Rev Left Radio - Red Rosa: The Political and Economic Theories of Rosa Luxemburg

Episode Date: October 12, 2019

Simone re-joins Breht to discuss the political and economic theories of Rosa Luxemburg. Intro Clip  by Novara Media, find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUBWmpga2FQ Outro Song: "Coffee" by Sylvan Essa ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical Intro music by Captain Planet --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism. Those words echoed down the ages as a prophecy and as a challenge. They were written over 100 years ago by a middle-aged woman in a freezing German jail cell, a woman who would go on to leave an indelible mark on history. Rosa Luxembourg was a radical, a rabble rouser and a revolutionary. She was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, and her calls for freedom, socialism and democracy scandalised people at the time, both from the left and the right.

So who was this woman whose passion for revolution and justice sent shockwaves throughout German society, whose thought continues to influence millions around the world today? I'm here in Berlin, a hundred years after her death, to find out. All accounts of her both praising and damning agree on one. thing, the fact that she lived a truly extraordinary life, especially for a woman of her time. She was Polish, she was Jewish, she was an immigrant, she was a political refugee, she was disabled, she was a socialist. There were so many strikes against her name that should have kept her on the margins, that should have shut her up, but she never shied away from speaking

her mind, especially to people who were considered her social superiors. The Rosa Luxembourg Foundation is the home to archives charting her life, work and legacy. She was born in 1871 into a lower middle-class family in Poland, then part of the vast Russian Empire. This was a time of pogroms, violent union-busting and socialists being hung in the street. As a teenager, her left-wing loyalties caught the attention of the police, and she was forced to flee the country. She earned a doctorate in economics and eventually found her way to Germany. There she joined the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which at the time was a mass movement. She quickly cemented a reputation as an impressive public speaker,

a tireless organiser, an activist, an educator and a pioneering thinker. Rosa Luxembourg was an extremely prolific figure. She was also an extremely charismatic leader of the socialist movement. And her contribution goes in many directions. So I would say there's three areas in which Luxembourg's work is important. in economic study of capitalism in connection to imperialism, the political study of socialism and the relationship to the national question. What makes Rosa Luxembourg such an original contributor to economics and to Marxist thought?

She says that the way in which capitalism enters into contradictions and the reasons, the conditions for the accumulation of capital, have to do with the fact that capital expands to extra-European markets. So faced with the crisis of overproduction and under-consumption within their domestic advanced capitalist markets, capitalists seek for investment opportunities abroad. And they do this by finding markets that have not been conquered by capital yet. And this connects Luxembourg's economic analysis to one of her main contributions to the study of Marxism, which is the link between the analysis of the crisis of capitalism and imperialism,

imperialist wars. Rosa's economic work chartered capitalism's drive to conquer and cannibalize more territory, fueling war and destroying the environment. So for her, socialism was always bound up with the struggle against colonialism.

This thinking solidified a firmly internationalist outlook. Whilst many of her peers were throwing themselves into national liberation struggles, Rosa Luxembourg dismissed this as a kind of bourgeois distraction, focused on securing a handful of

short-term gains for a handful of relatively privileged workers while just leaving everyone else in the dust. And moreover, if capitalism is a global system of global destruction, only global solidarity can hope to provide any solution. Luxembourg argued we can't live in a world where capitalism is rendering life literally unlivable, so it's on us to change it. Hello everybody and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. So today, Today we are doing part two of our big Rosa Luxembourg sort of sub-series, just a two-parter, one part focusing on her personal life and her as a human being, and the other part really focusing on her political theory and contributions to Marxism broadly.

So this episode will be with Simone Norman, our comrade and friend who was on our irony and sincerity episode, which is really well received. She'll be tackling the theoretical side of Rosa Luxembourg in this part. And then the other part, which would be released on the same day as this one, we'll be doing with the author of Red Rosa, the graphic novel. The author of that is Kate Evans. So we'll have her on for the other part of this Rosa Luxembourg episode to talk about Rosa's life and legacy, et cetera. So you have two options to go. You can do the theory.

You can do them in either order. It'll work both the same. But I love Simone. I love having conversations with her. and this was a really fun, really engaging, super interesting a conversation about the theoretical inputs of Rosa Luxembourg, but also, you know, we talk about her as a human being. We talk about why she's so inspirational, why people across the left continue to find so much inspiration in her life and in her work. And so we hope this is, you know, a loving contribution to the preservation of her legacy and fits well within our sort of historical figure sub-series where we cover people like, Malcolm X, Thomas Sankara, Rosa Luxembourg. We're going to keep doing this. We're doing Sitting Bowl in a couple months.

And I think it's really important to understand these figures and their lives, not as a great man of history or great woman of history thing, but rather as a sort of funnel and prism through which you can understand the broader context historically, economically, politically of these people and their times and sort of use these wonderful figures on the left to examine, history to examine our proletarian history and how it's come about and the amazing periods of it throughout history. So I really hope people love this episode.

I know I do. And as always, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio, we really would appreciate any sort of support that can take the form of joining our Patreon at patreon. At patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. But it can also take the form of just leaving good reviews on iTunes, which really like pumps the algorithm and gets our show out to more people. It can be as simple as just retweeting our episodes on social media, telling your friends about us,

and just expanding our base of influence. And I hope we're doing the sort of work that justifies that. So thanks to everybody who already supports us. Thanks to all the listeners. Thanks to Simone. Now let's jump into this episode on the theory of Rosa Luxembourg. I'm Simone. I'm an actor, comedian.

a writer and an organizer with New York City DSA. I'm in the Emerge Caucus, which is a New York City Communist Will Caucus. And yeah, I am not a leftist scholar, but I have a library card. So that's where I'm coming from. Awesome. Yeah, and you know, that's what we've talked about this many times on the show itself, which is this idea that Rev. Left is not just a platform. for, you know, credentialed academics.

This is made by and for working class people. And so I'm never the sort of person that says, we've got to tackle this topic. I'm going to go look to academia to find somebody. It's always like which one of my comrades and friends that I know, either in real life or through the Internet, would be a great companion to tackle this with me. And Simone definitely meets all those standards.

Our last episode, Simone was on, was the irony and sincerity episode. And I've gotten nothing but, you know, great feedback from that. People really seem to love that. And it obviously touched a spark with a lot of people, especially on the left, the content that we were talking about there. So I knew right when we had that episode done that I had to have you back on. And what better way to do that than to have you back on to tackle this big Rosa Luxembourg project we're working on?

