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Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 - January 15, 1919) was a Polish and German Jewish Marxist politician, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a social democratic theorist with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and later the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. She started the newspaper The Red Flag, and cofounded the Spartacist League, a Marxist revolutionary group that carried out an unsuccessful revolution against her orders in Berlin in January, 1919. The revolution was crushed by the SPD, the remnants of the army, and freelance right-wing militias collectively called the Freikorps; Luxemburg and hundreds of others were captured, tortured, killed, and dumped into the canal over a period of weeks. The Spartacist League joined the Comintern, and became the Communist Party of Germany.
Rosa Luxemburg was born Rosalia Luxemburg on March 5, 1870 in Zamość near Lublin now Poland. She was the fifth child of the Jewish lumberjack Eliasz Luxemburg and his wife Line (maiden name: Löwenstein). After fleeing to Switzerland from imminent detention, she attended Zurich University, along with other socialist figures such as Anatoli Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches.
In 1893, along with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski (alias Julius Karski), she founded the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza ("The Workers' Cause"), in opposition to the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. An important part of Luxemburg's platform was that the struggle against capitalism should be carried out for its own sake, and not for an independent Poland. Luxemburg denied the right of self-determination for nations under socialism, which later caused tensions with Vladimir Lenin. Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland could only come about through revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Russia.
In 1898, Luxemburg received German citizenship through marriage. She became active in the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, where she sharply defined the border between her faction and the Revisionism Theory of Eduard Bernstein. She completely rejected the increasing trend in the SPD towards participation in the parliamentary process as it became more and more clear that a major war was about to begin. Her work was interrupted by several prison terms for political agitation. Her faction was strongly against World War I, calling for conscientious objection against military service.
Together with Karl Liebknecht, she created the Internationale group, which later became the Spartacist League, at the end of 1915 (January 1, 1916.) This, in turn, was part first of the Social Democratic Party, and then, of the Independent Social Democratic Party, before it became the nucleus of the Communist Party of Germany.
On June 28, 1916, Luxemburg, along with Karl Liebknecht, was sentenced to two years imprisonment. During this time she wrote several articles, including The Russian Revolution, which criticised the Bolsheviks on a number of scores, and presciently warned of the danger that a dictatorship would develop under Bolshevik rule. Nonetheless, she remained a loyal supporter of Lenin's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", and forbade the publication of this unfinished document.
Luxemburg was active in the 1918 German Revolution as an agitator and founder of the Spartacist League. Along with Karl Liebknecht, in December of 1919 she had the group change its name to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and join the Comintern, in solidarity with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to work for international revolution. In January of 1919, the newly renamed Communist Party staged the so-called Spartacist uprising in Berlin, which she and Liebknecht opposed as being adventurist. She claimed that the Spartacist League/Communist Party didn't yet have enough support among the German workers to stage an effective revolution, and as it turned out, she was right. The revolution was easily suppressed by the remains of the Imperial German military, the SPD, and the various right-wing militias known as Freikorps.
Luxemburg was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, along with Liebknecht, on January 15, 1919, by soldiers of the Freikorps in Berlin. Her body was then dumped into the river, and her remains were recovered some months later. Hundreds of KPD members were similarly killed.
The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization was the central feature of her thought, according to which spontaneity and organization are not two completely seperate things, but different moments of the same process, which cause each other. These theoretical insights produce the idea of a basic, spontaneous class struggle; and through this, they build to a higher theoretical level.
"The working classes in every country learn first of all that their struggles are fought... Social democracy.. is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and especially the watchwords, of the workers' struggle. Simply in developing these struggles, social democracy creates clues for the way forward." (In a Revolutionary Hour: What Next?, Collected Works 1.2, p. 554)
Spontaneity is always mediated by organization, just as organization must be mediated by spontaneity. Nothing could be more wrong than to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of holding the idea of an abstract "spontaneity".
She developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization under the effect of a wave of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905. She didn't regard organization like the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International did, as the product of scientific-theoretic insight into historical imperatives, but rather as that of the struggles of the working classes.
