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What is political thought? How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? Perhaps, Luxemburg’s life and writing suggest, it might be a peculiarity of women who find themselves on – or rather propel themselves on to – the world stage at such moments to go a little bit too far (according to the crippling and ever-ready norms of judgement). Everything Luxemburg touched, she pushed to a kind of extreme – ‘jusqu’à outrance’, or ‘to the outer limit’, to use her own phrase, the slogan she proposed to Jogiches.20 ‘We live in turbulent times,’ she wrote in 1906 to Luise and her husband Karl Kautsky – also from prison, this time in Warsaw, convicted of aiming to overthrow the Tsarist government – when ‘ “All that exists deserves to perish” ’(lines from Goethe’s Faust).21 It is of course the whole point of a revolution that you cannot know what, if anything, can or should survive. For Luxemburg the danger was as real as it was inspiring. ‘The revolution is magnificent,’ she wrote again in 1906, ‘Everything else is bilge [Quark].’ (The German Quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means full, soft cheese.)22
In whatever conditions she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of fourteen political prisoners crammed into a single cell – Luxemburg never lost her fervour, her joy as she put it amidst the horrors of the world. ‘My inner mood’, she wrote after listing the indignities of her captivity, ‘is, as always, superb.’23 ‘See that you remain a human being,’ she wrote to Mathilde Wurm from Wronke prison in December 1916. ‘To be a human being is the main thing above all else.’24 ‘And that’, she presses on, ‘means to be firm and clear and cheerful, yes cheerful in spite of everything and anything because howling is the business of the weak.’25 As so often with Luxemburg, the firmness is somewhat misleading – in the same letter she admits to knowing no recipe for being a human being, only when a person ‘is one’.26 Energy and enthusiasm are, however, key. ‘The tiny, fragile Rosa’, wrote Zetkin, ‘had become the embodiment of unparalleled energy.’27 ‘Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,’ Luxemburg proclaimed in one of her very last letters, ‘what more could we want of ourselves!’28 Luxemburg had, we could say, the relish and courage of her convictions (although convictions might turn out to be not quite the right word). There is no one, I will risk saying, who better captures the spirit – the promise and the risk (or peril) – of revolution than Luxemburg.
Two years after Luxemburg was murdered, Clara Zetkin returned to Germany from a visit to Moscow with a recommendation from Lenin to publish her collected works. In spite of her ‘errors’, Luxemburg was for Lenin the ‘eagle of the revolution’. One manuscript, however, Zetkin had instructions to burn: ‘The Russian Revolution’ of 1918 (whether this was Lenin’s own instruction, or came from others in the Politburo, is unclear).29 Luxemburg had written the manuscript in her prison cell. Almost invariably she welcomed her prison sentences as an opportunity for thought, whether concerning matters of politics or the heart. Famously, she wrote some of her most eloquent letters from prison (as the 1921 Letters from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht was the first publication to make clear).30 As brave as it was controversial, ‘The Russian Revolution’ offers one of the most powerful entries into the political corridors of her mind. Unpublished in her lifetime, the essay did not appear until 1922, when it was published by Paul Levi, her former lawyer and some say briefly her lover. Levi chose his moment carefully, preparing the manuscript only after the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 which marked the first revolt of the people against the Bolshevik regime.
In fact Luxemburg’s praise for Russia’s revolutionary moment was without limit – her passion for the revolution was twinned with her deep-rooted hatred of war. It was, she opens her essay, the ‘mightiest event of the War’, ‘its outbreak, its unexampled radicalism, its enduring consequences’ the strongest rejoinder to the ‘lying phrases’ of official German Social Democracy which had presented an essentially imperialist war as a battle to liberate the oppressed people of Russia from the Tsar.31 The day when her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, voted in favour of the war munitions budget in August 1914 was, it is generally agreed, the darkest day of Rosa Luxemburg’s life. According to Zetkin, both she and Luxemburg had seriously contemplated suicide. Instead of uniting against war and in their own shared interests, the workers of the world would now be steeped in each other’s blood. In response to the tragedy, she suggested – with the biting irony that was a hallmark of her speeches and writing – an amendment to the famous ending of The Communist Manifesto: ‘Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat!’32 In one fell swoop, the Russian Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Tsar, exposed German Social Democracy’s hypocritical capitulation to an imperialist war, and put paid once and for all to the belief that Germany, or rather central Europe, was the advanced civilisation, the properly industrialised society, and therefore the older brother of revolutionary potential from which the backward Russians had everything to learn. Much of the hostility towards Luxemburg was therefore pure chauvinism. If she was hated by her Social Democratic peers, it was at least as much for her unconcealed enthusiasm for political developments in Russia as for her opposition to the war of which her once revolutionary comrades – ‘of late lamented memory’, as she scathingly puts it – had become the willing, murderous, parties.33