So I'm happy to have you back. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. For sure. Just let's, some basic question, how and why did you initially become interested in the topic of Rosa Luxembourg, her life, and her theory? Well, I guess it kind of happened organically where, I mean, I've just been educating myself over the past year, drifting more leftwardly and reading as much as I could. And then you said that you, you know, oh, I'd love to have you back on at some point. And you mentioned Red Rosa that you were reading it. And it just kind of organically came about. And at first, like when you first asked me to do a larger episode on, Rosa Luxembourg. I was really hesitant and intimidated because I didn't know much about her. And

like we said, knew there were probably like so many literal Luxembourg scholars who could explain her work on your show. And I admitted to you at one point that I wouldn't be offended if you went with someone more knowledgeable. But you brought up that really good point that I hadn't even considered, which is that we can't just rely on the academic elite to weigh in on theory and history. I mean, I'm a Jewish woman of Polish descent with internet access. Like, that's enough. That justifies a little self-educational tour of who I think is one of the most fascinating female revolutionaries and economic thinkers to emerge from Europe. So I got researching and reading, and I was totally fascinated by her life and her contributions to economic theory,

her organizing, her revolutionary spirit. So I was really honored that you run me in to attempt to scratch the surface of what she contributed. And I hope your listeners take this as encouragement to become an expert on a topic they're interested in and not defer only to scholars for their opinions or analyses. And what's great about this topic in particular, of Rosa Luxembourg in particular,

is she's not nearly as difficult to read as other economists or, like, luminaries on the left, like Marx, for instance. Like, I really cannot make it through capital effect. It's difficult, yeah. I've kind of stopped trying. And some of her more, like, technical chapters in the economic texts, they're difficult, and they go over my head. But as a whole, I found her body of work to be so accessible because her language is,

just very direct and clear and succinct. She wants her reader to understand what she's saying, as opposed to so many theorists who seem to want to safeguard their theories by intentionally confusing the reader, or at least just want to sound very smart. And Roza, I think she thought that was crap, and I very much enjoyed reading her for that reason. And so when it comes to the economic sections of our conversation, you and I, I'll be quoting her a lot directly because it's fairly straightforward for the

listener's center saying. And she did that on purpose. So, but I also, and before we get into it, I want to say, I want to give a shout out to Verso books because I use several of their texts to research for this episode. And they are not paying me, but I stand. They have the complete economic and political works of hers divided into several volumes. and a book of all for letters. And yeah, like I said, they're not paying me. I just like, they publish dope shit and their books are like my biggest guilty pleasure to buy.

Like my shoes and clothes have holes in them. But your bookshelf is stacked. I'm like walking around ratty as fog, but I see a sale on books pop up in me. And I'm like, yeah, better spend $30 on this right now. It's a bad habit, but it could be worse, we all over vices. to be vaping, which turns out that makes your lungs, like, fall out now. Yeah. That's what it is.

That is a long answer to your question. Awesome. Yeah, definitely shout out to Verso for that. We really deeply appreciate that. All right. So I just want to ask this question before we get into Rosa's theory deeply, which is just sort of a general question. What was something particularly surprising or inspiring or otherwise notable or relatable,

which you learned during the course of your research into Rosa that, you know, really stood out to you? Oh, definitely how fearless she was. You know, she's a revolutionary. She was writing a very provocative, divisive things that she was publicly distributing in these pamphlets and in public newspapers and magazines. And she was constantly getting dragged to prison. Also for agitating when she would speak at like direct actions and agitate for strikes. And like every time she went to prison, she was so plusy about it. She'd, Because, like, I read her letters and she'd write, like, well, I'm headed to prison tomorrow, but I do look forward to the opportunity to get some writing done. I was like, oh, my God, she's such a badass. Like, it never, that never prevented her from agitating, never deterred her, never put her off her organizing or her public outrage. And, like, for a woman in Europe in the turn of the 20th century, like, public outrage is not a common. And that's not really what women were doing.

And going in and out of prison, I mean, she viewed prison as an unfortunate but necessary component of her work. And that's so metal. Yeah, truly. But she was like a hilarious cat lady with, and in Red Rosa, which everyone should read, they do not, she does not shy away from that. She loved her cat and she had a million sexy radical lovers. Some of them were younger than her. She was just, she was just so cool. Yeah.

absolutely I cannot like reading her every time I read her I get so inspired you know obviously every time I read about her death like I'm just like heartbroken all over again but some things that really stood out to me about her like she is not only she a woman in this highly patriarchal reactionary Europe of her time she's a she's tiny in stature she's a feminist Marxist which you know yeah yeah intense and yeah like you said in prison multiple times tortured she was beaten. I mean, before she was assassinated by the Freikor, she was also, you know, tortured and beaten

leading up to that death. And then, you know, they put a bullet in her head and threw her into the water. So she just had this intense life and she lived it very intensely, whether politically or personally. And she was a radical from a very young age. As I was reading this, I saw that, you know, she's a Polish Jew.

And she, from, as a child, she was in the midst of, you know, pogroms, you know, these sort of mini holocausts, if you will, attacking Jewish people throughout Europe, you know, it was really widespread at that time. So from a very young age, she knew that just because of who she was, that her life was immediately and always in extreme danger. And even in the face of that, she never once took a step back. You know, she faced this brutal-ass world with everything she had, and it'll never stop being

inspirational to me. Yeah, and she never internalized criticism. She never internalized bigotry or oppression or prejudice or or like the status quo she rejected everything she didn't agree with flat out and was very vocal about why that was wrong and like she just yeah a general fearlessness it was a shoot she's the definition of radical in my mind absolutely absolutely so you know it's funny because i got kind of in some criticism when we did this left communist episode recently because we put Luxembourg's name in the title. And a lot of people were saying, you know, Rosa's not a left communist.

And I said, I know we just used her name in the title because she's a big part of this conversation. And, you know, the differences between left communism and Marxism, Leninism, she gets brought up often. And, you know, Rosa can't be easily pinned down into one single tendency. A lot of the tendencies that we think of today were really theorized and formalized after her time. She died in 1919.

And many on the left claim her and love her to some degree, which I think is important and actually good. So just sort of understanding the nuances and the complexities and the fact that she doesn't fit neatly into any category, how would you sort of categorize her politics broadly? And why do you think she is so well received on the left across tendency differences? Yeah. So first of all, I would say, I mean, I definitely don't think she's a left communist and I don't understand why people were criticizing you because you never said she was. I think like it would be really weird to put a label on her that didn't exist at the time that she was, you know, know, even alive. But I think that so many tendencies want to claim her because, I don't know, I read her in a vacuum, you know, I read her just before this episode, having never really heard

much about her before. I am like kind of a non-denominational revolutionary communist, but I'm not like, you know, it's hard. People want to pin themselves down in tendencies with labels behind certain names, Trotsky or Lenin or Mao. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I think that Rosa is really interesting because she hovers above all of those figures and luminaries and tendencies and kind of does something that only, I believe, Marx ever did besides her, which was formulate a theory of capitalism that was part of a scientific economic theory. Like if you view Marxism as a science, which not everyone does, but it's certainly applied as rigorously as a scientific theory would be, even if whatever, like Rosa's contributions

to his theories, I think are completely. unique in history. So that's what I would first say. But in terms of how you would want to categorize her, so I would just, I'd say she's a very steadfast Marxist, but she was also not afraid to criticize and expand upon his theories. And we'll get into it, but her critiques of capital were some of the most important ever formulated. She really did more to improve upon his theory of expanded reproduction more than any, any economist before or after. And obviously I haven't read anything. But this is, you know, my, my life. limited opinion, but the primary goal of her theoretical work was to postulate an international

application of the mechanics of capitalism. She never wanted to limit her analyses to a national scale. She never wanted to view any one society in a vacuum, and that was the cornerstone of her politics. And so, of course, people across tendencies on the left are going to identify her as as prescient and and key to how we today view capitalism on a global scale. She believed the international proletariat needed to rise up in unified efforts to go about a mass revolution, bring about socialism. So I would call her, I would call her like a Marxist, an anti-imperialist, and an international revolutionary anti-capitalist. That's about as, that's what I, yeah, that's what I would say. Absolutely. Her proletarian internationalism was a huge part of her entire outlook and her strategy. And then, you know, just just the role she played within Marxist feminism, right, like is absolutely essential, not only the theory but the practice and ultimately being a Marxist feminist martyr. So if Marxist feminism can be considered a tendency, you know, I'd put her somewhere in that because she did so much for for women in the theoretical and the practical realm. And insofar as she had any, like, influence over.

