7. Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Luxemburg mounts a devastating critique of Bernstein’s reformist programme, which proposes to realise socialism through trade unions and co-operatives rather than revolutionary struggle against the capitalist mode of production. Bernstein’s scheme, she argues, rests on two instruments: trade unions, which he calls ‘economic democracy’ and which are supposed to suppress industrial profit, and co-operatives, which are to eliminate commercial profit. Luxemburg demonstrates that both are fundamentally incapable of transforming capitalism.
Producers’ co-operatives, she explains, are a hybrid form—small units of socialised production trapped within capitalist exchange. Under capitalism, exchange dominates production, and competition forces every enterprise into pitiless exploitation to survive. Workers running a co-operative must therefore govern themselves with ‘the utmost absolutism,’ playing the role of capitalist entrepreneur toward themselves. This contradiction accounts for their usual failure: they either become pure capitalist enterprises or dissolve. Bernstein, following Mrs. Potter-Webb, attributes this failure to a lack of ‘discipline,’ but Luxemburg retorts that what is called discipline is nothing but the natural absolutist regime of capitalism, which workers cannot successfully use against themselves. Producers’ co-operatives can survive only if they secure a constant market through consumers’ co-operatives, which limits them to small local markets and the manufacture of immediate necessities. They are excluded from the decisive branches of capitalist production—textiles, mining, metallurgy, machine construction, shipbuilding. To imagine them as instruments of general social transformation would require breaking up the world market and returning to the merchant economy of the Middle Ages.
Trade unions, meanwhile, cannot give workers a determining influence over production. They cannot control the dimensions or technical progress of production. Their activity takes place within the framework of the law of wages, which they apply rather than shatter. They are not an offensive weapon against profit but the organised defence of labour power against capital’s attacks. Their economic functions—influencing the labour market and ameliorating working conditions—are a labour of Sisyphus, constantly undermined by the proletarianisation of the middle layers and the growth of productivity. To transform unions into instruments for progressively reducing profit would require a return to pre-capitalist conditions.
Bernstein, Luxemburg charges, has thus renounced the struggle against the capitalist mode of production and redirected the socialist movement against capitalist distribution. He proposes to combat distribution in the hope of gradually establishing socialist production, inverting the Marxist relation between production and distribution. Having no materialist base, he falls back on the idea of justice—the old war horse of pre-Marxian utopian socialism. Luxemburg compares him unfavourably to Weitling, who defended a similar socialism fifty years earlier with more force and fire, but without knowing scientific socialism. ‘That, too, is the art of a tailor but it has nothing of a genius about it.’
The political condition of revisionism is the supposed inevitability of democracy. Luxemburg demolishes this claim by surveying the varied political forms capitalism has assumed: democracy in medieval communes, absolute monarchy under manufacturing capitalism, the democratic republic of 1793, the Napoleonic monarchy, the Restoration, the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and the Second Empire. Universal suffrage in Germany was an instrument for fusing small states, not a bourgeois conquest; in Austria, a safety line for a decomposing monarchy; in Belgium, won by the labour movement against the bourgeoisie. No general law connects capitalist development and democracy. Moreover, democratic institutions have exhausted their function for bourgeois society. World politics and militarism, the dominant factors of the present phase, push the bourgeoisie into reaction. The labour movement frightens liberals into abandoning democracy. Bernstein advises the proletariat to disavow its socialist aim to win back the liberals, but this proves that democracy is in contradiction with capitalist development and that the socialist movement is the only support for what remains of democracy. To renounce the struggle for socialism is to renounce both the labour movement and democracy.