Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born socialist who became one of the sharpest Marxist thinkers in the German labour movement. She attacked reformism, opposed the First World War from prison, co-founded the Communist Party of Germany, and was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries during the failed Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January 1919. Her defence of democracy within socialism has kept her influential far beyond the communist movement.

Luxemburg was born on 5 March 1871 in Zamość, in the part of Poland ruled by the Russian Empire, the youngest child of a secular Jewish timber merchant's family. The family moved to Warsaw in 1873. A childhood hip illness left her with a lifelong limp. At school, where Polish was banned and Jewish places were limited by quota, she joined clandestine socialist circles, and in 1889, facing arrest, she was smuggled across the border.

In Zurich, then a centre of exiled Russian and Polish Marxists, she studied natural sciences and then law and political economy, earning a doctorate in 1897 with a thesis on Poland's industrial development. There she began a long partnership with the revolutionary Leo Jogiches. In 1893 they helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, which, against the Polish Socialist Party, rejected Polish independence and called for a joint revolution with Russian workers.

To gain citizenship she contracted a marriage of convenience and moved to Berlin in May 1898, joining the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? (1898–99) answered Eduard Bernstein's call to abandon revolution for gradual reform, arguing that reforms were a means and revolution the aim. The Russian Revolution of 1905 drew her to Warsaw, where she was arrested in March 1906 and held for four months. Afterwards she wrote on the mass strike as the spontaneous weapon of the working class, and from 1907 taught economics at the SPD's party school. Her break with the party theorist Karl Kautsky in 1910 left her leading a small radical left. In The Accumulation of Capital (1913) she argued that capitalism needed to expand into non-capitalist regions, which drove imperialism.

When the SPD voted for war credits on 4 August 1914, at the start of World War I, Luxemburg, with Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and others, organised an anti-war opposition that became the Spartacus League. For most of the war she was behind bars. There she wrote the Junius Pamphlet, with its warning of a choice between "socialism or barbarism", and a manuscript on the Russian Revolution that welcomed it but criticised Lenin and Trotsky for dissolving the Constituent Assembly and suppressing free debate. Its most quoted line holds that freedom is always freedom for those who think differently.

Freed on 9 November 1918 as revolution swept Germany, she and Liebknecht edited the newspaper Die Rote Fahne and, at the turn of 1919, co-founded the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919 a mass protest in Berlin grew into the Spartacist uprising; she doubted its timing but supported it. The Social Democratic government used Freikorps volunteer units to crush it. On 15 January 1919 Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured, taken to the Eden Hotel and killed on the orders of Captain Waldemar Pabst. She was clubbed with a rifle butt, shot, and thrown into the Landwehr Canal; her body was found only on 31 May. The perpetrators were tried leniently or never charged.

Lenin praised her as an "eagle" while listing her errors, and under Stalin "Luxemburgism" was condemned as a heresy. Later generations of democratic socialists, the New Left and many historians have valued her insistence that socialism must rest on mass participation and political freedom.

Our 1914 map shows the German Empire and Russian Poland where she worked, and the 1920 map shows the new German republic and independent Poland after her death.