the editorial line of the red flag the paper that she ran with her comrades she would always inject it with with feminist critiques and always had that in the in the background of her Marxism which is awesome obviously yeah I'm glad you brought that up she absolutely was was influential to Marxist feminism and and so like it's it's honestly insane to me that we don't call Luxembourgian like a tendency or whatever but it but at the same time it it makes perfect sense because she's so, I think, baked into our understanding of, of these, like, phenomena that, yeah, she's, she's just, she's everything, grosses everything. Truly. Yeah, and I don't know, um, you know, Lux, there are people, I think, in the world

that call themselves Luxembourgists of one sort, but I don't really know any personally, and I don't really know how that would cash out fully in political strategy in theory, but I mean, it is a term that I've heard bandied about, although I've never met somebody that necessarily self-identified as such. Just worth noting, I guess. Yeah. But let's go ahead and dive into the theory because, as you said earlier, this is going to be a two-part episode, right? One part, this part is going to be focusing on her political theory and the other part is going to be focusing on just the intricacies of her life as a human being. And I thought doing both, you know, would be an interesting way to get a well-rounded

view of who she was as a full human subject. So diving into her theory with you, in 1906, Rosa authored a text entitled The Mass Strike. So can you just talk about that work and the theory that she really, you know, advocates within those pages? Sure. So the mass strike was a pamphlet. Like you said, she published it in 1906. And it had a couple of different aims. First of all, the SPD or the Social Democratic Party, which was, that's what German Marx has called themselves back then, were Social Democrats, had commissioned Rosa to write a pamphlet for them. In 1904, she was living in Germany. And in the middle of her writing about it, some real-ass revolution broke out in Russia in 1904, sorry, in 1905, after several demonstrations in St. Petersburg turned to violent massacre. And strikes broke out all over the city, as they spread outwards to freeze up entire swaths of Russia.

And workers were demanding better conditions, political and economic improvements. improvements. And finally, the Tsar acquiesced to making reforms. And so this was the first real revolution of the modern era in the area. And it took place in a partly industrialized society. And the whole thing was driven by mass discontent among the striking proletariat. So she was like, I have a lot to write about. So she sits down with her material for this pamphlet. And the first thing she writes about is just a rundown of all the striking activity that had just taken place during the Russian Revolution. And she thoroughly described and categorized these waves of mass strikes.

I won't recap them all now because it's literally a list of like, first, these folks struck here, then these other folks struck there. So you can look at a, you're interested in the day-to-day striking minutia. But I was a little more interested in the theory behind the mass strike. that came next. So after giving this account, a lot of which was firsthand accounts, by the way, because she had actually herself gone to Russia and occupied Poland to agitate along with the strikers. And then she came back. And after giving this account, she starts to get into some political theory. And she's answering a problem Marx and Engels had attempted to solve and never really

succeeded with. The problem was, like, Marcus and Engels had postulated that the, quote, ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch, the ruling ideas, end quote. Okay, cool. But they also said the emancipation of the working class must be in the act of the workers themselves. So how are the workers supposed to free themselves if the ruling class controls all ideological and institutional power, right? How are the workers supposed to gain class consciousness and organize themselves into revolutionary position if the ruling class has monopolized the information and tools necessary to foster that process? That was the conundrum. And Rose's formulation for that little snag was really cool. She posited that they were getting the order of events wrong, basically.

She said it's not that the proletariat needs to get politicized and woke, get organized, start striking, and then bring about a revolution. Like, no. First of all, she said the mass strike isn't an isolated tool you can pick up and put down at your leisure. And I should stop and also clarify by mass strike. I mean, obviously, workers laying down their tools and striking, like, all over, like, across an entire nation. So she was saying this wasn't like a tool that you could just use whenever you wanted to. She was saying the mass strike is actually, quote, the indication, the rallying idea of a whole period of class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades. quote. And it's not that the working class, like, it gets politicized and therefore starts caring about their economic position and organizes to change it. Again, she says this linear

kind of order of events that people were assuming was inaccurate. She said, quote, with the spreading, clarifying, an involution of the political struggle, the economic struggle not only does not recede, but extends, organizes and becomes involved in equal measure. So she's saying that the political and the economic, they're reciprocal struggles. They feed into each other and inform one another with a palpable synergy. And I'm going to keep quoting her. This shit is fire. And he doesn't want to quote, every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle,

extending at the same time its external desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action, a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stocks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely, the workers' condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keep their fighting energy alive in every political interval. It forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength, and at the same time leads the indefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there,

to isolated sharp conflicts out of which public conflicts on a large scale unexpectedly explode. In a word, the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political center to another. The political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle, and their unity is precisely the mass strike. Boom. Beautiful. That is. so cool I love so so so she's laid down the law here on what the conditions for the mass strike are they it is it is a synergistic blend of political and economic struggle that is happening on its own and it's it and so she starts to expand on how that interacts with revolution among the proletariat she rejects the notion that

Revolution is just a series of bloody confrontations in the street and civil obedience. Like, she's a scientific Marxist through and through. So she reminds folks that revolution is like a thoroughgoing reversal of social class relations. Like, revolution is an ongoing atmospheric condition. It's exciting to working class so that it's like the air is charged, charged with revolution. and any little conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie and the capitalists, it will grow into like an explosion, like as if the air is filled with gunpowder. So it leads her into how does the worker then kind of,

how does the worker exist within this gunpowder atmosphere where class conflicts are throwing sparks up? How does the worker get engaged with that? And she says, the worker suddenly aroused to activity by the electric shock of political action immediately seizes the weapon lying nearest his hand for the fight against his condition of economic slavery. The stormy gesture of the political struggle causes him to feel with unexpected intensity, the weight and the pressure of his economic chains. So the entire crux of the matter logically follows that mass strike. does not produce revolution, the revolution produces the mass strike. No one has ever said this before. So she's saying you can't just get together after work and plan a strike with the intention of starting a revolution that is. I mean, you can obviously organize for a strike,

but that's not how revolution comes about. It's not like, first we get woke, then we get together, then we have a meeting, we plan our strike, we start our revolution. Like, it's she's describing spontaneity playing such an important part it's because while the proletariat they are uneducated but it's more than that she's saying it's it's more than just that they're not necessarily as well versed and how to foment revolution but it's it's more she's saying that the concept of revolution or even revolution as an entity she says does not quote allow anyone to play schoolmaster with it. So this whole dialectical

phenomenon means that organizing flows out of political and economic struggle. Not that you take up organizing as a way to engage with political and economic struggle. Mass strike and organizing come out of revolution, which fomens on its own through a proletarian common consciousness

and a shared misery and then spontaneously erupts when the conditions for class conflict emerge. Yeah, so we really, really see here that, I mean, this is a truly Marxist way to apprehend a process, right? This is process philosophy in that revolution isn't, one, it's not something that you can consciously plan like a dinner party, right? Right, right.

