a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Since last weekend, the Toronto newspapers and radio talk shows have all been full of discussion of the G20 protests –the violent ones and the non-violent ones–and the police action against the protesters. Reading and listening, I found myself taking a tour in my mind of what I learned about citizen action from my teacher, Hannah Arendt. And what I have learned in the years since her death in 1975 from the citizen action tradition that became, I think, the most important one in the world after the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and apartheid ended in South Africa. That tradition, of course, came not from Europe or America –Arendt’s sources of inspiration—but from India.

Among my most treasured possessions is a two volume first edition of Peter Nettl’s 1966 biography Rosa Luxemburg. Hannah Arendt reviewed the biography for the New York Review of Books; then republished her review two years later in Men In Dark Times, a collection of biographical portraits. She made me a gift of the volumes in 1973, after we had had a conversation about what was valuable in the Marxist tradition, and what was just misconceived and dangerous—the topic of a series of lectures she had given in the 50s at Princeton. (The whole group of those lectures is only now on its way into the public domain thanks to an edition my friend Jerome Kohn is preparing.) “Rosa Luxemburg really could answer the question Was ist Politik? [What is politics?] You find the whole story in here,” Dr. Arendt said as she handed me the Nettl volumes.

The first lesson I –then 26 years old–got from reading through the 994 pages of Rosa Luxemburg was about how to read a book. There was not a page in the two volumes that was not covered with Dr. Arendt’s under-linings, little penciled marginal notes, and “yes!” and “no! with heavy exclamation points. The inside covers, front and back, were dense with topical words or phrases, page numbers, cross references—like a private index. Dr. Arendt did not, obviously, just read. She argued, she fought, she praised, she engaged Nettl and Rosa Luxemburg herself in a 994 page conversation. The action of the review was spontaneous, but based on deep, disciplined debate and deliberation.

But first to Rosa Luxemburg: she was a Pole, Jewish, respected but not very prominent in the German Social Democratic Party when Hannah Arendt’s parents joined the Party about the time of their daughter’s birth, 1906. Ten years later, toward the end of the First World War, however , “Red Rosa” had emerged as co-leader of the most radical left faction of the SPD called the Spartakus Bund. That is when Arendt’s future husband Heinrich Blucher, then a young working man, joined the Bund. Shortly afterwards, in 1918, Red Rosa was brutally murdered by right wing thugs –perhaps with the complicity of the former SPD colleagues who had renounced her and her ideas. Today, the spot where her tortured body was dumped in the Landswehr Canal is marked with a historical plaque: you can read it if you take a tour boat up the Canal, through the new post-Wall, post-1989 Berlin.

Red Rosa was considered a deviant thinker among the SPD Marxists for, basically, two of her ideas –the very two that Hannah Arendt thought were the most valuable legacy of Marxism. The first idea was that action is the crux of politics. Politics is people’s actions –the actions of people who consider themselves equals and who gain freedom together. This led Rosa to back all kinds of ways in which people act together –particularly mass striking and boycotting—and it led her to oppose all kinds of ways in which, even if for a supposedly good end, action is suppressed. No end is good that prevents people’s action. No political action is right that does not pave the way for more political action.

The second idea was that capitalism is not, as Marx himself thought, an economic system that is bound to collapse because its workers will rise up and destroy it when they grasp completely how it has exploited their labor and oppressed them. In that Marxian view, leaders and intellectuals must point out to the workers that capitalism’s crash time has come, and lo! the revolution will begin. Privatized property will be destroyed and workers will own the means of production, no longer being alienated from their labor.

Capitalism, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg argued against this Marxist vision, is inherently expansionary, and it will grow indefinitely, grinding up workers and then going overseas to pull into its grasp every soul anywhere on the planet who can become a worker, a “wage slave.” All industrialists were imperialists, she insisted, who avoided the wrath of their workers at home by exploiting the overseas peoples their nation-states had already colonized. Nation-state imperialism and capitalist imperialism go hand in glove. Out-sourcing for cheaper labor and thus greater profit means that capitalism will not collapse until it has devoured all the planet’s resources and all the planet’s peoples. Red Rosa foresaw what we call globalization, and she even realized that globalization would require interlocking national banking systems. That is, industrial capitalism, producing and trading goods, would turn into finance capitalism, exchanging not just goods but printed money and money instruments.

The implication of this second idea was that the workers should act immediately to oppose the developing form of capitalism. They should, for example, refuse to participate in imperialistic wars . So, not as a pacifist, but as an anti-imperialist, Red Rosa urged workers against enlisting in First World War armies –capitalist armies. On this theory, we should all be anti-war, as by this time there is no such thing as a war between states or regions that is not capitalist imperialist.

