Pre-election thoughts on the protests at that time

I wrote this material about three months before the election in response to the massive protests that were occurring at the time.  In many ways, the spirit of these protests continued on through to the first few months of the Trump administration, particularly in the form of the protests at the airports that occurred when the Muslim ban was first announced, but also in the form of street fights with the so-called alt right and the far more legal and formal protests of the women's march.  It also took a far smaller and local form through protests of representatives and phone calls as well.  However, it seems like that high tide of protest has at least ebbed.  My hope is that we will see such forms of ungovernability soon and in larger numbers.  I put up the essay as a marker of the time period.  I'm not sure if I would write it the same way at this point, but I still think its worth putting up.

            In the proliferation of such a massive amount of political action within the past year, particularly around the Black Lives Matter movement, I found myself thinking of a passage within Rosa Luxemburg's treatise on the Russian revolution of 1905, titled "The Mass Strike".  Luxemburg exams the phenomenon of the mass strike within the revolution as both a critique of the top down notions of struggle as developed by mainstream of the main intellectual of the SPD, Karl Kautsky, along with the ahistorical concept of the mass strike as developed by anarchists.  In opposition to both, Luxemburg emphasizes the mass strike as a phenomenon that arises out of the self-development of the proletariat through the process of the class struggle.  Through that engagement, Luxemburg emphasizes both the multiplicity of the struggle, along with intensity of the struggles.  She notes:

            The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efficiency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. It suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty. It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

            At the most immediate level, we can see that Luxemburg recognizes what Louis Althusser might later refer to as a moment of revolutionary fusion as occurring within the years of her analysis.  An almost infinite array of discrete and concrete struggles or contradictions came together, aligned themselves in a manner to challenge the very nature of the empire.  But her insight moves beyond that initial insight.  If we see a moment of revolutionary fusion, it does not take the form of a synthesis.  Instead the struggles maintain their multiplicity, their inability to form a whole.  At the same time, the struggles are marked by a form of indistinction, of mutation, 'peaceful wage struggles' become 'street massacres, barricade fighting'.  Through this description, we can see an embrace of what Hobbes phobically linked to the figure of the multitude, a disjointed and militant mob that refuses to become a people and refuses to be governed.  Luxemburg draws on the naturalistic metaphor of the sea to describe the pervasiveness of the social movements of the time and their ability to adapt and mutate themselves in the face of a multiplicity of efforts to repress that refusal.  The movements ‘bubble forth’ ‘ceaselessly’ move, and constitute a ‘changing sea of phenomena.’  She ties that movement to the strength of the revolutionary forces in the country, to the logic running counter to capital.  One one hand, these movements reflect the multiplicity that is at the heart of the concept of use value, the multiplicity of needs that continually exists exogenously to the logic of exchange, even as exchange is absolutely dependent on that multiplicity.  On the other hand, the movements constitute a kind of counter flow to the flows of labor and commodities that define capitalist accumulation.  It’s a flow that refuses the coagulation into the logic of exploited dead labor, the infinite exchangeability of labor time.  Inasmuch, these movements point to an alterity always present within capital, the potential for another way of life.

            In the past year, we have been seeing a similar moment in our own country, albeit with a smaller magnitude than the one that Luxemburg discusses, largely, but not exclusively around the phenomenon labelled Black Lives Matter^[1].^[2]  To rehearse material that is undoubtedly familiar to the audience, we have seen an explosion of demonstrations in response to police violence.^[3]  That violence has become a focal point to challenge the ever-changing structures of white supremacy that at are so significant in structuring the logic of capitalist accumulation, both at the present moment and through the entire history of the country.  It’s taken the form of insurrectionary violence^[4] in Ferguson and other cities, objects hurled at police officers, freeway occupations around the country, peaceful marches of school children, lock-downs of police stations, demands made to Democratic presidential candidates, and a variety of other conventional protest.  The truth is that any effort to document the rich variety of protest will necessarily fail in capturing the rich diversity of activities that has occurred in the past year, and any effort to demarcate these protests as being a part of a particular moment is necessarily going to erase the histories that feed into these protests and inform their logic.  At the same time, we can see a particular language of action, slogans, and social formations that are particular to this moment. And we can see the impact of those movements on the presidential campaign through the disruption of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, through explosive protests against the racist authoritarian nature of the Trump Campaign.^[5] Through those actions, it has introduced a genuinely democratic and agonistic dimension to the stage managed theatrics of the presidential campaign.  The movement has also challenged the connections between the traditional trade union movement and police unions, and has succeeded in creating a meaningful wedge between these formations.  It has also formed alliances with elements of those traditional structures.  But perhaps most significantly, it has transformed the freeway, that representation of the flow of labor, of commodities, into a representation of a profound refusal, through its blockage.  We’ve seen this tactic not only employed in cities traditionally associated with protest, but across the country.^[6]

