Politically Red is a magnificent reading of Marx and his companions, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jameson, Cedric Robinson, and their interlocutors and readers. It is an archive embedded in a gallery of images, gorgeously reproduced, inspiring, mobilizing in their beauty, and evocative. Politically Red is a work of art, an ode to the red common-wealth. [Read more here…]
Rosa Luxemburg
2 posts
Ernst Fraenkel’s 1927 essay Zur Soziologie der Klassenjustiz (‘On the sociology of class justice’) had disparaged social-democratic trust in German law as a site for political reform. The law, he contended there, could not be understood in abstraction from its actual practitioners who were, after all, endowed with a specific class position. Franz Neumann, too, sought to point to the necessity of rethinking the law from its liberal foundations. In his Behemoth (1942), Neumann would chastise Social-Democracy for its ‘complete reliance on formalistic legality’ and its inability — or outright reluctance — to ‘root out the reactionary elements in the judiciary’. But more than this: According to Neumann, the parties supporting the republic had relied too much on an easy pluralism which sought to dissolve sovereignty and the unity of the state into a system of plural stakeholders in constant negotiations. This strategy had kept Social-Democrats outside of the real centers of power: the army, bureaucracy, the judiciary and, crucially, industry itself. It had given their political successes in labour law and social legislation a fragile character without robust political backing. [Continue reading here…]