 In the great tradition of the legendary documentary, Paris is Burning, the British Library is about to open officially. Open! Because reading is what? Fundamental! Wait there, Drag Race, we are all getting a bit overexcited at the prospect of the British Library reopening its doors. But even Rue Paul has to wait. It's April for the Reading Rooms and May for the galleries. But stay in touch with us online for more information. Today we're here for the 150th birthday of Rosa Luxembourg, whose life burned brilliantly, but all too short. Do send your questions, comments, birthday greetings and feedback right here on the platform. And guiding us through this celebration is Dr Catherine Connolly. She's a historian, activist and lecturer and a biographer of Sylvia Pankhurst, who is of course featuring in the library's Unfinished Business exhibition. Kate recently edited and introduced Sylvia Pankhurst's previously unpublished manuscript on America. So, cheers and happy birthday Rosa. Kate, over to you. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome you for this, what I know is going to be an absolutely fantastic event to celebrate and explore the life of an outstanding revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxembourg, who was born 150 years ago today, and came in that sort of second generation of revolutionals after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who so inspired her life and work. Someone who struggled and indeed was murdered in the struggle for working class revolution. We have a brilliant panel to help us explore her life today. It's my very great pleasure to introduce Dr Dana Mills. Dana Mills is an author, an activist, a dancer and an academic. She's a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, and she is the author of the biography, Rosa Luxembourg, which was published last year by Reaction Books. This book is a brilliant introduction, I can really, really recommend it to both Rosa's life and her writings, which combines cutting-edge research into new archival material and provides new insights into some of Luxembourg's key texts. And we'd also like to say as well that she brings to this biography some wonderful photographs that she was using from the archives as well, photographs that I'd never seen, certainly, in years of reading about Rosa Luxembourg. Dana is on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxembourg in English, and incredibly for someone whose book was only published last year. Dana has since had another book published in that time, which has only just come out in the last few days, a book called Dance and Activism, a Century of Radical Dance Across the World, which has just been published by Bloomsbury. And she's also the author of Dance and Politics, Moving Beyond Boundaries, which was published in 2016 by Manchester University Press. I always think that we should be somewhat suspicious of political theorists who are not political activists, and I can say with all confidence that we need to have no suspicions about either of our speakers tonight. Dana both combines theoretical work with an attempt to change the world, and is somebody that I'm always bumping into on demonstrations for justice, every demonstration against inequality and oppression. She is always there. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome Dana to speak on Rosa Luxemburg tonight. And she is going to be speaking alongside Kate Evans. Kate is a cartoonist, an artist, an author, a mother, and an activist. Her graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, was published in 2015 by Verso. I'm sure that probably all of our audiences are familiar with this book. It's a brilliant telling of Luxemburg's life and work, which I think very vividly brought to life her politics and her personality, and all its complexity and brilliance. I honestly have lost count of the number of times that I've met people who said that this book was their introduction to Luxemburg's life and what really inspired them to find out more. So this book, I think, very importantly, brings a kind of radical telling of Luxemburg's life in a very, very urgent and accessible way. And I know that it's inspired so many people. Both The Independent and The Observer chose Red Rosa as their graphic book of the year. And there are now 11 international editions of Red Rosa available. Kate Evans is also the author of Threads, a book on the refugee crisis. She's the author of Bump and Food of Love, which are two books on different aspects of motherhood. She's the author of a book Don't Call Me Princess, which is a feminist anti-fairy tale. I am very keen, certainly, to buy for my son. And she's the author of a book, Funny Weather on Climate Change. And she is going to be using art. And it's a lovely reminder, actually, that Rosa Luxemburg was very, very passionate about art and was an artist herself. And Kate is going to be using her art in a presentation about Luxemburg's life tonight. So that's very, very exciting indeed. And I think a very special way as well to think about Luxemburg. So those are our two speakers. We're also very honoured to have with us tonight Azuka Ofoka, who is an actor who began her career at the Birmingham Rep and at the Royal Court Theatre. She is best known for playing Louise Tyler in the BBC drama, Casualty. And tonight Azuka is going to be reading live the words of Rosa Luxemburg so that we can hear from Rosa herself in the course of this evening. So I hope that everybody here tonight really enjoys this very exciting multimedia discussion and celebration of Rosa Luxemburg. The way that this is going to work is that we're going to have a presentation, first of all. We're then going to have one of our readings. We're then going to move into a question and answer which I'm going to compare. And the readings are going to be interspersed in those questions. And then in the last 15 minutes, we're going to move to questions and answers from our audience, so you yourselves. So please do think throughout what you would really like to ask of our expert panellists here tonight. I'll be reading those questions out. So without further ado, it is my very, very