Women Activists

"When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time."

"Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss."

"Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy . . . At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America."

"The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch "practical" recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the "United States of Europe" as a basis for the limitation of international militarism."

"Militarism in both its forms — as war and as armed peace — is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism. Only in this way can real Social Democratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in connection with the armaments debate."

"Die Friedensfreunde aus bürgerlichen Kreisen glauben, das sich Weltfriede und Abrüstung im Rahmen der heutigen Gesellschaftsordnung verwirklichen lassen, wir aber, die wir auf dem Boden der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung und des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus stehen, sind der Überzeugung, das der Militarismus erst mit dem kapitalistischen Klassenstaate zusammen aus der Welt geschafft werden kann."

"What is our task in the question of peace? It does not consist merely in vigorously demonstrating at all times the love of peace of the Social Democrats; but first and foremost our task is to make clear to the masses of people the nature of militarism and sharply and clearly to bring out the differences in principle between the standpoint of the Social Democrats and that of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts."

"Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization."

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

"Rosa Luxemburg is an outstanding example of a type of mind that is often met with in the history of Marxism and appears to be specially attracted by the Marxist outlook. It is characterized by slavish submission to authority, together with a belief that in that submission the values of scientific thought can be preserved. No doctrine was so well suited as Marxism to satisfy both these attitudes, or to provide a mystification combining extreme dogmatism with the cult of “scientific” thinking, in which the disciple could find mental and spiritual peace. Marxism thus played the part of a religion for the intelligentsia, which did not prevent some of them, like Rosa Luxemburg herself, from trying to improve the deposit of faith by reverting to first principles, thus strengthening their own belief that they were independent of dogma."

"Rarely was heard on her lips the phrase, “I cannot”; more frequently were heard the words, “I must.”"

"With a will, determination, selflessness and devotion for which words are too weak, she consecrated her whole life and her whole being to Socialism. She gave herself completely to the cause of Socialism, not only in her tragic death, but throughout her whole life, daily and hourly, through the struggles of many years ... She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution."

"La mujer," one of the articles that Luisa Capetillo published in 1912 in Cultura obrera, was later included in the anthology, Voces de liberación (Voices of Liberation), published in 1921 by Lux Editorial from Argentina. Printed for the purpose of gathering the libertarian voices of the most progressive women in the world, the book contains short essays by Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, and various Latin American women including Margarita Ortega, a Mexican revolutionary, María López from Buenos Aires, and Rosalina Gutiérrez from Montevideo. The editorial note introducing the authors states, "These voices of liberation are a call to women by their own compañeras to think more and act together with men in the struggle for human emancipation."

"Rosa Luxemburg’s name is less well-known in other countries than it is to us in Russia. But one can say with all certainty that she was in no way a lesser figure than Karl Liebknecht. Short in height, frail, sick, with a streak of nobility in her face, beautiful eyes and a radiant mind she struck one with the bravery of her thought. She had mastered the Marxist method like the organs of her body. One could say that Marxism ran in her blood stream. I have said that these two leaders, so different in nature, complemented each other. I would like to emphasize and explain this. If the intransigent revolutionary Liebknecht was characterized by a feminine tenderness in his personal ways then this frail woman was characterized by a masculine strength of thought. Ferdinand Lassalle once spoke of the physical strength of thought, of the commanding power of its tension when it seemingly overcomes material obstacles in its path. That is just the impression you received talking to Rosa, reading her articles or listening to her when she spoke from the tribune against her enemies. And she had many enemies! I remember how, at a congress at Jena I think, her high voice, taut like a wire, cut through the wild protestations of opportunists from Bavaria, Baden and elsewhere. How they hated her! And how she despised them! Small and fragilely built she mounted the platform of the congress as the personification of the proletarian revolution. By the force of her logic and the power of her sarcasm she silenced her most avowed opponents. Rosa knew how to hate the enemies of the proletariat and just because of this she knew how to arouse their hatred for her. She had been identified by them early on. From the first day, or rather from the first hour of the war, Rosa Luxemburg launched a campaign against chauvinism, against patriotic lechery, against the wavering of Kautsky and Haase and against the centrists’ formlessness; for the revolutionary independence of the proletariat, for internationalism and for the proletarian revolution...By the force of the strength of her theoretical thought and her ability to generalize Rosa Luxemburg was a whole head above not only her opponents but also her comrades. She was a woman of genius. Her style, tense, precise, brilliant and merciless, will remain for ever a true mirror of her thought."

