5. The Quiet Before the Storm¶
Core Argument¶
5. The Quiet Before the Storm
The years between the 1905 Revolution and the First World War were deceptively calm on the surface, yet beneath this quiet, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was fragmenting into irreconcilable wings. Rosa Luxemburg, teaching political economy and economic history at the party school in Berlin, produced her most ambitious theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital. In it, she identified what she considered a flaw in Marx’s analysis of expanded reproduction: within a closed capitalist system of only workers and capitalists, she argued, surplus value could not be realised because workers could only purchase consumer goods and capitalists merely exchanged among themselves. She concluded that capitalism could only expand by selling commodities to non-capitalist strata and countries, providing an economic rationale for imperialism. Her critics, however, maintained that Marx had demonstrated capitalism’s capacity to create its own internal market through reinvestment, albeit in a contradictory manner that generates crises of overproduction. The capitalist drive for foreign markets, they insisted, stemmed not from a realisation problem but from the need for expanded accumulation, higher profits, and the super-exploitation of colonial nations. Lenin’s response to the Narodniks had already clarified this: foreign markets are necessary not for realisation but because capitalist production strives inherently for unlimited expansion, and imperialism is primarily about the export of capital, not commodities. Reality has since falsified Luxemburg’s theory of automatic collapse; the overthrow of capitalism depends on class struggle, not economic inevitability.
The political quiet before the storm was shattered by personal and strategic ruptures. After a trip to Lake Geneva in 1907, Luxemburg privately dismissed Karl Kautsky as “heavy, dull, unimaginative, and ponderous”. By 1910, when Prussian electoral reform failed to alter the status of most voters and mass demonstrations erupted, she wrote ‘The Next Step’, calling for a mass strike and the demand for a republic. Both the Vorwärts editors and Kautsky refused to publish it, citing agreements and arguing the masses lacked sufficient excitement. This marked the final break between them, crystallising three wings within the SPD: the right-wing leadership, Kautsky’s centre, and Luxemburg’s revolutionary left. During the Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911, she published confidential correspondence between the International secretary and the SPD Executive, exposing the leadership’s prioritisation of electoral prospects over opposing German imperialism. The party attacked her personally, and she became increasingly isolated. After the 1912 election, in which the SPD became the largest party but entered an electoral alliance with liberals, Luxemburg insisted the proletariat must maintain class independence. With Franz Mehring, she launched the Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz when their articles were rejected elsewhere. In September 1913, a speech against imperialism led to prosecution for inciting disobedience; she turned her defence into a public attack, was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and continued to raise the mass strike against imperialism as working-class militancy revived on the eve of war.