My Amazon Review of Dana Mills' "Rosa Luxemburg"

 

Red Rosa

 

Dana Mills, a self-proclaimed socialist feminist, has written a very hagiographic biography of the early 20^th Century socialist intellectual and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. At least to me, she has grafted her 21^st century politics of enviro-feminism on to Luxemburg’s world view. Luxemburg was a one of a kind rising from a middle-class Jewish family in Poland to become one of the leading socialist intellectuals overcoming the sexism of the day. However, Mills is practically silent on what made Rosa a socialist, a real failure of the book. Another failure is that the book is over-loaded with socialist jargon that tries even the most stout-hearted.

 

At a very young age she wrote a critique of Eduard Bernstein’s reformism which was to become the basis of European social democracy. She takes a no compromise position with capitalism. And nearly unprecedented for the times Luxemburg received a doctorate in law in Switzerland. From Switzerland she moves to Germany and becomes a member of the Social Democratic Party and takes up with one of its leaders, Leo Jogiches. Because of Jogiches family wealth Luxemburg acquires a taste for bourgeois lifestyle, not atypical.  Along the way she writes here opus “The Accumulation of Capital” on Marxist economics.

 

Mills rightly portrays Luxemburg as an internationalist. She opposes Polish nationalism and is a firm believer in proletarian internationalism. That belief falters as most of the working-class parties join hands in supporting their respective nations at the start of World War I.  Her internationalism puts her athwart the leading political force of the 20^th century, nationalism. In this sense she is more Trotsky then Lenin.

 

Luxemburg was a critic of the Leninism in Russia. She believed in a bottom up socialism, not the top down dictatorship of Lenin.  The problem is that full blown socialism can only be accomplished at the point of a gun.

 

After being released from jail in 1918 she joins up with Karl Liebknecht and others to form the German Communist Party. The antecedent of which was formed a few years early in opposition to World War I. She is part of the Spartakist faction that would lead a revolt against the nascent social democratic government. The Spartakists were brutally suppressed leading to her murder at the hands of the Freicorps. Here there is no criticism of the revolt. Why would any serious leftist oppose the first and very fragile social democratic government in Germany? That government had enough problems dealing with the Right that it had to face off against the Left. It reinforces my view that the worst thing that happened to the Left in the 20^th century was the Bolshevik Revolution which split the Left and hardened the Right.

 

Mills notes one of Luxemburg’s famous sayings: “freedom is the freedom for one who thinks different.” I only wish that were true of today’s Left with its odious cancel culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2SSCGZ7DTIJSQ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv