03.22.08
Rosa Luxemburg and the Legacy of Classical German Philosophy
via marxmail:
http://www.marxmail.org/msg38897.html
available at: http://www.critiquejournal.net/cr41.html
One of the liabilities of Marxism is the hopeless confusion over German Classical Philosophy. The best strategry confronted with this philosophic quagmire is to shovel dirt over the whole subject and move on to something else, something practical. If the founders of the American Republic had ever tried to do democracy using Hegel (or Kant) we would still be without a system of government. There are two problems with Hegel: 1. intrinsic objections, philosophical 2. the obscurity of his work resulting in the near universal failure to understand him. The latter problem is non-trivial. If you examine the balderdash produced by Marxists here you can see the fatal confusions, topped off finally by Lenin’s pastiche in his attack in empirio-criticism.
This is compounded by the Marxist effort to make changes in the sytem of Hegel in the name of dialectical/historical materialism, a gesture that makes the confusion almost deadly. It just won’t work. Historical materialism won’t work as scientism, and won’t work as an Hegelianism. And the dialectic has degenerated in Marxist hands into a sophistical ideology of revolution in terms of historical dynamics, violent poppycock.
You can see the confusion in the Second Internationale where the status of their activism was confused by teleological confusion: should we wait for the predestined socialism, or actively bring it about.
This symptom of the movement shows the shoddy foundation of the whole theory.
With all due respect for Rosa Luxemburg I don’t buy the post-Neo-Kantian emphasis on Hegel. The question of the Neo-Kantians is complicated, first by the fact that certain figures, e.g. Bernstein, had a poor understanding of Kant, and were revisionists, associating Kant with revisionism, etc…
The confusion starts with Engels, whose grasp of either Hegel or Kant is open to doubt, a point explicitly pointed to by Lukacs who was sharply critical of Engels. Not that Lukacs really resolved the issues.
Frankly, if you are going to do German Classical Philosophy you have to start with Kant. If you can’t do Kant, you’ll never get Hegel straight.
The problem here is to confuse the Neo-Kantians with Kant. Neo-Kantianism is not necessarily a full reflection of Kant, and some of the key aspects of Kant have been put through the gristmill of the contemporaneous scientism.
It is worth reading the massive work of Kowalkowsky, reactionary to most Marxists, no doubt, Main Currents of Marxism, to see the phenomenon of philosophy in the Second Internationale laid out in detail.
It is a sorry tale of bad philosophy all around.
It can take years to mature in the study of GCP, while we see activist movements revving up with sausage versions of the dangerous system of Hegel. And Hegel’s system IS dangerous. The muddle over ‘geist’ and its slaughterbench historical massacres, the ambiguity of ethical systems in Hegel’s system, the false imputation that dialectic is an evolutionary dynamic, the trashing of simple logic in the name of non-dual modalities (dialectic), all this thrown at non-intellectual activists in their twenties, is part of the reason the Russian Revolution flew out of control.
With the possible exception of Lukacs’ work, which is however at best a kind of Hegelian chinoiserie, I am unaware of a single work on Marxist Hegelianism that is of any value.
It is work reading Shopenhauer (a figure with unfortunate rightist tendencies, not reflected in his system) for his warning about Hegel, and the way it will corrupt young minds who think they are doing philosophy with Hegel.
Violent characters, with their sense of ethics disarmed and sold the concoction that revolutionary dialectics has some kind of teleological legitimation of the inevitable coming of socialism, were the inheritors of Marxist Hegelianism.
It is a subject that went to an early grave. The left, if there is such a thing, has to start from scratch with something better.
for an abstract see below:
Thispaper aims to explore the philosophical foundation of Rosa
Luxemburg’s work. This aspect of Luxemburg’s work is hardly researched least of all worked
out. This is probably due to the fact that there are only few passages in the published work of
Luxemburg’s, where she discusses explicitly philosophical questions. Indeed, there are only few explicit
passages in Luxemburg’s work, where she defines her philosophical position in relation to classical
German philosophy, but these passages are of such a fundamental importance that they deserve to be
examined. Towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th
century in and among Social Democrat Party of Germany (SPD) many intellectuals, so-called
neo-Kantians, called for a return to Kantian philosophy. This return to Kantian philosophy in combination
with Marxian critique of political economy they believed would enable social democrats to develop a proper
philosophy of socialism. In these explicit passages Luxemburg criticised neo-Kantians and defended
Hegelian philosophy. Unlike neo-Kantians Luxemburg believed that Marxian philosophy can only be
developed further if Hegelian dialectical philosophy is saved in Marxism. But apart from these passages where Luxemburg defines explicitly her relationship to classical German philosophy her whole work is penetrated by a philosophical conviction. She uses implicitly in her critique of Bernstein, Kautsky and Sombart, for example, many
dialectical concepts which still need to be brought to the fore. This concerns above all her approach to the
relationship of content and form, essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, quantity and quality, is
and ought, and to the concept of critique. By utilising these concepts Luxemburg develops a dialectical
philosophy of science. She formulates this philosophy of science particularly in the context of
social and political sciences. The aim of this paper is to work out these aspects of Luxemburg’s work
and consider it in relation to some contemporary philosophies of sciences to indicate its
relevance for the 21st century.