Advice of Hannah Arendt & Rosa Luxemburg (translated from the Dutch

by Brendan Monaghan). New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Keywords

Capitalism, Social democracy, Arendt, Luxemburg, Citizen councils

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.43.1.39623

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC

BY 4.0). © 2023 The author(s).

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Few would deny that we live in dark times. Even if we are lucky to have a regular job, we may

still be struggling to meet the steadily rising bills of food, energy, transport, housing, and ed-

ucation. Our globalized economy does not seem to work in the interests of ordinary citizens,

of distrust and hostility, growing international tensions may suddenly erupt in war and the

spectre of nuclear annihilation becomes a credible prospect again. The list of disturbing trends

can be readily extended.

With such a bleak outlook it would not be surprising if people lost all hope. Joke Hermsen’s

book is intended to keep hope alive at this critical juncture in time. She does this by borrowing

extensively from the ideas of two of her heroines, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg, who

have lived through earlier dark times and succeeded, against all odds, to keep their spirits high.

It is indeed remarkable how Arendt, after fleeing from Nazi Germany and finding a new home

in America, was able to regain her love of the world and to strike a hopeful note in her account

of political action by stressing the ever-present possibility of “new beginnings.” The case of

She was impressed by the power of ordinary people to say no and hoped that their protests

might be the first signs for a turning of the tide, all the while taking to heart Luxemburg’s

lesson that the spontaneity of the masses cannot be directed from above by a political party.

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that were the entire message, however, it would be just an edifying Sunday sermon. The sub-

title of Hermsen’s book suggests that the two political theorists have more substantial “politi-

cal advice” for us in store. For Hermsen, their main advice comes down to a plea to start

experimenting with citizen councils, following the examples of the Paris Commune of 1871

and the councils of workers and soldiers that sprang up in Russia and Germany in the aftermath

of the First World War. Such popular councils, she holds, would help to turn the tide and

ameliorate our current problems by granting ordinary citizens an active role in the creation of

The overall line of argumentation by which Hermsen connects her diagnosis of the present

main.

(3) A socialist revolution in the Marxist sense of an expropriation of the means of produc-

tion offers no solution for it suffers from the same flaw.

(4) To overcome its subordination to the economy, the political space must be kept free

from economic necessities.

(5) Instituting citizen councils is a way to create a democratic political space that is free

from economic necessities.

(6) Citizen councils may help to remedy the harmful tendencies of “hyper-capitalism.”

Although Hermsen invokes the authority of Arendt and Luxemburg to support her argument,

she cannot deny that there are fundamental differences in the views of both political thinkers.

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unresolved. When Arendt advocates instituting popular councils to renew the democratic or-

der, Luxemburg replies that ordinary people will be unable to participate as long as their basic

needs remain unfulfilled. But when Luxemburg argues for the necessity of a socialist revolu-

tion, Arendt retorts that such a revolution deprives people of their freedom and still subordi-

nates politics to the economy. A compromise seems within reach when Luxemburg suggests

that we can just make a start with popular councils, which “can help get a local, co-operative

economy up and running” (92). But here Luxemburg seems to have abandoned her cherished

to the political, and thus to ameliorate the harmful tendencies of unrestrained capitalism, raises

many questions. It appears that her diagnosis is fatally ambiguous once we start seriously

thinking about what a proper remedy would be. Should the untamed beast of “hyper-capital-

ism” be restrained and tamed (again) or is it beyond remediation and should it instead be killed

off and replaced by something else? Can we turn our backs on the existing capitalist economy

and simply start with renewing the political order by instituting popular councils? In other

words, what would the desired subordination of the economy to politics exactly look like?

Merely proposing citizen councils leaves these crucial questions unanswered. Luxemburg and

Arendt held fundamentally different views on these matters, a difference that Hermsen failed

to resolve. Worse, neither of their views much helps us to find a feasible solution to our current

that setting, political action in the public sphere was an opportunity for free men to show who

they were and to acquire fame and glory for their words and deeds, without having to concern

themselves with “economic” issues, which were left to the private household. It was this

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that political actors should steer clear of engaging with economic and social problems. In On

Revolution (1963), she makes an invidious comparison between the American and the French

revolutionaries. While the Founding Fathers deliberated about the best form of government,

the French revolutionaries fell into the error of attempting to solve the “social question,” with

all the fatal consequences that resulted from this mistake. The noble game of politics appar-

ently turns on participation for the sake of participation. Arendt also celebrated the workers’

councils that arose in the immediate aftermath of the First World War as opportunities for

running” (92).

