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Rethinking Spontaneity BeyondClassical Marxism: Re-readingLuxemburg through Benjamin, Gramsciand ThompsonAlex Levant

To cite this article: Alex Levant (2012): Rethinking Spontaneity Beyond Classical Marxism: Re-reading Luxemburg through Benjamin, Gramsci and Thompson, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory,40:3, 367-387

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Rethinking Spontaneity BeyondClassical Marxism: Re-readingLuxemburg through Benjamin,Gramsci and ThompsonAlex Levant

This paper reconsiders the established reading of Luxemburg’s conception of sponta-

neity, where she is said to have overestimated the role of spontaneity and under-

estimated the role of the party because of an economic-determinist view of history.

It reconsiders this view by re-reading Luxemburg’s concept of spontaneity through

the work of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and E.P. Thompson. Using conceptions

of subjectivity not yet available at the time of these debates, as well as the recent

scholarship of Lars Lih on Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, this article illuminates both

conscious and unconscious processes behind what often appears to be spontaneous

resistance, and offers a new reading of Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin’s views

on organization in 1902�1905. It argues that Luxemburg’s perceived economism is

produced by her critics’ own economistic reading of spontaneity. In contrast, it suggests

that her depictions of spontaneous activity speak to historical processes that can be

illuminated by conceptions of subjectivity developed after her assassination, and which

require a substantial reconceptualization of the nature of subjectivity beyond the limits

of classical Marxism.

Keywords: Spontaneity; Luxemburg; Benjamin; Gramsci; Lenin; Consciousness

The Problem of Spontaneity

The concept of spontaneity has been central to the question of political organization

since the beginning of the international workers’ movement. Many of the old debates

between Anarchists and Marxists, and within Marxism itself, had to do with the

question of how to understand and engage with spontaneous resistance. Those

debates have a renewed significance in light of the recent shift away from traditional

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2012 Critique

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2012.697761

Critique

Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2012, pp. 367�387

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party- and state-focused approaches toward more decentralized methods of re-

sistance to capitalism.1 Prompted by the bankruptcy of social democracy and

a general suspicion of centralized control, this shift has been accompanied by a

celebration of spontaneous resistance. In response, some commentators have re-

asserted the continued centrality of the state, as well as the limits of spontaneous

activity.2

However, what does spontaneity mean? When we celebrate spontaneity and es-

pouse suspicion toward centralized co-ordination, what are we celebrating? Con-

versely, when we point out the insufficiency of spontaneity, what exactly are we

referring to? Despite the vast differences between these approaches, spontaneity

tends to be understood in quite similar ways*as something that happens . . . well,

spontaneously, that is without planning. Spontaneous resistance seems to mystically

appear from time to time as a force to be celebrated, encouraged, channelled, directed,

harnessed, feared, quelled, etc. It appears that both advocates and critics of privileging

spontaneous activity over co-ordinated resistance tend to use the same mystified

conception of spontaneity.

In classical Marxism, spontaneity tends to be understood as a limited form of

resistance that requires external leadership to be effective. For example, consider

Leon Trotsky’s steam analogy. In the History of the Russian Revolution, he wrote,

‘Without a leading organization the energy of the masses dissipates like steam in

the absence of a cylinder and piston’.3 Similarly, V.I. Lenin viewed such resistance

as ‘the unconscious (the spontaneous) to the aid of which socialists must come’.4

In this tradition, spontaneity is generally associated with instinctive and uncon-

scious resistance, which on its own would not amount to much beyond ‘trade-

union consciousness’5 or ‘commodity consciousness’.6 Consequently, socialist ideas

must be brought in ‘from the outside’ in order to empower the working class to

emancipate itself. This ‘merger thesis’*the view that social democracy is the

merger of the doctrine of socialism and the workers’ movement*has informed

1 See for example, Jeremy Brecher et al., Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA:

South End Press, 2000), or the symposium in Historical Materialism, 13:4 (2005) on John Holloway’s Change the

World Without Taking Power.2 L. Panitch, ‘Reflections on Strategy for Labour’, Socialist Register, 37 (2001), p. 375. ‘Nation states are not

victims of globalization, they are the authors of globalization. States are not displaced by globalized capital,

they represent globalized capital, above all financial capital. This means that any adequate strategy to challenge

globalization must begin at home, precisely because of the key role of states in making globalization happen’.

Boris Kagarlitsky, The Twilight of Globalization: Property, State and Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2000), p. 16.

He writes, ‘all international institutions represent continuations of national states, rest upon them and are

powerless to act without them’.3 Leon Trotsky, Istoria Russkoi Revolutsii. Pervii Tom: Fevral’skaia Revolutsia [History of the Russian

Revolution, Volume One: The February Revolution] (Moscow: Terra, 1997 [1930]), p. 29.4 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961 [1902]),

p. 388.5 Ibid., p. 388; Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1975), p. 48.6 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971 [1923]), p. 168.

368 A. Levant

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classical Marxist theory since at least the Erfurt Program (1891) of the Second

International.7

However, certain tensions within classical Marxism point toward a different

reading of spontaneity. Particularly instructive is the exchange between V.I. Lenin,

who stressed the limits of spontaneous resistance and argued for the necessity of a

vanguard party, and Rosa Luxemburg, who was concerned that such a party would

stifle workers’ initiative and placed more emphasis on their spontaneous activity.8

A widely held view among Marxist theorists is that Luxemburg had overestimated the

role of spontaneity and underestimated the role of the party because of an economic-

determinist view of history. In contrast, Lenin’s conception of the party has been

praised as the organizational method of overcoming the economism9 that plagued the

Second International.10

This article reconsiders this view by re-reading Luxemburg’s concept of spontaneity

through the work of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and E.P. Thompson. It argues

that Luxemburg’s perceived economism is produced by her critics’ own economistic

understanding of spontaneity. In contrast, it suggests that her depictions of spon-

taneous activity speak to historical processes that are illuminated by conceptions

of subjectivity that were developed after her assassination, and which require a

substantial reconceptualization of the nature of subjectivity beyond the limits of

classical Marxism.

By reconsidering the prevalent reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s approach to spon-

taneity, I attempt to rethink the classical understanding of spontaneous resistance.

Broadly speaking, I want to argue that spontaneous resistance is a much more com-

plex phenomenon than it appears in classical Marxism. Rather than an automatic

(unconsidered) reaction to economic conditions, it ebbs and flows in relation to

how changing social conditions are understood within a popular consensus. Rather

than counter-posed to organization, it is likewise organized, albeit episodically and

insufficiently.

In addition to being more complex, spontaneous resistance appears to play a

much more central role in the revolutionary process. I return to Marx’s concept

of self-emancipation, noting that people become empowered and radicalized by

personally participating in struggle, and that, through this process, they tend to

develop the capacities, consciousness and unity necessary to emancipate themselves.

7 Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Lih argues that the

merger thesis can be traced back to Engels. According to both Kautsky and Lenin, the first person to set forth

the logic of the merger narrative was Engels in Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845. The

Erfurt Program was Kautsky’s commentary on the SPD congress in 1891, which was held in the German town of

Erfurt.8 R. Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, Political Party, and the Trade Unions’, in Mary-Alice Waters (ed.) Rosa

Luxemburg Speaks (London: Pathfinder, 1970 [1906]), pp. 212�300.9 Lenin, op. cit., p. 387. ‘Economism’ is the notion that ‘politics always obediently follows economics’.10 For primary sources see Lenin’s What is to be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, as well as

Luxemburg’s ‘Organizational Questions of Social Democracy’. For proponents of this view, see John Molyneux,

Marxism and the Party (Exeter: Wheaton, 1978), Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., and Waters,

op. cit. For a critique of this view, see Lih op. cit.

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This rethinking of the concept of spontaneity requires a reconsideration of the

merger thesis and hence points beyond classical Marxism.

Luxemburg’s Fatalism and her ‘Errors’

Luxemburg was one of the most interesting advocates of recognizing the importance

of spontaneous resistance. She appears to straddle both poles of the divide between

spontaneity and centralized control. Although she was acutely aware of the need for a

centralized party apparatus*after all, she helped found the Polish Social Democratic

Party (RSDLPiL), she worked for years inside the German Social Democratic Party

(SPD) and was a principal founder of the German Communist Party (KPD)*she

nevertheless consistently argued for the vital importance of spontaneous activity in

the workers’ movement.

This apparent ambivalence has puzzled a number of Luxemburg scholars over

the years. On the one hand, she appears to have argued that the contradictions of

capitalism led to its demise, and that the unfolding of this process moves workers

into action. This view would make the role of an organization created for that

purpose rather irrelevant. On the other hand, she clearly believed in the need for such

an organization to intervene in this process. Some commentators have resolved this

apparent paradox by locating a disjuncture between her political economy and her

activist writing. Others have argued that these two perspectives speak to distinct

moments in her political development.11 In general, however, she has been received,

albeit critically, within the camp of the revolutionary socialist movement.12 I say

critically received because almost all scholarship on Luxemburg, no matter how

praiseworthy, includes a section on her ‘errors’.

These ‘errors’ are said to arise from a fatalistic conception of history.13 She has

typically been criticized for underestimating the role of the party and over-

estimating spontaneous activity in the struggle against capitalism. For example,

the Hungarian philosopher and parliamentarian, Georg Lukacs, put it as follows:

‘this false assessment of the true driving forces leads to the decisive point of her

misinterpretation: to the underplaying of the role of the party in the revolution and

of its conscious political action, as opposed to the necessity of being driven

along by the elemental forces of economic development’.14 Her fatalism has to do

with the notion that workers’ spontaneity arises in response to these ‘elemental

forces of economic development’. Consequently, she has often been accused of

economism.

11 Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso, 1983).12 See Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., Molyneux, op. cit. and Waters, op. cit.13 The term ‘fatalism’ refers to the view that all events are predetermined or inevitable. Luxemburg’s

supposed fatalism is said to arise from overemphasizing the ‘iron laws’ of historical development and

underemphasizing the possibility of human intervention in the form of a vanguard party.14 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 275.

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In contrast, Lukacs believed that Lenin’s conception of a vanguard party was

an advance over what he perceived to be Luxemburg’s fatalism.15 Lukacs thought

that capitalism demystified itself, and fostered the formation of working class-

consciousness; however, he understood that bourgeois society also produced new

forms of mystification, which he sought to grasp with his concept of reification. The

role of Lenin’s party, he believed, was to help overcome these barriers and facilitate

the formation of class consciousness.16 Understanding consciousness not as a product

of ideas alone, but of activity as well, he viewed Lenin’s approach of an activist party,

which made demands on the activity of its members, as an advance over the parties

of the Second International and over Luxemburg.17 Lenin’s party, according to

Lukacs, was a way to intervene in history, to make history, while Luxemburg’s faith in

workers’ spontaneous activity led her to fatalistically anticipate the unfolding of the

laws of history.

This widely held view, however, obscures some of the most significant lessons that

we can learn from Luxemburg about the nature of spontaneous resistance. However,

before we turn to developing our concept of spontaneity, it is worthwhile to reflect

for a moment on why she has been received with such condescension. Like a little

sister who has not quite grown up, she has been lauded more for her self-less

commitment to the struggle than for her brilliant observations and reflections on

the problem of subjectivity and organization. Almost a century after she mused to the

‘Party Fathers’ that the epitaph for Clara Zetkin and herself would read, ‘Here lie the

last two men of German Social Democracy’,18 our essential reading of Luxemburg has

not fundamentally changed.

The Principle of Self-emancipation

Luxemburg’s emphasis on workers’ spontaneous resistance does not appear to arise

from an economistic conception of history, but from a staunch adherence to the

15 Much has been written about the novelty of Lenin’s ‘vanguard party’. Lenin argued for an organization

consisting of the most class-conscious layer of the working class whose task was to facilitate the process of

workers’ self-emancipation. The originality of this organizational approach has often been attributed to Lenin.

However, as Lih argues in his recent re-translation of, and substantial commentary on What is to be Done?, this

notion of ‘a party of a new type’ was already present in Kautsky’s Erfurt Program (1892). While Lenin did not

consciously break with the Second International until 1914, there is a prevalent view that the Leninist party,

which at first was only an adaptation of The Erfurt Program to the Russian context, contained the germ,

unbeknownst to Lenin himself, of a new type of party. In light of Lih’s work, it appears that the novelty of

Lenin’s approach has been overstated and its debt to Kautsky understated. In fact, the continuities between

Lenin and the Marxism of the Second International on the relationship between spontaneity and organization

require further attention.16 Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (London: NLB, 1970 [1925]), p. 25; Lukacs,

History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 314.17 Ibid. However, it is important to note that Luxemburg shared Lenin’s view on the important pedagogical

value of the struggle: ‘All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living

political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution’ (Luxemburg,

‘Organizational Questions of Social Democracy’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 172).18 Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), p. 192.

Critique 371

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principle of self-emancipation and a historical understanding of spontaneity. She

understood spontaneity as the initiative of working people in response to their

objective conditions.19 The reason she valued spontaneous resistance is because she

saw working people’s own initiative as the only means to achieve such a fundamental

social transformation.

Her focus on workers themselves as opposed to their representatives, advocates and

leaders, as the necessary agents of fundamentally transforming bourgeois society

recalls Marx’s own approach. The Provisional Rules of the First International, written

by Marx in 1864, likewise argue that: ‘the emancipation of the working classes must

be conquered by the working classes themselves’.20 In fact, according to more recent

Marxist thinkers, the principle of self-emancipation set him apart from utopian

socialists, and other radicals, who contrived various blueprints for a post-capitalist

society and conceived of the process of transformation as essentially a top-down

affair. For example, in his 1995 pamphlet Socialism from Below, Canadian political

theorist, David McNally, writes, ‘Marx was the first major socialist thinker to make

the principle of self-emancipation*the principle that socialism could only be

brought into being by the self-mobilisation and self-organization of the working

class*a fundamental aspect of the socialist project’.21 This view was also shared by

Engels. He wrote in his 1895 preface to The Class Struggles in France:

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small consciousminorities at the head of the masses lacking consciousness is past. When it is aquestion of a complete transformation of the social organization, the massesthemselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is atstake, what they are fighting for, body and soul.22

The principle of self-emancipation was understood by Marx and Engels as the only

realistic route to a socialist society. Rather than a blueprint originating in the mind

of a socialist visionary, the specific form of socialist society was to be produced

through the long struggle involving the bulk of the population. They believed that,

through this process of struggle, not just society, but also people themselves would be

transformed in fundamental ways. The process of struggle for a classless society was

to be the forge that transformed working people*who had been trained by their own

life-experience to conform to existing social norms*into masters of their own fate.

Consequently, the dream of socialism could never be realized by utopian visionaries

or benevolent masters, but only by means of a process that involved the broadest

possible layers of working people themselves. Self-emancipation was, for Marx and

19 Molyneux, op. cit., p. 100.20 Marx, ‘Provisional Rules of the First International,’ in The First International and After (London: Penguin,

1974 [1866]), p. 82; Michael Lowy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books,

2005 [1970]); Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. II: The Politics of Social Classes (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1978).21 David McNally, Socialism from Below (Chicago, IL: International Socialist Organization, 1984); Draper,

op. cit.22 Lowy, op. cit., p. 19.

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Engels, absolutely central to their understanding of socialism.23 In light of the

principle of self-emancipation, it is clear why Luxemburg placed so much value

on workers’ spontaneous activity. If one believes that the working class must

emancipate itself, and that no organization can do this on its behalf, then one ap-

proaches the initiative of working people as absolutely indispensable to the process

of revolution.

Against Reformism and Ultracentralism

Recognizing the principle of self-emancipation, Luxemburg approached the question

of organization with an eye to its impact on spontaneous resistance. For instance,

she appears to have criticized two very different approaches*a reformist trend in

German Social Democracy and Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party*for very

similar reasons. In each case, her concern focused on the role of the initiative of

working people.

The Second International has often been criticized for its reformism.24 This

reformism manifests itself in various ways, including its understanding of spon-

taneous resistance. In ‘The Mass Strike’, Luxemburg criticized how her German

comrades understood the relationship between the workers’ movement and their

leading organizations. Mocking their notion of a mass strike produced by an orderly

issue of commands, she writes,

The mass strike, as it appears for the most part in the discussion in Germany, is avery clear and simply thought out, sharply sketched isolated phenomenon . . . Whatis meant by it is a single grand rising of the industrial proletariat springing fromsome political motive of the highest importance, and undertaken on the basis of anopportune and mutual understanding on the part of the controlling authorities ofthe new party and of the trade unions, and carried through in the spirit of partydiscipline and in perfect order.25

From this perspective, working people’s own initiative, or spontaneous resistance,

scarcely plays a role, except to follow the dictates of ‘the controlling authorities’.

Instead of empowering people, this method of organizing tends to reinforce their

subordination.

Similarly, Luxemburg critiqued Lenin’s ‘ultracentralist’ adaptation of social-

democratic organizational principles to the Russian context in the form of the

vanguard party because she believed that it threatened to stifle spontaneous

resistance.26 ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, written by Lenin, an outstanding

23 Draper, op. cit.24 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit.; Engels, ‘A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic

Program of 1891’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 27 (Moscow: Progress, 1990) p. 217.25 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op. cit., pp. 158�182.26 Ibid., p. 169. However, Lih argues that Luxemburg’s critique is unfair. ‘In her 1904 attack on Lenin, she

asserted (with almost no textual documentation, let it be said) that Lenin was so intent on total central control

that he overlooked the creative role of the worker movement itself ’ (Lih, op. cit., pp. 206�207). He contends,

however, that ‘Luxemburg’s articles provide no evidence that she had even read WITBD . . . It purports to be

Critique 373

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member of the Iskra group, is a methodological exposition of the ideas of the

ultracentralist tendency in the Russian movement . . .. Laid down as principles are

the necessity of selecting, and constituting as a separate corps, all the active re-

volutionists, as distinguished from the unorganized, though revolutionary, mass

surrounding this elite’.27 She goes on to remind Lenin of the unique nature of the

socialist revolution and what this means for the question of organization.

