In Our Time - Rosa Luxemburg

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), 'Red Rosa', who was born in Poland under the Russian Empire and became one of the leading revolutionaries in an age of revolution. She was jailed for agitation and for her campaign against the Great War which, she argued, pitted workers against each other for the sake of capitalism. With Karl Liebknecht and other radicals, she founded the Spartacus League in the hope of ending the war through revolution. She founded the German Communist Party with Liebknecht; with the violence that followed the German Revolution of 1918, her opponents condemned her as Bloody Rosa. She and Liebknecht were seen as ringleaders in the Spartacus Revolt of 1919 and, on 15th January 1919, the Freikorps militia arrested and murdered them. While Luxemburg has faced opposition for her actions and ideas from many quarters, she went on to become an iconic figure in East Germany under the Cold War and a focal point for opposition to the Soviet-backed leadership.With Jacqueline Rose Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of LondonMark Jones Irish Research Council fellow at the Centre for War Studies, University College Dublinand Nadine Rossol Senior lecturer in Modern European History at the University of EssexProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Rosa Luxembourg argued for revolution in an age of revolutions. She was born in Poland in 1871, then part of the Russian Empire, yet is most rumoured for her life and brutal death in Germany in 1919.

She was a pacifist even before the First World War. which put her at odds, both of the main German party of the left, which backed the war, and with the government, which imprisoned her for much of it. She was released into a Germany in revolution and supported the even more radical Spartacist uprising in January 1919, a step too far for her opponents. She was arrested, murdered, and thrown into a canal, which, for some extinguished her and for others made her a martyr, while her ideas live on. With me to discuss the life and times of Rosa Luxembourg are Jacqueline Rose,

co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Mark Jones, Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin. Nadine Russell, senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Essex. Jacqueline Rose, what was Rosa Luxembourg's background in Poland? Well, Poland, as you said, was occupied by Tsarist Russia. So she was politicised very, very young. She was born in Zemosh, and the family moved to one. Warsaw when she was about four years old. And they were a Jewish family, but they did not live in

the Jewish quarter, as it were. They were, I think what we would describe as assimilated Jews, although in fact her father was very involved in reformed Judaism. But she was politicized from an incredibly young age. One of her first memories will have been the pogrom of 1880, which involve rape and murder across Poland. And oddly enough, the Jews, that were not in the Jewish quarter were in some ways the more vulnerable because they thought they would not be the targets of the hatred and they were completely wrong. But she also was confronted with the idea of sedition from an incredibly young age, so that when she was 14, four socialists were actually hung, executed in front of the Warsaw Citadel. And when she was

15, two remarkable women, Maria Behovic and Rosalia Felsior. and hired were tried for sedition for belonging to the proletariat committee and sent to Siberian died on their way there. So from, and this politicized her. She was offered, no, she wasn't. She was refused the gold medal for achievement as a schoolgirl on the grounds of her rebellious tendencies. So that was her sort of baptism by far into the political and imminently revolutionary life of Poland. She became as a very substantial economist and an inspired. Speaker and so on. What was her education, young education? You mentioned she didn't get the medal, but she had a good, what was the education? Well, her education was a traditional education in Poland, but she was an autodidact. She was reading Marx from a very, very young age, and she was educating herself in the classics of communism and became a fervent supporter of the communist ideal and the revolutionary ideal.

I would say by the time, well, by the time she was 18, certainly. And she had to leave Poland because she was already under observation and at risk of arrest at the age of 19. And she got out in a cart pretending that she was a Jewish girl who wanted to marry a Catholic man, her parents disapproved. So a priest got her out under a straw bed in a cart. So she was incredibly imaginative. but she was politicised from a very, very young age and she went towards what was then the classics of socialist thought

and she, as you say, Melvin, she not only read them but she mastered them and she became one of the most brilliant commentators on them. She had to get out of... Who was after her? The Polish government was after her for... Why specifically? Because she was involved in underground revolutionary movements.

In what way? How was that shared itself? Why did you threaten them? Why did it threaten them? Because this was Saris Russia and any dissent. As I said, four of the revolutionary activists were hung in the public square. So there was no dissent. And there was also a quota on Jews and schools. It was a fervently anti-Semitic country.

And there was a Polish nationalist movement that was seen as very threatening to Saris Russia. She never supported them. One of her geniuses was that she never believed in nationalism as the basis for any political identity. but she was involved in the revolutionary underground from the age of 18 onwards. And what age did she get us about on this? 19. She was 19.

