News & Letters, June 1998

Rosa Luxemburg Society meets on May Day

By Kevin Anderson

CHICAGO--A three-day conference on Rosa Luxemburg, held here over May Day weekend, brought together Luxemburg scholars and activists from Japan, Germany, France, Korea, and the U.S.

Sponsored by the International Rosa Luxemburg Society, in cooperation with William Pelz' s Institute of Working Class History and News and Letters Committees, conference participants viewed Luxemburg' s life and work from two vantage points: (1) the 100th anniversary of her famous essay, SOCIAL REFORM OR REVOLUTION (1898), in which she critiqued Eduard Bernstein' s revisionism; and (2) the situation of labor and other movements for human liberation today.

In his opening speech, Narihiko Ito, author of ROSA LUXEMBURG'S WORLD (in Japanese), described the work of the International Rosa Luxemburg Society, from its founding in 1980 until today: " Why did we establish the Rosa Luxemburg Society? We wished first of all, to create an international network among Luxemburg specialists the world over. At the same time, we wished to stimulate the democratization of 'existing socialism'and to overcome the Cold War." Since then, international conferences on Luxemburg have been held in Switzerland, Austria, France, Germany, Japan, China, and Poland, with one scheduled for Finland in September. Ito said that Chicago was chosen as the site of the first U.S. meeting because the eight-hour movement Chicago workers launched on May 1, 1886, " bloodily suppressed by the police," involved " a fundamental demand of the workers to live as human beings." He also pointed to one of Luxemburg' s first articles, " On the Origins of May Day," published in Polish in 1894.

" Rosa Luxemburg and May Day: As Concept and Experience" was the topic of Annelies Laschitza, author of a recent biography of Luxemburg, and editor of her collected letters, both in German. Laschitza pointed to other periods in which Luxemburg made a category out of May Day. In 1913, Luxemburg saw May Day as a form through which the proletariat could make " a direct appearance" on the historical stage, not hemmed in by parliamentarianism nor national borders.

Three years later, in the midst of the carnage of World War I, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht organized the historic rally of May 1, 1916, at which German workers for the first time came onto the streets against the war. They cheered Liebknecht' s speech, in which he declared: " Down with the war! Down with the government!" Liebknecht was arrested on the spot, and Luxemburg soon after. For Luxemburg, May Day always represented a form of internationalism which sprang not from pious declarations at international socialist congresses, but from the living history of the labor movement.

In her presentation on Raya Dunayevskaya' s ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, Olga Domanski of News and Letters Committees stressed the way in which Dunayevskaya had demolished " the myth that Luxemburg had no interest in women," and the relevance of this for liberation movements today.

In a presentation on " Rosa Luxemburg and the Berlin Workers' Uprising in January 1919," the Berlin-based historian Ottokar Luban detailed the days just preceding her murder by reactionary officers on the night of January 15-16, 1919. Luban also challenged the myth that Luxemburg was reluctant to participate in the abortive Spartacist uprising.

In a presentation entitled " The Spirit and Mind of Rosa Luxemburg," the Trotskyist theorist Paul Le Blanc, author of a book on Lenin, asked, in part on the basis of Dunayevskaya' s work, whether " being a woman enabled Luxemburg to develop a Marxist orientation animated by qualities often beyond the reach of her male counterparts." Le Blanc emphasized the idealist dimension of Luxemburg' s Marxism, her rejection of all dogmatisms, and her unwavering confidence in the revolutionary consciousness of the masses.

Other presentations by the historian Harvey Kaye (on the continuing relevance of socialism) and by the Korean economist Kim Dae Hwan (on capital accumulation) rounded out a lively and multidimensional discussion of Luxemburg' s life and work.

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