“I always speak in a revolutionary manner”
Rosa Luxemburg on trial for “incitement to violent acts” in 1906
In the dog days of August, reactionary politics always stir, as we’ve seen this year from Jacksonville to Montgomery. By way of counter, I’ve been reading volume IV of Rosa Luxemburg’s collected works “On Revolution.”1 The editors—whose labors were prodigious—suggest her ideas could be central to the “reorganization of thought” needed after the George Floyd Uprising. More than this, Luxemburg shows how the mainstream refusal to engage with abolition has reinvigorated white supremacy.
In her famous 1906 pamphlet on “The Mass Strike,” newly translated here by Nicholas Gray, Luxemburg understood the 1905 Russian Revolution as a set of “popular movements” (236). Rather than as a single tactic, she saw fifteen different strikes within what she collectively called the “mass strike.” These strikes were not and could not be called by any organization or individual but were necessarily de-centered. As long-term readers know, I include the strike against whiteness and white supremacy in these tactics.
While there were polling majorities for radical change in 2020, with more white-identified people taking part in direct action than ever before, mainstream politics has restored the tear in white reality. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is top of the charts, while Barbie and Taylor Swift both grossed $1bn. this summer. What happened?
Today, Trump’s election defeat has been transformed into a counterrevolution. It presents as a new “Lost Cause,” the obfuscation for Confederate white supremacy under Jim Crow. When Trump crows that he is fighting for “you,” his audience correctly understands him to mean “you, the white people.”
Rosa Luxemburg understood that defeats and setbacks are part of revolution. It is the peculiarity of liberalism to assume that everything unfolds in a steady but undramatic “progress.” The revolution circles and disappears, like a mole, but just because it’s out of sight doesn’t mean it’s gone. You have to look differently, across the grain of white sight.
Visualizing the Strike
Luxemburg perceived a countervisuality to white sight, and its projection of a white reality in the experience of the mass strike. It created another way of seeing. Adapting a journalist’s notion of the revolution as a “moving image” (208), Luxemburg described it as an
enormously colorful picture of a general confrontation between capital and labor…Within this general picture, the purely political demonstrations play an utterly subordinate role—they are single tiny dots in an enormous expanse (210 and 223).
Imperial white sight had visualized its dominion through a distancing glass screen, organized according the “laws” of single-point perspective. The pixelated mass strike, by contrast, “mirrors…all phases of the political and economic struggle” (221). The counter to white sight was decentered, yet panoramic and in color.
The 1917 Soviet revolution has long defined radical ways of seeing as a machine, or what Dziga Vertov called “the mechanical eye.” Machine vision unsurprisingly led to a bureaucratic state-centered apparatus.
Life vs. the Police State
There’s a way here to go back to the future via the general strike, first in 1905 and again in 2020: both targeted what Luxemburg called the “police state.” The long regime of colonialism and secret police in Tsarist Russia created a complex racial hierarchy, deploying language, citizenship and other factors as well as visualized ethnicity. It was expressed in the depressingly familiar slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Striking against the Russian state in 1905 opposed the racializing police state, just as the 2020 Uprising did.
Luxemburg further situated the the 1905 strikes in the context of a “police-oriented materialism” (198), making them simultaneously political and economic (225). In 1905, the key demand was for a livable working day of eight-to-ten hours. She documented Russian factories running shifts from 6am to 11pm, closer to the social death of slavery than the free exchange of labor power.
In 2020, making life livable meant first and foremost defunding the police, as the intersection of the economic and the political. The demand was central to the revolutionary “reorganization” of the social order that is abolition. The police are a primary agent of the “premature death” that marks present-day racism, to use Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s classic definition.
This killing ranges from the visible murder of “suspects,” to the immense human costs of mass incarceration and the vast cost of the security state. In Democratic New York City today, the NYPD budget is $10 billion, just under 10% of the entire city budget. Increases in police budgets “coincidentally” mirrored cuts in education.
Foreclosed from defunding this apparatus, the 2020 mass strike shifted into economic tactics to make life livable, such as the Great Refusal and “quiet quitting,” alongside union activism to raise wages. Workers now refuse to take minimum-wage jobs, or to return to five-day-a-week commuting. The final act of strike breaking is, then, the ongoing effort by the Federal Reserve to discipline the workforce via mass unemployment.
Reform Produces Reaction
Just as Democrats failed to back up the 2020 strike with concerted action, so did Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) pass a resolution condemning “direct mass action” in 1906. Committed solely to parliamentary reform, the SPD believed gradual but inevitable progress would deliver the change they sought, an axiom of US liberal thinking today.
Instead, as Luxemburg foresaw, the SPD collapsed both itself and the Second International with its disastrous vote for war credits on August 4, 1914, inaugurating the First World War. The previous decade of insistence that workers would not fight each other gave way overnight to imperialist and nationalist war, resulting in millions of deaths.
In other words, being “cautious” and “reasonable” led to the catastrophic triumph of unreason. Has something similar not happened since 2020? By refusing any involvement with what they call the “defund the police agenda,” have mainstream Democrats validated white supremacy?
That is, if the Uprising’s response to militarized white supremacy was a co-ordinated set of proposals—ranging from using social workers not cops when mental health crisis is involved; to no new jails; and ultimately abolition—refusing all of them has become an (unintended) endorsement of white supremacy. For if the solution must be refused, it follows that there was no problem all along.
“What Next?”
This was Luxemburg’s question once the mass strike had been violently repressed. She wrote the final version of her pamphlet in prison.
The strike against white sight begins with the refusal to accept its consensus as reality and extends to the refusal to accept that transformative change is “unrealistic.” The far-right are trying to project their Lost Cause as reality. It won’t be the courts that decide whether that succeeds.
As the new academic year begins, those of us working in higher education are faced with a systemic effort to erase every effort to make white sight visible. It cannot just be the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous people to refuse that effort. What’s next is right now.
Quotes come from the pamphlet “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions” (1906). Page numbers in the text.