Mark Jones, she moved to Berlin in her late 20s. So what happened in the 10 years between 19 and late 20s? Well, first of all, I think we should say that she's also a woman, which means she can't study at university in Zaris, Russia. So one of the other factors taking her out of Poland is that she wants to study, she wants to go to university. She's very, very, very smart. She's very intellectually gifted.

So she goes then to Switzerland, which at that time is a very liberal country, one of the most liberal in Europe. It allows women to study, also allows women from other countries to study. And also in Zurich, where she goes to, there is an enclave of emigre socialist thinkers, people like Luxembourg who are fleeing arrest.

And so she goes to Zurich, where she begins to study and lives in this milieu of European socialist emigres in Zurich. One of the people there who she meets, who becomes very influential for the rest of her life, is Leo Yogikis, who is also an emigre from Vilnius. He, like Rosa Luxembourg, he's a little bit older than her. He's also very gifted, intellectual.

He's also wanted by the Tsarist police and also decides to flee from the Russian state and goes to Zurich and they fall in love. And they are then together as a pair for much of the next 10 years. Who's supporting her? How is she supporting herself? Well, her family doesn't have much money for her.

And so from the accounts that I've read, I think, you know, Yogik is better off than Rosa. And so he's able to support her a little bit. And that frustrates her as well. but she's not particularly well off but she's able to live on the money that comes into him. Does she get what is recognisable today as a good university education does she go and to teach?

Is this time in Switzerland, it seems quite a long time, your 20 is a very important time. What else does she get from that? I think she gets an awareness of European socialism by mixing with different groups, mixing with French, with Germans, with Russians like herself. She also travels a lot.

So she goes to research in Berlin. I think her first trips to Berlin are research trips. She goes to Paris. She spends time in Paris. She gets to experience, I suppose, two different European worlds at this time. You know, the provincial university town of Zurich and then the metropolis of Paris,

which is at first a little bit scary for her, but actually over time she comes to really love Paris. And this in turn creates difficulties with her relationship with yogikas because he is in Zurich and they're writing letters to each other and she is maybe beginning to see Zurich as being a little bit,

as being a stage that's too small for her. Is she consciously building up a web of relationships in the socialist left-wing political part of Europe? It's hard to say that with certainty. I think when we look back at her life when we read things backwards into it,

we could certainly say that she appears to be an excellent networker creating alliances in different places with different socialist leaders. And so we could say she's consciously doing that. I think by the time she comes to move to Germany, it's clear that she has laid groundwork for, you know, when she's going to Germany,

she knows whose doors she's going to call on when she arrives there. She's already attending the socialist conferences, the international conferences. And so she is building a reputation while she's still in Switzerland. So when she arrives in Germany, you know, She is young and female, but she's not unknown. What lured her to Germany, do you think, Nadine? Nadine Roslin.

Her connections and her links to the left-wing and socialist sort of movement if certainly helped in bringing her to Germany if she was deeply connected to Karl Liebknecht, who was her sort of political partner for much of her time later on. And he belonged to the more radical part of the Social Democratic Party. And, you know, her inspiration of sort of socialist's ideas, the country to go to in the early 20th century, to possibly test out some of those ideas probably would have been important.

Peerial, Germany. So she saw Berlin and Germany is the best place for her to develop her own ideas. So she went with her own ideas there. She wasn't drawn there because of them. She went because of herself. It's probably a combination of both. She went with her own ideas, but she also was drawn to a quite active, you know, socialist political landscape, if you like. Could you tell us her views of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and how that changed her? But can you You know, over and answer to that, I know you're pointing to Jacqueline, but you can't not come to Jacqueline later on this. So how did, she must have some reaction that you would know about?

She was quite, she was quite impressed by the Russian Revolution. She saw, particularly when she later on compared it to what was happening in Germany as the sort of the right kind of revolution, the revolution that were, the power was going to Soviet councils, which she believed was the right kind of political form of organization. Particularly when we look at what she thought about what was happening in Germany in 1918, 1919, she felt that this was the revolution that was actually moving power to the right people rather than a revolution that only transformed the political system, but actually didn't transform the life of the people.

She seems to become prominent in, let's call it, extreme left-wing politics quite soon. There wasn't much franchise. She couldn't vote and so on. There weren't many women doing as well as she, if any, maybe one or two others. What distinguished her at that young at that time? Yes, so you're right. She couldn't vote. Women couldn't vote in Germany at this point in terms.

women only got the vote in 1819 and first voted in 19, so actually only a few days after she was killed. So she didn't experience to actually vote in Germany. And she couldn't stand for elections either. She couldn't stand for a political office. So her power was through her writing, being a political activist, being a brilliant thinker and a distinguished, journalist and publicist. And she worked within the radical part of the Social Democratic Party. So it was difficult to make her voice heard in that sense

as she couldn't engage in the political decision-making process as a woman, but also with her cooperation with quite prominent men in this particular party she was able to make her. her voice heard. Jacqueline Rose, can you give us some idea then? Thank you, Nadine. That we're in Berlin. She's working away.

