I would just like to point out that the most striking feature that of all the social explosions of the past few years - and remarked upon by virutally every observer - is just how unexpected they were. What existed before, however one evaluated it, was taken as given and unchanging; just as most people read the situation that has emerged as a new given and equally unchyanging. It is the same mistake that was made in 1789, again in 1848, and again in 191`7. These revolutions, too, surprised almost everyone, and as soon as they happened almost everyone alive at the time thought -- wrongly - that they were over.
(Dialectical Investigations, p. 3) The social explosions he refers to are the collapse of the "Communist" states.]
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In October of 1898 Rosa Luxemburg found her self in a pickle; in the words of a poem written decades later, the center would not hold, the Party to which she was dedicated seemed to be losing its direction. In her two speeches at the Stuttgart Congress she urged the need for a perspective that would give meaning and coherence to the "everyday struggles" that constituted the Party's present, a glue that could hold it together and make it in practice the Party she hoped it was. IF - if her words could bring the Party back in practice and in spirit to its stated purposes. But perhaps her words only illustrate how hard it is to persuade the liberal imagination that the truth does NOT lie in the present, for the present conceals from us its meaning - which I take to be the thrust of my favorite sentence from the works of Karl Mars: "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." Other formulations of the same peception are are "The Present As History," "Doing history Backwards," or, perhaps most famously, from those Stuttgart speeches of Luxemburg, often quoted, not quite accurately, as "The movement is nothing, the final goal is everything.. But the two speeches, on Oct. 3 & 4 of 1898, were closely reasoned, and I think her arguments can be reformulated to live again in our period.
I want to look at the argument of those speeches in the context of the condtion of the radical left in the United States today. And a maillist response to my posting of a paragraph from those speeches excellently poses that question. (I am suppressing names since they are irrelevant to my purposes here.) I posted the following text under the subject line "Words for Today":
<<<Then what is it in our day to-day struggles that makes us a socialist party? It can only be the relation between these three practical struggles and our final goals. It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle. And by final goal we must not mean, as Heine has said, this or that image of the future state, but the prerequisite for any future society, namely the conquest of political power.>>>
As an isolated quotation on a maillist I should probably have stopped there, for the following sentence bristles with problems:
<< This conception of our task is closely related to our conception of capitalist society; it is the solid ground which underlies our view that capitalist society is caught in insoluble contradictions which will ultimately necessitate an explosion, a collapse, at which point we will play the role of the banker-lawyer who liquidates a bankrupt company.>>
We know better of course than to expect capitalism to collapse into our arms. But the post brought forth an invaluable response, which quoted only that final sentence:
<<<Aha, thank you for revealing the fantasy behind catastrophist thought. Since, as you are fond of pointing out, there is no "left" in any coherent sense, there is no "we" to plug into this passage, then there will be no "we" to officiate at the receivership hearings. And since there are no compelling reasons to believe that final explosion is likely, then these words for today really read like words for many yesterdays ago. Maybe a possible tomorrow, but not today.>>
This is all quite true. Let's sort out the points made.
First, as noted above, we no longer expect capitalism to colapse into our arms. That is a trifle. Luxemburg & most or all of her contemporaries were mistaken in that, though looking back it is hard to see what difference correctness on this point could have made I 1898.
She was also mistaken, as noted, and more tragically, in her belief that the SDP was a revolutionary party and could by her and others's arguments be kept so. That is, the left that Luxemburg appealed to in 1898 was, beneath the apparent coherence of the SDP, in as sorry a shape as we find ourselves in today - when, as I have argued in varius forums for some years, criticisms of "the left" today are empty, and misunderstand our condition - which requires the building of a coherent left reistance to capitalism, not a correction of the faults of an imaginary entity.
But the criticism of Luxemburg quoted above ties two quite separate arguments together. Here is the second argument, disentangled from the pont about Luxemburg. First part: "Since … there is no "left" in any coherent sense, there is no "we" to plug into this passage…" - which is true, but then, he argues: "then there will be no "we. . ." This argument, quite simply, assumes that what is will be. And that was specifically the argument that Luxemburg stood up 110 years and some monts ago to denounce. She attempted to do so, precisely, by "doing history backward," by insisting that the present must be seen as history, that is, seen from a future point.
But _not_ a future empirically described or predicted. For good reasons or bad, she did fall into prediction in her reference to capitalist collapse, but _not_ in her core statement. There she correctly rejecting the goal of "socialist society," vaguely conceived or otherwise, in that being true to Marx's own avoideance of writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. Nor does she ground her argument in any explicit assurance of success in the struggle, but in fact, in a paragraph remarkable for what it leaves out, she implicitly allows for failure:
But if we take the position that we w[abt] to bring to fruition the interest of the proletariat, then it is impossible to make statements such as those that Heine has recently made to the effect that we can also make concessions on the question of militarism; it is impossible to make statements such as those of Konrad Schmidt to the central committee of the socialist majority in the bourgeois parliament, impossible to say, as Bernstein has, that once we take over command of the ship, even then we will not be in a position to do away with capitalism. When I read that, I said to myself: what a stroke of luck that the French socialist workers weren't that bright in 1871, for then they would have said: "Children, let's go to bed, our hour has not yet struck, production is not yet sufficiently concentrated for us to maintain control of the ship." But then, instead of a moving drama, instead of a heroic struggle, we would have seen a different scenario, for then the workers would not have behaved like heroes, but like old women.
The empirical model she holds up for her listeners is the story of a great defeat, and perhaps these words would be appropiate to any monument to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. Defeat is no excuse.
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