Digifesto

One of the interesting parts of Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a detailed analysis of Vladimir Lenin’s ideological writings juxtaposed with one of this contemporary critics, Rosa Luxemburg, who was a philosopher and activist in Germany.

Scott is critical of Lenin, pointing out that while his writings emphasize the role of a secretive intelligentsia commanding the raw material of an angry working class through propaganda and a kind of middle management tier of revolutionarily educated factory bosses, this is not how the revolution actually happened. The Bolsheviks took over an empty throne, so to speak, because the czars had already lost their power fighting Austria in World War I. This left Russia headless, with local regions ruled by local autonomous powers. Many of these powers were in fact peasant and proletarian collectives. But others may have been soldiers returning from war and seizing whatever control they could by force.

Luxemburg’s revolutionary theory was much more sensitive to the complexity of decentralized power. Rather than expecting the working class to submit unquestioningly to top-down control and coordinating in mass strikes, she acknowledged a reality that decentralized groups would act in an uncoordinated way. This was good for the revolutionary cause, she argued, because it allowed the local energy and creativity of workers movements to move effectively and contribute spontaneously to the overall outcome. Whereas Lenin saw spontaneity in the working class as leading inevitably to their being coopted by bourgeois ideology, Luxemburg believed the spontaneous authentic action of autonomously acting working class people were vital to keeping the revolution unified and responsive to working class interests.