"Rosa Luxemburg is one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century: she developed an analysis of imperialism that apprehended not only its economic and political, but also its social, cultural, and human dimensions; she resolutely opposed capitalist militarism; she was a leading theorist and strategist; and she was an activist, from her first party work among miners in upper Silesia, through her speaking tours to mass crowds after the 1905 Russian revolution, to her agitation among revolutionary workers on the streets in the final days of her life."

"Like the women civil rights activists, Jewish radicals have historically had a range of responses to Jewish identity. Emma Goldman, for example, balanced the universalism of her anarchist philosophy with an appreciation for Jewish culture and a clear commitment to speaking out against anti-Semitism. Revolutionary socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, was hostile to any attempts to link her politics to her Jewish identity and was particularly critical of the Jewish socialist Bund."

"Rosa Luxemburg, as we have seen, neglects the rise in real wages which takes place as capitalism develops, and denies the internal inducement to invest provided by technical progress, two factors which help to rescue capitalism from the difficulties which it creates for itself. She is left with only one influence (economic imperialism) to account for continuous capital accumulation, so that her analysis is incomplete. All the same, few would deny that the extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring of what an academic economist has called the 'vast secular boom' of the last two hundred years, and many academic economists account for the uneasy condition of capitalism in the twentieth century largely by the 'closing of the frontier' all over the world. But the academic economists are being wise after the event. For all its confusions and exaggerations, this book shows more prescience than any orthodox contemporary could claim."

"Rosa was saved from personal, inner disaster during the great betrayals of the First World War by several, all rather tough-minded, characteristics. She had a tenacious orthodoxy: she was perfectly confident of the sufficiency of Marxism as an answer, though she was more humane about it than Lenin. She had a warm, purely human love of people — physically, their smell and touch and comradeship. And a kind of Jewish indomitable guts, that ultimate unkillability which comes only from grandparents in yamulke and horsehair wig."

"she was the outstanding personality in the international labor movement after Marx and Engels; and that her work has not lost its political relevance despite the changes the capitalist system and the labor movement have undergone since her death...Despite some false notions, with respect to theory and some illusions regarding socialist practice, her revolutionary impulse yielded the essential elements required for a socialist revolution: an unwavering internationalism and the principle of the self-determination of the working class within its organizations and within society. By taking seriously the dictum that the emancipation of the proletariat can only be its, own work, she bridged the revolutionary past with the revolutionary future. Her ideas thus remain as alive as the idea of revolution itself, while all her adversaries in the old labor movement have become part and parcel of the decaying capitalist society."

"It is characteristic of the unity of theory and practice in the life work of Rosa Luxemburg that the unity of victory and defeat, individual fate and total process is the main thread running through her theory and her life. As early as her first polemic against Bernstein’s she argued that the necessarily ‘premature’ seizure of power by the proletariat was inevitable. She unmasked the resulting opportunist fear and lack of faith in revolution as “political nonsense which starts from the assumption that society progresses mechanically and which imagines a definite point in time external to and unconnected with the class struggle in which the class struggle will be won”. It is this clear-sighted certitude that guides Rosa Luxemburg in the campaign she waged for the emancipation of the proletariat: its economic and political emancipation from physical bondage under capitalism, and its ideological emancipation from its spiritual bondage under opportunism. As she was the great spiritual leader of the proletariat her chief struggles were fought against the latter enemy – the more dangerous foe as it was harder to defeat. Her death at the hands of her bitterest enemies, Noske and Scheidemann, is, logically, the crowning pinnacle of her thought and life. Theoretically she had predicted the defeat of the January rising years before it took place; tactically she foresaw it at the moment of action. Yet she remained consistently on the side of the masses and shared their fate. That is to say, the unity of theory and practice was preserved in her actions with exactly the same consistency and with exactly the same logic as that which earned her the enmity of her murderers: the opportunists of Social Democracy."