The social democratic movement is the first in the history of class societies whichreckons, in all its phases and through its entire course, on the organisation and thedirect, independent action of the masses. Because of this, the social democracycreates an organisational type that is entirely different from those common toearlier revolutionary movements . . . for Lenin, the difference between the socialdemocracy and Blanquism28 is reduced to the observation that in place of a handfulof conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this differenceimplies a complete revision of our ideas on organisation and, therefore, an entirelydifferent conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party andthe struggle itself.29

From Luxemburg’s perspective, Lenin’s new type of party did not appear all that

new, but was in fact far too similar to the organizational methods of bourgeois

revolutions. The danger of this organizational approach was that it stifled the spon-

taneous resistance that needed to be nurtured, cultivated and developed.

Rather than empowering working people to further develop their spontaneous

resistance, this ‘ultracentralism’ threatened to reproduce the similar type of sub-

ordination that they experienced in bourgeois society. In fact, Lenin glorified the

‘discipline’ that workers became accustomed to under alienated conditions of factory

production. He argued that such discipline demonstrated that workers were more

class conscious than intellectuals who rebelled against his ultracentralism. In re-

sponse, Luxemburg railed against this notion of 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 ina body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and (2) the spon-taneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men [sic] . . . Theworking class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the social democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it bythe capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedienceand servility.30

a review of Lenin’s One Step Forward . . . I believe that Luxemburg was handed One Step by the Mensheviks who

were organizing the literary campaign against Lenin who pointed out to her the notorious passages about

factory discipline and Jacobins. Luxemburg had better things to do than actually read Lenin’s long, obsessive

polemic but, instead, relied on the anti-Iskra critique earlier deployed by her friend and mentor Boris

Krichevskii’ (ibid., p. 526).27 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 163.28 Blanquism refers to the view that the revolutionary process involves a small group of conspirators who

seize the state in a coup d’etat, who then use the state to introduce a new social order.29 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 165.30 Ibid., p. 168.

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Luxemburg cautioned that his ultracentralist approach failed to cultivate workers’

self-emancipation, and threatened to reproduce the very processes of alienation

inside the movement.

This critique of Lenin, however, may be unfair. As we saw above, Luxemburg may

not have even read Lenin’s What is to be Done? or One Step Forward. In fact, Lenin

shared much of Luxemburg’s understanding of the working class as its own liberator.

He placed considerable value on workers’ self-organization, and was among the first

socialists to grasp the significance of workers’ councils (or soviets), when they first

appeared in 1905 St Petersburg.31 His ideas changed substantially over the years and

at times very closely approached those of Luxemburg.32

However, following Kautsky, Lenin understood spontaneous resistance as work-

ing people’s own instinctive, unconscious response to exploitation.33 Spontaneity, for

Lenin, could never amount to more than trade-unionism (although he reconsidered

this point in light of the mass strikes of 1905).34 Consciousness, on the other hand,

was social-democracy. As Molyneux writes, ‘For Lenin the development of the class

struggle itself, even its economic form, is a process of moving from ‘‘spontaneity’’

to ‘‘consciousness’’’.35 Here we see an identification of consciousness with social-

democracy and spontaneity with the unconscious, passed on from Kautsky via Lenin,

from the Second to the Third International. In light of this understanding of spon-

taneity and consciousness, Lenin argued for an organization consisting of the most

class-conscious layer of the working class whose task was to facilitate the process of

workers’ self-emancipation.36

In contrast, Luxemburg was sceptical of what kind of conscious direction socialists

could provide to the workers’ movement, and accused Lenin of playing ‘school-

master’ with the revolution.37 ‘Except for the general principles of the struggle, there

do not exist for the social democracy detailed sets of tactics which a Central

Committee can teach the party membership in the same way as troops are instructed

in their training camps’.38 Instead of socialists, she saw the struggle itself as the most

important teacher. For instance, in her polemic against Lenin on organization, she

wrote: ‘The proletarian army is recruited and becomes aware of its objectives in the

course of the struggle itself ’.39

This view already points beyond the merger thesis, as it challenges the classical

understanding of spontaneity and socialist intervention. Spontaneous resistance

already appears to play a much more central role than it does in Erfurtian Marxism.40

31 Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1975).32 Ibid.33 Lenin, op. cit., p. 388.34 Liebman, op. cit., p. 48.35 Molyneux, op. cit., p. 44.36 Lenin, op. cit.; Lih, op. cit.37 Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 259.38 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 166.39 Ibid.40 Lih, op. cit.

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Rather than an elemental force to be channelled or educated, it appears as a self-

developing phenomenon, that is, working people engaged in active struggle tend

to develop the capacities, consciousness and unity that are necessary for their

emancipation. This development, of course, is impeded by countervailing phenom-

ena, which alienate, fragment, disorient*in general, disempower*working people.

Rather than infusing socialist ideas into spontaneous resistance, the role of socialist

intervention appears to call for an engagement with this dynamic*a very different

political project.

Most commentators, however, identified Luxemburg with the fatalism of the

Second International, and Lenin with a new organizational method.41 However, is

that really the case? How do we reconcile this apparent fatalism with her work in the

SPD and the KPD? It may be the case, as I argue below, that Lukacs’s reading of

Luxemburg as economistic is limited by his own economistic understanding of

spontaneity, as he inherited it from Lenin, and Lenin from Kautsky. Let us turn now

to the work of E.P. Thompson, Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin as we attempt

to rethink the concept of spontaneity beyond economism.

Rethinking Spontaneity A: E.P. Thompson and the Moral Economy

Spontaneous resistance appears much less instinctive and unconscious, and much

more considered when examined in light of the work of the historian, E.P.

Thompson. For example, in his Customs in Common (1991), Thompson sought to

grasp the motivations behind apparently spontaneous uprisings. He reflects on how

historians have understood the phenomenon of the ‘riot’ by examining food riots in

18th century England.

He argues that historians typically understand riots using what he calls a

‘spasmodic view of popular history’.

According to this view the common people can scarcely be taken as historicalagents before the French Revolution. Before this period they intrude occasionallyand spasmodically upon the historical canvas, in periods of sudden social dis-turbance. These intrusions are compulsive, rather than self-conscious or self-activating: they are simple responses to economic stimuli.42

This is precisely the view of history that posits spontaneity as an unconsidered

reaction to economic conditions.

