Rosa Luxemburg

by J.P. Nettl

A classic book on the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg’s work with essays of political analysis by leading scholars

he inspirational power of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) remains as important today as it was in her lifetime. An uncompromising, original thinker and revolutionary activist, Luxemburg’s efforts to develop an emancipatory version of Marxism through her involvement with Polish, Russian and German Social Democratic parties and then the Spartacist League ensured her position as an influential force, yet resulted in her brutal murder during the January 1919 uprising in Berlin.

J. P. Nettl’s biography was first published half a century ago and remains the most detailed and comprehensive study of Rosa Luxemburg to date. His extensive knowledge of the social and political context of the European socialist movements in which she was active, and his engagement with her voluminous writings in German, Polish, and Russian (many of which are only now being translated into English), brings to light the multidimensional nature of her life and work. This new edition will enable a new generation to explore Luxemburg’s political and activist work, as well as grasp the unique personality of this remarkable woman, theoretician and revolutionary.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Germany, Politics, Biography Memoir, Feminism

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Feliks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually only award 5-star reviews for books which fill me with good feeling, bright hopes, exuberance, and good humor. This is not that kind of book. It is somber, downbeat, morose, and ruminative. Enjoying it is purely an academic satisfaction.

There are many 'dry' passages; it is far too inordinately detailed for one to call reading it a pleasure--but my appreciation for it in every other way--is very high. Because it is a perfectly executed work of history and nearly a 'clinic' in political analysis. You may at first wonder why all the events in the story are set in Germany--but what we always overlook today is that it is Germany--birthplace of Karl Marx--where socialism and communism were reared, and where they underwent all their early birth-pangs.

The author (John Peter Nettl) transports you to that Germany of 1890-1918; brings that era alive like no other writer I have ever seen. This should command all our fullest respect. How many other authors do you know who can do this? He cleanly, neatly dissects all the major political ideas of the day as well as exposes the goings-on of the numerous, pre-WWI Polish and German underground political movements. It is one of the richest biographies I've ever read; truly 'paints a picture' of its age. A cogent companion-piece to any of the more well-known and oft-recommended biographies of more famous figures like Stalin or Hitler. This book really tells the whole story; describes what was going on in people's minds at the time. The debates. The arguments. The speeches. The gatherings. This was Rosa Luxemburg's world: grassroots revolution.

Of course, most westerners today wouldn't even know of this woman's name, much less her writings or her books or her accomplishments. But we should. She is a marvelous figure for women's history: fearless, ferocious, a spitfire; possessed of razor-sharp intellect. Yet also, nothing more than a tiny, frail, little wisp of a female. But she went 'toe-to-toe' with the biggest names of her era; and cowed before no one. I would recommend Rosa Luxemburg to anyone wanting to know what really drives revolutionaries and idealists of the kind which flourished at the turn of the 19th century--the infamous, wild-and-woolly, 'gunboat era' of anarchists and bomb-throwers and saboteurs.

For this bewildering episode in Europe, this one book contains the most impeccable scholarship I am aware of. Nettl distills it all down and makes it comprehensible. It is that dense, challenging, demanding kind of academia which you have to read very slowly. The kind you can't really find anymore these days. [Who is this guy Nettl anyway? The acumen of this man is extraordinary. His name should be much more renowned].

Anyway, Nettl has his subject matter down cold. And he has a stupendous power of eloquent English. The commentary he wields is of a high order; his sentences as finely-wrought as poetry. And really, it needs to be: to cross the gap of time involved in telling this story. It's hard to believe (at the start) that he will pull-it-off; but he does. What emerges from the salvo-upon-salvo of bone-dry factoids he rattles out--what rises above this fastidious and painstaking account of socialist firebrands of the early 1900s--is a intricate portrait of a very warm, human, heroic individual. Rosa Luxemburg.

This biography is not merely politics: it is a really wonderful exploration of a woman's personality. Unlike other remote-at-hand bios, the narrative is suffused with the subject's own voice: Luxemburg (like other revolutionaries of the time) lived through letters, speeches, handbills, newspapers. It is all presented so skillfully in the course of the story. You feel as if you are sharing her week-to-week existence. One morning she is waiting for a telegram--and you wait with her--on another, she looks up from a book of botany to receive a visitor--and your eyes rise with hers. Nettl is fantastic. You can smell the bread on the table by her elbow.

