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Rosa Luxemburg (Pol: Róża Luksemburg) (March 5, 1870/71 – January 15, 1919, was a Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary for the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, the German SPD, and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany.

She founded the The Red Flag (Die Rote Fahne) journal. After the SPD's supporting German participation in World War I, she co-founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary Spartacist League (Ger: Spartakusbund) that later became the Communist Party of Germany. The Spartacist League participated in the unsuccessful Berlin revolution of January 1919. Luxemburg's propaganda supported the revolt, which was jointly crushed by the Freikorps (the monarchist army remnants and right-wing freelance militias collectively). Luxemburg 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.

Life

Poland

Rosa Luxemburg (Rosalia Luxemburg) was born on March 5, 1870 or 1871, to a Jewish family in Zamość near Lublin in Russian-controlled Congress Poland. The birthdate discrepancy stems between her Zürich University CV (1871) and her 1887 Abitur certificate (1870). Rosa was the fifth child of timber trader Eliasz Luxemburg III and Line Löwenstein.

On her family's moving to Warsaw, she attended a Gymnasium from 1880. Since 1886, she belonged to the Polish, left-wing Proletariat party (founded in 1882, anticipating the Russian parties by twenty years). She began in politics by organizing a general strike; resultingly, four of its leaders were put to death and the party disbanded, though remaining members, Rosa among them, met in secret.

In 1887, she passed her Abitur examinations. After fleeing to Switzerland to escape detention, in 1889, she attended Zurich University (as did the socialists Anatoli Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches), studying philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics. She specialized in Staatswissenschaft (the science of forms of state), the Middle Ages, and economic and stock exchange crises.

In 1890, Chancellor Bismarck's laws against social democracy were annulled and the SPD was legally able to gain seats in the Reichstag.

In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski (alias Julius Karski), she founded the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza ("The Workers' Cause"), to oppose the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party, believing that only through revolution could an independent Poland exist, especially revolution in Germany, Austria, and Russia. She maintained that the struggle should be against capitalism, itself, and not just for an independent Poland. Her position denying a national right of self-determination under socialism provoked philosophic tension with Vladimir Lenin.

She and Leo Jogiches co-founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) (later the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania [SDKPiL]) by merging with Lithuania's social democratic organization. Despite living in Germany for most of her adult life, Luxemburg was the principal theoretician of the Polish Social Democrats, and led the party in a partnership with Jogiches, its principal organizer.

Germany

In 1898, Rosa Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck, obtained German citizenship, and moved to Berlin. There, she was active in the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), wherein she sharply defined the border between her faction and the Revisionism Theory of Eduard Bernstein by attacking him in the brochure titled "Social Reform or Revolution?" (1899).

Luxemburg's rhetorical skill made her a leading spokes-woman denouncing the SPD's conformist parliamentary course in face of the obviously coming war. She noted that the critical difference between capital and labour could only be countered if the proletariat assumed power and effected revolutionary changes in production methods. She wanted the Revisionists ousted from the SPD. That did not occur, but Karl Kautsky's leadership retained Marxism on its programme; though his aim was more Reichstag seats.

From 1900, she published analyses of contemporary European socio-economic problems in newspapers. Foreseeing war, she vigorously attacked German militarism and imperialism in persuading the SPD to opposing it. She wanted a general strike to rouse the workers to solidarity and prevent the coming war; the SPD leaders refused, and she broke with Kautsky in 1910.

Between 1904 and 1906 she was thrice imprisoned for her political activities. In 1907, she went to the Russian Social Democrats' Fifth Party Day in London, where she met Lenin. At the Second International (Socialist) Congress, in Stuttgart, her resolution, which was accepted, that all European workers' parties should unite in attempting to stop the war.

She then taught Marxism and Economics at the SPD's Berlin training centre. A student of hers, Friedrich Ebert became SPD leader, and later the Weimar Republic's first president. In 1912 she was the SPD representative at the European Socialists congresses. With French socialist Jean Jaurès, she ensured that European workers' parties would effect a general strike when war broke.

In 1914, when nationalist crises in the Balkans erupted to violence and then war, she organised anti-war demonstrations in Frankfurt) calling for conscientious objection to military conscription and the refusal to obey orders. On that account, she was imprisoned for a year for "enciting to disobedience against the authorities' law and order"; not immediately jailed, she participated in a July Socialist Office meeting. There, she disappointedly recognised that nationalism was more important than class consciousness to workers' parties.

