Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Unfinished Conversations with Revolutionary Women

This series is based on the new Rowan and Littlefield volume edited by Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon. All participating session leaders are contributors to the forthcoming, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, which will be available here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786614421/Creolizing-Rosa-Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation. Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new paths of understanding the complexities of revolution.

This six-part seminar series explores some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.

Unfinished Conversations among Revolutionary Women

Paget Henry, Brown University; Sandra Rein
May 15th, 2-4 pm USA DST / 6-8pm GMT

Session Six stages conversations between Rosa and other revolutionary women with whom she could not have spoken, including Paget Henry speaking about Sylvia Wynter and Claudia Jones, and Sandra Rein will speak of the revolutionary legacy of Raya Danayevskaya.

The May 15 panel will be from 2 to 4 pm. 

All events are sliding scale. No one is denied admission because of inability to pay. Please write info@marxedproject.org to get information on attending this series or any other event or class at The Marxist Education Project.