rosa luxemburg cat name mimiwhy is graham wardle leaving heartland
[12] Angela Davis, Angela Davis on the Struggle for Socialist Internationalism and a Real Democracy, interviewed by Astra Taylor, Jacobin, October 21, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/angela-davis-socialist-internationalism-democracy. At five hundred and twelve pages, this collection, the most complete available in English, returns the personal struggles of Rosa often omitted by earlier editorsto the life of Luxemburg. Thomas SpenceCat Coin for a Utopian Economy[8], From Niccol Machiavelli to Adam Smith, from Friedrich Engels to Louise Michel, from Rosa Luxemburg to John Maynard Keynes, and yes, Karl Marx himself, those who have studied the relationship between state power and economic power, those who have contemplated and indeed instantiated how different that relationship could be, have used cats to do so. The emphasis on personal emotion and on the lure of domesticity implies that Luxemburg herself was not immune to that embourgeoisement which was so characteristic of the SPD leadership. RT @LadyIzdihar: Lenin meeting Rosa Luxemburg's Cat Mimi . She was one of the most charismatic public speakers in the SPD (in 1903 she gave 12 speeches in a period of 14 days, addressing audiences of over a thousand for up to two hours). [25] Clayton J. Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 18801945, (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016) p. 93, Site designed and developed by Social Ink, https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/image/media-143046, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm. Before things are even over with Jogiches, we find love letters of a more patronizing tone, addressed to Kostya Zetkin. On this concept hinges the fundamental alternative which she defined in 1898: Social Reform or Revolution? Since Luxemburg is often identified with a facile notion of spontaneous revolution, it must be emphasised that this process involved a strenuous programme of political education. On my grave, as in my life, there will be no pompous phrases. Later on, while devoting herself to socialist politics, she kept an herbarium, a collection of plants, dried, mounted and annotated.[3]. .) According to one of Rogdolllove's blogs," Ragdoll cat price range is . The great tits are in loyal attendance in front of my window, they already know my voice exactly, and it seems that they like it when I sing. She sang to them, spoke to them, mimicked their calls. And do you know what that means, Miss Jacob? Selling arms abroad is seen as the key to export-led industrial prosperity. Mathilde Jacob, secretary, comrade and friend of Rosa Luxemburg, was to die in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. . One exception is a letter to her lover, Hans Diefenbach, where she gives a description of bird migration that she, as one of the greatest minds of the time, seems to have believed in all seriousness, but is no longer credible. She is alive and well and speaking at a street meeting near you. Her biographer detects in the most famous of these letters an element of self-dramatisation: written to lift the spirits of less resolute comrades, they created and perpetuated a myth. T he generally accepted verdict on 20th-century ideologythat its . [1] She had first encountered the feline some years before while teaching at a socialist party school, adopted her, and given her a Hebraic name, Mimi, which means both rebellion and bitter. Her public life was not some kind of compensation for personal disillusionment. She was certainly ahead of her time in studying birds and other animals with sympathetic understanding, rather than dispassionately as objects. [], Sri Lanka: Popular Upsurge against Economic Collapse and Political Repression. Her letters reveal a revolutionary intellectual who was deeply committed to socialism and defiantly humane. Mimi was Rosa Luxemburg's cat. Marx for Cats should be understood as what the philosopher Walter Benjamin called a Tigersprung, or a tigers leap into the past. For Mr. Nettl is right: Her ideas belong wherever the history of political ideas is seriously taught.. Modern studies of bird behaviour confirm that birds do sometimes respond to human music. Moreover, her breed is Bicolor Ragdoll and has white/gray fur with blue eyes, which makes her absolutely adorable. Her whole life was devoted to consciousness-raising, and she was a tireless pedagogue. 