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Showing posts with the label “Rosa Luxemburg”

Quote of the Week: Progress of the Enlightenment

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually reinforcing.  The progress of the humanistic era of the Enlightenment”, she remarked sarcastically while commenting on German colonialism at the end of the 18th century, could be seen in how the captain of a ship transporting slaves from Guinea to Guyana in South America, “to alleviate their [the slaves] melancholy and to keep them from dying off, allowed them to dance on the ship’s deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the more brutal Spanish traders had not resorted. Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 209])

The Bourgeois World and Marxism

The bourgeois world, blown up by gunpowder, will when the smoke settles and the ruins are cleared, arise again, with some modifications, as another sort of bourgeois world, because it is not yet internally exhausted and the new world is not ready to replace it. — Alexan­der Herzen, the father of Russian populism Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history. —Rosa Luxemburg in Anti-Critique