In the Occupy Movement is a young Black woman who can mention the word "capitalism." It must come to an end. Well, finally! Revolution! But then--among the enslaved of the world, we have it "better" than them. Presumably, those she is referring to the enslaved workers in Africa and Asia.
This is not necessarily true. A middle-class Ethiopian receiving a salary from an NGO could have it "better" than she does here and what is it that the enslaved elsewhere produces for Westerns like her to have it "better" than they do? Why this statement at all if engaged in revolutionary practice?
"Red Rosa: The Writing of the Martyred Socialist Rosa Luxemburg Give a Plaintive View of History's Paths Not Taken," the late Christopher Hitchens' review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, [1] a collection edited by George Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, (Verso Books, 2011) appeared in The Atlantic, June 2011--before Hitchens' death in December, 2011.
Of Rosa Luxemburg Hitchens wrote that she was "the most brilliant--and the most engaging" of the Marxist intellectuals who analyzed 20th Century totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. The "Polish-born Jew," he adds, was "the most charismatic figure in the German Social Democratic Party" (SPD). This is the same SPD, Hitchens points out, whose majority leadership voted in August 1914 to "take part in the greatest fratricide the world had ever seen."
Of the first statement regarding the "brilliant" Luxemburg, I will return to shortly, but of the latter statement, I will let Luxemburg speak:
Dividing people according to whether they approved out of necessity or did so with a joyful heart isn't worth a pinch of powder"The only thing left would be to try and read people's hearts and kidneys as opposed to [2] their actual statements or explanations. No judgment can be made about motives in cases of such world-historical significance, only about actions. On top of that, almost every one of the approvers presents a slightly different motivation, so that not just two, but six or eight, different groups can be distinguished, and thus the supposed line of demarcation disappears in the sand. The reproaches one wants to make against "those on the right' only involve the degree of consistency in their approval of the war, and thus the distinction proposed by D[issmann], in the final analysis, boils down to that between a consistent pro-war policy or one that is not consistent. I am, under all circumstances, in favor of consistency, but I expect nothing but wretchedness from the notion of swallowing approval of the war, and may consistency be damned.
Luxemburg held her ground. For her, the Kaiser had to go and for that decision, Hitchens notes, she was "imprisoned." Charisma, it seems, was not a factor Luxemburg relied on to make her decision to oppose support for the First World War.
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