Yes, socialism or barbarism. Those are the choices. Yes, it comes from Luxemburg
^^^^ CB: How about a more limited interpretation of Luxemburg's statement along the lines that we already had barbarism instead of socialism in Germany with Nazism ? Socialism or barbaric capitalism .Sort of in analogy to the "Special Theory of Relativity" .
Thinking of the slogan as a more "general theory", it might mean that there is no result of a permanent or stable form of "capitalism with a human face", no comfort zone for "neo-Kautskyites". Either we make socialism or capitalism will degenerate into more and more barbaric forms. So the slogan implores, "get off your/our duffs, you revolutionaries."
The Empire might be suicidal in the sense of degenerating to barbarism, which with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, has a high likelihood of human species suicide, or self-generated extinction.
Marx and Engels used the term "inevitable" with respect to the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat. * But we might interpret this as a form of "Peptalk" for the proletariat, "rah, rah team", not ignorance of the potential failure of the Communist revolution - maybe a secular form of the theory of the power of positive thinking or motivational speaking.
* The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.