Women in Dark Times (8 page)

Even out of the greatest disasters, something will be born (disaster is never simply disaster, failure never simply failure). Remember Luxemburg’s description of the strike as an explosion of a deep inner contradiction that ‘spills’ into the realm of politics. In 1902, the volcanic island of Martinique erupted, leaving catastrophe in its wake: ‘mountains of smoking ruins, heaps of mangled corpses, a steaming, smoking sea of fire wherever you turn’.
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‘In the ruins of the annihilated city,’ she wrote in a newspaper article at the time, ‘a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before – the human being.’
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It was, for Luxemburg, the revenge of the earth against the tyrannies and abuses of the world (her language has the most striking resonance with Arendt’s idea of the new beginning at the heart of true political life). She had nothing but contempt for the statesmen who were rushing to commiserate, hot from the ravages of empire and the bloody suppression of domestic revolt: ‘Mt Pelee, great-hearted giant, you can laugh; you can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping carnivores.’
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Again, the resonances for today, this time with the 2011 earthquake disaster in Japan, are overwhelming.

Always there is a political lesson to be learnt – to this extent there is something of Brecht, who was one of her great admirers, in Luxemburg. The volcano had been rumbling for some time, but ‘the lords of the earth, those who ordain human destiny, remained with faith unshaken – in their own wisdom.’
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These are the real dupes of history. Luxemburg is talking about hubris, capitalism as inflicting the supreme form of not just physical but mental bondage. For the same reason, the worst evil of slavery was the ‘exclusion of slaves from mental life’.
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Her 1907 essay on the topic ends with a promise: ‘In the socialist society, knowledge will be the common property of everyone. All working people will have knowledge.’
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The lords of the earth, like the centralist dictators of party policy, make the fatal error of thinking knowledge belongs to them alone.

I think this is why teaching was so important to her. Although she was first reluctant to take it on, she came to view her classes at the Party school in Berlin as one of the most creative activities of her life (it also spawned many of her most important writings). Education was the strongest rejoinder to tyranny, especially education in the human sciences. She had lived through a period in Poland when revolutionary writings had to be smuggled over the border from Russia and most humanities teaching took place more or less underground (in today’s climate, with humanities teaching in higher education increasingly isolated and under threat, we should take warning). It meant, wrote Ettinger, that the humanities acquired a ‘spiritual meaning alive to this day’.
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‘We have tried to make clear to [the students] from first to last,’ Luxemburg said in a speech on the Berlin school in Nürnberg in 1908, ‘that they will not get from us any ready-made science, that they must continue to go on learning, that they will go on learning all their lives.’
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This is politics as continuing education. Learning takes on the colours of revolution, endless uncontrollable life. This, we might say, is what conservative – or rather coalition – politicians who have cut 80 per cent off the teaching budget in humanities and social science have understood. Perhaps they had all been reading Rosa Luxemburg.

Let’s say then that Luxemburg did not want to be master of the revolution, she wanted to be its teacher. The worst insult, she once stated, was to suggest that intellectual life was beyond the workers’ reach, just as the tragedy of the war was the thousands dying in the trenches ‘in mental darkness’.
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Or even, perhaps, its psycho­analyst: ‘In the great creative acts of experimental, often spontaneous class struggle,’ she wrote in her 1904 critique of Lenin, ‘the unconscious precedes the conscious.’
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This is not of course – or not yet – the Freudian unconscious (although her term,
das Unbewußte
, is Freud’s). By ‘unconscious’, Luxemburg means the ‘logic of the objective historical process’.
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In fact it is axiomatic in Marxism that history is unfolding invisibly beneath the surface of political life – hence the counter-stress on consciousness, which was at the core of Lukács’ disagreement with Luxemburg, of his belief in the party as the sole purveyor of knowledge and historical truth. This is not her vocabulary. As she wrote in that justly celebrated and inspiring letter to Jogiches in 1899: ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out. In my “soul”, a totally new, original, form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions. It breaks them by the power of ideas and strong conviction. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds, not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.’
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*

So, how far – to repeat the opening question of this chapter – should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? ‘Freedom,’ she famously pronounced, ‘is always the freedom to think otherwise.’
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The German is ‘
die Andersdenkenden
’, which means more precisely those who think otherwise, with its implication of thinking against the grain, thinking the other side of dominant, or I would add – pushing it perhaps, but then again perhaps not – conscious thought. What happens when you allow thought, like revolutionary life, to proliferate and grow, to spread without inhibition wherever it will? For Luxemburg, thinking was ‘another mode of moving in the world in freedom’ – the words used by Hannah Arendt to describe Lessing in
Men in Dark Times.
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In a letter of 1907 to her new young lover, Kostya Zetkin (son of Clara, who appears not to have objected to the liaison), Luxemburg complains of a depression because she has got out of the habit of thinking. The editors of the 2011 collection of her letters add in parenthesis ‘systematic or intensive thinking’ but these words do not appear in the German original, which simply has ‘
Denkeweise
’
–
the way or path of thought (for Arendt, action and thinking were not opposites but profoundly linked as freedom of movement underlies both).
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For Luxemburg, thought, to be free, brooks no such qualifying restraint. It can go anywhere.

