  Yet Luxemburg’s arguments in support of women representation were never confined to a demand for abstract legal recognition in liberal parliamentary democracies. She was vividly aware that the few privileges extended to Western feminist campaigners might come at the price of the ongoing exploitation of women in other parts of the world. In an article entitled “Proletarian Women”, she wrote movingly about the struggles of women in German Africa where “the bones of defenseless Herero women are bleaching in the sun” and about “the high cliffs of Putumayo” where “the death cries of martyred Indian women, ignored by the world, fade away in the rubber plantations of the international capitalists” (Luxemburg 1914 [RLR: 245]). In this sense, Luxemburg’s calls to advance women’s struggle, were part of her more general argument that the demand for social rights obtained through parliamentary representation ought to be part of a more radical critique of capitalism where the key is access to political power and a profound transformation of both the economic and the political structures of society. Within existing capitalist institutions, she insisted, there could be no true gender and racial emancipation. The only secure foundation for the rights of women, she argued, was for them to join the social democratic movement where they could affirm their equality through mass orgnisation and protest alongside men, and where they could shake the pillars of the existing legal order before it grants them “the illusion of … rights” (Luxemburg 1914 [RLR: 244]).