And two, it's not something that is just a one-off event that you just topple the classes that be, and then you institute a new thing. It is this protracted process with structural roots out of the control of any one group were set of people to dictate it and the comment about the schoolmaster of the revolution and her belief in spontaneity will come into conflict with her friend Lenin eventually and perhaps we'll probably get to that in the other in the other part of this series when we talk about her life and legacy and her personal relationships but just something worth keeping in mind because at one point I think she does say that Lenin wants to be the schoolmaster and whether

you agree with that or not you can see these divides starting to occur a little bit you know, very close in some ways, her in Lenin, and in other ways, as we'll see, the divide was starting to grow in certain ways. But to understand her views on the mass strike is really to get a good snapshot of how she thinks about revolution overall. Totally. So Rosa lived and, you know, agitated before and during World War I. And as many know, the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism played out very intensely in that era for those on the left in Europe at the time. You know, the whole idea of

class before nation. You know, Lenin was big on this as well, as was Rosa. So what was Rosa's position with regards to nationalism versus internationalism? And how did that really play out in her theory and her praxis? Yeah, Rosa was all about an international lens through and through. Some of her first piece, the industrial development of Poland was really put her on the map. She used her analysis of the Polish economy under Russian occupation, how it was part of an increasingly globalized capitalist system. It was becoming dependent on global capital. Its goods and skills were dependent on imports from Western Europe

and the new markets that were opening up as Russia began to invade Asia. So her analysis of the Polish, of this situation, the Polish economy under Russian occupation, she used that to posit that, like, or she was predicting basically the path of Poland's, national development due to its economic entanglements. And she was arguing against it. So here's a quote from industrial development of Poland. It is an inherent law of the capitalist method of production that it strives to materially bind together the most distant places,

little by little, to make them economically dependent on each other and eventually transform the entire world into one firmly jointed productive mechanism. So she is opposing the call for Poland's national self-determination. And because she's saying Russia's economy had become so dependent on Poland, that this would basically make no sense and would be impractical to achieve Lenin big time disagreed with her. And we'll talk about that later. And obviously, Poland was later able to gain national independence.

So that's like one of her predictions that didn't hold up. But she was, yeah, she was clearly always very oriented towards an international view of bringing about socialism. And so these views were part of a larger theory that she agreed with from Marx and Angles that you mentioned a few minutes ago, that she was articulating over the course of her life, which many people call it proletarian internationalism or the belief that because capitalism is a global system, the working class has to act as a global working class to succeed. I mean, that is the rallying crime, the communist manifesto, like, workers of the world unite. And so she was a member of the International Working Men's Association, also known as the International, which had its first second and, like, eventually third iterations. But she was a member of the first international, which advocated for workers to link up across national borders to maximize bargaining power and influence. She co-sponsored resolutions with Lenin during her time with the International that proposed a

It's like the duty of the international working class to not only band together, but to resist any war that breaks out anywhere, as war is principally a capitalist tool and must be intervened upon by all. So she was definitely an internationalist. And yeah, Lenin had some things to say about that. But it's here that I think many left communists were influenced by Rosa with the proletarian internationalism. but like we said we shouldn't make the mistake to call Rosa left communist yeah I think she did I think it's fair to say that she had some skepticism towards I mean so much skepticism towards nationalism broadly that it did sort of lead into this this sort of tension between like her and the more Leninist approach regarding national liberation struggles and there was a certain sort of impatience with Rosa Luxembourg in the face of some of those you know what what Leninists would consider these these sort of prerequisite to building socialism in the context of colonialism or imperialism. But on the other hand, she also had this, she was one of the early theorists along with Lenin of imperialism, you know, the age of imperialism that World War I really brought in in full

effect and made explicit to the world. You know, her and Lenin right around the same period of time, we're really theorizing through what imperialism is, how it's an extension of capitalism, and how the, you know, underlying motivations of capitalism really push these capitalist powers to expand in the form of explicit imperialism. Is that fair to say? Totally. Oh, totally. Yeah. And we're going to, I mean,

it just, all of this flows into each other so organically. And I think it's like, yeah, I'm going to we're going to talk about it more. Awesome. Okay, cool. So, you know, Rosa was, of course, as we all know a Marxist, but like any good Marxist, she had disagreements with Marx himself. That's part of, that's part of the

methodology of Marxism. We can use it to go back and critique it's it's progenitor so what were her critiques of marx's economics and how did she endeavor to address and correct those perceived flaws so it's really interesting to think about this kind of this nationalism versus internationalism issue that she was first talking about in her early works that she was already identifying earlier on and then like when she was encountering capital more specifically Marx's capital, you know, she she'd already laid the groundwork in her own head for what came next, which was around 1911, I think. She started to become really interested in this gap or puzzle that she encountered in capital, which was mainly

what are the limits to capitalist expansion. And she realized that Marx never really adequately described what they were, what were the limits to capitalist expansion, and by not adequately defining that, Rosa interpreted or said that that could lead to the

interpretation that capitalism can just expand infinitely. And that was something she rejected. Because she said, well, like, if that's true, then socialism is a utopian pipe dream, and it's not a historical necessity.

And she, so she rejected that. And so, like, her criticisms of Marx flowed from there. And across several volumes of capital. Volume one of capital focuses a lot on the production of surplus value. You know, the capitalist purchased labor power from workers, pays them subsistence wages, and then squeezes as much actual labor out of the worker as possible and keeps their surplus value. Very one-on-one. And then in volume two of capital, it focuses on the realization of surplus value.

And Marx had a rather simplistic view of the realization of surplus value. Basically just said that, well, there are two classes in society. They're the workers and the capitalists. And neither of those classes can consume or realize the bulk of surplus value. So there's this thing, expanded reproduction, which says that the excess surplus value, which can't be consumed individually by capitalists, who are people, capitalists or people, is consumed productively instead by capital, meaning it flows back into the process of production, appropriation, and accumulation of more surplus value.

So the term accumulation of capital is used to describe this process of turning surplus value into active capital. And according to Marx, capitalism is an ever-expanding process of production for the sake of production instead of production for the sake of meeting consumers' needs. And to that, Rosa was like, hell no. She basically calls Marks like a dreamy dummy for imagining

that there would be some self-contained reality, reality we all live in where this she called it a never-ending merry-go-round in mid-air we're happening like she acknowledges that it works nicely on paper like where does a surplus value go oh we turn it into productive capital and just make more factories and more tools to make more surplus capital and it just feeds in on itself and expands infinitely and yeah she called that a never-ending merry-go-round in mid-air because in reality, there's more than just capitalists and workers existing in some, like, closed society, assuming zero foreign trade. So her masterpiece work was called, you guessed it, the accumulation of capital. She breaks down everything that Marx, like, left out or glossed over or just died in the middle of doing it.

