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Stephen Eric Bronner begins: "How times fly! It has been well over twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spate of revolutions that led to the collapse of communism. Other dictatorships are trembling now. Rebellions of differing magnitudes have gripped Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and - above all - Egypt."

At Tahrir Square, victory signs and a massive crowd, 02/01/11. (photo: Carolyn Cole/LAT)
At Tahrir Square, victory signs and a massive crowd, 02/01/11. (photo: Carolyn Cole/LAT)



Rosa in Cairo

By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News

08 February 11


Reader Supported News | Perspective

 

ow times fly! It has been well over twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spate of revolutions that led to the collapse of communism. Other dictatorships are trembling now. Rebellions of differing magnitudes have gripped Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and - above all - Egypt. All of them were spontaneous and rose from the ground up: it's almost as if the events of 2011 constitute a replay of 1989 in the Middle East. Mainstream commentators, however, have had as little meaningful to say about the former as about the latter. Transnational revolts generated by workers and everyday people have left our political experts baffled. Their inability to provide an interpretive context, their narrow focus, their obsession with personal stories and their reliance on the obvious has had political implications. Our intellectual vacuum has been filled with the hot air of conspiracy theories by right-wing media pundits. Glenn Beck and his associates seem to think that the uprisings in the Middle East have been caused by Marxists, communists, Islamic radicals and (you've got to love it!) the American anti-authoritarian and feminist group CodePink, which has been active in raising awareness about conditions in Gaza. Neo-conservatives, meanwhile, have only added fuel to the fire. They keep wringing their hands over the new threats to Israel and the dangers of abandoning "reliable" long-time authoritarian allies of the United States. All their talk about spreading democracy in the Arab world, which served to justify the invasion of Iraq, has apparently been forgotten. Real democracy doesn't appeal to them: it apparently imperils our way of life.

Clinical paranoia and hypocrisy are to be expected from the usual parochial purveyors of prejudice. Mainstream pundits are, of course, more reasonable. Interviews with everyday people are a must. Afterwards there is discussion about the importance of "poverty" - as if poverty had not always gripped the masses of the Middle East - and as if economic conditions had not been worse at other times. Then there is the obligatory reference to bureaucratic corruption and the lack of democracy - as if corruption and dictators were recent inventions. Mention is also often made to the new organizing power of the Internet - as if transnational events of this sort never occurred prior to the discovery of the computer. And that's that. All these factors are important, of course, but they provide no sense of historical specificity, radical tradition, or cosmopolitan pedagogy. Above all, however, there is virtually no discussion of political agency. The dynamics of what has become a revolutionary chain reaction simply disappear: it all turns into a media spectacle. Even progressives, it should be noted, evince an establishmentarian fixation with elites and media, leaders and elites, conspiracy theory, and a woeful ignorance of what Ernst Bloch termed "the underground history of the revolution."

Where then to look for an analytic framework? Perhaps a good place to start is with Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). Early in my career I edited and translated "The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg" and a short biography, "Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times." I can't help but think of Rosa now: she would surely have been thrilled by what has transpired in the Middle East. Everyone called her Rosa. A libertarian socialist of exceptional charisma and charm, a powerful intellectual and a genuine celebrity in the international labor movement, Luxemburg was brutally murdered by proto-Nazi thugs in 1919 at the age of 48. Masses still gather in Berlin to commemorate the day of her death, and her name has been used for the research institute of the Left Party in Germany. Luxemburg was a Marxist of the old school. There was nothing special about her commitment to republicanism and social equality. What made her unique was the special emphasis she placed upon the role of democratic consciousness, and what I would call a cosmopolitan pedagogy, whereby one exploited community learns from another in an ongoing revolutionary process. Democratic consciousness and cosmopolitan pedagogy have both played a crucial role in the rebellions that are cascading from one nation to another in the Middle East.

"Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions" (1906) explored this dynamic. Luxemburg's pamphlet was inspired by a series of spontaneous protests that began in Baku in 1902, spread to Kiev and St. Petersburg, and ultimately engulfed the entire Russian Empire in 1905. The first parliament in Russian history resulted from strikes whose spontaneity tended to obscure the years of underground work by unionists and political activists. Luxemburg saw in the mass strike a justification for privileging the institutional aims of the socialist movement, as well as the untapped democratic capacities of the disenfranchised and the exploited. In her world, which was dominated by monarchies, this meant - above all - highlighting the prospect of a republic. The mass strike would first express itself locally in the towns and cities through the actions of workers and then spread to the countryside; bourgeois liberal aims would unify the masses with liberal elements of the elite and, ultimately, bring about regime change; afterwards, of course, new political and economic class conflicts would arise over questions of governmental structure, leadership and policy. Does the outbreak of the mass strike guarantee success? Not always - and, certainly, not always in the short run.

What if the uprisings fail? What if a new tyrant arises? Should the uprisings not have been undertaken? Conservatives ponder these matters with patronizing platitudes and Olympian calm. But the masses in the Middle East knew what they were doing. They responded to intolerable tyrannies and social injustice by looking at their neighbors, standing up for themselves, and rolling the dice. The mass strike was seen by Luxemburg as crystallizing decades of mostly unacknowledged subterranean activism. She was a brilliant economist who believed in the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. In the meantime, however, economic deprivation would serve only as the backdrop for political action. Luxemburg knew her history. She embraced an explicitly political tradition of international revolt that reached back over 1905 to 1848 and to the century of democratic revolution that extended from 1688 to 1789. Other traditions also come to mind. The international assault on communism in 1989 harks back to the birth of Solidarity in Poland in 1980, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, and the Berlin uprising of workers in 1953. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted in February of 2010 that more than 3,000 labor protests had taken place since 2004. Those brave rebels demonstrating in the streets of Cairo must surely have reflected upon them as well as the failed (if still simmering) "Green Revolution" in Iran, and the other uprisings in neighboring countries, even while chanting: "Tunisia is the solution!"

Written amid the factory takeovers in Warsaw during 1905, Luxemburg's letters show her enthusiasm for the dramatic attempts to introduce democracy into everyday life as well the burgeoning "soviet" or "council" movement. But she never abandoned the republican goals of the mass strike. Only a republic, she knew, could secure civil liberties. Luxemburg never equated democracy with the will of the majority or even social justice; she knew that perhaps, above all, democracy rested on the protection of the minority. Her famous line from The Russian Revolution (1918) still rings true: "Freedom is only and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." Luxemburg anticipated that the communist suppression of bourgeois democracy in 1917 would unleash a dynamic of terror. She also recognized that the exercise of terror is, ultimately, a sign of weakness - not strength. This same knowledge surely informs those rebels in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The mass strike is not a blueprint for the future. It also does not provide a full explanation for what is now taking place in the Middle East. To suggest otherwise would be absurd. But this extraordinary intellectual activist - too much the revolutionary for socialist reformers and too much the democrat for communist revolutionaries - still has much to teach about international solidarity, radical democracy and a meaningful notion of class politics. Her thinking provides links with the past, insights into the present and inspiration for the future. Rosa may not have the final word on the great events of our time, but she gives us a place to start for making sense of them.


Stephen Eric Bronner is the Senior Editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, as well as Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of Global Relations at the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights at Rutgers University. His books include "Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement" (Columbia University Press) and "A Rumor About the Jews: Anti-Semitism, Conspiracy, and the 'Protocols of Zion'" (Oxford University Press).


Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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