Abstract
Although Rosa Luxemburg is enjoying a well-deserved renaissance, much of the current discussion of her work fails to contend with her commitment to a rather orthodox reading of the Marxist theory of history. This article argues that all of the features that make Luxemburg's work so attractive to contemporary scholars—her revolutionary radicalism, her accounts of spontaneity and democracy, and her critique of imperialism—are undergirded by her commitment to that theory, along with its commitments to unilinearity, necessity, and progress. This theory provides the systematic backbone for Luxemburg's thought. In the wake of postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, and feminist critiques of the Marxist theory of history, this feature of Luxemburg's work considerably complicates her legacy for contemporary critical theory.
Rosa Luxemburg's work is having something of a moment. In recent years, a host of new books, articles, conferences, and podcasts have been dedicated to discussion of her extraordinary life, her revolutionary activism, and her formidable (and mostly untranslated) body of work. In 2019, Verso Books reissued Joseph Nettl's definitive 1969 biography;1 this was followed in 2020 by the publication of a new biography by the political theorist Dana Mills.2 The year 2021 saw the publication of Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell's edited collection Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg3 and a major online symposium, sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, celebrating the 150th anniversary of her birth;4 in 2022, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy published an entry on Luxemburg written by the prominent political theorist Lea Ypi.5 With Verso in the midst of collecting, editing, and translating her complete works—over 75 percent of her work is not yet available in English—the interest in her work only appears likely to grow in the coming years.
This resurgence of interest in Luxemburg's life and work is, no doubt, in large part a function of the broader resurgence of interest in Marx, Marxism, and the critique of capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In this context, Luxemburg's radicalism, so memorably displayed in her turn-of-the-twentieth-century debate with Eduard Bernstein, has considerable appeal. Contemporary scholars also draw inspiration from her account of revolutionary politics, with its emphasis on spontaneity, democracy, and freedom over centralized party planning. But the centerpiece of the current Luxemburg revival is arguably her powerful theorization of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. In the wake of the postcolonial critique of Marx/ism, the current return to Marx is a repetition with a difference, with questions of the relationship between imperialism, colonialism, and slavery front and center. In this context, Luxemburg's work is particularly attractive. After all, she was a Marxist of the Second International who offered an original and trenchant critique of the role that imperialism, racism, and the “civilizing” mission play in capitalist expansion, a critique that was based on extensive research into pre- and noncapitalist societies.6 For this reason, Peter Hudis, the general editor of Luxemburg's complete works, describes her as “an important reference point for challenging criticisms of the Marxist tradition that have been voiced by an array of postcolonial theorists.”7
And yet, I want to suggest, some caution is in order. One point that tends to be downplayed, if not ignored altogether, in the current Luxemburg revival, is that she remained firmly committed throughout most of her life to a rather orthodox understanding of Marx's theory of history, a commitment that complicates her legacy from the point of view of post- and decolonial theory.8 Jacqueline Rose's review of the 2011 publication of the English edition of Luxemburg's letters, written against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, is an early and illustrative example of the tendency of contemporary readers to downplay this aspect of her work.9 Although Rose's masterful essay covers many of the main themes of Luxemburg's work, including her accounts of freedom and spontaneity, her understanding of the relationship between socialism and democracy, and her critique of Lenin, there is only the briefest of mentions of Luxemburg's belief in the inevitability of capitalism's demise, a claim that stands at the core of her theory of history. As Rose puts it, “It is Marxism's central credo that capitalism contains the seeds of its own collapse: the destructiveness of capital heralds its defeat. On this Luxemburg never relented. . . . In this she was a true daughter of Marx, even if some would say it was his greatest error.”10 Even while acknowledging this point, however, the main thrust of Rose's essay runs in the opposite direction; emphasizing Luxemburg's accounts of spontaneity, democracy, and freedom, Rose reads Luxemburg as a thinker who “elevated uncertainty to a principle, a revolutionary creed.” On Rose's reading, Luxemburg becomes a theorist of the open-endedness and unpredictability of revolutionary politics, a kind of Arendtian avant la lettre.11
Ypi's more recent reading overlaps with Rose's in some respects but also brings in a new emphasis. Reflecting on Luxemburg's legacy, Ypi echoes Rose when she maintains that Luxemburg's “main concern is with freedom, its development in the course of global history, the obstacles to its realization, and the different types of oppression that capitalist society entrenches, enables or fails to abolish.”12 Similarly, Ypi briefly mentions Luxemburg's adherence to an orthodox Marxist belief in the inevitability of capitalism's collapse, only to dismiss the issue and to highlight instead her emphasis on the “conscious agency of the oppressed” in the realization of socialism.13 Moreover, leaning into Luxemburg's critique of imperialism, colonialism, and racism, Ypi emphasizes Luxemburg's relevance for contemporary work on the complex development of global capitalism through the interaction of capital accumulation and imperialism, and she even goes so far as to suggest that Luxemburg's work supports the development of an “intersectional” analysis of oppression that “brings together the concerns of gender, race, and class.” As such, Luxemburg's writings, according to Ypi, “enable us to articulate a richer analysis of the capitalist system which is genuinely inclusive of the history, theory, and practice of oppressed groups of people living in different parts of the globe and that tries to unify these concerns instead of isolating them from each other.”14 If Rose portrays Luxemburg as an Arendtian, Ypi envisions her as a forerunner of Angela Davis.15
There can be no doubt that these readings capture important features of Luxemburg's work. However, precisely because they downplay or outright deny Luxemburg's commitment to the Marxist theory of history, they obscure the fact that all of the features that make her work so appealing to us today—her revolutionary radicalism, her account of spontaneity and democracy, and her critique of imperialism—are undergirded by her commitment to that theory. What precisely do I mean by “the Marxist theory of history”? While acknowledging that this is a large and hotly debated topic, for the purposes of this article, I will take that theory, frequently attributed to Marx, to consist of three core commitments: to the universality or unilinearity of the developmental, stadial historical process that leads from feudalism through capitalism to socialism; to the deeply ambivalent yet ultimately progressive character of that process; and to its necessity or inevitability.16 Regardless of whether one believes that Marx himself held the Marxist theory of history, Luxemburg was firmly committed to it for most of her life.17 Moreover, and this is my main argument, this commitment forms the systematic backbone of her major works, including Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike, and The Accumulation of Capital. In all these writings, Luxemburg's theory of history is tightly bound up with her accounts of revolutionary transformation; freedom, spontaneity, and democracy; and of imperialism. So tightly, in fact, that it is difficult to see how these elements of her thinking could be sufficiently disentangled in the way that they would need to be if her work were to be put to contemporary radical democratic, post/decolonial, or intersectional ends. Her commitment to the unilinearity and progressive nature of historical development sits uncomfortably with the impulses driving postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional theory, and her faith in the necessity of capitalism's demise, a faith that undergirds her radicalism, is at odds with the concerns of radical democrats. Even Luxemburg's celebrated critique of imperialism is undergirded by a progressive, epistemically imperialist logic, a belief that the cause of international socialism was, in the end, advanced by the imperialist expansion that, for all its horrors, brought capitalism closer to its inevitable demise. This is the sense in which she exclaims, in The Junius Pamphlet, that “imperialism ultimately works for us.”18 The point here is not to play gotcha with Luxemburg, and I have no intention of suggesting that we should judge her legacy solely by her most problematic utterances. My claim, rather, is that this remark is symptomatic of her deep and abiding commitment to an orthodox understanding of the Marxist theory of history. Contemporary readers who take Luxemburg to be an exemplary unorthodox Marxist have failed to grapple seriously enough with this commitment and the long shadow it casts on her thought. Only by doing so can we gain a clear-eyed understanding of her relevance for our present.