Right, exactly. So, all right, we're getting into it. Like I said, Rosa, she rejected the notion that surplus value gets just evenly sucked up as revenue for the individual capitalists and as wages for new laborers and that all products enter neatly into human consumption without any leftover means of production that can't be consumed, like tools, machinery, raw materials, buildings. And not only is she rejecting what Marx is saying on the matter, she's disagreeing with the classical economist Adam Smith and David Ricardo, because Rosa believed adamantly that someone had to consume the surplus value. It didn't just get sucked up and realized as different forms of capital, like within a national economy. And the thesis of her work, accumulation of capital, is the answer to the question of who may that be? is consuming that surplus value. The capitalist can't buy it because there simply isn't like enough money for that. And the workers can't buy it because they have even less than the

capitalist. Then Rosa realized, aha, perhaps we're leaving a core constituent of social consumption out entirely. And I'm going to quote her directly here because why would I even try to sell them when she stayed so clearly? The realization of surplus value requires a circle of purchasers beyond capitalist society as its first condition. The decisive moment here is that surplus value can be realized neither by workers nor capitalists, but by the social strata or societies that do not engage in capitalist production. Yoss. Fucking finally.

She states what we've been waiting for. By the way, that comes in in chapter, fucking 26 of the whole thing. And it was so goddamn satisfying for me to read that one sentence of the going to 300 very technical economic theory, reputations and shit. Okay, we're here. It has to be consumed by social strata or societies that do not engage in capitalist production. We've reached the peak of the summit, argument summit, and now it's going to be fun from here, maybe. So that gets us to her theory of expanded reproduction.

I'm going to quote her again, because she rules in its drive to appropriate these productive forces for the purposes of exploitation, capital ransacks the whole planet, procuring means of production from every crevice of the earth, snatching up or acquiring them from civilizations of all stages and all forms of society. And then Rosa goes on to assert that international trade or these transactions between capitalist and non-capitalist areas, that is a historical condition for the existence of capitalism. And this transaction isn't just about commodities or resources that you could find in some other land that has not yet been industrialized or trampled upon.

It's not just about finding other sources of commodities and resources. It's also about accessing new wells of labor power. So she says the process of extricating labor power from primitive social relations and absorbing it into the capitalization. wage system is one of the indispensable historical foundations of capital. So that is really important. Her grasp of how capitalism drives imperialism and colonialism is contained right there, that it is the process of extracting commodities, resources, and labor power from primitive social relations and absorbing it in to the capitalist wage system.

And that, you know, Marx never got that explicit. it. Right. So she goes on to describe how exactly is capitalism going across the globe. How is it using both direct and indirect means of violence, really, against natural economies and forcing them to become competitive markets? So she says, each new colonial expansion is accompanied by capital's relentless war on the social and economic interrelations. of the indigenous inhabitants and by the violent looting of their means of production and their labor power. Hence, permanent military occupation of the colonies,

indigenous uprisings, and expeditions to crush these are the order of the day for any colonial regime in order to rest these means of production and its labor power from these formations and to convert them

into purchasers of its commodities, capitalism strives purposely to annihilate them as independent social structures. God damn. I'm reading, right now I'm reading A Wretched of the Earth by France Phenon. Oh, yeah. This just fucking slaps in both directions.

I mean, that is like, that could have been written by Fanon and vice versa. Amazing. I know. I know. So, yeah, it's all very familiar, right? Like, she, the example, she states are all obviously going to be examples that occurred prior to 1911. So she includes the destruction of the English peasants and artisans of Indians of Indeons. Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of African peoples by Europe,

ruination of small farmers in the Midwestern and Western U.S., which I found very interesting. French colonialism in Algeria, British colonialism in India, British encouraging them to China, British, British, British, British colonialism in South Africa. The sun never sets. They really invented colonialism. So those were the examples she were able to say at the time, but obviously, like there are so many more examples of capitalist-fueled imperialism.

You could cite between when she wrote that and today, which I won't get into for the sake of time, but obvious examples, even in just the 21st, I mean, Iraq, Honduras, really all of Zundal America. Okay. So we've established that capitalism will invade less industrially developed geographic strata to defile their natural economy. And by natural economy, I mean, like, that the inhabitants are producing for their own needs throughout. culture and handicraft. So it will defile that natural economy. Capitalism will destroy it and tear tearing those branches of production, the agricultural producers, the handicraft producers, tearing them from each other in order to concentrate them in factories and force them to engage with mass production. So that's the process of forcibly replacing the natural economy with a simple commodity

economy. So yeah, first you get in there, you destroy the natural economy, you institute the simple commodity economy because, oh boy, that's where capitalism likes to stretch out and get its legs, get it for the next phase. Oh, and what was so interesting is she includes like, oh, by the way, all of this is being done under the guise of establishing peaceful competition in other countries or areas like we're just going to give these populations a nice loving capitalist market but really the accumulation of capital it's violence it knows only violence all of this is being done with violence so so the next phase once you've seized their means of production and labor power force them to become consumers on a market you basically whipped up out of thin air

capitalism successfully supplants that simple commodity economy it just established and starts competing with that new market and now you can destroy that population entirely as an independent social structure and so Rosa positing a definition of imperialism she's she's basically saying imperialism is a political expression of the process of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle over the unspoiled remains of the non-capitalist world environment Damn. I know. And of course, as we've seen, this phase of capitalism uses a lot of fancy tools to do that.

Like we mentioned, I mean, war, military occupation, violence. But then, and this was so interesting when I was reading about it, there's also more insidious tools that capitalism will use, like protective tariffs, international credit. So to sum this up, basically, we've established capitalism views every non-capitalist stratum on earth to be up for grabs, to seize and exploit and turn it into new markets to realize surplus value. And that is so much more, it goes against what Marx said. Marks didn't speak much about leaving your capital estate and conquering new lands to get your surplus value used up. So Rosa's theories on imperialism are in an extricable element or phase in the accumulation of capital. And she just said it so well before anyone else ever did. Yeah.

So my mind is just buzzing with a bunch of different references and stuff. So that's super fascinating. And of course we know that what, you know, Lenin and Rosa investigating imperialism represents is, you know, capitalism has entered the stage of imperialism, right? Lennon called it the highest stage of capitalism. Marx was living really before the rise of imperialism as we currently know it. And so, you know, couldn't really theorize on that level that Rosa and Lennon could because of his historical epoch. So it's really an expansion of Marxism, which is, again, one of the beauties of Marxism. This quote always comes up.