Were you aware that Germany very nearly turned into a communist state immediately after WWI? You will learn that and a lot more of German history besides. But nevermind. Focus instead on the main strand of the tale: this is a stirring, moving analysis of an extraordinary life. My god! What a mind Rosa had! And what nerve! What idealism...what commitment. In the end, what sacrifice. The brutal account of her death is one of the most gripping I have ever encountered. It rips your heart out. When you turn the last, matter-of-fact page, you want to stand up and cheer.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of biography of a revolutionary you'd expect a German academic to write: pedantic, heavy, obtuse, and always missing the point. J. P. Nettl should have heeded Lenin's eulogy for Red Rosa: "Eagles sometimes descend to the level of chickens but chickens can never fly like eagles, and to us, Rosa Luxemburg was an eagle." Luxemburg was the first and foremost Marxist female thinker of her time, challenging Lenin's the theory of imperialism, the right of self-determination for all nations, and to how to organize the revolutionary party. And, on every point, she lost. The German Social Democrat Party (SPD) and trade unions moved father to the right every time she published an article, culminating in the SPD leaders fomenting her death in 1919. (A young Hitler took notice. If the Socialists could kill their own, the German Army would have no problem dealing with the Socialists.) Her contention that in our time "there is no national question, only capitalism" and therefore all nationalism is reactionary would be news to Ho Chi Minh, Mao and Castro. World imperialism continues to "suck off profits" from the periphery of Latin America, Asia, and Africa with the full collaboration of the local bourgeoisie. Nowhere have "the masses taken to spontaneous action" without a revolutionary party to lead them. Rosa's martyrdom still inspires; her thought must be made the subject of the kind of needle sharp criticism she reserved for her political opponents. Reader's note: Nettl's Preface to his own biography is contradicted by Hannah Arendt's Introduction. He thinks "Rosa has never been more relevant" and "offers a choice between orthodox Marxism and social democracy". Arendt, brilliant as always, thinks Luxemburg's life a lesson in political frustration: "Could it be that her failure resembles the failure of revolution in the twentieth century?".

