Human shoulders and elbows first evolved as brakes for climbing apes

Study introduces 'downclimbing' from trees as a driver in early-human evolution

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

 

IMAGE: DARTMOUTH RESEARCHERS REPORT THAT APES AND EARLY HUMANS EVOLVED MORE FLEXIBLE SHOULDERS AND ELBOWS THAN MONKEYS (ABOVE) TO SAFELY GET OUT OF TREES. FOR EARLY HUMANS, THESE VERSATILE APPENDAGES WOULD HAVE BEEN ESSENTIAL FOR GATHERING FOOD AND DEPLOYING TOOLS FOR HUNTING AND DEFENSE. view more 

CREDIT: LUKE FANNIN, DARTMOUTH

The rotating shoulders and extending elbows that allow humans to reach for a high shelf or toss a ball with friends may have first evolved as a natural braking system for our primate ancestors who simply needed to get out of trees without dying.

Dartmouth researchers report in the journal Royal Society Open Science that apes and early humans likely evolved free-moving shoulders and flexible elbows to slow their descent from trees as gravity pulled on their heavier bodies. When early humans left forests for the grassy savanna, the researchers say, their versatile appendages were essential for gathering food and deploying tools for hunting and defense.

The researchers used sports-analysis and statistical software to compare videos and still-frames they took of chimpanzees and small monkeys called mangabeys climbing in the wild. They found that chimps and mangabeys scaled trees similarly, with shoulders and elbows mostly bent close to the body. When climbing down, however, chimpanzees extended their arms above their heads to hold onto branches like a person going down a ladder as their greater weight pulled them downward rump-first.

Luke Fannin, first author of the study and a graduate student in Dartmouth's Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society program, said the findings are among the first to identify the significance of "downclimbing" in the evolution of apes and early humans, which are more genetically related to each other than to monkeys. Existing research has observed chimps ascending and navigating trees—usually in experimental setups—but the researchers' extensive video from the wild allowed them to examine how the animals' bodies adapted to climbing down, Fannin said.

"Our study broaches the idea of downclimbing as an undervalued, yet incredibly important factor in the diverging anatomical differences between monkeys and apes that would eventually manifest in humans," Fannin said. "Downclimbing represented such a significant physical challenge given the size of apes and early humans that their morphology would have responded through natural selection because of the risk of falls."

"Our field has thought about apes climbing up trees for a long time—what was essentially absent from the literature was any focus on them getting out of a tree. We've been ignoring the second half of this behavior," said study co-author Jeremy DeSilva, professor and chair of anthropology at Dartmouth.

"The first apes evolved 20 million years ago in the kind of dispersed forests where they would go up a tree to get their food, then come back down to move on to the next tree," DeSilva said.

"Getting out of a tree presents all kinds of new challenges. Big apes can't afford to fall because it could kill or badly injure them. Natural selection would have favored those anatomies that allowed them to descend safely."

Flexible shoulders and elbows passed on from ancestral apes would have allowed early humans such as Australopithecus to climb trees at night for safety and come down in the daylight unscathed, DeSilva said. Once Homo erectus could use fire to protect itself from nocturnal predators, the human form took on broader shoulders capable of a 90-degree angle that—combined with free-moving shoulders and elbows—made our ancestors excellent shots with a spear (apes cannot throw accurately).

"It’s that same early-ape anatomy with a couple of tweaks. Now you have something that can throw a spear or rocks to protect itself from being eaten or to kill things to eat for itself. That's what evolution does—it's a great tinkerer," DeSilva said.

"Climbing down out of a tree set the anatomical stage for something that evolved millions of years later," he said. "When an NFL quarterback throws a football, that movement is all thanks to our ape ancestors."

Despite chimps' lack of grace, Fannin said, their arms have adapted to ensure the animals reach the ground safely—and their limbs are remarkably similar to those of modern humans.

"It's the template that we came from—going down was probably far more of a challenge for our early ancestors, too," Fannin said. "Even once humans became upright, the ability to ascend, then descend, a tree would've been incredibly useful for safety and nourishment, which is the name of the game when it comes to survival. We're modified, but the hallmarks of our ape ancestry remain in our modern skeletons."

The researchers also studied the anatomical structure of chimp and mangabey arms using skeletal collections at Harvard University and The Ohio State University, respectively. Like people, chimps have a shallow ball-and-socket shoulder that—while more easily dislocated—allows for a greater range of movement, Fannin said. And like humans, chimps can fully extend their arms thanks to the reduced length of the bone just behind the elbow known as the olecranon process.

Mangabeys and other monkeys are built more like quadrupedal animals such as cats and dogs, with deep pear-shaped shoulder sockets and elbows with a protruding olecranon process that make the joint resemble the letter L. While these joints are more stable, they have a much more limited flexibility and range of movement.

The researchers' analysis showed that the angle of a chimp's shoulders was 14 degrees greater during descent than when climbing up. And their arm extended outward at the elbow 34 degrees more when coming down from a tree than going up. The angles at which mangabeys positioned their shoulders and elbows were only marginally different—4 degrees or less—when they were ascending a tree versus downclimbing.

"If cats could talk, they would tell you that climbing down is trickier than climbing up and many human rock climbers would agree. But the question is why is it so hard," said study co-author Nathaniel Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology and Fannin's adviser.

"The reason is that you're not only resisting the pull of gravity, but you also have to decelerate," Dominy said. "Our study is important for tackling a theoretical problem with formal measurements of how wild primates climb up and down. We found important differences between monkeys and chimpanzees that may explain why the shoulders and elbows of apes evolved greater flexibility."

Co-author Mary Joy, who led the study with Fannin for her undergraduate thesis and graduated from Dartmouth in 2021, was reviewing videos of chimps that DeSilva had filmed when she noticed the difference in how the animals descended trees than how they went up them.

"It was very erratic, just crashing down, everything's flying. It's very much a controlled fall," Joy said. "In the end, we concluded that the way chimps descend a tree is likely related to weight. Greater momentum potentially expends less energy and they're much more likely to reach the ground safely than by making small, restricted movements."

But as a trail runner, Joy knew the pained feeling of inching down an incline in short clips instead of just hurtling down the path with the pull of gravity, her legs extended forward to catch her at the end of each stride.

"When I'm moving downhill, the slower I'm going and restricting my movement, the more I'm fatiguing. It catches up to me very quickly. No one would think the speed and abandon with which chimps climb down from trees would be the preferred method for a heavier primate, but my experience tells me it's more energy efficient," she said.

"Movement in humans is a masterpiece of evolutionary compromises," Joy said. "This increased range of motion that began in apes ended up being pretty good for us. What would the advantage of losing that be? If evolution selected for people with less range of motion, what advantages would that confer? I can't see any advantage to losing that."

The paper, "Downclimbing and the evolution of ape forelimb morphologies," was published Sept. 6 by Royal Society Open Science. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS 0840110, 0921770, 0922429, GRFP 1840344), the Clare Garber Goodman Fund and the James O. Freedman Presidential Scholars Research Fund at Dartmouth, a Mamont Scholars Grant from The Explorers Club, the Leakey Foundation, and the Primate Society of Great Britain.

