Hace más de un año, presencié un panel de discusión sobre los movimientos sociales globales, el análisis de la primavera árabe, la crisis del capitalismo global, entre otros temas. Integraban el panel Slavoj Zizek, Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas y Drucilla Cornell. Como suelo hacer, tomé notas y luego me llamó la atención la mucha insistencia de Drucilla Cornell en la necesidad de, ahora más que nunca, decía, retomar el pensamiento de Rosa Luxemburgo. A un año y medio de eso, Rosa Luxemburgo y su pensamiento reaparecen en la genealogía que estoy trazando sobre la relación Derecho y "lo político". Hace unos días vi la película de Margarethe von Trotta sobre ella (Rosa Luxemburg, 1986) y la semana pasada pasé horas largas en un piso de la biblioteca dedicado a estudios Soviéticos e historia rusa. Cientos de libros, genialidad de fuentes bibliográficas, sus cartas mientras estuvo en prisión. Tanto ahí.
No escuchada, olvidada y ninguneada por los 'suyos' por mucho tiempo, esta mujer y su pensamiento son hoy revisitados, y sus cartas, historias y debates principales en los adentros del socialismo, objeto de análisis minuicioso. Hoy, en el día de no más violencia contra la mujer, comparto este fragmento escrito por otra grande del Siglo XX, Hannah Arendt. Arendt, en Men in Dark Times, comenta una biografía de Rosa Luxemburgo y nos da luz sobre los detalles de su vida y obra. En este fragmento Arendt resume sus discrepancias con Lenin.
Porque el olvido y la invisibilidad de las mujeres y su pensamiento también es violencia. Salud!.
"The second point was the
source of
her disagreements with Lenin during
the First World
War; the first of her criticism of Lenin's tactics in the Russian Revolution of 1918. For she
refused categorically, from beginning to end, to see
in the war anything but the most terrible disaster, no matter what its eventual outcome; the price in human lives,
especially in proletarian lives, was too high in any event. Moreover, it would have gone against her grain to look upon revolution
as the profiteer of war and massacre-something which didn't
bother Lenin in the least. And with respect to the
issue of organization, she did not believe in a victory in which the
people at large had no part and no voice; so little, indeed, did she believe in holding power
at any price that she "was far
more afraid of a deformed revolution than an
unsuccessful one"-this
was, in fact, "the major difference between her" and the Bolsheviks. And haven't events proved her right? Isn't the history of the Soviet Union one long demonstration of the frightful dangers of "deformed revolutions"? Hasn't the "moral
collapse" which she foresaw-without, of course,
foreseeing the open criminality of Lenin's successor-done more harm to the cause of revolution as she understood it than "any and every
political defeat . . . in honest struggle against superior forces and in the teeth of the historical
situation" could possibly have done? Wasn't it true that Lenin was
"completely mistaken" in the means he employed, that the only way to
salvation was the "school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the
broadest democracy and public opinion," and that terror
"demoralized" everybody and destroyed everything?
She did not live long enough to see how right she had
been and to watch the terrible and terribly swift moral deterioration of the
Communist parties, the direct offspring of the Russian Revolution, throughout
the world. Nor for that matter did Lenin, who despite all his mistakes still had more in common with the original
peer group than with anybody who came after him. This became manifest when Paul Levi, the successor of Leo Jogiches in
the leadership of the Spartakusbund,
three years after Rosa Luxemburg's death, published her remarks on the
Russian Revolution just quoted, which she had written in 1918 "only for you" -that is, without intending publication.10 "It was a moment
of considerable embarrassment' for both the German and Russian parties, and
Lenin could be forgiven had he answered sharply and immoderately. Instead, he
wrote: 'We answer with . . . a good old Russian fable: an eagle can sometimes fly
lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never
rise to the same heights as an eagle.
Rosa Luxemburg ... in
spite of [her] mistakes .
. . was and is an eagle." He then went
on to demand publication of "her biography and the complete edition
of her works," unpurged of "error," and chided the German
comrades for their "incredible" negligence in this
duty. This was in 1922. Three years later, Lenin's successors had decided to "Bolshevize" the German
Communist Party and therefore ordered a
"specific onslaught on Rosa Luxemburg's
whole legacy." The task was accepted with joy by a young member named Ruth Fischer, who had just arrived from Vienna. She told the German comrades that Rosa
Luxemburg and her influence "were nothing less
than a syphilis bacillus."
….
One would like to believe that there is still hope for
a belated recognition of who she was and what she did, as one would like to hope that she will finally find her
place in the education of political scientists in the countries of the West.
For Mr. Nettl is right: "Her ideas belong wherever the history of political ideas is seriously taught."
-Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1955, 1968, pp. 53-56).