            Within this web of activity, we can see the possibility of a new form of live, although perhaps only in a negative form, through the refusal of so many to be governed by the same oppressive institutions that have committed such violence.  We can perhaps see the capacities of such a movement in its spectral form, in the phobic descriptions of the movement by the recent comments by Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke at the Republican National Convention.  Clarke marks the organization, along with the Occupy movements, as breaking an unspoken and unwritten code of conduct for the country, and therefore standing outside the respectable conventions of protest, and representing anarchy.  It’s initially difficult to negotiate this description with the often quite modest political reforms called for by the official representatives of the movements, but it makes sense when we look at the protests themselves, which have pushed far beyond these official demands in their radicality.  It also makes sense when we see the refusal of even the reform branch of the movement to be formally incorporated into the political system.^[7]  If anything, we have seen an intensification of this refusal in the continuation of street protest, despite the calls for official calls for calm after sniper attack in Dallas.  Through such actions, we see a movement that is increasingly unconcerned with the preservation of the forces of the status quo.  At the same time, it would be a mistake to ignore the precarity of the contingent web of alliances that created this potential historic bloc.  At the most obvious level, there is the threat of the opportunistic incorporation of this formation into the Democratic Party, a threat that is most notably media personality and former mayoral candidate, DeRay Mckesson.  However, the conflicts that defined the freeway occupation in Minneapolis between activists seem like a greater threat.  Without getting into the details, the arguments represent long historical divisions that intersect questions of identity and tactics.  They represent the profoundly divided nature of the proletariat itself, and aren’t easily resolved through simple slogans.  The question the movement and those who wish to see it succeed have in front of them is how to make this multiplicity productive and grow.  We can see the violence of the backlash beginning to grow.

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^[1] Although it may actually involve more people than were involved in the insurrectionary activities in the Russian Empire at the time.

^[2] Given some of the confusions around the slogan, I should note that I am referring to the larger movement that has congealed around the term, rather than the specific network that has named itself Black Lives Matter.  The distinction is important since the movement is far larger than the network and contains both elements far more insurrectionary than the network, along with highly opportunist individuals and groupings tied to the Democratic Party and Teach For America.

^[3] There is a need more a more intense engagement with the logic of policing, one that could be informed by the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who draws from the earlier work of Marx and Foucault amongst others.  There is also a larger conversation within the Black Radical Tradition, as well.

^[4] It’s important to note that this has been largely limited to property damage, but not exclusively.

^[5] Which was produced by a large intersection of actors, but this could be said about the broad phenomenon, as well.

^[6] The tactic itself deserves more discussion than provided here, and it would be a mistake to think of the action as a unified.  Instead, we have seen very different approaches to taking over freeways.  Some have been mass actions, while others have been controlled protests by small groups.  Some are deliberately designed as acts of civil disobedience, while others are taken up by parties who are not interested in being arrested. 

^[7] Once again, we definitely see some opportunist exceptions, but the network has largely refused this incorporation.

social reproduction and the post-war

“What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labor by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labor into itself—‘as though its body were by love possessed.’”
--Karl Marx

I was initially unsure how to begin this project. To be honest, my examination of literature doesn’t follow a path that could be labeled explicitly feminist. However there is a question that I have been following in the guise of cultural studies that could be linked up with a feminist politics, both producing a theoretical framework that is involved in that work and a framework that can think through the politics of feminism. This project is linked up with a certain concept of the popular. It poses the same problem that Gramsci poses in the Prison Notebooks “to establish not why a book is “beautiful” but why it is “read,” “popular,” “sought after.”[1] To begin to pose the problem in these terms is to begin to ask how structures of power are reproduced within moments of the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’. It also points to their contingency and perhaps the possibility of those circuits.

This, of course, is not the first time for this question to be posed. One can read it in the competing narratives of the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School, and in the various uptakes of cultural studies, most notably the readings by American critics in the 1990’s. Stuart Hall in his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ best describes the binary produced in these debates. He notes that “the study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of that dialectic—containment/resistance.”[2] These terms that have some value when constituted dialectically, become problematic when separated. I want to read the popular within that tension. The popular must both draw from the lines of flight from capital and the ways that those lines of flight are captured again and made productive for capital. I will only approach this question at the very end of the paper, and briefly. The primary focus will be on the question of reproduction and the feminist political response to this in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

In order to do this, I want to begin by producing a provisional definition of the concept of reproduction. I will begin with the way that Louis Althusser in his unfinished text, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses defines it. This will be revised by an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s investigations into the question of reproduction in her most significant work, The Accumulation of Capital. This will challenge some of the conservatism that Althusser reads into the reproduction of structures of domination in capital. I will then move into a discussion of the ways that the structures of reproduction have been challenged and rerouted by new forms of collectivity created by a feminist and queer politics. I will end the piece with a discussion of how these challenges have been taken up in popular forms of media, most notably television.