She is a revolutionary. She's with important men who are doing things, but she has got no boat, and she's a woman, and we know enough about that to know that she would be marked down because of that. How was she making her voice heard? This is the key, I think.

First of all, just to stress the question of her being a woman is so important. She was not just a woman. when she was a Polish Jewish woman with a limp, right? And she was a tiny, which puts me on her side immediately. And she had this incredible capacity for public speaking. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why Leo Yochie has stayed in, you know, constructing the Polish-Lithuanian non-nationalist socialist party.

And she was in Berlin. And he, well, Luxembourg's biographer says that he wielded her like a pen. but I think a better way of putting it is that he needed her. He needed her desperately because she could work her way through the echelons of the German Social Democratic Party and she raised right to the top because of her capacity to infuse the people she spoke with. We've got the Social Democrats and there's two sides.

There's the evolutionists and the revolutionists really and she's one of the revolutionists. But they're still one party at the moment and are they separating? that they talk to each other, Asia. I'd just like to place her a little bit more in German politics at the time. The timing is before the First World War.

There's a big row. And some of her most important writing is against Edward Bernstein, who she accused of revisionism in the German Social Democratic Party. And she accused him of revisionism because he believes that capital would endlessly renew itself

on which she also partially agreed, although she firmly believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the imminence and in inevitability of revolution, she nonetheless never underestimated capital's ability to reignite itself. But she thought that his, the opposition, reform or revolution, he was on the side of reform, she said was like Hamlets to be or not to be. As far as she was concerned, to be a reformist was not to be. So she really took him to task. And that created a lot of enemies

for her. She had this idea, with more than an idea, theory, passionate belief, about spontaneity in revolutions, which is fascinating, and you pick out in your notes. Could you give us your summary of that, please? It's her most important idea for me. It's misunderstood as anything can happen, whereas actually what it means is you cannot control what will happen. It's sourced from the heart in her writing. It is the notion of something ripening.

And she says this in one of her letters to Leo Yochika, something ripening within her, which ignores all rules and conventions. She believes you cannot dictate the outcome of a revolution and if you try to dictate it you will crush it. So by dictating a revolution you kill the revolution? You kill the revolution, absolutely. And this was the basis of her fervent, passionate disagreement with Lenin and she accused him of trying to create a night watchman state.

And she said that he was playing schoolmaster with the revolution. and she used a vocabulary for spontaneity to do with a revolution billowing, flooding, gigantic networks of streams, which is almost identical to the vocabulary of somebody like Adav Suuuf describing the revolution in Tahrir Square in 2011. So she's not saying you don't have to plan. She's not saying that anything can happen,

but she's saying that if you suppress the spirit of spontaneity, you will destroy the true democratic spirit of revolution, which has to be unpredictable. Mark Jones, how is this idea of her, does she speak? Well, of course she would. She's that sort of person. She speaks about this. How is it received among her fellows, even on the left? Well, I think, you know, in the decade between before the First World War starts in 1914, she alienates a lot of her party from her both.

There was always a divide between left and right in the German Social Democratic Party at this time. But even those on the left of the party, she alienates them too, because she pushes the argument too far. Which arguments? Her argument that the party should be moving in a revolutionary direction and that it should do everything it can to bring German workers into a state where they will rise up against the state. So she's pushing for... And can we develop what she wants the German workers do? She wants them to own their own place. She wants them to strike. She wants general strikes. She wants them to be prepared to walk out on strike if war is declared. She wants them to do things which the leadership of the party don't want them to do at that time. So

the leadership of the party by the 1910s is focusing on the next election. So even though the electoral law in Germany is not equal, particularly in the state of Prussia, where workers' votes count for less than the votes of owners of property, the party leadership still thinks it will become the largest party. This is the Swiss little bit the Social Democrats. Yeah, the Social Democrats believe they'll become the largest party in 1912, and they don't want to do anything that will upset that parliamentary struggle.

