ByInes Schwerdtner Translation by Loren Balhorn

On the 100th anniversary of her murder, Rosa Luxemburg’s incredible life provides us with a model — not necessarily of what to do, but of how to do it.

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Hardly any figure in the history of socialism represents such an impressive combination of sharp-minded theoretician and rhetorically explosive politician as did Rosa Luxemburg. Her almost daily newspaper articles, her speeches at party and trade union meetings, her letters and theoretical writings all show us as much.

Luxemburg also stands as an important symbol of resistance. She continued her socialist writing even from prison and briefly but brilliantly intervened in the revolutionary tumult of 1918–19, before her brutal murder by right-wing soldiers who later flocked to Nazism. Today she is celebrated for diverse reasons, from her support for revolutionary upheaval to her alleged pacifism, her love of plants and animals, and often for her insistence that freedom is always “freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

In today’s world of crisis, with mainstream social democracy collapsing and the far right on the rise, many on the left would give anything for such a passionate socialist to lead us out of our political disorientation. And there can be no doubt that Rosa Luxemburg remains an icon of socialist theory and practice.

The risk, as we mark the centenary of her death, is that overly sentimental look at the past can often prevent us from firmly grasping our future. If humanity is to have any chance of surviving the coming environmental and economic crises and the capitalist system that causes, them we have to spend less time romanticizing the past and more studying what we can actually learn from it.

A Product of Her Time

Luxemburg’s life and work speak for themselves: she wrote, read, and spoke multiple languages, finished her PhD at age twenty-six, and founded a series of socialist magazines and even parties. Her career can only be understood in the historical context of Germany’s turn-of-the-century workers’ movement, at the very pinnacle of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). She engaged in lively exchanges with other impressive intellectuals and politicians; women like Clara Zetkin were close allies.

Luxemburg came of age inside a socialist mass culture that deeply believed that the working class’s victory was on the horizon. She retained her iron faith in this future even after the disaster of 1914, when the SPD — along with the German masses — decided to serve the Fatherland in World War I, abandoning its aim of abolishing capitalism. Yet experiences like the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and later 1917 provided Luxemburg with “proof” that political transformation was still possible.

This kind of unshakable revolutionary faith is hard to imagine in the present, especially when one thinks of the rainy, uninspired demonstrations commemorating her death every January in Berlin, or compare today’s party and trade union bureaucracies with those of Luxemburg’s time. The long period of welfare-state compromise followed by neoliberal deregulation (brought forth by the social democratic parties themselves) have seemingly written the working class out of public discourse. Since 1989 at the very latest, no right-minded person can honestly share Luxemburg’s confidence that the victory of socialism is inevitable.

Instead, we have to begin anew, and reimagine a mass socialist movement rooted in our communities and workplaces — one able to challenge capitalism at every turn. This can hardly be done by imitating the Social Democracy that existed before World War I. And yet Luxemburg certainly can teach us a few things about socialist method that do apply even a century after her death.

Thinking in Contradictions

Rosa Luxemburg’s sharp analysis, conducted with an unparalleled command of Marxist theory, remains both unique and impressive. Yet precisely because any attempt to copy her or the time in which she lived can only result in failure, the modern left prefers to linger somewhere between well-meaning hymns of praise to a martyr and the quiet melancholy over a lost past. Sometimes (sadly), Rosa shows up as an icon on posters or shoulder bags.

This is unfortunate, as Luxemburg has more to offer than just interesting history. Her work reveals at least two decisive insights for today. Firstly, the “brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy” remains unchanged, and continues to undermine both natural resources and human labor power — that is, the foundations of this same economy.

The need to transform production has not gone away, and has grown even worse in the face of looming environmental disaster. Yet as capitalism continues to expand into non-capitalist spaces and spheres of life, it also extends its own lifespan. That is, it will not necessarily collapse on its own. Rather, working people need to intervene politically in order to bring about a different, better society.

In Luxemburg’s eyes, this political intervention required education and learning from experience. Every protest, even those that fail, could help to create new, more successful movements. In this spirit, she served as one of the most popular instructors at the SPD’s party school, convinced of the need to equip party members with the tools to understand real-world developments themselves. In this sense, her most important legacy for future socialists is not the what of socialist theory and politics in the form of written formulas or laws, but rather the how of understanding and transforming society.

