Luxemburg on Revolution
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Rosa Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918) from a jail cell in Germany. In it she described how the Bolshevik revolution was going to change the world but also explained how and why it was already going badly wrong. David explores the origins of Luxemburg’s insights, from her experiences in Poland to her love/hate relationship with Lenin. Plus he tells the story of her terrible end.
Going Deeper:
- Vladimir Lenin, ‘What Is to be Done?’ (1902)
- Hannah Arendt, ‘A Heroine of Revolution,’ The New York Review of Books (1966)
- Kate Evans, Red Rosa (2015)
- (Audio): In Our Time, 'Rosa Luxemburg' (2017)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode of History of |
| 0:19.5 | Ideas, brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, is about Rosa Luxembourg, |
| 0:25.0 | Revolutionary and Critic of Revolutions. David discusses her classic takedown of Lenin's Russian |
| 0:31.7 | Revolution less than a year after it happened. She thought it was a wonderful event. Why did she |
| 0:37.9 | also think it was turning into a disaster? Rosa Luxembourg lived a revolutionary life |
| 0:59.8 | in that she lived the life of a revolutionary. It was a dangerous life. She spent a significant |
| 1:05.5 | amount of time in jail. She was often in personal physical danger. It was a pretty tumultuous |
| 1:11.7 | life. It was dramatic both her personal life and her revolutionary life. She also lived the life |
| 1:18.4 | of an outsider. She was a woman in a world of men. She was a Jew in a notoriously antisemitic age. |
| 1:26.4 | She was Polish. She was born in Poland. But she spent a large part of her adult life among Germans. |
| 1:33.0 | For all the drama, for all the tumult though, it is possible to say quite straightforwardly what |
| 1:39.6 | was the worst day of Rosa Luxembourg's life. That is the worst day before the final day of her life. |
| 1:45.1 | She was murdered at the age of 47 on January the 15th 1919. But before that terrible day, |
| 1:53.3 | the worst day by far, the worst thing that ever happened to Rosa Luxembourg happened on August |
| 2:00.0 | the 4th 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War. And more particularly, it was what |
| 2:06.4 | happened on that day in the German parliament. So Germany in 1914 had a real parliament, |
| 2:13.6 | but it was also a kind of fake parliament. It wasn't like the UK parliament in Westminster. It did |
| 2:19.3 | not have that kind of power. Germany was still a pretty autocratic regime ruled by the emperor, |
| 2:26.1 | the Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm, who appointed ministers who essentially appointed the government. |
| 2:31.2 | And the parliament did not have the power to stop him. It could not hire and fire ministers, |
| 2:36.0 | the great power of the British parliament, what gives the British parliament its power. |
| 2:41.2 | But the German parliament was elected on a pretty broad franchise. There was something close to |
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