Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Red Rosa: The Life and Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Oct 12, 2019 In this episode, I sit down with author and illustrator Kate Evans to discuss her powerful graphic biography Red Rosa, which vividly brings to life the story of revolutionary Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg. We explore Luxemburg’s radical politics, her commitment to internationalism and anti-militarism, and the challenges she faced as a Jewish woman in the male-dominated socialist movements of her time. Kate shares her creative process behind the book, how she translated dense political theory into an accessible visual narrative, and why Luxemburg’s legacy remains so vital for today’s struggles against capitalism and authoritarianism. Whether you're new to Luxemburg or a longtime admirer, this conversation offers fresh insight into one of the most brilliant and courageous figures of the socialist tradition. Find her book, and all her other work, here: https://www.cartoonkate.co.uk/ ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your hosting comrade Red O'Shea, and today we have the other part of our Rosa Luxembourg double episode feature special we're doing. This part is with Kate Evans, the author and illustrator of the amazing graphic novel called Red Rosa about the life of Rosa Luxembourg. and it's such a wonderful aesthetic accomplishment, an intellectual one, a biographical one. There's so many wonderful dimensions to Red Rosa. I really cannot recommend it enough. And Kate herself is just a lovely human being. It is absolutely just a pleasure to talk to.

Her passion and her sense of humor and her kindness and her thoughtfulness absolutely come through in every second of this interview with her. So I really hope people enjoy this. And again, this is the other half of our sort of two-part series on Rosa Luxembourg. This is really focused on her life and her biography. And then the other episode, which will be released on the same exact day as with Simone Norman, and that really focuses specifically on Rosa's theoretical work within the confines of Marxism. So definitely check out both of those episodes. It doesn't matter in which order you listen to them.

But the goal is to get a really well-rounded, multidimensional view of Rosa Luxembourg and who she was, not only as a historical figure or even as a Marxist, but as a well-rounded human being. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Kate Evans, and I hope you do as well. And as always, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio, you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio.com, find our YouTube page, find our Patreon. And if you do join our Patreon and you support the show, you get a bunch of bonus Patreon content every month. So yeah, with that said, let's go ahead and get into this wonderful interview with Kate Evans, the author and illustrator of Red Rosa. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm Kate Evans. I'm an author, an artist, sometimes an activist, sometimes a mother, and a graphic novelist. I've written a graphic biography of Rosa Luxembourg, entitled Red Rosa. Yeah, wonderful. And I'm a huge fan of this book. I know I've messaged you about how moving it is and how often it brings me to tears. Not only we'll get into like her death later on, but even just the depiction of her kindness to the animal who was being carrying the cart and being beaten, I mean, you just really bring the emotive,

you know, visceral human side of her out in such beautiful and compelling ways. So I'm so excited to be able to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for coming on. Cheers. We've got how many seconds into the interview and my daughter's coming already. Say hi to Brett, you're on Revolutionary Left Radio. Hello. You're on the radio.

How cool is that? Hello from Nebraska. Okay, give me a kiss. Okay. All right. You need you to go to bed now. Bye. Bye.

Go learn some more history so you can help inspire the next generation. Don't do a piece. Whatever. that's wonderful yeah i really enjoyed listening not only reading your book obviously but listening to lectures you've given and other interviews you've done and it's just so exciting to listen to you talk about rosa so i'm so happy to have you here let's just jump into the the questions i guess first question is why and when did you decide to create this beautiful graphic novel about rosa luxembourg's life and what did you hope to really achieve with it i didn't decide to create

to create a graphic novel about Rosa Luxembourg's life, I was commissioned. So I was 70 pages into writing a book about physiological birth, maternity and like pregnancy. It's basically a pregnancy manual. And I got an email from Paul Bull, who's a retired comics academic, who's devoting his retirement to creating graphic novels of revolutionary leaders. Now, he's behind the international Workers of the World Wobbley's graphic novel. He's behind the graphic novel biography of Che Guevara and a dangerous woman about Emma Goldman. So he'd come up with the idea of doing a biography of Rosa Luxembourg. He'd asked some mutual contacts at World War III illustrated, namely Seth Tobachman, if he knew any female artists who would be good for the book.

