Rosa Luxemburg on disappointment and the politics of commitment
| Author | Loralea Michaelis |
| Published date | 01 April 2011 |
| Date | 01 April 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885110395478 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
10(2) 202–224
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885110395478
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Article
Rosa Luxemburg on
disappointment and the
politics of commitment
Loralea Michaelis
Mount Allison University, Canada
Abstract
This article explores the conceptual commitments underlying Luxemburg’s repudiation
of the discourse of disappointment which had overtaken the European socialist move-
ment during the First World War. My analysis brushes against the grain of the traditional
interpretation of Luxemburg’s admonitions ‘to be cheerful despite everything and any-
thing’ as arising from her allegiance to a Marxist philosophy of history which decrees
that socialism must inevitably prevail and so refuses to give way to disappointment or
despair. The philosophy of history which Luxemburg absorbed from Marx, notably
through the Eighteenth Brumaire, prophesies the ultimate victory of socialism but ordains
that the actual events and experiences through which this victory is prepared will
consist in catastrophes rather than conquests. In Luxemburg, I suggest, we can see
more clearly how the experience of failure could make the realization of socialism
more rather than less certain, and in terms that refer more directly to the inner sit-
uation of the socialist activist than the abstract assurances on which Marx relied: failure
occasions the opportunity for deeper learning but, more importantly, it is in the expe-
rience of failure that the commitment on which the realization of socialism depends is
tested and, in Luxemburg’s hands at least, forged.
Keywords
disappointment, failure, Luxemburg, Marx, philosophy of history
Introduction
On 28 December 1916, Rosa Luxemburg writes a letter from prison to her friend,
Mathilde Wurm, describing the ‘state of rage’ that Wurm’s last letter has evoked.
We do not have a copy of Wurm’s letter but from Luxemburg’s reply it would
appear that Wurm has written to Luxemburg of her disappointment over the con-
tinuing failure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership to mount
Corresponding author:
Loralea Michaelis, Department of Political Science, Mount Allison University, 144 Main Street, Sackville, New
Brunswick, Canada E4L 1A7
Email: lmichael@mta.ca
any serious opposition to the war. In August 1914 the majority of SPD and trade
union leaders made their accommodation with the governing powers, some citing
fears of a revival of anti-socialist legislation or a loss of hard-won electoral support,
others going so far as to offer a uniquely socialist endorsement of chauvinistic
nationalism.
1
The minority of socialists who refused to mitigate their radicalism
ran the risk of social and economic ruin and, as with Luxemburg herself, impris-
onment.
2
This betrayal of the internationalist and revolutionary commitments of
socialism did not bode well for the future of the movement. Indeed, historians of
the SPD mark the years from 1914 to 1918 as one of those revelatory periods in
which the shape of things to come and the meaning of things already past suddenly
become clear. Peter Gay’s classic study, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, for
example, describes the SPD failure to oppose the war as the culmination of 25 years
of pursuing the revolutionary goals of socialism through elections and legal
reforms and also as the turning point beyond which the prospect of a united
socialist movement could not be recovered; thereafter the movement is split
between a revolutionary wing dominated by the authoritarian socialism of the
Soviet Union and a reformist wing dominated by parliamentary parties and
unions reluctant to endorse policies that might endanger the status quo to which
their own careers and the wages and pensions of their members were indebted.
3
The
sentiments of Wurm’s letter would have been informed by a strong presentiment of
this future. Because we record this future as history we may find it difficult to
imagine any more appropriate response to the times; her despair is prophetic
and so, to our eyes, well founded.
Luxemburg does not take this sympathetic view, however. ‘This whining tone,
this ‘‘alas’’ and ‘‘alack’’ about the ‘‘disappointments’’ which you have experienced’
– in this tone Luxemburg detects the sensibilities of the circle of SPD intellectuals
around Karl Kautsky who were unable to follow through on their own revolution-
ary rhetoric; they opposed the war in 1914 but they would not jeopardize their
freedom or their standing within the party by making their opposition public.
4
Two
and a half years into the war they complain of the opportunism of the SPD lead-
ership and the complacency of the working classes and yet still they are reluctant to
assume the risks of opposition. ‘Audacity would surely please you’, she writes, ‘but
because of it one can be thrown into the cooler and one is then ‘‘of little use’’’.
5
Luxemburg charges Wurm and her friends with cowardice and defeatism, intimat-
ing that prophecies of doom are self-fulfilling: if world history were made by people
such as yourselves, she declares, ‘we probably would still be living in the ancien
re
´gime’.
6
Even more interesting than the charge of defeatism, however, is
Luxemburg’s charge that the unwillingness to take decisive oppositional action
which drives this SPD circle stems from a more fundamental unwillingness to
run the risk of failure. She characterizes them as mercenaries, those who will
only fight for pay, in this case, the pay of being successful, and then, she shifts
the metaphor. ‘You would be ready enough to put a little bit of ‘‘heroism’’ up for
sale – but only ‘‘for cash’’, even if only for three mouldy copper pennies. After all,
one must immediately see its ‘‘use’’ on the sales counter’.
7
For Luxemburg such
Michaelis 203
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