Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal by Nixon Jon;

Author:Nixon, Jon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

The only alternative to ‘the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture’ is ‘the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, against its methods, against war’ (R: 321).

The barbarity of war – both in anticipation and in reality – produced an overriding sense of hopelessness, to which Luxemburg was herself not immune. Her despair – and outrage – at the failure of the SPD to resist the relentless march of events that culminated in war was acute. The generalised feeling that modernity was an encounter with ‘the horror’ (as depicted in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness) and that European civilisation had been reduced to ‘fear in a handful of dust’ (as T.S. Eliot suggested in his 1922 The Wasteland) was shaping and informing a new kind of cultural pessimism. Luxemburg never directly confronted what we now think of as ‘modernism’ (she was murdered while it was still emerging as the dominant artistic and literary movement of the early twentieth century). But her involvement in the early days of the German Revolution was an emphatic rebuttal of the nihilism that characterised some – but by no means all – modernist art and literature. Luxemburg was here challenging one of the emergent formulations that would shape the decade following her murder – l’entre deux guerres – and constitute a part at least of that decade’s cultural legacy. In her final piece for Die Rote Fahne, she made it absolutely clear that the undeniable fact of resistance was a bulwark against any form of nihilism: ‘Immediate resistance came forth spontaneously from the masses of Berlin with such an obvious energy that from the very beginning the moral victory was on the side of the “street”’ (R: 376).

We cannot – and should not – infer from Luxemburg’s mode of analysis that knowledge is unmediated by concepts, presuppositions and prior understandings. On the contrary, her work shows how knowledge is constantly filtered through a web of ideas, many of which we simply take for granted. It is for that reason that Luxemburg insists on the need to subject those ideas to critical scrutiny through what Williams called ‘demonstrable investigations’. Some of those ideas, she found illuminating, including much of the conceptual framework provided by Marxism. But others, she rejected on the grounds that they avoided, distorted or prevented a genuine understanding of the material conditions pertaining within particular economic systems. They mystified rather than enlightened. She understood, as Nye puts it, that ‘[m]aterialism … is the study and analysis of actual material conditions which are bound to change’ (1994: 50). It is because they are ‘bound to change’ that the generalisations – or hypotheses – we derive from them need to be constantly questioned, revised and rethought.

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