And he sent me this email that said, would you be interested in drawing and maybe writing a graphic novel of Rosa Luxembourg? And basically the only thing I knew about Rosa Luxembourg was, oh, she's one of those groovy women that people talk bang on about. I'm sure she's vaguely something good. And I replied and said yes,

before I googled who she was. In my defense, a lot of my early activism was spent in a tree, okay, on a motorway roads protest where really we didn't have much access to theory. We were kind of living this stuff rather than analysing it. And the most of the time since I spent at the Anacist Book Fair seems to be more about drinking than reading the books. So maybe that's just a British attitude to Anacus. So I didn't actually know a great deal about Rosa Luxembourg at all.

and the more I found out, the more just blown away I was by her vitality, her theoretical clarity, her intellectual rigor and power, and her complete kind of like badass attitude to life. And so it was just an incredible honour to be able to bring that into a book. I mean, I just had this amazing subject. I've got Rosa Luxembourg's life. which has, it was really good for me at the time because I was thinking about writing something about capitalism. But my previous book, Funny Weather, about climate change, had ended up sort of falling between two stools. I'd done a book about climate change in comic form, and I thought that that meant that people would be really interested in reading a science book in comics form. But actually, people don't really know what to do with that kind of thing.

Like, didn't make it into the science bookshops, and it didn't make it into the comics bookshops. So I wanted to do something similar about capitalism, but I was a bit kind of like, oh, God, this is going to be a bit dull and dry. But then by writing about Luxembourg, I get to write about Luxembourg's theories, and I get to ground it all in a, like,

a straightforward explanation of Marxism. And so I got the opportunity to draw the comic that, I hoped would have the effects on readers that reading Descapital for the first time had on me as a student when I was 17. So I took the whole of Volume 1 of Descapital and I turned it into a 12-page conversation between Rosa Luxembourg and her brothers, which is a miracle of compression. But it enabled me to say from the outset, the problem is capitalism and this is how capitalism is the problem. And so, and then to take that and then explore all of Luxembourg's life and works on the back of that enabled me, it was sort of like it was really good not just because it's about Luxembourg, but also because it's about something that is even more of a problem now that it was in Luxembourg today, which is capitalism and the limits to growth. Yeah, exactly. And in a lot of ways, Rosa was so prescient and predictive in just,

how capitalism would unfold and although she didn't have any idea what climate change was in some like indirect ways she really predicted it and it was so fascinating uh to see just how you know sensitive of a mind she had and how brilliant she was that's kind of a weird disconnect between i mean there's two aspects of her personality of her of her writings and her personality there like she didn't have a particularly ecological critique of politics I think she was very welded to this idea that society proceeds in stages, as laid out by Marx, the idea that an industrialized society in some ways is more advanced than a non-industrialized one. But at the same time, she had this really, she sort of sidestepped a lot of the colonialist ideas of her age,

and was an incredible critic of the genocide of indigenous peoples around the world. and she had this incredible love of nature. It's like there were all the seeds for modern politics, which was slightly divorced within her writings. There weren't necessarily theoretically tied together, but somehow they add up to a whole that is really very modern in its overall kind of interests. Yeah, absolutely.

And you mentioned earlier that you spent so many 12 pages or so, just sort of summarizing Das Kavis. which is an amazing achievement in and of itself but it's also yeah in the form of a conversation between rosa and her brothers and you know putting theory into graphic novel form like that really complex theory is amazing to see and you did it so well so i just like it leads well into this next question which is you know can you talk about the unique challenges of portraying rosa's life through the medium of comics and a graphic novel like what are the advantages and disadvantages of taking that medium not just her life it's her work as well The chapter is that she lived a full and interesting life and I was commissioned to write 120 pages and I managed to do it in 179. So I already made it half as long again as what was being paid for. And you have to really, really condense things to get it down into comics form. Like I've been doing this for like 25 years and now if I'm called on to write a newspaper article, I find it quite hard to. waffle. I can't like just fill pages with like extraneous prose because everything I do is about

pairing things down to like the tiny little tweetable soundbites. I don't say sound bites. But it's definitely about condensing things down so that you get, you take, I mean, Luxembourg has like thousands of pages of theory. And so to try and create a comic that gives an insight into what she was trying to say, you really do have to just pick out the few little quotes and points that are going to that are going to carry that to the reader. So one of the fun things about doing it is a graphic novel. I mean, you've mentioned that I talk about theoretical concepts in a, in a, in a,

in comics form. Well, I had experience of doing that with the climate change book. I really struggled with how to make climate change funny. It's called Weird Weather for the American Edition or Funny Weather for the UK edition. This book, by the way, it came out in 2008. Anyway, I really struggled with how to make climate change funny until I hit on the idea of climate modelers who are climate scientists who run models of weather patterns around the globe through their computers.

