Rosa Luxemburg

The totality of Western civilization, the totality of democratic government was their intent.

Lenin said you could do that in three ways, through a coup d'etat, as the Bolsheviks did, and which you immediately had in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, for example, in Bavaria and in Hungary and in other German states, as well as the failed Spartakusbund uprising of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Secondly, he said you could have the Red Army spread the revolution.

But outside of Warsaw in 1920, the Poles stopped the Red Army, famously, and were able to eject them and send them back into Bolshevik Russia.

But really, I didn't know what happened after.

I heard about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but...

this is this story is a lot more detailed and and it's hard to overstate how important germany was to marxists uh to revolutionaries at this time everybody believed that from marxist time on that the revolution was going to come here in the most advanced european economy in the world germany the russian revolutionaries except maybe stalin later on thought that russia's revolution was just a prologue and the real revolution was coming in germany lenin said in western europe above all in countries like germany it'll be much more difficult to begin the proletarian revolution than in russia but it will be much easier to continue and complete it as for the wonderful energy which 20 million german proletarians steeled educated and organized will be able to display in the final struggle for socialism we cannot yet have the remotest conception of it so So that gives you a real sense of the awe in which Germany was held by Russians and presumably all the other socialists of Europe at this time.

um so social history two-thirds of the german population was urban by 1910 and about the same number or proportion is what would be considered working class industrial working class workers there are some big families like everywhere and these big families are big capitalist families and they own the massive Means of production.

The individual worker lived in his party.

The party penetrated into the worker's everyday habits.

And that's why Rosa Luxemburg, who grew up in this system, I mean, she was from Poland, but she really had her, you know, her work was all in this party.

She wrote kind of against Lenin's what is to be done.

What does that do for me if I have no agency within the system to make changes? Right.

And that brought me to Lady Rosa Luxembourg, who said, you know, a socialist entering into the government does not transform the government into a socialist government, but instead is transformed themselves into a bourgeois minister of capital.

And that broke me.

That broke me.

But he's not saying to get rid of it.

So it's certainly not an extreme volume.

Or, you know, as you've pointed out, it's not, you know, from Luxembourg or Marx or whatever.

And yet she got hold of it.

Cabral too, same thing.

Rosa Luxemburg had hip dysplasia.

Mao also had ALS.

Fanon had terminal myeloid leukemia, and he wrote some of his best work under the knowledge that diagnosis was hanging over his head.

Yeah.

I mean, look, the kind of situation, yeah, that had developed in Spain by 1936, by the time of the military uprising, of deep social polarization and deep social crisis was really the kind of situation that the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg had in mind when, you know, at the time of the First World War, she spoke of society standing at a crossroads between socialism and barbarism.

It was really a choice between society moving forward to a radically more democratic and egalitarian way of organizing society towards socialism or going backwards in a wave of reaction.

That was really the choice in Spain by 1936.