Reading Rosa Luxemburg in an Era of Barbarism

At the outset of the unprecedented carnage and destruction of the first World War, Rosa Luxemburg, the German-Polish revolutionary leader and thinker wrote: 

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. 

Luxemburg’s appeal also coincided with Lenin’s observations and criticism laid out in his work Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which socialism is presented as the balm that heals an earth plagued by genocide, war, and poverty. What does it mean to refuse to settle for reformist pipe dreams and to actually build a socialist, abolitionist revolution that can end the scourge of capitalist barbarism once and for all? 

Rosa Luxemburg wrote a brilliant anti-war and anti-imperialist polemic in the Junius Pamphlet. In this text, she explained how German militarism began competing with French militarism in conjunction with the interests of their respective capitalist classes to steal, kill, and colonize sovereign lands. Luxemburg argues vehemently against imperialism and colonialism, which she describes as the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system that drives perpetual war and slaughter in the pursuit of profit on an international scale. Like in the period Luxemburg observed before the first World War, we have to once again recognize that we are confronted with the question of socialism or barbarism–on an even larger scale. We are living through existential crises directly caused by the capitalist system: imperialist war, genocide, climate catastrophe and collapse, pervasive poverty, the rise of global fascism, state repression, and reactionary political violence against the most vulnerable segments of the population. We are being driven backwards into existential precarity and uncertainty–into barbarism. 

Gaslighting for Capital and Empire

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has made it clear that she intends to continue to back and fund Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Harris has received over 5 million dollars from the pro-Israel lobby. When Palestinian solidarity activists confronted Harris at a campaign rally in Detroit by courageously chanting “Kamala, Kamala, you can't hide, we won't vote for genocide!”, she snapped at them with contempt and avoided the issue altogether by proclaiming: “if you want Trump to win, then say that…otherwise I’m speaking!”

Democrats have proven to be more effective in promoting the interests of the capitalist class and administering imperialist war through psychological manipulation and tactical deception. The highly developed mechanisms of lesser-evilism operates as a type of mental warfare that has been built up to suppress our expectations, to narrow and constrict discourse of what is possible and acceptable, to condition us to believe that even minor reform is next to impossible to achieve, and to perpetually drag the vote to the right as liberals accommodate to the imperatives of imperialism and to rightwing narratives. Ultimately, lesser-evilism has been the blunt force object that has conditioned so many people to accept the ruling class idea that there is no political path out of the declining material reality for working class and oppressed people, and the best we can do is vote Democrat to slow the process. This type of gaslighting is how liberals in power are able to prop up support for discredited neoliberalism and to try to mute opposition to imperialist war. 

At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris proudly declared her credentials as “California’s top cop”, a well-earned title. As California’s Attorney General, Harris fought against tenaciously to keep people in prison, even obstructing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ordered California to begin releasing non-violent offenders as a way to reduce prison overcrowding. A scathing New York Times editorial took Harris to task when she was announced as Biden’s running mate and described by her allies as a “progressive.” A California legal scholar familiar with her track record took her to task, explaining how she was on the opposite side of justice on every issue involving incarceration and police violence: 

She opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate shootings involving officers. And she refused to support statewide standards regulating the use of body-worn cameras by police officers. For this, she incurred criticism from an array of left-leaning reformers, including Democratic state senators, the A.C.L.U. and San Francisco’s elected public defender. The activist Phelicia Jones, who had supported Ms. Harris for years, asked, “How many more people need to die before she steps in?”

The overcrowded jails with non-violent offenders is a direct result of Harris’s policies, actions, and neoliberal belief system. Throughout her reign as top cop of the most populous state, Harris used ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to punish undocumented youth. In fact, in 2008, Harris spearheaded a San Francisco policy that increased undocumented youth arrests. Additionally, it is alarming that Harris failed to assist Michelle Lael-Norsworthy, an incarcerated trans woman who needed gender affirming surgery and petitioned the California Corrections facility. Harris’s wrong call on this exemplifies her role as “Cop Mala” a politician who enthusiastically enforces singular acts of cruelty and props up and defends the criminal injustice system in all of its aspects. 

Policing under capitalism serves as the enforcement wing of private property, as state-sanctioned violence to control and repress displaced and dissident workers, and as the first and last line of defense of the ruling class. As capitalism and imperialism operate in tandem at the global level, so too have the institutions of police repression. 

Israeli and US police train together, while thousands of US Zionists serve in the ranks in the Israeli military. These officers and soldiers, with the support of Netanyahu and the US government, are responsible for the over 250 Palestinian people being murdered on average per day, with many more dying additionally from the multiplier effects of colonialism. Sociopathic politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, among many other accomplices in genocide, represent the imperialist and capitalist class today. 

Socialism or Barbarism 

Luxemburg warned us about the limitations of social democracy. The so-called “Left” of the Democratic Party, including “The Squad,” the “Justice Democrats,” and the “Progressive Caucus,” have voted overwhelmingly in line with Biden over 90% of the time, providing liberal cover to enforce the priorities of US imperialism. That all of the “wings” of the Democratic Party converge so readily and work so seamlessly to prop up the US capitalist and imperial system–especially in times of crisis or when facing external threats and challenges–can explain why the liberal wing of capital is so essential to the very survival of the system. 

Luxemburg also warned us about the opportunism of the Social Democrats. As she stated in Reform or Revolution: “opportunist practice is essentially irreconcilable with Marxism.” The “left” of the Democratic Party not only supports imperialism and war to protect and expand US capital, but also so that weapons producers can rake in fortunes. According to the Financial Times:

The leading 15 defense contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026…almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021. Five top US defense contractors are forecast to generate cash flow of $26bn by the end of 2026, more than double the amount in 2021. 

The unconditional defense of profit and empire can also explain why the liberal establishment is moving so quickly to the political right. They are tailing and adapting to the politics of Trump and the Far Right, who unapologetically embody the political needs of capitalism and imperialism in decline and crisis, including: the willingness to commit genocide and inter-imperialist war to maintain and further project its hegemony across geostrategic regions of the world where it is being challenged; racist political scapegoating of migrants to divide the working class and increase the rate of exploitation of all workers; increased police repression of the working class and racially oppressed people; and the smashing of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. This is the barbarism of a capitalist and imperialist system increasingly incapable of resolving its own debilitating contradictions, except through further destruction, germinating fascism as a life-support system, and destroying the ecosystems which sustain human existence. 

The focus of Luxemburg's fourth chapter in the Julius Pamphlet outlines the detailed connections between finance and banking capital and imperialism. In every war (and genocide) since World War One, resource extraction for the sake of profit has been a key factor. The recent coup attempt in Venezuela–which the US state has attempted multiple times in recent years—has everything to do with the fact that Venezuela sits atop the largest oil reserves in the world. 

It has been documented that since 2001 nearly a million people (940,000) have been killed by US invasion and occupation, while another estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly as a result of US funded and backed military campaigns, coups and coup attempts, and other forms of instigated violence for capitalist and imperialist ends. By using the US military directly, or by aligning with and funding rightwing political regimes, militaries, and paramilitary forces; the US imperial state is in constant war against any obstacle to its right to plunder for profit. The US state, for instance, backed a coup in Bolivia in 2019 (and remained silent during a failed coup attempt in 2024) in an attempt to overthrow the leftwing MAS government and gain direct access to that country's vast lithium deposits. In a now infamous tweet, far right oligarch Elon Musk responded to the coup by declaring: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” This is precisely what Rosa Luxemburg warned us about in her writing and organizing. 

