this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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That's quite a cherry-picked quote, and to connect it to Bernie and AOC is to completely disregard the rest of the text.
Rosa draws a distinction between being a legislator in a parliament -- where you're able to battle the state within its own arena, and expose its contradictions -- and being an executive in a cabinet -- where your job is to manage crises and therefore hide contradictions.
She also explicitly endorses political engagement as a means of class struggle:
And not for nothing, the Communist Manifesto does too:
The broader theme of Rosa's text is to not accidentally align yourself with liberals in a cross-class coalition by focusing only on the political question of the day. I think we're in danger of doing that with memes just as much as self-proclaimed socialist politicians are in danger of doing it by entering government.
You know she was murdered by the social democrats, right?
Boiling it down to "Bernie killed Rosa" is not a good response to someone digging into the details of what she wrote.
And while there's stuff worth considering here, we're in a radically different situation than she was.
I think the point is that the points made above came back to bite her, by getting shot in the head and dumped in the river for people who sold out leftism and opened the door for Hitler.
In terms of Bernie, it is pretty valid. All the "democrat socialists" in the US become the representitive of bourgeois government because the US is a bourgeois settler colonial dictatorship. The white "working class" in the US have no revolutionary potential because the white "working class" are petit bourgeois settlers, no different from Israelis, and not part of the global proletariat, they exploit our labor and will continue to do so until it no longer materially benefits them and that doesn't seem to be coming any time soon. They will sell us all out to save 10 cents on gas and prop their petrostate. readsettlers.org
Death to the USA.
I've read Settlers and don't find it convincing. If you found it convincing, why quote someone from another imperial core proletarian movement?
You probably didn't like it because you're a yank
Yep. And that’s exactly why we need to keep electing self-proclaimed socialists.
The US is not a democracy and its elections are fake. Death to America.
Yes, but at a time when social democratic parties in europe hadn't quite formally formed or split into discernable socialist factions. The Social Democrats in Germany were in active coalition with monarchist anti-republic paramilitaries and had inherited the government from the abdicating kaiser. The KPD didn't exist yet, and this was technically an internal critique of the Social Democratic Party of which she was a member.
At the same time, the Social Democrats in Russia included Lenin.
At any rate it isn't worth giving the freikorps a pass by omission when unearthing conflicts about the SPD.
Curious about this part
I know you say "class" specifically here. But is the idea that this is true more generally? Because a unified republican party of people who hate each other on certain topics but who built a coalition around a single figure beat a disjointed set of groups who didn't do the same.
What makes cross class coalition bad or ineffective where uniting across ideologies on specifics seems to actually work?
Is it a line in the sand kind of thing? "Everybody on this side of the line unite or die ffs. Everybody on that side, you're the ones we're uniting against".
Is that the idea? The upper class(s) can never be part of our group because they're the ones we're unifying against?
(Kind of thinking out loud here. Am I on the right track?)
Consider the context that World War 1's conclusion left multiple imperial monarchies in ashes. The kind of government in question is one that is directly being sanctioned by aristocratic monarchy. The bourgeioise were and were working with kings and noble families as a matter of status quo, who had just spent years sending entire townships to the meatgrinder.