Rosalia Luxemburg was one of the most influential figures of the European communist movement. Left-wing revolutionary and coleader of the Spartacus League, later the German Communist party.
Background
Luxemburg was born to a Jewish family in Zamość on 5 March 1871, in Russian-controlled Congress Poland. She was the fifth child of timber trader Eliasz Luxemburg and Line Löwenstein. After being bedridden with a hip ailment at the age of five, she was left with a permanent limp.
Education
She graduated from the Women's Gymnasium in Warsaw. In high school proved to be a brilliant student. While still a student was engaged in revolutionary activities.
In 1887, she passed her Matura examinations. After fleeing to Switzerland to escape detention in 1889, she attended Zürich University (as did the socialists Anatoli Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches), studying philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics. She specialized in Staatswissenschaft (the science of forms of state), the Middle Ages, and economic and stock exchange crises.
In 1889, while hiding from police persecution for taking part in the Polish revolutionary underground "proletariat", emigrated to Switzerland, where she continued education. She studied at the Zurich University of the political economy, law, and philosophy. Vela revolutionary propaganda among the students participated in the political circles of the Polish immigrants, who started the revolutionary Social Democracy of Poland, led the fight against the Polish Socialist Party (PSP). There she met a socialist Leo Yogihesom (in the Russian revolutionary movement known under the pseudonym Tyszka) - her lover.
Career
Over the years, Rose has taught economics courses at the Party School of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. As the leader of the "Internationale", Rose was active revolutionary propaganda against the war. In 1916, she was arrested and jailed, but in prison, she continued to write articles.After his release from prison, Luxembourg, together with Karl Liebknecht in December 1918, was the leader of the constituent congress of the Communist Party.
Views
Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking embodied the concept of supranationalism: she developed a universal socialist philosophy that transcended and was intended to replace national boundaries. She saw the defeat of capitalism as an inevitable and essential target in the economic struggle of the proletariat and developed her economic theories in several articles and especially in her book. The Accumulation of Capital (1915).
Quotations:
Luxemburg's best-known quotation is: Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently (Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden), this is from a fuller quotation:
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter. Not because of the fanaticism of "justice", but rather because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effects cease to work when "freedom" becomes a privilege.
"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".
"For us there is no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realize today".
"We stand today ... before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism."
Personality
Although physically handicapped and barely five feet tall, she possessed enormous physical energy and a combative and fiery nature.