The researchers used sports-analysis software to compare the climbing movements of chimpanzees and mangabeys (pictured). They found that chimps support their greater weight when climbing down by fully extending their arms above their heads thanks to shallow, rounded shoulder joints and shortened elbow bones that are similar to those in humans. Mangabeys, which are built more like cats or dogs, have less flexibility and position their shoulders and elbows roughly the same when climbing up or down.

CREDIT

Luke Fannin, Dartmouth

---

JOURNAL

Royal Society Open Science

DOI

10.1098/rsos.230145 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Downclimbing and the evolution of ape forelimb morphologies

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Sep-2023

 

Study finds increase in travelers to Massachusetts seeking abortion care post-Dobbs

Analysis led by Brigham researchers showed an increase in out-of-state abortion travelers to Massachusetts from other states including Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia after Dobbs.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

• Analysis led by Brigham researchers showed an increase in out-of-state abortion travelers to Massachusetts from other states including Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia after Dobbs.
• Use of non-profit funding by charitable organizations for abortion care more than doubled among out-of-state travelers

A rigorous analysis by researchers confirms a rise in out-of-state travelers coming to Massachusetts to seek abortion care. In a new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, researchers report an estimated increase of 37 percent in the number of out-of-state residents seeking abortion care in Massachusetts, as well as an increase in non-profit funding covering costs for out-of-state residents. Results are published in JAMA Network Open.

“Before Dobbs, there was conjecture that certain states would get all the interstate traveling patients based on geographic proximity to states with complete abortion bans,” said corresponding author Elizabeth Janiak, ScD, of the Division of Family Planning at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “After Dobbs, we set out to understand how many out-of-state travelers come to Massachusetts for abortion care, and how they cover the cost of care.”

The federal right to provide abortion care was overturned by Dobbs v Jackson’s Women Health Organization in June 2022, resulting in rapid changes to state laws, including 15 complete bans. Since then, there has been a documented increase in interstate travel to access abortion care in permissive states neighboring those with bans. Even before Dobbs, abortions were expensive and 60 percent of patients paid out-of-pocket for their care, in part due to bans on abortion coverage in Medicaid and Medicare programs, a lack of coverage by private insurance, or fear of a confidentiality breach if insurance was used.

“Interstate travelers face elevated financial stress from additional travel expenses and the stigma of abortion, which prompts many people to be secretive about their abortion experiences,” Janiak said. “We wanted to understand how the allocation of funding for abortion care and travel by various non-profits and charities changed after Dobbs, since abortion can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.”

The researchers conducted a retrospective review of 45,797 abortion care records from January 2018 to October 2022 at the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. Then, they used time series analysis, a statistical tool commonly used to understand trends in health service utilization, to estimate the expected number of abortions after Dobbs, based on the observed number before.

“A major strength of our study is the large dataset of pre-Dobbs abortions,” Janiak said. “We used rigorous statistical modeling to understand how the number of abortions in the four months after Dobbs compared to the expected counts we predicted. Because of the large historical dataset, we know that these are real changes and not chance fluctuations.”

When observed counts were compared to expected counts, there was a 6.2 percent increase in the total number of abortions. Notably, when data were stratified by state of residence, there was a 37.5 percent increase in the number of out-of-state residents, which is about 45 additional abortions.

“We’ve always had abortion travelers from New England, but now we see that we have people coming from much farther away like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, or Georgia,” Janiak said.

Notably, the proportion of out-of-state residents receiving abortion funding increased by nearly ten percent post-Dobbs, from approximately 8 percent to 18 percent, while in-state residents’ use of funding increased by only one percent, from 2 percent to 3 percent, over the same period.

“Abortion costs are already well above the average out-of-pocket medical expenditures for reproductive age females in the United States,” Janiak said. “In the post-Dobbs context, interstate travel costs are even higher.”

Thus, although Massachusetts does not border any states with an abortion ban, the number of patients traveling and accessing charitable funding increased after Dobbs.

“In states like Massachusetts, we know the state government as well as advocates and healthcare providers are very invested in ensuring abortion access,” Janiak said. “We hope the data from this study serves as an example of how states across the country that share this commitment can monitor the trends in and needs of interstate travelers.”

Limitations of the study include using data from a single clinical source that might not be representative of the entire state. Still, the rapid and disproportionate increase in out-of-state residents seeking care at the largest abortion care provider in Massachusetts reflects a crucial need to assess and strengthen abortion service infrastructure in non-ban states.

“To my knowledge, this is the first analysis of state-level abortion volume changes post-Dobbs using medical record data, and definitely the first in a non-surge state,” Janiak said. “Next, we want to get a more nuanced picture of the barriers people are encountering and how they're overcoming those barriers to travel for abortion.”

Specifically, her team is surveying interstate travelers and in-state residents seeking abortion care in Massachusetts and beyond. They are tracking gestational age, pregnancy outcomes, underlying healthcare characteristics and the psychosocial stress associated with travel for abortion, with the goal of using study results to promote greater equity in abortion care.

Disclosures: Dr. Fulcher reports being employed as the vice president of data science at Delfina Care.

Funding: None.

Paper cited: Keefe-Oates, B et al. “Use of Abortion Services in Massachusetts After the Dobbs Decision Among In-State vs Out-of-State Residents” JAMA Network Open DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.32400

---

JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.32400 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Use of Abortion Services in Massachusetts After the Dobbs Decision Among In-State vs Out-of-State Residents

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Sep-2023

COI STATEMENT

Dr. Fulcher reports being employed as the vice president of data science at Delfina Care.

 

Non-binary and transgender Californians suffered alarming levels of physical and sexual violence in the past year

New survey shows victims suffer severe emotional impact, but most violence goes unreported

Reports and Proceedings

THE REIS GROUP

WASHINGTON (September 6, 2023) – An annual survey of physical and sexual violence suffered by Californians documents for the first time the higher incidence of violence among non-binary and transgender people. One in 20 California adults has experienced physical violence (5%) in the past year, a decrease from 8% in 2022, according to The California Violence Experiences Study (CalVEX); but the reported rates for non-binary and transgender individuals were notably higher, 14% and 27%, respectively.

“The new data we have in this year’s report show that rates of violence have declined since levels seen during the pandemic, but these experiences remain too common, especially for our gender diverse and sexually diverse communities,” said Anita Raj, PhD, MS, Affiliate Professor at University of California San Diego and executive director of the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University. “These data have historically lacked information on non-binary and transgender individuals, so we have not had a clear picture of their experiences with violence until now.”

The fourth annual CalVEX survey, covering more than 3,500 adults, also found that one in 11 adults (9%) said that they have been a victim of sexual harassment or assault in the past year, a decrease from 11% in 2022. Past year sexual harassment and assault reported by non-binary and transgender adults was egregiously higher, at 56% and 40%, respectively.

