New Zealand Workers Party Public Forums
AUCKLAND
Fortnightly, Tuesdays, 6pm
Auckland Trades Hall, 147 Great North Road (Upstairs)
1968+40 series
May 13: The French general strike
May 27: What is Situationism?
WELLINGTON
7:30, Level 3, Anvil House, 138 Wakefield St
Rosa Luxemburg was a Jewish Polish-born German Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary for the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German SPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany.
In 1914 after the SPD's supporting German participation in World War I, she co-founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary Spartakusbund (Spartacist League), that on 1 January 1919 became the Communist Party of Germany. In November 1918, during the German Revolution she founded the The Red Flag, the central organ of the left wing revolutionaries.
She regarded the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 in Berlin as a mistake,[1] but supported it after it had begun. When the revolt was crushed by the Freikorps (monarchist army remnants and right-wing freelance militias collectively), Luxemburg, Liebknecht and hundreds of left-wing revolutionaries were captured, tortured, and killed. Since their deaths, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht achieved great symbolic status amongst democratic socialists and Marxists.
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Social Reform or Revolution is the title of a pamphlet written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1900. It was published to confront the revisionist ideology beginning to emerge in Europe shortly after the internal conflicts amongst Marxists at the Second International.
Social Reform or Revolution has experienced an upswing in popularity lately due to conflicts amongst contemporary Marxists regarding this very same issue. While a detailed critique of the thinking of Eduard Bernstein it includes a short and devastating critique of marginalism and identifies credit and the stock market as things that will drive capitalism into crisis.
CHRISTCHURCH
Steed Meeting Room, UCSA Building
On November 16, 2004, Philippines army and police personnel killed 12 picketers and 2 children at the Hacienda Luisita sugar mill. Six thousand sugar plantation workers, living in poverty, had been defending their strike-picket, and raising demands for union rights and land rights. A courageous group of Filipino filmmakers captured the events and interviewed striking workers. Despite the massacre, workers resumed their struggle. They have now won some land rights in the Tarlac region. This is one of many struggles being carried out by workers and peasants in the Philippines.