The question of how capitalism reproduces itself on a day to day level became a focus for Louis Althusser in his well read essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The essay has become a cheap and short way for many college courses to dismiss a Marxian politic and methodology, but it is worth returning to in order to bring out certain structural elements in the everyday. He begins this effort with a fairly conventional discussion of the ways that reproduction has been discussed within a Marxist context. Most of this has focused on the reproduction of the means of production, where Althusser states that he is going to focus on the reproduction of the relations of production. He states early in the essay.

I shall say that the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.[3]

Althusser is beginning to point to a whole series of institutions that are required for the continuation of capitalism’s existence. It isn’t enough to reproduce the means of production, and the skills needed for that production, but one also needs to reproduce the social order which produces the logic of the former. These institutions are needed in order to reproduce a ‘submission to the ruling ideology for workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology for the agents of exploitation and reproduction.” Althusser finds these institutions primarily outside of the workplace itself. Following the footsteps of Antonio Gramsci, he finds these structures primarily in the institution of the school (which he sees as the replacement of the church as the dominant ISA) and the institution of the family.

One may not be entirely convinced by the narrative that Althusser gives to the transition, but the more significant argument is the way that ideology works in this system of reproduction. Althusser argues against an earlier conception of ideology that makes it into a form of illusion or false consciousness. Instead he argues that ideology is made up of material practices constructed in a nexus of institutions. Althusser expresses this in the following terms, “his ideas are material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.”[4]

Althusser marks modern subjectivity as being produced in the nexus of two main institutions the school and the family. Although if we take Foucault seriously, we also have to recognize that these institutions are produced by and propped up by a whole other series of institutions, and by the production of a whole series of knowledges. This places the most important work of reproducing dominant structures of society into what had been constructed as the private sphere. The narrative Foucault creates of this is contiguous with the history of capitalism. It has its most productive moments of creation at the moment of the middle of the 16th century and at the beginning of the 19th century.[5]

The most significant spaces for the reproduction of the logic of capitalism occur in the disciplinary space of the school and the discourses of sexuality in the family. These spaces constitute the locus points for the operations of the “polymorphous techniques of power.”[6] This productive arrangement was initially “elaborated in its more complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes, spread through the entire social body.”[7] There is something is dropped out of this account, that needs to be recognized, which is the way that the colonies acted as laboratory for this creation, but I will have to leave that aside for now. The important thing to draw from this is that the household has been made productive for the current structures of modern disciplinary power. It has done this precisely through its neutralization as a space of political contestation, by placing it in the private sphere. This will become an important issue later in the paper, but lets return to the more formal question of reproduction of the relations of power.

The difficulty that I find in Althusser (although not in Foucault’s) notion of the production of ideology, is its conservative quality. The reproduction that Althusser describes doesn’t capture the violent ruptural nature of capitalism, nor does it approach its appropriative nature. In order to capture that, I want to make a move that may seem a little retrograde at initial consideration, but it may be the two steps backwards that we need to make to make one step forwards. Rosa Luxemburg also approached this issue of reproduction in her work, The Accumulation of Capital, only she was approaching the more formal question as it would be asked by the classic critics of political economy, Marx and Engels. She opens up the question of reproduction in the following terms.

The literal meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we all can understand—why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition that we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features.[8]

Rosa Luxemburg opens up her book with the statement that reproduction is not repetition, as it seems to operate in the logic of Althusser’s (admittedly incomplete) understanding of the concept. Instead, the continual process of production must be understood as being a distinct problem. I want to look at two basic notions that she develops in this understanding of the reproduction of social capital in order to bring them into the discussion of the reproduction of capital as it occurs in everyday life. The first main issue is that of the conditions that it takes to ask the question in the first place. The second deals with the expansive nature of capitalism.

Luxemburg argues that in order to ask the question of reproduction, production must reach a certain level of productivity. Or as she puts it, “Reproductions is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society’s supremacy over nature, or in economic terms, a certain standard of labor productivity.”[9] This is not perhaps the language that would be used to explain the phenomenon today, but it gets at the point that in order to ask the question of reproduction, one must pass over a certain level of scarcity. For Luxemburg, this requires placing the ability to supply the basic necessities of life outside of the contingencies of the non-human, into the realm of the social, otherwise one is only dealing with the bare form of repetition. This element becomes especially relevant when one remembers that the question of social reproduction only gets its full hearing within the context of post-scarcity late capitalism, the point when capital subdues a rebellious labor forces by providing it a living standard that is considerably above the subsistence level.