great pleasure to hand over to Kate Evans, who is going to be providing us with a presentation which is going to be a beautiful overview of Luxemburg's life to introduce our subjects here tonight. So over to you, Kate. Hi, everyone. I'm just going to give a little tiny proviso at the start of this because I actually have chronic illness and I'm also in the menopause. So it might happen that at some point during this, I'll just suddenly forget what I'm saying. And at that point isn't that Zoom has frozen. It's actually just my brain. Somewhere in there, there's still some intelligence. It will emerge in a couple of years' time when I'm a fully qualified crone. But in the meantime, I'm just going to make the best of it. So I want to give a presentation. Basically, it's an overview of Luxemburg's life taken from my book. So who is Rosa Luxemburg? Maestro, here are the slides. Who was Rosa Luxemburg? A woman. And this was my entry point to Luxemburg because I was commissioned to write a graphic novel of her because the commissioning editor, Paul Bull, was looking for a woman to illustrate and to research her story. And what she managed to achieve as a woman is absolutely astounding and also the extent to which that hasn't been remembered as a woman is also quite astonishing. And it's very much a case, I think, that people are rediscovering the genius of Luxemburg when you see other contemporary thinkers like Gramsci, for example, who are sort of unquestioningly expected to be a great thinker. Luxemburg has had to be re-evaluated. Okay, so it's an offensive term. I use the term cripple when describing Luxemburg's disability to give an idea of how much she was living in a time in which ableism was rampant. And actually, when looking at things intersectionally, it's quite interesting considering how Luxemburg's physical disability might actually have helped her emancipation as a woman in that she wasn't expected to get married. And that meant that she retained her intellectual and economic independence. A Jew. Dana is going to be able to speak more in depth than I am on this because Dana is Jewish and I'm not. But I made this representation of the great synagogue in Warsaw and tried to ground Luxemburg both within her cultural heritage and also within her atheist and radical philosophical tendencies. And I think it's interesting when you look at the extent to which intellectual Jewish Jews, maybe as a result of the rampant antisemitism of Eastern European nations at the time, but you've got a lot of political intellectual leaders coming from within the Jewish community. Luxemburg was a refugee. She grew up as a socialist in Poland and it was illegal to be a socialist. And she was really obvious because she was the only five-foot-tall, limping Jewish female socialist with a gold tooth. So she wasn't really very undercover. So she escaped to Switzerland to go to university and then to Germany where she made her professional life. And I concentrate very much on the story of what happened to her in Germany, but she was also highly involved with the Russian Revolution and with Russian politics. So this is a sample, typical quote of Luxemburg and why I love her so very much. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction and the power of my expression. So Luxemburg was a lecturer. So this is one of the beauties of the graphic novel format that you can take words which are really quite dense and you can break them up into something that is easier to digest and more accessible for people. So this is a quote from Luxemburg's introduction to political economy and she's talking about the alienation of the worker. It's not submission to the vagaries of the market, a small price to pay for individual freedom. Alas, how unfree is this worker here? The distinctive feature of capitalism is the precariousness of a work of the worker and I've used this idea of a dandelion clock to show how ephemeral working life is. The capitalist controls the means of production. The worker has nothing. The only commodity he can sell is his labour power and the entire process revolves around the exploitation of that labour. The worker may think himself free, but what choice does he have other than to sell his labour? Jobs are scarce and insecure for the capitalist keeps a reserve army of the unemployed ready at his bidding. The capitalist certainly considers himself free, but what choice does he have but to press his workforce ever harder driving up his profit? But if he doesn't swim ahead of the competition, he will sink. All humanity groans with a frightful suffering under the yoke of a blind social power, capital that it has unconsciously created. The underlying purpose of every social form of production, the satisfaction of society's needs is turned completely on its head. Production is no longer for the sake of the people. Production for the sake of profit becomes the law all over the earth. Luxembourg was a leader. She was politically active. She was politically successful. She was a journalist. She was an editor. And she had this uncompromising focus on what was wrong with capitalism and the radicalism that was needed to put it right. So she was... One of the ways she came to prominence was in critiquing the ideas of Edward Bernstein, who was an established theorist within the German Social Democratic Party. And he was all in favour of just like incremental reform. And she pointed out that revolution is the only factor distinguishing social democracy from bourgeois radicalism. Without it, we're no longer struggling against the existing order, but vainly attempting to repair it. And I think really, when you look at some of the ways that democratic socialism has gone in our life, so vainly attempting, vainly not even attempting to repair capitalism is where we've ended up. So, yeah, here we go. The revolution is everything. All else is bilge. So Luxembourg was a thinker. He was really into pulling apart ideas. So this is my... I'm just going to take a couple of slides to talk about the accumulation of capital. And this was her masterwork. It should be more widely known. She's mathematically examining what would happen if