[11] To Sophie Liebknecht, 23 May 1917, Letters, 411. The overall impression is of a woman who was all too human, who suffered from overwork, stress, depression and sleeplessness and, like other women, had to put up with headaches and menstrual pains, and agonised over whether it was possible to combine the desire to have children with the demands of her career. For her, this was inseparable from her passion for human liberation. The position of the Jewish community in the Russian-governed Kingdom of Poland was precarious; a pogrom which occurred in Warsaw in 1881, after the family had moved there, was a sinister sign of the times. Regardless, whatever role Luxemburg actually plays in the history of Marxist thought cannot be discerned from her Letters. A public intellectual, Luxemburg participated directly in two revolutions, and offered timely, widely publicized commentary on others. Edward Timmss review of Elzbieta Ettingers biography of Rosa Luxemburg (LRB, 4 June) includes a reference to a revolutionary of the type described by Bakunin, illustrated by an unattributed (and inaccurate) quotation from the first of the Rules which must guide the Revolutionary. SIR In her biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Elzbieta Ettinger attributed the Catechism of a Revolutionary to Bakunin and Nechaev jointly. This is an archival, project, and I could not find what was not there. [1] To Sophie Liebknecht, 2 May 1917. At Wronke, she was allowed freedom of movement within the fortress grounds during daylight hours. Unfortunately, Ettinger takes the fact that Luxemburg did not subsequently make any significant reference to that pogrom, and indeed attached no importance to her Jewish origins, as proof that she was haunted by a specifically Jewish sense of insecurity. Sections. In fact, this document was almost certainly written by Nechaev, probably in Switzerland though possibly in Russia early in 1869, before being smuggled back into Russia, where it was one of the items seized by the Police in raids on his circle later in 1869, and was first published in the official report of their trial in 1871. The first real capitalist empire, Great Britain, adopted a leonine symbol, while some of the most powerful worker actions against capitalism have been known as wildcat strikes. Christian Aquino on August 22, 2020 at 1:10 . Empathy, as Bernard Crick pointed out in his biography of George Orwell, is no substitute for evidence. But cats have also been called on to oppose such movements, and some of economic historys most rapacious and atavistic rulers have passed their days in private menageries, staring into the eyes of big cats in kin-like fashion. The logic is circularlike a cat chasing its tail.[15] Luxemburgs answer departed from the feline circularity she used in her analysis. Saul K. Padover and Progress Publishers, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm. Greenfinch Chloris chloris At five hundred and twelve pages, this collection, the most complete available in English, returns the personal struggles of Rosa often omitted by earlier editorsto the life of Luxemburg. But a specter is haunting Marxism, the specter of the cat, and the time has come for a feline critique, both of capitalism and of Marxism. A heightened perception of life was one of Luxemburgs greatest gifts: but in practical terms it was a source of disillusionment. Now we know that they do so by storing fat in their bodies to fuel their journey. Rosa Luxemburg, (born March 5, 1871, Zamo, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]died January 15, 1919, Berlin, Germany), Polish-born German revolutionary and agitator who played a key role in the founding of the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League, which grew into the Communist Party of Germany. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. It was Rosas exceptional intelligence which enabled her to emerge from this milieu into the great world of European politics. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Mathilde Jacob, secretary, comrade and friend of Rosa Luxemburg, was to die in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943.[9]. Mimi is Pokimane's pet and belongs to the female gender. On my grave, as in my life, there will be no pompous phrases. Marx for Cats should be understood as what the philosopher Walter Benjamin called a Tigersprung, or a tigers leap into the past. The icon and the index can never be fully separated, and the symbolic feline history I uncover doubles as a material history in which both human and non-human actors who undertook revolutionary activity left traces of a changed world. 104 followers. Her voluminous letters convey a sense of pain, yet Luxemburg never lost her rebellious disposition and she remained determined to continue the struggle and make the socialist revolution, which she helped to do upon her release, in Germany, in 1918-19. 5 (1976), 177. One exception is a letter to her lover, Hans Diefenbach, where she gives a description of bird migration that she, as one of the greatest minds of the time, seems to have believed in all seriousness, but is no longer credible. Born in Poland, Luxemburg had become an important figure in the world socialist movement by 1913. And do you know what that means, Miss Jacob? We should not be misled by the frequent references in her writings to economic determinants and objective historical forces. [1] She had first encountered the feline some years before while teaching at a socialist party school, adopted her, and given her a Hebraic name, Mimi, which means both rebellion and bitter. She joined a revolutionary party called Proletariat, founded in 1882, some 21 years before the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) came into being. Modern studies of bird