Overall, more than half of all adults in California reported physical or sexual partner violence (54%) against them in their lifetime. Women (54%), non-binary individuals (76%), and transgender individuals (83%) are more likely than men (38%) to have experienced this.

The CalVEX survey also collected data on the rates and occurrences of violence and mental health and found significant effects associations.

Those who experienced physical violence in the past year were:

• More than twice as likely to report severe depression and/or anxiety symptoms (14% vs 6%)
• Four times more likely to report serious consideration of suicide (25% vs 6%)
• More than twice as likely to report recent substance misuse (67% vs 28%)

Those who experienced sexual harassment or assault in the past year were:

• More than twice as likely to report severe depression and/or anxiety symptoms (14% vs 6%)
• Four times more likely to report serious consideration of suicide (22% vs 5%)
• Nearly twice as likely to report recent substance misuse (51% vs 28%)

The study also examined racial/ethnic disparities and economic disparities among those affected by violence and found higher rates of violence among minority and economically distressed people.

“Experiences of violence are affected by gender, and we need to consider the unique vulnerabilities to violence that people face due to their gender as we build our violence prevention efforts,” said Raj. “Our goal with these data is to guide violence-prevention programming and policy development, recognizing the gendered risk attached to it and the socio-economic and health disparities.”

Overwhelmingly, most people who experienced violence did not report it to authorities: 80% of those who experienced physical violence and 95% of those experiencing sexual violence. This suggests that people may feel that there is no benefit to seeking support or recourse. Some may even be concerned that help-seeking could yield further problems for them.

The survey asked Californians about their most recent experience of being approached or stopped by the police. One in eight (12%) said they were treated somewhat or very badly, as reported by 11% of women and 13% of men. The survey also found that one factor discouraging the reporting of violence to the police was that 1 in 25 respondents (4%) said they were victims of police violence.

“This suggests that criminal justice responses may not be useful in addressing violence,” said Raj.

“Health and social welfare services such as conflict-resolution training and support services for families and youth may be a better means of serving victims and preventing perpetration, given the vulnerabilities faced by victims and that most perpetrators are victims as well.”

The survey was conducted online by NORC at the University of Chicago on behalf of University of California San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) from March to May 2023. More information about the study is available at https://geh.ucsd.edu/cal-vex/.

###

About the California Violence Experiences Study (CalVEX)

The California Violence Experiences Study (CalVEX) provides insight into the current state of violence and discrimination for adult California residents. The survey provides timely population-level estimates on physical violence, inclusive of knife and gun violence, as well as a range of sexual violence experiences, inclusive of harassment, coercion, and forced sex.

NORC at the University of Chicago conducted the online CalVEX survey on behalf of the University of California San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH). 3,560 California adult residents ages 18+ were surveyed from March 2023 to May 2023. For complete research methods, including recruitment, weighting variables, and subgroup sample sizes, please contact Nicole Johns at nejohns@health.ucsd.edu.  

---

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

Biden to hail West Coast dockworker union contract as possibility of UAW strike looms

PUBLISHED WED, SEP 6 2023
CNBC
Emma Kinery@EMMAKINERY

KEY POINTS

Last week the ILWU and the PMA ratified a contract after more than a year of negotiations that prompted the involvement of the Biden administration.

Biden frequently touts his labor chops and his administration has helped mediate several union disputes including averting the rail workers strike last year.

The White House’s embrace of the dockworkers’ contract comes as the United Auto Workers may strike when their contract expires on Sept. 14 if a deal can’t be reached.


The loading and unloading of cargo freighters has been suspended at all 29 U.S. West Coast ports this weekend because of chronic slowdowns on the docks that shippers and terminal operators have blamed on the dockworkers’ union, the companies said Friday.
Bob Riha, Jr. | Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will celebrate the recent West Coast dockworker contract in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday.

Leaders from both the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents the workers, and the Pacific Maritime Association, which operates the port terminals, will join Biden at the White House.

Last week, the ILWU and the PMA ratified a contract after more than a year of negotiations that prompted the Biden administration to get involved. The contract is set to last for six years and was approved by 75% of union members who voted. It included increased pay and benefits for 22,000 workers across 29 ports on the West Coast.

“The contract finalized last week represented a prime example of Bidenomics at work, reflecting workers empowered and bargaining together for the wages, benefits, and quality of life they deserve, and company owners recognizing those unions’ right to organize,” a White House official said in a statement.

Chronic worker slowdowns plagued the ports as negotiations lagged on, in some cases diverting shipments and leading to temporary port closures.

The White House’s embrace of the dockworkers’ contract comes as another major union fights over its deal. The United Auto Workers may strike when their contract expires on Sept. 14 if a deal can’t be reached. The UAW, which represents 146,000 workers, is asking for a 46% increase in pay, a 32-hour work week with 40 hours of pay and the return to a traditional pension system.

“The president, vice president are very strong supporters of the collective bargaining process,” National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard told MSNBC Sunday. “They want to see the collective bargaining process work its way through and you know, we are celebrating two successful collective bargaining agreements that were both ratified with overwhelming majority, both UPS Teamsters and also ILWU and the West Coast ports.”

Biden frequently touts his labor chops and his administration has helped mediate several union disputes, including averting the rail workers strike last year.

“When the last guy was here, he looked at the world from Park Avenue,” Biden said Monday at a Labor Day event in Philadelphia, Pa. “I look at it from Scranton, Pa. I look at it from Claymont, Del.”

Amid abaya ban, French school sends girl home for wearing kimono: Lawyer

Human rights lawyer who plans to file complaint says 15-year-old was asked to leave school for wearing Japanese garment.

Schoolchildren arrive on the first day of the new school year after summer break at the College Antoine de Saint Exupery Middle School, in Savenay, France [File: Stephane Mahe/Reuters]

Published On 6 Sep 2023

A schoolgirl in the French city of Lyon has reportedly been sent home for wearing a kimono, a traditional Japanese garment, as the European nation grapples with a controversial law banning the display of religious symbols in public schools.

Human rights lawyer Nabil Boudi, who plans to file a complaint over the incident, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that the 15-year-old girl was told by the head teacher to leave the school because of her outfit – jeans, a t-shirt and an open kimono.

“This scenario illustrates the dangerous excesses that could legitimately be expected from the recent orders given by the education minister to his administration,” said Boudi.

“Absolutely nothing, in the mere wearing of a kimono, makes it possible to characterise an ostensible manifestation of belonging to a religion within the meaning of the law of March 15, 2004, without resorting to discriminatory prejudices.”

The student reportedly said that her clothes did not represent any religious affiliation.

Acts of discrimination committed by civil servants are punishable by criminal law, the lawyer said.

Translation: The office was seized today by a young high school student who was excluded this morning by the principal because she was wearing a kimono. A complaint for acts of discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation will be filed. Our press release.


Religious signs in state schools have been strictly banned in France since the 19th century, with laws removing any traditional Catholic influence from public education. French public schools do not permit the wearing of large crosses.