Especially in an age when capitalist markets, transnational corporations, banks, and their crises appear to be catapulting humanity into disaster, developing a precise understanding of how these actors and systems function is essential to political strategy. For instance Luxemburg paid close attention to the connections between militarism and colonialism. If she were here today, she would tell us to study all of the statistics on Chinese industrial policy and compare them to German and US equivalents. If Luxemburg had her way, every socialist would be able to explain the relationship between the West’s military withdrawal from Syria while simultaneously strengthening its own borders against refugees.

She would have ripped to shreds hollow slogans like “Trumpism” or “populism,” which are used to classify different governments as “good” or “bad” but are largely useless for understanding the ways in which these regimes actually function. She would have countered rhetoric about a “post-political age” by precisely reconstructing the interconnections between economic interests, the development of the productive forces, crises, and ruptures and showing what forms of government emerge from them.

At the same time, she was a sharp critic of her own organizations: the parties of the working class and the trade unions. By and large she accused them of responding too rigidly and bureaucratically to the challenges — and the political earthquakes — of her time. Today, the Left’s distance to protest — let alone political violence — is much deeper. The battles we wage are almost exclusively defensive in nature.

Luxemburg, who after the Russian Revolution of 1905 wrote a sober yet militant pamphlet on The Mass Strike, moved in a different manner. Learning from the events in Russia, she concluded that it is impossible either to will a strike into existence or to stop one. In this she opposed both sides in the German debate of the time, which adhered to an anarchist understanding of the mass strike as a merely technical affair, only as a means to employ. She was more interested in discovering the objective sources of the mass strikes and using the potential they offered to achieve political goals.

Thinking about her insight today, we can immediately relate it to the gilets jaunes movement in France. These protests by the lower-middle classes from the provinces have shaken French society. The fact that they are not (yet) represented by trade unions and other political organizations poses important questions of socialist politics: how these organizations can support these protests and use them to win far-reaching transformations.

In today’s situation, Luxemburg would oppose the social compromises and “treading softly” of the trade unions and call on them to get to work. Though the spontaneity of the masses was always very important in her eyes, it was nothing if not paired with the years of previous “underground work” by the workers’ organization, such that it would ultimately be able to take power. You can’t have one without the other.

Revolutionary Realpolitik

It is this thinking in contradictions that defines the How of Luxemburg’s revolutionary politics. That leadership and spontaneity are not mutually exclusive but rather conditional is a core element of her thinking. The same was true of her support for reforms leading to real improvements to the living conditions of working people, while simultaneously remaining focused on the long-term goal of a democratic socialism — a balancing act Rosa described as “revolutionary Realpolitik”.

Like many elements of the Marxist canon, this formulation has been reduced to an empty phrase in left-wing politics and thereby stands in stark contrast to Luxemburg’s own, much more lively thought. She was less preoccupied with the formulation itself, but rather actual practice — particularly the practice of those capable of understanding and exploiting capitalism’s moments of crisis. She feared that the everyday work of serving in government would obscure the goal of taking real political power. The Left remained too tied to an ultimately apolitical logic of practical necessity.

Yet even now, in our seemingly defeated, post-political age, things have begun to stir: technocratic styles of governance have exhausted themselves. The political right also profits from this exhaustion, putting heroic myths back into the political sphere in the form of authoritarian power — usually in the hands of powerful men. Even Francis Fukuyama, who once declared “the end of history,” says he wishes socialism would come back.

And indeed, democratic socialists are taking the political stage in many countries. The fact that a new generation is rediscovering socialism together with older, previously marginalized leftists is not a matter of coincidence nor luck, but a result of previous waves of political protest. But the “underground work” and training up of new left-wing heroes remains, for the most part, in its infancy. What could give us strength is, as with Luxemburg, a lively and worldly language that connects the everyday consciousness of the masses with the visionary idea of another way of producing and living.

Luxemburg’s analysis and her humanist pathos are pathbreaking, as is her understanding of political education and organization. For the coming crisis of our age we need not one, but many Rosa Luxemburgs — women and men, young and old, black and white, and in every corner of the world. The struggle for socialism that her generation waged and ultimately lost remains as current as ever. If our generation fails to pick up the baton, humanity may not get another chance.Republished from Der Freitag.

Contributors

Ines Schwerdtner is an author, political analyst, and co-host of the podcast halbzehn.fm. She lives in Berlin.

Loren Balhorn is a contributing editor at Jacobin and co-editor, together with Bhaskar Sunkara, of Jacobin: Die Anthologie (Suhrkamp, 2018).

Rosa Luxemburg and the Question of the “Good Life”

Can we say what socialism will look like before we get there?

Information

Author

Bini Adamczak

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”[1] Ever since Karl Marx released it into the world, this rolling metaphor has been on the move, continually emerging in new formations.

Considering the Bolshevik attempt at revolution, Karl Kautsky — after Engels’s death the most influential theoretician of the Second International — advised against setting a locomotive in motion without first having “acquired the qualities necessary” to drive it. Leon Trotsky replied that no one had “learned to drive a locomotive by sitting in his study”.[2] Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, considering the socialist belief in progress, proposed to completely invert the Marxian image and to conceive of revolutions not as locomotives, but as a seizing of the “emergency brake”.[3]

Bini Adamczak is a social theorist whose recent publications include Yesterday’s Tomorrow (MIT Press, 2021) and Communism for Kids (MIT Press, 2017). This article is based on a presentation at the conference “Ho Chi Minh and Rosa Luxemburg’s Thoughts on Building a Good Society”, hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Hanoi Office in October 2021.

Translated by Marty Hiatt and Sam Langer for Gegensatz Translation Collective.

Rosa Luxemburg also drew on the image of the locomotive to explain a “natural law” of revolution, which she saw confirmed not only in Russia, but also by the English and French revolutions: “The ‘golden mean’ cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, it drags down with it irredeemably into the abyss.”[4]

This assessment is from Luxemburg’s text on the Russian Revolution, which she wrote in prison in Wroclaw between September and October 1918. Her assessment had recently been confirmed in Finland, where the Social Democratic Party shrank back from revolution because it only wanted to seize state power peacefully, via elections. It was confirmed again a short time later in the Volga region, where the Mensheviks and right-wing Social Revolutionaries wanted to establish a bourgeois republic in order to postpone the transition to socialism by means of a broad class alliance. Some refuse to board the revolutionary locomotive, others try to slow its pace, but both strengthen the gravitational pull of the old society and end up assuring the victory of counter-revolution and the liquidation of the revolutionaries. Wherever they hesitate to pose the question of power, it is answered by those who are already powerful. Wherever they have scruples, they fall victim to the unscrupulousness of their opponents.

We can also ask whether this locomotive law of revolution was confirmed by the November Revolution in Germany. After the Social Democratic majority had voted for war credits in the summer of 1914, making itself an accomplice of the world war, in winter 1918 it decided against the socialist republic and for the bourgeois-democratic one. The Social Democrats set an alliance with the bourgeoisie, nobles, and generals against the proletarian and emancipatory revolution — with brutal violence, in which the murderous counter-revolution of German fascism already announced itself. The backwards-rolling locomotive of revolution plunged Rosa Luxemburg into the abyss. A decade and a half later, she was followed by those who had stopped the revolution halfway — the Social Democrats. With more leniency and in lesser number than the Communists, many of them, too, nonetheless fell victim to the Nazis.

The opening of her text on the Russian Revolution deals with the Social Democrats: their small-mindedness and faint-heartedness, their lack of imagination and agency. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German Social Democracy committed itself to bourgeois nationalism instead of proletarian internationalism, and considered it more realistic to eliminate Russian Tsarism by an imperialist war, a humanitarian intervention as it were, than by a socialist revolution.

This left-wing melancholy, which in this country is also mixed with a certain German depression, has only deepened in the last hundred years. Not least because of the very history in which Rosa Luxemburg was involved. Failure and defeats have contributed to this: one hundred years ago it was considered unrealistic to revolutionize the world, now it is even considered unrealistic to save it — not fighting for communism, but merely stopping the climate catastrophe, or even just ending a pandemic.

Luxemburg, then, sides with the Russian Revolution, which gave the lie to German Social Democracy and, for the first time in world history, placed the ultimate goals of socialism on the agenda as its immediate programme. But Luxemburg doesn’t simply go in for affirmation, for a mood of revolutionary celebration. Instead, she develops a critique that is sharp precisely because it draws distinctions and does not leave the reader in the dark about what she herself wants. Luxemburg’s critique of the Russian Revolution even withstands the classic pragmatic objection to every radical critique: it not only says what is going wrong, it also says what could be done better. Her critique of Bolshevik revolutionary praxis thus revolves around three aspects: land, nation, and democracy.

