By Markar Melkonian

One of the greatest men of the twentieth century was a woman, and her name was Rosa Luxemburg. 

An economist and a freedom fighter, her voice one hundred years ago reverberates for us today—if only we could hear it.  “Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls,” she wrote, “the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds.”  These words were smuggled out of a German prison in April 1915.  The war in Europe had been raging for less than a year, and in Turkey the Three Pashas had just set the wheels of genocide into motion.  From her prison cell, Luxemburg was able somehow to scan the horizon of smoke and rubble. (Read Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch03.htm.  The discussion of mass slaughter of Armenians and others in Turkey appears in Chapter IV.) 

“Mass slaughter has become the tiresome and monotonous business of the day,” she wrote, and “the world war is a turning point.”  Even if the Central Powers were to win, Germany would lay in ruins by the end of the war.  And if, on the other hand, the Allied Powers were to win the war, their victory “would lead to a new feverish armaments race among all the states – with defeated Germany obviously in the forefront.  An era of unalloyed militarism and reaction would dominate all Europe with a new world war as its ultimate goal.”

On all sides, scholars, diplomats, and journalists ridiculed such predictions:  the fighting in Europe, they said, was the War to End All Wars.

The war set the stage for the October Revolution in Russia, and revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Italy, too.  But the rifles and bayonets of the old order drowned most of these revolutions in blood.  Luxemburg’s comrade V.I. Lenin understood that the defeat of the revolutions in the West did not bode well for the future of the Russian revolution.  He understood that socialism, workers’ power, could only sustain itself in an industrialized country with a large working class.  Czarist Russia had been the “weak link” of imperialism, but Soviet Russia could not survive alone.  The defeats in the West set the stage for the military and economic isolation of revolutionary Russia—and, as Luxemburg foretold, they also set the stage for the next world war. 

Two decades after Luxemburg’s murder, events would confirm her forecasts--and Lenin’s fears, too.  At the beginning of the War to End All Wars, Luxemburg raised her sight even beyond WWII:  “Another such world war,” she wrote, “and the outlook for socialism will be buried beneath the rubble heaped up by imperialist barbarism.”

What does this have to do with anything?

But things are much different now:  we have smart phones and Facebook, and growing middle classes in China and India are buying cars.  What does any of this have to do with us? 

A lot.  Notably, barbarism.  We are today paying the price for the defeat of the revolutions one hundred years ago, and also for the destruction of the last remnants of soviet socialism. 

Twenty-five years ago, an American president announced a New World Order of peace, freedom, justice, security, stability, and cooperation.  America had vanquished that uniquely Evil Empire and led the Captive Nations into the warm light of Free Enterprise.  Speechmakers in cities like Baku and Yerevan welcomed a glorious new millennium of prosperity and happiness.  What took place instead was the frenzied theft of public property, rampant unemployment, ruinous currency devaluations, recession, and an exodus from the newly independent states.  Instead of the promised peace dividend, Uncle Sam’s military budgets soared, his secret prisons swelled, and his warplanes darkened the skies.  Two, three, or four wars raged at the same time, and one followed another:  Serbia, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again; Waziristan, Libya, Syria, Yemen.  From Srebrenica to Bangui, hundreds of thousands died and tens of millions were “beggared.”  Cities like Fallujah, Qandahar, Mosul, and Aleppo became piles of ruins, and hundreds of villages became cemeteries. 

On and on it goes.  Neocon planners have fomented murderous hatreds throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent.  That hatred is now threatening to spread to western China, Central Africa, and beyond.  On one side, prisons and black sites, “enhanced interrogation,” carpet-bombing, and cities reduced to collateral damage.  On the other side, massacre and counter-massacre, ethnic cleansing, forced religious conversions, the televised beheading of captives, and a free market for sexual slavery.

The same technologies that brought us iPhones and Snapchat brought us unmanned drones and pervasive NSA spying.  The market-driven exploitation of technologies like shale oil extraction has spurred overproduction and the reckless consumption of fossil fuels, even as we face the snowballing effects of global warming.  From Mauritania to the Arabian Peninsula, countries become deserts.  We have already taken a step beyond the threshold of a dystopian future in which poverty and climate change combine to produce wave after wave of climate refugees and even worse regional conflicts. 

Luxemburg’s question

One hundred years ago, Rosa Luxemburg posed the question: “socialism or barbarism?”  As the Berlin Wall fell, her question embarrassed even socialists:  the late political thinker Norman Geras was typical:  Luxemburg’s slogan, he said, was an example of a dangerous black-and-white view of things; it was the sort of extremist rhetoric that had discredited the cause of socialism.  

But Luxemburg has had the last word.  It is now clear that what took place in 1989 or 1991 was not the victory of pretty words, but of imperialism.  (See:  “Imperialists, Not Ideas, Won the Cold War,” Hetq Online, Dec. 20, 2010:  http://hetq.am/en/society/not-ideas-won-the-cold-war.)   “In this war imperialism has won,” Luxemburg wrote in April 1915:  “Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery.”   In the first months of a war that would eventually claim 17 million dead and 20 million wounded, she drew the consequences: 

“The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.  At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences.”

“Imperialism and its servant, militarism, will calculate their profits from every victory and every defeat in this war,” she wrote, “– except in one case:  if the international proletariat intervenes in a revolutionary way and puts an end to such calculations.”

And what are the chances of that?

But small countries like Armenia cannot continue indefinitely to tread water in this maelstrom of barbarism.

In the past two weeks we have witnessed savage attempts at ethnic cleansing in Northern Nigeria and Nagorno Karabakh.  Without a strong, organized working class opposition, desperation will provoke foredoomed upheaval in the streets, and might invite further foreign aggression.

If Armenia is to survive this barbarism, then workers--and indeed the entire population of the country, minus the plutocrats--need to start building strong, militant unions and a well organized, far-sighted movement for socialism, by that or any other name.    

Markar Melkonian is a teacher and an author. His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005).