I want to affect people like a clap of thunder,
to inflame their minds not by speechifying
but with the breadth of my vision,
the strength of my conviction
and the power of my expression.
— Rosa Luxemburg, letter to Leo Jogiches, 19 April 1899.
Although Rosa Luxemburg is included in a previous diary about Women’s History Month, I wanted to do a somewhat longer article.
Rosa Luxemburg is not well known in America outside of Socialist circles but she was a truly amazing woman and deserves to be remembered. She was born in March of 1871, just over 150 years ago, in Poland, to an upper-middle class Jewish family. At age five she became very ill and suffered an injury to her hip that left her with a permanent limp and she never grew taller than 4'10".
Her part of Poland was under the control of Tsarist Russia at the time and opportunities were limited. Nonetheless she was active in politics even in high school, and worked to organize a general strike. She had to work in secret because of the Russification laws of the occupation. Eventually she fled to Switzerland.
In a time when most women did not, or could not, go to college, Rosa obtained a PhD in Law from the university in Zurich with a dissertation on The Industrial Development of Poland. After graduating, she spent most of her life in Berlin.
Throughout her life Dr Luxemburg was a passionate advocate for the working class and for democracy. She opposed imperialism and in fact argued that the worker’s struggle against oppression went beyond national borders..
Why speak of national self-determination? Under capitalism the nation does not exist! Instead we have classes with antagonistic interests and rights. The ruling class and the enlightened proletariat can never form one undifferentiated national whole.
She had wide ranging interests and was a prolific writer, authoring several books, her most famous being the 1913 The Accumulation of Capital, an extension of the ideas in Karl Marx's Capital of 40 years earlier. She published pamphlets, a common means of getting the word out in those pre-internet days, and also edited the party newspaper "Rote Fahne" (The Red Flag). She taught classes at the party's school to train members in socialist ideas.
She gave speeches, needing to stand on a chair so that she could be seen.
Luxemburg spoke four languages. There was an interesting event where, after she delivered a speech at the Second International (in German), a representative from France stood up to make some counter arguments. He spoke in French, which most people there did not understand. Rosa then repeated the Frenchman’s remarks in German, including the attacks on herself, before giving her response.
When the Social Democratic Party began to split on the issue of whether revolutionary tactics were still appropriate, she argued for holding to the previous line based on Marxism and against the idea that capitalism could be reformed from the inside, just by regulating businesses.
She was very much against Germany becoming involved in World War One and went to prison for most of that war because of her position. This did not stop her from writing letters:
“I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” — Rosa Luxemburg, in a letter to Mathilde Wurm, February 16, 1917.
While being a colleague of V. Lenin in promoting socialism, they disagreed about tactics. In her article The Russian Revolution (1918), criticizing Lenin and Trotksy, she wrote in support of democracy for the proletariat, "Freedom only for the members of one party isn’t freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently." (Here she makes a distinction between democracy for the working class and democracy for the bourgeoisie of the sort envisioned by the authors of the early U.S. Constitution.) But they continued to respect each other and she even had him to her house for tea!
In 1918, Rosa split from the Social Democratic party and formed, along with Karl Liebknecht, The Spartacus League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
On January 15, 1919, Dr Rosa Luxemburg was brutally murdered by fascist thugs on the orders of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Her naked body was dumped in a canal in Berlin. She was 47. Karl Liebknecht was shot.
V. Lenin wrote:
She was — and remains for us — an eagle. And not only will communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete work… will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.
In January 2019, the 100th anniversary of her death, 10,000 people marched in remembrance in Berlin.
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” — Rosa Luxemburg
Further reading