Her critique of Bolshevik agricultural policy is that the wildcat expropriations with which the peasants appropriated the land of large landowners did not promote socialist property relations, but created a class of rural private property owners. In doing so, they had also strengthened class relations in rural areas because “it was the rich peasants and … the village bourgeoisie … that surely became the chief beneficiaries of the agrarian revolution”.[5] In doing so, the Bolsheviks themselves had created their new main enemy, a petty-bourgeois peasantry.

This diagnosis is based on assumptions that Luxemburg shared with Kautsky as well as Lenin and Trotsky, and which were certainly false. The idea of a capitalist class structure in rural Russia, with big peasants on the one hand and penniless farm labourers on the other, only applied to a small part of Europeanized agriculture in Russia. In the vast majority of the country, capitalism had not yet advanced that far, not least because the Russian village community, the Obshchina, prevented the private ownership of land. Under the Obshchina system, land was communally owned and regularly redistributed by the council of elders according to the size of the households, which is why wealth and poverty were distributed not so much statically as cyclically. Someone who appeared in the statistics as rich in land one year might appear as relatively poor a few years later.

Aristocratic land appropriated by the peasants in the 1917 revolution was therefore not converted into private property, but rather transferred to the community, which managed it as communal property and — subdivided — distributed it among its members.[6] Yet Luxemburg’s critique does not end there, because the subdivision of the countryside meant that the patriarchal-familial communism of distribution was accompanied by family-based production. And on this basis — scattered units of land with low productivity — it was difficult to provide the necessary food for the village, not to mention a surplus for the city.

Yet if we ask what opportunities the Russian Revolution offered to both increase the agricultural productivity as well as maintain the proto-communist collectivity of the Obshchina, we must broaden our political perspective beyond the Bolsheviks, who are almost the sole focus of Luxemburg’s analysis. Possible types of agricultural policy that did not treat the peasants — as all too often in the Marxist tradition — as foreign or hostile, as backward or reactionary, can be found among the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries and also in the anarchist movement Makhnovshchina. While the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries relied on the self-governance of the peasant soviets, agricultural communes began to form in Ukraine. The first of these communes was destroyed in June 1919 by the Red Army during their campaign against anarchism. Their leading communards were declared outlaws, and shot by the White Army a few days later.[7] In memory of the recently murdered revolutionary and critic of Bolshevism — who had nonetheless shared so many presuppositions with the Bolsheviks on the land question — this commune was named “Rosa Luxemburg Commune”.

Of course, many aspects of this discussion are limited to the historical specifics of the Russian Revolution, which Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned in Wroclaw, knew only in part. Yet agriculture remains the largest industry in the world, employing a third of the world’s working population, and a significantly larger fraction in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The land question is therefore not something that has been historically settled. On the contrary, not only the ecological destruction, but also the epidemics of recent decades — brought about by ever-increasing landgrabbing and accelerated by monoculture and factory farming — show that the development towards industrial agriculture is not an unequivocal narrative of progress. But precisely this is Luxemburg’s perspective: the centre of politics should be the urban proletariat, the centre of the economy should be urban industry.

This may well come as a surprise: as a political commentator, Luxemburg is aware that the land question is the decisive question of the Russian Revolution; as a theoretician of primitive accumulation she is well-informed about the existence of communal land ownership; as a politician of spontaneity, it is clear to her that there are other sources of productivity than standardization, rationalization, and centralization; as a botanist who calls trees and bushes old acquaintances, she knows that so-called nature does not have to be something external; and as a lover of songbirds, those songbirds that forestry agriculture drives away, she has a different relationship to the land than that of instrumental rationality.

But Luxemburg herself would not have been surprised, as according to her own admission she was always in perfect contradiction with herself. And so from prison she calls for the state centralization and industrialization of agriculture, while at the same time, as she puts it, there are “passing out of my cell in all directions … fine threads connecting me with thousands of creatures great and small”, with the starling, the crested lark, the brimstone butterflies, violets and bumblebees, the chestnut buds, the Romanian buffalo, the nightingale, the wryneck, the antbird, the blackbird at evening, the alder buckthorn, forget-me-nots, pansies, currants, cherry trees, the silver poplar, chaffinch, tits, greenfinch, birch catkins, orchids and dandelion, privet shrub and Norway maple, the peacock butterfly, the swallows, colourful cobblestones, bees, wasps, ants, acacias, to the sky, the pink, the silver clouds, ash trees, bundles of seed pods, in the midst of it all a person, hibiscus, catalpa, southern catalpa and bluethroat, redstart, cotoneaster and myrtle, feather grass and elm tree, elder and privet. In her letters she writes that she feels more comfortable in the grass among the bumblebees than among comrades, yet still hoped to die at her post, whether in prison or fighting in the street.[8]

Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolshevik policy on nationalities proceeds analogously to her criticism of Bolshevik land policy: the Bolsheviks fight for a tactical advantage that then transforms into a strategic disadvantage. In order to secure short-term allies, they create long-term opponents in the form of the petty-bourgeois peasantry on one hand and bourgeois nationalist movements on the other. It is crucial that, for Luxemburg, neither social nor national identities constitute pre-existing realities that would have to be represented politically in the democratic process. They are rather social constructions that are usually created in the course of long-term historical processes, yet in a revolution this takes place at high speed. The analogy is on a different level: just as private land ownership did not exist in most of the territory of what would later become the Soviet Union, so nationalism was still barely able to gain a foothold there.

Luxemburg saw this more clearly in the latter case. The Ukrainian nation only existed as a phantom in the minds of a few bourgeois ideologues. The mass of the population not only didn’t care about such classifications, they also usually didn’t have the faintest idea about where to place themselves with respect to them. For Luxemburg, the right of nations to self-determination was thus quite properly nothing more than hollow petty-bourgeois phraseology. After the experience of 1914, she recognized nationalism as the greatest danger to international socialism and to democracy. This also became clear in the Russian Revolution: the Bolsheviks were for the right of nations to self-determination, not for the right of the people to self-determination.

To the democratic critique, Trotsky replied that “as Marxists, we have never been idol-worshipers of formal democracy”. To which Luxemburg rejoined that that may well be the case, but “we” had never been idol-worshipers of socialism or Marxism either. Neither of these concepts is an ideal to which reality would have to conform, nor a fetish that people have to submit themselves to. We must grant ourselves the freedom to decide against democracy and socialism. But what could a legitimate, that is, free and equal decision against democracy look like, if not democratic? And what could a decision in favour of democracy, a realization of democracy look like, if not socialist?

Obviously within a democracy it is absurd for all people to have exactly one vote, while some get 9.35 euro for an hour of work and others, an executive at Daimler for example, 3,809 euro per hour — that is, 407 times more. This is not about access to the means of consumption, but the ability to command other people’s working hours, and thus a question of power. Why not immediately re-weight the votes in elections — 1 vote for some, 407 votes for others? If democratic equality means equality with regard to the ability to freely shape social life, then democracy is simply incompatible with inequality as regards control over other people’s lifetimes. That is precisely Luxemburg’s position.

In December 1918, a month before her death, she penned the formulation that the goal of the revolution was to make the slogan “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”, proclaimed by the bourgeoisie in 1789, “become true” for the first time in world history through the “abolition of class rule”. True democracy requires the destruction of capitalism. Incidentally, for this the socialist revolution has no need of terror, because, as noted in the programme of the Spartacus League, it does not fight individuals, but institutions.

This is a general characteristic of left-wing politics and it distinguishes it from right-wing politics: it does not fight the sick, but diseases; not the poor, but poverty; not people, but inhumanity. It is neither necessary nor desirable to behead the powerful, it is enough to strip them of their power. It is neither necessary nor desirable to imprison the owners, it is enough to expropriate them. No democracy without socialism, but also no socialism without democracy. And this socialist democracy “is not something”, as Luxemburg says, “which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism”.[9]

That is why Luxemburg has to drop the image of revolution as a locomotive, even without having known Chiapas or Rojava, which represent historical alternatives to the kind of politics that knows only victory or defeat. Because revolution — despite all the talk of the natural laws of history — has no track bed, no predetermined path to follow, nor does it have a cabin from which it could be steered — least of all by individual locomotive drivers. On the contrary, it requires openness, creativity, but above all the broad participation of the masses.

The democratic character of revolution is thus for Luxemburg a practical necessity as well. Precisely because in Luxemburg’s view there is no ready-made recipe for a socialist revolution, constant experimentation, trial and error, and improvisation are necessary, and this requires the participation of the masses. Ultimately, and this is Luxemburg’s argument, the negative aspect, the dismantling of the capitalist property system, can be dictatorially decreed, while the positive aspect, the building of a socialist society, cannot. For Luxemburg this is an advantage that scientific socialism has over the utopian kind, because scientific socialism does not develop any ideas about the goal to be achieved, at least not before the revolution. Yet with regard to the Russian Revolution one may well wonder whether the Bolsheviks were so keen to give the impression of having a finished plan because, as anti-utopian Marxists, they had none at their disposal. Accordingly, they also couldn’t even try to convince anyone of it.

