In her book The Dream of Red – Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Language and Love (2016), Nina Björk – one of Sweden’s foremost and most outspoken social commentators – sets out to explore the life of a true socialist icon and trailblazer, Rosa Luxemburg. Drawing on Luxemburg’s life as a political activist and as a human being, Björk reflects on ideology, feminism and love, money and influence.
The Polish-German Luxemburg (1871–1919) was, throughout her adult life, tirelessly committed to the socialist struggle, both in Germany – where she played a key role in the country’s Social Democratic Party – and within the international socialist movement. By portraying her predecessor, Björk looks back and analyses, whilst linking her conclusions to us living people of today, at a time when capitalism has us in an iron grip that is, surprisingly, rarely questioned at all.
Nina Björk simultaneously highlights several facets of Luxemburg: at once the hard-line revolutionary, the skilled orator, and the analytical Marxist. Yet Luxemburg could also be a tender, loving private individual, and her political dreams were interspersed with fantasies of one day being able to slow down, the desire to settle down (in an unexpectedly bourgeois manner) and start a family. What Björk and Luxemburg have in common is their view of humanity as political beings, their belief in activism – in the possibilities of the ’no’ and that we are defined by our actions – and their conviction regarding the power of the masses and the path towards possible change.