The second important feature that Luxemburg brings into the picture of reproduction is the issue of expansion. This will become the more important of the two features. As Luxemburg notes,

Capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. Expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist… A growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues, which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction…. For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death.[10]

The uniqueness of capitalism is that it must continually expand in order to survive. Luxemburg captures the ruthless nature of this necessity. Capital is the sovereign figure of this system, not the bourgeoisie. But for our purposes, one can never understand the nature of reproduction of capitalism within static terms. There must be a continuous expansion of the system. Unlike other systems of production, capitalism thrives on the crisis produced by its own contradictions. It must continually absorb that which seeks to destroy it. Luxemburg shows how this produces the logic for the colonial venture, capital needing to continually incorporate its other, the non-capitalist in order to survive. I want to argue that this same ruthless expansive nature must be understood in order to understand how the reproduction of a social order works, it must both incorporate non-capitalistic relations into its structure, and more importantly for us, it must make its resistances productive as well.

This brings us to the question of the feminist and queer politics of the 1970’s and the way they act as a form of countersystemic politics. My understanding of this has been driven by both Negri and Wallerstein’s understanding of the revolution of 1968 as something that both opposed the U.S. hegemony, but also opposed the older models of countersystemic movements that failed to destroy it. The first thing that we must understand is that these modes of politics developed in a certain context. Before we discuss the nature of these movements, the ways that they tried to reroute the circuits of capitalist reproduction, not at the level of grand narratives, but at its more intimate spaces, the spaces that had been so assiduously neutralized, I thought it would be best to draw out the basic political preconditions for these movements. And I should note that we are discussing movements primarily in the U.S. and Europe.

The period that we are discussing is the post war era. I am not going to go into all of the details of the structures and changes that defined that era, but rather I am going to discuss the sections that directly impact the movements that I am discussing. The first thing that should be noted is that the era is defined by a backlash against the radical workers’ movements that were in effect in the 1930’s. This backlash is most strongly defined by McCarthyism, the attempt to drive women out of the workplace, and the continued enforcement of structures of white supremacy. In effect, the political movements had been placated by the offer of a decent wage and the creation of a family structure that had only been enjoyed by the upper echelons of society. By in large what I am driving at is there was a shift in living conditions in a large section of the working class, that was allowed through the destruction of a radical political project. So that while I take socialist feminism as a serious political project, I reject its self-narration of creation. The politics of the period were not created so much by the inadequacy of a marxian politic so much as its destruction.

What followed from there was a new terrain for a politic, one that was less defined by necessity of reproducing everyday life, as reshaping what that would constitute. We can return to the comment that Luxemburg made in The Accumulation of Capital. One can only think about the question of reproduction as such at the point of a certain level of security. That security had been obtained, but only at the cost of generations of radical politics and experience. Many of the substantial problems of New Left politics came out of that amnesia. At the same time, the situation created new possibilities for new forms of social relations and taking advantage of that accumulation. It is notable that the radical politics of the New Left were the first not to be defined by necessity.

As I stated in the general overview of the period, the post war period was defined by a return to a certain structure of household economy. This household economy is defined by women fulfilling the reproductive role of caretaker in the household, a neutralized position that allowed for the continuance of production while not being acknowledged as being a part of that productive process. This restructuring occurred through a great deal of state planning and action. One can find its creation in both official state institutions, and in the influence put on women’s publications. Obviously, this was not a universal condition for women in the United States, but it did act an ideal blueprint for the production of the household, in the same way that Foucault proposes that we read the panopticon for disciplinary society.

To push this into a discussion of the feminist movement, it should be noted that Betty Friedan was involved in writing for the women’s magazines that aided in drawing up some of the blueprints for this structure. She was able to produce her work due to a somewhat privileged position concerning the enforcement of the new household economy. She was able to then put a name onto the system of labor and drudgery that was being effaced under the term, the domestic. At the same time, the political movements of the time, whether we are talking about the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, or the New Left in its broader structures, tended to replicate this division of labor unthinkingly. Women filled the positions in these organizations that were crucial to the day to day operations, but positions that were devalorized as meaningful labor. So, in effect, the problem that Frieden identified was considerably more contemporary than many writers at the time would recognize.

