In 1916, Rosa Luxemburg published The Junius Pamphlet (aka The Crisis of German Social Democracy), which contains, among other things, the following passage: “Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’” Although Luxemburg attributed this striking assertion to Friedrich Engels, it was written by the German socialist Karl Kautsky. However, earlier than Kautsky, Engels had noted that without progress towards socialism, capitalism would plunge the world into real barbarism. Engels cited major conflicts as one of his examples.
Some 40 years later, universal barbarism did erupt, first from 1914 to 1918, and then from 1939 to 1945. However, before the First World War, and between it and the Second World War, and after the Second, there was also a surplus of barbarism – ranging from the real genocide orchestrated by the Belgians in colonial Congo, to systemic racial discrimination in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. You can argue with the term “barbarism”, which, in the progressive times of Engels, meant everything that had happened between antiquity and the bourgeois era (that is, the Middle Ages). Leaving aside the historical context, however, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg were at least partly right.
The Soviet Union itself was no laggard when it came to barbarism. I will not recite all of its crimes: suffice it to recall the Gulag and the mass deportations of whole ethnic groups. But here again there is a matter of terminology, and a much more serious one. What is “socialism”? Is Soviet socialism (or Chinese, or North Korean or Cambodian, and right down the list to the mildest species of socialism, Yugoslavian) the only socialism or even the principal form of socialism?
