Rosa Luxemburg

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Lore & Background

Rosa Luxemburg was born Rozalia Luksenburg on 5 March 1871 in Zamość, Russian-controlled Congress Poland, the fifth and youngest child of a secular Jewish family. At age five, she developed a hip disease, probably a congenital hip dislocation, which was misdiagnosed as tuberculosis and left her with a permanent limp. She taught herself to read and write during a year-long confinement in a cast. In 1880, she enrolled at the Second Girls' High School in Warsaw, where admission for Jewish students was subject to a quota. The 1881 Warsaw pogrom left her with a permanent fear of mob violence. While still in her teens, she became involved in clandestine student circles associated with the revolutionary Proletariat party. By 1889, threatened with arrest, she was smuggled out of Poland with the help of her mentor, Marcin Kasprzak. In Zurich, she enrolled at the University of Zurich in 1890, switching to law and political economy in 1892. In 1893, she co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), rejecting Polish independence in favour of international class struggle. At the Second International's third congress in Zurich in 1893, her mandate was challenged by the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) delegation; she climbed onto a chair to defend her cause, and though the congress rejected her mandate, she achieved a moral victory.

Reader's Guide

Luxemburg's significance lies in her sustained critique of reformism and imperialism, and her advocacy for a democratic, mass-based socialism. After moving to Germany in 1898, she became the foremost voice of the SPD's revolutionary wing. In her 1900 pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution?, she defended the necessity of revolution against the reformist theories of Eduard Bernstein, arguing that the struggle for reforms was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Inspired by the 1905 Russian Revolution, she developed a theory of the mass strike as the proletariat's most important revolutionary tool, emphasizing the spontaneous creativity of the working class. Her major work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), argued that capitalism's need to expand into non-capitalist regions to survive was the driving force behind imperialism. During World War I, she fiercely condemned the SPD's support for the war and was imprisoned for most of the conflict. From prison, she wrote the Junius Pamphlet, which declared the war a betrayal of the working class and popularized the phrase 'socialism or barbarism'. While she celebrated the Russian Revolution of 1917, in a posthumously published manuscript she offered a sharp critique of the Bolsheviks' authoritarian policies, defending democratic freedoms and the need for a revolution rooted in mass participation. Released from prison during the German Revolution of 1918–1919, she co-founded the KPD and became a central figure in the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin. After the uprising was crushed by the Freikorps, a government-sponsored paramilitary group, Luxemburg and her comrade Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered on 15 January 1919. Following her death, Luxemburg became a heroine and martyr for Marxists. Her legacy has been a subject of intense debate, with her emphasis on spontaneity and democracy celebrated by many on the left—particularly by the New Left and those in the libertarian socialist tradition—but sharply criticized by the Stalinist tradition, which denounced 'Luxemburgism' as a heresy.

Did You Know?

• At age five, Luxemburg developed a hip disease, probably a congenital hip dislocation, which was misdiagnosed as tuberculosis and left her with a permanent limp.
• She taught herself to read and write during a year-long confinement in a cast.
• At the Second International's third congress in Zurich in 1893, she climbed onto a chair to defend her mandate against the PPS delegation.
• From prison during World War I, she wrote the Junius Pamphlet, which popularized the phrase 'socialism or barbarism'.
• She was murdered on 15 January 1919 after the Spartacist uprising was crushed by the Freikorps.