And so their argument is we can move into a more aggressive form of revolutionary politics, when were the largest party, because that will be harder for the state to respond to, the harder to the state to repress. And so Rosa wants to make arguments against this. And she writes newspaper articles. I mean, this is one of the things she's doing at this time. She's teaching in the party school. She's teaching the new cadres of party leaders,

but she's also writing newspaper articles. And the newspaper editors are more conservative than Rosa Luxembourg is. And so she starts to fight with them. And so she ends up having a massive fight with Karl Kautzky, who's been one of her most important supporters and allies before this, and they end up not talking to each other from 1910 to 1914. Kautzky even suffers a nervous breakdown

partially as a result of his public row with Rosa Luxembourg. So she's alienating the left and perhaps the more important point to make when we think of the broader constellation is she's doing this all very publicly, and so those who are leading the party from the right, so the future leader Fritz Ebert

who plays a crucial role in 1918 and 1919, they already hate Rosa Luxembourg before the First World War has even started. Well, let's come to this First World War, because it was obviously a crucial thing. I'll come up to you a moment, Nadine, but just give us a quick

headline, and before we future, what led to her arrest and trial just at and just after, arrest, just at and then trial just after the beginning of the First World War? She's teaching in the school, as I say, and that's not lively enough for her, so she goes

on a speaker's tour. Yeah, but what led to her arrest? She calls for workers to act against the state. So she commits an act of verbal sedition and she's arrested for that. Because what we have, Nadine Ness, I understand it, a massive sweep of nationalists and that Kaiser calls in the German spirit,

this is a great national war, it's an imperial war run by, and the social democrats think they have to support him otherwise they'll be accused of being anti-patriotic. But she won't, Rosa Luxembourg takes against that. Could you tell me how she expresses her opposition to that very strong nationalist, imperialist,

and such have never had view? Well, she is in a party that, as you said, sort of supports the Kaiser in his war. She's not the only one who's against it. It's, as Mark pointed out earlier, it's a party that's divided among those who sort of support that type of policy and among a small minority

that doesn't from 1914 onwards. So we might need to be a bit careful about overstating that by August 1914, everyone was for the war and everyone within the Social Democrats was for the war, but the great majority was. So her opposition to this makes turns on an outsider. She publicly declares that she's against it. She also, as we said earlier, links up with powerful men. Karliebnecht is one of them.

He's a party delegate. He's a member of the parliament, and he repeatedly votes against the social democratic decision to support the Kaiser's war credits, which again directly brings her, through her link with Kaliepnacht, in an imposing position. So how is she putting her view forward? she's fallen out with newspapers. She's a suspect figure. How is she speaking in public,

or what's she doing to put this view forward? She's definitely speaking in public. She never stopped speaking in public. She's absolutely remarkable, not to speak of the flood of letters, which I know we're going to get on to in a minute. But I think we really have to give her credit for this opposition to the war.

I mean, Clara Zekkin, who was another one of her closest friends, and again, it's crucial that she has so many crucial, central women friends who she's writing to all the time. and in dialogue with, one of whom is Louise Kowtsky, of course, who is the wife of Karl Kowtsky. But what she, I mean, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg, the day that the party, the German Social Democratic Party, votes for the munitions bill to support the war, they both contemplate suicide.

They think it is a catastrophe. And they think it's a catastrophe because it is a nationalist, imperialist war. And one of Luxembourg's most graphic sayings is taking Marx's workers of the world. unite, but she adds, in time of war, slit each other's throats. Okay, so what she's concerned about is the fact that this is a war that is using as its cannon fodder, workers across the world who are killing each other who should see that their interests are identical against empire and against pseudo-patriotism and nationalism. And she's sent to prison.

And as you mentioned, she writes an awful lot in prison. She had this enormous capacity to be solitary, even in a very crowded cell and get on with her writing. And can you just give us the beginnings of the drive of her writing in those years she had in prison? Well, she never stopped writing. But it's absolutely true that when she was in prison, she wrote some of her most important, not just texts, but also her letters. And I think it's very, very important that we bring those in to the conversation

because the way they were received when they started being published more than 20, 30 years, years ago was they show the human woman behind the steely revolutionary, which is nonsense, because she was steely in her personal life and utterly human in her revolutionary thinking. So it's a false dichotomy. But what the letters do give you a sense of is the range of her thought, and just how much her revolutionary commitment was fueled by her sense of how human beings enact, interact, love, hate, and cooperate and go to war with each other. So the letters are flooded with remarks about the sea being like the latter that's always on the move.

