Rosa

Politically the film is by no means made Accumulation of Capital in 1913, that as Jogiches the organiser. In 1896 she ones. In this Rosa Luxemburg saw the moved to Germany and joined the 'bridge between the day-to-day struggle

river from which Cuiqiao gathers water and her destiny is a sludgy yellow. Yet

Chen Kaige's direction gives this barenness a strange and imposing beauly which is enhanced by the haunting folk songs which begin and end each scone.

The character of Cuiqiao is intrguing

- a young woman who has only ever known one way to live, whose whole experience of life should convince her to resign herself to the fate of all ihe other women around her, but who still cutches at the only straw she is offered to try and lake contiot of her des, and byline kly stor, who having Gu, and by the direcion, who opened up a world of possibilities for her leaves her to be destroyed by the question autonomy, like so many other heroines before her. Rosa Luxemburg COLIN SMITH A film by Margarethe von Trotta A RECENTLY published book of essays on Marxism has a cover design that

Tas on a bookshelf, various seminal works by the major figures of the Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky. These are broadbacked, chunky tomes. On the left, almost pushed onto the spinc, is a book slim as a volume of poetry. It is 'Reform of Revolution' by Rosa Luxemburg. It is

There is something typical, if inadvertent, about this. Perhaps more than any other great revolutionary Rosa Luxemoura's life and work have been the victims of careless caricature and deliberate distortion. Her books are now thought to be of marginal use in the education of Marxists. This is a groat pity and thoroughly unjust to her memory. In the words of Victor Serge she was 'the one figure in western socialism capable of equalling in intelligence and the spirit of freedom the leaders of the Bolshevik

This may be a bit of an exaggeration but it gives some idea of her stature at the time of her death and it is a more correct assessment than will be found in most opinions of her work today. Her voice oes not have the authority rendered t he words of Lenin and Trotsky by revolutionary success (an authority often attached to their mistakes as well as their 'truths') buther work is not less rewarding

in the simple propagandistic style of those

produced during the cultural revolution.

While its condemnation of arranged marrain gods, fató are

hopelessness of reliance on

clearly aimed against any romanticisa-

tion of peasant culture, Yellow Earth is not

sott on the role of the Chinese Communist

Party cither. Gu is painted as a sensitive

young man, yet his formalism in obeying

parly regulations is responsible for ‹

forced marriage and ultimate into the lives of

Cuiqiao's family .-which for the firsttime raises in the minds of the girl and her brother the possibility of an alternative

way of lite - appears as cruelly because it is not backed up by the material resources to realise those alternatives.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Poland in 1871 and became an active socialist in carly youth which lead to her fleeing the country to avoid arrest by the Czarist authorities. Five years later with Leo Jogiches - a life-long political collaborator and erstwhile lover founded Polish Social Democracy (Social Democracy was then the common name for revolutionary parties) for which sho was the main intellectual voice and German Social Democracy, then the largest and most powerful Marxist organisation in the world. Aimost immediately she became one of the leaders of the opposition to the reformism of Eduard Bernstein. It was in this struggle with Bernstein that Luxemburg began to develop some of her major concerns.

For Bernstein, as others dominated by turn of the century evolutionism, capitalism was essentially progressive. What was needed was a 'realistic' strategy, to pursue a programme of reforms based on day-to-day trade union and parliamentary activity. Calls for revolution were utopian and unnecessary. This sounds tamiliar and as Luxemburg correctly diagnosed what Bernstein was proposing was not the pursuit of socialism but a reformed liberal capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg at this time began to develop a theory which she later elaborated in her major theoretical work The

imperialism engulted the world capital-

ism would breakdown through its own nal

She did not see this

eventual capitalist breakdown loading

automatically to socialism like the mammals replaced reptiles after the extinction

of the dinosaurs, but to a catastrophic.

breakdown of civilisction into a species

Although she perhaps took her theory to cather cataclysmic extreme it allowed her to posit to the workers movement a revolutionary alternative to Bernstein and his reformisin. In her famous phrase 'socialism or barbarism' she summer! up the choice that still confronts humankind. it was not a case of leaving socialist revolution lo some distant future or ditching it altogether, as Bemstein proposed, but of finding ways to link the

minimal day to day struggle to the 'maximal' revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. For Luxemburg the solution to this problem was a matter of urgency

It was not in purely theoretical work that she found what she considered to be the seed of the solution to this problem of programmatic dualism, but in the study of actual events in the class struggle - the revolution in Russia in 1905. In her book Mass strike, Party and Trade Unions she analysed that such upsurges of the oppressed did not occur at the behest of a party but in response to changes and movements deep inside class What to both bureaucrat and police chief would seem like chaos and disorder was to Luxemburg the very face of creative proletarian revolution. It is the nature of such upsurges that partial demands overflow and coalesce, mands merge with political demands, immediate demands with more historic

revolution; that through the perience of its own emancipatory efforts and its mistakes, the working class will learn to confront and overthrow capitalism. This view has lead to charges of a naive faith in the spontancous activity of the mass of workers and a dangerous undervaluing of the role of a revolution-

But this was not a just criticism. Her championing of this self-activity was a vital antidote to the bureaucratic inertia and commandism that can infect even the best of workers organisations at times, and was certainly infesting German Social Democracy in the period before the first world war. As its leadership came to rely more and more on a politically timid electoral strategy, Luxemburg fought for a party which would ceaseless ly attempt to prepare for, develop and lead such workers' self activity in a revolutionary direction.