It is also forbidden for students to wear Jewish kippas and, in 2004, France also banned Muslim headscarves in schools, while in 2010 it passed a ban on full face veils in public, angering many in its five million-strong Muslim community.

In its latest move concerning how schoolchildren dress, the government announced last month a ban on the abaya – a loose-fitting, full-length robe worn by some Muslim women – saying it broke the rules on secularism in education.

The decision was welcomed by the political right but the hard left argued it represented an affront to civil liberties.

As a result of the new policy, French public schools sent dozens of girls home for refusing to remove their abayas on Monday, the first day of the school year.

Defying a ban on the garment seen as a religious symbol, nearly 300 girls showed up in the morning wearing abayas, according to Education Minister Gabriel Attal. Most agreed to change out of the robe, but 67 refused and were sent home, he said.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Ukraine lashes Putin for saying West put a Jew in power to cloak country’s ‘Nazism’

Kyiv lambastes ‘deep-rooted antisemitism’ in Kremlin’s remarks on Zelensky’s roots, adds: ‘We would like to hear something from Israel’

By LAZAR BERMAN

Today, The Times of Israel

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a media conference at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, May 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)


Kyiv blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday for comments about Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish background, calling them further evidence of antisemitism in Moscow’s leadership.

On Tuesday, Putin told Russian television that the West put “an ethnic Jew” into power in Ukraine to cover up the country’s “glorification of Nazism.”

Western powers, said the Russian president, “have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine — an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. So in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation… of the modern Ukrainian state.

“This makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time — and this is the extermination of 1.5 million people.”

Putin has repeatedly sought to paint his invasion of Ukraine as an effort to “denazify” the country, a claim rejected by the majority of the international community as baseless propaganda.

Kyiv called on the international community to condemn Putin’s statements.

“Vladimir Putin linked the Jewish origin of the President of Ukraine with the glorification of Nazism,” said Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry. “Putin’s chronic fixation on the ethnic origin of the Ukrainian president is yet another manifestation of the deep-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry had not responded to Putin’s comments by the time of writing.

Ukraine’s Ambassador Yevgen Korniychuk told The Times of Israel that “we would like to hear something from Israel. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this from Putin.”

Korniychuk said in a statement that Israel “should understand that Putin, in his harsh words against President Zelensky, only proves once again why Israel should support Ukraine, President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in their difficult time.”

Putin has commented on Zelensky’s Jewish roots on other occasions since his forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. In June, Putin claimed that Zelensky was viewed as a “disgrace” to his faith by other members of the religion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin comments on Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish background to Russian TV, September 5, 2023 (screenshot)

“I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin told an annual economic forum in Saint Petersburg. “They say that Zelensky is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”

Putin later noted that Zelensky was “a man with Jewish blood” before adding that “he covers for these freaks, these neo-Nazis, with his actions.”

“Why do you put Nazis on a pedestal?” Putin asked rhetorically regarding Zelensky.

Other senior Russian officials have also made statements about Zelensky’s background that drew furious condemnations as antisemitic.

Putin, in his harsh words against President Zelensky, only proves once again why Israel should support Ukraine, President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in their difficult time.

In the early months of the war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish does not contradict Moscow’s claims that it launched the invasion to “denazify” the country, claiming that even Hitler “had Jewish blood.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov adresses the Commission of the General Council of the United Russia party in Moscow, Russia, February 3, 2023

. (Yury Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP)

While Zelensky does not profess to be religious, he identifies as Jewish and told The Times of Israel in 2020 that he was raised in “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family.”

Zelensky has said that his great-grandfather and three of his grandfather’s brothers died as a result of the Nazi invasion of Ukrainian territory. His grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers took up arms against the Nazis in the Red Army; his grandfather was the only one to survive.

Zelensky has also said he has relatives who moved to Israel in the 1990s, during the wave of Jewish emigration from the newly dissolved Soviet Union. As Ukrainian president, he has visited once, for the 2020 Holocaust commemoration shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

In this grab taken from video released by Prigozhin Press Service on Saturday, May 20, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group military company members wave a Russian and Wagner flag atop a damaged building in Bakhmut, Ukraine.

 (Prigozhin Press Service via AP, File)

Russia has put pressure on local Jews in other ways during the war. Last October, Moscow’s exiled former chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt encouraged Russian Jews to flee the country after a Moscow official labeled the Chabad Hasidic sect a supremacist cult.

Since July 2022, Russia and Israel have been engaged in a legal dispute over Moscow’s attempts to shutter the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization that promotes immigration of Jews to Israel.

According to Goldschmidt, since the beginning of the invasion in March 2022, 25 to 30 percent of Jews in Russia have left, or are planning to leave.

Vivek Ramaswamy May Be Ahead of the Curve on Israel

Vivek Ramaswamy's views on Israel are shaped by two competing influences on his politics: libertarianism and national conservatism.

BY ARIF RAFIQ

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023


while Ramaswamy's proposal to phase out U.S. aid to Israel may irk Israel's establishment supporters, it may actual gain traction with supporters of Tel Aviv's far-right government. (Image Credit: Gage Skidmore)

Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments last month suggesting that he’d cut aid to Israel look like a self-exposed wound his rival Nikki Haley continues to hit. But the biotech entrepreneur’s comments — which he’s since qualified — may actually foreshadow where the Republican Party’s younger, America First-types are headed on the question of Israel.

In August, when asked by interviewer Russell Brand whether he would cut aid to Israel, Ramaswamy said, “There’s no North Star commitment to any one country other than the United States of America.” Ramaswamy went on to defend the historic U.S.-Israel partnership, but pledged that “come 2028” — or by the end of his first term — U.S. aid to Israel “won’t be necessary.”

Republicans and Israel

While progressive Democrats are increasingly vocal in calls to condition or reduce aid to Israel, the very idea of any downgrade in ties with Tel Aviv is an anathema for a Republican Party in which Christian Zionists are big players.

It wasn’t always this way. Past Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul called for ending aid to Israel. Their influence lives on in today’s Republican Party dominated not just by the MAGA movement, but also by a libertarianism — often paranoid — that is pushing back against the post-9/11 surveillance state.

Ramaswamy’s politics synthesize these two styles. While the businessman has little to show in terms of past allegiance to the Republican Party, he’s had what can be described as libertarian tendencies since college. He’s also expressed an affinity for Ron Paul. Ramaswamy’s use of the term “neocons” to disparage his Republican opponents is a telling sign of where he stands ideologically.

Yet Ramaswamy, unlike Paul, is keen on gaining the evangelical Christian vote. His comments on Israel, like his praise for India’s Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi, could damage his prospects with evangelical Christian Zionists, who see Israel not just as an ally, but also as the realization of Biblical prophecy.

While Ramaswamy has adopted an ecumenical notion of “faith” in his campaign, there’s really no way he — a practicing Hindu — can embrace a religious justification for U.S. support for Israel.

