Luxemburg's

Luzemburg's essay:

Did it have to come? An event of this scope is certainly no game of chance. It must have deep and wide-reaching objective causes. These causes can, however, also lie in the errors of the leader of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, in the waning of our fighting spirit, our courage, and loyalty to our convictions. Scientific socialism has taught us to comprehend the objective laws of historical development. Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless. Proletarian action is dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development. However, social development is not independent of the proletariat but is equally its driving force and cause, its effect and consequence. [Proletarian] action participates in history. And while we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow, we can certainly accelerate or retard history.

Freedom has everything to do with control as stated by Joel M. Charon in his book Ten Questions; A Sociological Perspective. In fact, the first time I heard about Luxemburg's was in a sociology class. I think that in this essay she’s trying to say that once a government, a society or any group, a religion or any organization, controls our way of thinking which in turn affects our decisions, than we have given up our freedom. When we are being active and self-directed then we have some sort of freedom, but although the action is independent our choices are limited by outside forces and that is why our freedom is not real, or entirely.

This pertains to politics today because we are being so manipulated by our government that we don’t even realize how deluded we are. We are so busy being driven by structure and social position (status) that in the process our perceptions have been altered by our government and promising politicians, we have been desensitized so that we don’t feel pain in people dying anymore. Through ethnocentrism, words such as “terrorist” “evil” and “murderers” enemies are transformed from human beings to “objects” without rights and it becomes difficult to value another’s life. When we become too deeply integrated within our values we have a difficult time accepting others that are different. But if we believe that we are right then others are not simply different, they are wrong. 

Same goes for how our politics, government and laws favor certain groups and not others within our own country. We have all internalized racists views through no fault of our own, the media does a marvelous job depicting certain groups as dangerous and reckless but If only we’d ask ourselves who controls the media and why. Our true freedom lies within our knowledge, but we have to do the work of informing ourselves. Although we don’t entirely have free will, we can’t afford to maintain silent and not try to make a difference. We can’t change history but we can reconsider, reexamine and adjust our perception. Even within our parameters and restrictions we are able to deviate from the direction in which we are expected to tread.