Rosa Luxemburg at 150 : A Revolutionary Legacy

 

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of  Rosa Luxemburg,Marxist theorist, agitator, internationalist, philosopher, economist.Rosa was one of the most famous political figures of the last century. For the international workers’ movement, she is renowned as a dedicated socialist whose sacrifice and theoretical contributions to Marxism make her one of history‘s foremost revolutionaries. The close proximity of her birth date to International Women’s Day (8 March)https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-socialist-roots-of-international.html means that this year, more than ever, Rosa Luxemburg’s courageous life and revolutionary ideas will be of  continual interest to many.

Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871, in the city of Zamosc, Poland, then under control of czarist Russia. Her father, Eliasz Luxemburg, was a prosperous timber trader, who had inherited his business from his father, Abraham. of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. Rosa’s mother was Lina Loewenstein, the daughter of a traditional rabbi and sister of a Reform rabbi. Rosa, who grew up speaking German, Polish and Yiddish, was the youngest of the couple’s five children. As a young child, she suffered from a hip ailment, which left her permanently afflicted with a limp.

During Poland’s 1863 uprising against Russian rule, Eliasz supplied the independence movement with weapons, so that for several years after the revolt’s failure, he had to remain in hiding from czarist authorities. In 1873, the family moved with him to Warsaw, where Rosa attended the gymnasium. 

Even during high school, Rosa was drawn to politics, becoming active in the Proletariat party, a forerunner to the Polish Socialist party. After several of her comrades in the party were arrested and executed, she decided to pursue her higher education in Switzerland. Luxemburg began at the University of Zurich as a student of zoology but ended up focusing on economics, philosophy and law. Throughout her political career, Luxemburg consistently opposed Polish nationalism, believing that socialist action had to take place on the international level, and that a separate revolution in Poland would be self-defeating.

Similarly, she was opposed to Jewish nationalism or separatism. Though she was sensitive to the problem of anti-Semitism, she was sure it would disappear with the overthrow of capitalism. since 1899,she became an important figure in the world socialist movement, and became involved in the international organisation of workers overcoming physical infirmity and the prejudice she faced as a Jew to become an active revolutionary whose  philosophy enriched every corner of an incredibly productive and creative life.

After finishing her studies in 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany, gaining citizenship via a marriage of convenience and  became a member of the Social Democrat Party of Germany (SPD),which, unlike the German SPD of today, was developing into a mass party of the working class. At that time, the social democrats had a clear anti-capitalist orientation, invoking Marxist doctrine, she became lleader of the radical wing of the Party , however  she broke with the SPD  after it supported the imperialist drive towards war, she believed in the build up to the First World War that 

' workers blood should not be shed in defence of the capitalist system'.

The 1905 Russian revolution had a profound effect on discussions within the international labour movement, at the time. Although it was crushed, this event strengthened the revolutionary wing. There were extensive discussions about the lessons from 1905, for example, the role of the mass strike.

In the period running up to the 1905 revolution, massive strikes had already shaken the Russian Empire: individual strikes quickly spread like wildfire.Unlike many SPD leaders, Luxemburg enthusiastically supported a new form of workers’ struggle – the mass strike. When revolution broke out in Russia in 1905, she seized the opportunity to study this phenomenon at first hand, hailing it in her book The Mass Strike as : 

“the natural method to mobilise the broadest proletarian layers into action, to revolutionise and organise them” and simultaneously a means “to undermine and overthrow the established State power as well as to curb capitalist exploitation”.She argued that " The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become. The chief form of bourgeois revolutions, the fight at the barricades, the open conflict with the armed poor of the state, is in the revolution today only the culminating point, only a moment on the process of the proletarian mass struggle."

Returning to the false separation between economic and political struggle, she pointed out that in a revolutionary period the economic struggle grows into a political one, and vice versa. There is a reciprocal influence between the two, as each enriches and deepens the other. The Mass Strike shows in detail how this occurs; it also demonstrates how completely justified she was to have faith in the ability of the working class to grow and learn and lead the struggle for a better world. Rosa Luxemburg recognised that the political action of a mass strike is one of the most important tools of the working class in its struggle for liberation.