For Luxemburg, by contrast, politics was not just for the sake of politics, but ultimately aimed

at effecting a revolution that would install a socialist economy. Hermsen makes much of her

criticism of Lenin’s dictatorial methods and her defence of democracy and freedom. Luxem-

burg also supported the workers’ councils and rejected the party dictatorship inaugurated by

the Bolsheviks. Still, it must be said that, like all Marxists at the time, she had only a dim

conception of what a socialist economy would look like and, more crucially, whether it would

“work” at all. What should have been clear, however, is that the envisaged destruction of cap-

italism and the transition to socialism were bound to be an extremely violent process. One may

well doubt whether the democratic rights and freedoms cherished by Luxemburg would sur-

vive such a radical transformation. She did not live to see the likely practical results of her

Hermsen writes, “What would have happened to Germany if ‘free socialist democracy’ had

succeeded can, unfortunately, only be left to our imagination” (71). The murder of Luxemburg

has turned her into an icon, allowing her followers to admire her ideal of a “free socialist

democracy” in its full purity, untainted by the harsh reality checks of politics and economics.

Hermsen calls both Arendt and Luxemburg “critical mavericks” (77), also citing Arendt’s view

that “it might be doubted that [Luxemburg] was a Marxist at all” (62). However, Luxemburg

was in many respects faithful to the Marxist orthodoxy, not only in her attack on Eduard

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ment, which shines through in several of the letters appended to Hermsen’s book. Such histor-

icist beliefs were anathema to Arendt, but they served to keep Luxemburg’s socialist hope

alive. Her principal theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), while unorthodox

in many ways, also followed the template of Marxist orthodoxy in one important respect. Lux-

emburg deviated from orthodoxy by arguing that the accumulation of capital always needs a

non-capitalist environment, hence the economic imperative of colonialism and imperialism.

Once the whole world had been incorporated into the capitalist system, however, accumulation

economy to politics is social-democratic reformism. Her failure to seriously discuss this alter-

native is inexcusable, as a radical reformist policy may be the only feasible option at present

for taming the capitalist beast. Luxemburg and Arendt had different reasons to reject this op-

tion. For Luxemburg, as she made clear in Reform or Revolution (1900), accepting reformism

à la Bernstein would be giving up her big dream, the imagined classless society lying beyond

the horizon of capitalism as the “final goal” of the socialist labour movement. After all, Bern-

stein had challenged his comrades by declaring that “the final goal is nothing, the movement

is everything,” and by advocating a sustained reform programme of realizing concrete im-

provements in the life conditions of ordinary people within the framework of the existing cap-

italist system. In his view, social democrats should abide by the rules of parliamentary democ-

desired emancipation of the working class. Reformists also ignored, she held, that under cap-

italism the state remained a class-based state. It would be an illusion to think that the state

could be an instrument serving the interests of the general population, even with social-demo-

cratic governments. Luxemburg did not completely scorn the day-to-day struggle to achieve

concrete improvements in the lives of workers, but she held that the room for them was limited

and that they could at best be only temporary achievements, likely to be reversed at the next

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revolutionary task ahead. Hermsen accepted Luxemburg’s rejection of reformism rather un-

critically, without questioning the Marxist assumptions from which she departed.

unworthy of the dignity of politics. She would most likely have accused the reformist politi-

cians of subordinating the political to the economic domain.

One might argue that in the end Luxemburg was right after all in so far as the Welfare State,

far from proving a lasting achievement, was increasingly dismantled by neoliberal policies

intent on reversing the achievements of the Welfare State through cutbacks, deregulation, and

liberalization. What we now need is a new popular political movement to counter this counter-

revolution and push back neoliberalism in its turn. A green and social-democratic reform pol-

itics would best fit the bill. The aim is to abolish “hyper-capitalism,” not capitalism. The eco-

nomic beast must be tamed and constrained to safeguard our future and create a liveable and

humane world.