In this – an apocalyptic – age, when we are forced to confront an ongoing, Orwellian war on terror, which has done much to provoke a resurgence of the far-right around the globe, when “national” and “transnational” governing institutions have been thoroughly co-opted by a plutocratic clique determined to plunder the globe, when the spectre of climate catastrophe begins to unfold, Luxemburg’s thought and her praxis, her principled articulation and embodiment of a distinctly anti-dogmatic, libertarian and thoroughgoing, internationalist version of Marxism, provides an invaluable intellectual resource, a source of inspiration, and she herself, a desperately-needed role model, for those of still committed to the struggle against capitalism and Imperialism.
Red Rosa, the revolutionary martyr, the woman who first made famous the phrase “Socialism or Barbarism,” whose earthly fate – shot in the head, dumped in the Landwehr Canal – was certainly an early indicator of which of the two alternatives was destined to come out on top in the twentieth century, and indeed, may even have helped tip the balance against Socialism, in favour of Barbarism. And yet, her ideals and her example, are more relevant now than ever, for us in the twenty-first century, in an age in which the complicity and defeat of social democracy have been rendered increasingly transparent, after the crimes of state communism even blurred the very distinction between “socialism” and “barbarism” in the eyes of so many.
Barbarism is, of course, a loaded term – one whose very use reflects and perpetuates a still deeply ingrained modernist prejudice, the binary pitting “civilisation” against “savagery,” a binary which long served, and continues to serve, to legitimate and justify imperial conquest, pillage and plunder. Though Luxemburg was certainly no apologist for Imperialism. To the contrary, her acute analysis of the contradictions of capitalism was centrally concerned with the theory (and critique) of Imperialism. And indeed, her formulation is even subversive, insofar as she implies that socialism is civilisation’s last chance, that failure to overcome capitalism will mean nothing short of civilizational collapse.
So too did her formulation proves prophetic, insofar as she glimpsed, albeit for but a moment, from behind prison bars, beyond the bounds of her epistemic certainty, of her faith, in the inevitability of the victory of socialism. The outbreak of the First World War had shaken her conviction to the core.
Strictly speaking, the possibility of civilizational collapse, of “common ruin,” did not lie beyond the parameters of the Marxist imaginary. In point of fact, towards the very beginning of the Communist Manifesto, just after Marx and Engels declare the class struggle to be the hermeneutic key for unlocking the mysteries of all history, or at least the mysteries of all written history, the founding fathers of historical materialism go on to explicitly add that, across this long span of (written) history, the battle between oppressor and oppressed had “each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of contending classes.” Revolutionary re-constitution or common ruin as alternative outcomes, alternative possibilities, for the class struggle had thus been envisioned from the start, recognised in the movement’s founding document, revealed in its sacred text. And indeed, Luxemburg attributes the formulation she rendered famous to none other than Engels himself.
And yet, if anything had characterised the Marxist mentality from its inception all the way up through the outbreak of the Great War, it was its steely confidence, the unflinching conviction, that the future belonged to socialism, that victory was inevitable, that the demise of capitalism was foreordained. Not just in one country, but on a global scale.
The Great War changed things forever. It was a calamity of unprecedented proportions, no doubt, though not one whose outbreak Luxemburg had failed to anticipate. She sniffed out the SPD’s – and Kautsky’s – ever-increasing opportunism a lot sooner than others, and so could see right through her party’s appeals to “peace utopias,” could denounce her party’s creeping inclination to capitulate to the machinations and manoeuvres of the right, to militarism, to nationalism, and, ultimately, to war. Indeed, as early as 1911, she had insisted that the only way to avoid the outcome of the war was through the outbreak of the revolution, and that therefore the party’s main priority and the message should be “ruthlessly to scatter all illusions with regards to attempts made at peace on the part of the bourgeoisie.”
Even so, the onset of the war proved quite the shock to her system. According to her comrade and first biographer, Paul Frölich: “The capitulation of German Social Democracy, its desertion to the imperialist camp, the resultant collapse of the International, indeed the seeming collapse of her whole world, shattered her spirit. For a moment – probably the only time in her life – she was seized by despair. But only for a moment! She immediately pulled herself together, and by a sheer act of will, overcame her sudden sense of weakness.”
The workers of the world were destined to unite. Why, then, had they so stubbornly insisted on clinging to their chains instead, even to the point of opting for meaningless and brutal death in the trenches? Why had they been so easily seduced by all the lies and propaganda, by all the appeals to national glory? Why could they not understand that the worker has no country?
