‘It cannot be denied that the direct cause leading the popular masses into the socialist movement is precisely the “unjust” mode of distribution characteristic of capitalism’ 

(Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)

‘While they’re standing in the welfare lines […]

Don’t you know talking about a revolution? 

It sounds like a whisper

Poor people gonna rise up and get their share
Poor people gonna rise up and take what’s theirs’

(Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution)

Reform or Revolution was Rosa Luxemburg’s first major political work. She herself considered it the work that allowed her to force the top echelon of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) to take her seriously as a political thinker and leader, despite the fact that she was still in her twenties, a foreigner, disabled, and a woman. In 1898, after competing her doctorate in Switzerland she moved to Berlin, where she became involved in the SDP debate on revisionism. In 1897–98 Eduard Bernstein, an influential SDP figure, published a series of articles in which he argued that revolution was not necessary and socialism could be achieved by a gradual reform of the capitalist system through mechanisms such as consumers’ cooperatives, trade unions, and the gradual extension of political democracy. He denied the Marxist materialist conception of history, the contradictions of capitalism and the theory of class struggle. Rosa Luxemburg entered this male-dominated debate with the publication of Reform or Revolution in 1900 (following two articles published in 1898 and 1899). According to Rosa, the controversy between reform and revolution posed the question of ‘the very existence of the social democratic movement.’

In opposition to Bernstein, Rosa argued that while social democracy must improve living conditions in the here and now, revolution must remain the main goal of any socialist movement. She insisted that we cannot counterpose reform and revolution but that there is a necessary link between the two, as the struggle for reform is a means of achieving revolutionary transformation. Leaders who support legislative reform in opposition to revolution are not choosing a different method by which to achieve the same goal but are opting for a different goal, namely a cosmetic modification of the existing system that does not fundamentally change the mechanisms of power distribution within it. While revolution was the underpinning purpose of Rosa’s work, she also spent time thinking about ways of achieving this future, the daily actions we must collectively take, the rights we must fight for and the freedoms we must defend, as well as critiquing particular conceptualisations of rights and freedoms.

Rosa’s response to Bernstein and her thinking about the everyday work towards the revolution provides important insights into how the international legal order has enabled and legitimised the global maldistribution of power and wealth, and possible radical change. In this blog I draw upon her lessons about crises, capitalist states and democracy as I examine whether a grassroots-inspired transnational social security framework can have the revolutionary potential to disrupt global capitalism’ unjust distribution.

Grassroots-inspired transnational social security law

Before engaging with Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking I need to explain the entry point of my analysis: how the international legal system has enabled global maldistribution. The decolonisation and the anti-colonial resistance of the 1950s–1970s did not lead to the dismantling of an international system built on domination and exploitation and the development of a new, just system based on reparation and redistribution. Instead, international law formalised and universalised rules aimed at protecting Western economic interest and ideology, allowing Western capitalist states and corporations to expand their global production, markets and profits without any parallel responsibility for contributing to people’s social security outside the nation state. While social security remains the  responsibility of states, international social protection initiatives are relegated to soft law and the fields of aid, charity, philanthropy, and increasingly the private sector, with no clear accountability framework. 

These dynamics, together with neoliberal policies on fiscal restraint regarding public spending and developing countries’ external debt, have reproduced and exacerbated the unequal distribution of resources and entitlement to social security, particularly between the Global North and Global South, but also within countries. This asymmetry is particularly visible in times of crisis, which expose inequality in incomes, social services and infrastructure, and shift the responsibility for support and survival from the state to families and communities. Demands for international social security were central to the Non-Aligned Movement and the unrealised decolonial proposals of the 1960s and 1970s, and have been reclaimed over the years by grassroots activists. The recent Covid-19 pandemic is a good example of how a variety of grassroots organisations have advocated for alternative recovery plans aimed at providing immediate social protection for those in need while developing long-term collective action to end the exploitative capitalist mode of distribution and change the international legal system that enables it. A binding transnational social security framework should build on these actions, based on all people being entitled to a rightful share of the world’s wealth to ensure universal decent living standards. 

Below I discuss three key lessons learnt from Rosa Luxemburg on crises, capitalist states and democracy.

Crises

Bernstein maintained that over time capitalism will adapt and become more social, egalitarian, and democratic to the extent that crises are no longer inevitable. Rosa Luxemburg instead claimed that Bernstein’s inclusive capitalism would defer crises for a period of time but would ultimately only exacerbate them. She pointed to the contradictions inherent within capitalism that produce crises, and how crises are the normal method of resolving such contradictions. Bernstein was probably right in predicting the adaptation of capitalism and its development of a social face: with the end of the Cold War and the global legitimisation of Western liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism in the 1990s, new narratives of inclusive capitalism such as social entrepreneurship, social business, corporate social responsibility and more recently philanthrocapitalism emerged, all promoting the win-win logic of producing profits while contributing to social objectives. However, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted, inclusive capitalism exacerbates crises and, because of its unequal distribution of risks and benefits, the costs are disproportionately borne by the people, communities and countries at the margins of the economy. 