you got to a world where capitalism was complete. So she points out that it's mathematically impossible. And she uses a few mathematical formulae to do it. And I've actually read Stalin's copy of the accumulation of capital, which was shown to me in Moscow. And he read as far as page seven where the formulae are. And then after that, he hadn't cut any of the pages because of one of those old-fashioned books where the paperbacks are stuck together. So I would like to say that if you can read the accumulation of capital, you're cleverer than Stalin. So, yeah, this is her laying out the mathematical problem that has absorbed her. And then, yeah, in a world formed purely of capitalists and workers, there's just no way that the capitalists viewed in their entirety can get rid of the surplus goods, change the surplus value into money, and accumulate capital. I'm paraphrasing her here, but that's the basic issue. Imperialism. Capitalism expands by forcing its way into non-capitalist markets. It must in order to exist. So Luxembourg is talking about globalization, and she's predicting the rampant march of globalization in this idea called primary accumulation, which is capitalism getting bigger and bigger and bigger to quote the Lorax. And she's talking about some quite complex ideas around globalization at a time when the word hadn't been coined and wouldn't be for another 50 years. And then she explicitly links that to militarism and the military industrial complex. Force is the only solution available to capitalism. The accumulation of capital employs force as a permanent weapon. And because I get to be really nerdy doing being cartoonist, that is actually a First World War bayonet. German one. So Luxembourg had an amazing personal life. She... It's funny, actually. I mean, I really like the fact that I got to bring this to life in my book, and it certainly makes the book a better read for people. She wasn't famous as having a personal life, but I do think that it's inspiring and interesting for people to see that in the 1890s and 1910s, people were giving their hippies a damn good run for their money as far as free love goes. So this is a genuine quote from one of Rosa Luxembourg's love letters. I've been letting it run through my head a little, the question of our relationship. It's time for me to take you in my claws. I must terrorize you completely. I'll smother this rage and fury that you have in yourself. Such weeds can't be allowed to get in amongst the cabbages. Be kind. Be gentle. Tell me you love me. I have the right to do this because I'm 10 times better than you. I just love her so much. So Luxembourg was a prisoner. There's just a little bit here from the point where she first gets sentenced, and this is stuff that she genuinely told the court. There is a substantial risk that the defendant would freeze. So this is the lawyer arguing that she needs to be put on remand and she can't be let out because she might flee. And she genuinely said to the court, I believe that you would flee. A social democrat does not. She stands by her actions and laughs at your judgments. And now sentenced me. I mean, she really wasn't. Although we're talking about her in prison, she really wasn't taking any prisoners at this point. And she said, I would not flee even if I were threatened by the gallows. Sacrifices are a part of a socialist work. There is simply a matter of course. So Luxembourg has come to political, become politically remembered because she was murdered. And I would argue that it shouldn't have needed that, you know, she should be remembered in her own right. And there is, there is a way in which she can be kind of turned into a heroin or an icon or a martyr. And actually the complexity of the ideas that she was, it's housing are worth thinking about in their own right. And it shouldn't, she shouldn't need to be, you know, stuck on an altar. But this is a representation of her arrest. The soldiers who were taking her away called the Freikor and they were embittered. First World War PTSD riddled horrible men. Who drove around with skulls on the fronts of their cars, which makes it very easy for them to look like the baddies in a cartoon. So, yeah, I mean, she was murdered at the age of 48. And I just want us to all take a moment for us to realize that if that hadn't happened, she'd be 150 today. So that's very sad. Okay. Thank you very much. Next slide, which is the last slide is the cover of my book. And thank you very much. Thank you so much, Kate, for that brilliant overview of Luxembourg's life and indeed a very beautiful overview and incredibly powerful ending there. Thank you. I'd now like to invite Azuka to read the first reading, which is from a letter by Luxembourg written in 1917. What do you want with this theme of the special suffering of the Jews? I'm just as much concerned with the poor victims of the rubber plantations of Putamaio, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. I have no special place in my heart for the Jewish ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears. Thank you so much. I want to take that quote and come to Donna now. There we have Luxembourg describing the horrors of imperialism. And Rosa Luxembourg's anti-imperialism is one of the things for which rightly she is most famous, particularly her opposition to World War one right from the outset when the SPD, the largest socialist party in Europe, backed it and betrayed socialists across Europe in so doing. She's also famous for an earlier polemic which Kate Evans referred to within that party where she defended the idea that had been expounded by Marx and Engels and that socialism could only come through class struggle and not as others were saying, chiefly Edward Bernstein, who was suggesting that it could come through piecemeal reforms under capitalism. I was wondering, Donna, if you could say something about what links there are between her commitment to anti-capitalism and her anti-imperialism, please. Thank you so much, Kate, for this and thank you all for this beautiful evening. And I actually want to start from the quote and Azuka's beautiful reading and very powerful reading. So thank you