Rosa Luxembourg
1) Her Biography:
The daughter of a wood merchant, Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871, in the little village of Zamo in the region of Poland that was under Russian occupation. She attended high school in Warsaw from 1880 until 1887, where she excelled in a setting often reserved for the daughters of Russian civil servants. She became fluent in four languages and quickly became politically active in Polish left-wing organisations after discovering a penchant for the written and spoken word at a young age.
Due to the prospect of being arrested as a result of these actions in 1889, she fled to Switzerland via Germany. She first studied natural sciences at the University of Zurich, one of the few schools of higher learning where women had equal access, before moving on to political science and economics. She received her degree in 1897, and as the lone female among the sons of landowners, factory owners, and members of government, she was respected and marvelled at. She also started a passionate love affair with Leo Jogiches, a Polish revolutionary, there.
Rosa Luxemburg co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), a political party, in 1893. In 1900, the SDKP changed its name to the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). She made her first significant public appearance in the setting of the worldwide labour movement in August of the same year, when she was just 22 years old. She made a brave statement at the third International Socialist Workers’ Congress in Zurich in an effort to win support for her new organisation and herself. The mandate was turned down at that point.
In 1898, Rosa Luxemburg relocated to Germany. She was able to get German citizenship through a convenient marriage. She then began to promote social democracy at German party congresses, at conferences abroad, and through her work as a journalist. She defended the necessity of global actions against imperialism, militarism, and colonial policies at the International Socialist Congress in 1900.
She represented the SDKPiL in the International Socialist Bureau from 1904 to 1914. She took part in the revolution in Russian-occupied Poland from the end of December 1905 to March 1906; there, she was detained but later released on bail in June 1906. As the head of the left-wing movement in German Social Democracy, she made a name for herself in Berlin by striving to draw insights for the German working class from the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907. She also championed the political mass strike as a revolutionary method of resistance.
She represented the SDKPiL in the International Socialist from 1904 to 1914. Together with Lenin and Martov, she created an anti-war agenda for the global workers’ movement in 1907 at the International Socialist Congress. She served as a teacher at the Berlin Social Democratic Party School from 1907 to 1914. She dated Kostja Zetkin, the son of her close friend and coworker Clara Zetkin, for a number of years.
She represented the SDKPiL in the International Socialist from 1904 to 1914. In She received a prison sentence for her anti-war lectures in the spring of 1914. Her trial attorney, Paul Levi, also became her new love. She wrote a paper in 1915, known as the Junius Pamphlet, denouncing the brutality of the War, which had been raging since August 1, 1914, under the alias “Junius.” She teamed up with Karl Liebknecht and other Social Democratic war opponents at the end of 1915 to form the “Internationale” group, which gave rise to the Spartacus group in 1916.
She represented the SDKPiL in the International Socialist from 1904 to 1914. Rosa Luxemburg spent the period of July 1916 to November 1918 incarcerated in Berlin, Wroclaw, and Wronki. She sent writings from prison in 1917 in support of the February and October revolutions in Russia. She supported the changes while also expressing concern about a Bolshevik rule. However, it wasn’t until 1922 that On the Russian Revolution, which carried this warning, was published. In this passage, she claimed that vitality withers away in every public institution without unfettered freedom of the press and of assembly, without a free conflict of opinions—it becomes a pseudo-vitality.
She totally committed herself to the German November Revolution after being released from prison on November 9, 1918. She wrote Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) with Karl Liebknecht, promoted thorough social change, and was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at the start of the 1918–1919 period. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were assassinated in Berlin on January 15, 1919, by officers and soldiers of the counterrevolutionary Reichswehr troops.
2) Main Works:
The Accumulation of Capital:
The only book on economics that Luxemburg really published during her lifetime was The Accumulation of Capital. In the polemic, she contended that in order to access fresh supply sources, markets for surplus value, and labour reservoirs, capitalism must constantly penetrate non-capitalist regions.
Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation:
The core of Luxemburg’s political ideology was The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, in which spontaneity is a grassroots strategy for organising a party-oriented class movement.
The Russian Revolution:
In this Luxemburg discusses the Russian revolutions of 1917 in February and October. She criticised the Bolshevik Party’s three main policies: its anti-democratic dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly; its nationalist policy of self-determination for ethnic minorities; and its distribution of land to private farmers rather than collectivization. Luxemburg often criticised Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s concentration of power in the hands of one political party and the repression of civil liberties including freedom of the press, association, and assembly.
