones finds in his early work ‘a restatement of the old Luxemburgist and anarcho-syndicalist couplet, economism/spontaneism’, though Luxemburg is credited with a ‘more sophisticated version’ of this than is offered by Luk`cs. The grounds for comparison with Luxemburg are Luk`cs’ belief in the final economic collapse of capitalism that ushers in the socialist revolution and his attribution of the emergence of proletarian consciousness to the advent of full-scale economic crisis. [12] Lucio Magri, in a discussion of the revolutionary party, explains Luxemburg’s ‘spontaneist vision’ by reference to the same kinds of view, though he finds it ‘astonishing’ that she should have had this vision since several other of her views contradict it. What is actually astonishing in Magri’s case is the argument said by him definitively to separate Lenin from spontaneism: ‘The passage from capitalism to socialism was never for him an inevitable process, a fatality dictated by the objective forces of development within capitalist society. On the contrary, he argued that . . . in their spontaneous development they would merely lead to a crisis of civilization, a new Dark Age.’ [13] This argument is Rosa Luxemburg’s. Ernest Mandel, discussing the Leninist theory of organization, and basing himself not on the theory of capitalist collapse but on a single sentence from her polemic against Lenin in 1904, attributes to Luxemburg a conception according to which experience in struggle, in mass actions, is sufficient for the achievement of an adequate class consciousness and of the proletariat’s historical objectives; a conception which is counterposed by her to the need for consistent preparation and education of workers and for the formation and schooling of a proletarian vanguard. For her, according to Mandel, the revolutionary party ‘will be created by the revolutionary action of the masses’. He also says, however, that ‘the so-called theory of spontaneity . . . can be attributed to Luxemburg only with important reservations’. [14] The reservations do indeed turn out to be important: in a subsequent text devoted to analysing the unity and importance of Luxemburg’s activity and work—and which, it should be said, is an excellent contribution to that project of recovery—Mandel affirms that she was never guilty of the very conceptions (‘enfantillages’) attributed to her in his text on organization. [15]

It should be evident from all this that there is a problem about simply attaching the spontaneist label to Luxemburg, and hence the qualifications and contradictions which arise whenever she is used, negatively and polemically, as the convenient bearer of it. This use of her is problematic because, on reading her work, one is confronted at every turn with concepts and arguments which radically separate her Marxism from that determinist science of iron economic laws which is the usual foundation of fatalism and spontaneism. In order to begin to establish this, it is necessary to quote at length from writings scattered over a period of two decades, confining the exercise for the moment to statements of a very general kind. That they are not mere empty or rhetorical gestures on Luxemburg’s part, but founded, on the contrary, on concrete political and tactical conceptions which reduce the spontaneist/fatalist charge to nought, is a contention which cannot be developed here, but which we will endeavour to prove on another occasion.

The Necessity of Political Struggle

In Social Reform or Revolution which, as we have seen, insists on the inevitability of capitalist collapse, Luxemburg also argues that ‘the present procedure of the social democracy does not consist in waiting for the antagonisms of capitalism to develop and in passing on, only then, to the task of suppressing them. On the contrary, the essence of revolutionary procedure is to be guided by the direction of this development, once it is ascertained, and inferring from this direction what consequences are necessary for the political struggle.’ [16] The thought which is expressed ambiguously in this passage is reiterated, this time clearly, in a text on militarism which dates from the same period: ‘In relation to the military system Schippel doesn’t understand, just as Bernstein doesn’t understand in relation to capitalism as a whole, that society’s objective development merely gives us the preconditions of a higher level of development, but that without our conscious interference, without the political struggle of the working class for a socialist transformation or for a militia, neither the one nor the other will ever come about.’ [17] What these passages say, to anticipate somewhat, is that if the collapse of capitalism is ‘written’, as a blind fatality, in its objective economic antagonisms, the creation of socialism is not. The latter requires a conscious political struggle on the part of the working class.

Nor is this a working class without organization and leadership whose elemental power alone permits it to storm Heaven. Luxemburg’s mass strike pamphlet of 1906, which is often regarded as the seat of such a metaphysic, explicitly repudiates it: ‘The social democrats are the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. They cannot and dare not wait, in a fatalist fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the “revolutionary situation” . . . they must now, as always, hasten the development of things and endeavour to accelerate events.’ Though it is not in the party’s power to actually create a revolutionary situation, ‘what it can and must do is to make clear the political tendencies, when they once appear, and to formulate them as resolute and consistent tactics.’ [18] Putting this in a nutshell, Luxemburg wrote in 1915: ‘Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party like the social democracy.’ [19]

Two more passages will suffice to complete the general point being made here. They also date from 1915. The first, which measures Social Democracy’s capitulation to the First World War against what it supposedly stood for in the preceding decades, may be regarded as Luxemburg’s own ‘thesis on Feuerbach’: ‘Just as in Marx himself the roles of acute historical analyst and bold revolutionary, the man of ideas and the man of action were inseparably bound up, mutually supporting and complementing each other, so for the first time in the history of the modern labour movement the socialist teachings of Marxism united theoretical knowledge with revolutionary energy, the one illuminating and stimulating the other. Both are in equal measure part of the essence of Marxism; each, separated from the other, transforms Marxism into a sad caricature of itself.’ Put to the test by an event it had foreseen, Social Democracy proved itself unwilling and unable, on the basis of that understanding, actually to make history. [20]

