Rosa Luxemburg: profile of a revolutionary
By Ella McHenry
On January 9, 100,000 people marched through the streets of Germany to commemorate the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Demonstrators carried red flags, and some of the more radical marchers carried flags of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party. Police attacked the more radical wing of the demonstration and arrested 39 people for "rioting". Resistance magazine looks at what it was about Rosa Luxemburg that has inspired so many activists for so many years.
From her birth in 1871 to her murder by government troops in 1919, Luxemburg dedicated all her energy to the goal of freeing the world from injustice and oppression. She fully understood that in order to wipe out war, poverty and exploitation, it was necessary to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a system based on meeting people's needs.
When she was a high school student, Luxemburg joined an underground revolutionary movement called the Proletariat Party. At this time the risk of persecution was very real.
Soon after she left school, Luxemburg's name became known to police, and she was forced to leave Poland hidden in the back of a hay cart. She went to Switzerland, where she met members of the Bolshevik party who would go on to lead the Russian Revolution. Luxemburg quickly educated herself in Marxist theory.
Luxemburg was instrumental in setting up the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. In 1896 she moved to Berlin to work within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD was a massive organisation which maintained 90 newspapers. Its official policy was "not a person nor a farthing for this system".
Unfortunately, this revolutionary stance was undermined by party leader Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein advocated "evolutionary" socialism — a series of reforms within the capitalist system. Defending his policies, he wrote that the "final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing; the movement is everything".
Luxemburg launched into a theoretical battle with Bernstein, arguing that the "final goal of socialism is the only decisive factor distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and bourgeois radicalism".
Through this debate, Luxemburg's best-known book, Reform or Revolution, was published. She made it clear that, if injustice and oppression are to be abolished, capitalism must be overthrown.
Luxemburg was the first to recognise the reformist right-wing tendencies of the SPD. It was not until the news came that the SPD had voted to support the imperialist World War I that other revolutionaries realised Luxemburg was right.
Luxemburg and the few remaining Marxists in the party split from the SPD and formed a new underground communist party called the Spartacus League.
In 1917, Luxemburg was in jail for opposing the war. She followed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia closely, seeing it as a victory for all workers.
In 1919, she organised a revolutionary strike against the German SPD government. The government responded with a crackdown of terror. Rosa Luxemburg and her comrade Karl Liebknecht were arrested, then murdered on their way to prison.
Luxemburg engaged fully in theoretical debates within the socialist movement. In some of these debates, many Marxists agree, she took the wrong stand. For example, she did not support movements for self-determination on the basis that nationalism, even the nationalism of oppressed people, was counterposed to socialism. Luxemburg also debated Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin on the character of the party necessary to lead a socialist revolution.
But even if she was incorrect on these issues, Luxemburg's enduring contribution to the Marxist movement was her struggle against reformism. During that struggle and ever since, Luxemburg has been an inspiration to millions of socialists around the world.