Red Rosa
Rosa Luxemburg occupies a curious place in public discourse. It is certainly more often invoked than its contemporaries such as Jean Jaurès, Eduard Bernstein or Keir Hardie, being surpassed only by Russian revolutionaries and the founders of the First International. But her name is being raised not to evoke her texts, theories or activist work, but to remind us that she was killed by the Social Democrats, by extension Social Democracy. All her thoughts and work thus become irrelevant, tautologically reduced at the time of the assassination: Luxembourg is important because she was an important person killed by a vaguely identified social democracy. Depending on who’s doing the evocation even her death might not be mentioned.
Obviously, such a process of thinking and remembering is unproductive. The state of affairs is supported, among other things, by the lack of a literature and filmography to deal with the life of the socialist. Which makes a volume like Red Rosa a necessity for the broad public. Based on major academic biographies, as well as her epistolary work, the graphic novel published in 2015 by Verso Books and written by Kate Evans presents the life of Rosa Luxemburg as a woman in the early twentieth century, as a party activist and as a theorist.
The most valuable and powerful moments of the volume are when it highlights the intersectional pressures she was subjected to due to her congenital disability, the birth of a Jewish family in Tsarist and anti-Semitic Russian Poland and her identity as a woman. The book ironically points out that it was this accumulation of oppression that paved the way for her doctoral studies in Zurich (one of the first universities to issue doctoral degrees to women).
Regardless of social status, marriage would have been the destiny of most women, either for consolidating wealth and trading property: her dowry was not to be envied; or for the production and reproduction of labor: impossible due to her physical condition. Thus, with the help of her wealthy family, she had the “freedom” to emigrate to Switzerland where he studied botany and zoology, then mathematics, politics, economics and philosophy, writing a doctoral dissertation on the economic development of Poland.
In the feminist literature Rosa Luxemburg is mentioned, because it would be impossible not to bring her into question, but only as a politically active female personality at that time. However, she is a non-feminist because she did not write for feminist (liberal) publications and was not part of feminist (liberal) organizations. But her relationship with Jogiches shows that feminist issues cannot be ignored in her revolutionary work.
While the two are lovers, Kate Evans takes the opportunity to represent female pleasure in an unusual and emancipatory way, being probably the only situation in which the volume justifies its existence as a graphic novel. Any presentation of sexuality, from the pursuit of pleasure or adventure, to maintaining or avoiding fertility, to the way we relate to our own bodies (size, color, shape, proportions, hair), is incomplete without representation. But the language of the film is so tainted by the male gaze that it is not enough to leave the camera in the hands of a woman, because we must all learn new ways of looking. Here comes the drawing, which starts precisely from the look and the translation on paper of a certain optics, of a certain way of seeing. And Kate Evans manages to represent autonomous female bodies.
When the romantic relationship between Luxembourg and Jogiches ends, Evans draws attention to domestic abuse, as can be seen even between peers and colleagues, as it does not necessarily occur through physical violence. It is also felt through language, control and the establishment of an atmosphere of surveillance, isolation, without intimacy or freedom, not much different from that in the prisons in which Luxembourg has often found itself throughout his life.
Thus, not only the state is an oppressive presence in the life of Rosa Luxemburg (and all women), but also the patriarchy. And under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , the two forces come together to become an organization less and less concerned with both reform and revolution (presented in volume not as two contradictory goals, but as two complementary socialist means, each according to a certain historical moment), preferring its own reproduction and growth through parliamentary means.
Unfortunately, the graphic novel is not satisfied with these clues, often including didactic passages that communicate the truncated premises of Marxism, the Marxist economy, Luxembourg’s conception of imperialism which the book claims anticipates our current understanding of the phenomenon of globalization, and statements about the role of the party in agitating the proletariat to produce revolution.
The intersection of the radicalism of positions with the triviality of the stated theory contributes to the establishment of a higher, unpleasant tone. I cannot imagine a socialist convinced of the need for a world revolution who has no idea of the Marxist conception of social classes. Thus, apart from the moments dealing with Rosa Luxemburg’s interpersonal relationships, the book seems to place itself in the position of an authoritarian teacher, who addresses, not without contempt, a class of students a priori convinced of the conclusion of the course.
This attitude pollutes the way the volume presents the socialist’s activity. When it presents her as a speaker, activist and agitator, the book turns into a hagiography, considering that no proof is needed for her talent to sensitize and convince the proletarian masses. And when it looks at Luxembourg as a party member, the leadership of the SPD with which she often comes into conflict, especially with Friedrich Ebert, is caricatured and grotesque, almost always appearing as silent film or comic book villains who oppose the proletarian revolution.
This approach personalizes the historical subject, gives it an eminently non-materialistic dimension, but a moral and especially moralizing one. The book suggests to the end that any of us would have understood that the line between revolution and barbarism lies where Rosa Luxemburg drew it, and we would have joined them in the struggle with the bourgeois and imperialist state.
The paradox of history lies precisely in the fact that this never happened. Despite Luxembourg’s oratorical talent, the workers did not revolt to the extent that the capitalist system collapsed. Although she was a perfect theorist and a tireless polemicist, she could not persuade her party colleagues to make courageous decisions against Germany’s participation in the Great War . The failure of the SPD‘s left wing to assert itself echoes the timing of 1968s, the recent Labor or Syriza failures, and Red Rosa does little to elucidate how this reverberation can be stopped.
In the end, the graphic novel seems to select an audience willing to read it as a course, without putting any resistance to the ideas issued and without being disturbed by the paradoxes of its theses. This selection of the public succeeds through the unpleasant aspect.
Kate Evans is a decent cartoonist, attentive to the expressions of the characters and their body language. Her characters touch, hug, distance, express their power relations by the way they sit against each other, express their emotional state by the way they hold tea cups, bend or straighten their backs. Indeed, it does not represent them in the most attractive ways, but the individual drawings are reasonable, sometimes even strong, despite the clumsiness and the unfortunate digital gradients. The pages, on the other hand, make reading it a pain. The text competes with the drawings, suffocates images, even if they often communicate the same information. And the addition of handwriting with common computerized letters (including some types of serif characters) deepens the feeling of amateurism.
Red Rosa remains a necessary graphic novel, in which one can find subtle and evocative moments, but which seems to despise its own necessity. And that is why he seals the fate of being read to the end only by socialists already skeptical of the grounded narratives of historical parties, but with a precarious reservoir of knowledge.