The second passage is the much quoted one from The Junius Pamphlet. It is cited here again at such length because the argument being pursued turns upon it: ‘Man does not make history of his own volition, but he makes history nevertheless. The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of [maturity] to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat; it is in the same measure its driving force and its cause as well as its product and its effect. And though we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it . . . The final victory of the socialist proletariat . . . will never be accomplished, if the burning spark of the conscious will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development. Socialism will not fall as manna from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of powerful struggles, in which the proletariat, under the leadership of the social democracy, will learn to take hold of the rudder of society to become instead of the powerless victim of history, its conscious guide. Friedrich Engels once said: “Capitalist society faces a dilemma, either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism” [21] . . . We stand today, as Friedrich Engels prophesied more than a generation ago, before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, against its methods, against war. This is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat. Upon it depends the future of culture and humanity.’ [22]

Socialism or barbarism! This affirmation of an historical alternative, of an outcome still to be decided and in genuine doubt, is no mere passing thought on Luxemburg’s part. She repeated it many times and in the last months of her life, during the German Revolution, she wrote it into the proclamations, and into the very programme, of the Spartacus League. [23]

The Persistent Problem of Fatalism

Yet, the simple rehearsal of all this far from settles everything, as some of the interpretative literature on Luxemburg suggests that it might. For example, Cliff, who makes reference to it in order to justify the assertion that Luxemburg’s ‘non-fatalistic’ perspective did not presuppose the inevitability of socialism, shows no awareness that certain aspects of her work might render the demonstration, rather than assertion, of this point problematic. [24] Others are more sensitive to the existence of such a problem, but only in the sense that they transfer it from her work into their own, reproduce it rather than solve it. Thus, Frölich’s book emphatically acquits her of fatalism, objectivism and spontaneism, [25] but refers at the same time to her conviction of the inevitability and historical necessity of socialism, this being the only possible issue of certain capitalist collapse. [26] A passing allusion to ‘the dialectical character of historical necessity’ is hardly a satisfactory resolution, more especially since the meaning Frölich gives this is that human activity affects only the ‘more or less rapid’ fulfilment of what are in any case ‘iron laws of historical development.’ [27] Similarly, Howard argues that for Luxemburg socialism is a necessity, the result of ‘an internally self-contradictory system which must eventually break down and lead to a revolutionary transformation’; [28] but it is not a ‘metaphysical’ or ‘mechanical’ necessity, and her view is contrasted with that dominant in the spd, ‘a non-dialectical, determinist view of the world which argued that socialism was objectively necessary’. [29]

The intention here is not to make cheap debating points at the expense of writers the value of whose work in rescuing Luxemburg’s ideas from distortion and misunderstanding is beyond question. It is simply to point to an unsettled difficulty in their work and terminology, one which reflects an identical difficulty in hers. Prima facie at least there may appear to be a contradiction between her political economy, which predicates automatic capitalist collapse on a simple economic mechanism, namely, the eventual impossibility of accumulation, and the resolute refusal, embodied in her political activity and theory, to countenance any form of economism or to wait for that economic process to work itself out. This contradiction, it will be shown, is more apparent than real. But if some have taken it for real, concluding either that the refusal is only a gesture which masks a basically economistic conception, or that between her political economy and her political theory there is a gulf which cannot be bridged, there are certain ambiguous formulations in Luxemburg’s work which explain why they might have done so. In these she gives expression to her revolutionary optimism, to her confidence in the victory of socialism, by speaking of the creation of socialism and the collapse of capitalism in the same terms, assimilating the one to the other as if they were the same thing, determined by the same economic laws and both equally inevitable or necessary. If there is anything which can be said to mask the meaning of Luxemburg’s work, it is formulations such as these. In any case, it would be tendentious to ignore their existence, and so a few examples, drawn again from writings which cover a period of twenty years, will be cited.

In her contribution to the debate over revisionism, in propounding her theory of accumulation, and in defending that theory against its critics, Luxemburg insisted that socialism was an ‘historical necessity’. [30] She argued: in 1899, that the ‘inevitability’ of proletarian victory was demonstrated by scientific socialism; in 1915, that the same thing was ‘assured’ by the ‘inexorable laws of history’; and at the end of 1918, that it was ‘guaranteed’ by the ‘prepotent law of historical determinism’. [31] Finally, the elision or reduction on which such statements were based is evident when she speaks, in 1899, of ‘the inevitability of [capitalist] collapse, leading—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—to socialism’; [32] or when she asserts, in 1915, that ‘the rebellion of the workers, the class struggle, is only the ideological reflection of the objective historical necessity of socialism, resulting from the objective impossibility of capitalism at a certain economic stage’; [33] or when she argues, in 1918, that ‘it is the objective insolubility of the tasks confronting bourgeois society that makes socialism an historical necessity and the world revolution inevitable’. [34] That these formulations mask rather than present Luxemburg’s meaning, we will now proceed to show by examining and rebutting two attempts to cope with the contradiction to which they give rise.

