Rosa Luxemburg: A Life for the International

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH If you need to know in depth, and you should, what Rosa Luxemburg's contributions to Marxist theory were and about her struggles within various European left-wing socialist parties to fight for her revolutionary perspective then this is not the book for you. You need to read the compilation of her own works edited in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks or read one of her eminent political biographers like P. Froelich or M. Nettl. If, however, you need a short primer about Rosa's theories and political struggles then this book can provide some insights about what it was like to be a leading revolutionary socialist woman in early 20th century Europe. Mr. Abraham takes some trouble to go through the details of Rosa Luxemburg's political education in the early socialist movement in Poland; her rise in the German Social Democratic Party that was her home base for most of her career before her assassination by right-wing soldiers in 1919; and, her various trials and tribulations in connection with the Bolsheviks, particularly over the question of the national right to self-determination for Poland and other oppressed nations. He, thankfully, spends far less time on Rosa's personal life than that of Ms. Elizabeth Ettinger (see all my reviews) whose biography of Rosa while admirable in its way nevertheless almost consciously avoids politics. I take issue with Mr. Abraham on two points, at least in part. He off-handedly tries to sneak Rosa into the feminist camp. While feminism may be the fashion in the late 20th and early 21st century it is not belaboring the point to note the contempt Rosa held for the feminism of her time. One cannot in fact understand her political career other than as one of seeing that women's liberation would occur though socialist revolution, or not at all. That, dear reader, has nothing to do with feminism. The second point is his emphasis on the efforts that Rosa made to create a `third way' for Marxist development away from the apparent sterility of bureaucratic German social democracy and the alleged rigidity of Russian Bolshevism. This again is more of a posthumous attempt to use Luxemburg's orthodox Marxist approach to create something more than her theoretical projections would warrant. Otherwise what is one to make of her long term bloc with those very Bolsheviks in the pre-World War I period and of her almost pathological fear of breaking with the German SPD when it was time, in fact past time, to do so. I will definitely take arguments on that one. I read political biographies mainly to get a background look at what makes the subject of the biography tick. After reading this book it struck me, as it did after reading Ms. Ettinger's more personal account, that even revolutionaries, and particularly revolutionary women, cannot fully transcend the facts of their personal upbringing and their times. Clearly, Rosa was a liberated woman by any measure. However, I got the overwhelming feeling that she co