In contrast, Thompson argues that riots are more complex affairs than spon-

taneous responses to economic conditions. His examination of food riots in 18th

century England suggests that the poor were responding not only to their worsening

economic conditions, but also to a perceived breach of their customary rights.

It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action somelegitimising notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women

41 For example, see Lukacs, op. cit., Molyneux, op. cit. and Waters, op. cit.42 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991), p. 185.

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in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rightsor customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of thecommunity.43

It appears that the riots were a reaction not only to their economic conditions,

but also to the new laws and practices within a popular consensus. Thompson

continues:

It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpracticesamong dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popularconsensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices . . .Outrages to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was theusual occasion for direct action.44

What appears as an unconsidered reaction to economic hardship from the spasmodic

view of history, from the perspective of the rioters appears as outrage in response to

the illegitimate erosion of customary rights.

Thompson’s approach helps demystify an important aspect of spontaneity.

Spontaneous collective action, which often appears as an automatic response to

economic conditions, is informed by a popular consensus, which is central to un-

derstanding some of the motivation, conscious consideration and initiative behind

spontaneous activity.

Rethinking Spontaneity B: Gramsci and the Subaltern

Antonio Gramsci, leader of the Communist Party of Italy from 1924 to 1926,

similarly argued that spontaneous resistance was guided by traditional conceptions

of the world. However, in addition to noting some of the conscious motivations

behind apparently unconscious uprisings, he also identified another aspect of how

spontaneity is much more considered and significant than it often appears in classical

Marxism.

In a well-known passage from his prison writings, he wrote, ‘‘‘pure’’ spontaneity

does not exist in history: it would come to the same thing as ‘‘pure’’ mechanicity. In

the ‘‘most spontaneous’’ movement it is simply the case that the elements of

‘‘conscious leadership’’ cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be

said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the ‘‘history of the subaltern

classes’’’.45 Recall that Gramsci understood the ‘subaltern’ as subordinate social

groups, such as ‘slaves, peasants, religious groups, women, different races, and the

proletariat’,46 who, by virtue of their marginalized position, have left few traces of

their conscious activity. From this perspective, events that appear to have arisen

43 Ibid., p. 188.44 Ibid.45 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 196.46 M. Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the

Subaltern’, Rethinking Marxism, 14:3 (2002), p. 2.

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spontaneously may simply have been organized by subordinate social groups, rather

than the sanctioned official opposition, hence giving the impression of an absence of

conscious planning.

Marcus Green’s careful study of Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern highlights

Gramsci’s Notebook 3, §90, where he identifies his methodological criteria for the

study of the subaltern. It lists six phases in the development of subaltern groups,

beginning with their objective formation, through their organizational development

to their development of political formations that assert autonomy beyond the old

framework.47 The lack of evidence of their activities reflects a weakness of political

organization typical of elementary forms of spontaneous resistance. However,

as these formations develop through the process of struggle, their activity appears

less spontaneous. Gramsci pays close attention to the development of subaltern

groups from spontaneous resistance to forming political organizations capable of

assembling a hegemonic bloc and challenging the ruling class for political power.

In contrast to Erfurtian Marxism,48 which argues that spontaneous resistance can-

not develop beyond reformist or economic demands, and advocates that class-

consciousness and appropriate organization must be brought to the workers’

movement from the outside, in Gramsci’s prison writings, spontaneous resistance

appears as an embryonic form of organization that can develop into something much

more effective. By recognizing that the process of organization is already at work

among subaltern groups, and need not be imposed from the outside (but should be

engaged and cultivated), Gramsci likewise points beyond the classical Marxist

treatment of spontaneity.49

This view was echoed several decades later by another Italian Marxist, Romano

Alquati, who sought to read a similar proposition into Lenin’s What is to be Done?,

which he understood ‘not as a dismissal of spontaneous actions, but as the

recognition that the latter already possessed an innate political significance. Used

in this manner, the term spontaneity drew attention to the already existing forms

of ‘‘invisible’’ organisation produced by workers in the absence of formal class

organisation under their control’.50

47 Ibid., p. 9.48 Lih, op. cit., pp. 5�6. ‘I have coined the term ‘‘Erfurtian’’ to describe the bundle of beliefs, institutional

models and political strategies that constituted orthodox Marx-based Social Democracy. Erfurt was the German

town where the SPD held a congress in 1891 at which they celebrated their victory over Bismarck’s repressive

anti-socialist law and also adopted a new programme. An Erfurtian is someone who accepts the SPD as a model

party, accepts the Erfurt Programme as an authoritative statement of the Social-Democratic mission, and

accepts Karl Kautsky’s tremendously influential commentary the Erfurt Programme as an authoritative definition

of Social Democracy’.49 P. Ives, ‘A Grammatical Introduction to Gramsci’s Political Theory’, Rethinking Marxism, 10:1 (1998),

p. 42. Peter Ives’s detailed study of Gramsci’s conceptions of spontaneous grammar and normative grammar,

similarly challenges the ‘spontaneous’ appearance of spontaneity, and stresses the significance of activity and

history in spontaneous grammar in a nuanced way.50 Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London:

Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 49�50.

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Although Gramsci demystified the concept of spontaneity, he did not abandon the

term altogether. He understood spontaneity as activity that is ‘not the result of any

systematic educational activity on the part of an already conscious leading group, but

[has] been formed through everyday experience illuminated by ‘‘common sense’’, that

is, by the traditional popular conception of the world’.51 Similar to Thompson, he

understood subaltern activity as not simply an automatic reflex reaction to objective

conditions, but as activity that is guided by the subaltern classes’ conceptions of the

world.

The work of both Gramsci and Thompson challenges the classical understand-

ing of spontaneity. Rather than an automatic response to economic conditions,

spontaneous resistance appears as a considered response in light of shared social

norms, which is organized in an elementary form. When the classical identification

of spontaneous resistance with the economy is severed, we begin to see sponta-

neous activity in a new light. This demystification of spontaneity has enormous

consequences for the project of self-emancipation. It advances our understanding

of spontaneity from mystical and economic-reductionist conceptions, and helps us

to grasp it as the self-activity of subaltern classes, which is thoughtful, conscious

and always present. Suddenly, the traditional dismissal of Luxemburg’s focus on

spontaneity as economistic appears less convincing.