behaviour confirm that birds do sometimes respond to human music. Rosa Luxemburg's magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, was in fact composed with help from her cat Mimi. As the imperialist first World War raged, Luxemburg was imprisoned for insulting the Kaiser. But Luxemburgs view of war as the outcome of intensified competition between military-industrial systems still has applications for the rivalry between Soviet state capitalism and the corporate capitalism of the West. Polish was the language spoken in the Luxemburg home, Yiddish the language of commerce, Russian the language of the state education system. It was in her letters from prison that Luxemburg wrote about birds in particular, those written in the period from October 1916 to July 1917, when she was held at the fortress of Wronke (now Wronki in Poland). I am sorry that in my compressed account of her argument (LRB, 4 June) Nechaevs name was omitted and I am grateful to Mary Lewis for her clarification. .) This does not merely apply to the United States and the Soviet Union, each of which is currently estimated to devote over 25 per cent of its gross domestic product to military projects. 2 Comments. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. The great merit of the book is that Ettinger has immersed herself so deeply in Rosas correspondence she edited the volume of Rosas letters to Leo Jogiches, Comrade and Lover (1979). Long before Lukacs she identified class-consciousness as the key to the political future. Rosa dreamed of living openly as man and wife and of a complete sharing of love and work together. The water buffalos, the birds, Mimi, these animals do seem to have been Luxemburgs comrades. Posts Tagged. Thus far, we have not witnessed Luxemburgs rhetoric surfacing in protest literature, but perhaps that will change with Versos massive release of Luxemburgism in the coming years. Luxemburg was internationalist in orientation and unflinchingly dedicated to a radical democratic vision. It is because of this wishful thinking that she failed where Lenin succeeded. She was delighted when at last she had an apartment of her own, took great pains over the choice of clothes and furniture, enjoyed dinner parties, had problems with domestic servants, and was happiest when curled up at home with Mimi, her cat. b. circa 02.2014 in a "really bad parking lot" in New York. And readers in Western countries cannot afford to ignore her identification of the militarised economy as the endemic disease of a system on course for self-destruction. Her public life was not some kind of compensation for personal disillusionment. There she diagnosed a lacuna in Marx's prose and solved a problem with his theory of accumulation that is still appreciated today. is an active member of Unite the Union in England and has written on international issues and other topics for, Marxist-Humanism in the Heat of the Present, 2017 The International Marxist-Humanist, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_(cockatoo), [Book Review] Ukraine: Voices of Resistance and Solidarity, Stop Russias Imperialist War on Ukraine! Luxemburg, Rosa 1870 or 1871-1919. But she shows that Rosas life was also enriched by a number of affectionate relationships with women, most of them members of the socialist movement like Luise Kautsky and Sonja Liebknecht. The publication in 1898 of her brilliant pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? established her almost overnight as one of the leading left-wing theorists of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP). However, the warbler family is doing fairly well: most European species have a conservation status of green least concern. Her multiple stays in prison become needed respite quality time spent in cells with other radicals, or alone focusing on her work. She is alive and well and speaking at a street meeting near you. Not because of the song they sing for people, but rather it was the picture of the silent, irresistible extinction of these defenceless little creatures which hurt me to the point where I had to cry. In the eighteenth century, French and Haitian revolutionaries were denigrated as tigers by conservatives who opposed them; in the twentieth century, the Black Panther Party insisted that capitalism was a fundamentally racist system and demanded its overthrow. Thats why the Spaniards call it Hormiguero the ant-bird. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza. Increasingly systematic forestry, gardening and agriculture are, step by step, destroying all natural nesting and breeding places: hollow trees, fallow land, thickets and shrubs, withered leaves on the garden grounds. by Elzbieta Ettinger. . What is surprising is that Luxemburg was aware of habitat loss and its impact on bird populations over a century ago. This volume does not lend any landmark insight into Luxemburgs political thought, nor does it stand alone as a triumph of feminism. It is available with English subtitles. Find out more about the London Review of Books app. [13] Marx for Cats offers one such imagining. She argued there must be an outside, and only if there are times/spaces of non-capitalism, can capitalism continue its expansion, which it does through a combination of imperialism and forms of credit/debt. Debates with Leo about social propriety were no less spirited (we are told) than their discussions of the Prussian military budget. Ettinger also charts Rosas more transient love affairs: with Costia, the son of her SPD colleague Clara Zetkin, an idealistic young man 15 years her junior; with Peter Levi, her defence counsel in a spectacular political trial they had a brief and intense affair in 1914; and Hans Diefenbach, the doctor with whom she conducted her last romantic affair in her letters from prison.