The Coherence of Luxemburg

The first attempt is that of the late Peter Nettl, and is succinctly resumed in the following judgement: ‘Rosa Luxemburg always postulated failure as an alternative to the successful resolution of the dialectic; chaos or defeat could engulf the emerging society. There was nothing inevitable or automatic about her doctrine—provided one does not rely on The Accumulation of Capital alone.’ [35] In other words, for Nettl, there is indeed a contradiction in Luxemburg’s work between the affirmation and denial of determinism, the theory of accumulation and collapse being identified as the site of the first, while the socialism-or-barbarism formula is regarded as at least one indication of the second. In order to make some sense of this contradiction, he simply drives a wedge between The Accumulation of Capital and the rest of Luxemburg’s writings and activities. The former was the product of purely theoretical preoccupations concerning Marx’s reproduction schemes in Volume II of Capital, [36] and the economic explanation of imperialism which it ‘incidentally’ provided had ‘no obvious connection’ with her political writings on the same subject. These two aspects of her work were ‘kept in separate compartments’ and there is no evidence to suggest that she ever tried to relate the theoretical economic analysis to her concrete political concerns. Had she done so, this would indeed have meant ‘a propensity to spontaneity and objective automatism, only mitigated by the specific recommendations to action’. And the most likely explanation as to why she did not do so is a tactical one: she wished to avoid justifying the kind of theory of spontaneity and political inaction of which she was later accused. [37] In short, the contradiction exists in Luxemburg’s work, but one of its terms is consigned to The Accumulation of Capital and that work itself is tucked away in the closet of her exclusively theoretical concerns. On the part of an author who devoted long and arduous labour to the most detailed study of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work, this judgement constitutes a failure of perception bordering on the fantastic. Each of its arguments is demonstrably false.

In the first place, there is an obvious connection between the economic explanation of imperialism and her political writings on the same subject, sufficiently obvious at any rate to have been noticed by a fair number of her readers. [38] The economic analysis claimed to lay bare the roots of those phenomena, such as colonialism, militarism, tariffs, the collapse of bourgeois liberalism, etc, to which Luxemburg’s political writings of the period repeatedly and urgently drew attention in an effort to alert the spd against the danger they represented and to mobilize it against them. [39] Secondly, there is evidence that Luxemburg, aware of the connection, related the theoretical analysis of accumulation to her concrete political concerns. The Anti-Critique, written in prison in 1915 in defence of that analysis, begins with a brief recapitulation of it and then continues in the following unambiguous terms: ‘At first glance it may appear to be a purely theoretical exercise. And yet the practical meaning of the problem is at hand—the connection with the most outstanding fact of our time: imperialism. The typical external phenomena of imperialism: competition among capitalist countries to win colonies and spheres of interest, opportunities for investment, the international loan system, militarism, tariff barriers, the dominant role of finance capital and trusts in world politics, are all well known. Its connection with the final phase of capitalism, its importance for accumulation, are so blatantly open that it is clearly acknowledged by its supporters as well as its enemies. But Social Democracy refuses to be satisfied with this empirical knowledge. It must search for the precise economic rules behind appearances, to find the actual roots of this large and colourful complex of imperialist phenomena. As always in these cases, only precise theoretical knowledge of the problem at its roots can provide our practical struggle against imperialism with security, aim and force—essential for the politics of the proletariat.’ [40]

Thirdly, Luxemburg felt perfectly able to make the connection for which Nettl claims there is no evidence, because, so far from fearing that to do so would be to justify a policy of inaction, she saw her theory of accumulation and collapse in the opposite light. It gave firm foundation to a stance of revolutionary opposition to imperialism and rendered utopian the hopes of the spd ‘centre’ that disarmament, a peaceful federation of democratic states, a more moderate imperialism, might be achieved by alliance with the bourgeoisie. In this view she was confirmed by the hostile reception accorded to The Accumulation of Capital by the theoretical representatives of that political tendency. [41] Fourthly and crucially: independent of Luxemburg’s own judgement on it, in which she may after all have been wrong, the theoretical analysis of that book provides no basis for spontaneism and ‘objective automatism’. This last point can be demonstrated by considering the precise significance of the socialism-or-barbarism formula.

We now summarize the argument of the one text to have focused on the importance of this formula, and to have done so with a degree of analytical rigour which is rare in the literature dealing with Luxemburg’s relation to spontaneism and economism. Michael Lowy has argued recently [42] that the same optimistic and passive fatalism which was the central axis of Kautsky’s vision of the world and dominant in the spd’s theory and practice, represented a ‘temptation’ in Luxemburg’s thought prior to the outbreak of the First World War. In her opposition to Bernstein’s attempt to base the struggle for socialism not on the objective contradictions of capitalism but on timeless moral principles like justice (his invocation of Kant against cant), [43] she gave expression to this temptation in a number of arguments. Lowy refers to those in Social Reform or Revolution according to which the anarchy of capitalist economy leads inevitably to its ruin, its insoluble contradictions to inevitable collapse, and in which the class consciousness of the proletariat is said to be the simple intellectual reflection of these contradictions and of this imminent breakdown. [44] Even Luxemburg’s refusal to countenance the purely passive tactic of waiting does not escape from a fatalist frame of reference since it is formulated in terms of accelerating a process which is in any case unilinear and inevitable, and in which therefore the conscious political intervention of a revolutionary party can only be an auxiliary, and not strictly necessary, element. [45] That all this was only a temptation in Luxemburg’s thought in this period can be seen from her dissatisfaction, after 1905, with the purely parliamentary tactic, from her polemic, after 1910, against the endorsement of it in Kautsky’s so-called strategy of ‘attrition’, and from her long struggle within the spd for the adoption of the mass strike orientation. But though these positions helped to put some distance between her and any full-blown fatalist problematic, it was only when the catastrophe of 4 August 1914 destroyed her conviction in the irresistible necessity of the advent of socialism that she broke definitively with it.

And that break, Lowy argues, was expressed in The Junius Pamphlet, in the slogan ‘socialism or barbarism’. Its importance, according to him, hinges not on the content or meaning of the term ‘barbarism’ but on the very principle of an historical alternative: ‘What is important, theoretically decisive in the formula is not “barbarism” but “socialism or . . . . ’.” [46] That is to say, there is not one direction of development, there are several, and the role of the proletariat under the leadership of its party is not simply to accelerate the historical process but to decide it. Socialism is not the inevitable product of iron economic laws but an ‘objective possibility’ defined by the socio-economic conditions of capitalism. In the actualization of that possibility, the subjective factor, the conscious political intervention of the proletariat, is the decisive, and not an auxiliary, element. Thus, it is only in 1915, according to Lowy, that Luxemburg’s thought becomes truly coherent and escapes from the logic of political passivity implicit in the belief in the inevitability of socialism. [47]

Socialism and Barbarism

Lowy’s argument, in both its merits and its mistakes, conducts us to the threshold of a solution to the problem under discussion. By its clear and rigorous definition of the problem, it correctly identifies the significance of the socialism-or-barbarism formula: the possibility which it offers of giving coherent foundation to a non-fatalist, non-economistic and revolutionary Marxism. At the same time, while to the best of our knowledge that formula makes its first appearance in Luxemburg’s writings in The Junius Pamphlet in 1915, there are grounds for scepticism concerning the periodization of her work which Lowy uses that fact to support. First: not a single one of the formulations and arguments cited by him as evidence of a fatalist temptation in Luxemburg’s thought before 1915 disappears from her writings after that date. Reference has already been made to the category of assertion which, before and after 1915, predicates the necessity of socialism on inexorable laws and reduces the proletarian class struggle to an epiphenomenon of economic contradictions and of incipient capitalist collapse; indeed one such reference was to The Junius Pamphlet itself. [48] Again, in the very passage from that work on which Lowy’s argument turns, the socialism-or-barbarism formula sits happily beside the argument that it is in the proletariat’s power ‘to accelerate or to retard’ historical development. [49] Further, the theory of inevitable capitalist collapse, as has already been said, is not confined to Luxemburg’s interventions in the revisionist controversy. On the contrary, it received extensive theoretical elaboration in The Accumulation of Capital in 1913, was vigorously defended against criticism in the Anti-Critique in 1915, and was reaffirmed in the Introduction to Political Economy which she began to prepare for publication in prison in 1916 (but which was never, in fact, published in her lifetime). [50]

Secondly and conversely: in Luxemburg’s writings before the First World War there is no shortage of formulations which play the same role as the slogan, ‘socialism or barbarism’, by insisting that the conscious political action of the proletariat is indispensable to the creation of socialism. One of these, dating from 1899, has already been mentioned: without the conscious political struggle of the working class the socialist transformation will ‘never come about’, since the objective development of capitalist society provides its preconditions only. [51] To this may be added the argument of Social Reform or Revolution that socialism will be the consequence not only of ‘the growing contradictions of capitalist economy’, but also of ‘the comprehension by the working class of the unavoidability of the suppression of these contradictions through a social transformation’, also of ‘the increased organization and consciousness of the proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming revolution’. [52] And to that may be added the following argument of 1903: ‘The socialist revolution can only be completed by the working class . . . only the mass struggle, the organization of the proletariat and its enlightenment can bring about the conditions necessary for the future society.’ [53]

The temptation of (propensity to) fatalist economism, if it exists at all, can no more be confined to the pre-war writings than it can to The Accumulation of Capital. The break, if it exists at all, between that temptation on the one hand and activist revolutionary politics on the other, runs throughout Luxemburg’s life and work from beginning to end in the shape of a logical contradiction. The fact of the matter is, however, that neither the one nor the other does exist, and this fact emerges if we pay closer attention, in the socialism-or-barbarism formula, to the content of the alternative to socialism it postulates, to the meaning of ‘barbarism’, rather than just to the formal principle of there being an alternative. For what then becomes apparent is that the idea of inevitable capitalist collapse and the idea of socialism-or-barbarism, the two ideas which Nettl and Lowy, and the literature on Luxemburg more generally, regard as contradictory, opposing them to one another as representatives, respectively, of fatalism and activism—that these two ideas, so far from being contradictory, are not even different. They are one and the same idea. For Luxemburg, ‘barbarism’ signifies nothing other than the collapse of capitalism. Before substantiating this assertion with textual evidence which is conclusive, it is worth spelling out its implications.

The equation of barbarism and capitalist collapse entails that the first like the second is the spontaneous and necessary product of internal economic contradictions, and that it is not socialism but barbarism that is inevitable; a conclusion which may appear paradoxical in a revolutionary M if it is taken to suggest the impossibility of socialism. However the paradox disappears if we conceive the collapse of capitalism, as Luxemburg undoubtedly did conceive it, as a process of which both the forms and the end result are a species of barbarism. In that event, though the process is indeed unavoidable, it remains an open question whether it will be allowed to run its course down to the last barbaric consequences (and we shall see what this means in a moment), or whether, on the other hand, it will be halted in its early stages by the conscious political intervention of the working class which will prevent the impending catastrophe, by abolishing the contradictions which lead toward it and creating a socialist society. For Luxemburg, therefore, what the inevitability of capitalist collapse proves is not the redundancy, but the urgent indispensability, of conscious revolutionary struggle on the part of the working class. It is because of that inevitability, and not despite it, that such a struggle is required. It is also because of that inevitability that Luxemburg can meaningfully speak of there being an alternative to socialism. For what else, other than catastrophe, could that alternative be? The indefinite existence of capitalism? Some new form of class domination? Not a line in her work so much as hints at a belief in such possibilities. The whole breakdown theory gives sense to the slogan ‘socialism or barbarism’, distinguishing it from mere rhetoric; it is its meaning and not, as has so often been supposed, its negation.

