Women in Dark Times (6 page)

We are, therefore, still in the interregnum. Today, the situation in Egypt could not be more ominous as the military reasserts its brutal control over people and state. Still we cannot be sure which way the world will turn. Counter-revolution also contains its own element of unpredictability (although it hardly seems so at the time). ‘The Middle East is entering a long period of ferment,’ writes Patrick Cockburn, ‘in which counter-revolution may prove as difficult to consolidate as revolution.’
10
This makes Luxemburg’s unquenchable faith in justice more relevant than ever before. As Marwan Bishara has put it, those who asked too much of the Arab Spring at its outset were as misguided as those who, at the first hurdle or disappointment, pronounced the revolution dead, as many were quick to do before it had barely begun (his book is subtitled the ‘
promise
and
peril
of the Arab revolution’).
11
We need to reckon, he argued, with two propositions that do not sit comfortably together in the mind – that things can always get worse, and that the world has changed for ever. In fact it is a peculiarity of revolutionary moments that they force us to revise our sense of time, stretching us between past and future more acutely than usual, as we comb backwards for the seeds, the first signs of the upheaval, and look forwards, in exhilarated and terrified anticipation, to see what is to come. For many observers, mainly those in power, such uncertainty is a way of stalling the movement of revolution, curbing its spirit by calling it to account in advance for a future that it cannot possibly foretell. These are the harbingers of doom, the fear-mongers, who point to a range of possible outcomes – say, anarchy or Islamic control – as a way of discrediting what is happening in the moment; who manipulate the dread of a monstrous future – and the future may always be monstrous – to dull the sounds of freedom.

Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been imprisoned for opposition to the First World War, she praised her for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was sixty-three at the time. When she had visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been transparent in her eyes, which were, Luxemburg insists, younger than the rest of her by twenty years: ‘How I love you precisely for that inner uncertainty!’
12
For Luxemburg this was as much a political as a personal form of virtue. ‘Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions,’ she wrote in her 1918 essay on ‘The Russian Revolution’, also written in Breslau prison, ‘[socialism] is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future.’
13
There was, for Luxemburg, something radically unknowable at the core of political life. She could herself be tyrannical in her dealings with friend and foe, but – or rather for that very reason perhaps – she hated nothing so much as the attempt to subject the vagaries of public and private life to over-rigorous forms of control. To the immense irritation of her opponents and detractors, she elevated the principle of uncertainty to something of a revolutionary creed. It is, I will be suggesting in this chapter, the connecting thread that runs through her unwavering belief in democracy and freedom, no less than her commitment to socialism. It will also allow us to grasp the unbreakable link between what was most intimately private for her as a woman, and the public male-dominated world of politics. She is the first of the women in this book to lay down the weapon of false knowledge, and then – not bereft but strengthened – to offer that very gesture as her principle and guide. She is the first to cast her lot against omnipotence, to make her own life, both public and private, a measuring rod for injustice.

She was born in Zamo
ść
in Russian-occupied Poland in 1870. Her family moved to Warsaw when she was four – one of her earliest political memories would have been the pogrom of 1881. Secular Jews, they belonged neither in the Jewish community which rejected them, nor with the Poles whose predominant political mood was a fervent anti-Russian nationalism with which Luxemburg would never identify. From an early age, she was exposed to the perils of revolution for women – she was fifteen when Maria Bohuszewicz, head of the Central Committee of Proletariat in Warsaw, and Rosalia Felsenhard, her close collaborator, were imprisoned for sedition (both died on their way to Siberian exile).
14
She was always an outsider. She had arrived on the doorstep of the German Social Democratic party as a young Jewish woman radical in 1898. Although she never self-identified as Jewish, being Jewish is something which always identified her. As biographer El
ż
bieta Ettinger puts it, ‘she represented a nation that Germans considered inferior and a race that offended their sensibilities.’
15
None of that was altered – in fact in many ways it was exacerbated – by the fact that she rapidly rose up the echelons of the party to become a star. In the words of Hannah Arendt, she ‘was and remained a Polish Jew in a country she disliked and a party she soon came to despise’.
16
The misogyny she unleashed, which we have already seen, would become legendary – Adler’s description of Luxemburg as a ‘poisonous bitch’, Bebel evoking in his reply her ‘wretched female’s squirts of poison’ (their exchange at least has the clarity of their revulsion).