But I went, what if they actually made models? And so I got these visual idea of how you could show abstract physics and geographical concepts by a bunch of scientists sitting around in a lab and making models out of the earth with like Play-Doh and cellar tape and physical things. yeah. So I use this idea of using visual metaphors to carry abstract ideas. So I'm quite experienced in doing that. And that was great when it came to trying to show like the alienated worker as a dandelion seed blowing on the wind or, you know, the precarious worker, I should say. or using her cat as a reaction to almost having her cat sort of playing out some of the theories

that Luxembourg's trying to describe in the accumulation of capital. So I'm used to this idea of trying to find the silliest visual metaphor and using it to liven the dense theoretical text. One of the other things that was really nice that I really enjoyed doing in Red Rosa and that I hadn't seen done before is that I take Luxembourg's words. I take her political writings and I take her personal letters

and I take direct quotes from them and then I create the dialogue in the book using her actual words. And then I give you the full quote and its historical context in the notes at the end of the book. And it's like, like imagine if you could make a movie of someone's life,

but they're speaking the actual words that they said at the time that they're speaking words that are based on their actual writings and then you can pause it and then get a link to their writing right yeah within the graphic novel i think uniquely you have the ability to do that you're creating a visual drama and yet you cross-referenced it historically and you know no given it academic annotation and i've seen some books that I've done that since, but I hadn't seen it done before. So I was nice to feel that I was kind of doing something a little bit groundbreaking in that regard. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it was, you know, it worked to complete effect. Absolutely. Like my engagement with this,

with this text very much was a unique experience completely because I had never come across something structured in quite that way. I do want to move on. And, you know, in Red Rosa, you portray with like, honestly, like genuine beauty, humanism, and even eroticism, Rosa's intense love life and sexuality. In other interviews, you've talked about how some of the reviews of your book even kind of recoiled in the face of the explicit sex scenes that you have in the text, but that it was important for you to portray it anyways. So I was hoping you could talk about that process and the thinking behind it on your part.

Well, part of the light in which graphic novels are viewed in certain British culture is that they're seen as something for children. And people say, oh, would it be nice for a child? And I go, well, it doesn't have pushed his Etkin going down on her. So I'm not sure whether you want to give that to your eight-year-old. I mean, it is a healthy view of sexuality. I mean, there's two parts in the answer to the question is that one is I think it was really important to show. Well, no, I wanted to show her as a real human being.

And I think a lot of biography can fall into the trap of hagiography or in some ways, you know, people just become historical characters, almost like a costume drama. I wanted to show the physicality of the reality of her having a lived life. And so I started, I start the book with her as a baby in a pram. And I finished the book at the point when her body is dropped into the landfair canal. And her physical body exists on the pages. I think that's very, you know, it helps someone feel very engaged and connected. I mean, I was chatting to Seth to Bokkman about this.

Have you seen his work? He wrote Len, a lawyer in history that I was reading recently, and he doesn't actually go into his, it's again a biography, and he doesn't go into his character's sex life, partly because some of the people that Len had slept with are still living and so that was a little hard to do it. I mean, I've had some freedom

in that Luxembourg died 100 years ago so I had lots of photos of her all around the studio and while I was drawing the sex scenes I did think, oh my God, what would she actually think? That's hilarious. But yeah, did you feel also like because

in other interviews you talked about sort of the hyper patriarchal society she existed in and how like women's sexuality was really repressed at the time and so that was another part of the reason why you displayed it so explicitly I mean there is a feminism in in

like you get to have a character who has hairy legs and hairy underarms because that's historically accurate it's not just a feminist thing for sure Yeah, Luxembourg's life and work has to be viewed through the lens of patriarchy in that she, I mean, for God's sake, she was meant to graduate from university with the highest honours and they knocked that down to just with averagely great honours because they thought that would just be too much for a woman. And you might think that doesn't rankle, but Paul Levi mentioned it at her funeral, so I reckon it bloody did. like I mean at one point she was appointed a editor to a left-wing newspaper and she simply couldn't keep the job because none of the male journalists would accept having a woman put in over them a woman immigrant Jew put in over the top of them

she's particularly if you read the anti-critique to the accumulation of capital which I totally reckon you should do before you read the accumulation of capital because it's actually a really amusingly sort of fast-paced. What she's doing in the anti-critique here is she looks at all the reviews to her book, The Accumulation of Capital, which are all negative, and she pulls them to pieces. But you can see how, to what extent she was kind of like, even within this left-wing movement that had her as a kind of a figurehead in Germany in, like in 1915, they completely did not value her work and she completely like just all hats off to her

for absolutely refusing to compromise at any level on her intellectual ability and just going well fuck you I'm still going to keep writing Marxist theory and it's still going to be really important and relevant I mean if we look at how her work has been historically viewed as well there's been a hell of a lot of focus on Luxembourg the martyr or Luxembourg the writer of beautiful poetic letters from prison,

but hardly any analysis of actually how good her political theory is. I mean, when you compare the amount of analysis there's been on Luxembourg's writing compared to the amount on Gramsci, now I'm going to put some... Okay, so I'm trying to tackle the prison notebooks at the moment. And I can't help thinking, he did not finish this. This is like really scrappy stuff. Yeah.