The Meaning of the Collapse of Capitalism

Apart from the connotations of cruelty it carries, barbarism, as any dictionary will tell you, is a condition of being uncivilized and uncultured. If we take that literally, and eschew the usage according to which civilizations and cultures which are simply other and alien are labelled barbarian, then barbarism can only mean the complete absence of culture and civilization . . . total social breakdown, chaos. That is Luxemburg’s meaning. As Nettl himself has perceptively noted, ‘The continuity of chaos as a looming alternative to dialectical progress . . . strangely resembles the chronological continuity of the state of nature menacing “failed” societies in Hobbes’s Leviathan.’ [54] But that same chaotic condition is also the end point of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism if the proletarian revolution does not intercede to prevent its being reached. At the same time, even before it is reached, the forms taken by the process of collapse are sufficiently disruptive and destructive to count, for Luxemburg, as incipient forms of barbarism. That none of this is an arbitrary imputation to Luxemburg can now be shown by citing the relevant texts from her work. We will quote, first, some passages from her political writings which deal ostensibly with barbarism, then, some passages from her economic writings which deal with the collapse of capitalism. The solidarity between them is evident and leaves no room for doubt.

1. ‘What does a “reversion to barbarism” mean at the present stage of European civilization? . . . This world war means a reversion to barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence . . . the destruction of all culture . . . depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery.’

‘Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics—as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity—so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.’ [55]

‘The imperialist phase of the rule of capitalism has indeed made peace illusory by actually declaring the dictatorship of militarism—war—to be permanent.’

‘Either world war to the verge of universal ruin or proletarian revolution—imperialism or socialism.’

‘Humanity is faced with this alternative: dissolution and decline into capitalist anarchy or rebirth through social revolution.’

‘The world war has faced society with this alternative: either continuation of capitalism, new wars and an early decline into chaos and anarchy, or the abolition of capitalist exploitation.’ [56]

‘Our solution offers the only means of saving human society from destruction . . . . Today mankind is faced with two alternatives: It may perish amid chaos; or it may find salvation in socialism.’ [57]

2. ‘The more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilizations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. Though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe.’

‘Capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions.’

‘The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world . . . the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer.’ [58]

‘Expansion has accompanied the entire history of capitalism and in its present, final, imperialist phase, it has adopted such an unbridled character that it puts the whole civilisation of mankind in question.’

‘Imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure. The expansion of capital, which for four centuries had given the existence and civilization of all non-capitalist peoples in Asia, Africa, America and Australia over to ceaseless convulsions and general and complete decline, is now plunging the civilized peoples of Europe itself into a series of catastrophes whose final result can only be the decline of civilization or the transition to the socialist mode of production. Seen in this light, the position of the proletariat with regard to imperialism leads to a general confrontation with the rule of capital. The specific rules of its conduct are given by that historical alternative.’ [59]

‘Marx . . . discovered how these same laws regulating the present economy work towards its collapse, by the increasing anarchy which more and more endangers the very existence of society itself, by assembling a chain of devastating economic and political catastrophes . . . . The inherent tendencies of capitalist development, at a certain point of their maturity, necessitate the transition to a planful mode of production consciously organized by the entire working force of society—in order that all of society and human civilisation might not perish in the convulsions of uncontrolled anarchy . . . Socialism becomes a historic necessity, because it is a result of the operation of the very laws of capitalist development.’ [60]

When Luxemburg was condemned by Otto Bauer for offering a conception of capitalist collapse which placed the whole emphasis on ‘the mechanical impossibility of realizing surplus value’ and none on the action of the ‘educated, united and organized’ working class, she contemptuously repudiated the charge. [61] In the light of the preceding argument and the above documentation, one can see that both the charge and its repudiation are well founded. Bauer was referring to the thesis, which is unquestionably there, that the approaching impossibility of accumulation, in itself and quite regardless of the dispositions of the working class, spelled doom for capitalist society. Luxemburg, for her part, was referring to the contention that the catastrophic nature of this process was such as to make the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat a task of utmost urgency. And this, in terms of the argument here being made, is the essential point. For, if it is true that she subscribed to a theory of capitalist breakdown based ultimately on the postulation of purely economic disequilibria, and in that sense economist, it is also true that this did not serve as the springboard toward what is more usually understood by ‘economism’: the denigration or underestimation of theory and ideological combat, of political organization and leadership, uncritical faith in the power of ‘spontaneity’, etc. It did not because it could not, the collapse of capitalism and the creation of socialism not being identified in Luxemburg’s mind. ‘Left to itself’, capitalism in collapse could no more become an authentic socialist society than can a patch of ground, barren through neglect, become a field of wheat. Capitalism could not become socialism by the dynamic of its economic laws alone. What it offered was some preconditions and a threat and it required a concerted initiative on the part of the proletarian historical agent to put the first to good use and to pre-empt the second.