The first initial response to this structure was the consciousness raising session. This took form in both liberal feminist circles and in response to the deficiencies of New Left politics. The model drew from practices used both in black power circles and in the Chinese Revolution. To get a sense of the power that was found in this structure, I point to the words in the Socialist Feminist Reader. “They proved to be a supportive forum for discussing the liberation of women, personal and political experiences, frustrations with movements for social change that were supposed to be different from the rest of the world, and insights about domination and oppression that had fallen on deaf ears in the new left.”[11] The consciousness raising session became a powerful vehicle for organizing and rerouting the political desires of a new collectivity.

However, we should probably recognize that there is another model that could be drawn as a precedent for the consciousness raising session, and that is the confessional. This structure as Foucault points out is based on a certain “will to knowledge.” This structure, far from being absent from the post-war family, was animating feature of it. This family structure can be properly called post-psychoanalytical. The structure had been successfully transformed from a structure of alliance into “a whole series of tactics that combined the body and that of regulating populations.”[12] The structure of consciousness raising was successful, not because it was in revolt against the modern family, but precisely because it used its libidinal structures to its advantage.

This is not to say that the movement was tricked into using these methods or that it was trapped into a mode of false consciousness, but that it could only engage in a process of subjectivization based on the modes of subjection that had created its members as subjects. The interesting element of the feminist movement was ultimately not its narrative of liberation, but the way that it brought out a whole series of power relations outside of the neutralizing element of the private and pointed out that those relations were crucial to the constitution of capital. The field of the reproduction of the household became a site of contestation. The intensity of this politic is best captured by a comment about the relationships developed in the Bread and Roses collective.

From the perspective that the personal is political, almost everything in women’s lives was a potential target of struggle. Women were changing in many contexts: in friendships, in self-image, in sexual relations and the experience of sexuality, in work and new forms of competence, in the imagining and creating new alternatives.[13]

We find a radical politic here that is defined not by the mystified destruction of the structures of reproduction, but by rerouting them to create other forms of collectivity, other forms of subjectivity. This in turn lead to a whole series of political projects that ranged from attempting to recognize the labor of the household as crucial to the production of labor power, to child care collectives, and a whole range of other activities. It would be curious to try to write another History of Sexuality from the perspective of this resistance. I don’t think that it would radically change Foucault’s work, but it would be interesting to see what the differences are.

Ironically, I end on the note that initially made me think about this question in the first place, the question of the popular. As we have seen feminist politics and the queer movement (which I haven’t dealt with) have created new ways of thinking of family structures, de-emphasizing the nuclear family and presenting the possibility of other forms of kinship then previously available. One can go as far as to say that Gayle Rubin’s project in regards to this has been a success. Obviously the goal of destroying capitalism hasn’t been successful, but one cannot say the same for the structure of the family.

The way that I turn to the question of the popular is in a whole series of television series that define themselves precisely through these alternative sets of kinship. These television programs are defined by, in their most banal form, series such as Friends and Seinfeld, but they take more interesting political forms such as the series Queer as Folk and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These various programs, which may constitute a new genre, provincialize the nuclear family in order to emphasize a variety of other networks of kinship and care. This is obviously yet another appropriation, but I am curious to what its effects will be. It would be wrong to read this as an inherently depoliticizing gesture. After all, the latter two shows are to some extent defined by a political project. The question that I want to ask is to what extent does this new form carry the political energies of the former project? And perhaps more significantly, how will this effect the ways that new forms of subjectivization will come out of the new forms of subjection as defined by late capitalism?

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[1] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume II, Ed. and Trans., Joseph A Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123.

[2] Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 443.

[3] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 132-133.

[4] Ibid., 169

[5] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),119.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] Ibid., 122.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Routledge, 1951), 3-4.

[9] Ibid., 4.

[10] Ibid., 12-13.

[11]Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen, “Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: An Introduction”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 6.

[12] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),146

[13] Annie Popkin, “Social Experience of Bread and Roses”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 185.

Some initial comments on demands

      There has been a lot of talk about demands, lately.  Most of this conversation comes out of the Occupy protests occurring in a variety of cities across the United States.  A number of commentators have found the phenomenon confusing, claiming not to understand the goals of the movement or its methods.  To tell the truth, a lot of these folks, most notably the mainstream news industry, are engaged in deliberate obfuscation.  But some of these comments are coming from people who are committed to counter-systemic movements, such as Doug Henwood and Jodi Dean who have made some comments worth taking a look at.  My views on the question are a little more ambiguous, primarily because of some of the misunderstandings about the role of demands on the part of those who oppose them, and because of some of the exaggeration of what demands can accomplish in regards to organizational clarity on the part of those who support them.

