The ruling class (in Germany and elsewhere in Europe) would like nothing more than to continue suppressing the women's vote, she said. The capitalist state is fueled by fear--fear of resistance, opposition to its anti-democratic ordering of humanity. Women have within their means the power to "threaten the traditional institutions of rule," particularly militarism, Luxemburg continued, "(of which no thinking proletarian woman can help being a deadly enemy)." If "millions of women" stood up to "strengthen the enemy within, i.e. revolutionary Social Democracy," the monarchy and robber barons would have a fair fight on their hands--and they just might topple.
On the other hand, who are these German women calling for suffrage? From what class do they hail? What group is the most immediate and greatest threat from within? "Bourgeois ladies!" They are like "lionesses" in the struggle against --male prerogatives'" but would "trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage." But note: aside from the few jobs they hold, do these women take part in social production? No, Luxemburg answers. Bourgeois women are "co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat." And watch out: they are "usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their "right' to a parasite's life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation." :
The women of the property-owning classes will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.
Luxemburg asked her audience to recall the 1871defeat of the Paris Commune, when the men brought out the machine guns, the "raving bourgeois females" out did them "in their bloody revenge against the suppressed proletariat."
Some Serpents "fall"--but not as a result of their engagement as a proletariat on the right side of history!
Twenty years before the Paris Commune ended in defeat, here in the U.S., a former enslaved woman stood before an audience of predominantly women, bourgeois women, at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Few women were permitted to "speak in meeting" just as in Rosa Luxemburg's day. --Slowly from her seat in the corner rose Sojourner Truth, who, till now, had scarcely lifted her head. "Don't le her speak!' gasped half a dozen in my ear'" (Narrative of Sojourner Truth). [3]
"I tink dat "twixt de niggers of de Souf and de women at de Norf all a talkin' "bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon..."Nobody eber help me into carriages, ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place"and ar'n't I a woman? Look at me? Look at my arm...I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me--and ar'r't I a woman?'
Bourgeois society will fail to recall that white capitalist men playing the role of the Biblical serpent as opposed to our symbol for Mother Earth, whispered in the ears of white women words fit to conjure up images of horror: Black men as rapist, Black men as beast! The vilification of our grandfathers, fathers, and sons keep the vote from the Black community until the mid-1960s.
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