for that. And somewhere that I think we need to start thinking about Luxembourg as an anti-imperialist. Luxembourg was raised in Poland and the Russian Empire. So she was a citizen of empire herself. She was a Jew, so she was oppressed as a minority and she was a woman and she was a disabled woman. So she encountered the wrongs of imperialism and the wrongs of intersectional oppression before she had words and ways to think about that. And there's a long and interesting legacy of both collaborations and betrayal between different subjects of empire and different parts of the world. But she's one of the first people to very eloquently understand that oppression and the empire is one of the chief wrongs that one must stand up to. And indeed, as you mentioned, she stood up against the First World War, but even before that she wrote the accumulation of capital, which is indeed one of the best books I think ever written on the left. Her comrade Franz Merring called her the best reign after Marx and I think that's a worthy description. One thing that is really important to remember is that for Luxembourg, imperialism is the last stage before capitalism collapses. So it's absolutely important to fight against imperialism in order to bring the next stage, which is of course socialism. However, it's also important to note that here that the German left, by and large, were very happy to continue with imperialism. They kind of thought, was that the fort away from where we are, wrongs that are seen elsewhere, we do not have connection to that. And Luxembourg was one of the first people to really connect with oppression and exploitation happening in places that she couldn't even see. And like many people of her generation, she didn't travel a lot, she had ill health and she was disabled. So she very much stayed in the region of Germany, maximum Poland when she went undercover to see the revolution. But she actually was able to very powerfully understand oppression in different parts of the world. And in the accumulation of capital, she writes about South Africa, she writes about Australia, she writes about the South of the US without ever going there and seeing what's going on. So she, one of my students said, Rosa Luxembourg was an intersectionalist before it was cool and I think that's a really good way to think about her. Because she understands that you can't fight injustice one piece at a time and it very much is the red thread of her career. So it starts when she writes, of course, reform a revolution. She says absolutely we have to stand up and continue working towards the revolution. But then it becomes much more subtle and indeed she writes also very subtly and very, like you have to work very hard to find it, but she writes about disability rights, which of course she was implicated by herself. She writes about anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and she refers to all sorts of other kinds of oppressions. So for Luxembourg, anti-imperialism is part of her very deep understanding of injustice in the world. And here I think it's worthwhile again to come full circle and think about her own fate. She was a Jewish woman who encountered a lot of sexism and anti-semitism and she knew that very well. She knew she wasn't treated as equal amongst her comrades. And she knew a lot of people around her suffered different fates that are quite similar to hers. And it's also important to note here that a lot of her close comrades were murdered by the Nazis because they were either Jewish or communists or both. So her murder was tragic and horrible. And when she penned in 1915 and said, it's the choices between socialism or barbarism, indeed her murder very much unpacked this road towards barbarism. And so her standing up against imperialism is part and parcel of this entire worldview and standing up to injustice, whether she had personal contact to that or not. Thank you very, very much, Dana, for discussing some of Luxembourg's really key ideas there with us and also for pointing out their urgency for us today. I'd now like to invite Azuka to read the second reading, which is an extract from Luxembourg's work, Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle from 1912. In truth, our state is interested in keeping the vote from working women and from them alone. It rightly fears that they will threaten the traditional institutions of class rule, for instance, militarism, of which no thinking proletarian women can help being a deadly enemy. Monarchy and the systematic robbery of duties and taxes on groceries, et cetera. Women's suffrage is a horror and abomination for the present capitalist state, because behind it stands millions of women who would strengthen the enemy within, i.e. revolutionary social democracy. If it were a matter of bourgeois ladies voting, the capitalist state could expect nothing but effective support for the reaction. Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against male prerogatives would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletarians. They are the parasites of the parasites of the social body. Thank you very much, Azuka, for that reading. And that's where I want to start with the second question for both of our panellists. We are meeting, of course, only a few days before International Women's Day, which was a day that was founded by Luxembourg's great friend Clara Zetkin. And I want to ask both of our panellists what you think were the major issues for the women's movement at the time that Luxembourg was alive and what was distinctive about the contribution of Luxembourg and her women comrades, that generation of women in the Second International. What was distinctive about their socialist contribution to the understanding of women's oppression and where it came from, but also how women's liberation could be achieved. Maybe if we could maybe go in reverse order and start with Dana and then come to Kate, would that be okay? Yeah. So thank you for a great question and, again, a very powerful reading. I think Luxembourg starts on a path that we're still trying to struggle with today, which is the question of do we see feminism as legal reforms only