• £54.00 for overseas airmail multi-reader subscriptions, (U.S.$75.00) Please returnto: International, PO Box 503, London, N7 1YH.

Although she perhaps did not have a full Leninist conception of a vanguard

she was almost alone among Marxists in pointing out the limitations of such a party. 'The liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself' rather than the result of party fiat on behalf of the working class. There may be a taint of utopianism here but the pressure of her thought was towards an understanding of the importance of the broadest form of democracy for building socialism. plurality of tendencies and parties within the dictatorship of the poletariat. Later, in her book on the Russian revolution of 1917 written in full support of Lenin and Trotsky, she did not begrudge the Bol. sheviks their leading role and saw that some of the measures they took which curtailed forms of workers' democracy were forced upon them. But she warned against 'making a virtue of necessity, of making a principle out of what should be temporary emergencies. Lenin and Trotsky could have benefitted by the presence of Luxemburg's sharp insistence on this. She had after all lived through the bureacratic degeneration of what was

'the great machine' of German Social Democracy. They had not.

Before the world war one Rosa Luxemburg, together with Karl LiebKnecht lead the opposition to German militarism and war at the outbreak of which she was imprisoned while her one-time comrades were voting to support their ruling class in the war. She was freed from prison in 1918 becoming leader of the SpartakusBund (later the German Communist Party) and of the 1918 German revolution. Here was mass revolutionary upsurge about which she had long thought and fought. Whatever criticism of her tactics we may have it did not find her wanting. murdered in January crushing of the Berlin uprising by officers of the right-wing freikorps with the complicity of the then leaders of German Social Democracy.

I have dwelt rather inadequately on only a few of the more controversial aspects of Rosa Luxemburg's politics because they are either not well known or

subject to distortion and Margarethe von

Trotta's film unfortunately does not great-

ly illuminate these matters and adds a

distortion or two of its own. The film is consciously not a study of Rosa Luxemburg's work and film is not the best medium for this, it is rather a personal tribute or homage which through a sort of mosaic attempts to build a portrait of Rosa's lite - its tensions, struggles, endurances and moments of happiness. In this it is quite successful and shows considerable subtlety. It is, of course easier to hint at such things as the tensions in her relationship with Leo Jogiches; the warmth of her women in the revolutionary movement such as Klara Zetkin, Luise Kautsky and Sonia Liebk. necht, the problems faced by women in a predominantly male party and the tensions for a women between political life and 'normal' life with children, as such things are experienced, in one form or another, by most people. However, this is not so successful when it comes to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolufionary. What is someone without much knowledge of Rosa or the politics of the time to make of the scene where Rosa refuses to dance with Eduard Bernstein? It may be because of her trenchant opposition to his reformism, but it may be because he will tread on her toes. This is not an adequate way of dealing with what were important issues for Rosa Luxemburg as well as the whole revolutionary More importantly there is little sense of the mass revolutionary struggles of LUxemburg's lite. We are given a few minutes of the political power of a couple of her speeches but there is hardly a mention of revolution and the German revolution of 1918 is seen merely as a backdrop, in one scene while Karl Liebknecht plays the piano. The German revolution failed but in terms of numbers involved it was the greatest proletarian uprising western turope has ever seen. Even in a film so focussed on one person von Trotta does not do justice to her subject by dealing with this revolution so scantily. There is a further difficulty. The openSUBSCRIBE! Annual Subscription rate: (10 issues) • £8.50 for inland subscriptions • £17.00 for inland multi-reader subscriptions • £18.00 for overseas airmail subscriptions, (U.S. $25.00) Name Address.. Post Code.. Make cheques payable to International

ing of the film describes Rosa Luxemburg as a pacitist; she is seen disapproving of a cache of arms held by Polish revolu-

later repudiating for a premature uprising. These scenes together with her campaigning against the coming world war are not adequately balanced by other aspects of Luxemburg's politics and career; her full solidarity with the armed Bolshevik revolution; with a clear assertion that the working class will have to arm itself if it is to overthrow German

successfully. So while scenes shown are true the overall impression given is that Luxemburg was against violence as a general principle which is not true

Many of my friends did not care for that part of the film which imprisonment during the war and what Trotsky called 'her passion for art, nature, birds and growing things'. To them it seemed a bit wet. Present day revolutionaries seem to be trenchantly urban and support Mayakovsky's pronouncement at the time of the Russian revolution 'nature is obsolete'. Well, nature might be about to show us just how obsolete it is. A familiarity if not a burning interest in the workings of nature seem to me to be quite important for those dedicated to struggle for a socialist and rationally planned society. Her language may not be one we would use but just as there was more than a touch of the great Russian novelist about Trotsky, there was a touch of the poct about Rosa Luxemburg. Such things strengthen their politics.

In the end Margarethe von Trotta's film is moving, especially in the performance of Barbara Sukowa as Rosa and the final scenes of her murder are - although restrained - truly appalling. It should be

At the beginning of this article I made a cheeky jibe at the design of a book cover. It was The Literature of Revolution by Norman Geras, a book well worth reading itself, but ironically he is also the author of the best account of Rosa Luxemburg's politics written in English,

The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. Hope-

tully, after seeing the film people will be sufficiently inspired to go and read it.