Can capitalism overcome its internal contradictions?

Reform or Revolution, one of July’s Books of the Month, was Rosa Luxemburg’s first major political work. Luxemburg was one of the outstanding proletarian revolutionaries in pre-World War I Europe and until her assassination in 1919. Her revolutionary accomplishments were even more outstanding, given the prejudices of the time: still in her 20s, a foreigner (a Pole living in Germany), a Jew and a woman.

The two articles by Luxemburg in this book were first published in 1898 and 1899 in answer to writings by Eduard Bernstein, a well-known figure in the German Social Democratic Party, a revolutionary workers party that had grown rapidly despite being outlawed by the government in 1878. After anti-socialist laws were repealed in 1890, it emerged as an important political force and its candidates were elected to the federal Reichstag and some provincial governments.

Bernstein had begun disputing some of the theoretical conquests of scientific socialism that had been explained by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. He argued that revolution was unnecessary and that socialism could be achieved by gradual reform of the capitalist system, through mechanisms like consumers’ and production cooperatives, trade unions and the gradual extension of political democracy.

Luxemburg pointed out that what was at stake in answering Bernstein was “the very existence of the social democratic movement” and its goal “the conquest of political power.” Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

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BY ROSA LUXEMBURG
Bernstein’s socialism offers to the workers the prospect of sharing in the wealth of society. The poor are to become rich. How will this socialism be brought about? His articles in Neue Zeit “Problems of Socialism” contain only vague allusions to this question. Adequate information, however, can be found in his book.

Bernstein’s socialism is to be realized with the aid of these two instruments: labor unions — or as Bernstein himself characterizes them, economic democracy — and cooperatives. The first will suppress industrial profit; the second will do away with commercial profit.

Cooperatives, especially cooperatives in the field of production, constitute a hybrid form in the midst of capitalism. They can be described as small units of socialized production within capitalist exchange.

But in capitalist economy exchange dominates production (that is, production depends to a large extent on market possibilities). As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital — that is, pitiless exploitation — becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labor is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labor is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a cooperative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of the capitalist entrepreneur — a contradiction that accounts for the failure of production cooperatives, which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving. …

Within the framework of present society, producers’ cooperatives are limited to the role of simple annexes to consumers’ cooperatives. It appears, therefore, that the latter must be the beginning of the proposed social change. But this way the expected reform of society by means of cooperatives ceases to be an offensive against capitalist production. That is, it ceases to be an attack against the principal bases of capitalist economy. It becomes, instead, a struggle against commercial capital, especially small and middle-sized commercial capital. It becomes an attack made on the twigs of the capitalist tree. …

No law in the world can give to the proletariat the means of production while it remains in the framework of bourgeois society, for not laws but economic development have torn the means of production from the producers’ possession.

And neither is the exploitation inside the system of wage labor based on laws. The level of wages is not fixed by legislation, but by economic factors. The phenomenon of capitalist exploitation does not rest on a legal disposition, but on the purely economic fact that labor power plays in this exploitation the role of merchandise possessing, among other characteristics, the agreeable quality of producing value — more than the value it consumes in the form of the laborer’s means of subsistence. In short, the fundamental relations of the domination of the capitalist class cannot be transformed by means of legislative reforms, on the basis of capitalist society, because these relations have not been introduced by bourgeois laws, nor have they received the form of such laws. Apparently Bernstein is not aware of this, for he speaks of “socialist reforms.” On the other hand, he seems to express implicit recognition of this when he writes, on page 10 of his book, that “the economic motive acts freely today, while formerly it was masked by all kinds of relations of domination, by all sorts of ideology.”

It is one of the peculiarities of the capitalist order that within it all the elements of the future society first assume, in their development, a form not approaching socialism but, on the contrary, a form moving more and more away from socialism. Production takes on a progressively increasing social character. But under what form is the social character of capitalist production expressed? It is expressed in the form of the large enterprise, in the form of the shareholding concern, the cartel, within which the capitalist antagonisms, capitalist exploitation, the oppression of labor-power, are augmented to the extreme.

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