Outside and Against the Nation
Contrary to what has too often been suggested, Luxemburg was no naïve optimist about the spontaneous inclination or propensity of the working class to overcome the blinders of the nation. Not in the least. Rather, her implacable hostility towards nationalism in all its manifestations was motivated by a deep-seated recognition of its powerful allure and therefore its destructive potential. She was well aware, more aware than all the others, and rightly afraid, of its ideological efficacy when it comes to dividing and conquering workers. She rightly realised the nation to be the main alternative, the most fundamental danger, the biggest obstacle to the elevation of class consciousness, to the cultivation of class loyalties, both within and beyond the confines of state boundaries.
Luxemburg was a triple outsider. A woman, a Jew, a Pole; but at the same time, on intimate terms with the leaders of German Social Democracy, her charisma and intellectual acumen recognised by friend and foe alike from very early on. Her solidly middle-class background and doctoral degree no doubt facilitated her ability to connect with the German party leaders, despite their differences. So, perhaps more precisely, she was a triple outsider-insider, an immigrant at home among an inner circle of professional activists, bourgeois socialist agitators, leaders of an oppositional party that conjured and claimed to represent the working class.
This outsider-insider status no doubt helped render Luxemburg uniquely immune to the twin temptations of either espousing big nation chauvinism or embracing the dogma of self-determination. Her positionality granted her an epistemic privilege, as social theorists would say today. She could see through the nationalist blinders and illusions of both camps. Outside the nation, she proved capable of seeing beyond it. Indeed, as Whitehall has recently argued:
“Her marginal status arguably shaped her empathy for the community in its international orientation of borderless solidarity, propelled by and for the global proletariat.” Moreover, recovering her perspective allows us to glimpse “the richness of the contests for self-determination before the ideal settled according to liberal priorities after the war.”
Luxemburg’s initial splash in the Second International came at a Congress held in London, in 1896, at the tender age of 25, when she eloquently and vehemently objected to a resolution in favour of Polish independence, arguing against “providing an effective cover for social patriotism’s total lack of any scientific basis,” against “raising it to the level of dogma.”
Her opposition to the prospect of Polish independence not only contradicted the position of the founding fathers of historical materialism; it would bring her into conflict with the leading lights of both German and Russian Socialism, with Kautsky, with Liebknecht the elder, with Plekhanov, with Lenin, on multiple occasions, over the years. But it is an issue on which she would never waver; nor would her passion ever wane. She would return to it again and again, to articulate and confirm ever anew her consistent and principled point of view.
As for her discrepancy with Marx and Engels on the subject, she brushed off all accusations of heresy or sacrilege with a counter-attack against dogmatic modes of thought. As she would succinctly put the point in her 1915 Anti-Critique: “It has always been the privilege of the ‘epigones’ to take fertile hypotheses, turn them into a rigid dogma, and be smugly satisfied, where a pioneering mind is filled with creative doubt.”
Or, in a somewhat more direct and elaborate formulation, from a decade earlier, in a foreword she wrote for an anthology on “The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement,” where she patiently explained the difference between historical materialism as a fluid method of analysis and point of departure versus historical materialism as rigid dogma and foregone conclusion:
“The vital core, the quintessence, of the entire Marxist doctrine is the dialectical materialist method of social inquiry, a method for which no phenomena, or principles, are fixed and unchanging, for which there is no dogma, for which Mephistopheles’ comment, ‘reason turns to madness, kindness to torment’, stands as a motto over the affairs of human society; and for which every historical ‘truth’ is subject to a perpetual and remorseless criticism by actual historical developments.”
She was no dogmatist, but she was no revisionist either. She was first and foremost a revolutionary Marxist, committed to the overthrow of capitalism on a global scale. Her revolutionary Marxism was firmly rooted in a liberationist but “orthodox” interpretation of the core of the historical materialist faith – an interpretation grounded in a conscientious commitment to the “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Along with a visceral rejection of opportunism.
Indeed, it is the visceral rejection of opportunism that unites her critique of nationalism with her critique of revisionism, and of its associated pathology, “parliamentary cretinism.” As Nettl has explained, for Luxemburg the programme of national self-determination was but the first of her “many indices of opportunism which tied socialism to the chariot of the class enemy.”
to be continued…
