Luxemburg, Day 1 (7 September, 2010)

Before talking about Luxemburg, let me say a few words about her adversary in the text we are reading: Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein is best known for Evolutionary Socialism, a cleverly titled translation of his much less cleverly titled German book Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Preconditions of Socialism and the Task of Social Democracy, 1899).  This is the book against which Luxemburg inveighs, and against which Lenin will also inveigh in What Is to Be Done?

Bernstein was a lifelong socialist, active in the formation of the German Social Democratic Party (to which Luxemburg also belonged).  Exiled from Germany and then Switzerland for his political activities, he collaborated with Engels in England for a time, and helped to write the SDPD’s Erfurt Program, the document that governed the meaning of “social democracy” – as, in Bernstein’s own words, “the exercise of political sovereignty by the class party of the workers (ES, 3a) – until 1959, when the SDPD’s Godesberg Program helped redefine the term away from Marxism and towards the sort of thing that the NDP stands for, whatever that is.

In the mid- to late-1890s, Bernstein switched tacks, and embraced a non-revolutionary politics.  Socialism could be – and was being – achieved by means of social reforms – especially the spread of cooperative production – within capitalism.  This is the kernel of Evolutionary Socialism.  He returned to Germany in 1901, and served as an SPDP member of the Reichstag almost continually until he retired from public life in 1928.  He died in 1932, on year before Hitler’s rise to power again outlawed the SDPD.

The general argument of Bernstein’s book is ably and fairly recapitulated by Luxemburg in paragraphs 2-4 of Reform or Revolution? 

According to Bernstein, a general decline of capitalism seems to be increasingly improbable because, on the one hand, capitalism shows a greater capacity of adaptation, and, on the other hand, capitalist production becomes more and more varied.

The capacity of capitalism to adapt itself, says Bernstein, is manifested first in the disappearance of general crises, resulting from the development of the credit system, employers’ organisations, wider means of communication and informational services. It shows itself secondly, in the tenacity of the middle classes, which hails from the growing differentiation of the branches of production and the elevation of vast layers of the proletariat to the level of the middle class. It is furthermore proved, argues Bernstein, by the amelioration of the economic and political situation of the proletariat as a result of its trade union activity.

From this theoretic stand is derived the following general conclusion about the practical work of the Social-Democracy. The latter must not direct its daily activity toward the conquest of political power, but toward the betterment of the condition of the working class, within the existing order. It must not expect to institute socialism as a result of a political and social crisis, but should build socialism by means of the progressive extension of social control and the gradual application of the principle of co-operation. 

It is fair to say that the crux of the argument between Bernstein and Luxemburg is the nature and severity of economic crises.  We’ll return to this later.

OK, now to Red Rosa.  She was born in Poland, and was active in the Polish revolutionary Proletariat Party from the age of 15 or 16.  She also had to go into exile, to Switzerland, and then, in 1898, to Germany.  She was an economist and historian by training, and was extremely active on the Left wing of the SDPD, together especially with Karl Liebknecht.  She wrote against Berstein’s earlier articles, so their argument with one another was already explicitly developed in Evolutionary Socialism, and her critical response, in Social Reform or Revolution?, was expected.

The SDPD broke apart in 1914 over the issue of the outbreak of World War I in the Balkans – the party’s parliamentary contingent supported the issuing of war bonds, and pledged a truce with the Reich, promising not to support any strikes during the war.  Luxemburg led the contingent that left the SPDP over the war, and she, Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and others founded the Spartacus Band, which would become the German Communist Party after the War.  Her anti-war activities landed her in prison from 1916 until Germany’s defeat in 1918.  After the War, the SDPD came to head the new Weimar government, and the Spartacists opposed them from the Left.  At the beginning of 1919, there was a revolutionary outbreak in Berlin, and Luxemburg reluctantly supported it.  The Social Democratic President of Germany, a former student of Luxemburg’s, ordered a Right wing Freikorps militia to break the revolution, and, on January 15, 1919, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were captured and summarily executed, as were hundreds of other communist insurgents. 

