Woman in a man’s world (2021)

Book Review from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critical Lives: Rosa Luxemburg. By Dana Mills. Reaktion Books. 200 pages.

In her introduction Mills says that hers is a feminist biography, as one that concentrates on Luxemburg’s life as a woman in a man’s world, not just generally but also within the Social Democratic movement in which she was active all her adult life until her murder in 1919 at the age of 47. Hence, a couple of references to ‘patriarchal capitalism’ (even though not a term that Luxemburg would have accepted) and to Luxemburg as a ‘Jewess’ (often a term of abuse but one which feminists might be expected to want to rehabilitate).

The book is about both Luxemburg’s personal life and her political and economic ideas. These latter are explained accurately enough. There is, however, an odd passage in Mills’s account of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital where Mills writes:

 ‘Marx took ideas from Malthus (without referencing him), claiming that there was a tendency towards deficiency of demand in the market for commodities that capitalists produce to create surplus value. The question arises: who has the purchasing power to buy those commodities?’

A footnote refers to pages 93-4 of David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Harvey is not always reliable on Marx, but here Mills has misread him. Harvey was not saying that Marx ‘took ideas from Malthus’ but merely that he was discussing them (without, apparently, giving their source). In fact Marx never claimed that there was ‘a tendency to deficiency of demand’ under capitalism and rejected both Malthus’s view that there was and his proposed solution (consumption by aristocratic landowners, sinecure holders and other non-producers). Luxemburg didn’t think much of Malthus’s solution either but she did accept that, among others, he had identified a problem. This set her off on the wrong track as there is no built-in shortage of purchasing power under capitalism; she was seeking a solution to a non-problem.

In her personal life Luxemburg had man friends without getting married; her tastes in music, literature and art were conventional even bourgeois; she had a cat and, as her letters written while in prison for opposing the First World Slaughter showed, a love of nature. A lot of people do but it is rather weak to say that this meant she stood for ‘environmental justice’ (whatever that is). She was rather more radical than that. She was a socialist.

All in all, the book is an interesting and informative read. 

Adam Buick