“Bourgeois society stands at a crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
Rosa Luxemburg articulated society’s bifurcated choice in a time of great tumult. The threat of the first Global War hung over the international citizenry like an imperial fog.
In the Junius Pamphlet, a text Luxemburg wrote from behind bars, the great Polish thinker attempted to clear the obstructed air with a clear articulation surrounding the dangers of unfettered capitalism and subsequent imperial fervor.
The choice was simple: a collective way of living, one rooted in Marxist ideals, or a world hell-bent on unfettered growth and authoritarian governance.
The world chose the latter. History tells us what came next: Germany’s economy was kneecapped by internationally-imposed debt. An emergent parliamentary democracy failed to deliver on the needs of its elecotrate. National Socialists, armed with support from both Weimar’s elite and devastated masses, manipulated their way into power. Fascism took hold.
A century later, on the heels of a global pandemic—a major historical rupture, one that shifted hegemonic lines of thought and laid bare the cruelties of western capitalist ideals—we face the same Luxemburgian choice: socialism or fascism.
Western industrial nations deny the binary option and instead employ a neoliberal ideology to lull The People into an imagined state of representative democracy, an order ostensibly based on the will of the voters.
But what happens when you can’t hide the shortcomings and cruelty of the current system? What to do when a virus ravages an already gamed economy, one where stock indexes and homeless shelter occupancy rates rise in tandem?
The material and ideological conditions—two inextricably linked forces —are in place for the strongest case yet for an international socilaist order, an order that shreds the pernicious, cyclical binds of unquestioned liberalism, rampant capitalism, violent imperialism and sweeping fascism.
Enter Pastiche. In the mold of Critical Theory, our newsletter seeks to analyze politics and culture through a dialectical lens, a lens that employs the nuanced, multidisciplinary approach required in the understanding and dismantling of a patriarchal, capitalistic society.
Through a range of mediums—essays, podcasts, short stories, poetry etc—and a diverse group of writers we plan to recruit, Pastiche will do its best to make the case for “socialism over barbarism.”
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Benjamin Morse is a political science master’s student.
Isaac Chen is a law student.
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