I was reading James Yaki Saylis, his meditations on Reshit of the Earth, and he really succinctly put these terms in a nice definition for people to understand if they're still sort of confused. He says colonialism is a form of imperialism. And imperialism is an international expression of capitalism. So that really connects the dots to these things. These aren't separate entities. These are all connected. And if you read Rosa's accumulation of capital, if you read Lenin's imperialism, the highest age of capitalism,

and if you read Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, you'll walk away with a deep, complex, well-rounded understanding of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and how they're all interconnected. And then the next thing I wanted to say, which you, I never thought of this before, but as you were talking, it just popped in my head. You know, I don't know this for a fact, but it's almost has to be certainly true that Sylvia Federici had to be working to some level with Rosa Luxembourg's text here, with her primitive accumulation stuff in Caliban and the Witch,

because I think you can see the vague outlines, the beginnings in Rosa's work here of talking about some of that stuff that Sylvia Federici would later take and run with and develop into full blossom. So I think that connection just in the Marxist feminist tradition between Rosa Luxembourg up to Sylvia Federici's monumental work, Caliban and The Witch, is really explicit and direct and beautiful. Totally. And it's so cool. I mean, to see that kind of prescience and formulations of economic theories and how people lay the seeds, some Marxists lay the seeds earlier on and then later it gets, it blossoms. into more fully formed works like it just underscores the like the inevitability of this analysis and how how really scientific it can be and again and we said like not everyone thinks it's a science but i do it's like it just it's inevitable and it's it's so cool yeah it's awesome um yeah and i think i think it's really really important to take a moment here to just understand that all of this

means that imperialism is a part of capitalism therefore any left for that ostensibly wants to combat capitalism must, must deeply and consistently also combat its principal manifestation imperialism. There is no socialism that is not anti-imperialist and to be a proletarian internationalist requires that anti-imperialism. To be anti-capitalist, in my opinion, requires really consistent principled anti-imperialism. These things cannot and should not be separated. And no matter where you are on the left, please, please, at least take that away from this conversation, because I think that is so essential for people to understand. I completely agree. I just, I just totally agree. Awesome. Okay. So what did Rosa have to say regarding,

you know, the internal contradictions of capitalism? And importantly, like, what sort of predictions did she make regarding how those internal contradictions would manifest themselves toward the end of capitalism's reign? Okay. Yeah. Now we're getting spicy. So, So one of the most, like, I'm talking about it again, one of the most fascinating aspects of, like, the science of Marxism is, is the analysis of capitalism as an economic entity that contains its, it contains inner contradictions so insurmountable that they become the seeds of capitalism's own self-destruction. Capitalism is, it's a voracious thing. It, it'll metabolize itself over time. And so there's a really cool Rosa quote about how that metabolism, happens exponentially when it's enacted across the world stage through imperialism. And it's actually

the last paragraph of accumulation of capital. I'm just going to read it. The more violently capital uses militarism to exterminate non-capitalist strata, both at home and abroad, and to worsen living conditions for all strata of workers. The more the day-to-day history of capital accumulation on the world stage is transformed into a continuous series of political and social catastrophes and convulsions, which, together with the periodic economic cataclysms in the form of crises, will make it impossible for accumulation to continue and will turn the rebellion of the international working class against the rule of capital into a necessity even before the latter has come up against its natural, self-created economic constraints.

Capitalism is the first form of economy with propagandistic power. It is a form that tends to extend itself over the globe and to eradicate all other forms of economy. It tolerates no other alongside itself. However, it is also the first that is unable to exist alone without other forms of economy as its milieu and its medium. Thus, at the same time as it tends to become the universal form, it is smashed to smithereens by its intrinsic inability to be a universal. form of production. In itself, it is a living historical contradiction. The movement of its accumulation is the expression, the continual solution, and simultaneously the exacerbation of this contradiction. So she is predicting so much about how the internal contradictions

of capitalism would play out. And so, like, what didn't she predict? What do we have here? World War I and the ongoing infinite wars, an explosion of imperialism, the violent seizure of non-capitalist geographic strata to establish new markets. She predicts the obliteration of the world's natural resources. She predicts that more, she calls it convulsions and crises, but more global disasters and crises as capitalism metabolizes itself. Hello, global warming. And she also predicts or and advocates for along in this text an increasing class consciousness among the proletariat, which will lead to revolution. I mean, in America alone, in the U.S. alone, this class consciousness we can see is ramping up by the day. She predicts

globalization leading to the destruction of the world's different cultures. And in the, in the kind of more technical chapters regarding like foreign investment and foreign aid the whole process of modernization the role of the World Bank and the international monetary funds she predicts all of that and so she's a regular little Nostradamus over here but it makes sense

it's not that she's predicting it because she's well she is a genius but because she is some Nostradamus like figure with access to like portents or visions, she is following the logic of capitalism extending itself over the globe and eradicating all of the forms of economy. She is following the logic of what that will lead to. And lo and behold, you know, in 2019, what don't we have going on that she predicted? It's all coming to ahead because capitalism is in its late final seizures of existence.

Truly, yeah. And her quote, you know, socialism or barbarism has never been more true than it is today. Literally, that is the choice for our species. Now, I want to touch on a few things. The fact that she had such predictive power, as you said, was not a result of just like fanciful speculation about the future, which anybody can do. But it is really a testament to not only the Marxist methodology, but to the scientific nature of the socialist project and the Marxist tradition,

because being able to predict things based on this methodology is a core part of science, right? Can your theory make predictions about the future? And if it can, that is at least one shred of evidence in favor of it being a legitimate theory. And so I just wanted to point that out. But yeah, everything you say with it's just like screaming of climate change. And this is over a century ago. She could not have known about climate change, right? But here she is predicting it.

She's predicting climate change. She also could not have known the, I mean, everyone assumes technological advancement over time, but she could not have ever possibly predicted the way technology exploding would lead to this cataclysm. But it didn't even matter. Like, you don't need to talk about technology at all in this. Like, I think the only thing technology did, or, I mean, this is probably a reductive thing to say. but I think the only thing technology did was sped the process up. I don't think that it necessarily, like everything she's saying here,

the infinite war, seizure of non-capitalist geographic strata, obliteration of the resources, using international foreign aid and investment, all of that stuff has nothing to do with technology. It's it's just baked into capitalism's goals. So absolutely like, yeah, and it all screams of climate change. I mean, it's all just like we're sucking up everything the Earth has to offer. And the language she uses explosion, convulsion, like cataclysm. Like, it's quite apocalyptic, accurately so.

Yeah. And you said earlier, she said, you know, capitalism ransacks the entire planet. It metabolizes itself. In other words, after it hits its limitations geographically, it begins to devour its own tail. And in other parts, she said quotes like, you know, capitalism is willing to. to let the world burn. She met that metaphorically, but could she only have been here in the 21st century, she would see that that was actually more literal than she would have intended it to be.

So that's really important to remember. And then the other thing is the homogenizing force of capitalism. It is often laid at the feet of capitalism. Like it is the most dynamic, you know, force. It is so diverse. In reality, it is a homogenizing sort of bulldozer that any cultural, manifestation, any corner of the world that has a different way of viewing space, time, themselves, their reason for being on this planet, if it does not align or is at least not allowed to be

absorbed by capitalism, it will be crushed. And we see that specifically all the world over with the absolute onslaught of indigenous populations to this very day. Those indigenous populations often have entire philosophies and histories and ontologies about the universe, and the cosmos and they're placed in it that are antithetical to the basic incentive structure of capitalism and that is why those indigenous communities are so often and so consistently on the absolute front lines of the climate fight and against on the front lines of extractive industry the world over it's really profound to think about it in those terms yep and every corner of the globe i mean like where i'm standing right now in new york

city and where you're standing in omaha like hello like could i wouldn't be standing here if not for imperialism. Yeah, this expansionism inherent in capitalism, absolutely. All right, so what were, this is the last question, and then we'll get into legacy and conclusion to wrap this conversation up. What were Rosa's strategic thoughts regarding how to fight back against capitalism?

