“Fail better”: Utopia, Rosa Luxemburg, and learning from failure

The paper explores how Rosa Luxemburg's practice of learning from failure can enrich engagements with failure among scholars of utopia. Recently, scholars of utopia have integrated failure as an unavoidable aspect of social dreaming. Inspired by Samuel Beckett's dictum “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better”, these accounts view failure not as a lamentable lack but as a valuable opportunity for new experiments in alternative ways of being. Yet what is missing is a sustained exploration of the lived experience of failure as a site of both loss and possibility. Here Luxemburg can prove a valuable resource. Drawing on her theoretical and political writings and her correspondence, I show how her practice of learning from failure accounts for the crushing impact of failure and its productive political value. Thus, it valuably develops the utopian scholars’ focus on failing better and offers activists more robust resources to productively engage with failure.