Both of these ideas were central to Hannah Arendt’s thought from her youth; they lay behind her turn away from her first philosophy teacher, Martin Heidegger, whose notions about the people, the Volk, were fascistic, and toward her second philosophy teacher, Karl Jaspers, who became a hero of the German resistance to Hitler (a story I will write about later). When she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of imperialism suffused the long section called “Imperialism.” The foundation of Arendt’s cosmopolitan vision was laid out in that section, too. Only people concerned about the whole earth and all its peoples could conceivably act together against imperial capitalism, which, Arendt added, completely corrupts the overseas imperialists, who then go on to construct a “continental imperialism” in the countries of their near neighbors and a totalitarian regime in their whole Reich. A totalitarian regime is necessary to sustain overseas ventures and incorporate what being brutal masters over colonial slaves teaches about how to maximally control people and prevent them from acting. Rosa Luxemburg had suspected that racism would be the ideology of capitalist world conquest, and Arendt showed in enormous detail how that intuition also proved correct. Racism overseas melded into Aryanism at the Nazi homebase, Germany, and in their Reich.

That politics is action and that imperialist capitalism turning into totalitarianism is the complete antithesis of action, the destruction of politics, is Hannah Arendt’s thought in a nutshell. Politics-anti-politics; thesis-antithesis. And is there a synthesis to this dialectic, as the Marxists say? If a totalitarian regime collapses –because it has closed off its lifeblood, politics—something new may emerge. There may be a “new beginning” as Arendt said, but no dialectical “law of history” will bring it about. Only if the people have not lost all sense of what politics is will they be able to be political again. And both those who have been totalitarian and those who have fought totalitarians will have to recover, for even those who have fought a totalitarian regime assimilate to its anti-political methods. So Was ist politik? is really the key question in a world struggling to be post-totalitarian. The key question for the future. We are still in that world.

The main reason why Hannah Arendt’s thought is so difficult for most of her readers to grasp is that it really is as simple as I have just made it out to be. In the 1960s and 70s her simple idea made some readers angry enough at Hannah Arendt to want to denounce her and throw her in a canal. This was certainly so among the majority of American Jewish and Israeli readers of her Eichman in Jerusalem. There she showed how the Nazi totalitarians had systematically made their victims into people without politics–made the Jews and their leaders unable to act, to resist. Killed their action-sense before killing them. She was misunderstood to be saying that the Jews had “gone like sheep to the slaughter” or that they had co-operated in being killed.

She spoke an unfamiliar conceptual language, neither right nor left, so her meaning often could not be caught. For most people, politics is rulership, governance. For example, in his Prosperity Without Growth that I wrote about last week, Tim Jackson assumes that politics is government and hopes for the “good governance” that will instruct people how to do what is good for them – operating like a good prevention oriented public health system. He and most readers of The Oxford English Dictionary would be untroubled by the definition that you will find there: politics is ”the science and art of government.” This is the definition taken for granted in Departments of Politics or Government Departments in most universities, and in think-tanks of all persuasions, including Jackson’s.

For both Red Rosa and Hannah Arendt, by contrast, politics is people gathering to discuss and debate as equals and join each other as equals in acting. Politics presupposes a degree of freedom to discuss and act, and equality among those speaking and acting; the degree of freedom will grow in the acting. The constitutions and institutions such people make to keep alive their political process and to elect–one person, one vote—people to represent them when they cannot be there to speak and act directly, are their government. Laws are distillations of their accumulated wisdom about how to protect the political process and how to preserve the polity or organized society .

What Arendt did in the books that followed upon her great book The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, was to undertake something Red Rosa did not have the education or the political freedom for—or a long enough life. Arendt tracked back over the whole European tradition –starting with the Greeks–to figure out when and why people had started defining politics in a way that made the experiment in politics the Greeks began disappear from view. That is, defining it as rulership or government. She revisited the history of the American Revolution, too, asking how the Americans who cast off pre-industrial British imperialist rule rediscovered Was Politk ist –and the contemporary French revolutionaries did not.

In the other 20th century tradition where citizen action emerged as the essence of politics, the history summoned was different. And the self-taught scholar who summoned that different history was also the person who put its lessons into action in a political movement that accomplished something without precedent in the history of capitalist imperialism. Mahatma Gandhi inspired and led the Indian independence movement that brought a colonialized people to question British industrialism, cast off British rule, and establish an independent state. When he was murdered in 1948, at the age of 78, his unique voice was lost, but not his example or his vision, which I will write about next time and compare to the legacy of Red Rosa and her fine student, Hannah Arendt.

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