There's some ideas in there, but they're not particularly coherently developed. Exactly. And like Gramshy is like some touchstone of leftist thought in Luxembourg as a footnote. I mean, what are you on? Right. Yeah, totally. I agree with that. Yeah, it's interesting.

Like in her own life, she had to face that misogyny and that sexism and even her legacy to this very day, you know, still being marred by it in that exact way. Yeah, it's super interesting to think about that. I mean, within Germany, what happened is her letters to a friend was published in very shortly after her death. And it caused quite a stir because people saw this completely other side of Luxembourg. She'd only been seen as this firebrand speaker shouting about revolution. And nobody had seen the side of her, which, like, saving little wasps from drowning, you know.

yeah literally yeah um she had a real tenderness and a care of animals and a deep love inside of her yeah she fed wasps in prison from her jam ration wow it's what it's adorable yeah that's that's just incredibly interconnectedness of all life going on there um so but then people then i think lauded the the sentiment this then fitted into people's idea of like oh a martyed lovely sentimental woman, but she wasn't a sentimental woman. She was a Marxist theoretician, and I think we do her a big disservice if we don't prioritize that in our memory of what she did and who she was. Yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more. What aspects of Rosa's personality in life do you think often get ignored, downplayed, or otherwise missed that you think are important or that really

popped out to you in your research of her? Well, I think all aspects. of Rose's personality had been ignored in the English language biographies that I read of hers because there really hasn't been enough. There's really hardly any English language like exploration of who she was. I mean, and the events of her life. So there's three major biographies that I looked at. One by Paul Froelich, who was a student of hers. Is it very interesting on the politics but completely ignores her personal life there's this two volume work by nettle who's a historian and he just doesn't get her politics he's like well at this point luxembourg was just being arty by not agreeing with all the other members of the social democrat

party it's like no she didn't agree with them because they were wrong and she was right exactly she stood up for opposing the first world war or rights and um yeah and then there's this a woman called Elizabeth Ettinger, who's a psychoanalyst from the 1960s. And I just think half of it's fictional. I don't view her as a reliable source at all on, even on the basic events of Luxembourg's life. So pretty well all of Luxembourg had been ignored as far as I can see. I mean, as her biography, I got to ignore bits of her life that I didn't like or agree with because I only had 179 pages to write it all in. She was probably a bit factionalist in her early writing.

I think she's mellowed on that by the time we get to like the actual events of the German Revolution in 1918. But certainly early on, I think there was a little bit of powerbroking going on with their setting up of the Lithuanian, know, but her and the Ejoghish's attempt at setting up rival socialist parties in Poland. And so one of the main sources for the book is I went, I went directly to primary sources. I looked at her letters and I looked at her writings directly. I don't really rely very much on other people's interpretations of her because they're lately writing shit. But I get to show the bits in her letters where she, cheerful and outgoing and vibrant and engaged.

I mean, she could also be really quite rude and quite reserved, but I didn't have to show that side of her. There's a really good quote in one of her letters where she's like, and if you should see those fellows from the rival party, kindly take them to the window and boot them out of it. She's an absolute firebrand in that way. And certainly being a rigid factionalist is nothing new in the long, history of the left. I mean, we still have

plenty of that today. It's a tradition on the left to be like that to some extent. Well, she was critical of Lenin for being factional. She did write about the splits in the party in 1905 and was like, actually we'll only to sort it out and get together

and have a big conference, everyone, was more or less her position. So. Interesting. Well, yeah, that leads perfectly into the next question. And this is a big one so you can take this in any direction you want. But I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the sort of intellectual and political relationship between Rosa and Lenin because they were friends.

And as well, they had very strong disagreements. And Rosa had some critiques of the Bolshevik revolution and what came after. So can you talk about that relationship between Rosa and Lenin? Okay. So get this. Mimi is Luxembourg's cat, by the way. And she explicitly refers to herself as Mimi's mother. That's how, like, her and her cat, they're a thing.

okay yes so freedom now april the second nineteen eleven yesterday lenin came and up to today he's been her four times already i enjoy talking with him he's clever and well educated and has such an ugly mug the kind i like to look at poor minnie keeps going curle she impressed lenin tremendously he said that only in siberia had he seen such a magnificent creature that she was a majestic cat she also flirted with him rolled on her back and behaved in enticingly towards him, but when he tried to approach her, she waxed him with a poor and snarled like a tiger. I really liked him to that.

I love that so much. She's writing to her a 21-year-old lover there, so we can have all kinds of things on to that. She's 32. Right. So, okay, so she was deep in the heart of Russian politics. I had a bit of a problem in showing, so, okay, so I have already explained that Luxembourg's life is large and her theoretical body of work large, and there are many events going on in it, and I had a limited amount of space. I also had to create a narrative that would carry the reader through, and to do that, you can't just pack in everything. Now, Luxembourg was born in Poland, which is under Tsarist control, and she left there at the age of 18 or 19, already probably on, already an active socialist, and socialism was illegal in Tsarist Russia.

