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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2005Woman as Reason
Rosa
Luxemburg's feminist dimension
by Terry Moon March is Women's History Month, March 8 is International
Women's Day (IWD), and March 5 is the birthday of the revolutionary Polish
theorist and leader of the 1919 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. It was Rosa
Luxemburg's close friend and comrade, Clara Zetkin, who proposed an
International Women's Day (IWD) to the Second International, first celebrated in
1911. Now there is a new work that illuminates what Raya
Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, called Rosa Luxemburg's
"feminist dimension" in her book, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION
AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION. This new work, TE ROSA LUXEMBURG READER,
edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, is a collection of Luxemburg's
major theoretical writings, including some that have never been published in
English and some never before published at all. It brings together substantial
extracts from her economic, polemical, and theoretic writings with speeches and
letters revealing an expansive view of one of the most complex and important
woman thinkers and activists of the early 20th century. The excellent
Introduction puts Luxemburg's life in context and presents her as a thinker
relevant to our age of globalized capitalism and worldwide revolt. While there are many points of departure for viewing
Luxemburg's life and work, one of the most contested claims of Dunayevskaya's
work is that Luxemburg embodied a feminist dimension in her life and work.
Chapter 9 of the READER, "Writings on Women, 1902-1914," reveals
Luxemburg's conviction of the necessity of women's emancipation, especially for
the proletarian woman, and, at one and the same time, shows the limitations of
her time, especially for a revolutionary feminism. LUXEMBURG'S WRITINGS ON WOMEN "A Tactical Question," Luxemburg's attack on
the Belgian Social Democrats who abandoned the demand for women's suffrage to
assuage the Liberals, leads off the chapter. What Luxemburg is concerned about
is not tactics, but principles. And the principle is not only women's right to
vote, but "revolutionary methods." She is opposed to any
"compromise…that cost us our basic principles" (p. 235). To her disgust, the Party takes the same ground as the
bourgeoisie--claiming women are "not mature enough to exercise the right to
vote" (p. 235). How that must have rankled her is expressed when she writes
that the "inclusion of proletarian women in political life" of the
German Social Democracy as well as in its social life would mean "a strong,
fresh wind would blow in with the political emancipation of women, which would
clear out the suffocating air of the current, philistine family life that rubs
itself off so unmistakably, even on our Party members, workers and leaders
alike" (p. 236). She spoke from experience. As Dunayevskaya documents,
Luxemburg resigned as editor of a Social Democratic paper because the men
refused to grant her the same powers as her male predecessor. In her 1907 "Address to the International Socialist
Women's Conference," a straightforward talk to her women comrades, she
strongly advised the women's association to keep its headquarters in Stuttgart,
where it could maintain its independent existence. Luxemburg states that it is
"You, however, [who] will resurrect this moral center of the
International." (p. 237). Dunayevskaya shows us how prescient Luxemburg was
in securing the independence of the women's movement. The principle of having an
independent socialist women's movement became central when Luxemburg so angered
the leadership that they refused to print her articles. Then GLEICHHEIT
(Equality), the newspaper of the socialist women's movement edited by Clara
Zetkin, "was an outlet for Luxemburg's revolutionary views. Indeed it later
became the anti-war organ when World War I broke out and the International
betrayed" by voting for war. In the last two essays in Chapter 9 on "Women's
Suffrage and the Class Struggle" and on "The Proletarian Woman,"
one notices a contradiction in Luxemburg's feminist dimension. She is well aware
of the tremendous power of the women's movement and of the demand for suffrage
which is important politically, and is a demand to be seen as full human beings.
Furthermore, in speeches and private letters, her muted critique of the party's
sexism and her regard for the work of her women comrades, especially Zetkin,
shines forth. Yet her hostility to the bourgeois women's movement is jarring and
some of her generalizations untrue, for example: "The bourgeois woman has
no real interest in political rights, because she does not exercise any economic
function in society." (p. 243). The bourgeois women's movement did not only
agitate for the vote but also for education and equality, and if it was like the
movement in the U.S., it believed the women's vote would mean that women's
"values" could be asserted into the political realm. Luxemburg refused to recognize publicly what she had
herself experienced. Her public position was that for the proletarian woman,
"Her political demands are rooted deep in the social abyss that separates
the class of the exploited from the class of the exploiters, not in the
antagonism between man and woman but in the antagonism between capital and
labor" (p. 244). Clara Zetkin did not make this dichotomy, as seen in her
talk at the founding of the Second International in 1889: "Just as the male
worker is subjugated to the capitalist, so is the woman by the man, and she will
always remain in subjugation until she is economically independent." FIGHTING CAPITALISM AND SEXISM Lesbian feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich
comments on this contradiction in her Foreword to Dunayevskaya's book:
"Yet, in her [Luxemburg's] short and brutally ended life, feminism and
proletarian revolution never became integrated."
Dunayevskaya writes something similar: "Because, however, Luxemburg
refused to make any reference to what we would now call male chauvinism, during
the hectic debates with [Karl] Kautsky and [August] Bebel, the two sets of
activities [the general revolutionary struggle and women's liberation] remained
in separate compartments." It
is our age that has seen that for women to experience full freedom, both battles
must be fought, and furthermore, that, as Marx noted, capitalism exacerbates and
exploits all existing antagonisms for its own interests. Dunayevskaya's book on Luxemburg allows us to understand
the complexity of her feminist dimension. While on the one hand Luxemburg
worried that agitating for an end to male chauvinism in the movement could break
up the revolutionary organization, on the other, she had been talking of and
fighting for women since 1902. By 1910-1911 and the founding of IWD, the
socialist working women's movement had developed tremendously. When World War I
broke out and the German Social Democracy supported German chauvinism, the
women's movement became the stalwart center of the anti-war movement.
Dunayevskaya concludes that "Once again, everything merged into proletarian
revolution, but always thereafter, woman as revolutionary force revealed its
presence." This was so because
there was a "new stage of feminism" and it was moving "from total
concentration on working women's rights to opposing the capitalist system in its
entirety." The inclusion of the letters from Luxemburg are a
wonderful contribution to the READER as they reveal how her passion for human
liberation and her outrage at the murder of innocents in the service of
capitalism's expansion is intrinsic to who she is. They help us see her as the
whole person she was. Her letters to her lover Leo Jogiches show her as
confident, competent and deeply in love. Her letters to her women friends, many
from prison, show an uncompromising revolutionary discipline, a belief in the
power of the mass movement, and a passion for life and for justice that
encompasses the world. The READER confirms that Raya Dunayevskaya was right in
insisting that Rosa Luxemburg not only had a feminist dimension, but that it is
key in understanding who she was and what revolution meant to her. What the
discerning women's liberationist will discover in exploring this, however, is
that it compels one to try to understand all of Luxemburg's dimensions.
Luxemburg's feminist dimension cannot be separated from her theoretic
development, her arguments with comrades and enemies, her confidence and pride
in her economic and theoretic abilities, her passion for revolution and her
determination to transform our world. * * * The Rosa Luxemburg Reader Edited by Peter Hudis & Kevin Andersen, Monthly
Review Press "[This collection] offers invaluable perspectives on radical thought and practice in the early 20th century. The editors deserve praise for general scholarly excellence--this work is graced throughout by lucid introductions and helpful endnotes.... Highly recommended." --CHOICE, January 2005 |
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