Rosa Luxemburg Marxist theorist, philosopher and economist and revolutionary socialist activist was born on March 5, 1871 in the part of Poland under the occupation of imperial Russia. Her parents were Jews. She was thus born with two “disabilities”: a national minority and a Jew. She would acquire more “disabilities” as she advanced in her revolutionary career.
A disease in early life kept her in bed for a whole year. It was wrongly treated as tuberculosis of the bone and caused irreparable damage leaving her with a hip deformity that left her with a limp for the rest of her life..
Rosa was a very intelligent child and could read and write by the age of five. At school she was always top of the class.She
had her primary and secondary education in her “homeland” and became an
activist Marxist as a teenager.From a very early age, Rosa had a deep revulsion for humans' inhumanity to other humans. For her, this went along with a deep love for humanity itself, fascinated by natural science and art as well as politics.
When the revolutionary group she joined was
crushed, she was smuggled to Zurich in Switzerland. She attended the University
of Zurich from 1889 to 1897 and came out with a doctorate degree in Political
Economy. Her doctoral dissertation was titled The Industrial Development of
Poland. From Zurich Rosa Luxemburg came to Germany where her reputation as a
brilliant Marxist had preceded her. It did not take long for her credentials to
be confirmed. She was not introduced. Rather, she introduced herself—in a
particularly audacious manner.
By the time Rosa Luxemburg arrived in Germany, the German
Social Democratic Party (SDP) had been established not only as the largest
socialist party in Europe and in the Second International of Socialists but
also as the party with the largest concentration of frontline Marxist
theoreticians anywhere.
In 1898, after marrying Gustav Lübeck to obtain German citizenship, she settled in Berlin where she joined the SDP a committed revolutionary, Luxemburg campaigned with Karl Kautsky against the revisionist Eduard Bernstein,
who argued that the best way to obtain socialism in an industrialized
country was through trade union activity and parliamentary politics.
In 1903 Luxemburg,Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchiewski formed the Social Democratic Party of Poland, As it was an illegal organization, she went to Paris to edit the party's newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza (Workers' Cause). The arrival of Felix Dzerzhinksy
helped the movement to grow and together they formed the Social
Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. While in Paris
she became friends with Jen Jaures and Edouard Marie Vaillant, Marxist leaders of the French working-class movement.
At the Social Democratic Party Congress
in September 1905, Luxemburg called for party members to be inspired by
the attempted revolution in Russia. "Previous revolutions, especially
the one in 1848, have shown that in revolutionary situations it is not
the masses who have to be held in check, but the parliamentarians and
lawyers, so that they do not betray the masses and the revolution." She
then went onto quote from The Communist Manifesto :
"The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they had a world to win."
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 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."
She followed no leader, was no ones puppet and 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 steel
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.".
" workers blood should not be shed in defence of the capitalist system"'
Rosa Luxemburg was prophetic in her warnings against the
evils of imperialism, nationalism, and militarism.She warned that there would always be new wars as long as imperialism and capitalism continue to exist:
“World peace cannot be secured by such utopian or
basically reactionary plans as international courts of arbitration
composed of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic agreements concerning
‘disarmament’ … ‘European federations’, ‘middle-European customs
unions’, ‘national buffer states’ and the like. Imperialism, militarism
and wars will not be abolished or damned as long as the rule of the
capitalist classes continues uncontested.”
She warned against nationalism as a mortal enemy of workers and the socialist movement and as a breeding ground for militarism and war.
“The immediate task of socialism”,
she wrote in 1916, “
shall be the intellectual liberation of the proletariat from the domination of the bourgeoisie as manifest in the influence of nationalistic ideology.”
Her warnings were prophetic, insofar as some of the worst crimes of the
twentieth century—from the First to the Second World War and beyond—were
committed in the name of nationalism, national hegemony, “national
defence”, “national vital space”, and the like.
As a leader of the radical wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), since 1899,she had became an important figure in the world socialist movement, and became involved in the international organisation of workers, however she broke with the SPD however after it supported the imperialist drive towards war. She campaigned adamantly against the war , attempting to whip up general strikes and circulating anti-war propoganda She did so alongside comrades who, in every country, had a clear understanding of who benefitted from the slaughter of millions of young people on the battlefields.
Because of her relentless socialist agitation during the terrible First World War , she was imprisoned for it's duration, but after Germany's defeat she was released, and with her friend Karl Liebnecht,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/08/karl-liebknecht-german-revolutionary.html formed the Spartacus 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.
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. After the revolution failed subsequently on January 15, she and some of her her comrades were arrested, including Karl Liebnecht, Rosa was shot and dumped in the Landweher canal, Berlin.by right wing troops opposed to the revolutionary movement that swept through Germany in the wake of the First World War.
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 decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built... 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!"
The murder of Rosa and Kark re-ignited the communist revolution, four months of bloody upheaval followed. Rosa's body was later found and buried, together with Lienbnecht, in Friedricsfelde Central Cemetery.
Today 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, Long may Red Rosa be remembered as a strong defender of internationalist revolutionary socialism.
She had determination by the buckets and a steely willful commitment. A combatant who strove for peace. who did not hesitate in her beliefs, to speak and proclaim with her own independent reason her own opinion. For that alone I respect her. Her indelible mark has been left on the world, who combined ideals with action , her struggle had always been to make all humans lives better, which she worked towards with every fibre of her being. Her passionate life still stands as a beacon to those who have chosen to take up the many battles she waged. 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.
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