No, I am rather confident “inevitable” meant “inevitable.” I think it is easy to underestimate changes of consciousness brought about in the 20th century, both by advances in science and the by the implacable reality of history. Theirs was obviously not a bourgeois theory of progress but it was a theory of progress nevertheless. As was any non-reactionary theory of social development of the time.
Marx and Engels are dangerous here, as they were so ahead of the curve in so many ways, with their critical analysis of the unstated underlying assumptions of their own society and the limitations of the science of their times, that it can be difficult to keep in mind how they were (or, how they *must be*, if one is properly “Marxist” about it) constrained within the intellectual and social parameters of their own time and place.
Luxemburg and the phrase “Socialism or barbarism”: Let me try to rescue the heroic figure of history-shaping revolutionary struggle from my own reformulation of her words, made too easy by the passing of almost a century. Here is the context:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm
“On the ninth of November, workers and soldiers smashed the old German regime. The Prussian saber’s mania of world rule had bled to death on the battlefields of France. The gang of criminals who sparked a worldwide conflagration and drove Germany into an ocean of blood had come to the end of its rope. The people – betrayed for four years, having forgotten culture, honesty, and humanity in the service of the Moloch, available for every obscene deed – awoke from its four-year long paralysis, only to face the abyss.
On the 9th of November, the German proletariat rose up to throw off the shameful yoke. The Hohenzollerns were driven out; workers’ and soldiers’ councils were elected.
But the Hohenzollerns were no more than the front men of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Junkers. The class rule of the bourgeoisie is the real criminal responsible for the World War, in Germany as in France, in Russia as in England, in Europe as in America. The capitalists of all nations are the real instigators of the mass murder. International capital is the insatiable god Baal, into whose bloody maw millions upon millions of steaming human sacrifices are thrown.
The World War confronts society with the choice: either continuation of capitalism, new wars, and imminent decline into chaos and anarchy, or abolition of capitalist exploitation.”
The phrase “Socialism or Barbarism” appears later, as a subhead, but she has already made her point clear.
It is December 1918. A socialist Germany may be born at any time, but it is not guaranteed. A victory for the other side is a victory for barbarism—as Luxemburg’s own murder will one day show. She is saying, Look, this is what is staring you right in the face, this is your reality right now, if you only have the courage to acknowledge it. It is *immediate*. A historical shift is taking place *right now*. Here, the demand of the choice between socialism of barbarism is a *fact claim*, a formulation of the realities of the day. It is nothing more than that, nor, more importantly, nothing less.
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 5:56 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> socialismorbarbarism:
>
> 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" .
>
....
>