      To open up the conversation, I want to make it clear that I support the idea of making demands.  You can call those things any number of things, goals, policies, etc.  Any serious social movement needs to develop a sense of what its goals are, what it's trying to accomplish, in the short term, the mid term, and the long term.  Obviously, these projects aren't going to stay the same over time, but they provide a type of critical, cognitive mapping of where a movement is, and where it wants to be.  You might notice that I haven't made any statements about 'speaking truth to power' here, or even 'speaking to power.'  That's because demands are a way of organizing, of constructing 'constituent power' to use the language of Antonio Negri.  Rather than talking to members of congress or the bourgeoisie, demands allow for movements to communicate with potential participants, as well a allowing for a healthy internal debate over the direction of the movement.  They create the drive for projects, and allow for the success of those projects to be measured.  Our militancy and collectivity create space for reform amongst constituted power, while our communications are designed to foster those forms of militancy and collectivity.  Demands also can separate a movement from very problematic elements who want to appropriate it.  Exclusion may sound bad until you realize that the people being excluded are racists, conspiracy theorists, and libertarians, folks who are going to derail any social justice movement.

     The demands made surrounding the spring sit in in 2009 is a good example of how demands can be used.  (see here for a listing of the demands.)  The demands created by the group to link the demand for a public university to a variety of struggles on the university, making both immediate and long term demands.  They effectively challenged the economist interpretation of the movement by the local paper, by linking the struggle to fights against racism, militarism, and workers' struggles occurring on the campus.  More significantly, the demands created a lot of buzz on campus, and the various demands were discussed extensively by students and faculty.  We can effectively see a moment where demands allowed for a shift in political conversations, and took a small action (albeit a very militant and energetic one) and made it the talk of the campus.  It also managed to express the goals of the movement in a much more accessible and simple language than the often overwrought occupation manifestos of northern California, creating a non-sectarian and intersectional political project for the movement.  Finally, it set out a wide variety of demands, some which were very realizable such as the demand for unisex bathrooms, but also demands for larger structural changes that are not immediate available for appropriation.  In effect, it created demands that could create immediate victories, but without the illusion that those immediate victories were sufficient for the movement to succeed.

      At the same time, I think that there are some mistakes made by those who put their faith in demands.  Most significantly, this is a new movement, and the political goals of that movement have to be created through the struggles of that movement.  They can't be the creation of a few folks in a small room, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg.  I also think that it's a mistake to think that any genuinely political movement can be made immediately coherent with a few slogans or a couple manifestos.  As Adorno and others would point out, there's nothing radical about common sense, and therefore, any radical movement is going to seem strange and unfamiliar to the common-sense of our society, which largely operates on hegemonic norms.  To give a practical example, many of the demands for the action discussed above, often confused and alienated the students, particularly demands for non-economic concerns. Additionally, while we want to make our political projects accessible to potential members, we don't necessarily want to make our actions immediately accessible to dominant institutional structures.  Confusion frequently allows for us to accomplish better actions, ones that create larger effects, that attract more attention, that challenge the expectations of everyday life.  In effect, movements need to make themselves coherent to build themselves, but actions frequently benefit from forms of innovation and confusion.   Moreover, most real social movements constitute and represent themselves in struggle.  'Demandless' events can contribute to that process.

Unpublished Review of the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

“Red Rosa now has vanished too.

Where she lies is hid from view.

She told the poor what life is about.

And so the rich have rubbed her out.”

--Bertolt Brecht, Epitaph, 1919

            Brecht’s short tribute to Luxemburg, written in 1928, during the crisis of the Weimar Republic, provides a somewhat apt introduction into the reception history of the Polish Communist.  The short poem places Luxemburg into circulation by taking her out of particular context, removing the rich legacy of her polemics, critical engagements, and speeches.  The circulated residue acts as a cipher, allowing for her appropriation.  The reason for Brecht’s obfuscation is fairly obvious, allowing him to negotiate between the expectations placed on him by the official communist movement and his fairly idiosyncratic Marxism, but the tendency to transform Luxemburg into such a symbol goes beyond the particular situation of Brecht.  Luxemburg has been taken up as a symbol for a multiplicity of movements, from critiques of the official Communist movement to feminist critics and activists and those looking for an anti-authoritarian past to redirect the New Left.  The original publication of the larger collection of Luxemburg’s letters themselves fit into the rising field of history from below and the early focus of women’s studies on recovering an archive of an alternative women’s history, frequently through letters, memoirs, and other previously private documents.  The current volume under consideration makes a similar claim, arguing that Luxemburg’s analysis and political legacy offers a powerful set of tools to respond to the contemporary political, cultural, and economic crises.  It opens a new fourteen volume collection promises to provide dozens of essays never formally published in English. The question is, does this claim hold weight, and, if so, does this volume offer the best entrance into her critical framework?