Now, it's all very well being a socialist if you're like an average Polish bloke who can put on a flat cap or you can put on a cap and change your pay. and, you know, and change your name and travel around the country, spreading the socialist message. But when you are 4 foot 10 inches tall, have a pronounced limb and a gold tooth, and you're a woman and you're Jewish, and you are pretty bloody obvious when you're only socialist agitator who fits that description. So Luxembourg was a political refugee to Germany, first to Switzerland and then to Germany. And she's directly involved in, the political life of the development of socialism in

Germany. But she is only indirectly involved in all the events of what's going on in Russia. She does travel back to Warsaw right at the end of 1905 to participate in the

first Russian Revolution and she gets arrested while in bed with her lover. Anyway, she gets arrested in Warsaw and then she gets like bribed out of prison and escapes back to Germany but that's the only point where she's directly involved with what's happening in Russia so these two threads of her political

activism there's the German thread and there's the Russian thread and she's only like her participation in the Russian thread is to write the propaganda that is then exported out across Poland, Lithuania and Russia in one of all the many languages that she spoke but I can't really show that as a cartoonist because she's not actually there. So this whole story of Russia is like pretty well ignored in my book. And I do, obviously, I mention the fact that the Russian Revolution happened, but I don't include Luxembourg's critique of the Russian Revolution. It is interesting. It is quite vital, really. The thing is, where Luxembourg really differs from Lenin is in the democratic vision that she has for the proletarian uprising. There's a good quote here.

This is while the German Revolution is happening, she said, a bourgeois revolution could simply overthrow the official power and replace it with a couple of new men, but we must work for the bottom to the top. We can only come to power with the clear and explicit will of the great majority of the proletarian masses. So her vision of working class revolution is it's everyone doing it and it's everyone doing it because everyone has realized that this is the way forward. So it's very much a mass movement

and it's very much by mutual consent. And as such, she does have some very explicit critiques of Lenin's actions after he's got to power. She puts them out in a book called in a document called the Russian Revolution

which was printed posthumously. And apparently she was going to want to work it all up into another book, but then she died. She does this incredibly prescient analysis of what's going to happen if Lenin carries on along the path that he's currently on. Without general election, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains the active element. public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy

and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality, only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading, and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously. At bottom then, a clique affair, a dictatorship, to be sure. Not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians. She hits a nail on the head. That's exactly, like, she's prefiguring Stalinism there.

Do you know what I mean? Right, yeah. They ought to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously. Yeah. So, yeah, she was very, very much more democratic view of what's meant to happen after the revolution. And, like, who knows what a revolution on Luxembourgian lines

would have ended up being like yeah that's that's the big you know historical question is like you know what would that or even like the you know the sort of historical counterfactual of if Rosa could have been in the the Bolshevik revolution or you know played the role of Lenin how would things have been different we can never know that but those critiques are interesting and they still play out today

there would have been an ice pick for her wouldn't there well I'm sad to say maybe at some point I don't know I'm not sure it depends I don't know if she get the Trotsky treatment I don't know. She was never going to compromise, was she? That's true. That's true. That's one thing about her. She never fucking compromised. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. And that's super interesting. There's so much there we could talk about. I mean, that could be an entire episode of its own. But I do want to move on.

And I want to talk about the events of the German Revolution. So can you just maybe like summarize what the German Revolution was, talk about the Spartacus League and the sort of role that Rosa played in all of it? Oh yeah sure that's just an entire third of my book you realize yeah can just go ahead and summarize that really quick well basically when I did history at school and also again at like like a level which is like our pre-university level I don't know high school plus I don't know anyway I don't know what is for you guys but when I did um German history at school they completely neglected to mention the German revolution basically it went and then there was the first world war

and then the first world war ended and Germany was defeated and they completely skipped the bit where the proletariat of Germany rose up against the and the armed forces joined in and then they stormed the capital and then the Kaiser

abdicated and handed control to the socialist like they completely skipped that bit same here same in our teaching of it yeah it was it was really I mean I just didn't even know there was a German revolution. They said there was a bit of street fighting in Berlin, not like they took the newspaper quarter and then were holed up there.

