I am thinking of George Carlin’s 1972 seven “dirty” words routine. These words barely raise an eyebrow now. We have commodified images of Blacks, particularly of Black women. The best collaborators are betrayers.

But say the word “socialism.”

Enslaved Blacks were capitalism’s greatest commodity at one time. Exploitation of Black labor institutionalized capitalism in the New World.

But say the word “socialism.”

In the Occupy Movement is a young Black woman who can mention the word “capitalism.” It must come to an end. Well, finally! Revolution! But then - among the enslaved of the world, we have it “better” than them. Presumably, she is referring to the enslaved workers in Africa and Asia.

This is not necessarily true. A middle-class Ethiopian receiving a salary from an NGO could have it “better” than she does here and what is it that the enslaved elsewhere produce for Westerns like her to have it “better” than they do? Why this statement at all if engaged in revolutionary practice?

Red Rosa: The Writing of the Martyred Socialist Rosa Luxemburg Give a Plaintive View of History’s Paths Not Taken, the late Christopher Hitchens’ review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, [1] a collection edited by George Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, (Verso Books, 2011) appeared in The Atlantic, June 2011 - before Hitchens’ death in December, 2011.

Of Rosa Luxemburg, Hitchens wrote that she was “the most brilliant - and the most engaging” of the Marxist intellectuals who analyzed 20th Century totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. The “Polish-born Jew,” he adds, was “the most charismatic figure in the German Social Democratic Party” (SPD). This is the same SPD, Hitchens points out, whose majority leadership voted in August 1914 to “take part in the greatest fratricide the world had ever seen.”

Of the first statement regarding the “brilliant” Luxemburg, I will return to shortly, but of the latter statement, I will let Luxemburg speak:

Luxemburg held her ground. For her, the Kaiser had to go and for that decision, Hitchens notes, she was “imprisoned.” Charisma, it seems, was not a factor Luxemburg relied on to make her decision to oppose support for the First World War.

I have read Hitchens’ articles in Vanity Fair, and I have read at least one of his books, but while I read his review of the Luxemburg letters, I could not forget that its author was the one and the same Christopher Hitchens, with the benefit of learning from the devastations of two world wars, the Korean, Vietnam wars, and Bush Senior’s attack on Iraq in 1991, who defended the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same Hitchens who was once a socialist, and who at the end, proclaimed, on occasion, that he was still a Marxist. And the invasion of Iraq that serves the interests of the ruling class, the capitalists. But it seems Hitchens held his ground and had his motives, too, for supporting an Empire’s war.

Hitchens continues: “the central tranche of this collection of letters was written during that bleak incarceration, and that political relapse.”

Is “bleak” the correct word here? (Women are never “heard” even when they articulate their thoughts in writing!). “Bleak” is not a word that Rosa Luxemburg would have attributed to her numerous stays in a prison cell. Nor would she have said that the times in which she lived were “bleak.” On the contrary! For Luxemburg, the times were ripe for a revolution!

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.

Even from a prison cell, Luxemburg begins a letter (1917) to a friend, Louise Kautsky in which the subject is life itself - in revolutionary practice:

In the same letter, she writes:

And this:

This is the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the one who, unlike the “comrades with each day are backsliding most blatantly, following in the wake of the national patriotic government policy,” found the betrayals of these comrades on the Left and in SPD far more devastating and bleaker in the midst of the uprising workers and the uprising colonized (“Letter to Karl Moor,” Sudende, October 12, 1914). Luxemburg opposed imperialism and believed in and worked for an international workers’ uprising. Her work as a teacher at the SPD school in Berlin helped her “analysis theoretically the ramifications of imperialism” (“Introduction” to The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004).

Once World War I was underway, Luxemburg writes of the war within the SPD: where the “internal development of the party…undergoing an unstoppable process in which different elements are being sliced off...”

What happens between a fling with socialism and a very public war cry to invade a nation that did not send 19 hijackers to the U.S. in September of 2001?

“The beliefs people have will be formed under the pressure of the material and social circumstances in which they live.” There are those who will struggle to survive under the conditions which offer them little more than bare substance, he adds, yet, these same people will come to recognize the hopelessness of struggle and accept their situation or they will eagerly collaborate to gain from the status quo.

Consciousness is not “independent of the contradictions of material life,” Alex Callinicos writes in The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx , and this consciousness originates from the ideologies that rise from the economic base. Callinicos continues, and I paraphrase - it is to the advantage of the ruling class to make sure people do not understand the contradictions inherent in their lives under the capitalism system and thus reject struggling against the might of the capitalist class. Thus, the “systemic beliefs” held by people about the world “can only be understood from the standpoint of their role in the class struggle. In other words, Callinicos explains, these beliefs have to be analyzed in terms of their contribution “to sustaining or undermining the prevailing relations of production.”

Luxemburg’s starting point was her understanding of this statement: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle - and she never waved.

According to editors Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson of The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, Luxemburg opposed any kind of ‘rotten compromise’ with the liberal bourgeoisie’” She called the leaders on the Left the “Patriarchs” with, as Hitchens notes, “barracks mentality.” The Patriarchs included comrade Lenin whom she admired but differed with on a number of occasions for his emphases on “organizational centralism.” Luxemburg believed in mass action of the people.

Luxemburg could not resist speaking out against the “Patriarchs” in the SPD party, in particular Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky which “earned [her] the enmity of the top SPD leaders, who used blatantly sexist invective in their private, i.e. all-male, discussion of her.” The editors provide an example of a letter written to Kautsky from August Bebel (August 10, 1910):

Luxemburg “flies off the handle and becomes hostile,” according to the Patriarchs, when, as the editors write, first Bernstein “openly tried to revise Marxism by bringing theory into line with reformist practice. Kautsky, on the other hand, continued to claim adherence to revolutionary Marxism, even as he led the party down the reformist path.”