The new edition, which includes 246 of the some 2,800 letters contained in the German edition, captures a dense set of personal and political relations.  The vast majority of the early letters are written to Luxemburg’s lover and fellow party member, Leo Jorgiches, but the focus of her letters shift after 1905 to include a number of other figures in the Polish, German, and Russian social democratic milieu.  Those early letters engage with the often problematic and combative relationship between Luxemburg and Jorgiches.  Later letters engage with the fallout of their break up and her later relationship with Clara Zetkin’s son, Kostya Zetkin. But the letters don’t exclusively focus on her personal relationships, bringing in material from Luxemburg’s long running political association with Clara Zetkin, her often shaky relationship with SPD party leader Karl Kautsky, as well as a number of other significant social democratic figures.  The initial introduction argues that the current volume will give readers the historical context to understand the various more formal writings be presented in the future, therefore allowing for a deeper understanding on the part of contemporary readers.  Peter Hudis notes in his introduction, “We lose a great deal by reading Luxemburg’s works abstracted from the internal as well as external conflicts that she engaged in as she sought to chart an independent path on an array of political and economic issues.” (Hudis ix)  The current volume argues that it, along with the larger publication project, attempts to place the large volume of her work within the grasp of an English speaking audience, who previously could not access the previously untranslated and unpublished work.

            Luxemburg’s value as currency can’t be entirely disconnected from her own particular history.  Born in Poland in 1871, she spent most of her adult life in Germany after she had to escape Poland due to her involvement in socialist agitation, leading her to play a prominent role in both the Polish and German movements, as well as having an impact on the Russian struggles.     Luxemburg resisted the call for self-determination on the part of the Polish Socialist Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, arguing that such a call would benefit bourgeois nationalist movements far more than the nascent socialist movement.  She and Leo Jorgiches broke from the Polish Socialist Party to form another organization, which eventually became Social Democracy in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, an organization defined by its simultaneously close and antagonistic relations with the Russian Social Democrats.  She also played a significant role within several debates of the Socialist Party of Germany, arguing against the revisionist theories of Edward Bernstein along with Karl Kautsky, as well as rejecting Kautsky’s criticisms of the general strike, and eventually against the party’s approval of war credits for the First World War.  That position led to her imprisonment and eventually to her part in the formation of the insurrectionary Spartacist League, which led to her assassination along with fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht in 1919.  Through these conflicts, Luxemburg was at the center of the main conflicts of the 2^nd International, constantly challenging reformist elements within these movements as well top down approaches to organizing.

            However, this brief biography doesn’t give credit to her idiosyncratic role within the debates of her time.  Although Luxemburg accepted the basic Marxist framework of her time, which emphasized the inevitability of the proletarian revolution, she challenged the basic presuppositions of both the dominant strains of the 2^nd International as well as the premises of what would come to dominate the 3^rd International.  Additionally, her longer economic tract moved way from a number of orthodox readings of Marx’s critique of political economy, advancing and revising his theories concerning the question of social and economic reproduction.  She also rejected the premise of self-determination that would dominate the political logic of both formations.  Effectively, Luxemburg refused the common sense logic of both movements, which placed the site of struggle within the context of the nation-state form, gesturing towards a new, cosmopolitan form of struggle.  This position puts her out of sync with the long series of anti-colonial movements that defined the 20^th century, which has led to some of the most severe critiques of her politics.  Additionally, Luxemburg refused both the parliamentarianism of the Social Democratic parties that came out of the split in the International and the vanguardist concept of democratic centralism that would come to define the movements of the Communist International.  Instead, her work continually emphasized the importance of the collective self-organization of workers.  Institutional structures such as trade unions and social democratic parties played a conserving and rearguard role in such actions, preserving the gains of collective action, rather than playing the vanguard role of such struggles. 

She notably challenges Lenin’s concept of discipline in her lengthy essay, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy.”  She criticizes the concept of discipline of Lenin’s polemic, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, by opposing it with what she considers a genuinely revolutionary discipline.

 “We misuse words and we practice self-deception when we apply the same term – discipline – to such dissimilar notions as: 1. the absence of thought and will in a body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and 2. the spontaneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men. What is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?”

Luxemburg radically opposes the top down approach taken by Lenin, arguing that its organizational logic, its concept of discipline, draws on and uncannily replicates the structures of capitalist domination.  She opposes this with a concept of discipline that she links with class militancy created in the atmosphere of free association and self-organization.  This alternative version of discipline is dependent on a concept of organization based in experimentation, risk, and failure.  The revolutionary capacities of the proletariat are produced within this laboratory of experimentation, rather than through the guidance and dictates of a central committee.  It is this aspect of Luxemburg’s politics that constitutes the most significant aspect of her legacy, aligning itself with the participatory democracy of the New Left, and offering a substantially different vision of a socialist vision than the one offered by the tarnished vision of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.  The effort to resurrect Luxemburg’s legacy through the publication of this expanded edition of the letters can only be understood within this context.  If the publication of the initial set of letters was linked to the study of the subterranean documents of an insurgent subaltern in the history from below tradition and the feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’, than why begin the new publication of these new works with an expanded set of letters?

