Rosa Luxemburg
Biography
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish and German Marxist theorist, economist and revolutionary socialist. She was born in Zamość, in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland, into a Polish Jewish family and became involved in socialist politics while still young. Facing the threat of arrest because of her political activity, Luxemburg left Poland in 1889 and moved to Switzerland, where she studied at the University of Zurich.
Luxemburg became active in the Polish socialist movement and, together with Leo Jogiches and others, helped establish the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, later the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. She opposed the dominant nationalist current within Polish socialism, arguing that the struggle of the working class should be organised internationally rather than subordinated to the immediate goal of restoring an independent Polish state.
In 1898 Luxemburg moved to Germany and became active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), then the largest socialist party in Europe. She quickly became a prominent participant in debates within the international socialist movement. In Social Reform or Revolution?, written in response to Eduard Bernstein's revisionism, Luxemburg defended the necessity of revolutionary social transformation while arguing that struggles for reforms remained an essential part of working-class political activity.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 strongly influenced Luxemburg's political thought. She travelled to Warsaw during the revolutionary upheaval and was arrested by the Russian authorities. Drawing on the experience of the revolution, she developed her arguments concerning mass political action in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. Luxemburg emphasised the capacity of working-class struggle to develop dynamically rather than being entirely directed from above by political organisations.
Luxemburg was also an important Marxist economist. In The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, she attempted to extend Marx's analysis of capitalist reproduction and argued that capitalist accumulation depended upon continuing expansion into non-capitalist social environments. Her conclusions generated substantial controversy among Marxist economists and remain the subject of debate.
Luxemburg was a determined opponent of militarism and imperialism and strongly opposed the First World War. When the SPD parliamentary delegation voted for war credits in 1914, Luxemburg joined Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring and others in organising opposition to the party leadership's support for the war. This opposition developed into the Spartacus Group, later known as the Spartacus League. Luxemburg spent much of the war imprisoned because of her anti-war activity, during which she continued to write political works, including The Crisis in German Social Democracy, commonly known as the Junius Pamphlet.
Luxemburg welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917 while also criticising aspects of Bolshevik policy. In her unfinished manuscript The Russian Revolution, she defended the revolution against its opponents but criticised restrictions on political democracy and argued that socialist transformation required broad participation and political freedom within the working class.
Released from prison during the German Revolution of November 1918, Luxemburg returned immediately to revolutionary political activity. She and Liebknecht helped establish the Communist Party of Germany at the end of December 1918. During the political crisis of January 1919, revolutionary unrest broke out in Berlin. Luxemburg was sceptical of an immediate attempt to seize power but nevertheless supported the workers involved once the confrontation had begun.
On 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured in Berlin by members of the Freikorps, paramilitary forces operating with the approval of the Social Democratic-led government. Luxemburg was beaten and shot, and her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. It was recovered several months later. She was 47 years old.
Luxemburg's writings on reform and revolution, imperialism, democracy, mass strikes and socialist organisation became influential across numerous traditions of Marxist thought. Her insistence on working-class self-activity and her criticisms of both reformism and excessive political centralisation have remained central to debates within the socialist movement since her death.