2 – Rosa Luxemburg
“With a will, determination, selflessness and devotion for which words are too weak, she consecrated her whole life and her whole being to Socialism. She gave herself completely to the cause of Socialism, not only in her tragic death, but throughout her whole life, daily and hourly, through the struggles of many years … She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution.” Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg’s best friend, writing in “Rosa Luxemburg, Ideas in Action”
In a list of rebellious women, Rosa Luxemburg might well be the most rebellious of any of them. She was as dedicated a revolutionary as they came, and a theorist of how revolutions should be carried out and a passionate fighter towards having one. She was lucky enough to have lived in a time in which one large revolution took place – in Russia – and several more looked likely to follow it. It was in the pursuit of creating a revolutionary situation in Germany that she met her end.
Luxemburg was not, contrary to much popular belief, German. She was born in Poland, in 1871, in the southeastern city of Zamosc, close to the border with what is now Ukraine. Her family were Jewish, but spoke both German and Polish at home, while Rosa also became proficient in Russian: at the time, Poland was controlled by Russia via a union with the Russian Tsar. Her family were liberals and she would grow up surrounded by progressive thought. By the age of 15, she had joined the Proletariat Party, a Polish political group advocating for the working class, and organised her first strike. The authorities later executed four leaders from the Proletariat Party and closed it down, but Rosa was well on the way to a life of revolutionary advocacy.
She attended university in Zürich and gained a doctorate, one of the few women to do so. Though qualified in law, economics and finance, she threw herself into the nascent socialist movement, devouring Marx’s books and founding her own radical newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza (“The Workers’ Cause”). The position of the paper was notably different to most Polish radical journals, calling for socialism rather than independence, and she later founded a social democratic party on the back of it. The struggle was centred in Germany, however, so it was to there that Rosa moved in 1897.
She grew within the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) to become one of its leading theoreticians, especially on the question of whether socialism could be achieved by reform or if a revolution was necessary. Naturally, she favoured the latter. As the First World War loomed, she agitated tirelessly against it, and argued that, should war break out, the workers of Europe should immediately call a general strike against militarism. It was in vain, however, and when the reformists within the SPD won out and eventually supported German involvement in the war, she left the party. Indeed, so deep was her despair at the way that her fellow socialists had acted, she contemplated suicide.
As the war raged, Luxemburg continued to fight her own battle against it. Her and Karl Liebknecht became leaders within a group called the “Spartacus League” and printed pamphlets against the war, which were highly illegal and found Luxemburg imprisoned for two years from 1916 to 1918. On hearing of the Bolshevik Revolution while incarcerated, she wrote a vicious pamphlet denouncing what she saw an inevitable slide towards autocracy within in. “Freedom,” she wrote, “is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”.
As Germany crumbled at the end of the war, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were freed and immediately set back to work. The Spartacist League became the Communist Party of Germany and amid a climate of strikes, mutinies and uprisings, they proclaimed a Soviet republic from the Berlin Reichstag. The SPD, who had assumed power at the end of the war, called in the Freikorps, a paramilitary group of ex-soldiers, to crush the uprising. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested, tortured and on January 15, summarily executed. Her body was thrown in Berlin’s Landwehrkanal.
Rosa Luxemburg’s life was one of tireless struggle for ideas. In the subsequent decades, she has become acknowledged as one of the great minds of the Marxism and Communist movement, as well as one of its most effective organisers. On hearing of her death, Trotsky wrote:
“We have suffered two heavy losses at once which merge into one enormous bereavement. There have been struck down from our ranks two leaders whose names will be for ever entered in the great book of the proletarian revolution: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They have perished. They have been killed. They are no longer with us!”