Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg biography

Rosa Luxemburg was a Jewish Polish-German fundamentalist socialist and anti-war activist, born in Poland in 1871.

Although while she grew up, antisemitism was strong and women's role in society was still low, Rosa Luxemburg came from a fairly wealthy and educated family. She had a health condition as a child which made her bed-bound at the age of five when she taught herself to read and write.

Fig. 1 Rosa Luxemburg age 12

Luxemburg went on to study law and political economy in Zurich, eventually achieving a doctorate. This is where she met Leo Jogiches with whom she established the Polish Social Democratic Party.

Luxemburg was fluent in Polish and German, she also spoke Russian and French. She lived in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and Finland. She was the first Polish woman, and one of the first in the world, to get a doctorate in Economics. In her life, she published many articles, pamphlets, and books on revolutionary political and economic subjects. Due to her activism, she was imprisoned several times, in multiple countries.

She lived through the World War I, two Russian revolutions and the German revolution of 1918-1919, which led to her assassination.

Rosa Luxemburg's views

Luxemburg is known as a fundamentalist socialist. This means that she strongly believed that socialism couldn’t be achieved alongside capitalism.

In 1899, she published Social Reform or Revolution¹. In this book, she argued that there must be a revolution for the proletariat to succeed. However, she didn’t agree with Marx or Lenin on how this revolution should take place. Marx believed that there should be a complete revolution, Lenin believed in a planned revolution, and Luxemburg believed in a spontaneous revolution. She believed that a revolution was the only way to stop the exploitation caused by the capitalist system.

Luxemburg believed that capitalism was full of contradictions that would lead to its own demise. She explored this idea in her book The Accumulation of Capital (1913)². Here Luxemburg explained that capitalism thrived on the exploitation of territories and business, but once the capitalists ran out of these, there would be no further advancement, which would lead to its end.

According to Luxemburg, the capitalist state needed to be abolished, and this must be done by mass strike action by the proletariat, which would lead to an eventual revolution.

After this revolution took place, the state must become a socialist democracy where individuals had freedom of speech and non-corrupt elections. This sets her apart from what Marx and Lenin proposed: a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Rosa Luxemburg feminism

Compared to the breath of her written work, Luxemburg didn't write much on feminism specifically and wasn't active in any feminist movements. However, her life and her analysis of exploitation, exemplify the feminist struggle. Luxemburg lived outside the mould of what it was to be a stereotypical “woman” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: her level of education alone, proves this.

Fig. 2 Rosa Luxemburg

Luxemburg strongly supported the movement for women's suffrage. In her speech, Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle⁴, she argued for women's suffrage on various grounds:

• as a matter of principle;

• as a logical consequence of women's level of political involvement;

• because of women's contributions to society through their paid employment;

• because (working-class) women gaining the vote, would have led to a much stronger fight against capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a mass uprising throughout the Russian Empire against the Tsar, the nobility and the ruling class.

At the beginning of the revolution, Luxemburg smuggled herself into Warsaw, Poland, where 93.2% of the industrial workers went on strike⁵. Rosa saw the revolution's potential for democratising Russia and wrote many articles in Polish and Russian about the revolution. Because of her involvement in supporting the uprising, Tsarist authorities arrested her. She kept writing and smuggling her works from prison, and eventually was able to escape back to Germany.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 led to some constitutional reform by the Tsar and to the creation of the Duma, the multi-party system. However, its main legacy was setting the ground for the Russian Revolution of 1917 which ended with the execution of the Tsar and the abolishment of the monarchy.

Rosa Luxemburg socialist internationalism

Unlike Vladimir Lenin, who was a strong promoter of national self-determinism, Luxemburg was a staunch believer in socialist internationalism. She believed that the proletariat of the world should strike together, united in opposition to capitalism. She resisted the eruption of World War I which she saw as a war based on nationalistic grounds.

When the party she was part of, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), supported the war effort, Luxemburg split from them. Together with Karl Liebnecht and Clara Zetkin, they founded the Spartacus League.

Rosa Luxemburg death

The Spartacist uprising became armed. In response to this, the execution of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was ordered by the German Chancellor and SDP leader Friedrich Ebert. They were executed without trial by an elite paramilitary unit who were tasked with squashing the uprising. Many other members of the uprising were also killed. The perpetrators were tried retrospectively and, arguably, they were given sentences that didn't reflect the gravity of their actions.

Luxemburg's violent death led to her and Liebknecht being considered martyrs of socialism. There are still annual commemorations at the cemetery where they were eventually buried. Luxemburg's legacy lies in the impact of her contributions to socialist thinking.