From Philosophical Research
Main entry[edit]
- 1908The National Question (Luxemburg 1909) [1] -> Luxemburg says... the bourgeoisie push for national borders to protect themselves but also to gain an advantage over other countries they are poised to imperialize; "socioempire" technically appears in this text. this text sounds mildly against Deng Xiaoping Thought. borders are weird, they keep dividing countries in the middle of ethnic groups. so the proletariat does not have much to gain from borders specifically compared with the bourgeoisie, although a situational social-democrat program can aim to specifically fix (avoid?) badly-drawn borders. nation-states aren't inherently designed to get along (Marx said this). national populations are not made of ideals. 1800s South America fought itself like an utter mess. Poland only unified as a population to resist capitalism but trying to put a nation-state on party programs was a disaster. ok. so what is this saying with regard to the future for Luxemburg? that whenever you try to protect national populations it is all too easy for the bourgeoisie to take over the task and fail to create something that serves the proletariat? we're trying to solve here if she accidentally said anything about Trotskyism in one country. and I think there are definitely implications here that she would have thought that two Trotskyist states forming and then getting into fights with each other over different Trotskyist theories is highly suspect, or even something to drill into class explanations for. then again that is not a surprising conclusion when the statement that different Marxisms shouldn't be fighting each other should be obvious. but it's not materially obvious to actual on-the-ground history. so has she said anything about Trotskyite conspiracies. I feel like in a way she has said that no group of bourgeoisie can protect a population of people, which in a derived way would apply to a fortress Trotskyism considering where the theorists come from and how few you typically start with historically. she has said that workers' movements succeed on understandings of material processes rather than ideas. which makes Trotskyism baffling because their theory and the shape of their movements has never necessarily been matched at all. if you're Trotsky then you are logically pushing an anti-Stalinist nation-state or a bloc of them in Europe to oppose the Soviet Union and all the pre-republican bureaucrats inside it that you seem to believe are a class problem. so if you're Trotsky you need a border. whether you get all the workers together to do it or not you save Europe when the Soviet Union is simply not allowed there. because then you know Stalin can't corrupt East Germany. of course, if Trotskyists don't like not winning the whole Germany I wouldn't blame them there. the imagined scenario where workers somehow keep the United States from dividing Germany so that the various European countries can try to join together to oppose Stalin is at least less depressing even if it also feels strangely unnecessary. I think one of the most notable things Luxemburg says is you can distinguish a workers' government from a proletarian government by imperialism.
Motifs or claims[edit]
- The bourgeoisie are the same as national borders; bourgeoisie cause borders, although this does not immediately imply the converse is true -> this is an almost uniquely Trotskyist position. it's also one of the few things they hung on to from early Leninism that is actually somewhat correct. they have the implications of it wrong though. if this is true, it means you need to defend your country extra hard from any country that contains bourgeoisie at all because they have the power to extend the border of their country over yours just by getting in. that's terrifying. it also calls into question how bad it is for Third-World countries to transition to Deng Xiaoping Thought in order to protect their borders — if bourgeoisie are borders, aren't they also a perfect means of creating them? the only problem with them, of course, is that they are archaic; they're a rather medieval way of accomplishing something that could be done another way.
Ideology codes[edit]
- IV / early Trotskyism
- IV / Rosa Luxemburg