Instead, Ramaswamy speaks of U.S.-Israel relations in secular terms. His language is positive — he told Brand he thinks “our relationship with Israel has advanced American interests.” But, at the moment, it is the religious narrative that provides the bilateral relationship with a buffer today against the volatility of Israeli politics and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Without the garb of exceptionalism, Israel may have less leeway in Washington. Already, the pro-Israel consensus is fraying.

A Gallup survey conducted earlier this year reveals not just a growing partisan gap on Israel, but also a generational one. Millennials across party lines have greater sympathy for the Palestinians than Israelis compared to older Americans.

In the near term, support for Israel among Republicans is by no means in jeopardy. But beyond this election cycle, two ideas brought to the fore by Ramaswamy — the secularization of U.S. policy toward Israel and the idea that there are limits to which Washington will support it — could shake up the status quo on the bilateral relationship.

Today, nearly half of Republican voters favor an isolationist foreign policy, according to a Morning Consult tracking poll. As the conservative movement evolves, inward-looking millennial and Gen Z Republicans, like progressive Democrats, may question the rationale for providing aid to Israel, a high-income country. (Israel’s gross domestic product per capita is higher than that of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.)

From Christian Zionism to National Conservatism

But Ramaswamy isn’t all bad news for Israel. In fact, he may be simpatico with Israel’s far-right. He’s spoken out against U.S. interference in Israeli politics. In other words, a Ramaswamy presidency wouldn’t force Israel to roll back the controversial so-called “judicial reforms.”

Ramaswamy has also said he admires Israeli border policy and nationalism. Some may find this odd given that as a brown son of Indian Hindu immigrants, he’d be excluded from an American variant of Israeli ultranationalism. But Ramaswamy’s comments are probably a nod to the ideas of far-right Israeli ideologue Yoram Hazony.

Hazony’s “national conservatism” rejects global liberalism (aka “globalism”) and liberal internationalism and argues instead for the defense of sovereign nation-states anchored by religious virtues, social traditionalism, and free enterprise economics.

Somewhat paradoxically, Hazony and Co. have amassed supporters from various nationalist and ultranationalist groups and movements, including CPAC in the U.S. and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary. They convene at the annual National Conservatism Conference (or NatCon) organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation.

In 2021, Ramaswamy addressed one of these gatherings, telling the audience that “wokeism” is the merger of “German Nazism” and “Soviet Marxism.”

Ramaswamy and Hazony are bound by another connection: Peter Thiel.

Billionaire investor Thiel is a signatory to the National Conservatism’s statement of principles. He’s also backed numerous Ramaswamy ventures, including his “anti-woke” Strive Asset Management fund.

When Ramaswamy speaks about a pathway toward ending U.S. aid to Israel, it isn’t clear whether it’s the libertarian or the national conservative in him speaking. He, like Thiel, straddles the boundary between libertarianism and national conservatism. One might call him a conservatarian.

Either way, while Ramaswamy’s proposal to phase out U.S. aid to Israel may irk Israel’s establishment supporters, it may actually gain traction with supporters of Tel Aviv’s far-right government.

In July, Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz argued in the right-leaning Tablet for ending U.S. aid to Israel, claiming it “undermine[s] Israel’s domestic defense industry, weaken[s] its economy, and compromise[s] the country’s autonomy.” Some may find their contention laughable, but the point is that such an argument is being made by those adjacent to Israel’s right. Indeed, in practice, aid cuts could actually reduce Washington’s leverage with Tel Aviv and accelerate its far-right turn.

So, regardless of his motives, Ramaswamy may be pushing the U.S.-Israel relationship into unchartered territory.


Arif Rafiq is the editor of Globely News. Rafiq has contributed commentary and analysis on global issues for publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, the New York Times, and POLITICO Magazine. He has appeared on numerous broadcast outlets, including Al Jazeera English, the BBC World Service, CNN International, and National Public Radio.

West Germany’s Migrant Wildcat Strikes

Fifty years ago, diverse groups of workers began to connect anti-racism and class struggle


AUTHOR
Efsun Kızılay
Striking Turkish workers at the Ford factory in Cologne-Niehl, 29 August 1973. The wildcat strike was triggered by the firing of 300 workers who returned home from vacation behind schedule, but in reality, it was about a lot more than that.

Photo: picture alliance / UPI

Germany has seen a number of scandals and debates over the working conditions facing migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in recent years. Hundreds of thousands travel to Germany each year to harvest vegetables, drive lorries, or work in factories. They generally are not represented by trade unions and earn less than their German colleagues. And frequently, they fight back, like the group of Georgian and Uzbek lorry drivers who, in early summer of this year, went on a wildcat strike after their employer refused to hand over their hard-earned wages.

Efsun Kızılay works on migration at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Yet poor working conditions for migrant workers in Germany is not a new phenomenon. These conditions have a long history — as do the struggles against them. Workers began protesting against unfair and inhumane conditions early on, demanding better working and living conditions as well as fair wages. They took labour disputes into their own hands, often carrying out wildcat strikes, independent of works councils, and in conjunction with struggles against racism and social marginalization.

These struggles first came to a head about 50 years ago, in the summer of 1973, when migrant workers in West Germany took a stand against over-exploitation and discrimination. To this day, their example continues to offer lessons on how anti-racism and class struggle can linked together.

West Germany’s Labour Agreements

West Germany’s expanding post-war economy faced a labour shortage that the federal government decided to combat through labour agreements with other countries. These were concluded in 1955 with Italy, in 1960 with Spain and Greece, in 1961 with Turkey, in 1963 with Morocco, in 1964 with Portugal, in 1965 with Tunisia, and in 1967 with Yugoslavia. These agreements, undertaken as the most cost-effective solution, did not anticipate the permanent presence in Germany of the workers they recruited; for this reason, they were labelled “guest workers”.

These guest workers were assigned primarily to “low-skill” jobs, often as contract workers on assembly lines, in construction, or in coal mines. The increasing affluence throughout all levels of West German society in the wake of World War II, known as the Fahrstuhleffekt (“elevator effect”), led to migrant workers’ being employed at the lower end of the hierarchy while Germans were able to ascend to higher-level occupations. The discrepancy between the two groups of workers was also apparent in their wages, which often diverged wildly.

The struggle over limitations on residence permits was successfully connected to the struggle over better housing conditions and industrial struggles and strikes, and a new anti-racist moment was born.

Resistance to poor and unfair working conditions began to grow among migrant workers. They began to unionize and take part in workplace demonstrations. Out of roughly 2 million migrant workers at the beginning of the 1970s, about one quarter were unionized. Many of these workers possessed a strong political consciousness. They came mostly from countries that were experiencing radical political upheavals. Greece, Portugal, and Spain had dictatorships until the mid-1970s, Turkey in the 1970s had a strong labour movement with countless strikes, and some of the workers arriving in Germany came from socialist Yugoslavia.

