Who was Rosa Luxemburg?
Rosa Luxemburg came from Zamość in Russian-ruled Poland, where her family was Jewish. After studying at Zürich she moved to Germany in 1898 and soon stood out as an intellectual of the left in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), as well as in Polish social democracy. Among her best-known books are Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike and The Accumulation of Capital. When war came in 1914 she opposed it, and she spent a large part of the war in jail. She led the Spartacus League with others and helped found the German Communist Party. In January 1919 Freikorps soldiers murdered her in Berlin.
Political views
- Replied to Eduard Bernstein that reforms on their own could not bring about a socialist transformation.Source: marxists.org
- Believed that spontaneous mass strikes were the best way for workers to build political power.Source: marxists.org
- Opposed the 1914 war, and the SPD's decision to vote for war credits, and urged workers in all countries to act together.Source: marxists.org
- Attacked Lenin's plan for a strictly centralised party led by full-time revolutionaries.Source: marxists.org
- Welcomed the Russian Revolution, but blamed the Bolsheviks for closing down elections, the press and free assembly.Source: marxists.org
- Saw nationalism, even the Polish kind, as a diversion from the class struggle across borders.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Democratic socialists, council communists and some of the New Left admire Luxemburg for insisting that Marxism needs political freedom. Her sentence about the freedom of those who think differently is widely quoted. East Germany honoured her officially, but its dissidents used that same sentence in protests in 1988. Lenin called her a true revolutionary while rejecting her views on the party and on self-determination of nations. Liberal and conservative critics stress that she wanted capitalism overthrown. Polish nationalists disliked her stand against an independent Poland. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, close to Die Linke, carries her name, and economists and historians still discuss her writing on imperialism.
In their own words
“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”