as something that can be tweaked by the law that has nothing to do with material existence? Can we liberate women as a separate category to other oppressed people? Do we disengage other ways in which women are oppressed? And her answer is absolutely no. It's really important to note here that Rosa Luxembourg was absolutely an advocate of universal suffrage. So she advocated for all working-class people to get the vote, but she didn't see women, or especially bourgeoisie women, who were the key category working as suffragettes, as was the case here in Britain, right? Like the foremost part of the suffragette movement with very few exceptions were very much the public faces, at least, were middle-class women who wanted the vote for middle-class women. And it's really crucial, again, to connect Luxembourg's critique of bourgeoisie feminism to her writing about material inequality and her understanding that you cannot tweak injustice and inequality by just giving the right to vote. And I think there's something really powerful in this paragraph where she basically says, the moment the working-class women will get the vote, they will be able to bring down injustice. So the state knows that all the power to bring down these stagnated structures that are obstructing injustice and equality from happening are held by working-class women. And I think there's a lot of complicated things that go on in her own biography, which are, as Kate already mentioned, she was disabled, which was very much linked to her gender identity and to how she saw herself as a person in the world. She lived in a time, I think to your question of the Second International, not only did women not have the right to vote, they didn't have rights of various other kinds. That came through the Second International. So for her, her gender was always part of something much larger, and I think that's why she understood that gender equality is always part of a larger fight and is part of a material fight. And I think one thing that she has definitely told me is someone who writes about her and engages her theoretically is that our own perception of feminism in the 21st century and when I say our, I mean especially the West and the English-speaking West is a very narrow conception of feminism and is one that is still very lacking and very much doesn't engage other forms of inequality and oppression in which we kind of think we got the vote, we have form of equality, all is great, we can have celebrations, we can have all these kind of tokens of our advance. And of course, in many ways, we are doing much, much better than her generation. But in terms of material inequality, in terms of discrimination against certain professors that are still overpopulated by women, such as nurses, such as workers in the NHS that are underpaid and still underpaid and still are treated as second-class citizens, we are still very much lagging behind Luxembourg's vision. So when we turn feminism into something that has to be complex and intersectional but also looks at the material first and sees the legal political structures as something that cannot be separated from the material world, she was the foremost thinker of democracy within the Marxist tradition, which means we need to think about both the formal legal structures and the material basis in which we live together. This is something that feminism is still struggling with and I think she can teach us quite a few lessons today in 2021, which is very sad but also very telling. Do I take up the... I can argue with you over some of that, Dana. Like, I think you're right, she totally prioritises class struggle and the need to completely reform the inequality that is inherent within capitalism. She's got that as her number one aim and that's refreshingly clear focus. But intersectionality wasn't something that she had any contemporary... She had any awareness of and I think it's a case that she does sometimes argue either or. Like, she's interested in the class struggle and so the struggle against sexism can wait. And I certainly see her almost like she passes through life as an honoree man. She had five older brothers and then a very much older sister and the very much older sister didn't get married as well because she had the same disability. And I feel that Luxembourg took one look at her and just went, I'm not doing that. And so there's this extent to which I don't know how much solidarity she does show with other women at the time. I mean, I think her critiques of bourgeois suffragists is justified and I like her focus on working class women on the strength of proletarian women. But she also... I said I was going to have a brain freeze. But she also, within the intellectual milieu in which she was going in with, she's quite careful not to get drawn into the struggle for women's suffrage. She's very careful not to be sidelined as a feminist because that's what would have happened to her. She's clear that she's a Marxist theoretician and she's arguing questions of policy and strategy with men on their own terms. So you can even see it in the photos, she's in the middle of a group of men talking with them about this stuff. She's really kind of not interested in being pigeon-told over with the women. I mean, she was incredibly good friends with Clara Zetkin and Clara Zetkin invented International Women's Day. And then in Russia, in 1917, it was women on strike for International Women's Day that started the revolution. So if you want to know what the really important role of women was then, I think February 1917, you can really see them on the streets. The soldiers came out to fire on them and apparently they ripped their tops off and went, fire on this! And then they didn't. And that's how the revolution started. Can I come back quickly on that because that's a really interesting point. And I don't disagree with you, but I think historically it's really important and that goes back to Kay's question to note that what we see today as intersectionality, which is looking at the combination of oppressions, was actually a very big key theme of the Second International. So Eleanor Marx wrote the woman's question from a