"a great woman, a great revolutionary"

"This was Luxemburg’s single most impor­tant insight: The revolutionaries must re­main human throughout their struggle. Oth­erwise, what kind of revolution would these angry, repressed people make? Whom would it serve? And how would life be better after­wards? These thoughts never left her. They are there, year after year, in her letters to Leo, in the reasons she gives for wanting them to be close and to love each other freely. Out of these thoughts comes her op­position to war, her criticism of Lenin, her description of why she reads Tolstoy instead of Marx in prison. In Rosa Luxemburg, the line between emotion and intelligence re­mained strong and direct. All her life it was the task of her intellect to explain what her gut told her was true."

"Her writing is distinguished by a knowledge of art, histo­ry, and literature, her speech made vivid by strength and immediacy of feeling. Her criticism of party writing is amazing. “I think that with every new article,” she advises her comrades back in Poland, putting out The Workers’ Cause, “one should experience the subject matter through and through, get emotionally involved, every single time, every single day. Only then will the old, familiar truths, expressed in words new and bright, go from the writer’s heart to the reader’s heart… The goal I set for myself is never to forget to reach deep into my own self, to be enthusiastic, inspired every time I put pen to paper.” Because she never failed to “reach deep into her own self,” Luxemburg’s sense of the revolution remained remarkably whole and alive to the touch. She never lost sight of what she was fighting for, what socialism meant to her, what price she was willing to pay for it. Her position was often lonely but always independent. She thrived on the independence. Then suddenly it turned to isolation."

"The only way that inviolability has maintained its force overtime has been through the forces of organized violence standing between that concept of property and everybody else. That is it...the forces of organized violence, while very much tied to military uniforms, weapons, industrialized killing in that way, what Rosa Luxemburg called organized murder"

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"Rosa Luxemburg, brave woman Socialist of Germany, who was later brutally murdered by the militarists, sounded the alarm against a World War in 1913. She called upon the workers to make May Day a mighty demonstration for peace and socialism. “Workers of the world, Unite!” became the insistent cry on May Day. Every vital issue was pressed, more and more militant slogans raised in each country and internationally."

"What’s refreshing about Luxemburg is that she never loses sight of the fact that capitalism – exploitation of one human by another, facilitated by the abstractions of the money system – is the root cause of the problem. Although she feels the desperation of the exploited and the oppressed very keenly, she’s clear that it’s only by dismantling capitalism that that oppression can be ended."

"Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary. Her great services to the movement and what Trotsky called her luminous mind will always remain the indestructible heritage of the Fourth International. Precisely for this reason, however, it has been necessary to disentangle the error she has committed on the theory of accumulation from her revolutionary activity and her fight against reformism."

"the unsung hero of postcolonial theory...By giving detailed accounts of the British economic atrocities in India, and French colonialism in Algeria, Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the more detailed accounts of postcolonial theories by decades. By bringing the presumed margins of self-centering Europe to global consciousness, she enabled the postcolonial theorist a veritable voice at the worldwide gathering of critical Marxist thinking."

"During a period when so many who consider themselves Marxists sap Marxism of its deep humanistic content, no one can do more to release us from the chains of lifeless mechanistic materialism than Rosa Luxemburg. For Marx communism (or socialism) was "real humanism", "a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle"."

"A passion for truth made Rosa Luxemburg recoil from any dogmatic thought. In a period when Stalinism has largely turned Marxism into a dogma, spreading desolation in the field of ideas, Rosa Luxemburg's writings are invigorating and life-giving. Nothing was more intolerable to her than bowing down to "infallible authorities". As a real disciple of Marx she was able to think and act independently of her master."

"Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had — her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life."

"As the second decades of the new millennium nears completion we are beginning to truly understand what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said: Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism."

"no one would claim that the revolt of a few hundred insurgents in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 influenced the course of the war in any way. The immense importance of this event was in another dimension: a symbol, as is often said, the manifestation par excellence of the will to attest by struggle 'despite everything' - the famous trotz alledem of Heinrich Heine, found also from the pens of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and again in the famous song of Wolf Biermann. It embodied the will and capacity of human resistance in the face of adversity, despite the extreme disproportion of forces."

"The articulation of universalism with the sense of Jewish identity took varying forms depending on the different revolutionary currents: for internationalists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, the assimilation of a Jewish revolutionary into the concrete universal party, the dissolution of the 'little difference' into the status of equality of the militant, anticipated the society for which they fought; they did not consider the little difference' as called on to crystallize one day in terms of national identity. Were they blind? Blinkered, certainly, in the sense that they underestimated the national dimension of the Jewish problem in Eastern Europe."

"The Eastern-European born revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, the most famous examples, marched onto the pages of radical history and represented a new kind of Jewish woman, at odds with the balebuste of old."

"I remembered at this time the brilliant critical analysis of the German Social Democracy which Rosa Luxemburg had written in gaol in 1914, after her arrest for anti-militarist activity. The pamphlet had been signed by the pseudonym "Junius" and it was a confirmation of prophecies I had heard her make at a German Congress in Hanover many years before when she had engaged in a brilliant polemical duel with the German Revisionist, Edward Bernstein. Even then she had foreseen the development of that pernicious opportunism which was to result in the tragedies of the post-war years."

"In retrospect, Jean Jaurès and Rosa Luxemburg seem to me the only delegates who, like Adler, realized fully the inevitability of the World War and the horrors it entailed."

"While she was speaking I realized why she was considered one of the greatest speakers and teachers of the movement. Her simplicity, her enthusiasm, and deep sincerity, together with her wit, combined to produce a profound effect upon her audience. She was extraordinarily endowed intellectually. While still a very young girl, a university student, she had impressed authorities on political economy with her precocious writings on this subject. She had an exceptionally keen critical mind, and at an age when most girls are interested in little except clothes, romantic novels, and dancing, she was already a regular and highly-respected contributor to the scientific Marxian journals. Rosa Luxemburg belonged to that generation of famous women who had to struggle against almost insurmountable obstacles to gain opportunities which the men of her day accepted as a matter of course. For a woman to acquire intellectual recognition at that time demanded an authentic thirst for knowledge, much tenacity and an iron will. Rosa Luxemburg had all of these qualities to an exceptional degree. But there was also a softer side to her nature. When, after her tragic death, some of her letters to her intimate friends were published, they were a revelation to the public-particularly perhaps to that section of it which read the conservative press, which usually referred to her as "the Red Fury." Those letters were poetic in the truest sense of the word. The intense political activity and scientific work of Rosa Luxemburg expressed but one aspect of her mind and personality."

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past."

"Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"But here is the "ego" of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history — this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia."

"If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance."

"In the present situation, such an experiment would be doubly dangerous to the Russian Social Democracy. It stands on the eve of decisive battles against tsarism. It is about to enter, or has already entered, on a period of intensified creative activity, during which it will broaden (as is usual in a revolutionary period) its sphere of influence and will advance spontaneously by leaps and bounds. To attempt to bind the initiative of the party at this moment, to surround it with a network of barbed wire, is to render it incapable of accomplishing the tremendous task of the hour."

"Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ."

"But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment."

"The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility."

"Social Democratic centralism cannot be based on the mechanical subordination and blind obedience of the party membership to the leading party center. [...] The Social Democratic movement cannot allow the erection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat."

"For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself."

"Lenin's thesis is that the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees of the party. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organizations. This way, the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself, the composition of the highest party organs. The Central Committee would be the only thinking element in the party. All other groupings would be its executive limbs."