They're flooded with statements about something growing in her which will ignore all rules and conventions. They're flooded with kind of moments of brilliant sarcasm. So Walker, a famous astrophysicist, said he had found a secret to the universe and it was a kind of a ball. The universe was a ball and she said this is a petty, bourgeois concept. Infinity is infinity. It's not some bomb glacé. She wrote that to Louise Kowdke. So I think it's very important that in her letters you see sides of her, which you don't necessarily get from the writing, but that you understand of fueling it. And it's the

complexity of the human heart, which I think is is sort of supporting and driving into her notions of spontaneity and her notions of what can and cannot and must not be controlled, both in a human life and also in a revolutionary situation. Mark Jones, just to continue the prison, let us the prison position for a little while, if she is her political position outside the prison, is it still flickering, is it still alive, is it being supported,

is indeed as the war goes on and the Germans start to lose and the blockade means that there's no food, very little food coming in, is it strengthening? I think two things are happening. I think, you know, let's not forget at the start of the First World War, Germany is invaded in its eastern provinces and German refugees

come from, they're invited by the Russian armies, the Russian armies commit atrocities at the start of the First World War. But it's the refugees coming from Eastern Prussia who bring these atrocity tales into the cities and centrelands of Germany. And this makes you know, Luxembourg and

Leipnist, and particularly Leipnacht actually, it makes them into figures of hate among those who are rallying behind the calls to support the war. So in this sense, she's... The figures of hate because they come from? Because they oppose the national calls in a moment of national calling.

And so in this sense, her politics, you know, she is a political figure for that audience because she's disliked and Leipnacht as well. They're both disliked for the entire duration of the war. So even though she's locked away, she's still a symbol of another Germany that must be opposed because it betrays the nation

in a time of war. Among the intended audience for her political mobilisation, so this is the working class of Germany, it's difficult to assess how much influence she has. She has an organisation helping her to get her political writings

out of prison, particularly Yogukas, again, is closely working with her. He becomes the organiser at this time and Luxembourg is maybe writing intellectual texts against the war, but he's the one who's getting them printed and getting them circulated.

And for a whole body of writers on Rosa Luxembourg from the East German state or for those maybe in the 60s and 70s very sympathetic to the idea of a proletarian being forced into war influenced by Marxism, these letters are having a really important influence upon the decline in support for the war among the German population.

I'm a little bit skeptical about that view. I think it's difficult to find evidence of a direct influence of, you know, Rosa Luxembourg makes an argument it gets smuggled out from the prison and it affects soldiers' willingness to fight or it affects the urban workers' willingness to endure the war

for the next winter. And in? Can I come into this to support Mark's point? We see throughout the war a society and not just workers but a society that's getting quite war-warrie throughout the end of the war.

But they are they're getting interested in peace rather than in revolution. It's not a situation where, you know, because the war is going badly, because military defeat is obvious for some, or because food shortages are particularly obvious. Towards the end of the war, 17, 19, 18, we find demands for bread and peace among the German society and population, not demands for a revolution.

The national conservatives in the Weimar Republic sort of famously point out that it's the revolution that caused the defeat in the First World War, well, actually, it's the other way around. It's the defeat, the militaristic defeat in the war and the war war war war-warriness of society that allows the revolution to happen. Mark, you want to come in.

Yeah, I just wanted to add there. The war is going badly for Imperial Germany, but it's also going well. Let's not forget the Eastern Front is a victory for the German Empire in 1917 and leading to the Russian withdrawal of the war in 1918. And one of the reasons it's a victory for the German army in the East is because of the Russian revolutions in 1917.

And I think any discussion of Rosa Luxembourg in the First World War needs to bring this, point into focus. Luxembourg herself is very critical of Lenin, critical of the Bolshevists, and this later becomes part of her the myth of Rosa Luxembourg as an opponent of Bolshevism and Leninism,

because Luxembourg criticizes the Bolshevists' use of terror as a means of establishing the Soviet power in Russia. But what's important is, her message writing for revolution has to compete with this message coming from the shadow zones left by the collapsing Russian empire, which is that revolution brings chaos, it brings hunger, it brings starvation, and it brings terror. And at this point in time, in the course of 1918, the term Russian conditions in Germany comes to be synonymous with Armageddon.

She's a fervent and passionate supporter of the 1917 revolution because she thinks it really exposes the nature of the imperialist nature of the war in Germany. And she defends it fiercely, but she is critical of the way it has been conducted. I think it's very, very important to make the distinction between the spirit of revolution, which she uses against the German Social Democratic Party for presenting itself as the vanguard of proletarian struggle. She just says this blows them out of the water. So she is critical, I agree with you, Mark, that she thinks she's critical of Lenin,

Nightwatchman State, terrorist activity and so on. But the Russian Revolution also produces a model for an alternative to what's going on in Germany. So I agree with you about the desire for bread and peace. But as you also said, the soldiers who come back from the war are war weary, but they're also starting to be aware, are potentially. aware, and this is where the educational aspect of Luxembourg's writings are so crucial, they're starting to be aware that they have been used. And therefore, they come back, I would say almost with a split consciousness, which will lead into what happens next. On the one

hand, they know they've been used, and they know it's been an imperialist war, and they know the workers of the world should unite against that. So there are potential revolutionaries, but they're also nationalist. They haven't lost the nationalist fervor. And therefore, I think it is one of the most tragic moments in European history that at that moment, it could have gone either way. Right. So the people who murder Rosa Luxembourg in 1919 are people who, within hours, days before, were supporting the Spartacist uprising.

