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Review of ROSA LUXEMBURG: REFLECTIONS AND WRITINGS
edited by Paul Le Blanc.
Humanity Books, $22.95.
April 2001
New Luxemburg collection highlights feminist dimension
Reviewed by Kevin Anderson, author of LENIN, HEGEL AND
WESTERN MARISM
It has been over 25 years since a new collection of Rosa Luxemburg's major
writings, other than letters, has appeared in English. With the collapse of
statist communism in 1989-91 and the post-Seattle search for a truly
revolutionary alternative to capitalism, the important theoretical
contributions of this fiercely independent fighter for socialism and
democracy have taken on a new importance.
This makes the publication of ROSA LUXEMBURG: REFLECTIONS AND WRITINGS,
edited by Paul Le Blanc (Humanity Books, $22.95), a most welcome event. Le
Blanc has divided his collection evenly between commentaries on Luxemburg
and selections from her writings. This means that rather than a single
interpretation, we are offered no less than six different voices commenting
on Luxemburg. Le Blanc's volume thus serves as a lively and timely
introduction to Luxemburg.
Two chapters give us different takes on Luxemburg as feminist. In her
chapter, Raya Dunayevskaya questions a commonly held position when she asks
rhetorically: "Has the Women's Liberation Movement nothing to learn from
Luxemburg just because she hasn't written 'directly' on the 'Woman
Question'?" She adds immediately that "the latter doesn't happen to be
true" (p. 79). Dunayevskaya stresses Luxemburg's close links to Clara
Zetkin, the acknowledged leader of the large pre-1914 German socialist
women's movement. She also argues that Luxemburg's life and work as a woman
thinker and revolutionary, when taken as a whole, offer many points of
connection for later feminists. In her chapter, Andrea Nye suggests that
Luxemburg's concern with grassroots working people and their
"experience...circumvents the relativism and political stasis" (p. 110) as
well as the elitism of academic feminism.
Le Blanc's essay revisits the issue of spontaneism versus vanguardism as he
compares Lenin and Luxemburg. He shows that, in its internal structure,
Luxemburg's own Polish socialist party was even more centralist and elitist
than was Lenin's vanguard party. However, one could easily question Le
Blanc's rather condescending conclusion, rooted no doubt in his overall
Trotskyist perspective, where he calls for "a critical-minded integration
of 'Luxemburgist' into Leninist insight and experience" (p. 100). To be
fair however, it should be added that Le Blanc's introduction to the
volume, written more recently than this chapter, is not as permeated with
such an attitude.
The chapter on Luxemburg and dialectics by Lelio Basso is a disappointment.
Basso vastly overstates the link between Luxemburg and Lukács. He also
fails to note that Luxemburg wrote nothing of substance on dialectics, this
in contrast to Lenin's 1914-15 Hegel Notebooks, or to Lukács himself.
The second half of the book, with the texts by Luxemburg, is mainly given
over to her post-1914 writings. Included here are critiques of the 1914
betrayal of socialism, moving letters from prison, and her 1919 speech to
the founding convention of the German Communist Party. Among the rest of
the Luxemburg material are excerpts from her major work ACCUMULATION OF
CAPITAL (1913) and from THEORY AND PRACTICE (1910), the latter an important
attempt to connect the 1905 Russian Revolution with the struggles of the
Western European working class. These are all magnificent writings.
However, there is nothing from either Luxemburg's 1918 critique of the
Bolshevik single-party state during the Russian Revolution or her 1904
critique of Lenin on organization. This unfortunately deprives the reader
of a first-hand sense of Luxemburg's key disagreements with Lenin. In
addition, given the concentration on feminism in the first half of the
book, one might have expected at least one text by Luxemburg dealing with
women. (One thinks, for example, of her 1916 prison letter comparing
herself to the Amazon queen Penthesilea.)
As a whole, however, this volume offers an engaging and timely introduction
to the life and thought of a great Marxist theorist. It highlights the
neglected feminist dimension in Luxemburg's life and thought, not least
because Le Blanc has included several very different women commentators on
Luxemburg.
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