It's funny. I mean, it was a joy to try to create a narrative of it in graphic novel form because it becomes like an action movie. Like, we're really doing it. We're on the streets. I mean, Luxembourg doesn't directly participate in that element of crowds taking to the streets because she's imprisoned for the whole of the First World War for opposing it. So she's undergoing indefinite imprisonment. But she gets released on about day three of day two or three of the revolution and then hurries off to this end to Berlin to try and form an active part in it. Okay, so it was sort of, I mean, in one view of it, it was fatally compromised

because the socialist party were the largest party in the Reichstag at this point. And so when Kaiser abdicates and power is handed to the socialist, they already have an established party structure. France Abert is the leader of this social democrat. He's then made Chancellor of Germany. And Aber is reported to have said, I hate revolution. If Kaiser does not abdicate, the social revolution is. unavoidable, but I do not want it. Indeed, I hate it like sin. So he doesn't

be like revolution. And that's the leader of the SPD, right? That's the leader of the SPD. So he's like leader of the socialist. He's now Chancellor of Germany. And then he immediately enters into negotiations with the, with Groner, the general of the army. Grona offered the loyalty and cooperation of the armed forces in return for some demands, fight against Bolshevism, a speedy into the soldiers' councils, So the soldiers have set up soldiers in workers' councils, which are intended to have power, and a restoration of the sole authority of the officers court, of a court,

a national assembly and a return to law and order. So straightforwardly, they, yeah, and then the trade unions kind of back down from their revolutionary direct control of the seizure of the means of production, like within the first few days of the uprising after there's a Stinid Legion agreement with the corporations where the workers are given an eight-hour working day but they don't own the means of production. So they've been given a concession. The trade unions have been given it.

So there's very uneasy state of affairs immediately after the revolution where the workers have set up these workers, workers and soldiers councils, and they feel like they've got all the power. But on the other hand, the socialists have the power, and they, as parliamentary politicians, have immediately signed up with the army and with the employers to keep things running, to keep the status quo going, and to rest the power back from the working people. And in fact, when Luxembourg attempted to join the, address the Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils, they didn't let her

because she wasn't a worker or a soldier. That didn't work too well. So the Spartacists were anti-war, left-wing revolutionary socialists, including established public speakers and political figures like Luxembourg, and Karl Leibnacht, who was the only member of the Reichstag to have voted against war credits. And they formed a nexus of sort of a much more left-wing vision. And they put it out in their paper called Durotafan, the demands of what the Spartacus League would want. But in this kind of uneasy power struggle with Abert, who's actually chancellor, their paper was like denied a ration of newsprint paper to actually get it out there to people

and various obstacles were put in their way. And then there's all these returning soldiers from the front and they are really demoralised and quite embittered. And this is where we start to see the beginnings of like the what eventually becomes the fascist Nazi stormtroopers. They are the Frye Corps. They're these kind of roving bands of soldiers who are employed by capitalists to keep their workplaces safe and they're still sort of part of the army.

But in the end, Ebert and Norska, his right-hand man, actually put a price on Karl Blytnitz and Rosa Luxembourg's head. There's a kind of a second uprising in January 1919. and workers attempt to have another revolution but obviously that's kind of lost a bit of steam because people are like, oh but the socialists are in charge already and there's an absolutely hilarious bit where they go and try and take control of the Ministry of War

and the people on the gate are like you're taking the Ministry of War oh well do you have authorisation? What hilarious that I managed to write in the book It's like, oh, I'm sorry, you don't have authorisation to storm the military of war. We need an order. And we need to be signed. Yeah.

So they come back and get this signed order by Carl Leibnick saying we're occupying the Ministry of War in the middle of confusion and mass uprising stuff. And in the end, that's used to, I mean, Luxembourg doesn't actually know anything about this, but that Leibnick's like written signature of we are trying to overthrow the government is then used, I think, to justify his murder. So the Frye Corps and the army are brought onto the streets to take back the newspaper buildings which have been occupied by the Spartacus

and the real left-wingers. And it was never a very strategic place that they'd occupied. They just occupied for profits, which is the left-wing newspaper. They hadn't actually occupied, like, you know, the treasury or anything. Right, right. And they have these fights with these massive great rolls of newsprint out. I mean, everyone's got a gun.

Everyone knows how to shoot. It's the direct link between the fact that the entire population is armed and the fact that revolution can happen is something that's vaguely scary to think about if you're an American, I'm sure. Right. Absolutely. Anyway. And they get, they bring,

in the big guns, literally bring in the big guns and take the horse that's building back and then Luxembourg goes into hiding in Berlin but refuses to flee the country and she is, as she thinks she's being arrested and she thinks she's going to go back into prison, she's got a little bag

with her with some reading materials for carrying on, you know, writing books in prison, but instead she is beaten up and shot and dumped to make him out. So just to take a moment there, you know, German Revolution happens, there's a split on the left between what is today known as like the Social Democrats versus the communist.

Social Democrats get the power. They then go into collaboration with the Frye Corps, which is the proto-Nazi force. And they put a bounty on Carl and Rose's head and then the fascists go and carry out that political assassination. Today on the left, like in our in our meme communities and online, you'll often hear like the sort of funny meme phrase that say, you know, the social democrats killed Rosa and that's what they mean by this. It really was a collaboration between, you know, the left liberal social democrats who want to maintain capitalism and get rid of their communist left and the fascists who are more than happy to carry out that brutal assassination.