Responses to recent crises such as the 2007–08 financial crisis and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic have focused on making capitalism more ‘inclusive’ rather than changing its unjust mode of distribution. The response to the financial crisis, which had an unequal impact based on race, gender, class, disability, and migration status, was the adoption of a global agenda for universal financial inclusion, which was seen as an instrument for stability and development and for creating new opportunities for the financially excluded without the need for long-term structural interventions for the sake of social security. The response to the pandemic was to maintain the focus on business as usual and economic growth, while providing temporary social protection measures. At the start of the pandemic there was some hope that these temporary measures would become permanent and reverse the unjust capitalist mode of distribution; instead, in line with neoliberal capitalism, people now face a reduction of pre-pandemic social security with further cuts and austerity and increased inequality. Ultimately, the focus on making capitalism more inclusive aims to maintain the status quo while allowing further maldistribution with more vulnerable people bearing the brunt of the next crises. 

Capitalist states

Bernstein forecasted that the state would play a crucial role in regulating capitalism to make it inclusive and humane, and fostering socialist reforms. Rosa Luxemburg instead claimed that the present state is an organisation of the ruling class that adopts measures favouring social democracy only if they coincide with the latter’s interests. She provided examples including tariff barriers, which have been indispensable to Western capitalist states despite their apparent incompatibility with the logic of capitalist production. The removal of tariffs in the name of ‘free trade’, realised via institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later the World Trade Organisation, was the key principle of the international neoliberal project of the 1980s to the 1990s. However, such tariff liberalisation has been a very selective process, pursued where developed countries have advantages such as industrial products, capital and money, services and enterprises, but not where developing countries could benefit, such as by agriculture, labour mobility and technology transfer. They have been used instrumentally to protect the capitalist interests of Western countries and their corporations. 

Powerful capitalist states use both tariffs and other instruments, including legal instruments, to protect their own interests, even when this has damaging local and global consequences. A recent example is Western states and corporations’ use of intellectual property rights to oppose the TRIPS waiver that would have facilitated access to vaccines for developing countries. Instead they allocated vaccines via aid and philanthropic mechanisms, in this way maintaining full control of their entitlements and profits. In The Accumulation of Capital Rosa Luxemburg argued that accumulation to the advantage of capitalist states and corporations is inextricably bound to imperialism, which means they must seek new markets into which they can expand, conquering lands overseas, taking advantage of non-capitalist economies and expanding capitalist logics into areas that fall outside the purview of capitalist markets. The global marketisation and financialisation of healthcare and other areas of social security such as benefits, housing, and pensions have provided the dominant classes in powerful capitalist states with new instruments of control and value extraction in the form of resources, money and more recently data. 

Democracy 

Bernstein argued that democracy will consistently spread as capitalism becomes more inclusive. According to Rosa Luxemburg, class domination resting on real economic relations is a key element of a capitalist society; for instance labour is an economic relation before it becomes a contract. The expansion of formal democracy, or ‘democracy from above,’ is a form of contract that does not challenge but legitimises unequal economic relations and exploitation. The liberal strategy of expanding democracy sought not to overturn the capitalist system but rather to expand it. The global rise of capitalism coincided with the expansion of liberal democracy as the ultimate form of global governance. In international law this equation translated into the use of Western legal doctrines such as the rule of law, property and contract and the focus on individual, civil and political rights over collective, social and economic rights. According to Rosa Luxemburg, the metaphysics of liberal rights within the framework of liberal democracy primarily serves to protect private ownership and the accumulation of capital. 

Liberal rights do not arise as a reflection of actual material social conditions: they are merely set up as abstract and nominal and based on dominant norms around gender, race, ability, etc., rendering their actual implementation and application difficult or exclusionary. According to Rosa Luxemburg there is a particular elitism in the conception of democracy from above, according to which rights must be handed down to the grateful masses by a ruling elite, and only a professional minority can reform these rights.  Even institutions such as trade unions and cooperatives, which according to Bernstein would reform capitalism in socialism, can only regulate capitalism to make it less exploitative, but cannot change its unjust mode of distribution. As Rosa Luxemburg points out, change and revolutionary consciousness is built through action itself, and only the popular masses can transform capitalist societies. Democracy from below can only be realised through the self-emancipation of people at the grassroots and the building of a transnational socialist movement. 

Conclusion 

In this blog I have used Rosa Luxemburg’s reflections on crises, capitalist states and democracy to provide some examples of how the international legal system has enabled the maldistribution of wealth and power. These reflections provide a starting point from which to address the question of whether a grassroots-inspired and globally binding transnational social security framework can contribute to disrupting the unjust capitalist mode of accumulation and replace it with a redistributive system. Obligations and accountability for the provisioning of social security beyond the nation-state need to consider colonial histories and postcolonial and contemporary economic dynamics and, as mentioned, be based on the claim that all people are entitled to a rightful share of global wealth, which should be fairly distributed to ensure a decent living for all. As Rosa Luxemburg argues, law follows political creation, and any meaningful legal intervention should start from the people and the plurality of grassroots revolutions and movements necessary to create revolutionary change.