1. Reform or Revolution?
Luxemburg's commitment to the Marxist theory of history is evident in her iconic 1898 debate with Eduard Bernstein, a well-established leader of the reformist wing of the German Social Democratic Party (the SPD). A close friend and collaborator of Friedrich Engels who was later named literary executor of Engels’s estate, Bernstein had twice fled antisocialist persecution in Europe. He had served as editor of the official party organ, Der Sozialdemokrat, for a decade and was a senior leader in the party—a man with “impeccable socialist credentials,” as Stephen Eric Bronner has put it.19 Rosa Luxemburg was a twenty-seven-year-old Polish émigré newly arrived from Zurich, whose just-published dissertation on the industrial development of Poland was being widely read and discussed in socialist circles. Luxemburg and Bernstein represented not only different generations but also opposing wings in a long-standing debate within the SPD, which was formed in 1875 by the union of two German working-class organizations, the reformist Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein and the more revolutionary Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartie Deutschlands. Their debate launched Luxemburg as a major figure within the German socialist movement and one of the most prominent leaders of its revolutionary wing. Although Bernstein was also trenchantly criticized by more senior party figures of the time, including Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, he himself admitted that Luxemburg's articles were “on the whole among the best of those written against me, so far as method is concerned.”20
On a first reading, their debate might seem like a family squabble where what is at stake are primarily questions of political strategy. After all, both Bernstein and Luxemburg profess to share the same goal: the achievement of democratic socialism. They also share a willingness to question socialist orthodoxy when it fails to conform with how they see the facts on the ground. Above all, they were both “loyal to reality and critical of Marx,” as Arendt put it in her review of Nettl's biography of Luxemburg.21
For Bernstein, however, loyalty to reality required a major revision of Marxist orthodoxy in the form of a rejection of the Marxist theory of history. The specific elements of that theory that Bernstein rejected were the closely intertwined claims that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions and that socialism could be realized only through revolution. His revisionist program turned on the following points: (1) that capitalism is not, in fact, on the verge of collapse but instead displays a remarkable tendency to adapt and sustain itself; (2) that the transition to socialism could be accomplished via peaceful, parliamentary reforms; and, (3) that the best way to achieve that transition while redressing capitalism's exploitative and crisis tendencies is to strengthen and expand existing liberal democratic institutions. Thus, for Bernstein, democracy is not just an aim of socialist struggle; it is also a precondition for socialism: “Democracy is both means and end. It is a weapon in the struggle for socialism, and it is the form in which socialism will be realized.”22 To achieve this end, for Bernstein, liberal institutions must be “further developed,” not “destroyed.” “For that,” he continues, “we require organization and energetic action, but not necessarily a revolutionary dictatorship.”23
Not surprisingly, Bernstein's revisionist views, first elaborated in a series of articles in the esteemed socialist theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit and later published in book form in 1899 as The Preconditions of Socialism, prompted a strong reaction from the revolutionary wing of the party. In Luxemburg's searing response, originally published in 1899 as a series of articles in the Leipziger Volkszeitung and later, in 1908, as the pamphlet Reform or Revolution, she insists that the realization of socialism requires radical change that cannot possibly be achieved through reform alone. To pursue reform, in her eyes, is tantamount to giving up on socialism altogether. For Luxemburg, then, “the question: ‘Reform or Revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the Social Democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’”24
Importantly, however, this does not mean that Luxemburg opposes the struggle for piecemeal reforms that might improve the lives of workers in the here and now. Nor does she accept the accelerationist thesis that reforms should be eschewed because by ameliorating workers’ suffering they deflate revolutionary energies. Rather, she maintains that struggles for reforms that improve the conditions of workers are the crucial means for achieving the ultimate end of revolution (RR, 3). As Ypi explains, for Luxemburg, “reforms . . . provided crucial learning platforms through which the mass of oppressed people would develop a capacity for autonomous decision-making, and prepare for the conquest of political power. Yet such reforms were trials of freedom, they were not freedom itself.”25 Bernstein's error, according to Luxemburg, is not simply that he supports reform; it is rather that he makes social reform his aim: “People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of 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.” Their goal is, de facto, “not the realization of Socialism, but the reform of capitalism” (RR, 58).
In making her case, Luxemburg repeatedly attacks Bernstein's faith that progressive change can come from within the existing system. For example, Bernstein sees trade unions and cooperatives as vehicles for the evolutionary transition to socialism. Luxemburg, by contrast, insists that unions are in no position to overturn capitalism, operating as they do wholly within the capitalist system of exploitation; the most they can do is to strike a better deal for workers within the capitalist system, thereby mitigating some of its harmful effects. She is similarly critical of Bernstein's emphasis on parliamentary reforms. Like Lenin, Luxemburg insists that the bourgeois state is a class state that serves the interests of the capitalists; thus, pursuing reform through the state is necessarily of limited value. Meaningful change can come about only through the overthrow of the bourgeois state: “Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat” can bring about socialism (RR, 31).26 Because he overestimates the progressive potential of bourgeois democracy, Bernstein misunderstands the relationship between democracy and socialism. Mistaking existing bourgeois democracy for true democracy, Bernstein gets this relationship precisely backward: liberal democracy is not a precondition of socialism but a bourgeois impediment to it. Socialism is a precondition of true democracy—as Luxemburg puts it, “the fate of democracy is bound with the Socialist movement” (RR, 56)—not the other way around.