It is worth noting, however, that Gramsci did not romanticize this activity simply

because it originates among the subaltern.52 While he recognized that subaltern

classes are capable of self-activity, he acknowledged that this activity is not auto-

matically revolutionary or even necessarily progressive.

This understanding returns us to the question of the relationship between

spontaneity and organization, albeit reformulated as conscious subaltern self-activity

and the conscious activity of a leading group that is committed to advancing the

overall struggle. Gramsci argued for a thoughtful engagement with spontaneous

movements that seeks to ‘educate’, ‘direct’ and ‘give them a conscious leadership’.53

However, the problem is more complex than a battle of ideas. As McNally writes,

‘the political problem is not simply to dislodge the hegemony of ruling class ideas

but, in fact, to destabilize our unconscious identifications with the commodity form

itself ’.54 While Thompson’s and Gramsci’s analyses are quite strong when it comes

to revealing conscious processes that hide behind apparently automatic reactions to

economic conditions, they provide only a partial account of spontaneity. Gramsci

argues convincingly that spontaneous activity often appears as unconscious because

of the subordinate position of the groups that organize it; however, he sidesteps the

unconscious side of spontaneity, which is left mystified.

51 Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 198�199.52 In fact, he cautioned that such activity is often accompanied by reactionary movements of the ruling

classes that seek to lead it in directions that maintain existing social relations.53 Gramsci, op. cit.54 David McNally, Bodies of Meaning (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 232.

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Rethinking Spontaneity C: Benjamin and the Collective Unconscious

The work of Walter Benjamin helps demystify the unconscious side of spontaneity. In

light of Thompson’s and Gramsci’s work, we can grasp spontaneity*as the initiative

of working people in response to their social conditions*not economistically, but

as conscious self-activity. However, while spontaneity for Luxemburg involved self-

activity, it was not entirely guided by conscious planning. Although she recognized

the conscious effort involved in apparently spontaneous uprisings, her description of

such events clearly speaks to another phenomenon at work.

For example, consider her account of the wave of general strikes that swept across

Russia in 1905:

The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetusof the St. Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionarydeclaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reactedinwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And thisawakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that theproletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realisehow intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patientlyendured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon, there began aspontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains. All the innumerablesufferings of the modern proletariat reminded them of the old bleeding wounds.Here was the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here werebrutal foremen ‘driven off ’ in a sack on a handcar, at another place infamoussystems of fines were fought against, everywhere better wages were striven for andhere and there the abolition of homework. Backward, degraded occupations inlarge towns, small provincial towns, which had hitherto dreamed in an idyllic sleep,the village with its legacy from feudalism*all these, suddenly awakened by theJanuary lightning, bethought themselves of their rights and now sought feverishlyto make up for their previous neglect.55

This incredibly rich description of the 1905 general strikes demonstrates how

spontaneity in those events was inspired and guided not only by conscious planning.

Her imagery of the awakening of class-consciousness as if by electric shock, by the

lightning of the general strikes, reminding them of old bleeding wounds*speaks to

other processes.

The central role that she placed on this ‘sudden awakening’ earned her a con-

siderable amount of criticism. As we saw above, her ideas on spontaneity have largely

been dismissed as fatalistic. Although Luxemburg herself made plenty of remarks that

warrant such criticism, her observations of sudden awakening need not necessarily

be understood as fatalistic. In fact, this criticism of her approach is itself based on

a mechanistic conception of the nature of the unconscious. In other words, there

may be a different way to understand the unconscious side of spontaneity without

slipping into fatalism.

55 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op cit., pp. 171�172.

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Years after Luxemburg’s assassination, Walter Benjamin developed a conception

of the unconscious that is useful for re-reading Luxemburg’s ideas on spontaneity.

Drawing on Freud’s conceptions of consciousness and the unconscious, as well as

Proust’s ideas on memory, Benjamin developed his conception of the collective

unconscious.

In his 1939 essay, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, he investigated Freud’s concept

of consciousness, referencing the latter’s 1921 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

In Freud’s view, consciousness [has an] important function: protection againststimuli. ‘For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost moreimportant function than the reception of stimuli; the protective shield is equippedwith its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special formsof conversion of energy operating in it against the effects which tend toward anequalization of potential and hence toward destruction’. The threat from theseenergies is one of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks,the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect. Psychoanalytic theory strives tounderstand the nature of these traumatic shocks ‘on the basis of their breakingthrough the protective shield against stimuli’. According to this theory, fright has‘significance’ in the ‘absence of any preparedness for anxiety’.56

From this perspective, consciousness not only receives stimuli, but also protects

against potentially harmful stimuli by producing ‘a narrative which represses the

memory of these sensory shocks and the fears they inspired’, writes McNally. ‘Con-

sciousness, in other words, spins a tale of security and stability in a dangerous

and frightening world’.57 The narratives with which consciousness grasps the world

organizes it in a manner that protects us from traumatic shocks. The more suc-

cessfully such shocks are parried by these narratives, the less they are experienced

consciously; instead, they leave their mark on the unconscious as memory traces.

Benjamin conceived of these memory traces by drawing on Proust’s concept of

memoire involontaire from A la Recherche du temps perdu. ‘In the reflection which

introduces the term’, wrote Benjamin, ‘Proust tells us how poorly, for many years, he

remembered the town of Combray in which, after all, he spent part of his childhood.

One afternoon the taste of a kind of pastry called madeleine (which he later mentions

often) transported him back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited

to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness [memoire

volontaire]’.58 These experiences of a sudden flash of memory are, according to

Benjamin, unconscious memory traces that have been triggered by something in the

present. When consciousness acts as a shield that represses memories of sensory

shocks, the unconscious acts as a storehouse of traces of these repressed memories.

However, Benjamin’s purpose was neither to confirm nor deny the accuracy of

Freud’s concept of consciousness; instead, he was interested in ‘investigating the

56 W. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (New York: Schocken

Books, 1969 [1939]), p. 161.57 McNally, Bodies of Meaning, op. cit., p. 214.58 Benjamin, ‘Baudelaire’, op. cit., p. 158.

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fruitfulness of this hypothesis in situations far removed from those which Freud had

in mind’.59 He de-reified Freud’s concept by contextualizing it in bourgeois society.

He noted that bourgeois society involves an acceleration of shock effects*‘the

assembly line, photography, street lighting, film, the movement of crowds hurtling

through great cities, bombardment by advertisements, the unfathomable mobili-

zation of science and technology in war’60*resulting in consciousness becoming

increasingly protective.

‘The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions’, he wrote, ‘the

more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more

efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience’.61 Also, note that

shock is not only experienced at work, but also permeates experiences beyond the

workplace. ‘The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd’, he wrote,

‘corresponds to what the worker ‘‘experiences’’ at his machine’.62 Life under capital-

ism involves the experience of increasing shock effects, which develop the shielding

aspect of consciousness. Susan Buck-Morss puts it as follows, ‘the aesthetic system

undergoes a dialectical reversal. The human sensorium changes from a mode of

being ‘‘in touch’’ with reality into a means of blocking out reality. Aesthetics*sensory perception*becomes anaesthetics, a numbing of the senses’ cognitive capac-

ity that destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically even when

self-preservation is at stake’.63

Benjamin further departs from Freud by approaching consciousness and the

unconscious as social phenomena. The narratives that receive stimuli and repress

memories of shocks are shared; they are part of the social world that individuals

inhabit. Collective consciousness thus appears as a receptacle for stimuli, as well

as a shield against potentially damaging stimuli that represses memories of their

experience. The collective unconscious is thus a storehouse of traces of these re-

pressed memories.

These insights illuminate a whole dimension of experience that helps us to

demystify the unconscious side of spontaneity. Although Luxemburg did not have

this concept of the collective unconscious, it nevertheless helps us to understand her

observations of spontaneous radicalization, which have been understood as reflex

reactions to objective conditions. In light of Benjamin’s work, spontaneity is deeply

rooted in historical experience.

In fact, Benjamin praised Luxemburg’s Spartacist League*a left grouping within

the SPD, which eventually split to form the KPD*for its orientation on the horrors

of the past rather than forgetting the past and focussing on the promise of the future,

as was common in the social democracy of his day. In his brilliant ‘Theses on the

Philosophy of History’ Benjamin wrote,

59 Ibid., p. 160.60 McNally, Bodies of Meaning, op. cit., p. 214.61 Benjamin, ‘Baudelaire’, op. cit., p. 163.62 Ibid., p. 176.63 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 104.

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Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository ofhistorical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avengerthat completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of thedowntrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacistgroup, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats . . . Social Democracythought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of futuregenerations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This trainingmade the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both arenourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberatedgrandchildren.64

This orientation on the past brings to light the role of history in consciousness-

formation. Notice that, similar to Luxemburg, Benjamin focused on motivational

factors that are not strictly conscious. While Luxemburg did not have the language

with which to grasp this phenomenon, she noted that workers experienced a sudden

awakening in the process of struggle and described it in terms that were echoed by

Benjamin decades later. In light of Benjamin’s understanding of history as collective

trauma, we can begin to understand the logic behind this awakening.

Understanding Spontaneity Historically

Using the work of Thompson, Gramsci and Benjamin, we can demystify some of the

apparent mechanicity of spontaneity. Rather than an automatic reaction to econo-

mic stimuli, spontaneity can be understood as the self-organization of subordinate

groups, usually in response to practices that are judged by the standards of a popular

consensus. It involves conscious planning, reflection and judgement, and it often

has a radicalizing effect. Furthermore, Benjamin’s work helps us to examine the

unconscious side of spontaneity in a new way. Thompson and Gramsci illuminated

some of the conscious processes behind what appear as unconscious responses

to objective conditions; using Benjamin we can proceed further and approach

unconscious reactions as having a logic that is historical rather than economic.

Spontaneity begins to appear less like an automatic response to objective economic

conditions, and more like conscious self-activity on the one hand, and a return of

repressed collective trauma in a moment of collective struggle, on the other.

Benjamin’s conception of the collective unconscious helps to account for

Luxemburg’s observations of a sudden awakening in moments of mass collective

struggle. According to Benjamin, the past is always with us just below the surface,

threatening to erupt into the present. Marx insisted that people make history, but not

under conditions of their choosing. These conditions, for Marx, were not simply

economic, but were shaped by ‘the tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs

like a nightmare on the brain of the living’.65 Benjamin understood this nightmare

64 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (New York:

Schocken Books, 1969 [1940]), p. 260.65 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1852]),

p. 15.

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to be shaped by repressed memories of collective trauma. This nightmare*which

contains an economic moment, but which cannot be reduced to economics*can be

understood as an aspect of the terrain on which struggle takes place.

This tradition of all the dead generations, which for Marx weighs on us like a

nightmare, was for Benjamin also a powerful source of revolutionary energy. This

energy is essentially produced by past collective trauma that confronts us in our

stories, monuments, even our outmoded styles, fashions, customs, etc. Advertising

routinely taps into this energy by suggesting that commodities will meet our needs

and wants. The false hope offered by commodities has the effect of deferring

disappointment and hence maintaining the status quo. However, mass collective

action can also mobilize this energy by offering a different kind of hope.

Luxemburg’s observations of the mass strikes of 1905 read very much like a

return of repressed collective trauma that had the effect of radicalizing the par-

ticipants. The sudden eruption of the past into the present can be understood

using Benjamin’s conception of the collective unconscious. Rather than fatalistic,

from this perspective, Luxemburg appears to have had an acute historical sense of

consciousness-formation.

Far from being plagued by fatalism, Luxemburg was particularly successful

at grasping the power and limits of conscious direction and the significance of

spontaneity.

