That’s quite a cherry-picked quote, and to connect it to Bernie and AOC is to completely disregard the rest of the text.
Rosa draws a distinction between being a legislator in a parliament – where you’re able to battle the state within its own arena, and expose its contradictions – and being an executive in a cabinet – where your job is to manage crises and therefore hide contradictions.
But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government. While in parliament, or on the municipal council, we obtain useful reforms by combating the bourgeois government, while occupying a ministerial post we arrive at the same reforms by supporting the bourgeois state.
She also explicitly endorses political engagement as a means of class struggle:
Personally, in this great gathering of the different socialist organizations in the free play of the daily political struggle, we don’t fear the least danger for the doctrine of Marx and the principles of democratic socialism, in as much as they have already taken root in France. There is no better school for socialist democracy than the great and living class struggle freed from abstract clichés. The materialist conception of history doesn’t allow us to believe in the development of a living popular movement begotten of abstract formulas; on the contrary, it’s on the material base of a great and strong class struggle, embracing all of the proletariat, that a clear conception of theory and principles will be erected.
And not for nothing, the Communist Manifesto does too:
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The broader theme of Rosa’s text is to not accidentally align yourself with liberals in a cross-class coalition by focusing only on the political question of the day. I think we’re in danger of doing that with memes just as much as self-proclaimed socialist politicians are in danger of doing it by entering government.
Curious about this part
The broader theme of Rosa’s text is to not accidentally align yourself with liberals in a cross-class coalition by focusing only on the political question of the day
I know you say “class” specifically here. But is the idea that this is true more generally? Because a unified republican party of people who hate each other on certain topics but who built a coalition around a single figure beat a disjointed set of groups who didn’t do the same.
What makes cross class coalition bad or ineffective where uniting across ideologies on specifics seems to actually work?
Is it a line in the sand kind of thing? “Everybody on this side of the line unite or die ffs. Everybody on that side, you’re the ones we’re uniting against”.
Is that the idea? The upper class(s) can never be part of our group because they’re the ones we’re unifying against?
(Kind of thinking out loud here. Am I on the right track?)
Consider the context that World War 1’s conclusion left multiple imperial monarchies in ashes. The kind of government in question is one that is directly being sanctioned by aristocratic monarchy. The bourgeioise were and were working with kings and noble families as a matter of status quo, who had just spent years sending entire townships to the meatgrinder.
You know she was murdered by the social democrats, right?
Yes, but at a time when social democratic parties in europe hadn’t quite formally formed or split into discernable socialist factions. The Social Democrats in Germany were in active coalition with monarchist anti-republic paramilitaries and had inherited the government from the abdicating kaiser. The KPD didn’t exist yet, and this was technically an internal critique of the Social Democratic Party of which she was a member.
At the same time, the Social Democrats in Russia included Lenin.
At any rate it isn’t worth giving the freikorps a pass by omission when unearthing conflicts about the SPD.
Boiling it down to “Bernie killed Rosa” is not a good response to someone digging into the details of what she wrote.
And while there’s stuff worth considering here, we’re in a radically different situation than she was.
I think the point is that the points made above came back to bite her, by getting shot in the head and dumped in the river for people who sold out leftism and opened the door for Hitler.
In terms of Bernie, it is pretty valid. All the “democrat socialists” in the US become the representitive of bourgeois government because the US is a bourgeois settler colonial dictatorship. The white “working class” in the US have no revolutionary potential because the white “working class” are petit bourgeois settlers, no different from Israelis, and not part of the global proletariat, they exploit our labor and will continue to do so until it no longer materially benefits them and that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon. They will sell us all out to save 10 cents on gas and prop their petrostate. readsettlers.org
Death to the USA.
The white “working class” in the US have no revolutionary potential
I’ve read Settlers and don’t find it convincing. If you found it convincing, why quote someone from another imperial core proletarian movement?
Yep. And that’s exactly why we need to keep electing self-proclaimed socialists.
Banger quote, and a tough but necessary lesson for progressives that are not yet communists.
Don’t also forget who killed her. Wer hat uns verraten? – Sozialdemokraten!
I love her so much
