I got commissioned to write the book. There is also a certain lingering sadness as Rosa could never quite master the exchange of love the proportions are always off and her slightly more than occasional longings for a bobo [child] remained unfulfilled. She summed up the fundamental duplicity of institutionalised Marxism in the caustic phrase: Workers of the world unite in peacetime; but in war slit one anothers throats! Her indictment of war is, however, still framed by the Marxist conception of competitive capitalism as the motor of military imperialism. James would follow Marx and use this figure of the leap in their analyses of capitalism and of its overcoming. She wonders if the latter will ever understand economics, and more freely lets her literary tastes dictate his. This is not just some fairy story for children, but a scientifically verified observation. This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. [19], Indeed, she fantasied about a life in which she could paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals.[20] Still, as the years in prison, and World War I, dragged on, her thoughts returned to Mimi. Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire. Beyond this, she was a powerful speaker, a natural theorist and editor, a peer, a friend, and occasional lover to many of the leaders of the international labor and socialist movements: including Leo Jogiches, Karl Kautsky, Liebknecht, and Clara Zetkin. It is available with English subtitles. [25] Clayton J. Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 18801945, (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016) p. 93, Site designed and developed by Social Ink, https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/image/media-143046, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm. There she diagnosed a lacuna in Marx's prose and solved a problem with his theory of accumulation that is still appreciated today. She is alive and well and speaking at a street meeting near you. A student of botany, Luxemburg recorded that, we busied ourselves with the flowers, that is, Mimi and I, she is helping me skillfully the whole time. Mimi too had an epistolary habit: There is always a big celebration at my house when a letter from you arrives. For all this, though, it is perhaps her letters for which she is most beloved. Only for Marx, capital, not a feline, does the leaping. [13] To Hans Diefenbach, 27 August 1917, Letters, 439. Perhaps thats why Red Emma Goldman claimed she herself was like a cat, no matter where she was thrown from and regardless of where she was forced to jump, she always landed, she said, cat-like on her paws.[6]. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. On my grave, as in my life, there will be no pompous phrases. However, members of the working class not just young people in general are spearheading the current political motion. Even Mimi sniffs at it lovingly (she calls that reading the letter), she responds to a political ally. I get up early, work, go for a stroll, and have conversations with Mimi,[3] Luxemburg wrote to one lover. Her letters reveal a revolutionary intellectual who was deeply committed to socialism and defiantly humane. In asking how our society is structured and for whom, Marxism turns toward economic history. 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. 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. In this sense, as Luxemburg argued in 1898, militarism remains one of the driving forces of capitalist economic development. rosa luxemburg cat name mimi. Most likely it arose because people could not believe that small birds could fly such long distances under their own power. She was a woman who faced multiple oppressions and completely vaulted over them to become an economics lecturer at a time when there was only one country in Europe that women could graduate from university. But, alas, if we have learned anything from our study of revolutions in Modernity, it is that where there is revolution, it will need to overcome a counter-revolution. The aspirations of a political leader are reduced to the terms of personal insecurity and emotional frustration, with Ettinger insisting that the fears and dreams of the famous revolutionary remained those of the hurt child and the desperate adolescent. Mimi was Rosa Luxemburg's cat. Plus a change, as the French say. 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. This is a remarkable claim, and quite possibly an exaggerated one. [9] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschdigten Leben, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. For the uninitiated, the Letters, with all their exquisite details, read as well as any novel: we learn how Luxemburg's Persian cat, Mimi, behaved in the presence of Lenin; how much money she borrowed to keep her numerous publications in the hands of intellectuals and workers; which volumes of German literature she craved; and we hear her . As a Marxist who believed in participatory democracy, her ideas are ripe for rediscovery in the Eastern bloc, not least in the country of her birth. [2] See Jodi Dean, Comrade, (New York: Verso, 2019) for the terms longer genealogy. 'It is only by accident that I am whirling in the maelstrom of history,' Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in September 1915; 'actually I was born to tend geese.'