100 years on – Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy continues!

Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht

100 years ago, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in Berlin by right-wing Freikorps troops. When I participated on Sunday, 13 January in a march in memory of both revolutionaries in Berlin, it was clear that their legacy lives on. Thousands of people walked to the Memorial of the Socialists (Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten) to show their respect as well as their commitment to carry on the struggle against capitalist exploitation and for social justice. In this blog post, I will reflect on Luxemburg's key intervention about 'socialist democracy' in the organisation of revolutionary struggle.

NUMSA asserting its independence: showing the way for unions in Europe?

When I attended the Futures Commission of SIGTUR in Johannesburg/South Africa, Nelson Mandela was already seriously ill in hospital (see SIGTUR’s Futures Commission and the search for alternatives in and beyond capitalism!). Nonetheless, first voices of criticism were voiced by South African representatives at the Commission meeting, arguing that Mandela had given in too easily to demands by the white capitalist class. At the same time, his figure as the father of the new South Africa prevented a more in-depth discussion of his socio-economic legacy. As he has now passed away, could this be the moment for a more serious discussion about South Africa’s socio-economic future? The Declaration by the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) adopted at its special national congress, 17 to 20 December 2013, seems to suggest this. In this blog post, I will discuss NUMSA’s Declaration and reflect on its implications for European trade unions.

Trade unions as a battleground for the minds of workers: Trotsky and the role of the vanguard party.

The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci was not very optimistic about the potential transformative, revolutionary role of trade unions. ‘Trade unionism’, he argued, ‘stands revealed as nothing other than a form of capitalist society, not a potential successor to that society. It organises workers not as producers, but as wage-earners’ (Antonio Gramsci, 'Trade Unions and the Dictatorship' (25 October 1919), in SPWI, 1910-1920, p.110). In this blog post, I will critically engage with a collection of Trotsky’s writings on trade unions - Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (Pathfinder Press, 1990) – to establish whether he was more optimistic about the potential role of trade unions in resistance to capitalist exploitation.