Luxemburg’s argument for scientific socialism’s aniconism was already wrong in its time; today, after a century of practical experiences of socialism, it is no longer tenable. There are plenty of images; whether they satisfy our desire for the good life is another question. Every single person can put forward proposals for a way out of the history of domination, but the decision whether they are to be adopted must be made jointly and democratically. There is no reason to withhold good ideas for a better world until the revolution comes. The collective conversation about what kind of world we want to create can begin, or rather be continued, at any time.

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[1] Karl Marx, “The Class Struggle in France: 1848–50”, translated by Paul Jackson, The Political Writings, edited by David Fernbach, London: Verso Books, 2019 [1850], p. 451.

[2] Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, London: Verso Books, 2007 [1920], p. 98.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, London: Belknap Press, 2003 [1940], p. 402.

[4] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution”, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis & Kevin B. Anderson, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004 [1918], p. 289.

[5] Luxemburg, “Russian Revolution”, p. 292.

[6] Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society. Russia 1910–1925, Oxford: Clarendon, 1972, p. 160f.

[7] Arshinov, Peter, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918–1921, London: Freedom Press, 2002 [1923], p. 92f.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg, “Letter to Sonja Liebknecht”, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, p. 391.

[9] Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution”, p. 308.

Actually Existing Contradictions

Exploring unresolved problems in the debate on a socialist planned economy

Planning is a social process. But what exactly does that mean?

Lutz Brangsch is an economist. He most recently worked as a Senior Fellow for Democracy and State at the Rosa Luxemburg-Foundation’s Institute for Critical Social Analysis.

If we take as a point of departure the attempts at social planning under “actually existing socialism”, it has primarily meant dealing with the interests of both those responsible for and those affected by this planning. These are, by their very nature, two vastly different things. Planning procedures must therefore be able to accommodate these interests, weigh common and special interests, as well as prevent the realization of certain interests.

In this article, we will endeavour to understand existing social interests. In theory, this may seem like a simple task, but it is actually incredibly complex. The groundwork for this has been laid by the history of national economic planning in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), yet in the final analysis, the attempts to solve the problems associated with the consciously planned organization of society were similar in all actually existing socialist states, despite variations in their frameworks or preconditions. These iterations extend from the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1920s and continue in the other countries after the end of World War II.

Conscious Planning

The Communist parties that took power followed a Marxist understanding of a post-capitalist society. Planning was not the only metric that Marx, his comrades-in-arms, and their students used to envision a post-capitalist society. Their ultimate goal was not only a planned society, but one that was consciously and systematically organized. As such, planning was to be carried out by everyone, in the interests of everyone, and on a global scale.

In her studies on economic issues pertaining to the events of 1912, Rosa Luxemburg followed Marx in emphasizing the need to distinguish between “plan and consciousness”. In so doing, she draws upon the role of planning in those pre-capitalist societies characterized by a natural economy. This formed the basis of one of the fundamental assumptions of the later Marxist planning debate: that, in principle, it is possible to consciously shape society and to organize economic and social processes — the metabolic relation between humans and nature — in a systematic manner on the basis of aligning the interests of all members of society.

The wager was that the socialization of the means of production, paired with people’s individual development, as well as the bulk of the wealth to be distributed, should lead to the delegitimization of social egotism and competition between individuals. It was clear that this would be a demanding process. People would need to be able to collectively balance their interests in a spirit of solidarity and then agree upon and execute a coordinated plan of action. Planning was seen as an instrument for shaping society as a whole, not just certain segments, as was the case for planning under capitalism.

The first attempts at a planned economy were based on Marx’s assumption that the road to socialism would gradually obviate contradictions of interest and make way for solidarity.

It was thought that this ability — which would enable planning in a post-capitalist society — would emerge from the lessons learned under the conditions of large-scale capitalist production with its wide-ranging and global division of labour, as well as from the social devastation it caused. Many on the Left saw the planning of production in capitalist ventures, the war economy, and the experiences of workers’ cooperatives in the wake of World War I as a sign that the time had come for a society free of competition, crises, unemployment, socially produced forms of suffering, and colonial exploitation. The debates around socialization during this time, which have come to be associated with names like Richard Müller or Otto Neurath, as well as the debates on the planned economy in Soviet Russia influenced by Lenin, were all based on this assumption.

