Thoughts for the Brain: more on the Drowned Girl

As an historical figure Rosa Luxemburg has a negligible presence. She left nothing behind in the way of a new and different life. She founded no movement, let alone any state. Even Leon Trotsky, with his meagre, humiliating end, claims his place as a fallen Titan of the twentieth century.

Her pull as an icon, a figure of ideology is much greater. Those who encounter her find her bewitching (a loaded adjective to use for a woman, but it’s to the point). The Drowned Girl song, by Bertolt Brecht is a good example. It was taken from a poem written by Brecht in the aftermath of the Spartacus Days and reworked into a later play. Though not directly about her I think it’s still telling she was made into the drowned girl.

In the month before the revolution that toppled the Kaiser and ended the war, political prisoners were released as the pressure rose. Her jailers only dared release her on November the 8th, the night before the movement took Berlin. No photos exist (as far as I know) of her final two months. She was forty-eight but appeared frail and had completely white hair. Luxemburg is simply not remembered as old. She is forever a young woman, new to the party but besting the elders and generally shaking things up.

She was a woman who thrived in a male-dominated environment. Even now people tend to be familiar when referring to her. It goes Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky… Rosa, Red Rosa, Bloody Rosa, but almost always Rosa. She was a martyr too, to a gang of men no less.

The fact she has no concrete legacy gives her little definition. It means she can be pressed into many meanings. There is a feminist Rosa Luxemburg, an anarchist Rosa Luxemburg even an anti-communist Rosa Luxemburg (it’s a difficult job, but you can press her theses on the Russian revolution into Cold War service).  

Luxemburg is the meaning of her message, the value and detail of which is often overlooked. She is a true icon in the McLuhanite sense.

Song for a lost world...

David Bowie singing (albeit obliquely) about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Counterfactuals are a borderline science at best. Nevertheless it's entirely possible that the bludgeoning of a middle aged woman set humanity on its current road to doom. Even at this late stage we can choose another path, but we're running out of time.

Pessimism ahoy!

One of the most tangled questions of our time, I think, is how we pitch the idea of resistance to ordinary people. It is often said that the government is weak. This is true and yet it often sounds so false. Weakness is relative. The government is 'weak', yet its plans for austerity and privatisation roll on.

There is a lingering weakness that is perhaps ratified by an uncritical reading of Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the mass strike (it's a thin observation, I know - there's more to it than this, but...). In her design the mass strike carries a lot of weight. It is a solution to working class division and (all but) a cure all for the weaknesses of organisation. This is true, but the pamphlet separates out valid observations about mass strikes from the importance of long-term organisation. This is because the pamphlet was, effectively, an SPD internal document. It was not necessary for Luxemburg to argue the importance of the party in 1905 - that would have been stating the obvious. In the same way Gramsci did not have to add to his prison notebooks, whose first readership was senior PCI cadre, "by the way, we must smash also the state".

Things can change just like that, yet they don't seem to. The mass strikes of 1905 were a culmination of half a century of seemingly almost fruitless revolutionary activity. Mass strikes are always welcome. We want another good strike day on March 28th, but plenty of people can see it will not be enough to get the government on the run - simply pumping the action up won't cut it.

A week away from finking...

For very, very personal reasons (happy ones)... but here's something to put down; not a match for something like this, but what is...?

Rosa Luxemburg's argument with Eduard Bernstein, known as Reform or Revolution, is rightly celebrated. There are two obstacles to even roughly applying her arguments today, one is contemporary to her time, one to ours.

The first one is well rehearsed. Luxemburg's argument was with the figurehead of the revisionist movement within the SPD at the end of the 19th century. It was an intra-party argument. Rosa Luxemburg won, in argument. The trouble is arguments are won in practice, to the extent that honest champions of one set of ideas can end up bringing another set to life. The ideology of the SPD was revolutionary, the day to day practice of the SPD was strictly legal.

Her revolutionary career is negative proof of the old argument, you need a revolutionary organisation (however you might see it) to test and win revolutionary ideas.

But the second difficulty, our difficulty is this, who are the reformists? If there was one lesson the last decade has taught us all it is the modern system of government is impervious to the people's will. The next time a Labour left tries to assert how realistic and serious they are, compared to your (simultaneously) utopian and dangerous designs, it's worth parrying them with this. Who honestly still thinks you can change the world for the better through parliament (let alone bring about something like socialism)? Social democrats are the true believers. In this age revolutionaries are the realists, social democrats are utopian.

But, back to the first point, reformism does not arise out of a collective mind, but a social body. Reformism is not a bourgeois minority sport but the formalised version of the general mixture of impressions working class people gain in ordinary life. It is part of life. Who is trying to practice it these days?

Autonomists are often suggested to be the new reformists. One striking connection is the famous aphorism of Bernstein's, “the movement is everything, the final goal nothing”. A modern (and rather sectarian, if I may say so) version is “we are the demands”.

Another connection I believe is the rejection of violent confrontation. This can just be a tactical question. If you are outnumbered and outmatched by an opponent it would be wise to duck battle. This was of course the origin of the SPD's tactics, building a party in a semi-absolutist state. But if this is worked up into a strategic point trouble begins. The problem is obvious; you may reject violence but will violence reject you?

Lets not go too far, neither autonomists nor socialists think the system can be used to bring about communal democracy. Both favour encouraging ordinary people into direct activity, rather than passively engaging them through voting and lobbying etc. Many autonomists would regard themselves as revolutionaries, and who's going to stop them from doing so?

It's worth adding though, there's a difference between revolutionary activity and revolution. Autonomists often see socialists as waiting for a revolution for their cue to spring into action. Any who cares to notice knows this is hardly the case. There is also a link between modern autonomism and the sixties counter-culture, through the slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out”; drop out being the key element, you have to abandon bourgeois society in order to fight it. The sectarian streak in autonomism tends to see autonomist activity as revolution and everything else as missing the mark; “we are the demands”.

So autonomism is not reformism, but is related. There is call for a fraternal, reasoned critique of autonomist ideas, as distinct from traditional points made in the dialogue with reformists. A start may be that autonomism has a strong ethical dimension but no political economy (what it has is borrowed from neo-liberal theory).