[Marxism] very interesting

George Snedeker via Marxism Wed, 22 Oct 2014 08:27:54 -0700

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The Origin of Rosa Luxemburg's Slogan 'Socialism or Barbarism'

October 21, 2014
By Ian Angus
John Riddle, "Marxist Essays and Commentary" (October 21, 2014)

The origin of Rosa Luxemburg&#039;s slogan &#039;socialism or barbarism&#039;

Ian Angus traces an important socialist slogan to its unexpected source
Climate & Capitalism's tagline, "Ecosocialism or barbarism: There is no third
way," is based on the slogan, "Socialism or Barbarism," which Rosa Luxemburg
raised to such great effect during World War I and the subsequent German
revolution, and which has been adopted by many socialists since then.
The puzzle is: where did the concept come from? Luxemburg's own account doesn't
hold water, and neither do the attempts of left-wing scholars to explain (or
explain away) the confusion in her explanation.
Luxemburg first raised the idea that humanity faced a choice between the
victory of socialism and the end of civilization in a powerful antiwar pamphlet
she wrote in prison in 1915. The Crisis in German Social Democracy - better
known as The Junius Pamphlet, after the pen name she used to avoid prosecution
- played a key role in educating and organizing a revolutionary left opposition
to the pro-war leadership of the German Social Democratic Party.
Luxemburg attributed the concept to one of the founders of modern socialism:
"Friedrich Engels once said: 'Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads,
either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.' . Until now, we
have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without
suspecting their fearsome seriousness. . Today, we face the choice exactly as
Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism
and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation,
desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that
means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against
imperialism and its method of war."
Here's the problem: Despite many careful searches through his published and
unpublished works, no one has found the words that Friedrich Engels supposedly
said. So what's going on?
First, we should note that the English translation incorrectly puts quotation
marks around the sentence Luxemburg attributed to Engels. Those marks do not
appear in her German text, which indicates that she wasn't offering a direct
quote, and we shouldn't expect to find those exact words in Engels. That's even
more the case because she was writing in prison, with limited access to
socialist books, so we must make allowances for memory errors.
With that in mind, let's look at the suggestions three scholars have made for
passages that Luxemburg might have had in mind when she attributed the sentence
"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or
regression into barbarism," to Engels.
Three explanations
In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, editors Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson write:
"Luxemburg probably has in mind a passage in the Communist Manifesto where Marx
and Engels speak of class struggles resulting in 'either a revolutionary
constitution of society at large or the common ruin of the contending classes.'"
Although that passage expresses a related idea, there are three serious
objections to it as Luxemburg's source. First, her wording is so different from
the Manifesto's that it's hard to imagine her getting it so wrong, even quoting
from memory. Second, it's unlikely that she would attribute a passage from Marx
& Engels' best-known collaboration to Engels alone. And third, the standard
English translation I've quoted above, which Hudis and Anderson also use, omits
three important words that appear after "as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a
generation ago" in the original German: vor vierzig Jahren. Surely no one
writing in 1915 would refer to 1848, when the Manifesto was published, as forty
years ago.
Forty years would go back to the mid-1870s, which directs our attention to
Anti-Dühring, which Engels published in serial form in 1877-78, and as a book
in 1879. Since it was the most comprehensive statement of the Marxist worldview
written by either of the movement's founders, it's a reasonable place to look
for quotes similar to the one Luxemburg attributed to Engels - and two scholars
have done just that.
In The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Norman Geras suggests that she was "probably"
referring to a passage in which Engels disputes Dühring's claim that force, not
economic development, is the dominant factor in history. Engels argues that
attempts to use force to turn back economic progress have almost always failed,
except in a few "isolated cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian
conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste
or allowed to go to ruin productive forces which they did not know how to use."
As an example, he cites the Christian invaders who let advanced irrigation
systems decay after they overthrew Muslim rule in Spain.
That passage does discuss a disastrous conflict between civilization (Muslims)
and barbarians (Christians) which the latter won, but it says nothing about
capitalism or socialism, nor did Engels draw the general conclusion Luxemburg
attributes to him. Nice try, but it doesn't work.
In a recent essay, Michael Löwy suggests that Luxemburg may have been referring
to this passage in Anti-Dühring:
"both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production
and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying
contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree
that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode
of production and distribution must take place."
Again, this expresses a related concept, but as Löwy firmly points out, the
passage is "quite different," in both words and meaning, from the quote
Luxemburg attributes to Engels. Löwy concludes that the search for a source for
Luxemburg's slogan is bound to fail, because:
"In fact, it is Rosa Luxemburg who invented, in the strong sense of the word,
the expression 'socialism or barbarism,' which was to have such a great impact
in the course of the twentieth century. If she refers to Engels, it is perhaps
to try to give more legitimacy to a fairly heterodox thesis."
That's a reasonable conclusion, but I think it's wrong. For one thing, the idea
that Luxemburg invented the expression in 1915 is contradicted by her assertion
that "we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly." It is
clear that she expected her readers to be familiar with the phrase: it wasn't
something new and strange. And that means there was a third-party source.
Drum roll, please ..
The source
The search for Luxemburg's quotation in Engels' works is bound to fail, because
he didn't say it. The problem isn't misquotation, it is misattribution.

