Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)

Famous woman revolutionist and theorist of the German and the international workers’ movement; important leader of the left-wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in March 1871, in Zamość, near the Russian-Polish border, into a middle-class Jewish family. In her early years, she participated in revolutionary activities when she was student at the Warsaw High School. In 1888, she joined the Polish Social Revolutionary Party “Proletariat”. In 1889, she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. In 1890, she enrolled at the University of Zurich where she first studied biology and them political economy, and studied a large number of works of Marx and Engels, thus forming a Marxist world outlook. In 1898, she moved to Germany, where she took part in the activities of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International. At the party congresses in Stuttgart in 1898 and Hanover in 1899, Luxemburg fought resolutely against Bernstein’s revisionism. In 1900, she attended the Paris Congress of the Second International, where she advocated sanctioning Millerand’s treason. In January 1904, she was sentenced to imprisonment for three months for delivering a speech against militarism. In 1905, after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, she went back to Poland to lead the workers’ struggle, and was hailed by Lenin as an “eagle of the revolution”. In 1907, at the Stuttgart Congress of Second International, together with Lenin, she revised the draft proposed by Bebel, and made it become an important document of the international proletariat’s anti-imperialist war. After 1907, she served as a lecturer of political economy in the Central Party School of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and devoted herself to theoretical activities. After the outbreak of World War I, Rosa Luxemburg actively campaigned against imperialist war and social chauvinism. In December 1918, she participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In January 1919, she was arrested for the defeat of the Berlin Workers’ Uprising and murdered by the reactionaries on the 15th of that month.

Rosa Luxemburg was a prolific writer throughout her life, and Sozialreform oder Revolution? (Social Reform or Revolution?) is Rosa Luxemburg’s best response and counterattack to reformism as a Marxist. She advocated staunchly that with the continuous development of capitalism, its fundamental contradictions and crises could not be moderated. It was true that the workers’ movement would have to struggle for achieving amelioration through trade union and parliamentary activities, but since such amelioration would not be sufficient to abolish the capitalist relations of production as a whole, the working class would have to do so only through the conquest of political power by means of violent revolution. The book Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy made Luxemburg intervene in the debate between Lenin and the Mensheviks, and she criticized Lenin’s concept of “democratic centralism”. Luxemburg had no objection to centralism in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. She held that under the despotic terrorist rule of Tsarist Russia, a militant workers’ party would have no fighting power if it did not have discipline and centralism, but that the problem was how to implement centralism within the party. She held that the “democratic centralism” advocated by Lenin would eventually slip to extreme centralism, thus undermining liberty and democracy. In the book The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, she made an elucidation of the reasons for the transition from capitalism to imperialism, holding that a closed capitalist economy out of touch with non-capitalist society would inevitably collapse because of its inability to absorb all the surplus-value produced. Imperialism was the result of competition and struggle among various capitalist countries to gain access to the remaining non-capitalist environment.

As a famous activist of the international communist movement and a theorist and leader of the left-wing of the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg actively explored the cause of emancipation of the proletariat in both theory and practice, and made great contributions to pushing forward the development of the international workers’ movement and sacrificed her life.