Production was no longer dependent on individual entrepreneurs, but rather on the society’s capacity to consciously organize its “metabolic relation” with nature and the corresponding social relationships. Once experience and learning had made this clear, there would no longer be any conflicts of interest. As such, they focused on the ability of workers — who had previously been the object of corporate and state planning — to recognize their own interests and shape production and distribution accordingly, with the outcome being a different kind of planning.

Contradictions Old and New

However, the first attempts at a planned economy were also based on Marx’s assumption that the road to socialism would gradually obviate contradictions of interest and make way for solidarity. The alignment of interests was understood as an identity of interests. As a result, economic phenomena such as money, credit, and so on would lose their relevance.

In the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 and the experience of the USSR and post-1945 in the actually existing socialist countries, the assumptions about the behaviour of the various economic subjects, including companies, the public administrations, and both of their respective employees were in many respects governed by a revolutionary — and to some extent delusional — optimism, but also at least by dreams of a completely fresh start. However, it became clear very early on that the “birthmarks of the old society” were more persistent than the revolutionaries of 1917 and 1945 had anticipated, and that the new constellations of contradictions were no less complicated.

For starters, a political revolution only partially transforms the conditions under which people live and work. Even if private ownership of the means of production is abolished or restricted, the productive apparatus and its technologies remain unchanged. This is also true of the hierarchies among employees, not least with regard to the contradictions in gender relations. As early as 1920, Nikolai Bukharin asked why workers’ behaviour should be any different after the revolution. After all, eight hours spent working on the production line is exhausting and limited workers’ ability and desire to plan or reflect on how to evaluate the economic relationships that initially seemed to have nothing to do with their everyday lives.

It became clear that planning in a post-capitalist society could not simply be a matter of distributing products and services.

There was another problem as well. In his 1923 essay “On Morals and Class Norms”, Soviet economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky contrasted the behaviour of employees in the commercial sector under the conditions of war communism — in other words, a (more or less) planned distribution of products without the interference of market relations or money — with that under the conditions of the New Economic Policy (NEP). This shift in economic policy officially authorized the market, commerce, and money. According to Preobrazhensky, unfriendliness and arrogance had previously been the norm. With the change of policy, the shop assistants had once again become friendly and courteous. It was obvious that market relations could not simply be abolished and replaced. Their existence was not a question of ideology or power, but appeared to have firm economic foundations.

In light of this, it became clear that planning in a post-capitalist society could not simply be a matter of distributing products and services. Planning meant planning the circulation of goods and money, among other things. Marx had analysed what the resulting contradictions meant for capitalism, but what did they mean for socialism, in the transition to a post-capitalist society? In order to pivot from mere planning to a consciously planned organization of society, planning had to be understood both in theoretical and practical terms as a process of resolving contradictions of interest or as a process of creating the conditions for this resolution. From the mid-1950s onwards, all theoretical debates and practical attempts at reform centred on this.

The issue was the relationship between the interests of individual employees, the collective interests of the company, and the interests of society as represented by the state. Resolving the contradiction between the workers’ justified interest in high wages, decent social benefits, sufficient leisure time, a normal workload, and opportunities to be involved in decision-making, on the one hand, and society’s interest in high labour output and productivity on the other proved more complicated than it previously appeared.

For example, social policy had to be secured by a constant increase in labour productivity and continued modernization of the production apparatus. This in turn was only possible through training and qualification programmes, with the associated shifts in hierarchies among employees it entailed, and by challenging previous social norms. All of these factors also had to be summarized in appropriate metrics in order to evaluate them in the planning process. The aim was to express these factors in monetary terms. But how can emancipation (as the goal of socialism) be expressed in financial terms?

The question also arose as to how to resolve the contradictions between urban, rural, and other regions, or the contradictions in bourgeois educational privilege. Balancing the limited availability of both training programmes and university education with the need for a workforce that matched the desired economic and social structures meant that not everyone was able to receive the education they actually desired.

The support given to working-class children at universities meant that children from intellectual families were at a disadvantage, even though there were many other avenues for them to pursue their academic ambitions. The targeted promotion of women challenged traditional patriarchal hierarchies in all social classes. On the topic of higher education: the requirement that people accept job assigned to them in their desired profession after graduation (even if there were different options available), was also often at odds with personal interests and interfered greatly with individual life plans. Just because a person recognized the social necessity, did not mean that they were satisfied with the situation.

