by SEIYA MORITA
We are in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. In East Asian countries (except for Japan), the situations are fairly well under control, but in the United States and Latin American and African countries, the situations have not converged at all, and in fact are becoming more and more serious. In early July 2020, the world’s number of infected people topped 12 million and the death toll surpassed half a million. This momentum is not yet waning.
We already know this state of affairs has been prepared by the past 40 years of neoliberalism and austerity policies in these countries. In U.S., as well as in Western countries, medical and social welfare services are being cut, and health care is being left to market forces. Hospitals were shut and the number of hospital beds, especially ICU beds, were steadily cut. Since even in peacetime, as if in an emergency, social resources and margins were reduced to a barely acceptable level, when a real emergency emerges, we find ourselves in a situation where we cannot deal with it.[1]
Just before the coronavirus broke, the “Fridays for Future” movement was gaining momentum globally, and 2019 was the great year of the worldwide movement against global warming. The activist upsurge showed how catastrophic global warming had become. Moreover, the global inequality problem is only getting worse, and in the corona pandemic, the trend of expanding inequality remains. Governments spending huge amounts of money are helping billionaires more than the poor in their countries. Pumping public money into the stock market has led to a rapid recovery in stock prices, and the asset holdings of multinational corporate shareholders and internet entrepreneurs are growing by trillions of dollars, contrasting with the fact that tens of millions of people have lost their jobs.
These facts represent modern barbarism. Already a hundred years ago, German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg urgently raised a historical dilemma of ‘socialism or barbarism’ in prison in the midst of the First World War. Thus, rather than being at all outdated, her slogan has taken on an even more serious meaning today. This piece discusses its theoretical origins and validity for our day.
1. The origin of ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ by Rosa Luxemburg
The theoretical origin of Luxemburg’s famous slogan ‘socialism or barbarism’ has already been discussed by many people. Among them, a Canadian Trotskyist theorist and ecosocialist, Ian Angus, has published an essay on this theme on a website in October 2014 that attracted a great deal of attention.[2] Angus’ essay discusses what he thinks is the origin of the slogan by Luxemburg. The portion of her writing in which the slogan appears, which is the focus of Angus’ discussion, is taken from an article written by Luxemburg while in prison in 1915, ‘The Crisis of German Social Democracy’.
LINKS for more