On July 28, World War I began with Austria-Hungary declaring war against Serbia. On August 3 1914, the German Empire declared war with Russia. The next day, the Reichstag unanimously agreed to financing the war with war bonds. The SPD voted in favour of that and agreed to a truce ("Burgfrieden") with the Imperial government, promising to refrain from any strikes during the war. This political catastrophe led Rosa Luxemburg to contemplate suicide: The Revisionism she had fought since 1899 had triumphed in to war.



On the 5 August 1914, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, and she founded the Internationale group; it became the Spartacist League on January 1, 1916. They wrote illegal, anti-war pamphlets pseudonymously signed "Spartacus" (after the slave-liberating Thracian gladiator who opposed the Romans); Luxemburg's pseudonym was "Junius" (after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic).

The Spartacist League vehemently rejected the SPD's truce with Kaiser Wilhelm II's Imperial government endorsing World War I, trying to lead Germany's proletariat back to an anti-war general strike. Resultingly, on 28 June, 1916, Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned for two and a half years, almost as simultaneously as was Karl Liebknecht. During imprisonment, she was twice relocated, first to Poznań (Posen), then to Wrocław (Breslau). There, she wrote as "Junius"; friends smuggled out and illegally published the articles. Among them was "The Russian Revolution", criticising the Bolsheviks, presciently warning of their dictatorship. Nonetheless, she continued calling for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", albeit not the one-party Bolshevik model. In that context, she wrote "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" ("Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently"). Another article, published in June 1916, was "Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie" ("The Crisis of Social Democracy").

In 1917, when the U.S.A. entered the war, the Spartacist League was affiliated with the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) (anti-war, ex-SPD members, founded by Karl Kautsky). On 9 November, 1918, the USPD and the SPD assumed power in the new republic upon the Kaiser's abdication. This followed the German revolution begun in Kiel on 4 November 1918, when 40,000 sailors and marines seized the port, protesting the German Naval Command's proposed battle with the British Royal Navy, despite Germany's already having lost the war. By 8 November, Workers' and Soldiers' councils had seized most of western Germany, to found the Räterepublik ("Council Republic"), per the system of Soviets of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Luxemburg was freed from prison in Wrocław on 8 November, (Liebknecht had also been freed) and reorganised the Spartacus League. Together they wrote the Red Flag newspaper, demanding amnesty for all political prisoners and abolition of capital punishment.

Yet, in late December 1918, the united front disintegrated when the USPD abandoned it, protesting perceived SPD compromises with the capitalist status quo. On 1 January, 1919, the Spartacist League, the Socialists, and the International Communists of Germany (IKD) founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. She supported the KPD's participation in the national constitutional assembly that founded the Weimar Republic; but she was out-voted. In January, a second revolution swept Germany. The Red Flag encouraged the rebels to occupy the editorial offices of the liberal press.

In response, Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert ordered the nationalist, right-wing Freikorps to destroy the left-wing revolution. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and assassinated in Berlin on January 15, 1919; she was rifle-butt-stroked, then shot in the head, and her cadaver flung to a river; he, too, was so killed, then deposited to a mortuary as an anonymous cadaver. Likewise, hundreds of KPD members were summarily killed, and the Workers' and Soldiers' councils disbanded; the German proletarian revolution was ended. Four months later, in May, Rosa Luxemburg's cadaver washed up on the river side; a Freikorps soldier was imprisoned for two years for her summary execution death.

Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation

The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation was the central feature of Rosa Luxemburg's political philosophy, wherein "spontaneity" is a grass roots, even anarchistic approach to organising a party-oriented class struggle. Per the Dialectic, spontaneity and organisation are not separable or separate activities, but different moments of one political process; one does exist without the other. These insights arise from the elementary, spontaneous class struggle via which class struggle evolves to a higher level:

"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone." (In a Revolutionary Hour: What Next?, Collected Works 1.2, p.554)

Organisation mediates spontaneity; organisation must mediate spontaneity. It would be wrong to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of holding "spontaneism" as an abstraction. She developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation under the influence of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unlike the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International, she did not regard organisation as product of scientific-theoretic insight to historical imperatives, but as product of the working classes' struggles:

