And this:
Don't you understand that the overall disaster is much too great to be moaned and groaned about? I can grieve or feel bad if Mimi [Luxemburg's cat] is sick, or if you are not well. But when the whole world is out of joint, then I merely seek to understand what is going on and why, and then I have done my duty, and I am calm and in good spirits from then on.
This is the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the one who, unlike the "comrades with each day are backsliding most blatantly, following in the wake of the national patriotic government policy," found the betrayals of these comrades on the Left and in SPD far more devastating and bleaker in the midst of the uprising workers and the uprising colonized ("Letter to Karl Moor," Sudende, October 12, 1914). Luxemburg opposed imperialism and believed in and worked for an international workers' uprising. Her work as a teacher at the SPD school in Berlin helped her "analysis theoretically the ramifications of imperialism" ("Introduction" to The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004).
Once the World War I was underway, Luxemburg writes of the war within the SPD: where the "internal development of the party"undergoing an unstoppable process in which different elements are being sliced off..."
[O]n the one side, elements actually belonging to the bourgeois camp, who at best would constitute a reformist workers' party, subservient to the military, with a strong nationalist streak, and on the other side, elements who do not want to abandon the core principles of revolutionary class struggle and internationalism. ("Letter to Karl Moor," Sudende, October 12, 1914
What happens between a fling with socialism and a very public war cry to invade a nation that did not send 19 hijackers to the U.S. in September of 2001?
"The beliefs people have will be formed under the pressure of the material and social circumstances in which they live." There are those who will struggle to survive under the conditions which offer them little more than bare substance, he adds, yet, these same people will come to recognize the hopelessness of struggle and accept their situation or they will eagerly collaborate to gain from the status quo.
Consciousness is not "independent of the contradictions of material life," Alex Callinicos writes in The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, and this consciousness originates from the ideologies that rise from the economic base. Callinicos continues, and I paraphrase--it is to the advantage of the ruling class to make sure people do not understand the contradictions inherent in their lives under the capitalism system and thus reject struggling against the might of the capitalist class. Thus, the "systemic beliefs" held by people about the world "can only be understood from the standpoint of their role in the class struggle. In other words, Callinicos explains, these beliefs have to be analyzed in terms of their contribution "to sustaining or undermining the prevailing relations of production."
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