The Concept of a Historical Alternative

If this is so, how can one account for the fact that Luxemburg did sometimes speak of revolutionary political initiatives as the mere accelerators of a unilinear process, of socialist revolution as simply the other face of capitalist collapse, of socialism as an historical necessity or inevitability? That such formulations are ambiguous is a point which has already been conceded and there can be no question of trying to explain them all away. Nevertheless, at the risk of special pleading, some considerations may be offered in extenuation. First, this kind of terminology was the common language of all Marxists of the period, from Kautsky through to Lenin, [62] a usage which in no way abolished the real differences between them with regard to revolutionary politics.

Secondly, these statements may have a psychological meaning. They may reflect Luxemburg’s confidence in the ability of the proletariat to wage its class struggle to a successful conclusion, her revolutionary optimism that, in view of the alternative, they would surely do so, her faith in the victory of socialism. But such psychological qualities, essential to some degree in every revolutionary, are by themselves not equivalent to the theoretical conception according to which socialist revolution, as the product of inexorable economic laws, is beyond the power of human beings either to prepare or to prevent (Kautsky dixit), [63] which is as good as saying it is ordained by God. As Lelio Basso has put it: ‘Until her last breath, Rosa Luxemburg had faith in the victory of socialism, but she never grew tired of repeating that this victory would not be a matter of destiny, but the result of a stubborn and conscious battle on the part of the masses.’ [64]

Thirdly, the last cited passage from Luxemburg’s work should in itself serve as sufficient warning that the mere presence in a text of formulations of this kind does not justify the imputation of fatalism. There it is written, black on white, that socialism is an historical necessity, the result of the very laws of capitalist development, because there is an alternative to it. What ‘necessitates’ it, i.e. makes it the indispensable means toward further historical progress, is the danger of universal ruin. There is more than one kind of necessity under the sun. Again, when Luxemburg speaks of revolutionary action as a way of accelerating a course of development which is in any case objectively in progress, she expresses ambiguously what is expressed perfectly adequately elsewhere in her work: namely, the view that Marxism fuses an interpretative theory, or science, of objective laws with the revolutionary energy and will, which, on the basis of that theory, attempts actually to change the world. The first divorced from the second, the theory from the practice, is not Marxism but a ‘sad caricature’, a ‘miserable, rotten parody’, of it. [65] This is recognizably the problematic of the Theses on Feuerbach and, as such, definitively distinct from any mechanistic conception of history.

In short, to accept at their face value the formulations in question, inferring from them, and against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Luxemburg’s Marxism is economist, fatalist, spontaneist, is to denature the sense of her work. The conclusion of the foregoing argument is aptly summed up in the words, again, of Lelio Basso whose merit, unique to the best of our knowledge, is not only to have grasped the point (others have done that) but also to have expressed it clearly: ‘When Rosa Luxemburg spoke of socialism as a historical necessity, she did not mean that she considered it a fatality.’ [66] The judgement is borne out by these words from the last speech of her life: ‘Socialism . . . [is] a historical necessity. Socialism is inevitable, not merely because proletarians are no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but further because if the proletariat fails to fulfil its duties as a class, if it fails to realize socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom.’ [67]

In order to arrive at this conception in its broadest and most general lines, we have had to concern ourselves with the negative and preliminary task of clearing away the misunderstandings surrounding Luxemburg’s breakdown theory which obscure it. At a later date we shall undertake the more positive task of trying to illuminate the political concepts which define its content and make Luxemburg’s rejection of the views with which she has so often been charged more than an abstract gesture. By way of conclusion here, we offer some observations on Luxemburg’s notion of catastrophe.

The Contradictions of Imperialist Development

‘Proudhon . . . would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad . . . . For him the dialectical movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad . . . . What constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides.’ Karl Marx. [68]

‘There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century . . . . On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.’ Karl Marx. [69]

It is beyond the purpose of this essay to pass judgement on the technical analysis which informs Luxemburg’s theory of capitalist collapse. As far as we are competent to determine, it does seem to rest on a number of wrong assumptions concerning Marx’s schemes of reproduction. Regardless of the economic analysis which founds it, however, it is not easy to make sense of the thesis that, independent of the struggle of the working class, capitalist economic relations must reach a point where their continued existence ceases to be possible, that capitalist society must then fall apart beyond all hope of repair. Such an idea, which has meaning with regard to a mechanical contraption or architectural structure, is misguided when applied to a set of social relations. [70] The same goes for the apocalyptic vision, implicit in that idea, of the end of civilization and of society itself. No doubt, the prospect of nuclear and/or ecological catastrophe may, today, be invoked to lend that vision plausibility. But at any point short of extinction human society of one kind or another will oppose its imperatives to the putative threat of the void. Even the situation of endemic war, and of insoluble economic and political crises, which Luxemburg envisaged as the imperialist alternative to socialism, constitutes a mode of social existence with its own cultural forms, and not just irredeemable chaos.