That said, if Luxemburg sides with Lenin in her critique of bourgeois, liberal democracy, she is also sharply critical of the dangers of Lenin's antidemocratic interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As she famously put it in her unfinished and posthumously published pamphlet on the 1917 Russian Revolution, written from her jail cell in 1918, Lenin's “elimination of democracy as such . . . is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure.”27 Though she was not shy about the role of the revolutionary vanguard in educating the proletarian masses, and nor was she squeamish about the use of force, she was nevertheless a strong critic of Lenin's “pitiless centralism” and a passionate defender of the spontaneity and creativity of freedom and action that are central to popular democracy.28 Thus, as Arendt points out, Luxemburg “did not believe in a victory in which the people at large had no part and no voice; so little, indeed, did she believe in holding power at any price that she ‘was far more afraid of a deformed revolution than an unsuccessful one.’”29
Still, as Norman Geras helpfully reminds us, Luxemburg's commitment to freedom and radical democracy was far from unqualified.30 The dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship, after all. As she makes clear in her debate with Bernstein, Luxemburg firmly rejects the view that democratic socialism can be achieved through peaceful democratic means; what is held in place by force must be overturned by force. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus has an unavoidably coercive aspect to it.31 We might hope, as Marx suggests in the penultimate chapter of Capital, volume 1, that the expropriation of the expropriators will be less violent than the bloody, brutal, and protracted process of primitive accumulation through which the masses were expropriated, but from this it does not follow that no blood will be shed.32 Thus, it is crucial to keep in mind that the freedom that Luxemburg insists on so eloquently is first and foremost, as Geras reminds us, a freedom “for a plurality of tendencies and parties within the dictatorship of the proletariat.”33 It is decidedly not freedom for all, as it does not extend to the expropriators.
Far from being a minor squabble about party strategy, the Luxemburg-Bernstein debate is a deep disagreement about whether meaningful progressive change can come about by working to ameliorate the current system from within or instead requires a more radical—and potentially violent or at least coercive—negation of the status quo. Or, to put the point in terms that Luxemburg herself would have recognized, and that I will come back to in the next section, it is about the relationship between the minimum and the maximum party programs.34 And this is precisely what makes this more-than-a-century-old debate about party strategy feel so alive and relevant, as the question of whether to work for change within the system or press for it from the outside reverberates through a host of contemporary social movements. To be sure, where one comes down on the question of reform or revolution will depend on what sort of change one thinks is needed, which will depend, in turn, on one's diagnosis of the facts on the ground. For Luxemburg, the facts on the ground of capitalism clearly demand radical, revolutionary change. As she argues in her 1904 article “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy,” the international proletarian movement is unique in its conscious expression of the will of the people as opposed to the ruling class. This will, she contends, “can only be satisfied beyond the limits of the existing system.” Even if the proletariat can only “acquire and strengthen” its will by struggling within and against the existing capitalist society, “its historic goal” is “located outside of existing society” (LM, 95; emphasis added). In other words, while fighting for change within the existing system through workers’ daily struggles for piecemeal reforms serves its purpose, the struggle must necessarily aim beyond that system at its transcendence.
So far, so good. More than a century later, as the human and ecological wreckage of capitalism continues to pile up, Luxemburg's insistence that meaningful social change requires radical transcendence of the capitalist system seems truer than ever. Still, we might wonder what precisely she means by the “beyond” or “outside” of capitalism? And how do such notions inspire and sustain her radicalism? In Reform or Revolution, it's clear that the answer to these questions depends on Luxemburg's reading of the Marxist theory of history. After all, for Luxemburg, Bernstein's mistake is not only that he attempts to make change from within the system but also that, in questioning capitalism's inevitable collapse, he abandons the historical materialist commitment to the “objective necessity of socialism, the explanation of socialism as the result of the material development of society” (RR, 11). By giving up on the idea of capitalism's demise, he becomes unable to see beyond it, and his view loses its radical edge; it becomes more about reforming capitalism than achieving socialism. But by giving up on the inevitability of capitalism's demise, Bernstein's view loses its materialist grounding; socialism becomes a mere utopian ideal or abstract principle rather than “an historic necessity” (RR, 11).35 For Luxemburg, by contrast, the key that enabled Marx to solve the riddle of capitalism was precisely “his conception of capitalist economy as a historic phenomenon.” In other words, central to Marx's critique of capitalism and to Luxemburg's radical, revolutionary interpretation of it is the belief in “the inevitability of [capitalism's] collapse, leading—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—to Socialism” (RR, 45).
Luxemburg's revolutionary radicalism is undoubtedly attractive. And it's difficult not to look down on Bernstein as a milquetoast reformist. Although I have no interest in defending Bernstein's reformism, nor in questioning the need for a radical critique of capitalism, I do feel compelled to ask: To the extent that Luxemburg's revolutionary fervor was sustained by her faith in the objective necessity or historical inevitability of capitalism's overcoming, what might sustain such fervor for us, if we can no longer share that faith? More pointedly, does Luxemburg's faith in the inevitability or necessity of the demise of capitalism and the emergence of socialism commit her to some form of historical determinism?36 And if so, (how) is such a commitment compatible with her emphasis on the spontaneous, democratic, self-organization of revolutionary actors?
2. The Mass Strike
To address such questions, we first need to clarify what Luxemburg means by historical necessity or inevitability. Whereas an earlier generation of critics simply equated the “spontaneism” in Luxemburg's thought with economism and determinism,37 recent commentators read her in a diametrically opposed way, treating her theory of spontaneity as if it floats free of the theory of history in which it is embedded.38 What both perspectives fail to appreciate is that, for Luxemburg, there is no contradiction between her faith in the spontaneous, democratic self-organization of political actors and her belief that the revolution is made possible by social conditions that unfold with historical necessity and inevitability. For her, the subjective self-organization of revolutionary actors and the objective historical conditions are two sides of the same coin; the former is possible only on the basis of the latter, and the latter can be brought to fruition only through the activity of the former. Thus, it's clear that Luxemburg is not a historical determinist in any straightforward or simple sense of that term. Given the undeniable and undeniably crucial role that revolutionary political agency plays in her account, she can't understand historical necessity or inevitability to imply a fatalistic or determinist denial of the agency of political actors. However, insofar as subjective spontaneity and objective historical necessity are two sides of the same coin, nor can her emphasis on the former be taken as evidence against her belief in the latter.
Indeed, we could even say that historical necessity has both subjective and objective senses for Luxemburg.39 Subjectively, the appeal to historical necessity functions as a kind of exhortation, an urgent plea for workers to join the anticapitalist struggle. This sense of necessity is rooted in Luxemburg's revolutionary optimism, her faith that, given the horrors of capitalism and the depth of class antagonism it generates, workers simply must rise up and overthrow it. Objectively, the appeal to necessity functions less as an exhortation and more as a prediction—that is, as a claim about the historical inevitability of capitalism's demise, given its own internal, ongoing logic of accumulation and expansion. Although it's undeniably true that Luxemburg sometimes uses the term “necessity” in the former, subjective sense, this usage does not obviate her use of the latter, objective sense. Indeed, as we'll see below, these two senses of necessity ultimately go hand in hand for Luxemburg.
