Abstract
Theodor Adorno once wrote that tradition is “unconscious remembrance.”1 Adorno’s claim—wrought in superb dialectical fashion—was intended as a critique of the rigid structures of meaning and thought that were inherited passively from the past. Liberation from such thinking was possible only through a consistently critical stance toward accepted thought, even when the nature of this thought was ostensibly “radical.” We all too often associate this problem of tradition and its constraining character with conservatism. But the debate that has arisen over Stephen Bronner’s article “Red Dreams” in a previous issue of New Politics has shown that the Left is all too prone to this same tendency. The debate currently underway has gone, in my view, far beyond debating the scholastic issues of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and penetrated into the very heart of contemporary socialist thought itself.
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Notes
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum Press, 1973), p. 54.
Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (London: New Park, 1979).
The argument here is that labor served as a means of pushing liberalism into workplace relations that were previously dominated by preliberal notions of work and ownership. See the interesting work of Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Abba Lerner, “The Economics and Politics of Consumer Sovereignty,” American Economic Review (May 1972), p. 259 (emphasis in the original).
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© 2013 Jason Schulman
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Thompson, M.J. (2013). Socialist Metaphysics and Luxemburg’s Legacy. In: Schulman, J. (eds) Rosa Luxemburg. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343321_7
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