Rosa Luxemburg: biography of this Marxist philosopher and activist.

A summary of the life and political and intellectual legacy of Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg.

Known as "the Red Rose," Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born Jewish leader who had an enormous impact on early 20th century German society.

Her strong Marxist-based ideas and her criticism of armed conflicts, in which brothers were pitted against brothers, made her cry out to heaven and she defended that workers' strikes were the best way to demonstrate against the conflicts perpetrated by the capitalist powers.

Despite being a victim of the prejudices of her time against who she was, she overcame the obstacles and became one of the great female voices of the workers' revolution. Let's discover who this political leader was through a biography of Rosa Luxemburg. a biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

Brief biography of Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-German revolutionary who started working in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and who was an inspiration for the communist movements in Europe.

Despite being a supporter of the doctrines originally defended by her party, her criticism of the belligerent drift of the party and the Second German Reich in the course of World War I cost her imprisonment on several occasions.

She was a prolific writer, with a vast theoretical and practical production.. In her works stand out the themes that are part of her legacy and that constitute, after her death, what was called "Luxemburgism", a Marxist school with its own characteristics: pacifist, against revisionism and defender of democracy in the heart of the revolution. Her positions, sometimes very inflexible, made her confront very relevant figures within Marxist socialism such as Lenin, Trotski, Bernstein and even Kautsky.

Rosa Luxemburg always argued in favor of internationalism as a way of thinking, living and acting. Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto ended with the famous phrase "Workers of all countries, unite!" and Luxemburg together with Karl Liebknecht would make it their own, especially in the course of the First World War. Social democracy had traditionally advocated that, in the event of war between capitalist powers, the workers should refuse to fight and go on general strike, but this was not the case with the Social Democrats.But this was not the case of the SPD, in whose actions the fatherland prevailed over social class and supported the war.

It is for all this that the figure of Rosa Luxemburg has acquired such a transcendental role in recent history. Critical of the war and critical of those who did not apply true internationalist Marxism. Added to this, her condition as a Polish and Jewish woman, a fighter against adversity in a society in which practically everyone put obstacles in her way, has made her a true feminist reference.

Early years

Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871 in Zamość, near Lublin, in Poland under the Russian Empire.. Her parents were Eliasz Luksenburg III, a lumber merchant, and her mother was Line Löwenstein, being the fifth daughter of the marriage. She grew up in the bosom of a family of Jewish origin in a society in which, if the Poles already had a hard time to stand out in the Czarist Russia, it was even harder for the Jews.

But in spite of prejudice and adversity, Rosa Luxemburg's brilliant intelligence enabled her to study, attending a women's institute in Warsaw in 1880.. She was so intelligent that, years later, her friend Franz Mehring would define her as "the best head after Marx", although she did not stand out for having good organizational skills.

As for her physical appearance, she was a mixture of strength and tenderness, described as a small woman, with a large head and typically Jewish features with a large nose and a slight limp due to a congenital defect. The first impression was not very favorable, but it was enough to talk to her for a few minutes to discover the life and energy that this woman of great intellect and impeccable oratory harbored.

Exile to Switzerland and refuge in Germany

While attending the women's high school, she had the opportunity to hear about the Polish leftist party "Proletariat", which she eventually joined. When she finished her studies, and due to her socialist militancy, Luxemburg had to go into exile in Switzerland in 1889 at the age of 18.. She would end up in Zurich, where she would study in its university several careers at the same time: philosophy, history, politics, economics and mathematics.

In the Helvetic country he not only dedicated himself to study, but also to establish contact with other socialist exiles, expanding even more his knowledge of the socialist movement.In 1898, he decided to move to Germany, where he was to become a member of a group of socialist exiles, further expanding his knowledge of Marxism and feeding his desire for revolution, especially in his country of origin.

In 1898 he decided to move to Germany with the intention of joining the powerful German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and participate in the theoretical debates, heated since the death of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Luxemburg was the only one of all who remained firm to Marxist ideas so that, from 1906, she occupied important positions in the leadership of the party together with Karl Liebknecht.

In this period, Luxemburg founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and created a newspaper called "The Workers' Cause". She was not a nationalist, nor did she believe in the self-determination of the Poles or other peoples. She wanted the workers of the world to unite obviating national and cultural borders. However, the fact that she was born in a country under the rule of another made her understand the necessity and potential of revolution and resistance in the face of historical injustices.

In 1898 Berlin became his home, where he would live for the rest of his life.. There she married Gustav Lübeck, the son of a friend with whom she never lived, but which helped her to obtain German citizenship. This was a strategic move, since Rosa Luxemburg was convinced that Germany would begin the definitive revolution.

Luxemburg associated herself with Karl Kautsky and became the representation of the orthodoxy of Marxism against the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. She made important theoretical contributions regarding imperialism and the collapse of capitalism, which in her opinion she considered that it was only a matter of time before it happened.