"Social democracy is the embodiment of the consciousness of the historic consequences which will arise from the modern proletariat's class struggles. Its intrinsic guidance is in the reality of the masses themselves, and in conceptualizing the dialectic of their development process. The more that social democracy develops itself, grows larger, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own fates, their own direction, and the determination of their own proper principles into their own hands. And as the entire social democracy movement is only the self-aware advance guard of the proletarian class' stirring, social democracy must remain true to the words of the Communist Manifesto in every single moment of the ongoing struggle of liberation; and every partial group interst of the workforce is the other side of the interests of the entire group together; so, the inside of social democracy, its leaders, are more powerful, more influential, and aware of themselves only as the mouthpiece of the will and striving of the enlightened masses; only as agents carrying out the objective laws of class-stirring." (The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, p. 280)
and:
"The modern proletarian class doesn't direct its struggle to any particular end, or according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern worker's struggle is a piece of history, a piece of social development, and we are learning how to fight during the fight, amidst history, amidst developent... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal cultural working is epoch-defining, that's what lies in the modern worker's awakening: that first the overwhelming masses of the working people become conscious of themselves, that they start to believe, and that they begin to appreciate that they can forge the weapons of their own liberation." (The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions, Collected Works 2, p. 465)
In an article published just before the October Revolution, Luxemburg characterized the Russian February Revolution of 1917 as a revolution of the proletariat, and said that the liberal bourgeois were pushed to movement by the display of proletarian power. The task of the Russian proletariat was now to end the imperialist world war, in addition to struggling against the imperialist bourgeois. The imperialist world war made Russia ripe for a socialist revolution. Therefore "the German proletariat are ... posed a question of honour, and a very fateful question." (ibid., p. 245)
Her sharp criticism of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks was lessened insofar as she explained the errors of the revolution and of the Bolsheviks with the "complete failure of the international proletariat" (On the Russian Revolution, GW 4, p. 334). Despite all the criticism, it remains to the Bolshevik's credit that they dared to execute the revolution at all.
"In this breaking of new social ground in the very lap of bourgeois society, in this international undercutting and reduction of class antagonism lies the historical merit of Bolshevism, and because of this feat — like always in large historic connections — the particular mistakes and errors of the Bolsheviks are insubstantial and disappear. (Fragment on War, National Questions, and Revolution, Collected Works 4, p. 366)
After the October Revolution, it became the "historic responsibility" of the German workers to carry out a revolution for themselves, and thereby end the war (The Historic Responsibility, GW 4, p. 374). When a revolution also broke out in Germany in November, of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg immediately began agitating for a proper socialist revolution:
"The abolition of capital's lordship, the realization of a socialist social order — this, and nothing less, is the historical theme of the present revolution. It's a formidable undertaking, and one that won't be accomplished in the blink of an eye just by issuing a few decrees. It will only be accomplished through the self-aware action of the working masses in city and country, a calling that lasts a lifetime. Only through the people's highest mental preparedness and inexhaustable idealism can the revolution be brought providentially through all storms and find its way safely into the harbor." (The Beginning, Collected Works 4, p. 397)
The social revolution demands that power is in the hands of the masses, in the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils. This would be the program of the revolution. It would be, however, a far cry from the soldiers — from the "Guards of the Reaction" (Gendarmen der Reaktion) — to the revolutionary proletariat.
The party, the advance guard of the working class, has only to give the masses of workers the insight that socialism is inevitable, and put forth the socialist revolution. The internal contradictions of capitalism, the antagonism between capital and labor, will keep the revolution occupied. The revolution will, however, educate the masses, and will make revolutionaries out of them:
"History is the only true teacher. The revolution is the best school for the proletariat. The revolution will, therefore, worry that the "little troop" of the slandered and pursued comes around, step by step, to the right worldview: to see themselves as a fierce and victorious mass of revolutionary, socialist proletarians." (The National Conference of the Spartacist League, Collected Works 4, p. 478)
The task of the party is only to educate the backwards masses so that they become independent, to enable them to take over power themselves. Educating these working masses about their historic mission as part of the revolution is called creating the "self awareness of the working classes", and the party can completely effect this. The revolution itself can only be completely brought about through the working class. A party that acts as a guardian for the working class represents it (for example, in parliament), acts on its behalf, and must guard against counterrevolutionary elements.
Rosa Luxemburg's traditional last words, written on the evening of her murder, were about her belief in the masses, and in the inevitability of revolution:
"The leadership screwed up. Even so, the leadership can and must create anew, from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the bottom line, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; then this 'defeat' developed into a link in the chain of historical defeats, which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And therefore, from this 'defeat' the future victory will bloom.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' Their dull, stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow, the revolution will have already reoriented itself and will rattle up to the heights, and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I will be!"
(Order reigns in Berlin, Collected Works 4, p. 536)
The East German government named Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and its U-Bahn station on the U2 line in Berlin's historic city center, Mitte, after her. The Volksbühne (People's Theatre) sits on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Since she died well before East Germany was founded, the name has been left unchanged after reunification.
The grave of Rosa Luxemburg on the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in Berlin
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