Róża Luksemburg is the next of my wild women, and the first one so far where I feel ashamed that I know a lot less about her than I really ought to. I actually don't think that I studied her after O-Level history Weimar Republic. I did a module called 'Socialism' at University, which made up one-eighth of my Finals. And Rosa Luxembourg didn't figure. Which says a great deal about the patriarchal and conservative nature of my degree course. Or maybe about my attendance record...
Wikipedia has a fairly lengthy article, with external references, which I won't try to summarise, but will précis their summary
Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a theorist of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, later becoming involved in the German SPD, followed by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. She started the journal Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). After the support by the SPD for the German participation in World War I, she co-founded the Spartacist League, that later became the Communist Party of Germany. It took part in an unsuccessful revolution in Berlin in January 1919. The uprising was accompanied by Luxemburg's propaganda, and crushed by the remnants of the monarchist army and right wing freelance militias collectively called the Freikorps. Luxemburg and hundreds of others were captured, tortured, and killed. Since their deaths, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht have attained great symbolic status amongst democratic socialists and Marxists.
Someone I worked with named her daughter Rosa; her son was Lev, after Trotsky. I tend to link Luxembourg in my mind with Antonio Gramsci. But this category is not about men...
Although I know very little about Rosa Luxembourg, the ideas as summarised in the Wikipedia article are familiar and I could spout on at length. She argued that an independent Poland could only come about through revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Russia; the struggle should be against capitalism itself, and not for an independent Poland.
She also argued against the First World War and its build-up from years previously, stating that the workers should unite internationally in a General Strike against war. Eric Hobsbawn argued that World War One was a war fought for the benefit of capitalists; it certainly did few favours for the workers. But I have to say that I can't really see how war can benefit Capitalism, either, except to the extent that there are super-profits to be made in the short term from armaments and related industries. This was demonstrated in the aftermath of the First World War, and explains why Schuman and Monnet were so driven to set up the European Coal and Steel Community which led to what is now the European Union.
Luxembourg and her comrades found that the proletariat were not open to persuasion, preferring instead to absorb the nationalistic, jingoistic, bellicose propaganda of the ruling classes. The SPD in Germany adopted a bipartisan approach to the war, leading Luxembourg and others to split. (The history of all hitherto existing parties of the left is the history of factional splits and splinters; people write whole books on this, which, I assume, no one actually reads. Life of Brian does it better).
Rosa was a revolutionary, and argued that the revolution needed proletariat spontaneity and central organisation to co-exist, which is why Trots repeat their mantra about 'organising for the revolution'. She criticised the Bolshevik Revolution as not being from the proletariat, but, rather, a bourgeoisie reaction to proletariat power. They failed to follow Marx's argument that the role of the working class was to organize, arm and defend themselves, to campaign for a socialist political program, expanding workers rights, and to seize and farm intensively and collectively the old feudal estates, so as to feed the cities.
In my heart of hearts I agree with Rosa Luxembourg; a proletariat revolution is theoretically desirable. But I don't think it's possible at present, at least not in "the West". What we have is a form of semi-enlightened capitalism masquerading as democracy, where the bourgeoisie have realised that the status quo will endure as long as the petit bourgeoisie can believe themselves to be superior to the proletariat, most of who aspire to the petit bourgeoisie. Gramsci introduced the concept of cultural hegemony and his followers believe that if the proletariat are educated to high ideals and standards, a socialist utopia will dawn, ruled in an enlightened and benign way by the educated proletariat.
I don't think it's wrong in principle, but currently, there is little chance of fighting the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie who have constructed our modern society to give us the illusion of being free and autonomous citizens, whereas we are consumers, no less slaves than the proletariat of a century ago. Perhaps the greatest challenge to bourgeois values is coming from the green movement, but environmentalists also have to tackle the problem of cultural hegemony and consumerism, and persuade us that we would be better off if we rejected capitalism. There should be a natural coalition between greens and socialists, but radical socialism is dominated by protecting jobs, and feels threatened by any movement that calls for less production. Whereas, surely, Greens and Socialists and Pacifists - should be uniting to end the exploitation of the Earth's Natural Resources, including people, by the greedy capitalists.
Peace, Poverty and the Planet...
I'm doing a series of blogposts based upon a much-loved t-shirt
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