Rosa Luxemburg Add a review

Rosa Luxemburg (Polish: Róża Luksemburg, [ˈruʐa ˈluksɛmburk] ; German: [ˈʁoːza ˈlʊksm̩bʊʁk] ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20th century, and a founder of the Spartacus League and Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Born to a Jewish family in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, Luxemburg became involved in radical politics at an early age, and fled to Switzerland in 1889. She helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party in 1893, and in 1897 was awarded a Doctor of Law in political economy from the University of Zurich, becoming one of the first women in Europe to do so. In 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany, and soon became a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Her political activities included teaching Marxist economics at the party's training school. Luxemburg was imprisoned several times, including in Germany and in Poland during the 1905 Revolution.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the SPD supported the German war effort, after which Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the anti-war Spartacus League, which became affiliated with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917; the pair were arrested in 1916 for their activities and imprisoned until the November Revolution of 1918, after which they co-founded the KPD. In January 1919, Luxemburg participated in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, an attempted communist overthrow of the SPD-ruled Weimar Republic. The ill-prepared uprising was crushed by the government, which deployed anti-communist Freikorps paramilitaries which captured and summarily executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

Luxemburg argued against the reformist road to socialism advocated by Eduard Bernstein, defending the necessity of a socialist revolution. She also criticized Vladimir Lenin's concept of a vanguard party, instead advocating spontaneous action by the workers, and in particular the mass strike, which she viewed as the supreme form of revolutionary action. In her analyses of the Russian Revolution of 1917, she criticized the controlling character of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg saw the collapse of capitalism as inevitable after it had spread to all areas of the world through the process of imperialism. Due to her pointed criticism of both the Leninist and the social democratic schools of Marxism, Luxemburg has always had a somewhat ambivalent reception among scholars and theorists of the political left. Nonetheless, she and Liebknecht were extensively idolised as martyrs by the communist East German government after World War II.