You know, put another way, what is to be done about capitalism, according to Rosa? Because you can diagnose the problem, but coming up with the cure, a solution, a strategy to fight that disease, you know, that's often a whole other realm of difficulty to engage with. So what were Rosa's thoughts on that?

Yeah, what is to be done? In a word, socialism, baby, or I guess that's two words. Rosa published a pamphlet called socialism, baby. Okay, for real. So what is to be done? Here's a great quote from Rosa about what's to be done. At a certain level of its development, this contradiction of capitalism cannot be solved by any means

other than the application of the fundamentals of socialism, i.e. of the very form of economy that is inherently a universal one and simultaneously a harmonious system in itself, since it is oriented not to accumulation, but to the satisfaction of the vital needs

of laboring humanity itself through the development of all the world's productive powers. So, socialism, baby. Rosa, she believed that capitalism could only be overcome by by moving towards socialism in a participatory and democratic process that

actively involved the majority of the oppressed of the working class and this was a departure from hierarchical models of like electoral politics and and violent insurrection she totally differed from um she wrote a really great piece um reform or revolution which was was was really critiquing Edward Bernstein, who had said that the goal of the socialist movement is movement itself, which ultimately translates to revisionism. I mean, that's just, that's just endlessly seeking, like, concessions from capitalism instead of radically rejecting it entirely. So she believed, and she talks about it in reform a revolution, that the goal was to overtly reject capitalism through socialist revolution. And as we said, that that will ignite itself

through the growing class consciousness of the proletarian. Sorry, that's my sister calling me. She's really excited about this, too. So she's rejecting Edward Bernstein's suggestion that capitalism can be reformed or adapted. She points to the fact that capitalism contains fundamental contradictions that will spin itself

towards its own collapse. We said this, but she said that with revisionism, you can protract this process, that it spins itself out. But you can never restrain it entirely. She rejects the notion that socialism can be attained through any kind of process of social reformism, like wherein you would, I guess, slowly expropriate the means of production to social control. She wants revolution, world revolution.

And she points to the definition of the state as one that under capitalist development will slowly fuse itself to society. Eventually, the needs of the dominant class, like the bourgeoisie, will close. clash with the needs of economic progress, that's in and of itself a contradiction. How are you supposed to reform and maintain a state run by a self-interested dominant class that exponentially develops the conditions for its collapse? Like, you don't. She was like, you're trash, Edward. This is all trash. You don't move towards socialism under those conditions. It doesn't make any sense because those factors move in opposite direction. So it's here that she points to the need for a revolution to smash these contradictions apart,

clear the ground to make space for socialism and rest of control. And an amazing quote, only the hammer blow of revolution that is today, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down this wall. Hammer blow of revolution. That is what is to be done. Beautiful. Yeah, so a couple points to be made.

Yeah, exactly like her, you know, attacking, and deconstructing Bernstein's revisionism is a really important part of proletarian history because we see this come up again and again again with every really truly revolutionary movement there does spawn this sort of opportunistic revisionist element within the party itself,

within the movement itself, etc. Now, Lenin obviously fought against opportunism and fought against like, you know, Kotzkyist or revisionism. Mao was huge on being an anti-revisionist, and that's what Rosa's doing here is playing her, You know, not in China, not in Russia, but in Germany she's playing her role as holding the line for principled Marxism and fighting against these deviations and distortions of it, which is always going to be a problem in our movements and always something we need to have people combating constantly. And then the second thing I would point to, before we get into the conclusion part of this conversation, is these strategies really speak to why simultaneously Rosa is, like, loved by different tendencies and also why it's so hard to pin her into one or the other, right?

Because on one hand, she is, she believes in a party structure. She believes in, in that, you know, that alignment with a more traditional Leninist belief that you need this party form. But she's all, but she's very democratic in the way that she views that transition. So she does talk about like councils, like these federated sort of council communism-esque structuring of the revolution in the post-revolution society to really put forward democracy. And that's obviously still alive. It was alive in the Soviets. It's alive today in the Venezuelan communes, et cetera. That strain is always present in our history as well.

So you can see why different parts of the left would take some of her, you know, positive things that she said and some of her criticisms and like them or dislike them. and that would make her a figure of pretty much a pan-leftist figure in that way because of these different positions she took on these different questions. Right. And she, I mean, you mentioned Kotsky. I mean, she broke with him. I mean, they were like really good friends. Yeah.

Kotsky was dope in the beginning. He was a huge leading maintainer of Marxism. Big time. And they were friends and comrades and they eventually broke ties. Or they disagreed so heavily on this notion of like revisionism that, obviously didn't bow too well for Kotzky either. But, you know, she was just like absolutely not on that. And if you read her letter, like, you gotta read her letters.

She rakes him over the coals for that constantly. But Yan and many others, for short, many other social Democrats. Absolutely. Okay, so moving into the legacy and conclusion part of this discussion, in your opinion, what are some legitimate criticisms of Rosa? Like, what were her limitations in your opinion? So, honestly, I don't have too much, but I did. There was something that a criticism of hers that I kind of, I, again, I'm no scholar, so you can feel afraid to drag me for this, but Bukharin took issue with Luxembourg's definition of imperialism, which I kind of understood where he was coming from, because

just like logically what she said and we've we've said it today imperialism is the political expression of the process of accumulation of capital okay yes but um bucoran said like that by her logic it would then follow that a fight for territories that have already become capitalist is not imperialism which is utterly wrong and it it also follows from the same definition that a fight for already, quote unquote, occupied territories would then not be imperialism either. So the whole depth, so he says the whole definition suffers from the basic fault that it treats the whole problem without any regard to the necessity of a specific characterization of capital as finance capital. That is starting to get into the areas where I don't have a PhD and I cannot tell you who is right. But Buchanan and the Bolsheviks believe that while imperialism is a policy of conquest, not every policy of conquest is imperialism.

And that they wrote about in imperialism in the world economy in 1915. So, you know, if anyone can come at them and tell me why they're wrong, like, go for it. I would love to learn more about this. I could only go so far, but I thought that that was a fair characterization to. to say it's a policy of conquest, but not every policy of conquest is imperialism. And then in terms of, you know, I sought out to seek some legitimate criticism with her.