Workers from Greece organized resistance to the military junta from Germany, while workers from Turkey, where unions suffered state repression, started unions in Germany. From Italy, where the Communist Party was the second-largest party in parliament, workers brought extensive strike experience with them to Germany. In this way, migrant workers attempted to channel experiences from their countries of origin into labour struggles through union activity.

The Role of Unions and Autonomous Resistance

The existing trade unions initially perceived the recruited guest workers primarily as a new source of competition. This explains their reticence when it came to questions of being committed to and representing migrant workers. Since many migrant workers did not feel represented by the unions, between 1950 and 1970 they organized countless autonomous wildcat strikes independent of the unions. These wildcat strikes resulted both in schisms between German and migrant workers and successful solidarity-building between the groups.

Germans frequently met migrant workers with mistrust and scepticism. Many of the predominantly German works councils and trade unions refused to support migrants in labour disputes — their advancement within their companies was, after all, predicated on the fact that migrant workers would fill the lower ranks of company hierarchies. While German workers and unions were more interested in preserving company structures and so lent them their support, migrants frequently fought for changes to these structures and against their own exclusion. They criticized both racist conditions within the companies and poor housing conditions.

Their dissatisfaction eventually culminated in the waves of strikes that occurred in 1973. According to the editorial collective express, at least 275,000 workers at approximately 335 companies went on strike that year, spontaneously and independent of the unions. Spanish and Portuguese workers at the auto body manufacturer Karmann in Osnabrück, many of them women, stopped work to demand flexible working hours. Striking workers at John Deere in Mannheim were verbally berated and forced to protect themselves from physical attacks.

Although workers appealed to their employers primarily with demands for higher wages, they grew increasingly critical of the capitalistic structure of work as well. Workers at Valvo, a valve manufacturer in Aachen, and at the Hella automotive plant in Lippstadt, for example, demonstrated for a cost-of-living bonus and against wage discrepancies between German and migrant workers. The Lippstadt works council had previously won a cost-of-living bonus, but exclusively for German workers. Despite the fact that migrants included German workers in their demands, Germans rarely showed solidarity in migrant labour disputes. The Lippstadt Multinational Committee, which formed after the strike, openly opposed the company’s racist structures:

We are Greeks, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians; but regardless of our nationalities, we are all workers and we all face the same problems — or does the conveyor belt move faster for the Greek than for the German? We will not give management the satisfaction of seeing us divided because of the different colour of our hair and eyes.

The cost-of-living bonus was won for all, although in the end it was less than workers had demanded.

Resentment against poor working conditions was growing in many factories, erupting into various forms of resistance and protest. Disappointment spread regarding the restrained behaviour of the unions, and workers eventually refused to let them represent their demands. Two strikes in 1973 were particularly prominent: the women’s strike at automotive supplier Pierburg in Neuss, and the Ford strike in Cologne.

The Strike at Pierburg

The labour dispute at Pierburg took place in August 1973. It was one of the first successful strikes in West Germany against worker classification and compensation practices that discriminated against women.

One crucial element of the strike, and one of the factors that led to its success, was solidarity among the workers. Only a few days into the strike, German women technicians joined in solidarity with striking migrant women to oppose employers’ attempts at intimidation. With the demand of “One More Deutschmark”, 1,800 migrant and 400 German women workers staged an indefinite, spontaneous walkout.

Employers, the media, and even politicians attempted to criminalize the strike. It all began when Greek workers distributed leaflets in various languages calling for a strike. In response, police moved in to arrest the activists. During a scuffle, one police officer threatened them with a drawn pistol and hurled racist insults. As word of the violent, racist dimension of the police’s assault made its way around the factory, a wave of solidarity with the migrant workers immobilized the entire plant.

Fundamentally, labour disputes are always about more than labour disputes.

Despite racist company structures and a repressive management supported by both the press and the police, migrant workers were able to successfully call for solidarity and forge alliances. In doing so, they specifically sought out contact with German workers, for example by going to pubs they often frequented and recounting the racism they had suffered.

The strike was successful: the discriminatory Lohngruppe 2 was abolished, the lowest pay grade to which migrant women workers were assigned, with wages raised by 65 pfennigs per hour. Importantly, there were no lay-offs following the labour dispute.

It is important to mention that Pierburg already had a very active left-wing workers’ association before the strike. Many migrants already belonged to this association, which was in opposition to the works council of the time. In 1972, after years of work, it succeeded in winning more votes in factory-wide elections than the works council.

Members of the association accelerated the pace of their organizing work, regularly distributing information sheets in all the languages spoken in the factory. Multilingual representatives guaranteed the flow of information among workers, and even the workers’ assemblies were multilingual. All these developments and activities contributed to the strike’s success.

The Ford Strike

The best-known strike of 1973 was also carried out in August, at the Ford factory in Cologne’s Niehl district, where, about 11,000 workers from Turkey were employed between 1961 and 1973. They represented the largest “society of [Turkish-born] industrial workers outside of Turkey” and were given almost exclusively “unskilled” jobs. A sharp division therefore developed between these workers and the German workforce, who were mostly employed in better positions. The employment structure was based on a hybrid system in which migrant workers had to perform worse jobs, received worse pay, and could even be fired more easily than their German colleagues.

The catalyst for the strike was the firing of 300 workers who had returned late from vacation. But it was really about much more: prior to the firings, migrant workers had compiled lists of signatures petitioning the representatives of IG Metall, Germany’s largest metalworkers’ union, to campaign for a pay rise — yet the list was completely ignored in the next meeting of the workers’ association.

In the end, IG Metall reduced the migrant workers’ demands to a single one: cancelling their collective bargaining agreement. As Serhat Karakayalı writes, “As workers on a conveyor belt, most Turks earned an hourly wage between 7.15 and 8.24 marks, while Germans, as skilled labourers, earned between 8.98 and 10.59 marks.”

One week before the strike, a workers’ assembly took place at which the Turkish workers showed solidarity with those who had been laid off, while the majority of their German colleagues greeted the lay-offs and disciplinary actions with applause. When, in addition, the extra work resulting from the lay-offs was to be passed on to the remaining workers, their growing discontent was given voice through a train of protestors marching through the entire factory on 24 August 1973.

The subsequent strike lasted for seven days. More than half of the 33,000 employees took part, primarily Turks, although some German and Italian workers also supported the strike. The strikers’ demands were as follows: “decrease in conveyor belt speeds, reduction of the pace of work, better working conditions, six weeks of vacation, one more Deutschmark for all, the reinstatement of all those fired, and payment for striking hours”.

In the meantime, the works council was in unsuccessful talks with company management. When it then announced, “referencing industrial relations law and the ban on industrial action specified in the collective agreement”, that it would not support the strike, the works council forfeited any legitimacy it had in representing the interests of migrant workers. The union subsequently pursued a policy of division, which it shored up with demonstrations of its own. As a result, many German workers broke off and sided with the union. An alliance of trade union representatives, company management, press, city government, and police agitated against the striking migrant workers.


Migrant workers took their struggles into their own hands and, as political subjects, resisted the working and living conditions imposed upon them.