Who Actually Manages the Economy?

On another level, the fundamental question arose as to the character of the objects of planning, the production sites and industries, and the economic subjects. Answering this question allows us to characterize the relevant potential or required methods of planning. Commodity-money relations and the market play a central role here. The question of whether or not a post-capitalist or non-capitalist economy can still be defined by commodity production is still the subject of heated debate today. Beyond the political and ideological dimension of this problem, the answer depends on the importance one attaches to the interests of economic subjects: are they merely the object of planning or are they both object and subject?

In any event, the reality quickly revealed that these economic subjects are fully-fledged producers of goods, and that the market continues to exist as a transitional society under socialism. This applied not only to the private companies that still existed in the GDR, for example, but also to the state-owned, co-operative, and state-run enterprises. In addition, the economies under actually existing socialism were closely intertwined with the capitalist-dominated world market and thus were unable to behave in any other way than as commodity producers.

If we can draw any lessons from actually existing socialism, it is that actually existing conditions must serve as the starting point for a planned economy.

Until the 1970s, theory and economic policy wrestled to understand the simultaneous existence of the market and the planned economy. In the end, it was generally accepted that under the current conditions, the uneven development of production prohibited the kind of immediacy that would have ideally characterized relations between the economic subjects in economies without commodity relations. This meant that the fruits of labour had to be transformed into commodities in order to be exchanged.

As producers of goods and participants in the market, enterprises had to adapt to fluctuating demand, sell their goods at the highest possible prices in order to generate profit so as to then be able to pay wages and invest. This pitted their interests against those of other enterprises (who had the same goals) and against consumers. Every stipulation and every withdrawal of funds for social purposes meant a subsequent decline in the enterprises’ interest in operating more effectively. Furthermore, this occurred irrespective of whether these restrictions ultimately benefited the workforce in the form of social benefits.

The economic reforms implemented in all states under actually existing socialism from the 1960s until its demise attempted to do justice to this constellation of interests. They consistently oscillated between two poles: expanding the innovative capacity of different companies by granting them more autonomy — which in turn led to social problems such as growing income disparities — and restricting their autonomy with regard to decisions on investments and product range, which in turn generated supply problems and a decline in economic performance. None of the approaches, be it the more centralized approach in the GDR, the Yugoslavian approach of workers’ self-management, or the Hungarian approach of greater autonomy for companies, was able to solve these problems.

What Can We Learn?

If we can draw any lessons from actually existing socialism, it is that actually existing conditions must serve as the starting point for a planned economy. Furthermore, it is almost impossible to make reliable predictions about how a planned economy will look in the future — everything depends on the environment in which this question arises.

Every new attempt at a planned economy will be a planned economy in transition, in which new economic, social, and cultural relationships emerge. The implementation of the consciously planned development of society must result from social learning processes. In today’s world, this means carefully studying the real planning processes and participating wherever possible, or even creating these opportunities ourselves.

Before planning models can be developed, a capacity for self-change must first be cultivated.

The attempt to democratize budgetary policy, as undertaken in Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil in the early 2000s, was perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at emancipatory planning. Determining what services are needed, comparing needs and existing resources, prioritizing projects in a public, grassroots democratic process, formulating clear directives for parliaments and administrations, and holding politicians and administrations publicly accountable for fulfilling citizens’ directives was similar to the planning process under actually existing socialism, but realized in a very different way.

Nonetheless, this grassroots democratic principle formed the basis of incorporating computer programmes and the Internet into planning practices. As far as the present discussions are concerned, we can conclude that the question of digital planning and replacing money with other units of exchange must be preceded by a sober analysis of the interests at play and the conditions of reproduction in different companies.

The results of such attempts never cease to surprise. In this case, right-wing conservatives and left-wing avant-gardists alike felt that their perceived monopoly on representing the interests of “the people” was under threat. The initiative foundered in the face of resistance from both camps. Initiatives in Germany inspired by this project suffered a similar fate.

Before planning models can be developed, a capacity for self-change must first be cultivated. Despite its often being underestimated, the transition from planning to regularity ultimately also constitutes a “cultural revolution”. This must begin now, not when the issue of social planning becomes relevant.

This article first appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Hunter Bolin and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective.