Remembering ROSA LUXEMBURG
5 March, 1871 - 15 January, 1919
Today, a hundred years ago, Rosa Luxemburg, the greatest woman Marxist theoretician, had her skull smashed with the butt of a rifle and her brains blown out with a bullet fired by the Friekorps, a gang of fascist soldiers (the forerunners of the stormtroopers of Hitler), who had been mobilized by the German state at the time to crush the abortive German revolution better known as the Spartakist Uprising. Her body was then dumped into a canal that runs through Berlin and discovered only 5 months later. This Uprising was led by the German Communist Party that had been formed only two months before by Rosa and her revolutionary comrades after years of battling the reformist and revisionist ideas in their former party, the SPD.
The Revolution she led failed to fructify and if it had succeeded, history would have been very different – perhaps World War II could have been avoided, perhaps we would not have had the Holocaust. But that is only conjecture. What is real though is the enduring relevance of Rosa’s thought even after the world has changed enormously in the last 100 years.
Rosa, and her comrade who was murdered along with her, Karl Liebknecht, have remained iconic figures who campaigned fearlessly against militarism in their lifetime and still serve as rallying points in worldwide protests against imperialist wars from World War II to the invasion of Iraq and other countries.
Further, in this era of capitalist globalization, Rosa’s insistence on the imperative of internationalist resistance encompassing unity, association, cooperation, and solidarity of the exploited and oppressed in every country and continent holds a beacon for workers worldwide.
Against the reformist and revisionist compromise position that the labour movements could diminish the disastrous effects of capitalism touted by her erstwhile comrades of the SPD, Rosa argued that genuine democracy could not be achieved within the framework of capitalist relations of production. We need to relook at her work now especially at a time when sections of the Left in our country and elsewhere are plagued by what she termed as “parliamentary cretinism.”
Rosa was intensely opposed to bureaucratic and elitist methods of organisation and argued that radical thought cannot be injected into the working class from without, that theory should not remain the preserve of a few radical intellectuals in the party but that “the mass of workers should take into their own hands the keen and dependable weapon of scientific socialism” which would transform them from “dead machines” to become the “free and independent directors of society as a whole”. It is the role of the communist party to ensure that the workers develop the critical faculty through a dynamic relationship between the party and the masses.
Rosa’s other passionate concern was the establishment of real revolutionary democracy after the seizure of state power through revolution. She warned against the replacement of bourgeois democracy by socialist authoritarianism. “When the proletariat seizes power, it must exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – and dictatorship of the class means: in full view of the broadest public, with the most active, uninhibited participation of the popular masses in an unlimited democracy.” For her, socialism was meant to bring about “a total spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule” as regards their values relating to gender, race, religion, governance, freedom, etc.
No remembrance of Rosa can be complete without a few insights on her life as a woman. She had reportedly refused to occupy a “safer” and marginalized position as a women’s spokesperson in the socialist movement, but she was a strong supporter of working women’s movements though much of her involvement was behind the scenes work carried on through her close friend and comrade Clara Zetkin, the leading woman socialist of Germany who edited a widely circulated paper called Gleichheit (Equality). Rosa challenged the widely held view among her older male comrades that “a woman’s place is in her home” through her life and work. Her greatest love was her fellow comrade Leo Jogiches, with whom she shared a passionate and stormy relationship for 17 years; they remained close comrades even after it ended. Jogiches is meant to have collaborated with Rosa on her earlier writings but concentrated more on organising the revolutionary underground apparatus. He was, in the words of Clara Zetkin “one of those very masculine personalities – an extremely rare phenomenon these days – who can tolerate a great female personality.” Though she suffered emotionally after the relationship with Jogiches ended, Rosa did not go to pieces. “I cleave to the idea that a woman’s character doesn’t show itself when love begins, but when it ends.” She later wrote to her young lover Costia Zetkin, “ I am I once more since I am free of Leo”. In this context, Raya Dunayevskaya, the Marxist writer, has remarked : “Luxemburg needed to be free, to be independent, to be whole … . Her greatest intellectual accomplishments occurred after the break with Jogiches.” Rosa proved that a woman’s central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go.
A century after Rosa’s death, the best homage we can pay her is to read her works.