socialist point of view in 1886. There were comrades, they knew each other, and there were exchanges around these themes in the Second International. And I absolutely agree with your reading that she wanted to be seen as a man and she kind of acted opposite men on their own terms. I do find it really interesting that when you look at her writings after she leaves prison, there's much more awareness of gender because I think she noticed what it's like to experience gendered violence. So she talks about the humiliation of being stripped down when she's in prison and she talks about a lot of these things in her letters. And she writes about rights of prostitutes when she's in prison, which again, look at what we're talking about now about sex work. She's basically doing that in 1916, 17. And I think she's not very explicit and it's a bit like what's going on with disability rights. She doesn't write explicitly about disability rights, but you can see how she's writing about certain elements of life and what it's like to go through life with a disability, et cetera. And it's about reading within the lines and seeing what can be drawn from there. And again, I think in the context of history, of course, when we look at intersectionality, we can go back to the Chartist, right? Like you can see those discussions when we look at women of the Chartist movement. But definitely by the time we get to the Second International, she has these correspondences. They might be kept private because again, I agree with you that it was a strategic matter. But I do think there's a place to be a bit open to this kind of, I would say more generous kind of divide of different feminisms. And again, for me, I have to say I feel very disengaged from Western feminism as it is today. I think there's something very constraining about who counts as a feminist and who doesn't. And she opened up for me a vista thinking about the materiality of oppression and who do we look at and what categories do we analyze. That can actually be very useful for where we are right now. Thank you both of you so much for getting into this really, really interesting debate. And I'm sure there's a lot more that we can say and explore about this. It might be something people want to pick up on in the discussion. I've got one more question before we move to that discussion. But first of all, I'd like to invite Azuka to read our last and third reading, which again is from the same text as the second reading, women's suffrage and class struggle from 1912. Thank you. 100 years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words. In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true of our present society. The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletarians general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. Because of the female proletariat, general equal direct suffrage for women would immensely advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle. This is why bourgeois society abhors and fears women's suffrage. And this is why we want and will achieve it. Fighting for women's suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat. Thank you so much, Azuka, for all of those brilliant readings. It's very, very special to be able to hear Luxembourg's words because she was such a brilliant writer and somebody who really inspired through the written words. So it's incredibly special to hear that. Thank you so, so much. I would like to invite everybody in our audience to think about what questions you would like to ask our expert panellists on this subject. There is no such thing as a stupid question. Any question that you have or probably be questions that other people have in their heads as well. So please do send your questions in. Just before we go to that general discussion, I've got a question for both of our panellists. That last reading we had Rosa Luxembourg looking back at socialist thought and drawing from that as she did throughout her life. And I'd like to ask both of you if you can to tell us what do you draw from Rosa Luxembourg? What do you think we should take? Her writing I feel really resonates so much with the situation in which we find ourselves. So many of the same dilemmas, so many things that haven't gone away, exploitation, imperialist wars. But what for both of you do you think do you think we can take from Rosa Luxembourg in our struggle to change the world today? And again, I'll take you in an opposite order. So perhaps we can start with Kate. The one key phrase that keeps going around my head at the moment is a phrase that Luxembourg didn't invent. Kalkowski apparently wrote it first, but she popularized the phrase socialism or barbarism. And that is just key at the moment. I mean, there's so much about Luxembourg's work that resonates. She talks about the spontaneity of mass movements. She talks about how quickly things can turn. And I think that could become incredibly relevant. I mean, we've not... Oh, don't you? In Egypt we have seen a Twitter-led revolution, haven't we? So, you know, we have the ability, potentially with social media to end up with radical social transformation happening very quickly. But also when we look at what's happening in America, with the fact that the Republican Party now appears to have made a very clear statement that it is a fascist party, we're seeing very... that barbarism is raising its head in just as clearly as it would have been in Weimar Germany watching the rise of Hitler. And the only alternative to that is to make people's living conditions better. So we have to focus on socialism. We have to present a proper alternative, a genuine change. I mean, it's not a great lesson as well, but never trust the centrists, because they're the ones who murdered Luxembourg. And I think we've seen that play out in what's happened to Corbyn, turned to a lesser extent to Bernie Sanders, but certainly the way that the Labour Party closed ranks against its leader and actively militated against social change happening from the bureaucrats in the party. So we have to rate... the reason why fascism is on its rise is because the material conditions are is that the working