That said, however, it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the socialism-or-barbarism formula as the product of a fevered imagination. For, it represents the extrapolation to its logical limit, ad absurdum, of something which is true and important, and which separates Marxism from all the philosophies of pure progress with which it has been confused. And that something is: the profoundly and inescapably contradictory nature of the whole of capitalist development. Imperialism, for Luxemburg, is not just the unbridled militarism and violence which allows her to speak of barbarism even before capitalism reaches its point of final collapse; it is also, as has already been said, the historical basis and material precondition of socialism. [71] Capitalism, throughout its course, is not only a series of technological and cultural achievements, an extension of political liberties and rights; it is also exploitation and repression, force, deceit and murder. [72] Luxemburg’s perception of this is not limited to the innocent registration of an empirical fact, to the chronicling of an historical record. It is theoretically reflected in her conception of the very nature of capitalism, as the following quotation bears witness: ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the capitalist order that within it all the elements of the future society first assume, in their development, a form not approaching socialism but, on the contrary, a form moving more and more away from socialism . . . . Exactly because capitalist development moves through these contradictions . . . must the proletariat seize political power and suppress completely the capitalist system . . . social democracy [does not attempt] the futile task of picking for itself all the good sides of history and rejecting the bad sides of history . . . Capitalism furnishes besides the obstacles also the only possibilities of realizing the socialist program.’ [73] To those like Bernstein, who wanted to free Marxism from its ‘dialectical scaffolding’, retaining only the emphasis on ‘the growth of social wealth and of the social productive forces, in conjunction with general social progress’, [74] capitalism is only recognizable in its good sides. The bad sides are arbitrary excrescences, warts on an otherwise lovely face. They are not integral to the existence of capitalism, and general social progress will in time remove them, or, more weakly, there is no reason in principle to prevent one thinking that they could be removed, to produce a ‘pure’, peaceful and democratic capitalist society. Those who nourish or purvey this hope have a long time to wait—‘roughly until the sun burns out’ to borrow a phrase used by Luxemburg in a different context.

The Limits of Capital

The celebrated contradiction between forces and relations of production is not fully understood if it is conceived, mechanistically, to refer only to a late or mature stage of capitalist development. Capitalist relations of production, on this conception, are progressive for a period because they foster the development of the productive forces; then, a point in time is reached when they cease to do this, act as fetters on the productive forces, come into conflict with them; only then does the contradiction arise. Making all due allowance for the truth expressed in this conception—that the achievements of capitalism are historically progressive and the essential pre-requisite for socialism—it is misleading, to say the least. For, this contradiction arises with the very origins of capitalism and is expressed in the fact that each of the latter’s achievements, so long as it continues to serve capitalist ends, is double-edged. The advent of machinery was not an unmixed blessing to those who lived its effects; no more is technical innovation to the labouring population of contemporary capitalist societies. The scientific and technological development unleashed by capitalist society has provided not only increased forces of production and liberation but also new modes of destruction and oppression. It is sufficient to name them to uncover the ‘rational kernel’ in Luxemburg’s vision of barbarism: gas chambers, nuclear weapons and napalm, ‘scientific’ methods of interrogation and torture, the free fire zone and the strategic hamlet. Capitalist society is not only parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, but fascist dictatorship and police terror. All of which spells something other than unalloyed progress. If the limit of capitalism is a point in time, the point when its (living) victims will destroy it, it is equally something carried within that social order from its very inception—a congenital incapacity to subordinate its undoubted achievements to the needs of human beings; the human misery suffered and still being suffered; the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated and still being perpetrated in pursuance of its ends: exploitation and profit.

For this reason, it is quite incorrect to oppose to one another, as alternative characterisations of capitalism, the view that it is ‘just the most recent form [of] slavery, in a broad sense of the word’, and the view that it represents ‘a progress’, an important ‘accretion of dignity, freedom and welfare for the masses of the people’. [75] Insofar as exploitation and the apparatus for its maintenance are realities, it is the first, and in so far as the rule of law, trade unions, social security, better material and cultural standards, etc, where these things exist at all, represent significant gains, it is also the second. If to hold the first view to the exclusion of the second is to ‘slur’ the hard-won achievements of the masses, then to hold the second to the exclusion of the first is to belittle their continued sufferings. Finally, the socialist revolution is neither simply ‘a rupture with’, nor simply ‘a continuation of’, all earlier human history. It is, in one and the same moment, or rather historical epoch, both the one and the other. It is of little account whether we borrow from Hegel and call it an Aufhebung, or whether, following countless lesser talents, we say: in certain relevant respects it is a continuation, in other relevant respects it is a rupture.

What is of some account is that we should not, blinded by capitalist progress, succumb to the religious and quasi-religious visions which make good present and past suffering by reference to future release from them. ‘Even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in pain.’ [76]

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[1] R. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, London, 1963, p. 271.

[2] ‘Speech to the Stuttgart Congress (1898)’, Howard, p. 42.

[3] G. Luk`cs, History and Class Consciousness, London, 1971, pp. 32–3.

[4] This essay forms part of a longer work, currently in progress, on the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. Most of the references are to three recent English collections of her political writings, namely: M.-A. Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970); D. Howard (ed.), Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1971); R. Looker (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings (Jonathan Cape, London, 1972). These are referred to herein as Waters, Howard and Looker respectively.

[5] ‘Speech to the Hanover Congress (1899)’, Howard, pp. 48–9.

[6] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, pp. 83, 39.

[7] The Accumulation of Capital, p. 366.

[8] Ibid., p. 446.

[9] Ibid., p. 417.

[10] Ibid., pp. 417, 446, 467.

[11] J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols, London, 1966, Vol. 2, pp. 533, 800–1, 805–6.

[12] G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Marxism of the Early Luk`cs: an Evaluation’, New Left Review, No. 70, Nov./Dec. 1971, pp. 50–1.

[13] L. Magri, ‘Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolutionary Party’, New Left Review, No. 60, March/April 1970, pp. 107–8, 105.

[14] E. Mandel, The Leninist Theory of Organisation, London, 1971, pp. 6–7, 24, 8.