Opportunists - Luxemburg called them!

Between September 1898 and April 1899, Luxemburg writes “Social Reform or Revolution,” (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader), as a series of articles that establishes her “as a major figure in the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International as a whole,” according to the editors of The Reader. As an analysis and critique of Bernsteins’s revisionism of Marx philosophy, Luxemburg confronts a major betrayer of the class struggle - in writing. In the day-to-day of Luxemburg’s life as a revolutionary in practice, she is less a “major player” and more someone who is courageous enough to stand up to Bernstein, who, following the death of Frederick Engels, was appointed “Marx’s literary executor.” Bernstein offers the Second International his revision of Marx’s theory on class struggle and Luxemburg responds.

Free speech is “meaningless unless it meant the freedom of “the one who thinks differently.”

The letters written before she takes up the task of responding to Bernstein reveals a woman who keeps before her the uprisings of enslaved workers attempting to free themselves from the stranglehold of the capitalists, the ruling class, while the SPD leaders were capitulating to the demands of the capitalists. (Sounds similar to the so-call “leadership” of unions and organizations and politicians today whose only interest is to appease the capitalists). In a letter to another friend, Clara Zetlin (after December 16, 1906), she is Rosa writing:

Realistically, Luxemburg was a major thorn in the side of the Patriarchs while she was alive and active! “Social Reform and Revolution” is as much an offensive tactic against the infiltration of opportunism in the SPD (beginning with its leaders who, Luxemburg argues, fail to hear the “great masses” of the party) as it is an attack on Bernstein’s practice of revisionism.

In “Social Reform and Revolution,” Luxemburg is emphatic! Reforms, she writes, are a good way to engage “in the proletarian class struggle” while “working in the direction of the final goal - the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labor.” In other words, “the practical daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for the democratic institutions, offers Social Democracy the only means of engaging” with and in the proletarian struggle. “For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reforms and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution its goal.”

However, she continues, Bernstein’s theory advocates the priority of reform. His article on “Problems of Socialism,” published in the Neue Zeit (1897-1998) and in his book, The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, Bernstein, Luxemburg writes, “tends to counsel the renunciation of the social transformation, the final goal of Social Democracy, and inversely, to make social reforms, which are the means of the class struggle, into its end.”

Luxemburg recognized then as we witness now in the 21st Century, the formation of “careerists” of the “movement,” who in their actions declare, as Bernstein did in writing, that “the final goal…is nothing to me.”

Bernstein’s misunderstanding of capitalism, Luxemburg argues, brings him to accept reform rather than revolution. His claim, writes Luxemburg, that since capitalism “shows a greater capacity of adaptation,” it follows that the “general crises” of capitalism have disappeared thanks to “the development of the credit system, employers’ organizations, wider means of communication and informational services,” is laughable now in light of the current economic crisis.

For Bernstein, Luxemburg writes, the struggle of the Social Democracy should not “direct its activity toward the conquest of political power but toward the improvement of the conditions of the working class.” In addition, the struggle “must not expect to institute socialism as a result of a political and social crisis but by means of the progressive extension of social control and gradual application of the principles of cooperation.”

With this logic, writes Luxemburg, Bernstein believes he is “in agreement with certain declarations of Marx and Engels.”

Bernstein, Luxemburg concludes, advises Social Democracy “to go to sleep now and forever, i.e., to give up the class struggle.”

Luxemburg was marginalized. Her work was excluded from not only the SPD party’s publication, Neue Zeit, but other Left publications as well.

With Clara Zetkin, Feminist, and Karl Liebknecht Luxemburg formed Die Gruppe Internationale and published Die Internationale as its journal (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader ). As a result of wartime censorship, issues of the Internationale journal were blocked; however, a year later, Luxemburg and Liebknacht formed the Spartacus Group and established its publication, Die Rote Fahne, (the Red Flag).

Luxemburg and Liebknacht joined the workers and, in Die Rote Fahne, Luxemburg called for the “occupation of all positions of power” after workers took to the streets demanding the overthrow of the Ebert-Scheidemann government (The Luxemburg Reader).

Occupation of all positions of power!

In the same letter, Luxemburg writes of awakening in the mornings “already being greeted” by the sun. After breakfast, she plays with a crystal prism, a paperweight on her desk. She puts it in the sunlight light and watches as the sunrays scatter “over the floor and walls in hundred of little splashes of rainbow light.” Mimi, her cat, enjoys the “game,” especially when she moves the prism and makes “the bright colors dart here and there and dance around.” Luxemburg enjoys the fields outside her door and gathers “fresh, juicy grass for Mimi.”

She enjoyed art and painted: “the little picture I painted has made me so happy and put me in such good spirits that I immediately started a new painting yesterday,” (“Letter to Kostya Zetkin,” [Fiedenau, August 21, 1908]). Luxemburg enjoyed poetry and Mozart. She describes in a letter to N.S. Sesyulinsky, how she “submerged” herself “in Krasinski, a Polish poet” and how she was “enraptured mostly by Mozart - The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni - that is my real ‘faith.’”

Luxemburg did not die a martyr: she lived the life of a revolutionary!

Luxemburg’s “brilliance” was her bravery to be different. To reject becoming a vessel filled with the Platonic Caves or the Absolute Spirit of Hegel (that rejects the majority of the world’s humanity). Modeling the iconic patriarchal Western “thinkers” is to ensure the survival of the imperialists/capitalists propaganda that might is right.

“Notorious among conservatives as Red Rosa,” (“Introduction by the Editor of the German Edition,” The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg) Luxemburg is alive and well. Rosa Luxemburg is everywhere the 99% protest and revolution is the goal. [4]