For example, consider how Luxemburg articulates her account of spontaneity in the context of her critique of Lenin. Luxemburg faults Lenin's “pitiless” and “despotic” centralism for being cut off from “the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment”—which is the source of the “most important and fruitful changes” in political strategy (LM, 85). Successful political tactics are not, she insists, dreamed up and imposed by the members of some central committee; they emerge from concrete social struggles. The political program of social democracy is, as she puts it, “the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward” (LM, 86). Rigid, hierarchical, centralized forms of organization can only squelch this creative, spontaneous spirit; the best hope for achieving coherence as a movement while preserving this spirit is to encourage emergent forms of self-organization. “Stop the natural pulsation of a living organism,” she writes, “and you weaken it, and you diminish its resistance and combative spirit—in this instance, not only against opportunism but also (and that is certainly of great importance) against the existing social order. The proposed means turn against the end they are supposed to serve” (LM, 96).
Note that what's at stake here is not the Marxist theory of history, to which Luxemburg and Lenin were both firmly committed, but rather Lenin's approach to party organization. In other words, spontaneity is juxtaposed not to historical necessity or inevitability but rather to centralism; the opposite of “spontaneous,” for Luxemburg, is neither “caused” nor “determined” but rather something like “centrally planned or imposed from above.” Spontaneous revolutionary ferment is a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from what Foucault might have called the capillaries of the revolutionary body.40 Such activity is not externally caused or generated through the actions of the party, but this does not mean that it is historically undetermined or contingently emergent.
The combination of these two commitments—to subjective spontaneity and objective historical necessity—is perhaps most memorably presented in Luxemburg's account of the general strike in her 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Union. Like Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike is a strategic intervention in political debates within the SPD.41 On the one hand, Luxemburg is pushing back against anarchists who understood the general strike ahistorically and idealistically as “the means of inaugurating the social revolution”; on the other hand, she is arguing with trade unionists who favored expanding the labor movement through parliamentary means. Luxemburg's critique of the resulting dilemma is withering: “Either the proletariat as a whole are not yet in possession of the powerful organization and financial resources required, in which case they cannot carry through the general strike; or they are already sufficiently well organized, in which case they do not need the general strike.”42
Geras contends that the mass strike concept also addresses a problem that had been posed but left unresolved in Luxemburg's earlier work—namely, the relationship between the “minimum and maximum demands” of the SPD. Whereas the former demands are responsive to “the immediate, everyday concerns of the masses” and realizable within the framework of capitalism, the latter are “ultimate socialist objectives” that could be realized only through the radical overthrow of the capitalist system.43 Luxemburg's revolutionary answer to the question of the proper relationship between these two demands is that social democracy must, as Geras puts it, “keep a firm hold on both ends of the chain. Only by a fusion of the programme of revolutionary socialism with the daily struggle of the masses could socialism be achieved.”44 And yet, Geras contends, in her initial formulations of this problem, Luxemburg had no account of how these two struggles could be connected. It was clear from her critique of Bernstein that struggles for piecemeal reforms within capitalism will not by themselves lead to socialism; achieving the latter requires the establishment of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. What had not yet come into focus for her was what form of political struggles would lead to socialist revolution. On Geras's reading, this is the problem that her account of the mass strike attempts to solve. The mass strike is, he claims, the “distinctive strategic concept” that enables Luxemburg “to transcend the dualism of the minimum demands and final goal.”45
What lessons does Luxemburg draw from her analysis of the mass strike? The first key point is that the mass strike is historically emergent, not artificially generated. The mass strike “is not artificially ‘made,’ not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated.’ . . . It is an historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitableness” (MS, 108; emphasis added). Thus, the mass strike cannot be understood through “abstract speculations” or through a “subjective criticism” issued “from the standpoint of what is desirable”; it can be grasped only through an “objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable” (MS, 108; emphasis added). Precisely because the mass strike cannot be imposed by party leaders or carried through by a small cadre of well-trained workers, there is no point in theorizing about whether staging one would be a good idea; it can emerge only organically from a series of concrete, ongoing, and intertwined social and economic struggles. Given its organic nature, the mass strike is not just historical but also “a natural historical phenomenon” (MS, 158); it is, Luxemburg writes, “a bit of pulsating life and blood,” “connected with all parts of the revolution by a thousand veins”; “a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena”; and “the living pulsebeat of the revolution” (MS, 134–35). From a subjective perspective, the mass strike can be realized only through “a multiplicity of the most varied forms of action” (MS, 111). But, considered objectively, the mass strike is the natural result of the developmental unfolding of a collective organism. Spontaneous political action emerges from objective historical conditions, and both of these contribute to this unfolding.46
To emphasize the objective historical conditions that form the basis for the emergence of the revolutionary mass strike, however, is not to say that activists should simply sit back and wait for the revolutionary situation to “[fall] from the clouds” (MS, 158). Although Luxemburg maintains that the mass strike cannot succeed unless the conditions for it are ripe—that is, unless and until the objective historical situation is one that supports revolutionary transformation—there is much that social actors can do to “hasten the development of things and endeavor to accelerate events” (MS, 158). Again, contra Lenin, this is a matter not of issuing plans, blueprints, or slogans—“revolutions do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with them” (MS, 142)—but rather of providing “political leadership” (MS, 157). Political leadership, for Luxemburg, involves educating and preparing the proletariat for the emergence of the revolutionary situation “by making clear to the widest layers of the proletariat the inevitable advent of this revolutionary period, the inner social factors making for it and the political consequences of it” (MS, 158). In other words, party leaders can play an active role in fostering the objective historical conditions for revolutionary transformation precisely by cultivating the creativity and spontaneity of the masses. But they can do this by educating the masses about the objective historical conditions and thus about the inevitability of the coming historical transformation. As Luxemburg says elsewhere, socialism will come “as a result of economic necessity—and the comprehension of that necessity—leading to the suppression of capitalism by the working masses” (RR, 43). In other words, subjective spontaneity and objective historical necessity must come together in the right way and at the right time for the mass strike to emerge.