One week after the strike began, company management decided to use all available means to end it. During a counter-demonstration by German workers, management called in the police, who cracked down violently on the strikers and arrested their supposed ringleader. Baha Targün, spokesperson for the strike committee, was deported to Turkey. Management laid off 100 Turkish workers without notice, putting pressure on a further 600 to “convert [their] termination without notice to ‘voluntary’ termination”.

The works council did not object to any of these lay-offs. According to historian Jörg Huwer, “In the suppression of the strike, German workers’ anger erupted over the fact that Turkish migrants had, for a short time, been able to take control of their workplace.” Günter Piening explains:


At Ford, it was about “one more Deutschmark” … but at the same time, any halfway serious analysis shows that the great strike of August 1973 addressed all the conditions of life — including living quarters, the health problems caused by the work, and how you can keep in touch with family and friends when you have rotating shifts and just a few weeks of vacation. Fundamentally, labour disputes are always about more than labour disputes.

Beyond the Strike

Unfair, discriminatory structures were denounced outside of factories as well. Countless “multinational centres”, where migrants organized into work and cultural associations, formed across West Germany in those years. Migrants demanded the right to vote and protested police brutality and media attacks. As migration scholar Manuela Bojadžijev argues:

Migrants’ self-organized struggles against racist working and living conditions in Germany should therefore not be seen as single-issue movements. They connected the legal, political, and economic aspects of oppression and exploitation. They expanded narrow perspectives on labour struggles to encompass the entirety of the migrants’ experience, everyday life, language and culture, and no less importantly to housing conditions, which constituted the crucial focal point of migrant struggle alongside the factory.

The phenomenon of migrant workers’ strikes was of interest not only to the public, but also to the majority of those in the “old” and “new” Left. Huwer argues that their agitation and organization began to focus increasingly on migrant workers, “in [whose] life circumstances a new level of capitalist exploitation was to be seen, and at the same time the seeds of active resistance. In the eyes of the press, they filled the gap left by the unions, which had not yet succeeded in incorporating foreign workers into West Germany’s social partnership system of industrial relations.”

Structures of solidarity could therefore also be built with left-wing organizations. The Proletarische Front (Proletarian Front) in Hamburg and Bremen, the Arbeiterkampf (Workers’ Struggle) in Cologne, the Revolutionärer Kampf(Revolutionary Struggle) in the Frankfurt Rhein-Main area, and the Arbeitersache (Workers’ Cause) in Munich developed ideas for “multinational company work”. They had connections to the migrant organizations within companies as well as to autonomous migrant organizations, and migrant and student milieus drew closer to each other.

Migrant workers at steel manufacturer VDM in Frankfurt and at auto manufacturer Opel in Rüsselsheim stormed the German-dominated works council meeting with the slogan (developed by the Revolutionärer Kampf) “One Deutschmark for all!”. During housing struggles in Frankfurt, in which residents — a majority of them migrants — protested displacement and poor housing conditions, banners were also hung addressing poor working conditions. Karakayalı explains: “With the slogan ‘Fiat-Opel-Autobianchi die padroni siamo stanchi!’ (We’re tired of those tossers, the Fiat-Opel-Autobianchi bosses!), they also took on the capitalist instrumentalizing of migration.” The struggle over limitations on residence permits was successfully connected to the struggle over better housing conditions and industrial struggles and strikes, and a new anti-racist moment was born.

In this way, migrant workers took their struggles into their own hands and, as political subjects, resisted the working and living conditions imposed upon them.

Translated by Anna Dinwoodie and Marty Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.

Rosa Luxemburg Was the Great Theorist of Democratic Revolution

The latest volume of her Complete Works provides a unique perspective on her political thought

AUTHOR
Peter Hudis



Generations of socialist thinkers and activists have grappled with the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet there are many surprises still in store for those interested in her legacy, as seen in the recent publication of Volume Four of the English-language Complete Works. Along with the previously published Volume Three, the new collection brings together her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution, one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.

Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and the General Editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

This article first appeared in Jacobin.

Luxemburg’s analysis of 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions is already well-known (and appears in Volume Four in a new translation). However, more than four-fifths of the material in the new volume, covering the period from 1906 to 1909, is appearing in English for the first time. Most of her writings that were originally composed in Polish — about half of the volume’s 550 pages — have never appeared in any other language.

Learning to Speak Russian

Luxemburg, like most Marxists of her generation (as well as Karl Marx himself) held that a democratic republic with universal suffrage was the formation best suited for waging the class struggle to a successful conclusion. Like many of her contemporaries in the Second International, she saw no contradiction between fighting for democratic reforms within capitalism while reaching for a revolutionary transformation that would abolish capitalism — even as she relentlessly battled those who separated the two.

In doing so, Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in “peaceful” as against those used in revolutionary periods. The aim in both scenarios was to enhance the consciousness and power of the working class. However, “in peacetime, this struggle takes place within the framework of the rule of the bourgeoisie”, which required that the movement operate “within the bounds of the existing laws governing elections, assemblies, the press”, trade unions, etc.

Luxemburg referred to this as “a sort of iron cage in which the class struggle of the proletariat must take place”. Hence, mass struggles in such periods “only very seldom attain positive results”. A revolutionary phase was very different, she argued:

Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered ... the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.

For Luxemburg, the activity and reason of the masses during the 1905 Revolution, in which millions engaged in mass strikes aimed at bringing down the tsarist regime, was a clear example of such a moment. As she wrote in early 1906: “With the Russian Revolution, the almost-sixty-year period of quiet parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie comes to a close.” The time had come for the socialist movement in Western Europe to begin to “speak Russian” by incorporating the mass strike into its political and organizational perspectives:

Social Democratic tactics, as employed by the working class in Germany today and to which we owe our victories up until now, is oriented primarily toward parliamentary struggle, it is designed for the context of bourgeois parliamentarianism. Russian Social Democracy is the first to whom the hard but honourable lot has fallen of using the foundations of Marx’s teaching, not in a time of the correct, calm parliamentary course of state life, but in a tumultuous revolutionary period.
Immediate Tasks

In the years since Luxemburg penned these words, numerous commentators have praised her efforts to push the rather staid social democratic parties in a more revolutionary direction, while others have criticized Luxemburg’s perspective on the grounds that it downplays the stark differences between the absolutist regime in Russia and Western liberal democracies. There are several points worth noting in this context.

Firstly, Luxemburg held that the mass strike “is and will remain a powerful weapon of workers’ struggle”, but went on to stress that it was “only that, a weapon, whose use and effectiveness always depend on the environment, the given conditions, and the moment of struggle”. Secondly, she held that the Russian proletariat was “not setting itself utopian or unreachable goals, like the immediate realization of socialism: the only possible and historically necessary goal is to establish a democratic republic and an eight-hour workday”.

In Luxemburg’s view, socialism could not be on the immediate agenda in Russia for two main reasons: the working class at the time constituted only a small minority of the populace of the Russian Empire (less than 15 percent), and it was impossible for socialism to exist in a single country:

The socialist revolution can only be a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time.

