REINTERPRETING ROSA LUXEMBURG'S THEORY OF SOCIAL CHANGE: CONSCIOUSNESS, ACTION, AND LEADERSHIP.
Item
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Title
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REINTERPRETING ROSA LUXEMBURG'S THEORY OF SOCIAL CHANGE: CONSCIOUSNESS, ACTION, AND LEADERSHIP.
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Identifier
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AAI8801696
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identifier
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8801696
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Creator
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COHEN, LORRAINE I.
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Contributor
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George Fischer
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Date
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1987
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Theory and Methods
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Abstract
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This dissertation has constructed a new reading of the political writings the European Marxist intellectual and leader Rosa Luxemburg. I emphasize a much less well known dimension of her theorizing: her consistent emphasis throughout her life and work on the primacy of the masses, the oppressed themselves, as the decisive agents of social change. This lifelong emphasis radically challenges the dominant Marxist paradigm of her own time, a paradigm that sees leaders, intellectuals, parties, trade union organizations as the indispensable central agents of social change. In her view this reduced the masses to little more than instruments of leaders in their struggle to acquire political power.;In making this shift to the masses, I argue that Luxemburg opens and develops an analysis of the subjective dimension of social change, the importance of consciousness and the capacity for action as necessary conditions of class struggle. Luxemburg strongly suggests that social change begins from reflection of the oppressed themselves on their own lived experience, their conditions of oppression, and their struggles to change those conditions. I call this dynamic a dialectic between objective and subjective factors.;Out of her conception of this dynamic developmental process she gives us a strong glimpse of a new type of Marxist democratic-interactionist leader. This is a leadership that is not based on domination and control but on empowering the masses to act as the agents of their own liberation.;I suggest that Luxemburg is a little recognized founder of what has come to be known as cultural Marxism. Within this heterogeneous grouping I see her work as anticipatory of a group of feminists who I call Cultural-Marxist-Feminists. In conclusion, Luxemburg's radical transformation of the relationship between masses and leaders strongly links her to the issues of contemporary Marxist theorizing today.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