Luxemburg not only understands the mass strike as the convergence of political spontaneity and objective historical necessity; she also views it as part of a progressive, universal historical development. For her, the 1905 Russian Revolution that inspired her account of the mass strike is no isolated event; rather, it is a moment in a broader historical development that connects the earlier bourgeois revolutions with the coming socialist revolution. As she puts it,
The mass strike is thus shown to be not a specifically Russian product, springing from absolutism, but a universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations. From this standpoint the three bourgeois revolutions—the great French Revolution, the German Revolution of March, and the present Russian Revolution—form a continuous chain of development in which the fortunes and the end of the capitalist century are to be seen. (MS, 161; emphasis added)
Given its universal significance, it would be a mistake to regard the Russian Revolution “as something specifically ‘Russian’”; even though it emerges from “the most backward country of all,” the Russian Revolution is a harbinger of things to come, an example that “shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries” (MS, 162). To be sure, this process of historical development of which the Russian Revolution forms a part is deeply contradictory, more a “lightning-like zigzag” than “a beautiful, straight line” (MS, 165).47 Contradictory as it may be, however, this historical arc that stretches from the French to the Russian Revolution is also a universal, continuous, and progressive one, and even the emergence of capitalism itself must be understood as a part of that progress, as a historical achievement that, for all its exploitation, force, brutality, and oppression, generates the material conditions for socialism. As Luxemburg puts the point, “Capitalism furnishes besides the obstacles also the only possibilities of realizing the Socialist program” (RR, 161).48
Luxemburg's emphasis on spontaneity, freedom, and democracy as crucial elements of revolutionary politics is appealing, especially when compared with Lenin's defense of centralized party structures.49 And it's very tempting to read her, as Rose does, as an Arendtian radical democrat, as a thinker who prized the freedom, spontaneity, and unpredictability of action tout court. What such a reading misses, however, is the extent to which Luxemburg's account of spontaneity goes hand in hand with her belief in the universal, progressive, and inevitable character of the objective historical conditions that give rise to revolutions. Thus, readers such as Rose refrain from asking: (How) can Luxemburg's commitments to spontaneity, freedom, and democracy be disentangled from the theory of history in which they are embedded?
3. The Accumulation of Capital
The contradictory, crisis-ridden historical development of the objective conditions of capitalism's demise receives its fullest exploration in Luxemburg's brilliant and groundbreaking 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital. As Luxemburg herself notes in one of her letters, this remarkable text was written “in a veritable trance” and virtually in one sitting—the entire nine-hundred-page manuscript was composed and sent off to the printers in a mere four months!50 In some sense, The Accumulation of Capital represents a departure from Luxemburg's earlier writings in that it is the first of her works to develop a deep and detailed critique of Marx's critique of political economy. And yet, far from distancing herself from Marx's theory of history in her critique, Luxemburg doubles down on it; if anything, The Accumulation of Capital is Luxemburg's attempt to do a better job than Marx himself did of explaining the historical inevitability of capitalism's downfall using his conceptual framework.51
The Accumulation of Capital is most appreciated these days for highlighting the ongoing structural role of imperialism in capitalism, which Luxemburg articulates through her interpretation of Marx's account of primitive accumulation. As consequential as that aspect of her argument is, however, it is important to keep in mind that it emerges as the response to a technical question that is internal to Marx's critique of value. Indeed, the central question that The Accumulation of Capital sets out to answer is precisely how capital accumulates. As any reader of Capital knows, capital's capacity for ongoing, continually expanding self-valorization, its “occult ability to add value to itself,”52 is the core of Marx's definition of capitalism in this late work. One of Luxemburg's fundamental assumptions is that this expansionary logic so clearly operative at the level of the individual firm or capitalist also holds true at the level of capitalist society as a whole; at both levels, the capitalist imperative is: expand or die. Thus, when Luxemburg argues, as she does in part 1 of The Accumulation of Capital, that Marx never gave a satisfactory explanation of how this expansionary logic is possible at the level of what she calls “the reproduction of total social capital”53—indeed, that this logic cannot possibly be understood using the terms that Marx used to formulate it—she is aiming straight for the heart of Marx's mature critique of capitalism.
Her critique centers on Marx's discussion of simple versus expanded reproduction in Capital, volume 2. All societies must reproduce themselves if they are to survive, and, as Luxemburg notes, some amount of surplus labor is required for such reproduction. Surplus labor—that is, labor that is above and beyond what is required for meeting the material needs of the society's population—provides support for those who are unable to work, generates reserves that can be called upon in emergencies, and enables an expansion of production that meets the increasing needs resulting from population growth and/or rising standards of living (AC, 44).54 What's distinctive about capitalism is the specific form that surplus labor takes—namely, a commodity that is realizable in cash (surplus value) that is owned by the capitalist. In all societies, this reproductive process is cumulative and ongoing; the accumulated results of past labor serve as the basis for the reproduction of society in the present.55 Again, in capitalism this process takes a distinctive form, in which “the past labor of society that is accumulated in the means of production takes the form of capital” (AC, 54). But the fact that social reproduction is an ongoing, never-ending process already suggests that there can be no such thing as a society governed by simple reproduction—that is, reproduction that, as Marx put it, “supplies the same mass of commodity values and satisfies the same quantity of needs” from year to year.56 The concept of simple reproduction is a conceptual abstraction (Luxemburg calls it a “mere fiction”) that serves Marx's argument, not a historically existent form of social organization (AC, 54).
If simple reproduction is a circle, with no beginning and no end, expanded reproduction is “an ever-ascending spiral” (AC, 73). Once it is set in motion, the accumulation of capital “leads mechanically ever further beyond itself” (AC, 75). But how is such an ever-expanding spiral possible? For Luxemburg, the key point is that capital can accumulate only if surplus value is realized by being converted into saleable commodities. This means that an increase in effective demand for commodities is needed to sustain the ongoing expansion of capitalist societies. But herein lies the rub, because, as Luxemburg argues, such an increase cannot come from within the capitalist society itself. The capitalists cannot serve as the source of continually expanding effective demand because Marx's model of expanded reproduction stipulates that they refrain from consumption in order to accumulate more capital. Nor can the workers be this source, because their wages are so low as to permit no more than their bare subsistence and reproduction as a class. Thus, Luxemburg concludes, “realization of the surplus value outside of the two existing classes of society appears as necessary as it is impossible. The accumulation of capital is caught in a vicious circle. In the second volume of Capital, at any rate, no solution to the problem is given” (AC, 114).
It is this technical analysis of the shortcomings of Marx's account that provides the context and foundation for Luxemburg's famed analysis of the structural connections between capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, Luxemburg insists that “imperialism on the whole and according to universal empirical observation is nothing other than a specific method of accumulation.”57 The key to solving the mystery of expanded reproduction is the realization that capitalism is dependent—not just at its inception but throughout its existence—on a non- or precapitalist outside that serves not only as a source of raw materials and additional labor power but also, and crucially, as the market for the goods that must be sold in order for the surplus value generated in capitalist production to be realized. This is the insight that provides the inspiration for Luxemburg's rewriting of Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. Unlike Marx, who described primitive accumulation as a historical process that enabled capitalism to emerge from feudalism in England, Luxemburg reads primitive accumulation as both a historical process and an ongoing structural condition that is constitutive of all capitalist production.58 As she puts it, “Even in its full maturity, capitalism depends in all of its relations on the simultaneous existence of non-capitalist strata and societies. . . . The accumulation of capital . . . in fact is inconceivable in every respect without the noncapitalist spheres that form its milieu” (AC, 262). It is in light of this structural, economic necessity that capital must establish domination over noncapitalist territories and societies.59 Colonial and imperial policy are among the primary means of establishing such domination, but Luxemburg also highlights forms of “soft imperialism” supported by international debt, credit, and finance markets and military conquest as tactics that accomplish the same goal.