[Geoffrey Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this thoroughly documented and engaging study, Peter Nettl uses the life of Rosa Luxemburg to explain the rapid growth and ultimate failure of the Marxist revolutionaries to make a reality of their dream of an egalitarian, truly democratic society.
Thus this book is far more than a biography of a brilliant, passionate and highly energetic woman who came to a terrible end — though it is that, too, and Nettl's account of Rosa Luxemburg's struggles, her intense and complex love life, and above all her passionate commitment to her notion of a better world for all, is dramatically, at moments even breathlessly told. But this is also an essential piece of the much larger story of the origins of Bolshevism, Soviet Communism, and Hitler's "National Socialism" — the antithesis of all that Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades strove for. Following her life, her voluminous writings in Polish and German, and her actual, life-risking and ultimately fatal revolutionary action allows us to enter and follow the ferocious debates involving Bernstein, Bebel, Kautsky and many others whose names are probably less familiar today. All men, except Rosa.
Rosa Luxemburg was born into a tight, lower-middle class Jewish family 1871 in Russian Poland. Too bright and too ambitious for the educational opportunities in her homeland, she traveled to Zurich, where she learned German well and quickly enough to win her doctorate in economics before age 23, and quickly became a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD — in spite of what Nettl describes as "her natural disadvantages —youth, foreign origin, sex, above all impatience and intellectual superiority." (p. 105) In the SPD her comrades were barely, if at all, aware of her writings and other contacts in the Polish revolutionary parties, where she wrote, spoke and organized fiercely against the narrow Polish nationalism of the main revolutionary party; her view was that a movement whose main aim was seeking to reunite all three Polish territories in a single state favored only the bourgeoisie. Instead, the smaller, more militant party that she helped found believed that the revolutionary's only national loyalty had to be to the coming society of the victory of the proletariat, in which all national distinctions of language or customs would have become irrelevant.
In German and Austrian circles, she was known mainly as the principal opponent of "revisionism" — the thesis, first expressed by Eduard Bernstein, that the path to socialism would come not through sudden and violent revolution, but rather by the progressive and continuing reforms of the sort already being achieved by the large and powerful German trade unions. This debate became the most divisive in the SPD in the years up to the outbreak of the great war in 1914.
As an advocate of direct proletarian action without the direction of any non-proletarian vanguard, Rosa enthusiastically supported the 1905 Russian revolution, arguing that that was the model to follow. In Russia and in meetings in Zurich and later, she developed a close working and personal and political relationship with Vladimir Lenin — which, however, did not endure after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 with its "vanguard party." Rosa's view was that Bolshevik strategies of "democratic centralism" were not going to work in the far more industrialized, proletarianized society of Germany. Though she and Vladimir Ilyich later became polemical antagonists, each continued to maintain great respect for the other's quick and comprehensive intelligence.
At the outbreak of the war, almost all of the SPD deputies in the Reichstag broke with their long-standing commitment to world peace and international brotherhood and voted in favor of the Kaiser's appeal for war funds. At this point, Rosa Luxemburg, together with Karl Liebknecht, one of only two who had voted against the war funds, along with other SPD radicals created a new revolutionary organization at the margins of the SPD, which eventually took the name of "Spartakusbund" — the Spartacus League.
In 1919, in the midst of the German disaster after the war, the Spartakusbund was the most prominent organization stirring revolutionary workers in factories and neighborhoods across Germany to seize power. But the newly installed government, under the cautious and conservative SPD president Ebert, feared chaos and gave license to the so-called "Freikorps", a self-organized militia of war veterans, to clamp down on the movement, and soon both she and Liebknecht were discovered in their safe house. The Freikorps thugs mercilessly beat her near to death before throwing her cadaver in the Landwehr Kanal; Liebknecht they killed more quickly, with a bullet through the brain.
Today, Rosa Luxemburg's faith in the ultimate success of highly class-conscious proletariat creating a revolution by their mass action appears as a grave misreading of the real class dynamics, where the so-called working masses are divided among innumerable trades, working conditions, and local aspirations. To me, it seems that the gentle and much-loved (within the SPD) Eduard Bernstein had the better argument: focusing on the ultimate goal of an all-encompassing and pure socialist revolution is a waste of energy; much more effective will be to channel our energies into improving conditions here today, by successive reforms seeking ever to widen the freedoms already gained by trade unions and social movements at great sacrifice.
But we can't deny that the ever brilliant, provocative Rosa Luxemburg is much more exciting to read. One of her German comrades warned the others to beware of her in debate, because she was blitzgescheit, lightningbolt-clever. And very courageous.
Judging from the bibliography, his footnootes and his many references, it appears that Nettl had read everything Rosa Luxemburg ever wrote and almost everything written about her, in all her languages plus English (Rosa herself was clearly fluent in Polish, German and Russian and knew French well enough to serve as improvised interpreter for a speech by Jean Jaurès). To our great loss, Nettl died in a plane crash the very year that this abridged version of his more extensive biography was published. Too bad that we can't know what such a subtle, brilliant and multilingual political sociologist would have made of later developments, not just May 1968 in Paris but 1989-93 in Russia and Germany.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good, oscillates between i) conventional biography ii) history of ideas and iii) european / intertional context rather than managing to streamline them all, bit repetitive in parts as a result

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyday without her is pain 😭

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange combination - I wouldn't recommend this monster to anyone, but I loved reading it, came to love Rosa Luxemburg as much as her devoted biographer evidently does, while also remaining critical of her utopian, uncompromising politics, found solace in her passion, vision, womanness, weaknesses, eventual dramatic and martyred death which is what she would have wanted.

Some of my favourite Rosa-as-person moments:
- "Radek [her political opponent] belongs in the whore category"
- From prison, writing letters chewing out her friends because they are depressed, drawing dancing ladies in the margins, making friends with the birds, drinking good wine with the prison guards, writing for 3 different newspapers
- When her man becomes too controlling, she dumps him and starts a passionate affair with THE 20 YR OLD SON OF HER BEST FRIEND!! And then another friend's son, and then a friend,
- one of her major techniques was to "seduce" the wives of her political opponents, which ... ;)

Rosa-as-politician is more complicated because she was predominantly a journalist and critic rather than intellectual, meaning she kept grudges for a long time, hated who she wanted and let propaganda get in the way of her thought. I winced to read that Rosa fought passionately against trade unions, the independence of Poland and Lithuania from Russia, Jewish labour organisation - because all of these in her mind prevented the real revolution from coming, which it would. It was a time where revolution was actually happening, and she turned out to be right about the Bolsheviks, actually.