I wrote down one and then the rest are just compliments. So I have some people who really loved her around the world. I wanted to just kind of underscore not how important she was to like European stuff. the Chinese scholar Hey Ping had a whole love letter to her basically but but like he also wrote he had a criticism of her do actually now that I'm looking at this again he said Luxembourg couldn't see past the need for Western capitalist countries to create a world capitalist system involving also Eastern non-capitalist countries

so people in other parts of the world were reading her were influenced by her her and and they were they were criticizing like she she failed to recognize how eastern countries could play their own dynamic role on the world stage like they weren't just passive victims to be metabolized by imperialisms but global actors themselves so like hey ping or this whole thing about how much like how wonderful luxembourg was but also noted that like hey eastern countries can be capitalist too which is funny but then yeah but then all the rest of this is just so much all these scholars that basically were just like she was a genius um george lucas said rosa luxembourg perceived at a very early stage that the organization is much more likely to be

the effect than the cause of the revolutionary process just as the proletariat can constitute itself as a class only in through revolution um tony cliff said rosa luxembourg's conception of the structure of the revolutionary organizations that they should be built up from below on a consistently democratic basis fits the needs of the workers' movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin's conception. And then a compliment of her,

of me, a critic, as I say, Rosa Luxembourg fucking rocks. Wonderful quote. Yeah, I guess, so that Eurocentrism, you know, it's always been present in Marxism and has the same way that the great thing about Marxism is that it can be expanded and updated by other thinkers as we've seen with Sylvia Federici,

France Fanon, Rosa Luxembourg, have all done work, you know, expanding and bolstering and making Marxism better because it's its open-ended development. And so in the same way that some, you know, thinkers of the Marxist tradition out of Europe had a sort of Eurocentrism and even like a sort of stagist, almost sometimes deterministic understanding of how things play out, not Rosa specifically, but just thinkers broadly. You know, that's always been a weakness. But again, it's within the methodology of Marxism itself to critique and update that, which it has in a million in different ways. And then the other critique that I might, you know, wage against her is that, you know, there was this romantic streak. There was this sort of, this sort of strain of purity in her thinking

about revolution. And a lot of the critiques of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I think, come out of this, you know, admirable, but sometimes, sometimes short-sighted understanding of how revolution should immediately be organized. And, you know, in the con, and this is, I mean, this is a big problem on the left broadly, this sort of purity politics when it comes to revolutions of the past and their failures. And of course, there are genuine critiques of the Bolsheviks and Lenin. I mean, I can, you know, talk about those all day. But one of the things that they had to do with that, a lot of their critics never had to deal with is actually build a revolution in the context of being sandwiched between two world wars and then having a brutal civil war where I think like 14

imperialist countries teamed up to overthrow the newly founded Bolshevik, you know, state. And so in these hyper-repressive, intensely, you know, warlike contexts, it's very hard to have the most beautiful and hopefully democratic versions of socialism spring up in those contexts. And I know Rosa critiqued Lenin for his policies cracking down on some liberal political rights, such as free speech and the freedom to organize, etc. But I think we've seen in a lot of socialist experiments that just given the intensity of the reaction that these

proletarian movements have to deal with, sometimes jettisoning liberal of rights and not extending them to your enemies is something that you have to do. It'll automatically get you called authoritarian by those who think that you should never do that no matter what. But sometimes the question really is, do we want to fucking survive

or do we want to be pure? And that's a question of history. It's a question of history, but sometimes I think, you know, Rosa, just through no fault of her own, in a lot of ways, very admirably, sort of erred on the side of a little bit too romanticism and thinking through those problems, you know? That's just my two cents. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. And like I said, if you read her letters, you'll see she is

quite the romantic with men and with revolution. Yeah, personally and professionally. Okay, so last question. How do you think Rosa's, or what do you think Rosa's ultimate legacy is and what should communist and leftist in the 21st century really learn from her and take out of her story in your opinion? I think her legacy, like we said it, it encourages an internationalist view of the economic and political frameworks of Marxism.

Her legacy is a fierce rejection of bourgeois social reformism, an adamant, though, admittedly romantic revolutionary spirit, of fearlessness, and an incredible collection of beautifully written works that are still quite accessible. I think learning what communists in the 21st century could learn from her, well, she wrote for the people, not for the intelligentsia, like we said, and it shows. She wrote in her academic text the same way she wrote in her popularly distributed pamphlets. And so I think, aside from the, like, you know, the technical applications of Marxism that she puts forth, we can learn from her what we started this whole conversation saying, that anyone can come from any background to learn and organize and agitate.

like she grew up in in in programs and like in the kinds of environments that absolutely did not encourage young Jewish women to foment for like revolution yeah she did it and she did it as a as a real person and and so I just think that yeah I think that's her legacy and I and it's really inspiring to me absolutely I I echo all those sentiments I mean her courage her her relentlessness her perseverance her her sense of discipline and obligation to others is always something I deeply admire in another human being and something that, you know, Rosa had in absolute spades. And when we fly that red flag of socialism, you know, the reason why it's red, it's the color of communism, of course, but it's

also been said that our flag is red with the blood of our martyrs. And insofar as that's true, which I believe it is, a big part of the redness of our flag comes from the blood of Rosa and her comrade Carl who who fought their, dedicated their lives to the cause and ultimately paid with their lives and in a brutal, brutal way by the Freikor who were, you know, a proto-Nazi formation. They would eventually go on to form the base of Nazi Germany. So, you know, what would have happened if the social Democrats got beat by the communists and the communists took over Germany instead of those fucking worms?

You know, would Nazi Germany even have been a thing? And if Nazi Germany wasn't a thing, what would the implications for Soviet Russia be? then those counterfactuals you can talk about that shit all day but yeah it's it's certainly worth reflecting on those possibilities and then just remembering no matter what side of the left you're on rosa is our martyr and we carry forward her spirit and her passion and everything we do she can never ever be forgotten totally and like for i mean the question of what would you do if you could go back in time everyone's like kill hitler honestly just don't kill rosa luxembourg save rosa luxembourg I mean, I might be exaggerating, but I think that it could have been even more important.

Absolutely. I'm a lot to speculate. Yeah, for sure. Now, I'll take that. I'll take that all day. I mean, the Soviets handled Hitler at the end of the day, so I would take Rose's life back. Exactly. All right.

So, thank you so much, Simone. This has been amazing. Honestly, like, you know, the amount of work that you put into this, like, people will never know because they didn't see our emails back and forth. They didn't get a call from you as you're at a cafe studying this shit. You put in a fuck ton of work to really read through all of this material and answer these very difficult questions and I'm deeply appreciative of it. Let's do something else, right?

Like every time I have you on, we immediately start thinking of the next episode we can do together. And if you're down for it, if you have free time, I know you're extremely busy, but I'm down to do whatever topic you want to tackle next because I love having you on the show and I love talking to you. Thank you. Well, I love being here. And I think I mentioned to you as we were talking about just how much work like this was, was that, hey, I don't, I'm not going to grad school. I can't afford it. And I don't have the time. And I wish I could just spend my time reading about this stuff and take classes on and write papers on it. And I can't. So it's a welcome opportunity for self-education and clear proof that anyone can do it for themselves if they are interested enough. Yeah, you're a working-class hero and a comrade in my book. Thank you. Where can listeners find

you and your wonderful work online? Okay. Well, my website, SimoneNorman.com, has pictures of me on it or whatever, but if you want to hear my thoughts and takes, you can follow me on Twitter at Y-Simon-Y, that's W-H-Y-Simon-W-H-Y.

You can find me on Instagram, local honey, that's local H-U-N-N-Y. And then I'm a comedian I don't know how much of today was very comical but you can see me in live shows in New York City all the time and there's like

a schedule of all the shows I do on my website so awesome I love you I love your comedy I think you're one of the funniest Twitter counts out there so yeah thanks again let's keep in touch and let's do this again my friend all right have a good one to it's a dance we know the moose

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