The right-wing of the SPD and the trade union leaders, of the time, rejected this position, arguing that mass strikes are only possible when the entire working class is organised and trade union coffers are filled to the brim.

Though Luxemburg was militant about the idea of proletarian revolution, she was also strongly anti-militarist. She believed in democracy and was an outspoken opponent of the Bolsheviks’ belief that a small cadre of bureaucrats should made political decisions on behalf of the proletariat: Revolution had to be political as well as economic, she felt.

Because of  her socialist agitation during this terrible war , she spent the majority of the years from the outbreak of World War One in 1914 to the revolution of November 1918 behind bars, imprisoned for being one of the very few people in Germany with the courage to speak out against the slaughter unfolding in the trenches. In the Junius Pamphlet, written from her freezing prison cell in early 1915, she painted a vivid picture of the choice she believed humanity faced in those years:

 “Either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration—a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war”.

She scolds those who sit quietly as injustice is done: 

" Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus, it reveals itself in its true, its naked form."

After Germany's defeat she was released, and with her friend Karl Liebnecht,  formed the anti war Spartacist league, and  she assumed the leadership of the radical independent socialists. Her will and her desire was to see an end to all exploitation and oppression.

Her faith was a socialist idea  that  combined the powerful passion of both mind and heart. She devoted herself to the cause of revolution,and its preparation. She lived and breathed its fire, with selflessness and devotion, in every waking moment she dedicated herself to its cause.  Standing bravely up for freedom with a  strong powerful intellect. An individualist, she formulated her own ideas, using her own words to energise and radicalise the people and bring about a socialist revolution. 

She followed no leader, was no ones puppet and while Rosa was enthusiastic about the Russian revolution, she nevertheless criticized Lenin, her lifelong comrade, for his concession of democracy and centralist tactics such as the dissolution of the Provisional Government and Constituent Assembly. Luxemburg defended democracy as an integral part of  the process of revolution as well as its goal. When  she criticised Lenin,  it was in relation to dictatorial aspects. She said " Terror has not crushed us. How can you put your trust in terror."

 She quoted Leon Trotsky saying

 "As Marxists we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy." She went on "All that really means is: We have always distinquished the social kernal of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom - not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy - not to eliminate democracy altogether....... but socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land, after the foundations of socialist economy are created, it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the Socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses, it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the political training of the mass of the people."

Possibly her  believe in democracy is what failed her philosophically, nevertheless the questions she posed still worth looking at today. She also wrote " the revolution is the sole form of war, and this is also its most vital law - in which the final victory can be prepared only by a sense of defeat.".
She had determination by the buckets and a steely willful commitment.She herself took part  in  revolutionary events , recognising the need of a revolutionary party, which could unite and give a lead in a revolutionary situation, seeing  socialism as a movement of the proletarian masses that should emphasise unity and equality rather than highlight the oppression of any particular group, with an undogmatic commitment to an unfinished notion of freedom that still appeals to many people today.
In November 1918 after four years of war, German society crumbled both at the front at home, and a revolutionary fervour swept the land, the working class took to the streets in a series of strikes and the navy mutinied., though critical with some demands of the revolutionary movement, Rosa threw in her lot with her comrades, believing that she could not simply wait on the sidelines. Subsequently on the night of January 15, 1919 she  and  Liebnecht were abducted, tortured in the luxury Hotel Eden, and then driven seperately to the nearby Tiergarten Park and murdered, Liebknecht was delivered to the  city morgue while Luxemburg’s skull was smashed by a rifle butt and her body dumped into Berlin’s Landwehr canal. They were both 47.
Her body was only recovered five months later after the winter ice had thawed. She was buried next to Liebknecht in the Friedrichstelde Cemetery.
Famously on the evening of her murder almost certainly knowing that her fate was sealed she wrote.

'"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 decicive element, they are the rock on which the final victors of the revolution will be built. Order reigns in Berlin! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already raise  itself with a rattle and announce with fanfare, to tour terror; I was, I am, I shall be!"