Even as capitalism depends on a precapitalist outside to fulfill its prime directive, the ongoing accumulation of capital, it systematically destroys and dismantles its very condition of possibility. As it expands, capitalism disrupts natural economies, separates industry from agriculture, dispossesses peoples of their land and their means of production, and forces colonized peoples into commodity production in a doomed effort to compete with capitalist enterprise. In the process, it draws those precapitalist economies into itself. As Luxemburg explains, “The accumulation of capital is a process of metabolism occurring between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production. The accumulation of capital cannot proceed without these precapitalist modes of production, and yet accumulation consists in this regard precisely in the latter being gradually swallowed up and assimilated by capital” (AC, 302). The logical conclusion of this process is the complete, global domination of capital. However, by metabolizing its noncapitalist outside, capitalism devours its very conditions of possibility. Thus, no sooner would the process of assimilation be concluded than capital would suddenly be unable to realize itself and further accumulation would cease. Given that the ongoing accumulation of capital is the core of capitalism, its raison d’être, this would mean the collapse of capitalism itself. “In capitalist terms, the impossibility of accumulation implies the impossibility of the further development of the productive forces, and thus the objective historical necessity of capitalism's demise” (AC, 303; emphasis added).
To be sure, as Geras has perceptively argued, the collapse of capitalism is not, at least in Luxemburg's late work, equated with the creation of socialism.60 If it were, it would make no sense for her to argue, as she does in The Junius Pamphlet, that the world in 1915 faces a fateful choice between socialism or barbarism.61 For one thing, the very posing of an either/or choice—socialism or barbarism—suggests that Luxemburg believed that a historical alternative to socialism was possible. Moreover, as Geras insists, Luxemburg makes a distinction between the collapse of capitalism, which she equates with a regression to barbarism, and the creation of socialism; even if the former “is ‘written,’ as a blind fatality, in its objective economic antagonisms,” the latter “requires a conscious political struggle on the part of the working class.”62 But does this mean that Luxemburg gave up, late in her life, her belief in the inevitability of socialism? Consider this passage from her “Anti-critique”:
Capitalism paves the way for its own downfall in a twofold manner. On the one hand, through its expansion at the expense of all noncapitalist forms of production it continues its heedless drive toward that moment when all of humanity will in fact consist solely of capitalists and wage-workers, and therefore any further expansion, and with it accumulation, will no longer be possible. At the same time, it sharpens class contradictions to the same extent that this historical trend asserts itself, and it intensifies international economic and political anarchy so severely that long before the final consequence of economic development is reached—that is, the absolute, unqualified domination of capitalist production throughout the world—it is bound to cause the rebellion of the international proletariat against the continued existence of capitalism.63
Notice the reference here to the two senses of necessity delineated above. The first is the objective necessity that is rooted in capitalism's expansionist logic; the second is Luxemburg's revolutionary faith that, confronted with the world-historic choice in front of them, the working class will surely choose socialism over barbarism. Again, my point is not to deny that Luxemburg sometimes appeals to necessity in this more subjective sense; it is simply to point out that such appeals do not obviate her commitment to claims about objective historical necessity. Indeed, Luxemburg insists in her “Anti-critique” that the commitment to the “historical necessity” of “socialism as the final stage, with imperialism as its predecessor” is central to a “historical materialist” account of imperialism.64
As I have emphasized above, given Luxemburg's stress on the role that revolutionary actors must play in capitalism's overcoming, it would be wrong to charge Luxemburg with historical or economic determinism full stop. And yet to deny that she retains a claim to the objective necessity or inevitability of the development from capitalism through imperialism to socialism would be equally misleading. Moreover, despite her vividly expressed moral outrage at the horrors of imperialism, Luxemburg insists on the progressive character of this development. As she puts it in The Junius Pamphlet,
This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition for the socialist world revolution. . . . Thus, the capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense. . . . And in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us.65
Furthermore, in the same text, she indicates an ongoing commitment to a universal, stadial account of the stages of historical development, according to which “we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow.”66 Elsewhere, in her lectures on political economy, Luxemburg brings the ideas of progress and universality together when she emphasizes her commitment to understanding history as “a developmental series” conceived “as a unitary process, an advance of humanity from lower to higher forms of life.”67
“Imperialism ultimately works for us”: This claim could make sense only if Luxemburg assumes that imperialism, for all its horrors, creates both the objective and subjective conditions for the emergence of socialism. This is its “light side”—a side that will be fully revealed only in the end, after the inevitable socialist revolution. With this claim it becomes clear that, her incisive critique of imperialism notwithstanding, Luxemburg has taken on board the considerable Eurocentric baggage that plagues the Marxist theory of history. Passionate though her critique of imperialism and its racist, “civilizing” logic may be,68 this critique is embedded in the kind of historicist thinking69—replete with talk of “backward” peoples and “primitive” economies that recurs frequently in section three of The Accumulation of Capital—that is utterly central to imperialist ideology. So, we must ask, (how) can we take up Luxemburg's critique of imperialism anew? Is that critique indelibly marked by the kind of historicist commitments that have been so thoroughly criticized by postcolonial, Black radical, and Indigenous readers of Marx and the Marxist tradition? If not, how can these two strands of her thinking be disentangled?
Conclusion
(How) can Luxemburg's radical critique of capitalism be disentangled from her faith in the objective necessity or historical inevitability of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism? (How) can her emphasis on the role of spontaneity, democracy, and freedom in revolutionary movements be detached from her account of the objective historical conditions that make such movements not only possible but, in some sense, inevitable? (How) can we recover her trenchant critique of imperialism without taking on board the progressive, epistemically imperialist logic that governs her understanding of history? Avoiding such questions not only prevents us from gaining a clear-eyed assessment of Luxemburg's legacy but also obscures the depth of the challenge faced by those of us who would reclaim the legacy of Marxism today, in the wake of postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, and feminist critiques of the Marxist theory of history. Inspirational though Luxemburg's work has been for a whole host of radical critical theorists—critics of settler colonialism, Arendtian radical democrats, feminist theorists of social reproduction—who would themselves undoubtedly reject Marx's theory of history, her own work is considerably more complicated and even contradictory.
Even those contemporary readers who are more willing to criticize Luxemburg have failed to appreciate fully how her blind spots are rooted in her adherence to the theory of history. For example, commentators such as Hudis and Adamson lament Luxemburg's failure to accept that colonial subjects could be the source of a political revolution against capitalism, but without noting that it is precisely her theory of history that prevents her from seeing this.70 When it came to the proletariat, Luxemburg readily pushed back against warnings that workers might take power prematurely, insisting that the seizure of power by the workers is necessarily premature precisely because the only path to maturity is through the exercise of political and economic power (RR, 62–65). Extending this line of thought to colonized peasants and other subaltern subjects would open the door to a more radical—and more contemporary—analysis of racial capitalism. But doing so would also have required Luxemburg to abandon the theory of history that undergirds her account of imperialism.