Not just a woman and a Jew, she was also partly crippled, walking with a pronounced limp (after a misdiagnosed childhood illness). She never talked about it, except possibly in her famous ‘Junius’ pamphlet, smuggled out of prison and anonymously published in 1915, when she accused the war of reducing the labouring population to ‘the aged, the women, the maimed’, words which we might read as painfully invoking a now older image of herself, since by then she was herself all three.
17
She never belonged. ‘A severe criminal stands before you, one condemned by the state,’ she announced in August 1914 to the protest meeting outside the Frankfurt court after her trial for inciting public disobedience against the imminent war, ‘a woman whom the prosecution has described as rootless.’
18
She took pride in being, in the words of the prosecutor, ‘a creature without a home’.
19
She could not – she did not ever want to – hide herself. But the very obliqueness of her position, her status as outsider, also gave her a kind of freedom to think the un-thought, to force the unthinkable into the language of politics. It is my argument in these pages, something I have long believed, that this is one of the supreme and unique tasks of feminism, what it has to contribute to political understanding. I now realise that, perhaps without knowing it, I got the idea from Rosa Luxemburg.

*

What is political thought? How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? Perhaps, Luxemburg’s life and writing suggest, it might be a peculiarity of women who find themselves on – or rather propel themselves on to – the world stage at such moments to go a little bit too far (according to the crippling and ever-ready norms of judgement). Everything Luxemburg touched, she pushed to a kind of extreme – ‘
jusqu’à outrance
’, or ‘to the outer limit’, to use her own phrase, the slogan she proposed to Jogiches.
20
‘We live in turbulent times,’ she wrote in 1906 to Luise and her husband Karl Kautsky – also from prison, this time in Warsaw, convicted of aiming to overthrow the Tsarist government – when ‘ “All that exists deserves to perish” ’(lines from Goethe’s
Faust
).
21
It is of course the whole point of a revolution that you cannot know what, if anything, can or should survive. For Luxemburg the danger was as real as it was inspiring. ‘The revolution is magnificent,’ she wrote again in 1906, ‘Everything else is bilge [
Quark
].’ (The German
Quark,
which has since made its way into English, literally means full, soft cheese.)
22

In whatever conditions she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of fourteen political prisoners crammed into a single cell – Luxemburg never lost her fervour, her joy as she put it amidst the horrors of the world. ‘My inner mood’, she wrote after listing the indignities of her captivity, ‘is, as always, superb.’
23
‘See that you remain a human being,’ she wrote to Mathilde Wurm from Wronke prison in December 1916. ‘To be a human being is the main thing above all else.’
24
‘And that’, she presses on, ‘means to be firm and clear and
cheerful
, yes cheerful in spite of everything and anything because howling is the business of the weak.’
25
As so often with Luxemburg, the firmness is somewhat misleading – in the same letter she admits to knowing no recipe for being a human being, only when a person ‘
is
one’.
26
Energy and enthusiasm are, however, key. ‘The tiny, fragile Rosa’, wrote Zetkin, ‘had become the embodiment of unparalleled energy.’
27
‘Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,’ Luxemburg proclaimed in one of her very last letters, ‘what more could we want of ourselves!’
28
Luxemburg had, we could say, the relish and courage of her convictions (although convictions might turn out to be not quite the right word). There is no one, I will risk saying, who better captures the spirit – the promise and the risk (or peril) – of revolution than Luxemburg.

