Rosa Luxemburg

The Communist Women’s Movement – high point of first wave feminism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Stalin in London: not the true story

Stephen May’s Sell Us The Rope is a new novel about the London congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg play leading roles in the story. I know: it sounds great. But before you click on ‘Buy Now’ on Amazon, let me tell you a bit more. The book’s premise — that Stalin was a long-term, paid informer for the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) — made the story especially interesting for me. The fact that it had a positive review in the New York Times — that was icing on the cake. Sadly, this is a very disappointing book. The...

Letters: Hands off Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg

I was nauseated by Eric Lee’s unwarranted attack on Clara Zetkin in Solidarity 664 . Zetkin was an outstanding revolutionary socialist, feminist and fighter for working class politics over 50 years, whose mistakes towards the end of her life did not make her a loyal Stalinist. Zetkin’s incredible life (1857-1933) and record deserve to be better known. She joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1878 and became one of its most prominent leaders. They built a mass working class party of one million members, a model followed by the best socialists of that epoch, including the Bolsheviks...

National struggles and inter-imperialist struggles: Lenin answers Stop the War

In defiance of the facts, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers' Party, Counterfire, etc, claim the war in Ukraine is primarily an inter-imperialist conflict between Russia and NATO, not a war of Ukrainian self-defence. (Some of Stop the War's supporters are straightforwardly pro-Russia, as was on display at its 25 February demo .) Couldn't the Ukraine conflict be transformed into an inter-imperialist war? Of course. That doesn't mean it is one now. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg's 1916 Junius Pamphlet , excerpts below, Vladimir Lenin addressed precisely this kind of issue. (At...

The valuable, critical Marxism of Paul Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc has been one of the most prolific revolutionary socialist authors in recent decades, publishing scores of books, articles and reviews, in large part devoted to the early twentieth century Marxist tradition. Le Blanc’s work has numerous virtues. He writes clean and readable prose, makes theoretical issues accessible, represents various points of view objectively, puts the historical material in context and explains its relevance to present-day activism. He is honest about his own mistakes and the evolution of his views. And Le Blanc takes an ecumenical approach, willing to engage...

Kino Eye: Rosa Luxemburg on film

The article on Paul Frölich ( Solidarity 612 ) brought to mind the 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg, by Margarethe von Trotta. Despite some faults Rosa Luxemburg does justice to the “Eagle”, as Lenin once referred to her. Although she doesn’t resemble Rosa Luxemburg, Barbara Sukowa turns in a superb performance as we follow Rosa from her childhood in Poland to her death at the hands of the far-right Freikorps in the dying embers of the Spartacist revolution in Berlin in 1919. All the main elements of Rosa’s life are shown in the film: her fight against the revisionist Bernstein, her friendship with...

Join Rosa Luxemburg's march

Dana Mills concludes her new short new biography, Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion Books) , with the appeal: "See that you join Rosa Luxemburg's march". "The extraordinary force of her [Luxemburg's] legacy marches on beyond her politics… The idea of unequivocal commitment for social justice for all is returning to our streets. The shadow of the little great woman is marching on, arguing for freedom from oppression and equality in dignity for all". Mills asks us to see Luxemburg as a model. She highlights Luxemburg's "empathy towards the victims of… violence", her "ability to remain committed to...

Read Rosa!

Elizabeth Butterworth reviews the Workers’ Liberty pamphlet on The German Revolution. Get and read more about the pamphlet here . Around the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s brutal murder, I saw numerous posts on social media apparently celebrating Luxemburg’s contribution to anti-fascism, Marxism and free thinking. Luxemburg must be one of the most quoted Marxists on the internet. These two quotes are often shared: “Those who do not move do not notice their chains” and “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” In my ten years on the left, I’ve seen...

Rosa Luxemburg on 1905

“The extent to which the party rises to the occasion [of a revolutionary upsurge] — that depends in the greatest degree on how widely [the Marxists have] known how to make their influence felt among the masses in the pre-revolutionary period...” It depends on “the extent to which [they were] already successful in putting together a solid central core of politically well-trained worker activists with clear goals, how large the sum of all their political and organisational work has been”. Volume 3 of the new Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published this year, shows how false the idea is that...

The "revisionism" debate of 1898-9

The "revisionism controversy" in the German socialist movement in 1898-9 is often described, with hindsight, as showing that the movement was already rotten. It is held that such central figures in the movement as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky opposed Eduard Bernstein's revisionism only half-heartedly, and really had gone most of the way to accepting Bernstein's gradualist approach. The conclusion, often, is that there is not much to learn from the writings of the movement from that era, after Marx and Engels and up to 1914, except perhaps for some texts by Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. That...

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