Of course, even during the revolution, mass strikes do not exactly fall fromheaven. They must be brought about in some way or another by the workers. Theresolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed theinitiative and the wider direction naturally fall to the share of the organised andmost enlightened kernel of the proletariat. But . . . there are quite definite limits setto initiative and conscious direction. During the revolution it is extremely difficultfor any directing organ of the proletarian movement to foresee and to calculatewhich occasions and factors can lead to explosions and which cannot. Here alsoinitiative and direction do not consist in issuing commands according to one’sinclinations, but in the most adroit adaptability to the given situation, and theclosest possible contact with the mood of the masses. The element of spontaneity,as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, beit as a driving force or as a restraining influence. This does not occur in Russia,however, because social democracy is still young or weak, but because in everyindividual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political andsocial, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another insuch a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were amathematical problem. The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the socialdemocrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuvre of theproletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing,displacing and crumbling of the social foundation. In short, in the mass strikes inRussia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because theRussian proletariat are ‘uneducated,’ but because revolutions do not allow anyoneto play the schoolmaster with them.66

66 Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike’, in Waters, op. cit., pp. 258�259.

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In light of this passage, it is clear that Luxemburg did not have a fatalistic view of

the revolutionary process. She certainly championed the necessity of revolutionary

intervention by those in the vanguard of the struggle, but she always grasped this

activity in the context of the overall historical process, which led her to recognize and

underscore the limits of such activity.

Luxemburg Beyond Classical Marxism: From Class-Consciousness to Empowered

Subjectivity

While I am tempted to say that Lenin overestimated the role of the party and

underestimated the role of spontaneity, the aim of this article is not to side with

Luxemburg against Lenin in the debate on organization; rather, it is to urge us to

revisit our understanding of the basic terms of that debate. In contrast to Lukacs and

others, I do not believe that Luxemburg was a ‘spontaneist’. On the contrary, her

approach to spontaneous resistance has been occluded by an economistic under-

standing of spontaneity, which plagued much of the Second and Third Internationals.

Luxemburg has been poorly read, and the prevailing reading tells us much about the

readers.

Again in contrast to Lukacs (and in agreement with Lih), I believe that the novelty

and significance of Lenin’s organizational method, as articulated in What is to be

Done?, has been exaggerated, and his debt to Kautsky and to the Second International

requires further consideration. In other words, casting this debate as one between

economistic spontaneity and conscious intervention is not true to the work of either

Lenin or Luxemburg, and limits our ability to learn from them.

Specifically, we are limited by a weak understanding of spontaneous resistance,

which was inherited by Lenin from Kautsky, and passed on to Lukacs and other

advocates of the early Third International (and critics of the Second International).

In this regard, there is substantial continuity between the Second and the Third

International. Spontaneity has been mechanistically identified with the unconscious

reactions of working people, while consciousness has been identified with social-

democratic theory as articulated by the party. In Kautsky this class-consciousness

appears as ‘socialist consciousness’, which must be ‘introduced into the class strug-

gle from without’;67 in Lenin it appears as ‘Social-Democratic consciousness’ that

‘would have to be brought to them [workers] from without’;68 in Lukacs it appears

as ‘imputed’.69 In all three thinkers, class-consciousness appears as pre-conceived.

Lukacs saw class-consciousness as ‘the appropriate and rational reactions ‘‘im-

puted’’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production’.70

He understood these ‘appropriate and rational reactions’ as proletarian ideology,

67 Lenin, op. cit., pp. 383�384.68 Ibid., p. 375.69 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 51.70 Ibid.

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which he saw as Marxism itself. In other words, proletarian consciousness was a

thoughtful, sober and rational response to existing conditions.

One can imagine some of the consequences of this understanding of class-

consciousness for the question of organization. If class-consciousness already exists in

some form, then it could be apprehended and disseminated. This, according to

Lukacs, was precisely the main role of the Communist Party. The Communist Party

was to foster class-consciousness by clearly formulating the point of view demanded

by the class as a whole in a way that workers could understand.71 What is particularly

disconcerting here is the tendency to equate class-consciousness with a (correct)

perspective, rather than an empowered subjectivity formed through experience. From

this perspective Marxism appears as the ideology (in the positive sense) of the

embattled proletariat,72 and the Communist Party as the ‘place’ where this ideology is

safeguarded and developed.

Although Lukacs and Lenin both repeatedly insist that the party does not fight on

the workers’ behalf or in their place, but only to accelerate the development of their

consciousness to make them fit to struggle on their own behalf, in practice and even

in its own rhetoric, the Communist movement, even in the immediate aftermath of

the Russian Revolution, did substitute itself for the initiative of the working class. For

example, consider Thesis 1 on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian

Revolution from the Second Congress of the Third International (1920): ‘The

Communist Party differs from the whole working class because it has an overall view

of the whole historical road of the working class in its totality . . . The Communist

Party is the organisational and political lever with whose help the advanced part of

the working class can steer the whole mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat

on the correct road’.73

Rather than a correct world view that can be disseminated to working people,

and in agreement with theorists like E.P. Thompson, I approach class-consciousness

as a product of shared experiences that are mediated by narratives that render

the world meaningful. In order to reflect the experiential and embodied nature

of consciousness-formation, I prefer the term empowered subjectivity to class-

consciousness.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Luxemburg had the approach to subjectivity

that I am trying to articulate. What I am arguing is that her understanding of

spontaneity (and hence consciousness) cannot be reduced to economism. She

approached spontaneous resistance as the initiative of working people, which is

important not only as the ‘steam’ of the revolution, but also as its teacher. Recall

the conclusion to her polemic against Lenin: ‘the errors committed by a truly

revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the

71 Ibid., p. 326.72 J. Larrain, ‘Ideology’, in Tom Bottomore et al., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1983), p. 222.73 Alan Adler (ed.), Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International

(London: Ink Links, 1980), p. 68.

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cleverest Central Committee’.74 She reminds us of the significant pedagogical value of

active participation in struggle. Instead of the birds-eye view of the Communist Party,

struggle itself is the process by which the ‘correct road’ is recognized. If we consider

spontaneous resistance beyond economistic explanations, we can learn a lot from

Luxemburg. If she had had access to theories of subjectivity developed decades after

her assassination, perhaps she would have articulated her views differently. However,

such speculation is beside the point. The point being made here is that, rather than

pointing back to the fatalism of the Second International, Luxemburg in fact points

beyond the limits of the Third International and classical Marxism.

74 Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Questions’, in Waters, op. cit., p. 182.

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