2 Comments. Skylark Alauda arvensis She summed up the fundamental duplicity of institutionalised Marxism in the caustic phrase: Workers of the world unite in peacetime; but in war slit one anothers throats! Her indictment of war is, however, still framed by the Marxist conception of competitive capitalism as the motor of military imperialism. [7] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, vol. Monthly Review Press, 2004. Laugh out loud passage in Rosa Luxemburg's letter of April 2 2011 to Kostya Zetkin (Clara's son) about Lenin's visits and the sharp dialectical criticism of Lenin by Mimi the cat. [13] To Hans Diefenbach, 27 August 1917, Letters, 439. It was in Zurich during the 1890s that she was drawn into the world of Marxist politics and made the most significant personal encounter of her life: with Leo Jogiches, a wealthy political exile from Lithuania. She wonders if the latter will ever understand economics, and more freely lets her literary tastes dictate his. At that time of year, the nightingale would have just completed its spring migration, returning from an Africa carved up, subjugated and ruthlessly exploited by European powers, to a Europe where the slaughter and devastation of world war were unleashed. Rosa Luxemburg was passionate about many things, among them, the natural world and especially bird life. Required fields are marked *. Reform or revolution became reform against revolution. (and) what mattered most in her view was reality, in all its wonderful and all its frightful aspects, even more than revolution itself.. How, she wondered, could a socialist revolution transpire if workers in one country were willing to slaughter those of another, all at the behest of nationalist, capitalist accumulation? In those openings, we may locate how felines have long been creatures of economic critique and communist possibility. A student of botany, Luxemburg recorded that, we busied ourselves with the flowers, that is, Mimi and I, she is helping me skillfully the whole time. Mimi too had an epistolary habit: There is always a big celebration at my house when a letter from you arrives. What is surprising is that Luxemburg was aware of habitat loss and its impact on bird populations over a century ago. They targeted the proletarian women [who] are whores and cats [and] communists who live in a cathouse.[24] Homosexuals, too, were on their list; Berlins gay bar at the time was called Zur Katzenmutter, The Mother Cat. Criminologist and psychiatrist Paul Ncke visited the establishment in 1904 and reported that it was decorated with small pictures of cats.[25]. Although she had a shrewd sense of the weaknesses of the SPD leadership, Luxemburg cultivated throughout her life an idealised image of the proletarian masses as agents of historical transformation. Her conception of socialism was thus the exact opposite of Lenins and she clashed with him on numerous occasions. The intensity of Rosa Luxemburgs feelings towards birds must be partly due to her situation as a prisoner, separated from her friends and cut off from her political activities, all in the midst of a war she abhorred. The time when I was writing the [first] Accumulation of Capital belongs to the happiest of my life. The question left unresolved is how a person so frail and fallible could have become one of the most charismatic figures in the history of revolutionary Marxism. In this sense, as Luxemburg argued in 1898, militarism remains one of the driving forces of capitalist economic development. . rosaluxemburgthecat. Luxemburg writes: This leap is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development.[23] We must highlight a different aspect, namely a certain irony: a cat-lover uses a feline term in her hope of abandoning non-human animals in a quest for freedom. And she seems to have been most fully alive pen in hand, composing the next letter, lecture or political article. At least, Luxemburg was correct in thinking that bird vocalisations can convey a wide range of meanings. The time has come to amend that exclusion. Her Marxism was inspired by ethical ideals, and she believed that ideas can change society. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Christian Aquino on August 22, 2020 at 1:10 . Luxemburg famously solved a lacuna in Marxs theory of accumulation, but this question of animal freedom, of who leaps where and from who we take our cue to leap, that constitutes a lacuna in her own life. On the contrary, her irrepressible capacity for love in the personal sense seems to have been the source of her political vision, of her ability to envisage a community based on co-operation and affection, not on exploitation and conflict. Really I was living as though in euphoria,. But Luxemburgs view of war as the outcome of intensified competition between military-industrial systems still has applications for the rivalry between Soviet state capitalism and the corporate capitalism of the West. Bakunin got into quite enough trouble for what he did do, especially during his association with Nechaev. She had become, in Marxs words, vogelfrei or bird free.[18] Marx uses this term to isolate the particular double-freedom that capitalism delivers. . Or with illegal socialist groups which challenged nationalism in all its forms? Medieval kings and lords styled themselves as lions; dissidents from the medieval order were identified through their relationships with domestic cats, who likewise were considered dissidents. This is a remarkable claim, and quite possibly an exaggerated one. In February 1914 she was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for arguing, in a major political speech, that the German people should not let themselves be dragged helplessly into a war. A heightened perception of life was one of Luxemburgs greatest gifts: but in practical terms it was a source of disillusionment. Let us remember Luxemburg for rising above the pig-headedness of her fellow radicals, certainly, but if we read her own, candid words carefully, we find plenty to celebrate strictly in what she had to say and how she said it. It lives only on ants with its sticky tongue like the anteater. Such sentiments were shared by other members of the Socialist International, but Rosa Luxemburg was exceptional in that she never wavered in her campaign and was ready to go to prison for her beliefs. There she diagnosed a lacuna in Marx's prose and solved a problem with his theory of accumulation that is still appreciated today. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza. Along with Karl Liebknecht she founded the Spartacus League, an early iteration of the German Communist Party and one distinct from that countrys war-supporting socialists. [19], Indeed, she fantasied about a life in which she could paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals.[20] Still, as the years in prison, and World War I, dragged on, her thoughts returned to Mimi. [4] To Sophie Liebknecht, 2 May 1917. I got commissioned to write the book. All this is very salutary as an antidote to the myth of the heroic revolutionary. In socially progressive Zurich she was able to take a wide range of university courses and obtain a doctorate summa cum laude with a dissertation on industrial development in Poland. Luxemburgs critique of war had both a political and an ethical basis. The vast majority of these are addressed to Luxemburgs long-term lover and political partner, Leo Jogiches and the same is true of the Verso edition. Perhaps thats why Red Emma Goldman claimed she herself was like a cat, no matter where she was thrown from and regardless of where she was forced to jump, she always landed, she said, cat-like on her paws.[6]. Thus far, we have not witnessed Luxemburgs rhetoric surfacing in protest literature, but perhaps that will change with Versos massive release of Luxemburgism in the coming years. You shouldnt spoil my joy with Mimi. [16]. Two things Rosa Luxemburg could not foresee (although the fatalism of these few lines in a private letter should not be taken as a fixed opinion). In asking how our society is structured and for whom, Marxism turns toward economic history. Even in prison Luxemburg continued her crusade. Even in a mere twenty-one years, it has aged poorly. At most, a stream of migrants may include both types of bird, heading in the same direction, but without the coordination of a flock. Marx returned to the leap in multiple texts, writing in his magnum opus, Capital, for example that, so soon, in short, as the general conditions requisite for production by the modern industrial system have been established, this mode of production [capitalism] acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds.[5] Numerous Marxists from Leon Trotsky to Mao Zedong to C.L.R. And at the touch of her pen the mundane details of prison routine undergo a spiritual transfiguration. At home so many times she knew how to lead me onto the right road with her long, silent look, so that I always had to smother her with kisses and say to her: Youre right, being kind and good is the main thing.[21]. Cats benefit from certain historical situations, being welcomed indoors, for example, and suffer from others, such as the cat massacres which roiled late medieval and early modern Europe. This is an archival, project, and I could not find what was not there. 1, The Process of Production of Capital, in Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. The position of the Jewish community in the Russian-governed Kingdom of Poland was precarious; a pogrom which occurred in Warsaw in 1881, after the family had moved there, was a sinister sign of the times. SIR In her biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Elzbieta Ettinger attributed the Catechism of a Revolutionary to Bakunin and Nechaev jointly. The first letter in the collection dated July 1891 comes just as she is finishing her studies. Her letters were written for personal friends and comrades, but in the knowledge that they would be monitored by the prison officers. Citing his inspiration and antagonist, the great German philosopher, G.W.F. Debates with Leo about social propriety were no less spirited (we are told) than their discussions of the Prussian military budget. Rosa Luxemburg speaks outside a congress of the the Second International in 1907. She rarely stresses her identity or complains about hostility towards her as an independently minded woman, as a Jew, or as a foreigner in Berlin. But she shows that Rosas life was also enriched by a number of affectionate relationships with women, most of them members of the socialist movement like Luise Kautsky and Sonja Liebknecht. Increasingly systematic forestry, gardening and agriculture are, step by step, destroying all natural nesting and breeding places: hollow trees, fallow land, thickets and shrubs, withered leaves on the garden grounds. The first real capitalist empire, Great Britain, adopted a leonine symbol, while some of the most powerful worker actions