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Beginnings of the 20th century

Between 1904 and 1906 Luxemburg was turned into political prey because of her constant manifestos against imperialism and wars against other powers.policies that ironically had been defended by the SPD. While she was not a prisoner, she devoted herself to teaching future party members, among them Friedrich Ebert, future president of the Weimar Republic. Curiously, it was Ebert who would give the order to imprison the insurrectionist communists after the First World War.

In 1913 Luxemburg published what is considered her main work: "The Accumulation of Capital" ("Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus"). In this book he made important contributions to Marxism, above all related to imperialism and the theory of the general strike. Although in this work a clearly revolutionary spirit and supporter of strikes is captured, Luxemburg also stands out for being critical of violence and opting for pacifism.

With the passage of time she also distanced herself from Kautsky. she also distanced herself from Kautsky and the rest of the party as they moved towards parliamentary methods.. This would end up making her the main leader of the most left wing of the SPD. Despite this, she was also critical of her main leftist referents, among them Vladimir Lenin himself for his centralist and authoritarian conception of the party of professional revolutionaries.

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The Spartacist League

At the beginning of the First World War (1914-1918) Rosa Luxemburg would lead together with Karl Liebknecht several protests, motivated by the fact that the SPD had definitively renounced pacifist internationalism and supported the conflict. As a result of criticizing her own party and the decisions that Germany was taking in the war, Luxemburg would return to prison in 1915, being already known as "the Red Rose".

Despite her imprisonment, Luxemburg continued to be enormously influential, writing from prison.. During the time she remained in the shadows, Rosa Luxemburg wrote together with other members of the party critical of it the so-called "Spartacus Letters", pamphlets of opposition to the armed conflict signed in the name of the mythical Thracian gladiator.

These letters eventually became the basis of the Spartacist movement, also known as the "Spartacist League" founded in 1918, the year in which Luxemburg was released from prison. A year later, this league would definitely split from the SPD and become the German Communist Party (KPD).

But despite being the intellectual founder of the German Communist Party, Luxemburg wrote several essays in which she warned of the dangers of the Bolshevik revolution ending in a dictatorship. After the Russian Revolution of October 1917, Luxemburg reprimanded the Bolsheviks for dissolving the elected Constituent Assembly and eliminating the rival parties. She herself said:

"Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party, however numerous they may be, is not freedom at all.

And she defended:

"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for him who thinks differently".

Last years and death

At the end of World War I and Germany was defeated, Luxemburg advocated to participate in the Assembly that would end up giving rise to the Weimar Republic, something his comrades did not support.This was not supported by her communist comrades who decided to organize an insurrectionary movement. These were post-war times, a dark time for Germany, which had just seen its Emperor Wilhelm II forced to abdicate.

In 1919 Luxemburg, together with her colleague Liebknecht, decided to launch the Spartacist Revolution. From January 5 to 12, 1919, Berlin became the scene of a general strike of major proportions.. The demonstrators dreamed of replicating on German soil what had happened in Russia, putting an end to the tyranny of the few and giving the decision to rule to all. It was the stepping stone to a proletarian society.

These strikes in the German capital would become known as the Spartacist Uprising, although in reality the Spartacist League neither called nor led it. Nevertheless, and given the great significance that the movement was acquiring, the League eventually cooperated, albeit reluctantly. In fact, Rosa Luxemburg herself Rosa Luxemburg herself pointed out that the situation in Germany in 1919 and that of Russia in 1917 was not the sameand that the people did not have what it took to overthrow the government.

And, indeed, she was right. Everything was against her, and it was this insurrection that would mark the end of the Polish-German leader. The president of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, who would have been Luxemburg's pupil, ordered the Freikorps to stop the rebellion. This paramilitary group, considered a kind of pro-Thonazi, arrested Rosa Luxemburg together with Karl Liebnecht on January 15, 1919.

She was beaten, tortured and humiliated. One of the paramilitary broke her skull by hitting her with the butt of his rifle. With Blood gushing from her wound, they put Rosa Luxemburg in a car where she would be shot to death and thrown into the Landwehr canal of Berlin. She was 47 years old.

Four and a half months later a corpse was found that was concluded to be that of Rosa Luxemburg judging by her gloves and the remains of her dress.. Although it cannot be affirmed that those were her real remains, her discovery and subsequent burial was an event that allowed the people to express their pain and the feeling of seeking justice. Hated and loved in equal parts, those who idolized her made a lot of noise to let the world know that a great leader was gone.

She would be fired at her funeral by her friend Clara Zetkin, a fellow member of the Spartacist league, with the following words:

"In Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist idea was a dominant and powerful passion of the heart and the brain; a truly creative passion that burned incessantly. (...) Rosa was the sharp sword, the living flame of the revolution".

It is believed that the last words written by the influential Marxist leader were:

"Tomorrow the revolution will rise vibrant and will announce with its fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am and I will be!".