[15] E, Mandel, ‘Rosa et la social-démocratie allemande’, Quatrième Internationale, No. 48, March 1971, p. 18.

[16] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, p. 60.

[17] ‘Militia and Militarism’, Howard, p. 144; last emphasis added.

[18] ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Waters, pp. 200, 205.

[19] ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, p. 311.

[20] ‘Rebuilding the International’, Looker, p. 209. A similar passage, dating from 1907, is cited in L. Basso, ‘Rosa Luxemburg: the Dialectical Method’, International Socialist Journal, No. 16–17, Jan. 1966, pp. 525–6.

[21] The reference is probably to F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1959, pp. 217–18, cf. also pp. 228, 386.

[22] ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, p. 269.

[23] See ‘To the Proletariat of All Lands’ and ‘What Does the Spartakusbund Want?’, Looker, pp. 269, 275–7.

[24] T. Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg, London, 1968, pp. 94, 37–8.

[25] P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, London 1972, pp. 49–51, 140–4, 163.

[26] Ibid., pp. 49, 159.

[27] Ibid., p. 144. But see n. 47 below on a different resolution.

[28] Howard, pp. 12, 14; emphasis added.

[29] Ibid., pp. 15 n.9, 16, 33.

[30] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, p. 63; The Accumulation of Capital, p. 325; ‘The Accumulation of Capital—an Anti-Critique’, in R. Luxemburg and N. Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, London, 1972, p. 77. This last text is referred to henceforth as ‘Anti-Critique’.

[31] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’ and ‘Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party’, Waters, pp. 86, 264, 415.

[32]

[33] ‘Anti-Critique’, p. 76.

[34] ‘Fragment sur la guerre, la question nationale et la révolution’ in R. Luxemburg, Oeuvres II: Ecrits politiques 1917-1918, Paris, 1969, p. 99.

[35] Nettl, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 538.

[36] Not Volume III as is incorrectly stated at p. 530.

[37] Ibid., pp. 530–6. Cf. Waters (p. 19) who seems to follow this line of argument.

[38] See, for example, I. Fetscher’s ‘Postscript’ to Frölich, op. cit., p. 308; E. H. Carr, 1917. Before and After, London, 1969, pp. 47–9; E. Mandel, ‘Rosa et la social-démocratie allemande’, loc. cit., p. 19; Looker, p. 29.

[39] See, for example, ‘Peace Utopias’, Waters, pp. 250–4; ‘Concerning Morocco’ and ‘What Now?’, Looker, pp. 166, 172–3, 175–6; ‘The Idea of May Day on the March’, Howard, pp. 317–20.

[40] ‘Anti-Critique’, p. 60.

[41] Ibid., p. 148. Cf. P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, London, 1946, pp. 206–7; and The Present As History, New York, 1953, p. 294.

[42] M. Lowy, ‘Il significato metodologico della parola d’ordine “socialismo o barbarie”’, Problemi del Socialismo, 3° serie, anno XIII, no. 1, 1971.

[43] E. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York, 1961, pp. 200–24.

[44] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, pp. 39–41. Cf. above n. 6 and text.

[45] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, p. 60, and a passage cited in Frölich, op. cit., p. 143. Cf. above n. 16 and text.

[46] Lowy, loc. cit.

[47] In the preface to the second German edition of his book, Frölich (op. cit., pp. xvi-xvii) suggests a similar periodization.

[48] See above notes 30–4 and text.

[49] See above n. 22 and text.

[50] ‘What is Economics?’, Waters, p. 248.

[51] See above n. 17 and text.

[52] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, pp. 59, 39.

[53] ‘In Memory of the Proletariat Party’, Howard, p. 196.

[54] Nettl, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 538 n.1.

[55] ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, pp. 269, 262; cf. also pp. 325–8.

[56] ‘Rebuilding the International’, ‘The Old Mole’, ‘To the Proletariat of All Lands’ and ‘What Does the Spartakusbund Want?’, Looker, pp. 204, 234, 269, 275.

[57] ‘Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party’, Waters, p. 412.

[58] The Accumulation of Capital, pp. 446, 453, 466–7.

[59] ‘Anti-Critique’, pp. 143, 147–8.

[60] ‘What is Economics?’, Waters, p. 248.

[61] ‘Anti-Critique’, p. 149.

[62] See, for example, V. I. Lenin, What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, Moscow, 1966, pp. 31, 47, 50, and ‘Karl Marx’, Selected Works, 3 vols. Moscow, 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 25–6.

[63] ‘The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it.’ K. Kautsky, The Road to Power, Chicago, 1909, p. 50.

[64] Basso, loc. cit., p. 527.

[65] See above n. 20 and text.

[66] Basso, loc. cit., p. 527.

[67] ‘Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party’, Waters, p. 412.

[68] K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, 1966, p. 98.

[69] ‘Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols, Moscow, 1969, Vol. 1, p. 500.

[70] Cf. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, pp. 214–15.

[71] See, for example, ‘Anti-Critique’, p. 143, and ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, pp. 324–5.

[72] See, for example, The Accumulation of Capital, pp. 452–3, and ‘Anti-Critique’, p. 147.

[73] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, pp. 79–80.

[74] Bernstein, op. cit., pp. 212–13.

[75] See G. A. Cohen, ‘Remarks on Revolutionary Perspectives’, Radical Philosophy, No. 2, Summer 1972, p. 23.

[76] H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, New York, 1961, p. 216.