We Need to Rescue Rosa Luxemburg From the Soap Opera Treatment
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist, and revolutionary. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The twentieth century liked to place great revolutionaries on a pedestal, or even in a garish mausoleum. Our own age prefers to see them as the kind of people with whom you could go for a drink. It’s progress of a sort.
Everyone knows the story of Karl Marx going on a bender around the streets of London, pursued by the cops for strictly unpolitical hooliganism — there’s even a display about Marx and Engels in the Wetherspoons on Charing Cross Road. New biographies of Trotsky combine an account of his struggle against Stalin with the more colorful details of his affair with Frida Kahlo.
Lenin doesn’t really lend himself to the human-interest angle, but the many photos of the Soviet leader petting cats do at least give him a foothold in the latest Internet trends. Irish people delight in the claim that he spoke English with a posh Dublin accent, supposedly acquired from a tutor in London.
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