Karl Kautsky

The author of the sentence Luxemburg quotes, and of the "socialism or
barbarism" concept more generally, was not Engels, but the man who was widely
viewed as the most authoritative Marxist theoretician after Marx and Engels -
Karl Kautsky.
The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was founded in 1875 as a merger
between Marxists and followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, with a program that was
broadly socialist but not Marxist. In 1891 Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein
drafted a Marxist program that Kautsky rewrote after public discussion: it was
adopted at a party congress in Erfurt that year. The Erfurt Program, as it was
known, remained the SPD's official program until after World War I, and was
widely used by socialist parties in other countries as a model: Lenin, for
example, based his 1896 draft program for Russian socialists on it.
The program itself was deliberately brief - just over 1300 words in English
translation - with little in the way of explanation or argument, so Kautsky
then wrote a book-length popular commentary on it, explaining the program and
arguing the case for socialism. Das Erfurter Programm in seinem grundsätzlichen
Teil erläutert (The Erfurt Program: A Discussion of Fundamentals) was published
in 1892. Historian Donald Sassoon writes that the program "became one of the
most widely read texts of socialist activists throughout Europe" and Kautsky's
commentary "was translated into sixteen languages before 1914 and became the
accepted popular summa of Marxism" around the world.
Rosa Luxemburg, who became active in the Polish and German socialist movements
in the 1880s, undoubtedly read Kautsky's book, and would have heard its ideas
discussed many times. Chapter 4 includes this passage:
"I indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind would
be cut off from all further economic development. In that event modern society
would decay, as did the Roman empire nearly two thousand years ago, and finally
relapse into barbarism.
"As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either
move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism."
The similarities between this passage and the one quoted above from The Junius
Pamphlet are obvious. The crucial final clause in Kautsky is virtually
identical to its counterpart in Luxemburg's "Engels quote" -

Kautsky 1892: we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into
barbarism (es heißt entweder vorwärts zum Sozialismus oder rückwärts in die
Barbarei)

Luxemburg 1915: either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism
(entweder Übergang zum Sozialismus oder Rückfall in die Barbarei)

Luxemburg has used nouns instead of verbs, but otherwise the two are the same.
Further confirmation that Luxemburg's words had their origins in Kautsky's book
is found in the fact that both refer to the fall of the Roman Empire as an
example of a society that regressed because it failed to move forward, a
subject Löwy unfortunately dismisses as "not very relevant."
So why did Rosa attribute the "socialism or barbarism" idea to Engels instead
of Kautsky? It's impossible to know for sure, but it seems likely that after
two decades of wide use as the popular explanation of socialism, many of the
concepts and forms of expression in Kautsky's book had become common currency
in socialist circles, to the point where the words were detached from their
specific origin. Think of the many quotations that are wrongly attributed to
Albert Einstein, and you'll have an idea of how Kautsky's phrase could be
credited to Engels. When she quoted it from memory in prison in 1915, Rosa
Luxemburg made an informed (but wrong) guess that the most likely place to find
it would be Anti-Dühring, so she added the "40 years ago" reference. Her
pamphlet then had to be printed in Switzerland and circulated illegally in
Germany, so detailed source-checking wasn't on the agenda.
Kautsky's authorship of "socialism or barbarism" wasn't identified before this,
I suspect, because after he condemned the Bolshevik revolution, socialists
stopped reading Kautsky. As someone has joked, thanks to Lenin's polemic many
people think that Kautsky's given name was Renegade. Most of his works are now
out of print or available only in German in expensive academic editions. As
this case shows, that neglect has made it more difficult to understand
Luxemburg.
If I'm correct, then Michael Löwy is wrong to suggest that Luxemburg "invented,
in the strong sense of the word, the expression 'socialism or barbarism.'"
Rather, she wrote "we have all probably read and repeated these words" because
that was the simple truth - as a result of Kautsky's widely-read book, the idea
that humanity must move forward into socialism or fall back to barbarism was
already well-known among socialists in Germany.
Her great contribution was to give "socialism or barbarism" a more immediate
and profound revolutionary meaning than the original author intended. The words
came from Karl Kautsky, but Rosa Luxemburg gave them wings.
Ian Angus is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism.

[Marxism] very interesting

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