Rosa Luxemburg Add a review

Rosa Luxemburg ( LUK-səm-burg; Polish: Róża Luksemburg [ˈruʐa ˈluksɛmburk] ; German: [ˈʁoːza ˈlʊksm̩bʊʁk] ; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German Marxist theorist and revolutionary. She was a leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and later co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League, which evolved into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). An influential member of the international socialist movement, she is remembered for her writings on imperialism and revolution, and as a champion of socialist democracy who famously stated, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

Born and raised in Russian-ruled Poland to a secular Jewish family, Luxemburg became active in revolutionary politics in her youth. She co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), a party that rejected Polish nationalism in favour of an international class struggle. After moving to Germany in 1898, she became the foremost voice of the SPD's revolutionary wing. In her 1900 pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution?, she defended the necessity of revolution against the reformist theories of Eduard Bernstein, arguing that the struggle for reforms was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Inspired by the 1905 Russian Revolution, she developed a theory of the mass strike as the proletariat's most important revolutionary tool, emphasizing the spontaneous creativity of the working class.

As World War I approached, Luxemburg's anti-militarist and anti-imperialist convictions brought her into increasing conflict with the SPD leadership. In her major work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), she argued that capitalism's need to expand into non-capitalist regions to survive was the driving force behind imperialism. She fiercely condemned the party's support for the war, and was imprisoned for most of the conflict. From prison, she wrote the influential Junius Pamphlet, which declared the war a betrayal of the working class and popularized the phrase "socialism or barbarism" to describe the choice facing humanity. While she celebrated the Russian Revolution of 1917, in a posthumously published manuscript she offered a sharp critique of the Bolsheviks' authoritarian policies, defending democratic freedoms and the need for a revolution rooted in mass participation. Her writings on the Russian Revolution were later viewed by some as a prescient critique of Stalinism.

Released from prison during the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Luxemburg co-founded the KPD and became a central figure in the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin. After the uprising was crushed by the Freikorps, a government-sponsored paramilitary group, Luxemburg and her comrade Karl Liebknecht were captured and summarily executed. Following her death, Luxemburg became a heroine and martyr for Marxists. Her legacy has been a subject of intense debate, with her emphasis on spontaneity and democracy celebrated by many on the left—particularly by the New Left and those in the libertarian socialist tradition—but sharply criticized by the Stalinist tradition, which denounced "Luxemburgism" as a heresy.