"Socialism or Barbarism"

It is apparent to few that the latter is prevailing. Warnings of over a century have gone mostly unheeded and the fruits of this apathy are beginning to emerge in stark reality.

Ian Angus, "If Socialism Fails: The Spectre of 21st Century Barbarism"

Rosa Luxemburg spent her entire adult life organizing and educating the working class to fight for socialism. She was convinced that if socialism didn't triumph, capitalism would become ever more barbaric, wiping out centuries of gains in civilization. In a major 1915 antiwar polemic, she referred to Friedrich Engels' view that society must advance to socialism or revert to barbarism and then asked, "What does a 'reversion to barbarism' mean at the present stage of European civilization?"

She gave two related answers.

In the long run, she said, a continuation of capitalism would lead to the literal collapse of civilized society and the coming of a new Dark Age, similar to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire: "The collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration -- a great cemetery" (The Junius Pamphlet).2

By saying this, Rosa Luxemburg was reminding the revolutionary left that socialism is not inevitable, that if the socialist movement failed, capitalism might destroy modern civilization, leaving behind a much poorer and much harsher world. That wasn't a new concept -- it has been part of Marxist thought from its very beginning. In 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles . . . that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In Luxemburg's words: "Humanity is facing the alternative: Dissolution and downfall in capitalist anarchy, or regeneration through the social revolution" (A Call to the Workers of the World).