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VolineWe have to recognize that the Freikorps represented legitimate grievances.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Anarchists don't love Rosa Luxemburg. I mean, there may be some that do for whatever reason, but she hated anarchists and wrote about it.
@richpuchalsky regardless of what luxemburg said about anarchists I can confirm through personal experience that a lot of anarchists love her
@richpuchalsky not really, people are often more ideologically heterodox than seems "logical" and that's not even a bad thing
It's not really a matter of being heterodox: she thought anarchists sucked. She wasn't at all unclear about it. I think that many anarchists may just know she was killed by the state and never bothered to read anything she wrote.
@richpuchalsky I think you may be struggling with what "ideologically heterodox" means
If someone calls themself an anarchist, that's presumably a central commitment for them, right? I don't care how heterodox they are: if they don't think of themselves as some kind of anarchist, why call themselves one?
"therewith the historical career of anarchism is well-nigh ended": I guess people could be heterodox masochists or something? I think it's simpler to just think they haven't read her stuff.
@richpuchalsky lots of anarchists are also into nietzsche and that is a far, far bigger ideological gulf than anarchists and rosa luxemburg
@richpuchalsky anarchists who only read other anarchists are usually not worth talking to, just like marxists who only read other marxists are not worth talking to, or psychoanalysts who only read other psychoanalysts are not worth talking to
I have no objection to them reading her: I just doubt that they did. Whatever you think of Nietzsche, he wasn't actually arguing for one left tendency over another and so people can excuse his right-wing stuff as philosophical.
@richpuchalsky his right-wing stuff very much was not just philosophical!
@richpuchalsky like it is to me much easier to get stuff out of a leftist thinker who I might disagree with on one particular point (how revolutionaries should organize) but am in agreement with on all the other ones (is capitalism good, what is the nature of imperialism, etc.) than with a guy who openly opposes most of my values (and I do think you can get things out of *some* right-wing thinkers, nietzsche being at the top of that list, just that there's far more to set aside when you read him!)
@richpuchalsky (also, reading a lot of Classical Anarchists also involves Having to Put Some Issue Aside, whether it's Was WWI Good, or Are Jewish People Ontologically Evil, or What is the Role of Woman, to name a few well-known cases! yet I have still gotten a lot out of reading Bakunin and Kropotkin - Proudhon not so much tbh)
catch@julieofthespirits @richpuchalsky also even stuff like 'is capitalism good' can be broken by completely wrong definitions of 'capitalism' and 'good'. And one of the people who helps clarify those definitions is... Rosa Luxemburg.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits iirc most of her anti anarchist stuff is in the Mass Strike, written 1906.
So that's 8 years before her own party the social democrats voted for war credits and she broke with her entire faction except for a couple of people. And 12 years before they sent proto-fascist paramilitaries to assassinate her. Possibly context might be useful in this case.
@catch56 @richpuchalsky also there is always the possibility that many anarchists have in fact read Rosa Luxemburg but not The Mass Strike in particular!
You might prefer The Russian Revolution, written in 1918, then:
"Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat."
That is the antithesis of anarchism and the cause of most Marxist/anarchist disputes. But sure, people can like whatever.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits yeah I can quote mine too. Also from the Russian Revolution:
"Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model."
It's not quote mining. It's her conclusion.
I've found this discussion to be about as helpful as any discussion with Marxists, which is to say, not very. Condescending and not willing to even acknowledge the basics of your own belief now that it has failed.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits I'm not a Marxist Rich, been an anarchist for 30 years but I have read a lot of Marxists because I found them useful (and a lot of anarchist literature not very useful).
Forgive me for reading your bio.
OK, since you're read a lot of Marxists then you know that this business of the dictatorship of the proles isn't something that anarchists at the time just said "we love that" about. Anarchists also saw the problems of the Russian Revolution (much more clearly than Rosa Luxemburg did) and did not fall back on a reiteration that we needed a state but needed to do it right in some way that never could happen.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits my bio says 'communist'. Most Marxists aren't communists. They support various forms of state capitalism. Since you dislike them so much I'd assume you'd recognise that.
They say that they're communists, just as you say that you're an anarchist without having any notable familiarity with the whole concept of the dictatorship of the proles and why anarchists rejected it even in its delusional "it must be the work of the class" form.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits where did I say the dictatorship of the proletariat was good or that anarchists like it? You're going to run out of straw soon.
You posted that I was quote mining and that the next paragraph contradicted what I'd quoted. It did not. You also presented what she wrote as if anarchists were supposed to take it seriously and not as the usual "Oops! Looks like the anarchists were right about this but by not acknowledging that I can continue to support the state" bit.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits this is the very next paragraph after the one you quoted:
"Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people."
Which almost completely contradicts the previous paragraph, and we don't know what she would have said about things in 1920 or 1921, after the crushing of the Left SRs, Makhnovists, Kronstadt etc.
But we can see the reaction of people like Otto Ruhle or Herman Gorter who came out of broadly the same mileu and completely rejected Leninism.
@richpuchalsky @julieofthespirits she was on a very rapid trajectory around the time she was killed, which was also closely related to the reason she was killed.
Pannekoek also talked shit about anarchists.
@catch56 @richpuchalsky huey p newton also talked shit about anarchists and basically every anarchist I know loves him
john.brown_typeface@julieofthespirits
one would think with all the love there would be more "Luxemburgists"
but, nope, it's like 3 people