"Social democracy is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat's class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. And as the entire social democracy movement is only the conscious advance guard of the proletarian class movement, which in the words of the Communist Manifesto represent in every single moment of the struggle the permanent interests of liberation and the partial group interests of the workforce vis à vis the interests of the movement as whole, so within the social democracy its leaders are the more powerful, the more influential, the more clearly and consciously they make themselves merely the mouthpiece of the will and striving of the enlightened masses, merely the agents of the objective laws of the class movement." (The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, p.280)

and

"The modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation." (The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions, Collected Works 2, p.465)

Criticism of the October Revolution

Part of the Politics series on Left Communism

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In an article published just before the October Revolution, Luxemburg characterized the Russian February Revolution of 1917 as a revolution of the proletariat, and said that the liberal bourgeoisie were pushed to movement by the display of proletarian power. The task of the Russian proletariat was now to end the imperialist world war, in addition to struggling against the imperialist bourgeoisie. The imperialist world war made Russia ripe for a socialist revolution. Therefore "the German proletariat are also ... posed a question of honour, and a very fateful question." (ibid., p. 245)

In an essay written from jail and published posthumously by her last companion, Paul Levi (publication of which precipitated his expulsion from the Third International) entitled "The Russian Revolution,"[1] Luxemburg sharply criticized the Bolsheviks' absolutist political practice and opportunist policies--i.e., their suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, their support for the partition of the old feudal estates to the peasant communes, their policy of supported the purported right of all national peoples to "self-determination." Her criticisms of the Bolsheviks' simultaneously despotic and opportunist practice, vis. the peasantry (and the workers as well), stem in large part from Luxemburg's fidelity to Marx's original concept of the permanent revolution. Marx outlines this strategy in his March 1850 "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League." As opposed to the Bolsheviks own neo-Blanquist concept of permanent revolution, Marx argued that the role of the working class revolutionary party was not to create a one-party state, nor to give away land--even in semi-feudal countries like Germany in 1850--or Russia in 1917--where the working class was in the minority. Rather, Marx argued that the role of the working class was, within structures of radical democracy, to organize, arm and defend themselves in workers councils and militias, to campaign for their own socialist political program, to expand workers rights, and to seize and farm intensively and collectively the old feudal estates, so as to feed the cities. According to Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks' failure to carry out this strategy created tremendous dangers for the Revolution:

1. its bureaucratization
2. starvation in the cities
3. weakening of the Revolution's military defenses, as the peasant soldiers rushed home to get in on the land grab, which also contributed to
4. the disastrous Brest Litovsk treaty with the German empire. For as a result of the loss of morale and desertions in the Russian army, the German Empire was able to seize the Ukraine, the breadbasket of Russia, for itself--and justify this an act of "national self-determination," preached by the Bolsheviks themselves!

Her sharp criticism of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks was lessened insofar as she explained the errors of the revolution and of the Bolsheviks with the "complete failure of the international proletariat" (On the Russian Revolution, GW 4, p. 334).

"In this erupting of the social divide in the very lap of bourgeois society, in this international deepening and heightening of class antagonism lies the historical merit of Bolshevism, and with this feat — as always in large historic connections — the particular mistakes and errors of the Bolsheviks disappear without trace. (Fragment on War, National Questions, and Revolution, Collected Works 4, p. 366)

After the October Revolution, it becomes the "historic responsibility" of the German workers to carry out a revolution for themselves, and thereby end the war (The Historic Responsibility, GW 4, p. 374). When a revolution also broke out in Germany in November, of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg immediately began agitating for a social revolution:

"The abolition of the rule of capital, the realization of a socialist social order — this, and nothing less, is the historical theme of the present revolution. It is a formidable undertaking, and one that will not be accomplished in the blink of an eye just by the issuing of a few decrees from above. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port." (The Beginning, Collected Works 4, p. 397)

The social revolution demands that power is in the hands of the masses, in the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils. This is the program of the revolution. It is, however, a long way from soldier — from the "Guards of the Reaction" (Gendarmen der Reaktion) — to revolutionary proletarian.

