From abstract ideals to scientific socialism

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Luxemburg was one of the main leaders and theorists of the wing in the socialist movement before World War 1, and of the German Communist Party until January 15 1919, when she was murdered by paramilitary forces operating under the right-wing What is Economics?' is the first chapter of an introduction to economics written by Rosa Luxemburg on the basis of the classes she gave from 1907 to World War 1 at the German Social Democratic Party activists' school in Berlin. She argued that the develop ment of economics was bound up with the development of capital. ism. In previous societies that were relatively slow changing, and where economic relations were determined by customs of servitude, there could be little room for economic science. But bourgeois economic science, once developed, opens questions that Thus it was that "the final conclusions of the science analysing the capitalist mode of production were drawn by a man who, from the very beginning, stood on the watchtower of the revolutionary This brief account of Marx's place in politics is the conclusion of What Luxemburg.

Social Democratic government. it cannot answer.

proletariat - Karl Marx".

AS AN IDEAL about a social order built on equality and fraternity for all men, as an ideal about a communist commonwealth, socialism was thousands of years old.

Among the first apostles of Christianity, among the various religious sects of the Middle Ages, in the peasant wars, the socialist ideal had always flared up as the most radical expression of the revolt arainst contemnoranenus societv. INTUI 46 But as an ideal which could be advocated at all times, in any historical milieu, socialism was only the beautiful vision of a few enthusiasts, a golden fantasy, always out of reach, like the airy image of the rainbow in the skies.

At the close of the eighteenth and in the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the socialist idea, freed from all religious sectarian frenzy, as a reaction to the horrors and the devastations which ascendant capitalism perpetrated in society, appeared for the first time with roal farre hahind it Rut even at that time, socialism basically was only a

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the development of socialist is Economics?' by Rosa mari The Paris Commun ganda. But the postulation of the socialist idea was the same in all of them; basically, it was only a scheme, the vision of an ingenious mind who prescribes its realisation to suffering humanity, for the purpose of rescuing it from the hell of the bourgeois social order.

Thus, in spite of all the power of their criticism and the magic of their futuristic ideals, these socialist ideas remained without any noticeable influence on the real movements and struggles of the times.

With a handful of friends, Babeuf le: "the glorious harbinger of a new society begun to take up the struggle agains the clutches of capital; the class struggle had been initiated by the revolts of the silk weavers of Lyons in France, by thi Chartist movement in England. How ever, there existed no direct link be tween the spontaneous movements o the exploited masses and the variou: socialist theories.

The proletarian masses in revolt die not have a socialist goal in view, nor dir the socialist theoreticians attempt tr base their ideas on the political struggl of the working class. Their socialism wa: to be instituted by certain cunning! devised artifices, like Proudhon': People's Bank or Louis Blanc's produc tive associations.

The only socialist who looked on the political struggle as an end towards the realisation of the social revolution wa Blanqui; this made him the only rea representative of the proletariat and o its revolutionary class interests at the time. But, basically, even his socialisn was only a scheme - attainable at wil - as the fruition of the iron determina tion of a revolutionary minority and thi outcome of a sudden coup d'etat carrier through by the same minority.

The year 1848 was to be the high poin and also the critical moment for the olde socialism of all varieties. The Parisiar proletariat, influenced by the tradition