Rosa Luxemburg's Concept of a Post-capitalist Society

This paper explores Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to the effort to theorize a viable alternative to capitalism. It argues that few figures in the radical tradition had as multidimentional and all-encompassing a vision of a new society, as seen in her famous insistence that there can be no socialism without democracy and no democracy without socialism. At the same time, however, Luxemburg's understanding of a post-capitalist society was constrained by the conception, widespread among the Marxists of her era, that capitalism is defined by market anarchy and socialism is defined by planned, ‘socialized’ production. This juridical counterposing of ‘market anarchy to a ‘social planning’, it is argued, falls short of Marx's own vision of the transcendence of captialism. Despite these limitations, however, Luxemburg began to articulate a much more liberatory conception of socialism, rooted in the transformation of alienated conditions of labor, in some of her political writings at the very end of her life, in 1917–1918. The tension in her work between articulating traditional and more radical conceptions of socialism is discussed in the context of confronting the problems associated with formulating a viable alternative to capitalism in our own era.

Aesthetics · Economic system · Economics · Environmental ethics · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

• Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and beyond

  A Stetsenko•Educational Philosophy and Theory•2019

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