Role of the party

The party, the advance guard of the working class, has only to give the masses of workers the insight that socialism is the means to free themselves from exploitation, and put forth the socialist revolution. The internal contradictions of capitalism, the antagonism between capital and labor, will keep the revolution occupied. The revolution will, however, educate the masses, and will make revolutionaries out of them:

"History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat. They will ensure that the "small horde" of the most slandered and persecuted becomes, step by step, that which their world view destines them: the struggling and victorious mass of the revolutionary, socialist proletariat." (The National Conference of the Spartacist League, Collected Works 4, p. 478)

The task of the party is only to educate the backwards masses towards independence, to enable them to take over power themselves. It is the teaching of the subjective element of the revolution, that is the consciousness of the working class of their historic mission, which the party can achieve. The revolution itself can only be brought about through the working class. A Party that speaks for the workers, 'represents' them — for example in parliaments — and acts instead of them, will get bogged down and itself become an instrument of the counterrevolution.

Last words: belief in the revolution

Rosa Luxemburg's last known words, written on the evening of her murder, were about her belief in the masses, and in the inevitability of revolution:

"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I shall be!"
(Order reigns in Berlin, Collected Works 4, p. 536) [2]

Quotations

• Rosa Luxemburg's most famous quotation is: Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters (Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden), usually cited as Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently; this is from a fuller quotation:

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of "justice", but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If "freedom" becomes "privilege", the workings of political freedom are broken.

• "Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength".
• "Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element".
• "For us there is no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realize today".

Memorials

In Berlin's historic Mitte (city centre), the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and the eponymous U2 line U-Bahn were so named in her honour by the Communist East German government. The Volksbühne (People's Theatre) is in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The names remain unchanged since reunification in 1989.

In 1919, Bertolt Brecht wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honouring Rosa Luxemburg, and, in 1928, Kurt Weill set it to music as The Berlin Requiem:

''Red Rosa now has vanished too. (...)

''She told the poor what life is about,

''And so the rich have rubbed her out.

''May she rest in peace.

Of Rosa Luxemburg, Trotskyist writer-historian Isaac Deutscher wrote: "In her assassination Hohenzollern Germany celebrated its last triumph and Nazi Germany its first".

See also

• Luxemburgism

Works

• The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. A. Schwarzschild in 1951. Routledge Classics edition, 2003. Originally published as Die Akkumulation des Kapitals'' in 1913.
• The Accumulation of Capital: an Anticritique written in 1915.
• Gesammelte Werke ("Collected Works"), 5 volumes, Berlin 1970–1975.
• Gesammelte Briefe ("Collected Letters"), 6 volumes, Berlin 1982–1997.
• Politische Schriften ("Political Writings"), edited and preface by Ossip K. Flechtheim, 3 volumes, Frankfurt am Main 1966 ff.

Further reading

• Stephen Eric Bronner: Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times, 1984
• Elzbieta Ettinger: Rosa Luxemburg: A Life, 1988
• Paul Frölich: Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work, 1939
• Norman Geras The legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 1976
• Klaus Gietinger: Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal – Die Ermordung der Rosa L. (A Corpse in the Landwehrkanal - The Murder of Rosa L.), Verlag 1900 Berlin – ISBN 3-930278-02-2
• Peter Hudis (Editor), Kevin B. Anderson: The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004
• J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 1966 - long considered the definitive biography of Luxemburg
• Donald E. Shepardson: Rosa Luxemburg and the Noble Dream, New York 1996
• Raya Duayevskaya: "Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution," New Jersey, 1982

Film

Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg (1986), in German & Polish, Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. IMDB link

The film, which stars Barbara Sukowa as Luxemburg was the winner of the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

External links

English language

• Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive at Marxists.org, a free library of her most important works.
• Biography (Study on Rosa Luxemburg ) by Tony Cliff, 1959, also at Marxists.org.
• Libertarian Communist Library Rosa Luxemburg articles
• Website of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
• Rosa Luxemburg Leninism or Marxism?
• Rosa Luxemburg at Findagrave.com
• Trotsky on Luxemburg and Liebknecht

German language

• Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive on Marxists.org, also available in English, see above.
• Rosa Luxemburg
• Short biography.
• Zur Russischen Revolution (On the Russian Revolution), 1922.
• Das Leben von Rosa Luxemburg (The life of Rosa Luxemburg).

Persondata
NAME	Luxemburg, Rosa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Róża Luksemburg
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH	March 5, 1870/71
PLACE OF BIRTH	Zamość near Lublin in Russian-controlled Congress Poland
DATE OF DEATH	January 15, 1919
PLACE OF DEATH	Berlin