Social Reform or Revolution?
Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-German Marxist theorist, made her three main criticisms of the Bolshevik Social Reform or Revolution in an 1899 booklet. Trade unions, reformist political parties, and the growth of social democracy, according to Luxemburg, are important for the proletariat’s development of class consciousness but cannot, as claimed by Eduard Bernstein and others, produce a socialist society. Instead, she contends that capitalism is economically unsustainable and will eventually collapse and that a revolution is required to convert capitalism into socialism. This argument is made from a historical materialist perspective. Along with Luxemburg’s earlier works, the booklet had a significant impact on revolutionary socialist circles and served as a crucial foundation for left communist ideology.
The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions:
Rosa Luxemburg’s 1906 pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, which analyses the 1905 Russian Revolution, presents it as a lesson for German socialists to learn from, and calls for a political mass strike, is the subject of her three main criticisms. Notably, Luxemburg came to the conclusion in this booklet that a successful revolutionary movement depends on the spontaneous growth of mass movements—a viewpoint known as the Luxumburgism of spontaneity. Her views of the Russian Revolution, when unplanned mass strikes boosted the proletariat’s creativity and readiness for action, serve as the foundation for her point of view. She contends that a mass strike does not require an ideal or fully developed socialist organisation to exist in order to be effective.
It is also one of the most influential pieces exhorting socialists to adopt an aggressive stance and using the political mass strike as an illustration. Mass Strike contributed to the conversation by tying together political and economic problems, a viewpoint that is still prevalent among contemporary socialists.
3) Main Themes:
Revolutionary Socialist Democracy:
Luxemburg declared her support for democracy and the need for revolution. Though Stanley Aronowitz refers to Luxemburg’s conception of democracy as a “generalised democracy in an unarticulated form”, it is actually extremely reminiscent of Karl Marx’s ideas and constitutes Luxemburg’s biggest departure from “mainstream communism” (“The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”). Aronowitz claims that one of the reasons Luxemburgian democracy first had trouble getting public support was because it was so nebulous. In her works on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, Luxemburg herself defined her views on democracy.
Early on in the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg criticised anti-democratic elements. Every public institution experiences a death of life without general elections, without full freedom of the press and assembly, without a free exchange of ideas, and only the bureaucracy remains as the active component. A small number of party officials with infinite expertise and unending enthusiasm eventually put the public to sleep. They direct and dominate. In reality, only a dozen of the best leaders lead them, and an elite of the working class is occasionally invited to meetings where they are expected to applaud the leaders’ speeches and unanimously approve proposed resolutions. Ultimately, this is a clique affair, a dictatorship that is not of the proletariat but rather of a small group of politicians. This is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (Luxemburg).
Additionally, Luxemburg pushed for socialist democracy. She claimed that having freedom that is exclusively available to those who support a particular government or political party, no matter how many there may be, is not at all free. Freedom is always and only available to those with differing viewpoints. The efficiency of political freedom’s educational, healthy, and purifying qualities hinges on this crucial quality, not because of any fanatical notion of “fair”, but rather because “freedom” loses its power when it is seen as an unique privilege. Socialist democracy, however, does not start when the socialist economy is fully established; it does not appear as some sort of Christmas present for the deserving people who have, up until that point, faithfully supported a number of socialist tyrants. The development of socialist democracy coincides with the dismantling of class hierarchy and the establishment of socialism.
Capitalism:
In the polemic, The Accumulation of Capital, she claimed that in order to get access to new supply sources, markets for surplus value, and labour reserves, capitalism must constantly penetrate noncapitalist regions. According to Luxemburg, Marx made a mistake in Capital when he claimed that the proletariat could not afford to purchase the goods they produced. By his own standards, this meant that in a closed-capitalist system, it would be impossible for capitalists to make a profit because there would be insufficient demand for goods, and much of the value of those goods could not be converted into money. Thus, according to Luxemburg, imperialism developed as capitalist states attempted to rule over weaker economies in order to realise profits by selling surplus goods to non-capitalist economies. However, as they were more incorporated into the capitalist system, this resulted in the demise of non-capitalist economies. But if non-capitalist economies collapsed, there would be no more marketplaces for surplus goods to be sold, and capitalism would collapse.
Spontaneity and Organisation:
She made the case that organisation and spontaneity are not separate or independent actions but rather various phases of a single political process because one cannot exist without the other. Her concept that class conflict progresses from an elementary, spontaneous condition to a higher degree gave rise to these convictions. In every nation, the working people are only taught to battle through their hardships. Social democracy is merely the proletariat’s front line, a small portion of the entire working class; blood from their blood and flesh from their flesh. Only as this battle progresses does social democracy look for and discover the specific slogans and paths of the workers’ struggle, and it only receives guidance for the future from this struggle.
Although Luxemburg did not view spontaneism as an abstract concept, she was influenced by large-scale protests in Europe, particularly the Russian Revolution of 1905, and she created the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation. She did not view organisation as a result of scientific-theoretic insight to historical imperatives, contrary to the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International, but rather as a result of the working masses’ struggles.
The modern proletariat’s class fight, which is motivated by awareness of its own historical repercussions, is simply embodied by social democracy. In actuality, the masses serve as their own leaders, dialectically designing their own growth. The intelligent masses of workers will increasingly assume control over their own destinies, the direction of their movement, and its leadership as social democracy develops, flourishes, and gains strength.
And because the entire social democracy movement is only the conscious advance guard of the proletarian class movement, which, in The Communist Manifesto’s words, represents the ongoing interests of liberation and the partial group interests of the workforce in relation to the overall interests of the movement at every moment of the struggle, the social democracy’s leaders are more powerful, more influential, and more conscious of these things.
The modern workers’ struggle is a part of history and social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight, according to Luxemburg. She also argued that the modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle in accordance with a plan laid out in some book or theory. This massive piece of culture within the modern workers’ movement is epoch-defining because the great masses of the working people first forge the weapons of their own liberation from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding. That is exactly what is admirable about it.
4) Marxism and Rosa Luxembourg:
Rosa Luxemburg was a distinguished revolutionary Marxist who was instrumental in establishing the German Communist Party and battling the opportunistic decline of German Social Democracy. Unfortunately, some of her publications and speeches are frequently exploited to show her as an opponent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which paints a completely inaccurate picture of what she actually believed.
The so-called “Luxemburgists” portray her as a champion of working-class ingenuity and “spontaneity”, in contrast to the “ultra-centralist” Lenin who, it is claimed, attempted to stifle workers’ initiative and subjugate them. Left reformists, anarchists, “libertarian communists”, and even bourgeois liberals hoped to utilise the stature of this great revolutionary as a club against Leninism by erecting this image of Luxemburg. On the basis of this, the idea of “Luxemburgism” has been created, as if it were a unique tendency within the Marxist tradition.
Some sincere young communists who are looking for a different strain of Marxism from what they consider as “Leninism” are drawn to this so-called “Luxemburgism”. They are looking for such an alternative because the Stalinist, bureaucratic caricature of socialism has been portrayed as “Leninist” (or “Marxist-Leninist”, as Stalinists today like to describe themselves). This caricature was first realised in the USSR under Stalin and later replicated in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and other regimes.
However, reading Lenin’s Last Testament (also known as his “Last Testament” Letters to the Congress, which were written from December 1922 to January 1923) is enough to realise that, even before he passed away, he had begun to grow concerned about the bureaucratic tendencies that were developing in the Soviet Union and had offered solutions to counteract them. Stalinism is a full denial of what Lenin stood for, not the logical offspring of Leninism. The Luxemburgists of today casually overlook this reality.
Therefore, we must question ourselves: What does this “Luxemburgism” genuinely entail? Is it really so different from Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary Marxism? Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary in real life, according to a thorough analysis of her works, life, and causes. Luxemburg was on the same side of the line as the Bolsheviks when the global workers’ movement split into revolutionary and reformist groups. Similar to how the Bolsheviks battled the Menshevik opportunist tendency, Luxemburg fought against the German Social-Democrats’ opportunist degeneration. Despite the criticisms she held at various times, she wholeheartedly supported the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution led by Lenin.
It is very obvious that Rosa Luxemburg did not reject the need for political leadership in general even when she criticised the Bolsheviks, just as Lenin did not reject the spontaneity of popular struggles. The two disagreed about how much importance revolutionaries ought to give to the tactical work of getting involved in the mass struggles. However, it has now been established that Luxemburg was mistaken in her previous work on this subject because successfully influencing the masses requires a number of extremely practical activities.
The October Revolution would demonstrate that the Bolshevik Party’s existence, a well organised and educated organisation with cadres in significant workplaces and neighbourhoods, was precisely what permitted the Russian workers to seize power. Additionally, near the end of her life, Luxemburg worked to create a party in Germany with a similar philosophy.
What we have been emphasising makes it clear that there is no real difference between these two distinguished Marxists when it comes to this issue. This exaggeration is intended to misrepresent the facts in an effort to turn workers and young people away from a sincere revolutionary vision, particularly from the necessity of creating a mass revolutionary party as a necessary condition for a successful socialist revolution.
5) Her Legacy:
Because they are part of a tradition of socialist thought that has as its main concern freedom, its evolution over time, the challenges to realising it, and the various forms of oppression that capitalist society entrenches, facilitates, or fails to eradicate, Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas are still relevant today. Despite frequently appearing entrenched in a concept of historical agency – both individual and collective – that shares the humanism of classical Marxism, Luxemburg’s study of freedom as a philosophical idea is never openly stated in her writings. Socialism, according to Luxemburg, is the only popular movement in the world that has set itself a goal and has established in the social life of a human being a conscious idea, a clear purpose, the free will of the mankind, and the right to organise one’s own society.
She believes, as did Marx and others before him, that humans possess a special moral authority based on freedom that serves as the foundation for a fundamental criticism of current capitalist structures and the drive behind the battle for a truly free society. Because capitalism creates global patterns of tyranny and dominance that trade the freedom of the many for the comfort of the few, capitalism impedes freedom.
But crucially for Luxemburg, freedom is not just a goal to strive for at the end of a political emancipation journey; it is also actively lived out when those who experience injustice express their will through political engagement that serves as an educational tool. In this sense, political emancipation must be self-guided rather than under the direction of others because the knowledge gained through political practise serves as a learning platform where collective freedom is appropriated internally and exercised through social activism before being institutionalised externally through political and legal mechanisms.
Despite the fact that Luxemburg’s writings are dispersed and occasionally challenging to read, her dedication to freedom serves as the moral and political compass that enables us to comprehend her contributions to a variety of issues, including the boundaries of liberal parliamentarism, the importance of self-determination, the dynamics of global capital accumulation, the persistence of imperialism, the issue of political organisation, and the transition from one revolution to another.
Although Luxemburg, like many Marxists of her generation, was less interested in abstract theoretical analysis and more interested in how to use that analysis as a tool for political change, her reflections continue to serve as an essential starting point for the development of critical thinking in at least three areas.
First, there is the issue of how to conceptualise political power in the context of an ongoing global capitalist crisis, where the costs of that crisis are disproportionately borne by oppressed groups of people whose diverse identities do not neatly overlap with the borders between nation states. Luxemburg’s comments on imperialism and capitalist accumulation provide a useful springboard for thinking about social justice in a way that is sensitive to the evolution of global capitalism, historically nuanced, and free of the methodological nationalism that frequently accompanies liberal thinking on unequal development.
The second concern is how politics are organised, how important education is, and how much it will cost to switch from one legal system to another. When considering the ethics of revolution and how to draw lessons from the struggles and setbacks of earlier progressive movements, Luxemburg’s theory is helpful since it blends radical commitments with an awareness of the need for compromise.
Finally, her books are essential for educating us about the various oppressions that continue to exist in the world and for helping us to think about them in an intersectional way that combines issues of gender, race, and class. They provide us the ability to express a richer critique of capitalism that is genuinely inclusive of the history, philosophy, and practise of oppressed groups of people around the world and that strives to unite these issues rather than separate them from one another. Rosa Luxemburg is a contemporary rather than a martyr due to all of these factors and the unusual, terrible circumstances of her life and death.
6) Some Quotes:
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“Tomorrow the revolution will ‘rise up again, clashing its weapons,’ and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“Women’s freedom is the sign of social freedom.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction and the power of my expression.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“I want to burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden, bitter tears.”
― Rosa Luxemburg
“I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg
