Background

Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871, into a Jewish family, to Eliasz Luxemburg and Line Lowenstein. Her father was a timber trader.

Education

Rosa Luxemburg's family moved to Warsaw where she studied at Warsaw's Second Gymnasium for Girls, between 1880 and 1887. During graduation, she was denied the topper's gold medal because of her rebellious attitude.

In 1889, she went to study at Zurich University in Switzerland. Here she pursued history, economy, politics, and philosophy.

She submitted her doctoral dissertation, The Industrial Development of Poland, in 1897 which was published a year later, and received her Doctor of Law degree.

Career

Rosa Luxemburg's political career began while she was in Poland as a member of the left-wing Proletariat Party. In 1893, in collaboration with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchle, she started the newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause).

Soon Leo Jogiches and Luxemburg established the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, which later came to be known as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, SDKPiL, after they joined hands with Lithuania's social democratic organization.

Published in 1904, Rosa Luxemburg's work Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy opposed Lenin's theories. She believed a communist dictatorship would develop if power was centralized with the Party Central Committee.

During the failed Russian Revolution in 1905, she was arrested along with Jogiches in Warsaw. She realized that revolutions could happen not only in an advanced industrialized country but also in an underdeveloped country. At the Second International (Socialist) Congress in Stuttgart in 1905, she introduced a resolution, according to which all European workers' parties were to come together to prevent the war.

She started teaching Marxism and economics at the Social Democratic Party's Berlin training center. Here Friedrich Ebert who also attended her lectures here went on to become SPD leader and first president of the Weimar Republic.

In 1912, while she was representing SPD at the European Socialists congresses she appealed to the European workers' parties to declare a strike in the face of the impending war. When World War I broke out in 1914, she was shattered when the SDP and the French socialist agreed to a truce promising to refrain from any strikes. She organized anti-war demonstrations in Frankfurt against military conscription. For her refusal to obey orders, she was jailed for "inciting disobedience against the authorities' law and order."

In August 1914, she established the Die Internationale where her associates were Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and Franz Mehring. The organization later evolved into the Spartacus League. The organization was responsible for releasing illegal anti-war pamphlets, under the pseudonym Spartacus.

Contrary to the SPD, The Spartacist League was strongly against the war and called for an anti-war general strike. These strikes didn't go down well with the authorities and she was arrested and put into prison in 1916, along with Karl Liebknecht for more than a couple of years. Rosa was released in 1918 and with Liebknecht revived the Spartacus League and also established the Red Flag newspaper which advocated pardon for all political prisoners and asked for capital punishment to be revoked.

In 1919, when Berlin was on the verge of another revolution, she denounced the fierce attempts of Liebknecht to snatch power. However, the members of the Red Flag asked the rebels not to renounce their respective positions at the editorial offices of the liberal press. After Germany's new chancellor Friedrich Ebert came to power, he issued an order to eradicate the left-wing revolution. Both Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested in Berlin on January 15, 1919.

Following her capture, she was murdered and her body was discarded into Berlin's Landwehr Canal. A few months later her body was recovered and identified after an autopsy.

Achievements

• Luxemburg's contributions to socialist theory and practice were immense. She was the most vocal spokesperson of the German labor movement. Luxemburg was not an armchair revolutionary like many of the Marxists but believed in action. She ultimately became a martyr for her beliefs, which never wavered from a strong basis of humanitarianism.
  
  In 1919, Bertolt Brecht, a German poet, and Marxist, composed the poetic memorial Epitaph in recognition of her contributions. Kurt Weill, a German composer set it to music known as The Berlin Requiem.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Letters Of Rosa Luxemburg

    (The most comprehensive collection of letters by Rosa Luxe...)

    1978
  • The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution and the Mass Strike

    (One of the most important Marxist thinkers and leaders of...)

    2008
  • Reform or Revolution and Other Writings

    (A polemic writing by the famous "Red Rosa" Luxemburg, Ref...)

    1899
  • Writings of Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution, the National Question, and Other Essays

    (Selected writings from "Red Rosa" Luxemburg, one of the f...)

    2009
  • The Accumulation of Capital 1913

Religion

Rosa Luxemburg was an atheist.

Politics

Rosa Luxembourg was a Marxist intellectual who played an active role within left-wing politics throughout her life.

For example, Rosa Luxembourg co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League and the newspaper 'The Red Flag' to raise awareness of exploitation under capitalism. She believed that the evolutionary path towards socialism was insufficient given the extent to which capitalism was built upon the exploitation of the working-class. The only means by which a genuine socialist society could ever emerge was via a revolution based on class consciousness.

Whilst Luxembourg is undoubtedly a figure of the left, she was also a critic of both Leninism and social democracy. Unlike many other Marxists, she warned that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be replaced by the dictatorship of the party, which would in turn be replaced by the dictatorship of the central committee. That said, she was a true believer in revolution as a catalyst for social change. Indeed, she believed that the age of revolution against the bourgeois social order had finally arrived. Luxembourg also defended the Marxist conception of history driven by dialectical materialism.

Luxembourg also held certain beliefs more commonly associated with libertarianism. Indeed, one of her best-known quotes is that "freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." A society based around a slavish adherence to social conformity will stifle individualism. She also adds that "freedom is how free your opponent is." Such arguments have more in common with John Stuart Mill than any figure from the left of the political spectrum. Rosa Luxembourg was also a feminist who put forth the observation that "all war is male." As such, she can be classed as a socialist feminist alongside figures such as Simone de Beauvoir.

Views

Quotations: "Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

"Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud."

"The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening."

"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!"

"What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset."

"Women's freedom is the sign of social freedom."

"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."

"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."

Personality

According to Dunayevjkaya, Luxemburg's main necessity was that of being "free [and] independent." After all, her great intellectual development occurred after she split with Jogiches, and as Luxemburg stated, "the character of a woman shows itself not where love begins, but rather where it ends."

Physical Characteristics: At the age of five, Rosa Luxemburg suffered a hip ailment which left her with a lifelong limp.

Interests

• Botany, zoology

Connections

In 1889 Rosa Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck in order to obtain German citizenship. They divorced in 1903.

From her time as a student until 1907, Rosa Luxemburg maintained an intense and often conflictual relationship with Leo Jogiches. She was also engaged to him for a time. Leo Jogiches (1867-1919) came from a wealthy, highly educated Russian-Jewish family. He was one of the editors of the first Polish Social Democratic newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza, and one of the founders of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP). After the outbreak of the revolution in Russia in 1905, he fought with Rosa Luxemburg against tsarism in Warsaw. From 1907 on he headed the board of the SDKP. He was elected for the central office at the founding party congress of the KPD.

Beginning in 1907 Rosa Luxemburg had a love affair lasting several years with Kostja Zetkin, the son of Clara Zetkin. Kostya (Constantine) Zetkin (1885-1980) was a doctor.

For a time, Rosa Luxemburg had a relationship with her lawyer Paul Levi. Levi (1883-1930) came from a republican Jewish, merchant family. He joined the SPD in 1909 and was a member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. He was one of the founders of the Spartacus League and the KPD. After the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Levi led the party from 1919 to the spring of 1921. In 1921 Levi was expelled from the KPD for his critical attitude toward the Comintern and his criticism of the Communist Party's putsch-oriented tactics. But he remained true to his leftist convictions and the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, initially in the Kommunistischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft and later in the SPD.

Father:

Eliasz Luxemburg

Mother:

Line Lowenstein

ex-spouse:

Gustav Lübeck

(married 1889 - divorced 1903)

ex-boyfriend:

Leo Jogiches

ex-boyfriend:

Constantine Zetkin

ex-boyfriend:

Paul Levi

Friend:

Hans Diefenbach

Rosa Luxemburg and Dr. Hans Diefenbach had a deep, cordial friendship. Diefenbach (1884-1917) was a physician. He died on the front, serving as a military doctor, while Luxemburg was in prison.

colleague:

Clara Zetkin

References

• Rosa Luxemburg by Dana Mills
  2020
• Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans
  2015