Luxemburg was right
Marxism is the intellectual property of the working class
This is an English version of an article published in Der Freitag on the 150th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth
I only finally understood Rosa Luxemburg when I put my finger on a map of pre-1914 Europe and traced her movements. Zamosc, Zurich, Berlin — and then the fateful train journey to Warsaw in 1906, which took her out of the world of social-democratic respectability into one of strikes, pogroms, bombings and a five-month spell in jail.
Despite more than forty years of engagement with Luxemburg’s thoughts and writings, until I “put her on the map” I had never properly understood how far West the Russian Empire stretched, and how close the social maelstrom of its borderlands was to the “safe” world of the Kaissereich and the International.
To cross that border voluntarily, to walk into the chaos with a fake ID, having spent your adult life as the token woman in the group photos of elderly, bearded, socialist leaders, took not just courage but belief.
And Rosa Luxemburg believed in the working class. Not just as the agent of history, but as the living source of Marxism and the test of its validity.
When I became politically active, in the mid 1970s, the left was in the process of…
