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

My Amazon Review of Robert Gerwarth's "November 1918: The German Revolution"

The Socialist Center Holds

University College of Dublin historian Robert Gerwarth has written an important book on the creation of the Weimar Republic that rose out of the ashes of Hohenzollern Empire in 1918. Although many historians have viewed the new republic as doomed from the start, Gerwarth rightly believes it had a fighting chance to succeed. His history is largely written through the lens of the MSPD (Majority Social Democratic Party) and its leader Friedrich Ebert.

His story begins in 1914 with the start of World War I with the Social Democratic Party unified save for Karl Liebknecht in supporting war credits to finance the war. The party splits a year later between pro-war (MSPD) and anti-war factions (USPD) with the majority supporting the war. In late 1917 and early 1918 with Russia’s withdrawal from the war a wave of optimism sweeps Germany. That was quickly dispelled as the Americans enter the war and the final German offensive is crushed in August of that year. Nevertheless, even with potential defeat Germans remain optimistic that President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points would lead to a just settlement.  

With Germany headed for defeat in the fall of 1918 a revolution starting with sailors in Kiel spreads throughout the country. Unlike the French and Russian revolutions which started in the capitals, here the German revolution starts in the periphery and ends up in Berlin in November.  On November 9 a republic is proclaimed in Weimar with Friedrich Ebert as its president.

Then things go to hell in a handbasket. A revolution from the Left is orchestrated by the Spartacists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. That revolution is crushed by the army with the rightwing paramilitary Freicorps. Similarly the so-called Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich is again crushed by the army and the paramilitaries. Here we see Ebert showing no mercy for his former colleagues on the Left. From the Right there is the Kapp Putsch which is put down by Ebert calling for a general strike. Ebert and the MSPD genuinely believed in democracy and order and even though they were men of the Left, they rightly feared the chaotic consequences of a Bolshevized Germany.

So here we have new government challenged from the Left and the Right and further it is demoralized by the harsh terms of Versailles in complete contradiction of what they believed to be the moderate terms of a Wilsonian Peace. Simply put, they were sold out by Wilson. And if that were not enough the government faces a French occupation of the Ruhr, a runaway inflation and the assassination of its highly regarded finance minister, Walter Rathenau.  Yes despite all of this by 1925 the government is stable, the center parties are in control and the extreme parties of the Right and Left are marginalized. It would take a global depression and a conspiracy of the Right and the Left to bring down Weimar. Absent that, sitting from the vantage point of 1925, the prospects for Weimar looked good.

My two quibbles with Gerwarth’s book is that he spends way to little time on the events of 1920-23 that he advertises in the beginning and he doesn’t spend much time on the role of the nonsocialist center parties had in forming the government. Otherwise “November 1918” makes for interesting history.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1W9DUGA4109F4/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Robert Gerwarth's "The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End"

The Never Ending War

Irish historian Robert Gerwarth certainly proves George Kennan’s notion that World War I was “the seminal catastrophe of this century.” To most of us in the West World War I ended on November 11, 1918. However in the East the war would rage on through 1923 and even today nearly a century later we remain prisoner of the forces it unleashed.

He also confirms the view of Ian Kershaw in his “To Hell and Back…..” that the Russian Revolution, an outgrowth of the war, paved the way for fascism by dividing the Left and hardening the Right. We see that at the outset where communists under the leadership of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht die in their attempt to seize power in 1919 Berlin. Similarly an attempt to form a Munich Soviet fails in that year as well. Put simply the Social Democratic government relied on the rightest Freicorps to put down the rebellion. In its aftermath Munich would become the festering ground for the rise of the Nazis. In Hungary Bela Kuhn, a communist, temporarily takes power only to be put down by a counter action from the Right. All the while the Russian civil war rages and within that there are the Russo-Polish and Russo-Finnish Wars, so much for the end of violence in November 1918.

For the Jews of Eastern Europe and Germany the situation turns from bad to worse. On top of the latent anti-Semitism that already existed we have the conflation of Jews with communism as much of the communist leadership in Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary are Jewish. Thus the way was paved to broaden the appeal of anti-Semitism to much of the middle-class.

Where I think Gerwarth breaks new ground I think is in his discussion on the role of Mustapha Kemal’s success on Mussolini and Hitler. Kemal defeated the Greeks in Turkey and undid the toughest settlement against the Central Powers in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres which made Turkey a vassal of the Allies. In Kemal both Hitler and Mussolini saw his success in the ethnic cleansing of the Greek population in Eastern Anatolia by force and his willingness to stand up to the allies so much so that the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne completely undid the Treaty of Sevres. By the 1930s those lessons were well learned.

There is much more to Gerwarth’s book. He discusses why Italy ended up on the winning side; it still felt like a loser. And he discusses the chaos in the Balkans that we relived once again in the 1990s. Yes, World War I is still not over. Just look at the Middle East.

The complete Amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/review/RH2HKCJZ3RUZS/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv