On 5 March we shall be celebrating the 140th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg who died in the service of freedom.
German revolutionary leader, journalist, philosopher, economist and socialist theorist, Rosa Luxemburg, was killed in Berlin on 15 January 1919, drowned in the Landwehr Canal, after being hit with a rifle, during the German revolution. Rosa Luxemburg saw herself as a citizen of the proletariat. She lived the international life of a Socialist ‘pilgrim’, believing that only socialism could bring true freedom and social justice. Luxemburg was the advocate of mass action, spontaneity, and workers democracy, but her criticism of the “revisionists” and their ideological leader Edward Bernstein is considered her most important legacy to European political thought.
Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, in Russian Poland, into a Jewish middle-class family. However she was never especially concerned with the plight of Jews. She said: “Why do you come to me with your special Jewish sorrows? I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims in Putamayo, the Negroes in Africa. . . . I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” At the age of five she became seriously ill. After recovering she walked with a limp; sciatic pain troubled her throughout her life.
Luxemburg was educated at the Warsaw Gimnazium. From the age of 16 she participated in revolutionary activities and during these years her favorite writer was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz whose patriotism and life in political exile influenced her deeply. In 1889 Luxemburg moved to Switzerland to continue her studies and thence to Germany. But she was also partly forced to flee from her home country because of her political activities. In Russian Poland, people like her were banished to Siberia, whereas in Germany, the biggest social democratic Labour party had been legally active since 1890. She spoke and wrote the German language more fluently then most Germans, notwithstanding her exemplary language skills in Polish, Russian, French and English. The German labour movement either loved or hated Rosa Luxemburg, although she did not make it easy even for admirers to like her. Joern Schuetrumpf in her book Rosa Luxemburg or The Price of Freedom writes: “Polemics were her weapons of choice. This made her be loved by some and hated by others. Today where spin is commonplace and real facts are kept hidden, polemics must be learned anew as a medicine against proudly-cultivated voluntarism.” She continues: “…individualism can be learnt from Rosa Luxemburg. She was a great individualist – sometimes to the point of eccentricity – but she knew very well that individualism without cooperation leads to ineffectiveness. This she feared more than death.”
No less timely is Luxemburg’s critique of bureaucracies and organizations. The same author continues: “Today, in the age of large self-sufficient bureaucracies, her argument of organizations transforming into superfluous shells as soon as they primarily act in self-interest is of frightening topicality. They stifle all movement, all life, and replace it with pseudo-life.”
Luxemburg had entered the University of Zürich, where she studied natural sciences and political economy. In 1892 she changed to the faculty of law. Two years later she researched at the major Polish library in Paris. She started her career as a journalist and became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1898 Luxemburg completed her doctorate. The dissertation was entitled The Industrial Development of Poland. Between the years 1892 and 1919 Luxemburg produced almost 700 articles, pamphlets, speeches, and books.
In 1899 Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution in defense of Marxism appeared. She believed that her work would make the “old guard” of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to view her as a serious political thinker and leader. To obtain German citizenship, Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck, the youngest son of her friend, a marriage of convenience. In 1898 Luxemburg became a leader of the left wing of the SPD and participated in the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland. After insulting the Kaiser, in 1904 she spent a short period in prison in Zwickau. In the same year Luxemburg also drafted SDKPL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) party programme What Do We Want?
During the 1905 Russian Revolution she developed the idea that socialism is a revolutionary process which transforms political and economic relations towards ever greater democratic control by the workers themselves. Joern Schuetrumpf writes: “An idea that is becoming increasingly important, despite almost startling in its banality, is Luxemburg’s concept of movement. With her understanding of class as a movement as opposed to status, she has left behind a key for future resistance. Today with orthodox conditions of class being increasingly eroded and being replaced by new formations, the idea of common action as a precondition for emancipation gains new currency. In 1906 she was arrested in Warsaw but released finally on health grounds. She returned to Germany where she taught at SPD party school in Berlin until 1914 and developed ideas about general strike as a political weapon. In 1912 her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, appeared. In it she tried to prove that capitalism was doomed and would inevitably collapse on economic grounds. After differences with moderate German socialists, she founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the radical Spartacus League in 1916. She also drafted the Spartacists programme Leitsätze. Two years later the organization became the German Communist Party.
During World War I Luxemburg spent a long time in prison, writing her Spartakusbriefe and Die Russisce Revolution, where she welcomed the October Revolution as a precursor of world revolution. In The Junius Pamphlet (1916), written under the pseudonym of Junius, she argued that the choice of Socialism or Barbarism is a world-historical turning point which demands resolute action by the proletariat.
However, Luxemburg participated reluctantly in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin against the government. The uprising, which failed, was a defining moment among others for Adolf Hitler. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested in 1919. While being transported to prison, she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January 1919 by German Freikorps soldiers. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehr canal and found in May. She was buried on June 13 in Friedrichsfeld cemetery, where the graves of Liebknecht and the other murdered revolutionaries are situated. Her burial became a mass demonstration, witnessed by a number of correspondents, including the American screenwriter Ben Hecht who wrote the scripts for The Front Page, Some Like It Hot, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights and many more films.
Luxemburg’s lover Leo Jogiches was murdered in 1919. However, their affair had already ended in 1906 – Leo had gone too far in his infidelity. Just before his death, he had decided with Clara Zetkin and Mathild Jacob to publish Luxemburg’s collected works. The project proceeded slowly because at that time Lenin’s critical opinions of Luxemburg’s thought were not easy to ignore. Later Stalinist study was not very happy about her – her unorthodoxy was nearly as dangerous as Trotsky’s. Luxemburg’s collected works did not appear until 1970-75 in DDR.
A thorough reevaluation of Luxemburg’s work started in Germany in the 1970s. Her theories were considered as an alternative to Communism or Social Democracy. When Marxist study lost its attraction in the 1980s, Luxemburg still created interest among feminist theorists. Luxemburg herself did not participate in the women’s rights movement; women’s liberation was for her part of the liberation from the oppression of capitalism. However, she saw that socialist emancipation is incomplete without women’s emancipation. Raya Dunayevskaya argues in her study Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1981) that Luxemburg’s years after the break-up with her lover Leo Jogiches were not “lost years,” as J.P. Nettl presents in his large biography (1966). In the 1980s Margareta von Trotta’s film Rosa Luxemburg (1986), starring Barbara Sukowa, was a commercial success.
In 1919, Bertolt Brecht wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honouring Rosa Luxemburg, and, in 1928, Kurt Weill set it to music as The Berlin Requiem:
Red Rosa now has vanished too. (...)
She told the poor what life is about,
And so the rich have rubbed her out.
May she rest in peace.
“Last but not least”, Joern Schuetrumpf writes, “what remains of Rosa Luxemburg is world literature – a sparkling spirit which in its writings and letters always sought to protest and of which little is left in today’s Left.”
Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had — her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life.