Capitalism searches the globe to exploit cheap, unorganized labor and pillages natural resources. It buys off or overthrows local elites. It blocks the ability of the developing world to become self-sufficient.
Meanwhile, workers in the industrialized world, stripped of well-paying jobs, benefits and legal protections, are pushed into debt peonage, forced to borrow to survive, which further enriches global speculators.
An economy built on credit, Luxemburg foresaw, transforms a regular series of small economic crises into an irregular series of large economic crises--hence two major financial dislocations to the U.S. economy in the early part of the 21st century--the dot-com collapse of 2000 and the global meltdown of 2008. And we are barreling toward another. The end result, at home and abroad, is serfdom.
Luxemburg, in another understanding important to those caught up in the pressures of a single election cycle, viewed electoral campaigns, like union organizing, as a process of educating the public about the nature of capitalism. These activities, divorced from "revolutionary consciousness" -- from the ultimate goal of overthrowing capitalism -- were, she said, "a labor of Sisyphus."
We who seek to build radical third-party movements must recognize that it is not about taking power now. It is about taking power, at best, a decade from now. Revolutions, Luxemburg reminded us, take time.
In an understanding that eludes many Bernie Sanders supporters, Luxemburg also grasped that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. She would have excoriated Sanders' ostrichlike refusal to confront American imperialism. Imperialism, she understood, not only empowers a war machine and enriches arms merchants and global capitalists. It is accompanied by a poisonous ideology -- what social critic Dwight Macdonald called the "psychosis of permanent war" -- that makes socialism impossible.
The nation, in the name of national security, demands the eradication of civil liberties. It defines dissent as treason. It creates a centralized system of power that ultimately -- as has happened in the United States -- serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy. Democracy becomes farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show that coughs up two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in American history. Society devolves into what Karl Marx called "parliamentary cretinism" or what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism." Democracy is a facade.
Capitalism is ruled by two iron dictums--maximize profit and reduce labor costs. And as capitalism advances and consolidates power in a world where resources are becoming scarce and mechanization is becoming more sophisticated, the human and environmental cost of profit mounts.
"The exploitation of the working class as an economic process cannot be abolished or softened through legislation in the framework of bourgeois society," Luxemburg wrote. Social reform, she said, "does not constitute an invasion into capitalist exploitation, but a regulating, an ordering of this exploitation in the interest of capitalist society itself."
Capitalism is an enemy of democracy. It denies workers the right to control means of production or determine how the profits from their labor will be spent. American workers -- both left and right -- do not support trade agreements. They do not support the federal bailouts of big banks and financial firms. They do not embrace astronomical salaries for CEOs or wage stagnation. But workers do not count. And the more working men and women struggle to be heard, the harsher and more violent the forms of control employed by the corporate state will become.
Luxemburg also understood something that eluded Vladimir Lenin. Nationalism -- which Luxemburg called "empty petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug" -- is a disease. It disconnects the working class in one country from another -- one of the primary objectives of the capitalist class.
As parties on the left and the right -- in our case, the corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans -- vie to be more patriotic and hawkish, they deify the military and the organs of internal security. They revoke basic civil liberties in the name of national security and law and order. This process grooms a segment of the population, as we see in Trump rallies, for fascism.
Nationalism, Luxemburg warned, is always a tool used to betray the working class. It is, she wrote, "an instrument of counterrevolutionary class policy." It unleashes powerful forms of indoctrination.
As the contagion of nationalism erupted at the outbreak of the First World War, liberal European parties, including the German Social Democrats, swiftly surrendered to right-wing nationalists in the name of the fatherland despite many preceding years of anti-war rhetoric. Luxemburg saw this betrayal as evidence of the fundamental moral and political bankruptcy of the liberal establishment in a capitalist society.
By the time the war was over, 11 million soldiers on all sides, most of them working-class men, were dead. Capitalists, who had grown rich from the slaughter, had nothing to fear now from the working class. They had fed them to the mouths of machine guns.
Luxemburg distrusted disciplined, revolutionary elites -- Lenin's vanguard. She denounced terror as a revolutionary tool. She warned that revolutionary movements that were not democratic swiftly became despotic. She understood the peculiar dynamics of revolution. She wrote that in a time of revolutionary ferment, "It is extremely difficult for any directing organ of the proletarian movement to foresee and calculate which occasions and factors can lead to explosions and which cannot." Those who were rigidly tied to an ideology or those who believed they could shape events through force, were crippled by a "rigid, mechanical, bureaucratic conception."
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