In a lengthy essay addressed to the Polish workers’ movement, she further developed this point:

In its current state, the working class is not yet ready to accomplish the great tasks that await it. The working class of all capitalist countries must first internalize the aspiration to socialism; an enormous number of people have yet to arrive at an awareness of their class interests ... When Social Democracy has a majority of the working people behind it in all the largest capitalist countries, the final hour of capitalism will have struck.

A Workers’ Revolution

However, this did not mean that the Russian Revolution would be confined to a liberal or bourgeois framework. Much like Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik current — and in direct opposition to their Menshevik rivals — Luxemburg held that the immediate task facing revolutionaries in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class. Since the liberal bourgeoise was too weak and compromised to lead the revolution, “the proletariat had to become the only fighter and defender of the democratic forms of a bourgeois state”.

She stressed that conditions in Russia today were not like those existing in nineteenth-century France:

The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc., but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the [French] proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.

She further expanded on this point elsewhere:

The bourgeois revolution in Russia and Poland is not the work of the bourgeoisie, as in Germany and France in days gone by, but the working class, and a class already highly conscious of its labour interests at that — a working class that seeks political freedoms not so that the bourgeoisie may benefit, but just the opposite, so that the working class may resolve its class struggle with the bourgeoisie and thereby hasten the victory of socialism. That is why the current revolution is simultaneously a workers’ revolution. That is also why, in this revolution, the battle against absolutism goes hand in hand — must go hand in hand — with the battle against capital, with exploitation. And why economic strikes are in fact quite nearly inseparable in this revolution from political strikes.

Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism, including those pertaining to freedom struggles in the technologically developed capitalist lands. As she later wrote in December 1918, on behalf of the group she led during the German Revolution: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League.”

One Step Forward

Luxemburg’s perspective on the 1905 Russian Revolution raises a host of questions, which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world in the decades following her death. How can the working class maintain power in a democratic republic after the overthrow of the old regime if it represents only a minority of the populace? How can it do so if, as she claims, “Social Democracy finds only the autonomous class politics of the proletariat to be reliable” — since the hunger of the peasants for landed private property presumably puts them at odds with it? And how is it possible for such a democratic republic under the control of the proletariat to be sustained if revolutions do not occur in other countries that can come to its aid?

Luxemburg addressed these questions in a remarkable essay written in Polish in 1908, “Lessons of the Three Dumas,” which has never previously appeared in English. By 1908, the situation in Russia had radically changed since the revolution was by then defeated. She surveyed the course of its development, encouraging Marxists to “redouble their commitment to subjecting every detail of their tactics to rigorous self-criticism.” She did so by evaluating the history of the three Dumas — the parliamentary bodies established in the Russian Empire from 1906 as a concession to the revolution, with a restricted franchise that became progressively more biased in favour of the upper classes:

The Third Duma has shown — and from this flow its enormous political significance — that a parliamentary system that has not first overthrown the government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power (a belief the First Duma vainly held), not only cannot hold its own against that power as an instrument of opposition (as the Second Duma tried to do), but can and must become, on the contrary, an instrument of the counterrevolution.

She proceeded to look ahead in thinking about the possible fate of a future revolution that, unlike the one in 1905, did succeed in overthrowing the old regime:

If the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly — realizing political freedom across the Russian state — but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow.

Revolutionary Realism

Yet the question remained: How could the workers maintain themselves in power in a democratic republic over the long haul if they constituted a minority of the populace? Luxemburg’s answer was that they could not — and yet the effort would still be worth it:

The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.

Shortly before writing this, in an address to a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, she made the following remarks:

I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever-broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances ... But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat, the vanguard that discloses new contradictions, new tasks, and new paths for class struggle, as the French proletariat did in the nineteenth century.

She did not shy away from acknowledging the implications of this argument:

Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended.

This was a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. Luxemburg was fully aware that even a democratic republic under the control of the working class — which is how she as well as Marx understood “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constituted a minority. And yet, even though the revolution would therefore have “failed” from at least one point of view, it would have produced important social transformations, providing the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.

In short, Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required to achieve the transition to socialism was “thoroughgoing democracy”. If a nondemocratic regime stayed in power, the transition to socialism would become impossible, since the working class would be left without the means and training to exercise power on its own behalf. Yet on the other hand, if a proletarian democracy existed even for a brief period of time, it could help inspire a later transition to socialism.

Self-Examination

This argument speaks to what would unfold a decade later, when tsarism was finally overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution, followed in short order by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware at the time that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was why Lenin worked so hard to foster proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.

However, two fundamental issues separated Lenin’s approach from that of Luxemburg. Firstly, his regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties — a development that Luxemburg sharply opposed in her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, Lenin held that once the Bolsheviks seized power, they intended to keep it — permanently. This was very different from Luxemburg’s statement that “the inability of the proletariat to stay in power” would not be the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspired others to take up the fight against capitalism.

Luxemburg’s position is especially striking because she was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Indeed, she lost her own life following the defeat of the January 1919 Spartacus League uprising in Berlin, which she initially opposed on the grounds that it lacked sufficient mass support. However, Luxemburg was equally aware that any effort to forge a transition to socialism through nondemocratic means was doomed to fail. In this sense, she anticipated the tragic outcome of many revolutions in the decades following her death.

Whatever one makes of Luxemburg’s reflection on these issues, one thing is clear: she developed a distinctive, though rarely discussed, conception of the transition to socialism (especially for developing societies, which is what the Russian Empire was at the time) that has received far too little attention. The publication of these writings in English will hopefully remedy that neglect.

Although many of Luxemburg’s ideas speak to issues that democratic socialists, anti-imperialists, and feminists are grappling with today, on at least one critical issue, her perspective has not stood the test of time. It is to be found in her oft-repeated insistence: “When the sale of workers’ labour to private exploiters is abolished, the source of all today’s social inequalities will disappear.”

Luxemburg’s contention that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would provide the basis for ending “every inequality in human society” was not hers alone. Virtually every tendency and theorist of revolutionary social democracy in the Second International shared it, including Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and many others. Yet it is hardly possible to maintain this view today.

Neither the social-democratic welfare states, which sought to limit private property rights, nor the regimes in the USSR, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, which abolished them through the nationalization of property, succeeded in developing a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. A much deeper social transformation that targets not alone private property and “free” markets but most of all the alienated form of human relations that define capitalist modernity is clearly needed.

That is a task for our generation, which can be much aided by returning with new eyes to the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of the logic of capital. This entails a critical re-evaluation of the meaning of socialism that may not have been on the agenda in Luxemburg’s time, but which the overall spirit of her work surely encourages. As she wrote in 1906:

Self-examination — that is, making oneself aware at every step of the direction, logic, and basis for the class movement itself — is that store from which the working mass draws its strength, again and again, to struggle anew, and by which it understands its own hesitation and defeats as so many proofs of its strength and inevitable future victory.