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Review of ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARXISM PHILOSOPHY OF
REVOLUTION
by Raya Dunayevskaya. [University of Illinois Press, $12.95]
April 2001
Lives of Rosa Luxemburg
Reviewed by Linda Edmonson, "Lives of Rosa Luxemburg" in REVOLUTIONARY
RUSSIA, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 35-44.
The publication of Paul Le Blanc's Luxemburg collection gives N&L an
opportunity to excerpt a passage from a review by Russia scholar Linda
Edmondson of three books on this important revolutionary. Edmondson's
review, published in the journal REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA in 1989, discusses
J.P. Nettl's ROSA LUXEMBURG, Elzbieta Ettinger's ROSA LUXEMBURG: A LIFE and
Raya Dunayevskaya's ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S
PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION.--Editor
The argument about Luxemburg's ambition touches on an aspect of her
presence in revolutionary politics that only Raya Dunayevskaya considers at
any length: the fact of being a woman in a male-dominated political
movement and her response to the women's movement of the time. The
consensus of all but Dunayevskaya is that Luxemburg had little interest in
the "woman question" and felt a "distaste for the women's emancipation
movement."
Ettinger quotes from an article which Luxemburg wrote in 1904 for her paper
Gazeta Ludowa in Poznan. In this she attacked the Berlin congress of the
International Council of Women as "a congress of ladies...representatives
of the fair sex from the bourgeoisie" who "bored with the role of doll or
husband's cook, seek some action to fill their empty heads and empty
existence." To these ladies she counterposed working-class women, who
understood the connection between women's emancipation and social
revolution. However, these were exactly the terms in which socialist
feminists, from Zetkin to Kollontai and Kuskova, assailed the "bourgeois"
women's movement and for that reason it cannot be produced as conclusive
evidence of Luxemburg's indifference to the question of women's
emancipation. Elsewhere in her book, Ettinger suggests that Luxemburg never
shook off "a slightly patronizing attitude towards women in general,"
though she had close women friends, including Clara Zetkin. And she was not
above publishing her articles in Zetkin's SPD feminist journal DIE
GLEICHHEIT, when she was encountering difficulties getting published
elsewhere.
Raya Dunayevskaya's case for Luxemburg as feminist is rather chaotically
presented, but is well worth considering. She proceeds from the evidence
that other biographers have presented of the pervasive "male chauvinism"
(Dunayevskaya's words) in the SPD and argues that Luxemburg developed "tone
deafness" to it in order not to be deflected from her goals. According to
Dunayevskaya, Luxemburg had an interest in the question of women's
emancipation from the very beginning of her political work and she provides
a few snippets of evidence which, if representative of Luxemburg's
thinking, support the view that she took a characteristically socialist
feminist line: women's oppression could not be fought separately and would
be solved by the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a socialist
society...
Perhaps one day, an intrepid new biographer will disregard her apparent
indifference to sexual politics and attempt an analysis of Luxemburg as a
woman in a none too sympathetic political and social environment. Women in
politics have very rarely, if ever, been allowed to forget the fact that
they are outsiders and on perpetual probation. Whether or not they insist
that gender is irrelevant to the task they have undertaken, those who
analyze their conduct and performance will always find occasion to remark
on it. Unfortunately, most such analyses are simplistic in the extreme.
To make simplistic judgments about a complex individual like Luxemburg
would be a waste of precious effort. But the time is surely ripe for an
imaginative study of the sexual politics of European social-democracy and
of Luxemburg, a prominent socialist theorist, and emancipated woman in a
patriarchal culture, but one whose response to feminism was,to say the
least, ambivalent. But the ways in which her male comrades responded to her
were also riddled with ambivalence-both she and they brought inherited
expectations of gender difference into a revolutionary political realm
where such expectations were supposed to have been supplanted by sexual
egalitarianism. The extent to which old patterns of thinking about gender
influenced the ideas and behavior of socialists before 1914-and of their
present-day biographers-has not yet been fully recognized. A study of
Luxemburg and her world that focused on her experience of being a woman in
a highly gender-conscious society could prove to be an exceptionally
illuminating project.
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