The Conversation

Indomitable Rosa Today

Luxemburg’s Libertarian Democratic Socialism
as antidote to environmental destruction

The 15th January 2019 marks hundred years since Polish-born German Rosa
Luxemburg was assassinated by the proto-Nazi Freikorps, in Berlin. Rosa’s barbaric
murder, after being abducted and tortured, and her body damped in the Landwehr
Canal in Kreuzberg, intended to be a lesson to those who dared to challenge the
course of bourgeois history. After Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s assassinations,
and the massacre of thousands of workers demonstrating in the streets, months
after, the spirit of emancipation was over. But was it? Rosa Luxemburg’s colossal
influence is still celebrated with nostalgia and respect in Germany and worldwide.
Her conviction of the necessity of a libertarian and democratic Socialism was rooted
in her meticulous analysis of the workings of capitalism. She was convinced that
brutality was an inevitable feature of the system. If one would have only one word to
describe Rosa Luxemburg, that would be indomitable. On January 15th of 1919, the
world lost one of its most unconceivable (revolutionary) woman of all times.

Roza from Zamość

Roza Luksemburg was born on the 5th of March 1871 in Zamość, Russian-occupied
Poland. From early years, her parents knew that her congenital hip dysplasia was
not going to stop her from pursuing her passion for justice. She studies philosophy
and economics and was awarded a PhD in Law and Political Sciences (1898) in
Zurich, Swirzerland, where she was exiled now, hiding from the Russian police.
Rosa worked hard, teaching, and constantly writing, including passionate letters to
close friends like Clara Zetkin and Luisa Kautsky with which she fought the
loneliness of her imprisonment. At 28 she became naturalised German by marrying
Gustav Lubech, who helped her to avoid deportation to Russia. But her real love,
comrade and companion, apart from her beloved cat Mimi, was her soulmate Leo
Jogiches. Now and then she wondered whether she would have children but, like
many women, every time, she would abandon the idea quickly to concentrate her
energy in writing and intervening politically. Admirably, Rosa opened her own
personal and political path and her insightful analysis of capitalism and writings
made an indelible mark on the ideas of the Left. She challenged Marx and Marxist
father figures and made her male untouchable comrades worried. Unlike many of
them, she was explicitly anti-monarchic, anti-war, anti-bureaucratic, anti-imperialist.
She saw herself as a woman and close to the Feminist movement indirectly through
her friend Clara Zetkin. By reading her letters we learn that she truly hated
capitalism, war, the political mediocrity of reformism, class disparity, and that she
deeply felt for the dispossessed. Always closer to trade unions than to the political
party, she had confidence in the international labour movement as being the
protagonist of revolutionary change. Rosa was strong woman moved by her
convictions and emptions. She was a powerhouse who knew how to penetrate the
male dominated world of political and theoretical Marxism with bravery, and to
survive in a hostile environment. In return, she was diminished and imprisoned. But
nothing could stop her decision to work for the democratic socialist revolution.

Work and politics: Challenging the Untouchable

The idea of the possibility of a Socialist revolution led by the international labour
movement was central to Left politics at Rosa’s time. Revolution was not only
regarded as possible but as the only way out to capitalist barbarism. Rosa and her
comrades experienced a real moment of struggle for the definition of German
politics. In 1905, the Russian workers were mobilising massively in Warsaw. Rosa
advocated and wrote about the general strike as the best strategy against the
bourgeoisie. Was revolution really possible under the Russian empire? Perhaps, but
the SPS was taking a different view and Edward Bernstein’s reformist politics began
to make sense to many in the German Social Democratic Party, the largest party in
Germany’s parliament. In Reform or revolution (1899) Rosa made clear why she
rejected Bernstein’s ideas of revolution as an evolutionary, gradual process, through
progressive reform within the system and positioned herself to the left of the Left.
While Bernstein regarded reforms as an end in themselves, Rosa believed that
reforms were necessary without losing the main goal: revolution. `this was not a
capricious idea. Her opposition to reforms was based on her analysis of the
contradictions of capitalist accumulation.