It is a peculiarity of Luxemburg’s thought – one of her unique contributions – that her enthusiasm for revolution was not tempered by critique but rather intensified. In ‘The Russian Revolution’, her two main bones of contention with the Bolsheviks were the issue of land distribution to the peasants (which she feared would simply create a new form of private property) and that of national self-determination. She abhorred nationalism of any kind, even for a previously oppressed people like the Poles longing to break free of Russia. She was convinced, as history would bear her out, that national self-definition could only lead in time to pride, exclusivity and war. But running through these critiques and in a way their foundation was the issue of democracy and freedom. Luxemburg was the conscience of the revolution, calling it to account for a spirit too easy for the inheritors of revolution to re-repress (again she could have been talking about today). ‘Revolutions’, she had already admonished Lenin in her famous 1905 essay on ‘The Mass Strike’, ‘do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with them.’34 Famously she accused Lenin as early as 1904 of subordinating Russia to the ‘sterile spirit of the night-watchman state’.35 As she acknowledged in ‘The Russian Revolution’, no one knew better than Lenin that socialism demands a ‘complete spiritual transformation in the masses’.36 For seizing the moment of revolution, even for leading it, Lenin earned her unfailing respect. Her critique did not cloud their personal relations (they met several times and enjoyed each other’s company). But, she insisted with uninhibited ruthlessness, he is ‘completely mistaken’ in his means: ‘decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror’ (Schreckensherrschaft).37 Critics have argued that this disagreement can only be understood by recognising that Soviet Russia, unlike Germany, lacked the leadership and party organisation to keep the revolution in place. Luxemburg knew this. She had no issue with leadership – she was a leader herself. She is talking about power, about what happens – as feminism has always cautioned – when authority falls into the trap of starting to believe in itself. She was never, her first biographer Peter Nettl insists, ‘interested in power for its own sake’.38
It had been a central plank of Bolshevik agitation to demand a Constituent Assembly, but in 1917 on the point of seizure of power, the demand had been dropped. There is always a risk in democracy that it will throw up the wrong result – that surely is the point. For Lenin, the elections following the October Revolution, in which ‘the peasant masses’ had returned Narodnik and Kerensky, or non-Bolshevik, supporters to the Assembly, indicated the limits of democracy in a revolutionary situation.39 Parliamen
tary democracy, it was also argued, was at odds with the workers’ councils which were to be the new centres of political power. Luxemburg recognised their importance. But for her the loss of democracy was a betrayal of everything the revolution had been fighting for, and risked strangling it at birth. ‘As Marxists,’ she cites Trotsky, ‘we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy.’ ‘Nor,’ she snapped back, ‘have we ever been idol worshippers of socialism or Marxism either.’40 For Luxemburg, integral to democracy was the issue of freedom of thought (against idol worship of any kind). In a speech of 1907 with Stalin apparently in the audience she described slavish adherence to The Communist Manifesto as ‘a glaring example of metaphysical thinking’. At another moment, she described Marxism as a ‘gout-ridden uncle afraid of any fresh breeze of thought’.41 In fact she had always insisted that under conditions of rampant inequality, formal democracy is a hoax. Only under socialism would true democracy have a chance to be born. Without democracy, no socialism. It is for her the un-negotiable political aim:
The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure: for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.42
The people, like their representatives, will continue to grow and change. Trotsky’s view rules out the possibility that the second might be influenced by the first.43 It marks the death knell of politics. It shuts down the future, freezing us in place and time, like the image of the heavens which shows us ‘the heavenly bodies not as they are when we are looking at them but as they were at the moment they sent out their light-messages to the earth from the measureless distance of space’.44 If you want to understand the revolution, look to the stars. Luxemburg was a word-artist – in one letter she describes the pointed wings of swallows wheeling in the sky outside her prison cell as having ‘snipped the blue silk of space into little bits’.45 There is no politics without a poetics of revolution.
This is not anarchy. In fact the revolution was to be embraced as the ‘historical liquidation of anarchism’.46 Luxemburg was calling for elections and representative parliamentary forms. Her demands were specific: freedom of the press, and right of association and assembly (which had been banned for the opponents of the regime). Anything less, she insists, will lead inevitably to the ‘brutalisation’ of public life: ‘Life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life . . . gradually falls asleep.’47 For Luxemburg the only foundation of genuine political experience is the ‘school of public life’ itself.48 Politics is a form of education. In fact it is in many ways its supreme, if not only true, form. Not even the revolutionary party in Russia at the time of the mass strike in 1905 could be said to have ‘made’ the revolution, since it ‘had even to learn its law from the course itself’.49 As she had argued in relation to women’s suffrage in 1902, the well-tried argument that people are not mature enough to exercise the right to vote is fatuous: ‘As if there were any other school of political maturity [ . . . ] than exercising those rights themselves!’50
For Luxemburg, the way of politics is therefore incalculable. This is her famous theory of spontaneity, which has also roused the ire of critics who only get the half of it, if indeed that much.51 What Luxemburg is insisting on, as I see it, is that the unprecedented, unpredictable nature of the revolutionary moment be carried over into the life that follows, the period after revolution has taken place (this is why the question of organisation was always for her subservient to that of spirit). For critics, Luxemburg was again going too far, allowing spontaneity – beyond the first moment of revolution – to ‘embrace the struggle as a whole’.52 That however was the point. No struggle can predict its own future. What would our political landscape look like if it placed at the core of its self-definition the illimitable, potentially outrageous – jusqu’à outrance – processes of revolutionary life? In the words of Adrienne Rich, what happens if ‘as part of a movement, we try to think along with the human forces newly pushing forth, in ever-changing forms and with ever different faces?’53 Here again the link to Arendt is profound – indeed Arendt’s ‘new beginning’ was clearly indebted to Luxemburg: ‘To destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources.’54 ‘New territory. A thousand problems,’ Luxemburg wrote in ‘The Russian Revolution’. ‘Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescent life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to life creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.’55 It is perhaps unique to democracy that mistakes are something that can be seen. ‘In a totalitarian regime,’ Hosni Mubarak stated in an interview in 1994, ‘you never know the mistakes that are made. But in a democracy, if anyone does something wrong, against the will of the people, it will float to the surface. The whole people are looking.’56
Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ on the eve of the German post-war Spartacist revolution, before that revolution was crushed. Reading it with hindsight, we do not therefore have to accept her unflinching optimism, certainly not today, in order to register her undimmed passion for the energy and potential of the people as a form of life. She is talking about aliveness – what psychoanalyst Michael Parsons has recently described as the true meaning of faith, which is likewise wholly unpredictable (you could never provide a formula for the psychic conditions under which it will survive or be destroyed).57 Failure never diminished Luxemburg’s faith. It was a dynamic part of the picture – which is why I think she did not die in despair. Failure was unavoidable. It had to be seen not as the enemy but as the fully fledged partner of any viable politics. The ‘ego’ of the Russian revolutionary that ‘declares itself to be an all-powerful controller of history’ cannot see that the working class ‘everywhere insists on making its own mistakes’.58 Strikes which end without any definite success at all, ‘in spite, or rather just because of this’, are of greater significance as ‘explosions of a deep inner contradiction which spills over into the realm of politics’.59
Listen to her vocabulary. What matters is what explodes and spills, what erupts we might say. Her key term for describing political struggle is ‘friction’. Luxemburg is not a party manager. She does not compute, calculate, or count costs and benefits in advance. She does not hedge her bets. This does not stop her from being single-minded. She is asking for what might seem a contradiction in terms – a political vision directed unerringly at the future which also recognises the fact that the world will surely err. ‘It would be regrettable,’ she wrote to Russian Marxist Alexandr Potresov in 1904, ‘if firmness and unyieldingness in practice necessarily had to be combined with a Lenin-style narrow-mindedness of theoretical views, rather than being combined with broadness and flexibility of thought’ (you could be firm and flexible at the same time).60 The mistakes made by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are, she wrote in ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ in the same year, ‘immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable’ than the infallibility of any party.61 The greatest mistake of a revolutionary party is to think that it owns the history which it has done something, but only something, to create. Luxemburg is taking a swipe at omnipotence and perfectibility together. The sole way for the revolution – for any revolution – to usher in a genuine spirit of democratic freedom, where all views are by definition imperfect and incomplete, is to recognise the fallibility already at the heart of the revolutionary moment itself. The only flawless revolution would be dead. Or as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would put it, ‘Les non-dupes errent’62 – which can be roughly translated as: ‘Anyone who thinks she or he has got it right is heading down the wrong path,’ or, ‘Without mistakes, you are going nowhere.’
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So how far should revolutionary thinking go?
Infinity was no metaphor for Rosa Luxemburg. In 1917, the British astronomer Walkey claimed to have discovered the centre of the universe. The idea of the universe as a ball – ‘a kind of giant potato dumpling or bombe glacé’ – she wrote to Luise Kautsky in response, is ‘certainly rubbish’, ‘a completely fatuous petty-bourgeois conception’.63 ‘We are’, she wrote, ‘talking about nothing more or less than the infinity of the universe’ (her vision never more far-reaching than when she was in a prison cell).64 There is of course a geopolitical dimension to this question of limits. It was part of the dynamic of Luxemburg’s thinking that, like capital itself, it did not stop anywhere. She was one of the earliest theorists of globalisation (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in Marxist geographer David Harvey’s phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter with the title: ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient Germans and the Incas to India, Russia and Southern Africa’. In this too she was way ahead of her time. There is no part of the hemisphere – no piece of the universe – in which we are not implicated. To be limitless is to be a citizen of the world. Her moral compass and the geographical sweep of her vision are inseparable.
As it spreads ‘ever more uncontrollable’, ‘with no thought for the morrow’, to the outposts of what would become empire, destroying all non-capitalist forms in its train, capital offers the gargantuan, deformed reflection of the expansiveness, the unceasing flow, which she saw as the kernel of revolutionary life.65 Marx himself had proposed the endless extension of capital but for Luxemburg he had failed to provide an adequate account of it, most notably in Volume 2 of Das Kapital, which excluded foreign trade. For her, he did not see clearly enough that the problem of accumulation – how to dispose of surplus capital in a productive way – could not be contained by the industrialised world. ‘Capital’, she wrote in The Accumulation of Capital, also based on lectures at the school and considered by many to be her most important work, ‘must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development.’66 Capital ‘ransacks the whole world [ . . . ] all corners of the earth, seizing them if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society’.67
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