They believed in the possibility of a revolutionary moment of a very different kind. And so they're split down the middle, and Luxembourg famously said socialism or barbarity. And what we got was barbarity. Can I come to you, Nadine? Rosa Luxembourg was a co-founder of the Spartacus League, later became the German Communist Party,

and they began a revolution in 1919. They start, are I getting this wrong, or are you worried about the question? No, no, no, no. I would suggest in 1990 they tried a Spartacist uprising. An uprising, actually. Let's call it an uprising, not a revolution. What was the uprising about? So, to go back a little bit, the Spartacus League was on the radical left wing. They were actually much smaller than we often think.

And she was co-founder of it. That's right, I got that right. And they were founded already in 1916. And they, the Spartacus, believed that what the social Democrats were doing in November 1918 was

a revolution that wasn't going far enough just to call for to organize that the troops come home to sort of organize the end of the war to call for national elections in January

in 1919 to then create a national assembly that would so the social Democrats hoped, create parliamentary democracy, we all think the Spartacus belief was, to some extent, actually betraying the real revolution. So what did the Spartacists want? So the real revolution would be in political terms, a system that was much more along the lines of Soviet-style councils. Workers' councils. The power shouldn't be in parliament.

it should be with workers' councils in terms of so therefore elections for a sort of a national assembly that was deciding on a constitution and on parliamentary democracy they felt were useless although Rosa Luxembourg

changed her mind on this in December 1918 but I think couldn't make her voice heard within the Spartacus Bund in terms of economic changes that wanted much more clear change of how the economic system worked, a much clearer change of redistribution of property, so that, you know, again, suggesting that it's not a real revolution if the economic system essentially changes very little. The potential problem with that is I would

argue that in November 1918, but also in January 1919, they have very, very little support for those type of ideas. So that implies, Mark Jones, that they hadn't a hope of achieving anything. Is there a sense in which Rosa Luxembourg just recently out of jail

I thought that they were going too soon and they had too shallow a support base? Yes and no. I think the key point for... That's the answer you like to, yeah. For Rosa Luxembourg in the Revolution of Winter of 1918, 191919, is,

first of all, when the revolution that topples the Kaiser and leads to the Declaration of a German Republic on the 9th of November takes place. She's in prison in Breslau, so she's a peripheral figure. And for the Spartacus League that are not in prison, including Karl Leipnisch who's just been released, the outbreak of the revolution in Kiel and the German Navy

comes to them as much as a surprise as it does to the Kaiser. They don't have people on the ground in Kiel. And the revolution then spreads from North Germany down through southern central Germany, eventually reaching Berlin on the 9th of November. Leipnish goes to the castle and proclaims Germany to be a socialist republic and says it's time for the workers to emulate the Bolshevists in Russia.

And his message is very unsuccessful because at the same time when Leipnich says, workers stay on the streets, the revolution is only halfway complete, the new socialist government are the Kaiser's old socialists. The workers don't listen to his message to stay on the street. They listen to Friedrich Ebert's message, and they go back to work.

The council's movement then that emerges in Germany that's a result of this revolution also doesn't support the Spartacist group. So when there's a council, Congress of councils in Germany in mid-December in 1918 with just over 500 delegates elected by council members there's only 12 from the Spartacus League and Luxembourg and Leipnish don't get a mandate

so they're outside on the streets trying to mobilize support but they're not successful in the institutions of the revolution now then if I can just add one well we have got to get a move on but this is the really crucial point about Rosa Luxembourg in the winter and just before the Spartacist uprising is at the founding Congress of the party of the German Communist Party, she says Spardicus will never try to rule

without the overwhelming support of the majority of Germans. And this is what makes her, lays her claim to being a democratic socialist. But within a week's time when the uprising starts, which she doesn't have very much control over, the decisions behind the uprising are taken in her absence,

she throws her full weight behind the uprising. Has little chance of support unless it becomes a heroic gesture. Right, we have to know. She got murdered. Can you tell how she and Leibniz were murdered on the same day, but not in the same place? Yes, they were both murdered. I think that's what we need to know. And I think we are in danger in the way we're talking about Luxembourg,