conditions of ordinary people is getting worse and worse. So there has to be change, and it has to be radical change, it has to be effective change. And through the spontaneous mass action of the majority of people is how it comes about. I really like Luxembourg's emphasis on democracy. It's something that you can... you know, people say, oh, communism, that's just like Stalinism. You know, they've got it all associated with red terror in their heads. And the fact that Luxembourg was a temporary critic of events in Russia, and that she saw very clearly that the Lenin's abandonment of freedom of press and freedom of association and assembly and proper democracy had tainted that from the outset. And that's where she came up with her other famous quote, which is, freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently. Freedom can never be a special privilege. So with that democracy, with those spontaneous uprisings, and we have to get together en masse and create a better world. Thank you so much, Kate. Dana, can I ask you to respond to that as well? We've got a couple of really great questions in, so I'm going to have to ask you to sort of reply quite quickly so we can get some of those in as well. So I will disagree with Kate, but take some of the messages along because I think what became clear to me very early on from researching was Luxembourg is that she lived in a very dramatically different world to us. And Peter Hudes was the executive editor of her work, said to me one of the first things, she never lived to see fascism the way that we know it today. She never lived to see her comrades being murdered and being shipped to the camps. And it's really important to note that some of her closest comrades did die in the camps. And socialism and barbarism is one of those quotes that does it around a lot. And I think it is important in many ways, but it's also important to understand that fascism comes in different shapes and guises. And I think for me, one thing that she really embodies and has stayed with me throughout the process both writing the book and after it is her integrity and absolutely sticking to her principles no matter what happens. Even when she was wrong. So a lot of the things that she predicted, such as her writing about Polish nationalism, some of her critiques of the Bolsheviks were not founded and were part of a rivalry that was going on. She stuck to it and she stuck to what she believed in no matter what happened. So I think for me, the idea that you stick up to your ideals and you go with history, she had this very profound faith in history and she has this great quote from 1913 when she writes, when history will do its work, see that you too do your work. Which I think when you think about the arc of everything that has happened in the world since 1919 when she was murdered, we really have to be attentive to history but also to do our own work daily. Thank you very, very much. I am now going to go to some really interesting questions from our audience. So first of all, I've got a question for Donna Mills from Lucy Maxwell Scott. She asks, in your book on Rosa Luxembourg you have some wonderful pictures of her and beautiful drawings by her that show her love of nature. So first of all, where did you get hold of these? And if alive today, do you think she would have extended her recognition of the threat of globalism to include environmentalism? Thank you. This is such a fantastic question. Thank you so much. I think absolutely and you can really see the seeds of environmentalism in her writing, the humiliation of capital and in the anti-critique, there's quite a lot of segments about human beings' cruelty towards nature and indeed in her letters there's also some paragraphs when she writes about how when human beings are oppressive towards nature, when they abuse nature, this is the beginning of cruelty between men and men to a man and woman also, of course. In terms of source, I spent a lot of time in the wonderful Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, which has a huge part of her archive. I also had some different sources from elsewhere, but if you're ever around, I cannot recommend it enough. It's a wonderful place and that was where most of my sources were taken. And when I was talking about the comprehensive view of justice, I think that's one place where I really saw her as pioneer. I was writing the book round about when Extension Rebellion was rising its head and there were all these Fridays for future strikes and all of this going on. And I thought it was extraordinary that she really understood these complexities way, way before she had words and or access to some of the ideas that were then articulated in the public space. And she definitely was a pioneer in many ways. Of course, Marx himself writes about environment and the cruelty towards environment is part and parcel of capitalism, but she extended that and she understood that the global abuse towards nature else wins, kind of the sabotaging of earth and trees and basically other people's property, which is still obviously a staple of colonialism and other geysers is something that was embedded within her thinking. And I think the last come back I'll give to this question because it's just such a rich and wonderful question is that for me, her writing in letters and her drawings and her academic so-called writings are part and parcel of the same worldview. So it is a different genre. She expresses herself differently. She saw a letter writing as a different skill. She was a master or mistress of this skill, but it's absolutely part of her ideology and when she looks at nature, it's not that she kind of takes away her political hat. She doesn't think about what human beings do to each other, but it's very much her understanding of the world is something that is complicated and rich and demands a complex worldview in order to understand it. If you want an example of how much Rosa Luxemburg loved nature, she fed wasps in prison. She was, first off, she was in this prison where she had a little garden and that was great and she writes these beautiful letters with songbeds and then she gets put