Women in Dark Times (7 page)

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
Parliamentary 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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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).
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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’.
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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).
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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.
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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’
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– 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.’

*

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’.
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‘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).
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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Luxemburg did not idealise non-capitalist societies, certainly not ‘primitive communism’, as it was then called. Ever attuned to injustice, she did not hesitate to identify in those societies the elite-based forms of inequality, the encroachment of inheritance and property, the wars of conquest with their in-built drive to the oppression of conquered peoples. Militarism – she took the Incas and Sparta as her examples – was for her therefore the key to exploitation, a form of foundational violence (hence her revulsion at Germany’s slide into militarism and world war). ‘Domination from above,’ she wrote in her essay on slavery, ‘evolves faster when conquests and wars occur.’
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But, she wrote in ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism’, there is only one contact that primitive social forms cannot tolerate or overcome; this is the contact ‘with European civilisation i.e. with capitalism. For the old society, this encounter is deadly, universally and without exception’ (this is Luxemburg in anticipation of Naomi Klein).
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It is the central credo of Marxism that capitalism contains the seeds of its own collapse. The very rampant destructiveness of capital therefore heralds its defeat. On this Luxemburg never relented, not even when the old order was reasserting itself with such murderousness all around her in the last days and months of her life. That order was as self-serving as it was blind. It was Georg Lukács, famous Marxist theorist, literary analyst and one of her most fervent supporters and critics, who best captured the note of Greek tragedy: Luxemburg’s writing had transformed the last flowering of capitalism into ‘a ghastly dance of death, into the inexorable march of Oedipus to his doom’.
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In this belief, that capitalism must surely be doomed, she was perhaps never a truer daughter of Marx, even if some would say this was her greatest error (like believing life or the people unfailingly correct their own mistakes). Critics have argued that Luxemburg underestimated the adaptability of capitalism, its ability to pull itself up by its bootstraps, as we have witnessed all too clearly in the complacent aftermath of today’s banking-led credit crisis in the West. In fact it had been central to her early argument with Eduard Bernstein over revisionism which had first made her famous in 1898, that the crises or ‘derangements’ (her word) of capitalist economy are the very means whereby it perpetuates itself. In any case, these critics are missing the point. Whatever Luxemburg is talking about, she is always somewhere talking about knowledge and truth, about what is struggling, under the pressure of free inquiry and against the debilitating façade of bourgeois life, to be understood. Precisely because of its unerring and malicious canniness, capitalism cannot hide its ugliness from the world (periodically revealing that ugliness is simply the obverse of its inhuman powers of endurance). In which case the people will turn to revolution, not just, to use Marx’s terms, because of the clash between the forces and relations of production, but because the mind always has the power to expose and outstrip injustice. Or to put it more simply – as we have witnessed so powerfully since the Arab Spring of 2011 and then across an austerity-blighted Europe – there comes a moment when the people decide they have simply had enough.