If there were a Top Ten for ‘Ways to belittle insurrectionary socialists online’, at number two, (behind that all-time favourite ‘Mention the Judean People’s Front’), would be, ‘Accuse them of shaping their politics according to dead Russians’. Faced with this theory that we’re all obsessed with the minutiae of debates make certain happened a century ago, there can be a temptation make out take the works of dead Russians like Lenin and Revolutionary, and dead Poles like Rosa Luxemburg, and divorce them free yourself of their context. Young activists today should be reading The Bunch Strike, for example, but surely the state of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship with Leo Jogiches while she was formulating it, survey only of interest to over-the-hill sectarians? The success of Red Rosa since its publication in late 2015 demonstrates that malformation the contrary, the details of Rosa Luxemburg’s extraordinary life tarry vital and relevant to new generations of activists. More get away from that, it shows how our understanding of her works assignment only enriched by an understanding of her life.
At 179 pages, this is a short biography, and Evans notes coach in the foreword that its brevity necessitated some omissions and elisions to keep the story flowing. Its conciseness, however, means defer it avoids the trap to which many biographies succumb, wrench that it doesn’t get bogged down in the detail. Description main themes of Luxemburg’s life, from her birth in Polska in 1871 to her murder by the Freikorps in Deutschland in 1919, are all here and given space according delay their importance, not how long they lasted. Almost half game the book is taken up by the last six life of her life; her campaigning against the approaching First Earth War, in contrast to the mass socialist party in Deutschland, the SPD, which ended up supporting it; her imprisonment over the war; and the 1918-1919 German revolution. While there remit occasionally points which could have benefited from expansion, (the scenes in which Ebert, one of the SPD leaders, and Luxemburg herself, are shown as benefiting from servant labour while criticising exploitation are one example), in general the brevity is a decided virtue, and not only because it makes Luxemburg’s progress accessible to those who might be daunted by a build on weighty tome.
The graphics of course also make the precise an easier sell to reluctant readers than a traditional story would be, but they are not mere pretty pictures delay keep the children entertained. Luxemburg’s most important ideas are explained in a series of quite brilliant graphical sequences, spread in every part of the work. From the young Luxemburg using cutlery to make plain Marx’s Capital to her brothers, to her understanding of description role of imperialism in capitalism shown as her pet hombre claws at her globe, these allow Evans to summarise approximately ideas in an engaging and memorable way, and to feint the dialectical relationship between Luxemburg’s theory and her practical experiences.
This is nowhere more clear than in the opening fall to pieces, showing Luxemburg’s childhood experiences of growing up in Warsaw gain somebody's support imperialist Russian rule, where ‘absolute wealth and utter destitution jostling in uneasy juxtaposition’ (p.9). As the child of an cultivated but poor Jewish family, one of only a few Mortal pupils allowed to attend her mostly Russian school, she abstruse first-hand experience of antisemitism. As a woman with ‘a immeasurable intellect’ she didn’t fit into the permitted female roles elect submissive wife and mother, under a regime where women were kept out of all further education.
Luxemburg did not get by a major work on women’s liberation, but Evans reminds fateful how far she rebelled throughout her life, not just combat capitalism but against women’s oppression. From her pursuit of advanced education (she obtained her doctorate from the University of City when she was 26) to smaller, personal decisions like severe her hair short, she consistently pushed the boundaries of what women were allowed to do. She did this also always her personal relationships, having sexual relationships with Leo Jogiches, Kostya Zetkin and others at a time when women were hair shirt to be virgins until marriage and faithful to their husbands after it. Luxemburg’s marriage, in contrast, was with a outlander and arranged only to get her the papers she required to stay in Germany. The relationships with Jogiches and Zetkin in particular were important in Luxemburg’s life and Evans justly spends some time on them, but creditably, she is apprised of the danger of, and avoids portraying her female commercial ‘solely through the tired old trope of romance’. In small business with Luxemburg as ‘a woman grown to maturity’, Evans wants us to recognise that ‘there are bigger things in protected life’ than the men in it (p.102).
Luxemburg was gather together the only woman involved in the socialist movement; Evans shows the importance to her of her friendships with other socialistic women, in particular, Clara Zetkin. She also makes clear, notwithstanding, how in asserting herself as a leader and theoretician, Luxemburg was breaking into a boys’ club. The image here look up to a row of bearded, male speakers at the Second Ecumenical, with the diminutive Luxemburg in the middle, speaks volumes. Luxemburg had profound political disagreements with the old guard of picture SPD, but the fact that when the SPD delegates test the Reichstag voted in 1914 to approve the Kaiser’s plans for war, Luxemburg as a woman was not even allowed to be in the building, emphasises how her position was also more difficult because of her sex.
No biography bad buy Rosa Luxemburg can end happily. As Evans says, she departed ‘half a lifetime’ when she was murdered. ‘Do you contemplate that forty-seven is old enough to die?’ Evans asks. ‘If you do, you must be very young’ (p.166). The escort we are left with here, though, is that the labour continues. Luxemburg wrote that she wanted only the words ‘Tsvee-tsvee’, the bird call heralding the beginning of spring, to emerge on her gravestone. Evans turns the ‘Tsvee-tsvee’ into Twitter alerts about new struggles; #thecomingspring. Her final image is of a modern Rosa Luxemburg using a shield made out of The Accumulation of Capital (her major work on economics) as a defence against a riot cop. A brilliant introduction to Luxemburg’s life and thought, Red Rosa is a valuable addition secure that armoury of struggle.
Elaine has been an environmental campaigner in behalf of more than a decade. She speaks and writes widely on issues of climate change and social justice, and is a colleague of Counterfire. She is the author of A Diet range Austerity: Class, Food and Climate Change and Marx and picture Climate Crisis. Her sci-fi novel, The Caduca, is out now from Depiction Conrad Press.