Rosa Luxemburg 1871-1919
Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in the Tsarist Russian-occupied part of Poland. As a teenager she became politically active in Polish left-wing groups. In 1889 she was threatened with arrest and fled via Germany to Switzerland. At the University of Zurich, one of the few universities accessible to women, Luxemburg met several other political exiles, including members of the Russian Social Democratic Party Gregory Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod. In 1893, at the age of 22, Luxemburg co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) party, which later renamed itself the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). It later merged into the Communist Workers Party of Poland. Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany after a marriage of convenience in 1897 enabled her to gain German citizenship, and she became active in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)
After being legalised in 1890 the SPD was considered the most advanced socialist party in the world claiming hundreds of thousands of members and a wide readership of its publications within the working class. However the party became dominated by the politics of opportunism or reformism, Eduard Bernstein was the most prominent spokesperson of this trend, he argued that socialism could be achieved through incremental reforms of the capitalist system – evolution not revolution. According to Bernstein socialist revolution was no longer necessary the working class he argued could achieve these reforms mainly through electoral means. In response, in 1899, Luxemburg wrote ‘Social Reform or Revolution’ arguing that socialism can only be achieved by the overthrow of the capitalist state.
In 1905-1906 Luxemburg joined the revolution in Russian-occupied Poland, where she was arrested. Then In 1907, at the International Socialist Congress she fought against chauvinist resolutions on the looming imperialist war which called for the working class to ‘defend its national sovereignty in the event of invasion’ essentially siding with their own national ruling class. In opposition to – and to the chagrin of – her former SPD comrades, Luxemburg, together with Lenin and Martov, demanded the necessity of taking advantage of the crisis created by war for the purpose of hastening the downfall of the ruling class, turning against the warmongers at home, instead of fighting the working class of other nations. In 1914, World War I broke out. Despite signing up to militant anti-war proclamations at successive Second International conferences the SPD, like most of the parties of the Second International, supported their own imperialist government in the war. In 1915 while in prison Luxemburg wrote the famous ‘Junius pamphlet’ against the brutality of the war and the role of the social democratic parties in supporting their own ruling classes in the imperialist war.
This historic betrayal led to a split in the Second International. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg joined with Karl Liebknecht and other members of the SPD’s left wing to form the Spartacus League. Like the Bolsheviks, the Spartacus League argued that the enemy was not abroad but was the ruling class at home, agitating for the working class to refuse to participate in the imperialist war and instead turn its weapons on its own ruling class. To this end, on international workers day, 1 May 1916, the Spartacus League organised a mass demonstration against the war. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and other leaders were arrested and held in prison for over two years. When they were released in 1918 the political situation seemed promising, soldiers were mutinying against the war and workers’ and soldiers’ councils were being set up across Germany inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. On 1 January 1919 Luxemburg and Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party (KPD) and began publishing the Red Flag newspaper. In January the KPD/Sparticists launched an uprising in Berlin to attempt to oust the new SPD-led capitalist government. The SPD unleashed the right-wing Freikorps on the uprising and government troops murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Luxemburg’s body was dumped in the Berlin canal.
But the memory of Rosa Luxemburg refuses to be buried. Every year on 15 January, the anniversary of her death, communists and socialists march to the Luxemburg and Liebknecht memorial in Berlin with red carnations in their honour.
