After the Deluge: Concepts of Collapse in Fin-de-siècle Marxism

• In Event: Seeking New Directions in Contemporary Thought

Abstract

Marxism has long faced characterization by critics as an "apocalyptic" doctrine, premised on the inevitability of capitalism's self-destruction by global economic crisis. One key source of support for this reading has been the prevalence of "collapse" (Zusammenbruch) discourse among early Central European Marxists, including Henryk Grossman, Rosa Luxemburg, and leading figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) like August Bebel. This paper raises two questions. To what extent did the early German Marxist milieu depend on a concept of systemic collapse, and to what extent could an anticipation of economic crisis be reasonably called secularized apocalypticism?

Contemporary Marxists from Rudolf Walther to Roland Boer have answered these two questions in turn in roughly similar ways. To the first, they answer that invocations of collapse were largely rhetorical rather than analytical, a way of shoring up rank-and-file confidence in the socialist movement in turbulent political and economic conditions. (Grossman's concrete projections thus appear as an exception rather than the rule.) To the second, they answer that the "prophetic" tenor of select speeches and writings notwithstanding, Marxists by and large eschewed apocalypticism. This paper argues that while contemporary Marxists' cautions are justified, they nonetheless overcorrect. I argue the extant literature understates both the importance of "collapse" as an analytical question in fin-de-siècle Marxism, and its relationship to a genre of revolutionary apocalypticism popularized on the Continent over the prior century.

Author

• Asher Wycoff, Lehman College, CUNY