I think it's a little hard to call them fascist. I mean, fascism implies a certain centralized organization. They are proto-fascist disillusioned troops. There we go. I think they do go around with skulls painted on the front of their vehicles, which is an absolute gift to the graphic novelist if you're trying to identify who the baddies are. Right, yeah, exactly. And it fractures the left wing in Germany irrevocably,

because how are you going to forgive your parliamentary democratic socialist leaders for murdering your own hero, your own heroine? you know, the bad blood that must have emanated that must, you know, echo through to this day. So in Germany, if you've got a political party in power, then you get this big fat budget to create political education work. The left-wing delinca group have got one called the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. And then the kind of moderate socialists have got one called the Franz Ebert Foundation. And I can't help thinking what must happen if they both book the same venue for a Christmas party. Right.

Fuck. God damn. Yeah, what's really scary now is alternative for Deutschland is going to get a political foundation as well. That's horrifying, yeah. Yeah, that is really freaking scary. Definitely. Well, I didn't want to say before we get into like the reflection and legacy and the conclusion, you know, the way that you portrayed the death of Rosa in the, um, in the, in the book was so incredibly

moving. I've read it back like three, four times. Every single time I read it, it just floods my eyes with tears and like breaks my heart all over again. The 15th of January 1919. Do you think that

47 is old enough to die? If you do, you must be very young. Rosa Luxembourg lost half a lifetime. If she had lived, what more could she have achieved? Maybe saying this does her philosophy a disservice. You see, I've learned from history that one should not overestimate the impact that one individual can have.

And her death was only one moment among many in the history of the working people of the world. But it was a very dark moment. With Germany poised between socialism and barbarism, the actions of the Freikor foreshadowed far greater crimes against humanity to come. Do you think she went calmly? eagerly embraced the mantle of the martyr? No, she would have raged. Summoning the last of her strength

after the rifle butts slammed her into semi-consciousness, she gave her final order. Don't shoot. But they did. In the dark, I smile at life, as if I knew some sort of magical secret that gives the lie to everything evil and sad and changes it into pure light and happiness.

And all the while I'm searching, within myself for some reason for this joy. I find nothing and must smile to myself again and laugh at myself. I believe that the secret is nothing other than life itself. Order prevails in Berlin, you foolish lackeys, your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again, clashing its weapons, and it will proclaim with trumpets blazing. I was, I am, I shall be. I've never seen her death put in such beautiful and heartbreaking and tragic ways that you've been able to do with the words and the and the graphic

part of the graphic novel. I really encourage people to get this book and just read that. It will bring you to tears and it is, it's so hard. But the beautiful thing you do at the end of that book after you describe her death and you've sort of visualized, like, her life flashing before her eyes as she descends into the oblivion of death, is, you know, a modern person, perhaps yourself, I don't know who you thought of in that instance, sitting by Rosa's grave and being inspired by her to engage in Occupy protest. Was that supposed to be you in that text? Or what did you, who is, who is that just a stand in for the leftist today still being inspired by Rosa? Yeah, it's not me at the end there. It's, it's, she's some kind of, uh, like,

slightly more ethnically ambiguous person. I don't think you necessarily wanted a plump white woman sitting by Groves' roses. I didn't think I was going to carry it forward that much. I was going to form the revolutionary picture. Although, weirdly, all my previous boyfriends have ended up in some incarnation of her lovers, like, haunted the book, seriously.

Anyway, anyway. Yeah, well, I didn't expect that during the sex scenes. I was like, going back, go, shit, that looks like Jamie. How did they do it? Anyway, I mean, to go back to the way that I treated her death, I mean, Luxembourg's writing is sublime. She is such a poet. She really is. She's got so many amazing segments of writing. And she says here, like, I want to affect people like a clap of thunder to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.

And she really does that. So it's just beautiful being able to take this incredibly moving writing and then being able to chop it up and slice it about and slip it in with different pictures and different tones and paces of where I wanted the story to go. And there's one particular quote, which is actually a quote from when she's in a Barnstrasse Women's Prison. I'm not going to read it because you have to read the book.

