Socialist Metaphysics and Luxemburg’s Legacy

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.