R Is for Rosa

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Media Collection | Rosa Luxemburg R Is for Rosa

“Why is Rosa Luxemburg still important today?” asks the British journalist and filmmaker Paul Mason in the three episode series that he produced for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung on the occasion of Rosa Luxemburg's 150th birthday. Reform or Revolution (I), Imperialism and War (II), and Order Prevails in Berlin (III) are the topics that Mason engages with in order to show us why Rosa’s ideas and thinking have not lost their relevance.

Cast: Josephine Rogers as Rosa Luxemburg // Paul Mason (narrator) // Dana Mills (author, Rosa Luxemburg: Critical Lives); Writer and Director: Paul Mason; RLS: Dorit Riethmüller; Producer: Theopi Skarlatos; Camera: Louis Hollis, Mathilde Babo, Lukasz Jan Konopa, Elena Massa, Jon A Juárez; Post-Production / Animation: Exarcheia; Shot on location and at Camberwell Studios, London.

R is for Rosa: Episode 1 - Reform or Revolution?

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Rosa Luxemburg flees Poland to become a leading theorist in German Social Democracy. At first, the debate over revolutionary principles is abstract - then the 1905 revolution breaks out, and Luxemburg goes undercover, into thick of the action, in Warsaw, only to find herself in jail. On her release, she writes a pamphlet that shakes the reformist leaders of Western Europe to their core.

R is for Rosa: Episode 2 - Imperialism and War

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Rosa Luxemburg is teaching Marxism to German workers - but Marx wrote Das Kapital fifty years before, and capitalism has changed. Luxemburg writes a book predicting the downfall of imperialism, on the eve of a war in which millions will die… from her prison cell, as she attacks the hypocrisy and slaughter, even some revolutionaries think she has gone too far…

R is for Rosa: Episode 3 – Order Reigns in Berlin

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First Russia, then Germany. Released from her prison cell as the German Reich collapses, Rosa rushes to Berlin to form the Communist Party. Amid mass protests and the formation of workers and soldiers councils, she is torn between caution and the need to push hard for a break with the old order. After a failed uprising, she is arrested and murdered. But her vision of what a workers’ revolution means lives on.

R Is for Rosa: Episode 4 – Rosa Luxemburg Today

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Katja Kipping of Die Linke in conversation with Paul Mason.