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 Her idea of revolution was essentialist democratic or not revolutionary at all.
Real democracy was different from bourgeois democracy and could not be realised
under the capitalist state. But Rosa was also critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
While they regarded her libertarian and democratic socialism as a ‘deviation’ from
true Marxism’, she criticised them for their elitist politics and their ‘democratic
centralism’ which lacked a real democratic engagement with the labour movement.
She was outraged at the Party’s support to Kaiser’s declaration of war. This
contradicted the main goal of internationalisation of the labour movement: in addition
to the inhumanity of the war and how much it served the powerful, the war boosted
nationalism and hatred among workers/soldiers. With the creation of the clandestine
‘Spartacus League’ with comrade Karl Liebknecht, intending to contest the shift to
the right of the party, she provoked the wrath of the gods. What happened after the
League-led failed workers’ upheaval in Berlin is well known. Both leaders were
captured and killed with no mercy by the far right while the Weimar Republic, which
was Bernstein’s preferable option, was rising.

Democratic and Libertarian Socialism against the rise of Fascism and its
Environmental Destruction?

Rosa was killed at a crucial moment in world history, foreshadowing the

institutionalised brutality that would emerge in the following decades with Fascism's
rise. Many argue that her writings and political attitude are necessary to our lives
today, with the world being as uncertain in 2019 as in1919. What is her contribution
to the present world threatened by environmental destruction, violence against
women, gross inequality, insecure and exploitative work, and the global crisis of the
Left? Rosa’s writings point to the impending necessity to work for a truly democratic
and anti-elitist Socialism, rooted in the emancipatory praxis of the dispossessed
organised in an anti-war international labour movement. This is Rosa’s most
important input for today’s emancipatory politics that came from the unique
understanding of how global capitalism works: its tendency to conquer non-capitalist
territories in order to grow and expand unrestrainedly. For her, the capitalist
expansion towards non-capitalist areas and the consequent devastation of our
environment was not a deviation from a ‘sound’ global capitalism, but a inherent
feature of destructive system. In The Accumulation of Capital she explains that by

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definition, capital necessitates to conquer/absorb/subsume and destroy non-
capitalism territories geographically, militarily and economically (On this see Peter
Hudis). She criticised Marx for not paying enough attention to the external
contradictions to capitalist accumulation. A socialist revolution was, for Rosa, the
only way to stop the incessant expansion and the violent subsumption of non-
capitalist life into capitalism. This position has enormous relevance today. The
expropriation of our capacity to decide over the ways to (re)produce our life, deeply
connected to the oppression of women, and the environmental destruction it brings
about are not a ‘deviation’ from the norm but how capitalism works.

Today, war, military expansion, occupation of territories and colonisation of nature is

functional to the neo-extractivist strategy of accumulation that destroys irreplaceable
natural resources and forced millions of people into a crisis of the reproduction of
their own lives. Is then the term ‘green’ capitalism a misnomer? Will progressive
politics continue pretending and sadly let the world’s self-inflicted wounds bleed to
death? That after 25 years of the uprising, the Zapatista movement from Chiapas
Mexico are rearming themselves to resist Mexican President Lopez Obrador’s
‘progressive’ policy, is telling. They will resist the new "Mayan Train" plans to unite
Palenque, in Chiapas, with the main tourist and archaeological sites of Yucatan.
Why? Because, they explain, the plan would lead to an intensification of the
exploitation of the natural resources of the peninsula (Note that 14,000 km2 of forest
have already been destroyed only between 2000 and 2016) and, above all, to a
multiplication of the big tourist centers, with all that implies in terms of privatisation,
destruction and pollution of the coastal areas. Similarly, Brazil’s new-Fascist
president Bolsonaro's recent decision to “integrate the Amazon region into the
Brazilian economy”, will facilitate the business expansion of the already powerful
agribusiness corporations into the Amazon, thus affecting indigenous people’s live
hoods and human rights.

The hundredth anniversary of Rosa’s political assassination begs a question: can

save the planet from the ‘barbarism’ brought about by the global expansion of
fascism that sustain destructive environmental policies? I can imagine how Roza
would answer this question a century after she was viciously assassinated by the far

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right for advocating democracy, peace and justice, thus paving the way for the
creation of the Weimar Republic (1918-1924). Can you?