The new edition makes a number of claims for this choice, ranging from their literary quality to the theoretical and political questions that the letters touch upon.  But the strongest argument made concerns the context that the letters bring to Luxemburg’s political writings historically and psychologically.  While I agree with this basic premise, I’m not sure that the letters offer the ideal introduction to those internal and external conflicts.  The letters are certainly evocative at times and the complex negotiations and conflicts with her lover and partner Leo Jorgiches provide interesting material for feminist analysis.  However, the letters are fragmentary, often influenced by censorship of prison, and often assume a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader.  Certainly, the editors of the new edition provide footnotes for the letters and a glossary of historical figures and organizations, but this work cannot provide the context that one could find in a good biographical or historical survey of the period.  The current volume could have made up for this deficiency by including a historical sketch of Luxemburg, but aside from a short but useful history of  the publication history of the letters written by the editor of the German edition, Annelies Laschitza, very little is given on the history of Luxemburg or her times within the introductory material and certainly not a biography.

If the collection of letters doesn’t offer a useful introduction to Luxemburg for either a casual audience or an audience interested in getting to know her ideas, one could conceivably ask the question whether it has any value outside of the raw materials for historians, biographers, and critics of Luxemburg’s political and economic theories.  I’m tempted to accept that interpretation.  The focus on Luxemburg’s letters strikes me as another attempt to empty her of the particular analytical framework that defines her polemical and analytical works in order to circulate her within contemporary debates.  However, this transformation of Luxemburg into contemporary currency loses out on the density and complexity of her analysis.  At the same time, Luxemburg’s collection of letters resists this transformation into empty symbol.  While this material lacks historical context, it allows for an exploration of Luxemburg’s interpersonal relations that cut across the Social Democratic Parties of Germany, Poland, and Russia.  This deep interconnection between the various socialist and social democratic parties not only gestures towards the strength of the 2^nd International, but also toward the porous quality of the now seemingly naturalized borders of the European nation-states involved.  It is a reminder of the relative novelty of the form, a form that Benedict Anderson reminds us has its origin in the 19^th century.

The letters also deeply tie Luxemburg into the concerns and conflicts of her times through her personal, literary, and historical interests.  At a personal level, Luxemburg’s perspective on femininity troubles the feminist appropriations of her work.  As Sheila Rowbotham notes in her review of the letters, Luxemburg’s relationship to the nascent feminist movement remained detached and ambiguous, refusing the role of the ‘new woman.’  Her relationship to the patriarchal elements of the party was defined by complex negotiation, rather than rebellion.  The letters also contain a strong literary dimension to them, both in a complex series of references to novels and poetry, and their expressive quality.  Critic Walter Jens, referenced in the introduction, connects the quality of Luxemburg’s prose to the early expressionist work of Robert Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke, but the strong thread of 19^th century romanticism, as well as the work of Goethe is a more likely influence on her prose style. Each of these introduces a dimension of interiority not contained in Luxemburg’s other work, a dimension that simultaneously establishes Luxemburg’s singularity, as well as mooring her to 19^th century literary and personal constructions of the self.

The complex fragments represented by these letters become significant because they place Luxemburg in her time, and allow for a critical rereading of her polemical and theoretical writings.  Despite some of the difficulties with context, that exploration is worth the time, introducing a subjective framework for that work, continually returning that work to its time, despite its singularity.  However, they don’t provide a substitute for that work, which still provide the key to Luxemburg’s continued importance.  It gestures towards the trace of a historical materialist tradition that avoids the dual traps of reformist revisionism and the stagnant authoritarianism of what would become the Marxist-Leninist tradition.  For all of the literary quality of the collection of letters, it only hints at the analytical power contained in that writing, which reads in sharp distinction to the romantic and expressionist qualities in the letters.  Within the context of the contemporary crisis, the reprinting of her public and political work will be of far greater value than the current volume of letters.   

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

"Rosa Luxemburg: Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (Part 1)."

Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 07 July 2011. <http://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ch01.htm>.

Rowbotham, Sheila. "The Revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg | Books | The Guardian." Latest News,

Comment and Reviews from the Guardian | Guardian.co.uk. Web. 07 July 2011.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/05/rosa-luxemburg-writer-activist-letters>.