No Woman, No Revolution, Part 2a
Rosa Luxemburg on Women
Rosa Luxemburg was a major
revolutionary figure in history, ranking with her contemporaries, Lenin and
Gramsci, as one of the supreme pioneers of modern communist theory and
practice.
Rosa Luxemburg wrote many
powerful things. At least two of them have continuing currency as major,
canonical “classics” of Marxism. These are “Reform or Revolution?”, and “The
Mass Strike”.
There is a well-stocked
archive of Rosa Luxemburg’s work, translated into English, on the Marxists
Internet Archive.
Luxemburg has been accused
(by Janine Booth, for example) of being indifferent to the particular position
of proletarian women under capitalism. As much as with Lenin, or perhaps even
more so, it is hard to isolate a selection of texts of Luxemburg and say: this
is what Luxemburg wrote about women.
The attached text is a big
exception, and it shows that Luxemburg was highly aware and concerned about the
way that capitalist relations bore down upon women in particular.
It begins by quoting the
question framed in 1889 by Emma Ihrer, the founder in 1890 of “Die Arbeiterin” (the woman worker)
magazine: “Why are there no organizations for working women in Germany?”
“Die Arbeiterin” became “Die
Gliechheit” in 1891, and the editorship passed to Clara Zetkin.
Rosa Luxemburg brings her
exceptional powers of expression to bear upon the topic that she so rarely
covered, and in the process leaves no doubt that she was fully aware of
everything that was at stake.
The question “Why are there
no organizations for working women?” is still a crucial one in South Africa now,
as much as it was in the Germany of 1889 or 1912.
Luxemburg is scathing about
the feminists: “Most of those bourgeois
women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would
trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if
they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary
than the male part of their class,” she writes.
Luxemburg knows both the
purpose, and the limits, of democracy: “Fighting
for women’s suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the
present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary
proletariat,” she concludes.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Women’s Suffrage
and Class Struggle, Luxemburg, 1912.
