Film Screening: Rosa Luxemburg (1986)

Join the Platypus Affiliated Society for a special screening of Margarethe Von Trotta's 1986 Rosa Luxemburg. The screening will be onTuesday,22 February 2011, from 5:30- 8:00 pm, at MIT 4-415. A discussion will follow the film (very possibly at the Muddy Charles.)

"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I shall be!"

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Marxist radical at the turn ofthe 20th Century. Luxemburg was active in the German Social Democratic Party, the most powerful Marxist party in the world at the time of WWI (1914-19).

During WWI the German socialists abandoned revolutionary Marxism and supported the nationalist war effort. Luxemburg was killed by the Right during the suppression of the revolution that began in 1917 in Russia and spread to Germany in 1918-19.

Luxemburg wrote a scathing critique of this betrayal of the international socialist movement -- whose aftermath led to Nazism and Stalinism, and from which the Left has still not yet recovered to this day.