of slightly of crushing her. Because, you know, she was the radicalised minority, and radicalised minorities have something terribly important to say. And the fact that they are then defeated, I think there's a danger of reading it back as therefore they were completely in error in their analysis of what was happening. And I really don't think that is true at all. I mean, Luxembourg's legacy is astounding. Her analysis of credit and the destruction of credit

leads straight to 2008. I mean, she really knew that the endless expansion of consumerism within capitalism, so I agree with Nadine, unless there was an economic transformation, this was not going to be a revolution, even though it looked as if it was in the first stages of revolution in Germany. So I think on that, her internationalism, I think we really have. to hold on to that, her critique of nationalism, and her ecological sense of capital ransacking the globe and destroying the ecology of the land and impoverishing people by making areas of the

world unlivable. And I'll just say one small anecdote. She is in prison and buffaloes that were war fodder were brought into the courtyard and she looks at how destroyed there being and she says, found myself weeping their tears. Not weeping for them. That would be crass sentimentalism. She identifies with the animals of the earth. I have got to get to how she got murdered and who did it. Now, Mark, you want to do with that, please?

Yeah, I disagree with what Jacqueline's just said, but I'll stick to the question, which is, so the revolution breaks out in the German Navy and a group of naval officers conspire together to form a special unit which they want to create for the purpose of getting rid of their enemy. leaders. And she is arrested in hiding with Karl Leipnacht on the night of the 15th, 16th of January just after the uprising has been crushed on the 11th of January in Western Berlin. She's arrested by a group of men from a citizens' militia. They realise they've got a very valuable prisoner on their hands and they bring her to a anti-revolutionary lynchpin by the name of Vladimir Pabst who is working closely with this special group. And that group is then charged with

taking Luxembourg and Leipnizh to Moabid prison and on the way they're planning to kill Luxembourg and Leipnish they want to do it in separate transportations but unbeknownst to them in the same hotel where they're planning this operation another officer goes about bribing men to just beat them to death as they're being brought out of the building

and so that's what happens on the night of the 15th 16th of January Leipnich just brought through the hotel lobby first he's set upon by a group of men beaten he's put in the back of the car he's still alive at this point he's taken into the Tiergarten Park in central Berlin and he's given a chance to escape

and he's then shot and his body is handed in as an unidentified man to a nearby morgue. Luxembourg is beaten to death as she's been brought out of the hotel lobby. She's too weak to survive the blows that are inflicted upon her and her body is then dumped in the Landverc Canal. Thank you very much.

Would it be indifferent had she survived? Nadine? Oh, now we get into speculative territory. This has got to be brief, elliptical speculation, please. Possibly because the killing of both of them, not just her, created a bitterness within the political left that was very difficult to bridge for years to come.

So while the political left was divided anyway, this killing of those two people created almost impossible corporations for years to come among left-wing parties. Jacqueline, very briefly, what's her greatest legacy? The concept of spontaneity and the idea that revolutionary spirit must be fostered, helped, above all, not crushed,

and actually her most important idea was her statement, freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise. It's one of my favourite quotes from Rosa Luxembourg. Thank you very much, Jacqueline Rose, Nadine Russell and Mark Jones. Next week we'll be discussing Roger Bacon, philosopher, mathematician from the 13th century pioneer of scientific, modern scientific method. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

We're on our again. Okay. Not on our lives, so don't worry, sir, you want this, and he goes everywhere else. My comment that I wanted to make in response to Jacqueline's comment, you know, that's a, you know, a Rosa Luxembourg with whom we all have a lot of empathy, right? You know, there she is, feeling the suffering of others and sharing that suffering. And I just have to add to that, the uprising that she supports, a week after she says that she won't support an uprising if it doesn't have the support of the majority of German people,

when the uprising starts, it's clear that they don't have the support of a majority, within 24 to 36 hours of the uprising starting. And there's a chance in that moment that uprising could be ended with less people being killed through a negotiated settlement or through surrender on the part of the revolutionaries occupying the building. And there are two forces that don't want that to happen. One is actually the government side because they want to crush the rebellion with the maximum force that they can bring to bear on the rebels because they want to prove that they're strong.

And the other force who's opposing any kind of peaceful outcome, any kind of outcome to reduce the loss of life, is Rosa Luxembourg herself, who's writing articles in the Rotafana newspaper at this time, who is calling for workers to rebel, who's calling for violence and whose violent rhetoric is becoming more,

more aggressive in this time. And, you know, when we were introduced to her, at the start of the program, it was Rose Luxembourg as a pacifist. She is, but when the movement that's closest to her is sniping on people in the streets

and killing innocent people, she is a preacher of revolutionary violence at this point in time. and I can see Jacqueline doesn't like this comment but when we think of Rosa we have to think of this angry Rosa at the end of her life

as well as the Rosa that we all like and admire in the earlier parts of her life this isn't to say that she deserves what happens to her that's not to say that at all but it's just to try and understand that when the dynamics of violence take up and start defining politics Rosa's theory and her opposition

to violence for the last last 25 years, that goes out the window in that moment. Now, tell me why I'm wrong. We love her anger. That's the first thing. And secondly, one of the most striking speeches she made was when she said, people are saying blood is being shed by the Russian Revolution and that it is violent. Let's go into the mines. Let's go to the plantations.