This comes to what is to love and learn from her. She was a revolutionary - she believed it came from all of us - she did not give ground on anything - she hated over-organisation - she knew the "masses" would decide their own fate and that it would come from the needs of all rather than an elite intellectual party. She burns through the pages. Thank you Rosa!

[Ruairí]

Not sure what to make of Luxemburg’s life - Nettl views her ideas as amounting to something like a revolutionary ethics which seems fair from the perspective of today (and from the ‘60s when he wrote it). Invoking her critique of Bolshevism or the revisionists as some sort of immediate guide for now doesn’t seem all that helpful. Does the question of ‘reform v revolution’ even apply?

Got a laugh when Nettl writes of Liebknecht invoking the Decembrists against the Marxist Centre:

“Never had historical analogy been harder worked than by the German left, a sure sign of intellectual doubt and stress”

Will keep that line in my back pocket.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than 60 years on from the publication of Nettl's largely-sympathetic biography of the eminent Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, the contestation over her legacy still persists. Today, Leninists and Trotskyists still cling to belief that Rosa largely abandoned all her criticisms of Lenin in the midst of the 1918-9 German Revolution, while others hold her up as perhaps the most prominent critic of Leninism from within the Marxist tradition (the Mensheviks and early Trotsky seem to get sidelined in this view, though not unjustly) and insist her criticisms were largely borne out with the experience of 20th-century Bolshevism.

The need for greater exposition of Rosa's life and work as a result of her contested legacy was one of Nettl's motivations for writing this book (pp.4-6). Characteristic of Marxist critique, however, the fact these debates persist even today (albeit with much less intensity than in the mid-20th century) attests to Nettl's ultimate failure to offer this much needed clarity. To be sure, it is a good book, replete with discussions of Rosa's core ideas and the context in which they were developed (the revisionist debate, the role of the mass strike and spontaneity, critique of Imperialism, the rupture of WW1, and her engagements with Lenin), but the book also assumes prior knowledge of a lot of this context and - if the reader goes into it without this - a lot will remain beyond their grasp. The transformation of the SPD executive, for example, from one strongly opposed to revisionist compromise in the debates of the 1890s to a reactionary clique during WW1 and the subsequent revolution are completely opaque.

Overshadowing the entire book, and indeed Rosa's life work, is the question of nationalism and national self-determination. The book sketches out her initial engagements with this issue in the context of debates within Polish Social Democracy and touches on her divergences with Lenin on this same issue. One interesting observation worth remarking upon is the (fatal) decision of the Second International to endorse the principle of national self-determination (p.64).

Indeed, Nettl sees national self-determination as so central to Rosa's thought that he dedicates an appendix to her particular positions on this topic, albeit not a particularly useful one. Not only does Nettl base this section mostly on her early articles relating to Poland, but he offers a somewhat incoherent argument: at once Rosa's views are different to Lenin's (pp.510-1), charactured by Stalin (p.515), but then 'probably Lenin's policy could only lead to Stalin's practical application' (p.516). A closer, more careful reading of the Lenin-Luxemburg debate on this issue might have yielded clearer results.

Nettl is even sloppier in his conclusion that 'events proved Rosa Luxemburg's prognosis [that in a society based on classes, the nation as a uniform whole does not exist, but rather masks antagonisms] incorrect [...] the outbreak of war showed clearly that when the crunch came class antagonisms were swept aside by national solidarity' (p.507). This ignores the fact that such "national solidarity" is, in fact, created by bourgeois society. As Paul Mattick pointed out in his own review of this volume: 'Actual historical development substantiated Rosa Luxemburg’s position on the national question and the right to self-determination'.

The book is better in its handling of the Luxemburg-Lenin debates and subsequent historiography claiming or disclaiming Luxemburg's legacy in the name of Leninism. There is an excellent overview of the core tenets of Rosa's critique (pp.431-3). Against the later claims of Bolshevik sympathisers, particularly Rosa's friend Clara Zetkin and - of course - Lenin himself, Nettl is firm in arguing 'There is no reason to suppose that she [in summer 1918] now approved of those aspects of the [October] revolution which three months earlier she had criticized' (p.446). Indeed, it is common amongst Leninists and Trotskyists to claim Rosa retracted or revised her earlier criticisms of the Bolsheviks in light of the German Revolution, particularly in light of correspondence from Luxemburg indicating her position had moved on (Nettl makes one exception to his determined position - her criticism of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly). Rosa was, indeed, a sympathetic critic (or critical supporter) of the Bolshevik revolution, but even if she did retract her views on the Assembly (which one could argue convincingly was made obsolete by the existence of the Petrograd Soviet), the fundamental aspect of her criticism underlining the necessity of democracy remains completely relevant, especially in light of the Red Terror.

Other intellectual biographies like Bronner's might be better places to start, but this is comprehensive in scope, blending the personal and political for an eminent Marxist who has always defied neat classification.

[Claracristela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leído en la edición mexicana del año 74 sobre la edición en inglés del 69. Con lo que suponía escribir sobre el comunismo a finales de los años 60, en plena guerra fría. El libro no es tanto una biografía de Rosa Luxemburgo como un detalladísimo compendio de todos los conflictos internos de los incipientes partidos comunistas y socialistas europeos, fundamentalmente rusos y alemanes, desde fines del siglo XIX hasta 1919. Es, por tanto, una lectura densa, erudita, llena de nombres y de citas, y que hoy en día ha perdido gran parte de su vigencia. No en lo que se refiere a la labor historiográfica, que es magnífica, pero sí a un punto de vista que tenía al “comunismo real” heredero del leninismo, único que Rosa llegó a conocer, como sistema dominante en la mitad del mundo.
Destacaría de toda esa ingente cantidad de información la constante oposición de Rosa Luxemburgo al nacionalismo, en su caso el polaco, como ideología que debía quedar totalmente subordinada al marxismo y la lucha de clases. Los obreros polacos debían luchar con el resto de los obreros (rusos o alemanes) para derribar el sistema burgués, única nación común del proletariado. Para ella el internacionalismo era incompatible con cualquier nacionalismo.
También resulta especialmente interesante el progresivo fraccionamiento de los partidos socialdemócratas, entre aquellos que van aceptando entrar en el juego parlamentario y los que, como los espartaquistas de Rosa Luxemburgo, sólo entendían el cambio a través de la revolución. Una revolución de la que ella fue la gran teórica de su momento, pero que la sorprendió en el país equivocado, esa Alemania que ella consideraba más madura que Rusia para encabezar el alzamiento de las masas y en la que dejó su vida cuando precisamente un socialdemócrata presidía la nueva República…

[Omar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosa Luxemburg is easily one of the most inspirational activists and revolutionary socialists in history. I completed this biography blown away, truly impressed by her ideas, her organizational capacity and her commitment to the ideals of revolution, freedom and democracy.

JP Nettl does a phenomenal job tracing her life for us. From her early experiences with socialist political activity in Poland to her educational achievements in Switzerland to her contributions to Marxist theory and Social Democracy in Germany and Poland and finally her participation in the revolutions in Russia (1905) and Germany (1918-19). It is all here and it is an exhilarating albeit lengthy read.

I personally found her polemics with Lenin and the split of German Social Democracy (SPD) to be the most interesting and gripping parts of the book. The latter in particular was exceptionally upsetting, and it gives credence to the idea that the international socialist movement technically met its defeat in 1914 when working-class parties voted to support the First World War. Rosa opposed this war and this principled stance and her opposition to it cost her life when power-hungry SPD sellouts collaborated with proto-fascist paramilitaries to murder her.

It was a premature and sad end to an extraordinary life. She is truly one of the greats.

[Mitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dense; revisionist

[Steve Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The cannon fodder inflated with patriotism and carried off in August and September 1914 now rots in Belgium, in the Vosges, in the Masurian swamps, creating fertile plains of death on which profits can grow. Hurry, for the rich harvest must be gathered into granaries - a thousand greedy hands stretch across the ocean to help." - R.L. For Rosa - 5 1/2 stars. For the author - 3 1/2 stars. And there you have it - 4 stars. The biographical elements were quite interesting, but the political summation of an academic was pretty much worthless... as is to be expected I guess.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

rosa luxemburg was an amazing individual, but this book doesn't do her life justice. it's long, heavy on details (mostly about different political factions), but poorly written. the author is obviously a marxist, and writes like one (read: esoteric, academic, obtuse, long-winded, uses 19th century language and concepts)