That is why, in my view, she was so hated, which is also why she is so important to feminism today. Taking politics further than it could bear to be driven, she pressed against the limits of human thought. Lacan famously situated the language of hysteria as only a quarter turn from that of psychoanalysis because in hysteria, the membrane between conscious and unconscious life is stretched to transparency, almost to breaking point. This is not to join in the chorus of insults against Luxemburg by diagnosing her as a hysteric – she was of course accused of far worse in her lifetime. In fact Lacan’s remark is a tribute. He is imputing to the hysteric a rare proximity to her or his own psychic truth. But the peculiarity, even eccentricity of Luxemburg’s position as a Jewish woman at the heart of revolutionary socialism, meant that she could take political thinking to task, strip it of its façade, unleash what she described in a 1917 letter to Luise Kautsky as ‘powerful, unseen, plutonic forces’ at work in the depths.
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Luxemburg knew that the political weather could change without warning: ‘A fine sea captain he would be,’ she wrote to Mathilde Wurm from Wronke prison in February 1917, ‘who would chart his course only from the momentary appearance of the water’s surface and who would not know how to predict a coming storm from the signs in the sky and from the depths!’
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Gorky’s
The Lower Depths
was one of her favourite plays. She went twice to its Berlin opening in 1903 and wrote to Clara Zetkin that she would continue going as long as her finances would permit (he was for her one of the ‘screeching storm birds’ of the revolution).
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How could you possibly believe that a revolution can or should be mastered or known in advance if you are in touch with those parts of the mind which the mind itself cannot master and which do not even know themselves? ‘There is nothing more changeable than human psychology,’ Luxemburg wrote to Wurm. ‘That’s especially because the psyche of the masses, like Thalatta, the eternal sea, always bears within it every latent possibility [ . . . ] they are always on the verge of becoming something completely other than they seem to be.’
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Thirteen years earlier, in Breslau prison, she wrote to her friend Henriette Holst, ‘Beloved Henriette’: ‘Don’t believe it,’ – she has just allowed herself a rare moment of melancholy – ‘don’t believe me in general, I’m different at every moment, and life is made up only of moments.’
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The shifting sands of the revolution and of the psyche are more or less the same thing.

For Luxemburg it was a radical failure of politics not to be in touch with the deepest parts of the self. ‘Do you know what gives me no peace nowadays?’ she wrote to Robert Seidel in 1898. The fact that people, ‘when they are writing, forget for the most part to go deeper inside themselves’. ‘I hereby vow’, she continues, ‘never to forget when I am writing [ . . . ] to go inside myself.’
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She was talking about the language of the Party press, ‘so conventional, so wooden, so stereotyped’.
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But that is not all she is talking about. The question of the inner life was at the heart of her relationship with Jogiches. To put it most bluntly, he didn’t seem to have one. There is no gender cliché that does not spring to mind when thinking about Leo Jogiches. Constitutionally incapable of writing himself, he wielded Luxemburg, in the words of Ettinger, like a pen.
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He was her puppet-master. A brilliant organiser – to give credit where it is due – he was the spirit behind Polish revolutionary socialism. But he could never fully access the German revolutionary circles to which his lover’s meteoric entry gave him a pass. None of this was however quite public. He seems not to have wanted to be seen in her company, certainly not to be seen as living with her (only partly it appears for her protection). He did not want the life of a couple and although she pleaded for a baby – and later, when it was too late for her to have one biologically, to adopt – he refused (we only have her account as his letters have not been preserved). Today I think we would call him a commitment-phobe. Sadly, Luxemburg didn’t have any of the modern-day generation of feminists around to tell her that she would be better off without him.She is not of course the only revolutionary woman to have tied herself to a man woefully unequal to her vision – Eleanor Marx, no less inspirational and with many lived connections to the world of Luxemburg, would be another case in point.
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‘As soon as I am in the same room as you,’ Luxemburg wrote to Jogiches in 1899, ‘all my initiative evaporates immediately, and I “wait” for what you are going to say.’
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His endless instructions leave a ‘single, indelible impression on me, a feeling of uneasiness, fatigue, exhaustion, and restlessness that comes over me in moments when I think about it.’
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The one plus is that if he had agreed to live with her more fully, we wouldn’t have had all the amazing letters which pour into the void of their shared and unshared life.

Repeatedly she reproaches him for writing to her only about party and political matters, for neglecting all matters of the heart. All she sees around her is
Sprawa
(
The Cause
, the name of their party journal for which she did so much of the writing). She could cope with all of that, if ‘
in addition to that, alongside of that
, there was a bit of the
human person
, the soul, the individual to be seen’.
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But from him ‘there is nothing, absolutely nothing’, whereas for her it is ‘quite the contrary’, as she encounters a ‘whole crowd of thoughts and impressions at every turn’ (once again she is making a plea for the myriad nature of thought).
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She returns from a visit to see him in Zurich ‘with no shade of doubt’ that he has grown ‘utterly blind’ to her, to her ‘inner being’ (the letter also unusually suggests that he has made the same reproach to her).
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But she could also be merciless. At one point where he declines into a depression while caring for his dying brother, she accuses him of ‘senseless, savage spiritual suicide’.
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Jogiches lived for the cause, a cause which she reproaches for destroying all that is finest in a human – she is careful to warn off her next lover, Kostya Zetkin, from politics. For Luxemburg, the only point of the cause was to increase the human quotient of happiness for which man was created ‘as a bird for flight’.
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‘I have the accursed desire to be happy, and would be ready, day after day, to haggle for my little portion of happiness with the foolish obstinacy of a pigeon.’
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Again these are not quite metaphors. ‘Sometimes, it seems to me,’ she wrote to Sonja Liebknecht in 1917, ‘that I am not really a human being at all, but rather a bird or a beast in human form.’
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‘No other couple in the world,’ she wrote in one of her most poignant letters, ‘has such possibilities of being happy as we have.’
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But he was incapable of grasping the mobility of the soul, the freedom of thought and affect in which for her such happiness could only consist. It was for her the condition of all relationships, the inviolable rule of friendship: ‘I don’t want to know just the outer, but also the inner,’ she wrote in 1898 to Robert and Mathilde Siedel.
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