Volume 27, Number 3 · March 6, 1980
Love and Revolution
By Neal Ascherson
Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches
edited and translated by Elzbieta Ettinger
MIT Press, 206 pp., $12.50
'My ideal is a social system in which one would be free to love everyone with a clean conscience. Striving after it, defending it, I may perhaps learn to hate.' Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote those words when she was still a Warsaw schoolgirl, never reached that Eden. But neither did she learn to hate in a personal way. Certainly, she was an intense, terrific fighter. She never overlooked an error, and never let even an old friend get away with false doctrine—as her break with her admirer and patron Karl Kautsky showed. She hit hard, used desperate language when matters were desperate. It was Rosa Luxemburg who said, after the outbreak of the First World War and when almost all her socialist comrades in Germany had abandoned their principles to support that war, that the true face of bourgeois society was
Review, 3130 words
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