The Rise of US fascism and How to Defeat It 

The barbarism of capitalism and imperialism is gestating new iterations of fascism to enforce the violence necessary to preserve and perpetuate systems of exploitation, and to also attack and crush any threat of socialist revolution. As the right continues to harm Black, Indigenous, people of color, working class people, women, and queer people, these rapacious plunderers of society, as Kshama Sawant calls them, will stop at nothing to destroy us and the planet in their quest. The narrative that the United States government “defeated fascism” in the Second World War is a civics propaganda tool to mislead the people. The reality is much different.  

It was Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, anti-colonialists, and other antifascist forces that played an outsized role in resisting and turning the tide against Fascist movements and governments within Europe and in their colonies that won decisive struggles well before World War 2 concluded them. While the US and its European allies defeated their Fascist and Nazi imperial rivals militarily leading to their collapse, they were not interested and nor did they pursue the complete dismantling of the fascist state systems and bureaucracies, or in rooting it out as a political ideology. 

Nazis enjoyed an important afterlife in the service of the US state and military in waging war against “Communist enemies” and national liberation movements and anti-colonial revolutions. Nazi and fascist ideological concepts rooted in white supremacy and anti-communism bolstered the violent defense of the Jim Crow racial segregation and violence, McCarthyistic reaction, and other oppressive state and institutional structures that were weaponized against the postwar liberatory and civil rights struggles in the United States. 

Fascist movements in the US are resurging once again in the context of capitalist crisis, the increasing frequency of oppositional movements against the failings of capitalism, growing manifestations of state violence, and the weakening of the hold of bourgeois ideology which offers no solutions. Because fascism emerges as the most determined line of defense of the ruling class and capitalism, it cannot be defeated by voting within the electoral apparatus of that same system. 

The connections between JD Vance, Trump, and Elon Musk allow for their agenda of plundering the earth in order to enrich themselves. The Nazis banning and burning books, the looting of the Institute of Sexology in 1933 are histories repeating themselves today in Florida’s book bans, the attack on Drag Queen story hour, and the rapid growth in Christian Fascism. This is a particular variant of US fascism representing the fusion of Christianity and white supremacy to specifically oppress people of color, working class people, undocumented people, Muslims, and queer people. 

The real prerogatives of fascism go beyond the far right and reactionary schemes of “Project 2025”. The capitalist state is now singularly working to increase the rate and scale of profitability for finance capital at all costs–thereby creating more oppositional movements of the exploited and oppressed–and in response the conditions for fascism to grow and flourish. What Hitler did for German capitalists, Trump does for Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; and what Biden-Harris do for the likes of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. 

But it goes even deeper than that. Through their service to the to the barons of capitalism, Democrats get to serve as captains of the state to ensure the status quo and further state action to allow further accumulation. Bill Gates gets to own intellectual property rights over vaccines, for instance, and is enabled to become the largest owner of farmland in the United States. The Military-Industrial complex get washed in bloody profits and ensured that war orders will continue to flow. It is for this reason that capitalist politicians like Kamala Harris gets anointed and funded to be the highest position of power and allowed to be the “top cop” of the country. This means she has and will continue to be guided and act accordingly to the needs of bankers, tech capital, and the war industries. 

One solution is to organize with greater numbers to beat back the fascist movements in the streets. This requires direct organizing in our communities and across the nation. 

The protests worldwide against the genocide of Palestinians points in the positive direction as many people in the United States have shifted their view and questioning US imperialism and its direct role. More people coming of age in an era of barbarism are also critical of policing and carceral capitalism, and understand the connections between the military industrial complex, imperialism, and politicians like Kamala Harris and Trump. We have to organize these new generations of revolutionaries into socialist organization. 

More than ever we have to work to organize within the working class; within and alongside Black, Indigenous, Chicanx/Latinx, and Palestinian and Arab communities, queer people, people with disabilities, tenants, students, and everyone who understands that Rosa Luxemburg's powerful message and warning of “socialism or barbarism” is not an abstraction or exaggerated–but rather it is the existential equation we are now facing again in the 21st century.

Tina Trutanich is a queer communist worker and poet from Spain and California. They write about food, nature, revolution, love, and liberation.