Contemporary readers are right to highlight her emphasis on spontaneity, but wrong if they do so in a way that obscures or denies her commitment to the objective historical conditions that must be sufficiently ripe if spontaneous political movements are to emerge and be successful. Subjective spontaneity and objective historical necessity are not only, for her, conceptually compatible; they must also come together in practice—in the right way and at the right time—in order for revolutionary movements to gain traction. To be sure, as Rose argues, there is an element of unpredictability and uncertainty inherent in her account of spontaneity, and Luxemburg was certainly enough of a political realist to know that revolutions come with no guarantees. But from this it does not follow that she understood history as an open-ended or contingent process. On the contrary, she dismissed any “denial of the very lawfulness of social development” as “bourgeois social science.”71
Similarly, contemporary readers are right to highlight Luxemburg's attentiveness to the role of racism, slavery, and militarism in the global expansion of capitalism. But to read her as a theorist of racial capitalism or an intersectional theorist is to run the risk of failing to appreciate the distinctiveness of those critical projects. By folding racism and imperialism into the progressive-developmental logic of history—as she does when she claims that “imperialism ultimately works for us”—Luxemburg runs afoul of what Siddhant Issar describes as one of the core insights of theories of racial capitalism—namely, “the imbrication of racialization, colonization, and capitalist accumulation in a non-reductive way.”72 Relatedly, to the extent that Luxemburg's theorization of racism and imperialism is subsumed within her account of capital accumulation, she is implicitly committed to denying what is arguably a central tenet of intersectionality theory: the equality or equiprimordiality of oppressions.73
So where does this leave us? The value of reading Luxemburg today, in the wake of postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, and feminist criticisms of the Marxist theory of history, cannot be that she already had the answers we need. Rather, her legacy consists in helping us to see more clearly the challenges we face: how to articulate a radical critique of contemporary capitalism and a vision of revolutionary transformation that holds its vision of the future open; how to ground such a vision in a diagnostic assessment of current material conditions that is attuned to practical possibilities without losing sight of historical contingency; and, perhaps most importantly, how to develop a genuinely intersectional critique of racial capitalism that avoids subsuming racism and colonialism into the developmental logic of capitalism.
Notes
Gordon and Cornell, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg.
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, “Rosa Luxemburg at 150: Revisiting Her Radical Life and Legacy,” March 4–5, 2021, https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/44174.
On this point, see Hudis, “Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-capitalist Formations.”
But, for acknowledgments of this point, see Hudis, “Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-capitalist Formations”; Hudis, “Non-linear Pathways”; Adamson, “Against a Single History.” Both authors contend that Luxemburg was even more committed than Marx himself was to this theory by the end of his life (an interpretive claim about Marx that I think is debatable, but that's an argument for another occasion). It's worth noting, however, that these acknowledgments do not prevent these authors from arguing for Luxemburg's importance for responding to the postcolonial critique of Marx/ism (Hudis) or, more strongly, developing a decolonial philosophy of history (Adamson). An implication of my argument is that these claims are rooted in either a selective reading of Luxemburg's theory of history or a failure to grasp the depth of the post/decolonial challenge to Marx's theory of history, or perhaps both.
Rose, “What More Could We Want.” The only other reference to the theory of history in Rose's essay suggests, misleadingly, that Luxemburg dissents from the historical materialist line: “In fact it is axiomatic in Marxism that history unfolds invisibly beneath the surface of political life; hence the counter-stress on consciousness . . . , the belief in the Party as the sole purveyor of historical truth. This is not her vocabulary.” It's certainly important to emphasize, as Rose does, that Luxemburg put more faith in the revolutionary masses than in the wisdom of the party. However, as I'll argue in more detail below, she also held fast to the idea of the invisible unfolding of history that undergirds political life and to the closely related idea that objective conditions must be sufficiently ripe for the subjective force of revolutionary activism to be effective.
As I discuss further below, Arendt herself invites this reading in her admiring review of Nettl's biography; see Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg.” See also her brief but positive references to Luxemburg's critique of the Bolshevik revolution in Arendt, On Revolution, 264, 327–28. Drawing on these references and on Rose's essay, Maria Tamboukou contends that Luxemburg “largely inspired Arendt's theorization of the revolution as a spontaneous catalytic event, an open political phenomenon, which unleashes unpredictable forces and unfolds through a continuum of eruptions and contradictions in the pursuit of freedom, through the constitution of a new body politic” (Tamboukou, “Imagining and Living the Revolution,” 29). To the extent that this is true, it could rest on only a highly selective reading of Luxemburg on Arendt's part, one that significantly downplays the former's commitment to the Marxist theory of history, a theory that Arendt herself vehemently rejected.
Ypi further suggests that Luxemburg's “sensitivity to questions of race, ethnicity, and indigenous rights” led her to question the stadial model of historical progress, development, and social evolution that Marx had articulated in his early work. As will become clear below, I think this claim is misleading at best.
For a related reading of Luxemburg as a theorist of racial capitalism, see Gordon and Cornell, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, 4.
I discuss the specific senses in which Luxemburg holds that certain historical transformations are necessary or inevitable in more detail below. For now, allow me to state that I do not intend to defend the claim that Luxemburg is a historical determinist, at least not in any straightforward understanding of that term. Whatever she means by historical necessity or inevitability, it's clear that, within her framework, historical transformation can occur only through the revolutionary agency of the proletariat.
To be sure, there is considerable controversy over whether Marx himself ever adhered to what I'm calling here the Marxist theory of history and, even if he did so in his early work, whether he held on to this view in his mature critique of capitalism. These are significant interpretive questions that I'll have to set aside here, but I discuss them further in Allen, “Universality, Necessity, and Progress.” My own view is that he didn't, at least not fully, give up this view of history in his late work, but for a well-researched and influential argument to the contrary, see Anderson, Marx at the Margins. To say that Luxemburg was committed to this theory for “most of her life” is to acknowledge that she does show some signs of rethinking at least some aspects of this theory in her late reflections on the Bolshevik Revolution. For a masterful discussion of this shift in her thought, see Geras, Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 43–109. In light of this momentous historical event, Luxemburg's commitment to a unilinear, stadial model of history comes under considerable pressure. Thus, Luxemburg now emphatically rejects the “doctrinaire theory . . . according to which Russia, as an economically backward and predominantly agrarian land, was supposed not to be ripe for social revolution and proletarian dictatorship” (Luxemburg, “Russian Revolution,” 184). In this way, she opens the door to a more multilinear reading of the prospects for capitalism's overcoming. Even granting this point, however, we must be careful not to make too much of it. After all, Luxemburg makes clear that Russia is a special case, that its fate is dependent upon the level of capitalist development in Western Europe and on Russia's relationship to the international proletarian movement. These caveats suggest that the multilinearity of Luxemburg's reading of the 1917 Revolution is rather limited in scope. Moreover, it's worth emphasizing that simply allowing for more than one route to socialism is not tantamount to rejecting all elements of the Marxist theory of history. It may well be the case that all unilinear theories of history entail some claim about the necessity of the historical development they chart—if there is only one path of historical development, then every society must necessarily follow it—but from this it does not follow that multilinear theories are incompatible with claims to the necessity or inevitability of certain historical developments. Nor does endorsing a multilinear account require that we refrain from reading history in progressive terms. It's possible, after all, to reach the same end by multiple routes.
Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, chap. 8.
Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” 4 (hereafter cited parenthetically as RR).
This does not mean that Luxemburg fails to appreciate the gains of bourgeois democracy. On the contrary, she believes that the rights to free expression and political assembly central to bourgeois democracy are crucial historical achievements vital to the success of the workers’ movement. She also believes, however, that the once revolutionary function of bourgeois norms has been progressively historically exhausted and that bourgeois democracy now largely serves the conservative function of thwarting the prospects for proletarian revolution. Thus, bourgeois democracy, however important it may be, is no substitute for the dictatorship of the proletariat. For helpful discussion of this point, see Geras, Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 43–109.
Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism?,” 79 (hereafter cited parenthetically as LM).
As she notes in her reflections on the 1917 Russian Revolution, socialism “has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force—against property, etc.” (Luxemburg, “Russian Revolution,” 215).
Indeed, at the conclusion of the Preconditions of Socialism, Bernstein invokes the spirit of Kantian idealism against the seductive comforts of the Hegelian dialectic. By siding with Kant, Bernstein imagines socialism not as a science but rather as an ethical-political ideal that we ought to strive to achieve. On this point, see Tudor, introduction, xxxiv.
Luxemburg often equates the demise of capitalism and the socialist revolution, referring to both as inevitable; see, for example, the passage cited above, where she invokes “the inevitability of [capitalism's] collapse, leading—and this is only another aspect of the same phenomenon—to Socialism” (RR, 45). However, in at least some instances, particularly in her late work, she seems to distinguish between the inevitability of capitalism's demise and the possibility of achieving socialism, a shift that raises questions about her theory of history. I'll discuss this issue further in the next section.
For critical discussion, see Geras, Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 13–42.
For examples of this reading, see Rose, “What More Could We Want”; Tambakaki, “Why Spontaneity Matters.”
The connection may not be incidental. Foucault was inspired by some of his Tunisian students to reread Rosa Luxemburg and to study New Left thinkers such as Che Guevara and the Black Panthers in the late 1960s as he was beginning to formulate his analysis of power. See Foucault, “Chronologie,” 32–33.
For helpful discussion of this context, see Khachaturian, “‘Living Pulsebeat of the Revolution.’”
Luxemburg, “Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Union,” 102 (hereafter cited parenthetically as MS).
On this point, see Khachaturian, “‘Living Pulsebeat of the Revolution,’” 180.
Luxemburg's reference here to the contradictory, dialectical movement of history should not be taken as an indication that she rejects a unilinear, stadial model of historical development. Her commitment to the idea that history advances “in a continuous chain of development,” through a series of less advanced to more advanced stages, is perfectly compatible with the belief that societies are propelled through these stages by dialectical contradictions. For discussion of Luxemburg's ongoing commitment to a unilinear view of history, see Hudis, “Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-capitalist Formations”; Hudis, “Non-linear Pathways.”
For insightful discussion of Luxemburg's conception of progress, see Geras, Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 39–42.
But for a contemporary rejoinder to Luxemburg's critique, see Dean, Crowds and Party.
Luxemburg was extremely well-versed in Marx's critique of political economy; she taught courses on the introduction to political economy and Marx's Capital to members of the SPD at the party school in the early years of the twentieth century. Her courses form the basis for her unfinished and posthumously published text “Introduction to Political Economy.”
Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, 7 (hereafter cited parenthetically as AC).
There's a fascinating thread in Luxemburg's argument that equates civil servants and members of the liberal professions—including lawyers, doctors, accountants, and university professors—with nonworkers who do not provide for the satisfaction of material needs and therefore live off the surplus labor of society. So although academics are clearly not capitalists, our interests are more aligned with theirs than with those of workers, since we, too, live off the surplus value created by workers—we are, as Luxemburg puts it elsewhere, the “hangers-on of the capitalist class” (Luxemburg, “Anti-critique,” 357.)
As Luxemburg puts it, “Past labor is always the precondition of the social process of reproduction, however far back it is retraced. Just as social labor has no end, it has no beginning either” (AC, 53).
Luxemburg, “Anti-critique,” 362; emphasis added.
As Robert Nichols argues, this strategy of “shifting the temporal framework provided in Capital to a spatial one” is attractive as a way of theorizing the relationship between capitalism and colonialism, but it “puts considerable strain on the coherence of” the concept of primitive accumulation. Nichols maintains, and I agree, that Marx's notion of primitive accumulation has an element of historicism built into it, since the description of the emergence of capitalism in England also serves as a paradigm case of that transition. Simply transposing this paradigm of primitive accumulation from the relationship between feudal and capitalist societies to the relationship between core and periphery, as Luxemburg does, has the effect of exaggerating rather than resolving these difficulties. Nichols recommends a different approach: “disaggregating” the concept of primitive accumulation and focusing instead on one of its core elements, dispossession. See Nichols, Theft Is Property, 68–70.
Capital “requires the natural resources and labor-power of all territories for its movement of accumulation to proceed unimpeded. Since these are in actual fact overwhelmingly bound by the precapitalist forms of production that constitute the historical milieu of capital accumulation, capital is characterized by a powerful drive to conquer these territories and societies” (AC, 346).
Geras, Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 13–42. On this point, see also Ypi, “Rosa Luxemburg.”
“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” (Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, chap. 1).
Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, chap. 8; emphasis added.
“This fundamental idea,” she continues, “serves as a basis for the whole of modern social science in general, and particularly for the conception of history and doctrine of scientific socialism” (Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, chap. 1).
See Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, chap. 8, where Luxemburg excoriates the hypocrisy that leads Europe to ignore the suffering caused by imperialism around the globe, only to be outraged once its chickens come home to roost in the First World War.
The locus classicus for the critique of historicism is Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
See Adamson, “Against a Single History”; Hudis, “Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-capitalist Formations”; Hudis, “Non-linear Pathways.”
Issar, “Theorizing ‘Racial/Colonial Primitive Accumulation,’” 41; emphasis added.
