Rosa Luxemburg of Our Time

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4585
Date Written:  2016-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21363

Does Rosa Luxemburg leave feminists a theoretical and political legacy? That is, does she give us any theoretical guidance as to how to understand women’s oppression? If so, what is it?

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

All socialist-feminists see class as central to women's lives, yet at the same time none would reduce sex or race oppression to economic exploitation. And all of us see these aspects of our lives as inseparably and systematically related; in other words, class is always gendered and raced.

The term "intersectionality" has come to be used for this position. Luxemburg certainly held to this kind of perspective, in that she recognized some kinds of oppression as common to all women and others varying by class and by nation.

While the special needs of working women were Luxemburg's priority, she also supported positions some might see as merely "bourgeois demands," the end to all laws that discriminated against women and women's suffrage, which she advocated both as a matter of principle and for pragmatic political reasons.