. As Luxemburg said of her revelatory economic treatise while imprisoned in 1917: I know very well, Hnschen [Hans Diefenbach], that my economic works are written as though for six persons only. But actually, you know, I write them for only one person: for myself. Even in a mere twenty-one years, it has aged poorly. [7] Of course, it is also possible that the great tits were simply waiting to be fed. b. circa 02.2014 in a "really bad parking lot" in New York. These letters will give those unfamiliar with their authors importance valuable insight into her brilliant and unfashionable way of thinking. All this is very salutary as an antidote to the myth of the heroic revolutionary. Luxemburg famously solved a lacuna in Marxs theory of accumulation, but this question of animal freedom, of who leaps where and from who we take our cue to leap, that constitutes a lacuna in her own life. If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This is an archival, project, and I could not find what was not there. I myself dont know why this affects me so; perhaps its because Im reminded again that life is a beautiful story. Reality both personal and political could never live up to her exalted expectations. With the war over and Germanys politics suddenly flexible and contested, sailors began to mutiny in port after port; workers councils seized control of key German cities; a socialist republic was declared in Berlin. [6] To Luise Kautsky, 26 January 1917, Letters, 368. [15] Written in February 1922, first published in Pravda, 16 April 1924. 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. Luxemburg writes: This leap is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development.[23] We must highlight a different aspect, namely a certain irony: a cat-lover uses a feline term in her hope of abandoning non-human animals in a quest for freedom. Rosa Luxemburg was passionate about many things, among them, the natural world and especially bird life. 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. A disease in early life kept her in bed for a whole year. .) Get our print magazine for just $20 a year. 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. Tracking Luxemburgs relationships with men is fascinating. When I read something like this, I am so thrilled and it puts me in such a mood of joie de vivre that I begin to consider even Breslau a place fit for humans to live in. With whom was Rosa to identify in her struggle to escape from a constricting environment? One could be forgiven for wondering whether cats are to non-human animals what the proletariat is to all other classes, namely midwives of a different world. Not surprisingly, she fed them. In those openings, we may locate how felines have long been creatures of economic critique and communist possibility. Luxemburg, Rosa 1870 or 1871-1919. But if Luxemburg had been so deeply scarred by that childhood trauma, she would scarcely have had the courage to return to Warsaw to help lead the revolution in 1905, at the risk of imprisonment and the firing-squad. Here in Germany, Rosa writes in a letter, radishes are served with cheese after dinner. So persistent is Ettingers emphasis on personal matters that political commitments fade into the background. There are two dangers in this kind of psychologising. 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. It is this capacity for enhanced experience which gives her letters, particularly those written from prison, their incandescent quality. It was in Zurich during the 1890s that she was drawn into the world of Marxist politics and made the most significant personal encounter of her life: with Leo Jogiches, a wealthy political exile from Lithuania. Illustration of Rosa Luxemburg and her cat Mimi by Kate Evans, taken from Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. The picture they give is of a woman both passionate and insecure. But what is known is that humanitys relationships with non-human animals is exploitative and unsustainable. An eagle a powerful bird soaring to great heights. [12] Angela Davis, Angela Davis on the Struggle for Socialist Internationalism and a Real Democracy, interviewed by Astra Taylor, Jacobin, October 21, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/angela-davis-socialist-internationalism-democracy. [5] To Mathilde Jacob, 3 May 1917, Letters, 407. It is not difficult to imagine what was going on in Rosas mind, Ettinger writes in an early section dealing with the Warsaw pogrom of 1881. And if in impatience I dont live through it, then dont forget that on my gravestone nothing is to appear except that Tsvee-tsvee [16] To Sophie Liebknecht, 23 May 1917, Letters 413. Only to the rude ear of one who is quite indifferent does the song of a bird seem always the same. Rosa Luxemburg was a tiny Jewish refugee revolutionary socialist limping woman who was born in 1871. Thomas SpenceCat Coin for a Utopian Economy[8], From Niccol Machiavelli to Adam Smith, from Friedrich Engels to Louise Michel, from Rosa Luxemburg to John Maynard Keynes, and yes, Karl Marx himself, those who have studied the relationship between state power and economic power, those who have contemplated and indeed instantiated how different that relationship could be, have used cats to do so. Sections. Thats why the Spaniards call it Hormiguero the ant-bird. Monthly Review Press, 2004. 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. In presenting the past through this sometimes disjointed feline narrative I have followed Marx, who stressed the importance of understanding history not as a seamless continuum, but rather as constituted by moments of break and rupture, of forward and backward lurches. Where he espoused armed insurrection led by professional revolutionaries and an authoritarian Communist Party, she saw a revolution in which the masses would seize power by sheer weight of numbers. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 82. Supported by a modest allowance from her family, she moved in 1889 to Switzerland, traditional haven for the radical Russian and Polish intelligentsia. Moreover, she claims to a trusted friend that she wrote it for an audience of one. She took an interest in each of her students and was willing to carry on individual tuition after hours. What it does instead is provide an essential portrait of a committed intellectual. Mimi and I are alone together, she related to a friend. One reason why reading hundreds of pages of personal correspondence is so invigorating is because Luxemburgs mind never had a chance to slow with age. 07 Dec 2022 22:41:59 Accompanying an extensive glossary of personal names, abbreviations, and publications, the Verso edition also boasts more letters and footnotes than the German version, these being the only thing remotely dull or academic about the text.

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