against capitalism have been known as wildcat strikes. rosa luxemburg cat name mimi. With whom was Rosa to identify in her struggle to escape from a constricting environment? In the most revolutionary eruptions of both feudalism and capitalismthe peasant uprisings of the middle ages, the Paris Commune of the modern age, the queer and communist movements of the twentieth centuryin each of these radical reformulations of economic power and possibility, cats were present; indeed, they were often used for said reformulation. Given that German was her third or perhaps fourth language, her eloquence is stunning. Reading The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg one sometimes feels like a voyeur. Find out more about the London Review of Books app. Her notes on birds may help us reveal an aspect of her approach to life, nature, and the new society Editors. I am and want to remain an idealist, she insisted in a letter to Leo early in her career. It is not difficult to imagine what was going on in Rosas mind, Ettinger writes in an early section dealing with the Warsaw pogrom of 1881. In exactly the same way, step by step, they have been pushed from their land by civilized men and abandoned to perish silently and cruelly.[14]. And if editors make perhaps too much of her gender, they do the same for her position as a Polish Jew. [13], Hnschen, do you know that in their autumnal flights to the south, large birds like cranes often carry on their backs an entire load of smaller birds, such as larks, swallows, goldcrests etc.?! 105 posts. That she didnt is precisely what makes her so remarkable. [4] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. rosa luxemburg cat name mimi. Rosa Luxemburg led a revolutionary life. London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk It is at this point in the story that the limitations of Ettingers approach begin to emerge. Edward Timmss review of Elzbieta Ettingers biography of Rosa Luxemburg (LRB, 4 June) includes a reference to a revolutionary of the type described by Bakunin, illustrated by an unattributed (and inaccurate) quotation from the first of the Rules which must guide the Revolutionary. She repeatedly returned to this theme, notably in 1907 at the Stuttgart congress of the Socialist International: Wars between capitalist states are the result of their rivalry for world markets. We hope that it will enable us to grasp what she herself consciously struggled to give expression to throughout her life: I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression, Yet from this text alone the specificity of Luxemburgs unique contribution to Marxism remains ambiguous. Hegel, for example, Marx explains that: Hegel remarks somewherethat all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. The aspirations of a political leader are reduced to the terms of personal insecurity and emotional frustration, with Ettinger insisting that the fears and dreams of the famous revolutionary remained those of the hurt child and the desperate adolescent. I embrace you and Mimi with terrible longing, Your R.L.[8], Mimi was Rosa Luxemburgs cat. [1] To Sophie Liebknecht, 2 May 1917. European Robin Erithacus rebecula After Luxemburgs tragic and violent death, Lenin, who had clashed with her many times in the battle of ideas within the socialist movement, expressed his esteem for her in an avian image: To this we reply with two lines from a good old Russian fable: an eagle can indeed sometimes fly lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never rise to the same heights as an eagle. Only two syllables will be allowed to appear on my gravestone: Tsvee-tsvee. 104 followers. [14] Drawing by An Contreras Nino, commissioned work, 2020. In fact, this document was almost certainly written by Nechaev, probably in Switzerland though possibly in Russia early in 1869, before being smuggled back into Russia, where it was one of the items seized by the Police in raids on his circle later in 1869, and was first published in the official report of their trial in 1871. Regardless, whatever role Luxemburg actually plays in the history of Marxist thought cannot be discerned from her Letters. And with the materials it finds there, it begins to conceive of how the present might have been different and how the future still could be. Jennifer J Rycenga on August 20, 2020 at 9:31 am Thank you so much for this article! At the age of five she was treated for a tubercular hip, which left her with a marked limp for the rest of her life. Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire. However appealing, the idea of small birds as hitch-hikers on the backs of larger ones was totally wrong. [5] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. Rosa Luxemburg, The Cat. [4], Today I saw for the first time in my life a splendid bird: the yellowhammer. These unchangeable facts about Luxemburg her youth, her expatriate status in Germany, her gender, and her ethnic background certainly make her achievements even more impressive but the implication here comes dangerously close to the kind of pretty smart for a polish chick, paternalism thats best left in 1990.