Red Rosa by Kate Evans (July 2018)
Rosa Luxemburg was an iconic radical and revolutionary who many have chosen to describe on the internet with no fewer than a million descriptors: philosopher, economist, socialist, martyr, activist, pacifist, and, most importantly (in the context of this post, of course) - the subject of Kate Evans's Red Rosa. I checked out this book as a direct result of how much I enjoyed Threads, Evans's work about Europe’s current refugee crisis, and like Threads this biography was written in the same comic book style.
As I expected, Luxemburg’s beliefs are a significant influence throughout Red Rosa. Her disgust with the capitalist system’s flaws and shortcomings form the basis of a number of the book’s most interesting insights. I thought the description of money was one such insight. The flaw of using money as a means of exchange is how it establishes a social relationship between two objects. This allows people to value objects based on the work that went into the object’s creation. Over time, the familiarity of such a system gives people the tools to treat each other like objects, doing so by weighing a person against the sum of the work that went into his or her net worth. The failure of the system comes when people no longer need to interact at all, instead replacing interactions with valuations. This form of interaction separates people from the work of assessing what others need and, eventually, allows inequality not just to exist but also to seem natural, inevitable, and irreversible.
It is oversimplifying on my part to reduce the all of the book’s lessons down to one insight, of course, but I feel that the way Luxemburg viewed the role of money, value, and profits in the role of chronic inequality was the most important theme of Red Rosa. It demonstrates why those who believe that it is important for a society to consider how many mouths a person has to feed will always have deaf ears for arguments about capitalism’s strengths and successes. This might seem a stubborn point of view but, as Red Rosa points out, a person whose eyes are opened to the juxtaposition between wealth and poverty is destined only to see it everywhere, and in everything.
The final thought I liked from the book was about how inspirational teachers are those who never stop learning. A teacher who constantly learns models the very behavior he or she is trying to instill in the student. In this way, I think of inspiration as the task of setting a good example and showing others how to do what they are trying to do.
