What more could we want of ourselves!
Jacqueline Rose
- BuyThe Letters of Rosa Luxemburg edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver
Verso, 609 pp, £25.00, February 2011, ISBN 978 1 84467 453 4
On the occasion of the publication of a reader of her work by Duke University Press and of this essay, Paul Myerscough interviewed Jacqueline Rose in front of an audience at the London Review Bookshop. An audio recording of the interview can be found here.
We live in revolutionary times. I cannot imagine now what it would have been like to be thinking about Rosa Luxemburg if the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had not taken place. I do not know whether it would have been easier or more difficult. But one thing revolutionary moments do is force us to revise our sense of time, stretching us between past and future, as we comb backwards for the first signs of upheaval, and look forward to see what is to come. For many observers, but mainly those in power, the uncertainty is a way of stalling the movement of revolution, curbing its spirit by calling it to account in advance for a future that it can’t predict or foretell. These are the fear-mongers, who point to a range of monstrous outcomes – say, anarchy or Islamic control – as a way of discrediting what is happening this moment, now; who manipulate the dread of a terrible future (and the future may always be terrible) to dull the sounds of freedom.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 14 · 14 July 2011
From Peter Hudis
Jacqueline Rose errs in stating that Lenin wanted to ‘burn’ Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Russian Revolution’ (LRB, 16 June). She seems to be attributing to Lenin a comment reportedly made by Leo Jogiches. Jogiches was surely joking, however. He opposed publishing the book at the time because he was concerned about alienating the Bolshevik regime at a moment when the newly formed Communist Party desperately needed its help. But Jogiches would have been the last person to destroy any of her writings; he spent the last weeks of his life – at great danger to himself – gathering together as many of her writings as he could.
Lenin attacked Paul Levi for publishing the book, in 1922, on the grounds that Levi wanted ‘to achieve popularity with the bourgeoisie by republishing precisely those works of Luxemburg in which her errors appear’. This comes up in the same letter (to Pravda) in which he called her an ‘eagle’ and insisted on the publication of ‘the complete edition of her works’. Lenin applied tremendous pressure on Levi’s allies to get them to state publicly that Luxemburg had ‘changed her mind’ about what she said in ‘The Russian Revolution’ (she hadn’t).
Lenin’s preference was for Luxemburg’s complete works to be published, rather than ‘The Russian Revolution’ on its own, as that would better contextualise their points of agreement (of which there were many) as well as disagreement. Yet he also wanted to see her work appear in full and never advocated burning anything by her. While Luxemburg’s criticisms of Lenin’s centralism and authoritarianism remain of crucial importance, she still regarded him as a comrade and a friend.
Peter Hudis
Chicago
From Jeremy Bernstein
That Rosa Luxemburg chose the name ‘Junius’ for the pamphlet she wrote in 1916 and published in Switzerland shows that she had a knowledge of 18th-century Britain. The ‘Junius Letters’ attacking the establishment were published between January 1769 and January 1772 in the Public Advertiser. The pamphlets stopped when Sir Philip Francis, who was almost certainly their author, went out to India. Warren Hastings, the governor general, was a great admirer of the letters, but hated Francis personally. They fought a duel and Francis returned to England to assist Edmund Burke in the impeachment of Hastings.
Jeremy Bernstein
New York
Vol. 33 No. 15 · 28 July 2011
From Jacqueline Rose
Peter Hudis argues that Lenin did not want to destroy Rosa Luxemburg’s text ‘The Russian Revolution’, and that the remark was a joke – not a very funny one – on the part of her former lover Leo Jogiches (Letters, 14 July). Luxemburg’s biographer Elzbieta Ettinger states clearly that, even if it did not originate with Lenin himself, the instruction to destroy the manuscript came from Moscow. But this isn’t the issue. As Hudis acknowledges, the Communist Party’s attempt to discredit Luxemburg’s text was sustained. Lenin was indeed her friend and comrade. But it is hard not to read in this episode a classic (male) put-down of a (woman) follower’s right to challenge the discourse of the master. If only they had listened to her. Today we know that the refusal to recognise the dangers of autocracy inside the Communist Party played a key part in its subsequent failings.
Jacqueline Rose
London NW6