But she's talking about life, about life itself and inexpressible joy. And then when I read that quote, I just went, ha ha, I can completely take that out of context and put it with the events of her death. And it's quite nice, actually, because Luxembourg actually writes her own epitaph twice. I mean, she expects to be hanged for her participation in the 1905. uprising and she signs off a letter and that one and she goes we're living in turbulent times when all that exists deserves to perish during my lifetime things have gone superbly i'm proud of that the cell doors are being closed now wow she's written one after half then but then she gets bribed out of prison and then she carries on living she was expects to be a martyr

because right when she starts out as a politician, well, as a student with a political awareness, a whole bunch of socialists get hanged. So she kind of expects that that is what's going to happen. I'm not talking to think she wanted it. They're saying that that awareness was always there. This is what you've signed up for. And then she also writes her epitaph before,

I mean, the night before she's arrested, She goes, order prevails in Berlin, you foolish lackeys, your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again, clashing its weapons, and it will proclaim with trumpets blazing, I was, I am, I shall be. And it's great, yeah. People flog that, you know, people work that quote to death

around Rosa Luxembourg. So it was quite nice to sort of sidestep that and create some other narratives that interrogate that and kind of like, I don't know, just get it back to being a person, just a person that died. Yeah, and you do that beautifully. I can't recommend people read that enough. Don't you recommend that it should make a film about it?

Yeah, absolutely. Even in our last interview, they said that. This is the second time I've had an email from some major Hollywood scout person going, hey, who has the film rights to Red Rosa? And I'm like, I've got the film rights to Red Rosa. Yeah. And then they never emailed back. Come on.

The next Netflix miniseries. God, that'd be amazing. If anybody listening by any chance has any networking or association with anybody that can make this into a film, let's make that happen because it is ready for it. I have the right time. I would also be really good to work on with the scripts, definitely. God, I would love that so much. I would like money.

Anyway, yeah. Moving towards the end, giving the infinite array of issues we face today, like climate chaos, insurgent fascism, a decaying capitalist world order. What can and should we learn from the life and legacy of Rosa? What can she teach us today? Wow. There's a lot about her writing that is incredibly, was original at the time and is relevant now. I mean, she had an understanding of the way that capitalism and the military industrial complex are linked, which and the unending expansion of capitalism, how it like, basically she prefigured globalization and the military industrial complex in her writing

in a way that's quite subtle and interesting. She's a fierce opponent of colonialism and of the genocide of indigenous peoples. And again, she has this, even though it's quite a separate thread in her writing, she has this incredible ecological sensitivity, which I think would these days make her the, like it would make her an ecological writer now, even though she didn't have a political framework with which to peg that in at the time. She's got a famous quote. She's actually quoting Kalkowski, but she's a person who's put it down in writing in a format which we know of these days. Her famous quote is

socialism or barbarism. And we're looking at that choice so starkly now. Absolutely. We find a solution to the climate crisis. which results in climate justice, and we take on the power of the billionaires and of runaway capitalism, and we dismantle it in its own terms, and we put human survival and equality and justice at the forefront of a brave new world. Either we do that or we perish, and the barbarism, we can see it all around in the rise of right-wing thinking and in the fracturing of any kind of semblance of international agreements. and the way to do it is through a mass movement

and again that we can only come to power with the clear and explicit will of the great majority of people. Luxembourg, there's two things. One is she really believed in a democratic vision where everybody has a say in what is going on. And the other thing is she was a theorist of the moments of revolutions

of what happens when people take to the streets, what happens when people take direct, control of their own affairs and she's got some amazing writing on it in her in her writings called the mass strike and it can just be a little thing that can can spark something so much bigger we just we have to hope and pray and actualize and make that a reality because we really don't have a choice yeah absolutely beautifully said kate evans thank you so much for coming on It's been an absolute honor to read your work and then to get to talk to you. It's just been amazing.

Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can buy this amazing book of yours and where people can find you and your other work online. Okay. Well, there are 15 foreign editions. So I want to buy it in Turkish, Korean, Swedish. It's going to sound really pompy if I wrap them all off. There's a Slovenian edition. Get the Slovenian edition from Vigy Vaggy-Baggy-Kiniki books.

I actually really do because they're really sound. If you want the English version of Red Rosa, it's published by Verso books. You can buy Verso books direct. The cheapest way to do it, okay, is watch Verso for one of their flash sales and then you'll get it really cheap, yeah? But you can also buy them direct from me at cartunecate.co.org. And I have a shop and I will sign them for you and I will send them out to you and I will give you a personalized dedication with a little picture of Rosa Luxembourg that

will draw by hand. Beautiful. Because that means I, like, have money, which, obviously, you know, you know, I wouldn't be so capitalist as to want to survive or anything. Very rambling answer. That's not right. You can buy them from Verso. You can buy them from me at cartooncape.com.com.

You could order them at your library. You can go and support your local bookstop shop in person by ordering it in. do not buy it from Amazon. Amazon do not pay taxes. And Jeff Bezos is rich enough. Hell yeah. Absolutely. We second that. Yeah, the opportunity to buy it directly through you is amazing. I hope people that listening right now take you up on that. Thanks again, Kate. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio or make a one-time donation at buy mea coffee.com forward slash rev left radio.

Links will be in the show notes. You know,