 The murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were a major blow to the immediate hopes of the German (and by extension, the world’s) working class. But Luxemburg’s legacy as a revolutionary activist and theorist couldn’t be extinguished so easily. Her ideas, whether on the question of reform versus revolution, the significance of the mass strike or the civilisation-threatening barbarism of imperialist war, are as relevant today as ever.

Today 150 years after her birth she has left an indelible mark on history,  her ideas can be pressed into many meanings. There is a feminist Rosa, an anarchist Rosa, then there is a red Rosa, but she remains an icon in the truest sense of the word.  “She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution.” So wrote Clara Zetkin in her obituary for her close friend and comrade, Rosa Luxemburg. The words are a fitting tribute to a woman who was an outstanding leader of the socialist movement who never shied away from speaking her mind..

She has become part of Germany's cultural memory, immortalised in art, poetry, an award winning biopic, a musical and a graphic novel. And in her own words too, as well as being a brilliant Marxist theorist. Luxemburg was a prolific writer of letters, and her emotive lyrical writing has seen her emerge as a literary figure in her own right. Here's to Red Rosa, lets hope her spirit is not forgotten. Peace, bread, roses, Her revolutionary socialist politics endure because the struggle against barbarism remain as relevant as ever.

Here is poem written by Bertolt Brecht in 1920 about Rosa.

About the drowned girl - Bertolt Brecht

As she drowned, she swam downwards and was borne,
From the smaller streams to the larger rivers,
In wonder the opal of the heavens shone,
As  if wishing to placate the body that was hers.

Catching hold of her were the seaweed , the algae,
Slowly she became heavy as downwards she went,
Cool fish swam around her legs, freely,
Animals and plants weight to her body lent.

Dark light smoke in the evenings the heavens grew,
But early in the morning the stars dangled, there was light,
So that for her, there remained too,
Morning and evening, day and night.

Her cold body rotted in the waters there,
Slowly, step by step, god too forgot,
First her face, then her hands, and finally her hair
She became carrion of which the rivers have a lot.

 

Luxemburg and Liebknecht are commemorated  every year on the second Sunday of January when red flowers are scattered on their graves.

Red Rosa now has vanished too.
Where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life is about
And so the rich have rubbed her out

- Bertolt Brecht, "Epitaph, 1919"

She was also much admired by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893 -1978), a musicologist, composer, poet and novelist, who gained little recognition for her poetry during her own lifetime, who once joked, ' I intend to be a posthumous poet!
Like Rosa Luxemburg, she was appalled by the militarism of the First World War. Here is her tribute to Rosa Luxemburg , first published in her 1925 collection The Espalier.

I Bring Her a Flower

Sweet faith
Such looks of quiet hath
That those on whom she’s smiled
Lie down to sleep as easy as a child.

No night,
However dark, can fright
Them, no, nor day
To come, however bleak and fell, dismay.

But sound
Sleep they in prison-bound
As when at liberty
And if they wake, they wake in charity;

Like her,
Who rousing at the jar
Of weary foot in the rain
Pitied the wakeful sentry for his pain.

(1925)

 

 Further Reading

Rosa Luxemburg: A reapraisal - Lelio Besco
Andre Deutsch, 1975.

Rosa Luxemburg: A life
- Elizvieta Ettinga , Beacon Press 1987.

The letters of Rosa Luxemburg, Verso

The essential Rosa Luxemburg :Reform or Revolution and the Mass Strike

Red Rosa;a Graphic  biography of Rosa Luxemburg - Kate Evans. Verso


"either capitalism will continue, with fresh wars and a rapid plunge intp chaos and anarchy, or else capitalist exploitation will be abolished." Rosa Luxemburg 14/12/18 Rote Fahne

"Revolutionary idealism .... can be maintained over any period of time only through the intensely active life of the masses themselves under conditions of unlimited freedom." Rosa Luxemburg

" Being human means throwing  your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be."Rosa Luxemburg