Let's see the emiseration of life, the exploitation, the early deaths under the capitalist system. So if we're talking about violence, we have to distribute violence. and you are certainly loading the dice, Mark, if you don't mind me saying so, by saying she was not interested in stopping the loss of life, right? I really don't think that's correct. I see it very, very differently. She was exhorting a revolution because she saw what would happen if that revolution was thwarted. She saw that the revolution of the German Social Democratic Party

was on the way to generating the Fai Corps, who in fact were the people who murdered her, who would become the most fervent supporters of Hitler. So socialism or barbarity was the corrupt. cry and she saw it coming. But I also think there's another thing to say here. And I think we've downplayed the extent to which her political life was fueled by her sense

of the complexity of the human heart. Because I think what she also thought at that point was that she owed the revolutionary life. I see it completely differently. She knew she was going to die. She thought the revolution was not ready, but she felt she had no choice, given her writing, given her analysis of what was happening,

than to go the whole journey in what was happening, even though she knew it was going to fail. so I see it completely differently from you. Do you want to respond? I'm going to... Well, I am... I partly agree with Mark, but only partly really, because I think that by the Spartacus uprising,

she had actually very little control on what was going on on the ground. And, you know, I can see your point by sort of saying, but whatever you sort of published sort of spurs people on or, you know, people, you know, or sort of asks for moderation or not. But I think she was way little in control of the violence that was sort of carried out on both side at that point in time. And I feel she, I disagree with you in a sense that you're suggesting she sort of almost encouraged it to some way or another.

I think there was very little she could have done on this particular point in time because I think she actually had no voice. as such on the ground. It's debatable to what extent she has a voice influencing the rebels in the newspaper buildings occupied in Berlin between the 5th and 11th of January. But it's not debatable that the opponents of

the Spartacists named Spartacus uprising, which we're calling the January uprising. The opponents of it are reading Rosa Luxembourg's writings. They are engaging with her and in that sense she is feeding into a cycle of mobilization and counter- mobilisation, which is radicalising everybody and pushing both sides into the direction of more violence.

And to come back to Jacqueline's point, that may be true, and maybe she has a right to offer her life to the revolution, but I'm not sure she's the right to take other people with her. I don't think she did. That's why we disagree. I agree with Nadia and I do think she can be held responsible for the escalating violence of the revolution. I agree with, sorry, I agree with Mark on that point that the spot of his strategy is, to create sort of radical sort of ideas. And they do it from sort of 1918 onwards and often was sort of quite spectacular demonstrations, mass assemblies and so on.

That's overplaying their own strength quite considerably. So the opponents think they're actually possibly much stronger than they are. And therefore, as you said, sort of, it might not be her own people she's influencing in January 1919, but it might be her opponents who feel that they sort of need to react to that sort of. sort of radical language and to what they see on the street, as we said, quite an overreaction. I think that that point's been argued between the two of you as far as we can go on this context. I was very sorry, I mean, we are what we are. We're a colloquy.

We're not a four-hour discussion group. That's in the bag for later. But so the connection you made, Geoffrey, that she may between the psychic pain and the political pain, therefore, the political insight it was fascinating and I too was sorry we didn't get on to that I mean you've got time to develop that

if you want a little bit Well I'll just say it was so central in her relationship with Leo Yochiches because he was amongst all the other things he admirably was he was a commitment foe and a control freak and he manipulated her and he refused to make

certain commitments that she wanted and she wanted a child and then she wanted to adopt a child and he was having none of it. And she wrote to him and said, you have no sense of the inner life. She said, you know, all your interests is in one big thing, all your interest is in the cause.

There's nothing driven by the human heart. And she accuses him of being a schoolmaster with her. And it's obvious that her critique of Lenin and the Night Watchman State and playing a schoolmaster is sourced in the sexual politics of her own life, very intimately

and very passionately. And therefore I think this is a whole other dimension of her legacy and of what we need to take from her, which is absolutely crucial for me. Well, thank you all very much indeed, and the producers knocking on the door to make the great announcement. He would like tea or who'd like coffee. Tea would be lovely.

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