So much for her life, what about he thought?  For Luxemburg, it is essential that Marxism is scientific.  This is as opposed to utopian socialism, which expresses some imaginary or wished for future, from which we are separated by some indeterminate chasm of time and will, a chasm that we may or may not be able to leap across through action.  The question posed by utopianism is one of finding the means that will deliver us to the proposed end.  This is Bernstein’s “idealism” (p. 3) – the idea of socialism comes first, and guides us to its realization.

Scientific socialism, on the contrary, tells us what we are and what we do, but tells us nothing about the end state that we will achieve by being what we are and doing what we will do.  As capitalists, we encounter repeated crises, which lead necessarily to the impossibility of our continued existence.  As workers, we take part in an increasingly socialized process of production.  As members of the working class—and this is slightly different, a political identity rather than a factor in production—we also become increasingly “organized and conscious,” and increasingly revolutionarily active.

But Marxism is not an empirical science on the model of chemistry or psychology. (Hence, its claims are not falsifiable, as Popper says.)  Empirical science is about predicting (and then technically controlling) variable phenomena.  Marxism doesn’t attempt to predict economic phenomena with the aim of controlling them – that is one big difference between Marxism and Keynesianism.  Rather, it seeks to understand the historical specificity of the modern form of society (capitalism) in its totality. There’s nothing that can be isolated and repeated experimentally as a variable.  This understanding will certainly have consequences for empirical research, but that doesn’t mean it results from such empirical research, as normally understood.

Nonetheless, Marxism makes one claim that seems like a prediction: “The fundamental idea [of scientific socialism] consists of the affirmation that capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible. There were good reasons for conceiving that juncture in the form of a catastrophic general commercial crisis. But that is of secondary importance when the fundamental idea is considered.” (p. 2).  Bernstein treats this as a prediction, a prediction that he thinks is likely to be false, since capitalism gets more and more stable, in his judgment.

Luxemburg seems to want to separate the theoretical claim from any predictions that base themselves on that theoretical claim. The theoretical claim is that capitalism is in critical condition – that is, it necessarily tends to produce crises in which its own functioning breaks down, in which it becomes impossible – and this is analytically distinct from any predictions about the specific character, timing, or consequences of actual crises.  The theory gives us capital’s inherent tendencies.  It is up to empirical observations to predict when and how those tendencies will in fact produce commercial, financial, or ecological crises.

Why is capitalism in critical condition?  Why does it tend towards crises?  This is the question that more and more preoccupied Luxemburg, culminating in her 1913 work, The Accumulation of Capital, which she wrote in a fever of activity over 4 months – all 900 pages of it!  The outline of her argument there is that capitalism can only exist parasitically on a non-capitalist exterior, but cannot exist except by internalizing this exterior it nonetheless needs.  This has three facets:

Capitalist production needs a market for an ever increasing output – but capitalists cannot generally pay their workers to buy their product, nor buy it all themselves – hence, capitalism must turn the inhabitants of non-capitalist countries into consumers.

Capitalist production, in order to grow, also needs ever-larger inputs or raw materials.  This, too, is supplied by turning non-capitalist nations into the suppliers of the factors of production.

Finally, ever-growing production needs an ever-growing labour force, in order to keep wages low enough to realize profits, and in order to respond to changes in the market by sharply increasing production.  Again, it is the population of non-capitalist areas that serves this need.

When capital encounters barriers to expansion – when it is unable to sell its produce, or increase its production, or decrease its costs – this generates a crisis.  Capital is like the proverbial shark – if it stops moving, it dies.  A world in which capital had conquered every inch of the earth, and every sector of production, would be a world of cataclysmic crisis.  Every actually experienced crisis is like a premonition of this cataclysm.  But this is precisely where capital is constantly striving to go.