Two years after Luxemburg was murdered, Clara Zetkin returned to Germany from a visit to Moscow with a recommendation from Lenin to publish her collected works. In spite of her ‘errors’, Luxemburg was for Lenin the ‘eagle of the revolution’. One manuscript, however, Zetkin had instructions to burn: ‘The Russian Revolution’ of 1918 (whether this was Lenin’s own instruction, or came from others in the Politburo, is unclear).
29
Luxemburg had written the manuscript in her prison cell. Almost invariably she welcomed her prison sentences as an opportunity for thought, whether concerning matters of politics or the heart. Famously, she wrote some of her most eloquent letters from prison (as the 1921
Letters from Prison
to Sophie Liebknecht was the first publication to make clear).
30
As brave as it was controversial, ‘The Russian Revolution’ offers one of the most powerful entries into the political corridors of her mind. Unpublished in her lifetime, the essay did not appear until 1922, when it was published by Paul Levi, her former lawyer and some say briefly her lover. Levi chose his moment carefully, preparing the manuscript only after the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 which marked the first revolt of the people against the Bolshevik regime.

In fact Luxemburg’s praise for Russia’s revolutionary moment was without limit – her passion for the revolution was twinned with her deep-rooted hatred of war. It was, she opens her essay, the ‘mightiest event of the War’, ‘its outbreak, its unexampled radicalism, its enduring consequences’ the strongest rejoinder to the ‘lying phrases’ of official German Social Democracy which had presented an essentially imperialist war as a battle to liberate the oppressed people of Russia from the Tsar.
31
The day when her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, voted in favour of the war munitions budget in August 1914 was, it is generally agreed, the darkest day of Rosa Luxemburg’s life. According to Zetkin, both she and Luxemburg had seriously contemplated suicide. Instead of uniting against war and in their own shared interests, the workers of the world would now be steeped in each other’s blood. In response to the tragedy, she suggested – with the biting irony that was a hallmark of her speeches and writing – an amendment to the famous ending of
The Communist Manifesto
: ‘Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat!’
32
In one fell swoop, the Russian Revolution of 1917 overthrew the Tsar, exposed German Social Democracy’s hypocritical capitulation to an imperialist war, and put paid once and for all to the belief that Germany, or rather central Europe, was the advanced civilisation, the properly industrialised society, and therefore the older brother of revolutionary potential from which the backward Russians had everything to learn. Much of the hostility towards Luxemburg was therefore pure chauvinism. If she was hated by her Social Democratic peers, it was at least as much for her unconcealed enthusiasm for political developments in Russia as for her opposition to the war of which her once revolutionary comrades – ‘of late lamented memory’, as she scathingly puts it – had become the willing, murderous, parties.
33

It is a peculiarity of Luxemburg’s thought – one of her unique contributions – that her enthusiasm for revolution was not tempered by critique but rather intensified. In ‘The Russian Revolution’, her two main bones of contention with the Bolsheviks were the issue of land distribution to the peasants (which she feared would simply create a new form of private property) and that of national self-determination. She abhorred nationalism of any kind, even for a previously oppressed people like the Poles longing to break free of Russia. She was convinced, as history would bear her out, that national self-definition could only lead in time to pride, exclusivity and war. But running through these critiques and in a way their foundation was the issue of democracy and freedom. Luxemburg was the conscience of the revolution, calling it to account for a spirit too easy for the inheritors of revolution to re-repress (again she could have been talking about today). ‘Revolutions’, she had already admonished Lenin in her famous 1905 essay on ‘The Mass Strike’, ‘do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with them.’
34
Famously she accused Lenin as early as 1904 of subordinating Russia to the ‘sterile spirit of the night-watchman state’.
35
As she acknowledged in ‘The Russian Revolution’, no one knew better than Lenin that socialism demands a ‘complete spiritual transformation in the masses’.
36
For seizing the moment of revolution, even for leading it, Lenin earned her unfailing respect. Her critique did not cloud their personal relations (they met several times and enjoyed each other’s company). But, she insisted with uninhibited ruthlessness, he is ‘completely mistaken’ in his means: ‘decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror’ (
Schreckensherrschaft).
37
Critics have argued that this disagreement can only be understood by recognising that Soviet Russia, unlike Germany, lacked the leadership and party organisation to keep the revolution in place. Luxemburg knew this. She had no issue with leadership – she was a leader herself. She is talking about power, about what happens – as feminism has always cautioned – when authority falls into the trap of starting to believe in itself. She was never, her first biographer Peter Nettl insists, ‘interested in power for its own sake’.
38