Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary subjectivity:
“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the labouring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)
Zizek comments:
‘If we look at this argument closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxemburg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary subject does not "conduct," "direct" this process from an objective distance. He is constituted through this process, and because of this‑‑because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity‑‑we cannot "make the revolution at the right moment" without previous "premature," failed attemptshese objects have a kind of impenetrable density.’
&:
those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.