Herbarium Polonorum (Heimatphotographie)

Herbarium Polonorum (Heimatphotographie)The main theme of the text is the wartime and postwar history of the area of the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II, seen from the perspective of the production of landscape – with a special focus on the identity aspect, i.e. the nationalization of nature and the naturalization of the nation. The argument refers to imaging conventions of nature and ethnographic photography, like the German Heimatphotographie and the Polish Fatherland Photography, that go along with landscape production.This paper also touches upon the issue of classification as the principle organizing the workings of the human mind as well as the uses made of classification in terms of cognition and identity – up to and including the deadly consequences thereof. Another crucial point of reference is the history of the herbarium as a form of organizing knowledge (Maria Sibylla Merian, Rosa Luxemburg, Szymon Syreński) and its connections with the visual arts (Krzysztof Jung, Alina Szapocznikow).The rich iconography illustrates the analyzed representation patterns, with particular focus on the axiosemiotics of Polish antisemitism, going back to its elitist forms in Jagiellonian Poland. The text summarizes fifteen years of the author’s work on Herbarium, a photographic project carried out on the site of the former German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka II.Herbarium Polonorum (Heimatphotographie)Osnową tekstu jest wojenna i powojenna historia terenu niemieckiego nazistowskiego obozu zagłady Treblinka II z perspektywy produkcji krajobrazu – ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem aspektu tożsamościowego, czyli unarodowienia natury i naturalizacji narodu. Wywód odnosi się do towarzyszących tej produkcji konwencji obrazowania w fotografii przyrodniczej i krajoznawczej, takich jak niemiecka Heimatphotographie i polska fotografia ojczysta.Poruszone zostało też zagadnienie klasyfikacji jako zasady funkcjonowania ludzkiego umysłu wraz z jej zastosowaniami poznawczymi oraz/lub tożsamościowymi – do morderczych konsekwencji włącznie. Ważny punkt odniesienia stanowi ponadto historia zielnika jako formy organizacji wiedzy (Maria Sibylla Merian, Róża Luksemburg, Szymon Syreński) oraz jej związki ze w sztukami wizualnymi (Krzysztof Jung, Alina Szapocznikow). Bogaty materiał ilustracyjny odnosi się do analizowanych sposobów reprezentacji ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem aksjosemiotyki polskiego antysemityzmu, sięgając do jego elitarnych form w Polsce Jagiellonów. Tekst podsumowuje piętnaście lat pracy autorki nad projektem fotograficznym Zielnik na terenie byłego niemieckiego nazistowskiego obozu zagłady Żydów Treblinka II.

New perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of the transition to socialism

The ongoing project to issue the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, which will make all of her writings available in English translation, provides a critical lens to re-evaluate aspects of Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution that has often been passed over in much of the secondary literature on her. Of foremost importance in this regard is the distinctive contribution that she made to the understanding of how to achieve a transition to socialism in a developing society that remains surrounded by the capitalist world market and imperialist powers. This paper aims to show that her reflections during and after the 1905 Revolution, especially as reflected in a series of rarely studied articles and essays in the Polish revolutionary press, provides an important corrective to how the transition to socialism was understood by other Marxist currents.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)

In this chapter, Rosa Luxemburg examines the basic structure of wage labor. For Luxemburg, wage labor is a condition for the systemic, economical exploitation of one free human being by another. Luxemburg analyzes the capitalists’ thinking about wages, their interest in extending the workday and in lowering the pay, and the conflict of interest between the worker and the owner of capital. She also discusses the role of trade unions in keeping not only the real wages but also the social wages above the level of mere sustenance for the individual worker.

Anti-Semitism, Denunciation, and the Frankfurt Trial against Rosa Luxemburg

This paper examines the largely overlooked role of denunciation in initiating the Frankfurt trial of Rosa Luxemburg in early 1914 for inciting disobedience among German soldiers, and corrects errors that have entered the scholarly literature on the topic. This is then taken as the starting point for wider reflections on the connections between denunciation, anti-Semitism, and anti-socialism in Germany in the ‘long nineteenth century’. It will be argued that the practice of denunciation, directed both against the political Left and against Jews, long preceded the now well-documented salience of denunciation in the Nazi dictatorship. Denunciation was thus an asymmetrical political weapon – it could be invoked against the political Left by their right-wing and conservative opponents in nineteenth-century Germany, but was not available to the democratic Left, nor would it have been palatable to them. The capacity of German anti-Semites to resort to denunciation of Social Democrats also highlights the extent to which anti-Semites could count on being regarded as among the ‘state-supporting’ parties in Imperial Germany.

Revolutionary perspectives: German Jewish women and 1918–19

In November 1918, revolution swept across Germany: it led to the end of the war, the abdication of the Kaiser and a new parliamentary democracy. While leading figures of the revolution, such as Ernst Toller, Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner, have been the subject of much scholarly interest, less research has been conducted into the motivations and aims of the rank and file, a group which included many women. Women played key roles as revolutionaries: by spreading the revolutionary message, working in its administration or participating in direct action on the streets. By choosing to become a revolutionary, individuals risked imprisonment or even death. For German Jewish women, who faced anti-Semitism in their daily lives, the risk was even greater. This article focuses on these forgotten female revolutionaries to uncover their roles, aims and motivations, and to contribute to a heterogeneous understanding of the revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg in Mexico: On the Return of Primitive Accumulation

Perhaps no concept has shaped discussions of capitalism and its contemporary transformations more than that of ongoing primitive accumulation. This paper examines, accounts for, and unpacks how primitive accumulation came, within a certain genre of conversations, to be so central. While there have been prior critiques of its usage, notably by Robert Brenner, few have returned to the source of the modern framing of the concept, Rosa Luxemburg. Through a discussion of David Harvey’s updating of primitive accumulation as accumulation by dispossession, I return to Luxemburg in order to extract two methodological principles from her work: follow the production of aspects of accumulation and think their organic link and track violence. I then deploy these methodological principles in a discussion of certain critical processes of accumulation in contemporary Mexico to demonstrate the spatialized “organic link” of Luxemburg and Harvey has been violently reconstituted.

Rosa Luxemburg: reformismo, democracia y conciencia revolucionaria

Con el objetivo de mostrar la relevancia y actualidad de la obra teórica de Rosa Luxemburg, el artículo analiza tres de sus temáticas fundamentales. En primer lugar, su crítica a la deriva reformista de la socialdemocracia contra su original intención revolucionaria, confirmada en su validez por la evolución del capitalismo. En conexión con ello, su tesis de que la posibilidad de la realización de la democracia se encuentra estrictamente vinculada al proyecto revolucionario. Y, por último, su reivindicación de que la existencia de dicho proyecto depende de que el proletariado adquiera un conocimiento teórico sobre el funcionamiento del capitalismo que debe serle transmitido por el partido revolucionario.