There follows the text of the paper I read at last spring's Left Forum, in a panel on dialectics sponsored by _Critical Sociology_. I am already quite dissatisfied with it, but I think the essential thrust holds good. I will have further comments in subsequent posts.
Carrol
************************
As a frame or point of reference for this paper I offer the following from Dialectical Investigations:
I would just like to point out that the most striking feature of all the social explosions of the past few years - and remarked upon by virtually 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 unchanging. It is the same mistake that was made in 1789, again in 1848, and again in 1917. 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)
When Rosa Luxemburg spoke at Stuttgart some 110 years ago, launching her famous slogan on the final goal, she was, I think, exploring what I would term entrapment in the present, insisting that socialist thought was socialist only if it rejected that trap. The present, whether constituted by the daily work of a revolutionary party or by daily stock prices, conceals from us its meaning, which I take to be the thrust of Marx's aphorism, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." Other formulations of the same perception are "The Present As History," "Doing history Backwards," or, of course, Luxemburg's wording, often quoted, not quite accurately, as "The movement is nothing, the final goal is everything." I think her arguments can be cast to live again for us, in the context of tasks facing radical leftists in the United States.
This possibility shows up in a maillist response to a paragraph from the Stuttgart speeches, which I had I posted under the subject line "Words for Today": "Then what is it," Luxemburg asked,
<block quote> 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 goal. 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.[end quote]
As an isolated quotation on a maillist I should perhaps have stopped there, for the next sentence bristles with problems:
<block quoete> 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. [end quote]
The post brought forth an invaluable response to that last sentence:
<begin quote>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. [end quote]
Now this is quite good, though some untangling of its components is needed. We no longer expect capitalism to colapse into our arms. But that is a trifle. And "fantasy" distorts what, centrally, is involved here, as does "catastrophist thought," whether we are making a historical judgment of Luxemburg personally or attempting to extract the theoretical core of her argument. Her error was to incorporate an unnnecessary empirical prediction, but though unwise in the event, hardly a fantasy. In any case, then, capitalist bankruptcy is one question, the lack of coherence in the current left a second question, and the futre existence of such a left is yet a third question, all of which cannot usrfullly be jammed together as they are in the critique.
Abstracting from the first of these (bankruptcy), the critic's claim is that because it would be empty, within the current context, to declare the "final goal" of political power, it will be so in the future - or, the premise seems to be, What is, Will Be -- that the future is visible in the facts of the present. And this was precisely the position Luxemburg rose to deny in her speeches. .*****She attempted to do so, precisely, by "doing history backwards," by insisting that the present must be seen as history, that is, seen from a future perspective. .***** And just as we know now that) capitalism will not collapse into socialism on its own, we also know that the movement of her day drifted into the horrors of World War I. For she was also mistaken, and more tragically, in her belief that the SDP was a revolutionary party, one that could by her and others' arguments be kept so.
The point being, in order to understand the present, a future perspective cannot be empirically derived from the present, and she did not do so. She claimed no predictive powers over contingency. 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 rejected defining the goal as "this or that image of the future state," in that being true to Marx's own avoidance of writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. Nor, it is important to note, 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:
<block quote>But if we take the position that we want 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 workers would not have behaved like heroes, but like old women. [end quote]
The historical model she holds up for her listeners is the story of a defeat, thus quite clearly distinguishing her "final goal" from triumphak prophecy. Perhaps these words would be appropiate to any monument to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. Empirical prophecy (as in stock-market advice) is in fact but another manifestation of entrapment in the present, of attempting to find the antaomy of man in the anatomy of the ape!
[The second half of the paper will follow]