in a prison where she only has, you know, the opens in a jar and she saves her jam ration and she feeds some little wasps that come to visit. She would so have been a vegan these days. That's such a lovely story and thank you, thank you both for that. And, you know, what one of the kind of really exciting things that Dan has always stressed to me is about, you know, what new things we're discovering about Luxemburg's thought all the time as new things get translated and discovered. I have here a question from Paul Topley and I'd like to direct this one first of all to Kate Evans. Paul says, Lenin talked about socialist revolutionaries being the tribunes of the oppressed. Isn't this more a more historically accurate way of locating Luxemburg? No, I've got to answer that intelligently, haven't I? Can I plead ME on this? Hang on, the proletarians are the tribunes of the oppressed? But they are oppressed. Sorry, I don't get the question. Just bat it over to Dana and she'll say something clever. Dana, would you like to come in on this question? I mean, beyond this specific quote, which is great, of course, Lenin was a good writer. We all know that. I think I am going to hijack the question a little bit about Leninism versus Luxemburgism and Lenin versus Rosa, because I think that's an important point that we've been flirting around. And there are two streams of thought, which are Luxemburgism and Leninism. And they have at times little to do with the people who actually wrote. And it's really important to remember that Lenin and Luxemburg were comrades. They worked at the same time. They had ups and downs in their relationship. When Luxemburg writes the accumulation of capital, they are at the lowest point of their relationship. And he writes in the footnotes of his copy of the Capital that her description of people suffering in Africa is sentimental and non-Marxist, which, you know, considering he wrote a lot about imperialism afterwards, kind of shows a very different approach to writing, but they did have a close relationship. And again, they had different positions within their respective movement. So it's again, really important to remember that Luxemburg was most of her life a left outlier. She was to the left of the parties which she inhabited. And the last party that she founded, she didn't live in the position of power within. So Lenin was under different pressures to the ones that she was on under, really. They had different worldviews, which also is derived from that, but they had also different worldviews because again, Lenin wasn't a Jewish Polish woman who entered the German socialist movement from outside. He very much was at the hub of socialist activity of his time. So it's an interesting description. I think it's fair. There's enough room for revolution. We can talk about Luxemburg without Lenin. Maybe. And in the same way that we can talk about Lenin without Luxemburg, which mostly happens. Thank you. Thank you very much. We've got time for one more question. It's sort of similar to a question that I asked earlier, but what's different about this is it actually sort of asks about sort of priorities for Luxemburg as a political thinker and activist. This is a question from Fleur. And the question is what would Luxemburg think the main issue with society today would be? What would she find the most issues with in our modern world? And perhaps Kate, would you like to answer this one? Oh, I'm struggling against the thing to be, say, flippant and say, oh, she'd just be on Twitter all the time starting fights with people, but she blatantly does that in the letters as well. There's some really amusing quotes where she says, if you see so and so, would you kindly kick her out? Well, the main issue now is the environmental collapse of the world. You know, the fact that we have pushed systems of growth. And in that, we would see the two different strands of Luxemburg's thought come together. Her incredible connection with nature, you know, her, you know, beetle saving tendencies where she'll find a beetle on the path and get sad and move it to a nice place. You know, she's got this incredible appreciation of the actual world. I mean, she immersed in it and she describes it in her letter so beautifully that I think she would be appalled if she'd been scooted forward a hundred years in time and would be able to see the deserts that we have made, the environmental and ecological deserts. And I think the extent of the degradation of our environment isn't visible to us because it's happened over multiple lifetimes. So Luxemburg would be emphatic about that, but also she would just be uncompromising about the fact that capitalism is the actual problem in getting rid of capitalism is the only solution and that is the pressing question of our day because people say, oh, we can meet our carbon commitments because we could switch to electric cars except the electric cars don't have to be electric cars, they could be hybrid cars and then we could make the energy with hydrogen and the hydrogen we could make carbon capture and before you know it we haven't stopped emitting any carbon control. The problem is the fundamental relation that capitalism has with the natural world and that it has with the exploitation of people and the runaway accumulation of wealth at the top, you know, the trillionaires, the trillions that the billionaires own that is the problem and she wouldn't be afraid to point its finger and identify it. Thank you very, very much Kate. I think that's a brilliant note to end on. It's a rallying cry and it's very urgent. I hope that everybody who's come feels inspired to go out and try and change the world and all that remains for us to do I believe is to raise a glass to Rosa Luxemburg and to wish her a very happy 150th birthday. So thank you very much to the British Library for putting this event on. Thank you so much to be Rowlett for organising this. Thank you very much to Azuka for those beautiful and impassioned readings of Luxemburg's own words and thank you of course to both of our expert panellists Kate Evans and Donna Mills. It's me, Janice. Yay! Happy birthday Rosa. Have a little talk.