Rosa Luxemburg: biography of this Marxist philosopher and activist

Known as "the Red Rose", Rosa Luxemburg was a leader of Polish and Jewish origin who had a huge impact on German society in the early 20th century.

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

Despite being a victim of the prejudices of her time against who she was, she knew how to overcome obstacles and become one of the great female voices of the workers' revolution. Let's find out who this political leader was through a biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

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Brief biography of Rosa Luxemburg

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

Despite being a supporter of the doctrines that she originally defended her party, her criticism of the belligerent drift she of the same and of the II German Reich in the course of World War I she cost to be imprisoned in several occasions.

She was a prolific writer, with vast theoretical and practical production. In her works, the themes that are part of her legacy stand out and that constitute, once she had died, what was called "Luxembourgism". a Marxist school with its own characteristics: pacifist, against revisionism and defender of democracy within the revolution. Her positions, sometimes very inflexible, made her confront very relevant figures within Marxian socialism such as Lenin, Trotsky, 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 "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" and Luxembourg together with Karl Liebknecht would make it their own, especially in the course of the First World War. The Social Democracy had traditionally defended that, in the event of war between capitalist powers, the workers should refuse to fight and go on a general strike, but this was not the case of the SPD, in whose actions the homeland prevailed over the 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. She criticizes the war and criticizes those who did not apply true internationalist Marxism. Added to this, her status as a Polish and Jewish woman fighter against adversity in a society in the that practically everyone put obstacles to her have made her a true feminist reference.

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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 timber merchant, and her mother was Line Löwenstein, the fifth daughter of the marriage. She grew up in a family of Jewish origin in a society in which, if the Poles already had it raw to stand out in Tsarist Russia, she was even more so for the Jews.

But despite prejudice and adversity, Rosa Luxemburg's brilliant intelligence allowed her to study, attending a female 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 defect congenital. The first impression of her was not very favorable, but it was enough to talk with her for a few minutes to discover the life and energy that this woman of great intellect and impeccable oratory harbored.

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Exile to Switzerland and refuge in Germany

While she was attending the girls' institute, she had the opportunity to hear about the leftist Polish party “Proletariat”, which she ended up joining. When she finished her studies, and due to her socialist militancy, Luxembourg had to go into exile to Switzerland in 1889 when she was only 18 years old.. She would go to Zurich, where she would study several majors at her university at the same time: philosophy, history, politics, economics and mathematics.

In the Swiss country she not only devoted herself to studying, but also to establishing contact with other socialist exiles, further expanding her knowledge of Marxism and fueling her desire for revolution, especially in her country of origin.

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

In this period, she Luxemburg founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and created a newspaper called "The Cause of the Workers". 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 across national and cultural boundaries. However, being born in one country under the rule of another made him understand the need and potential for revolution and resistance to historical injustices.

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

Luxembourg became associated with Karl Kautsky and became the representation of the orthodoxy of Marxism against the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. She made important theoretical contributions on imperialism and the collapse of capitalism, which in her opinion she considered to be a matter of time before it occurred.

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Early 20th century

Between 1904 and 1906 Luxembourg was turned into a political prey because of her constant protests against imperialism and wars against other powers., policies that ironically had been defended by the SPD. While she was not imprisoned she dedicated herself to teaching future members of the party, among which Friedrich Ebert future president of the Weimar Republic stands out. Curiously, Ebert would be the one who would give the order to apprehend the insurgent communists after the First World War.

In 1913 Luxembourg 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 she made important contributions to Marxism, especially related to imperialism and the theory of the general strike. Although this work captures a clearly revolutionary and pro-strike spirit, Luxembourg also stands out for being critical of violence and opting for pacifism.

With the passage of time too she 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 left-wing referents, including the Vladimir Lenin himself for his centralist and authoritarian conception of the party of revolutionaries professionals.

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The Spartacist League

At the start 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 support the conflict. As a result of criticizing his own party and the decisions that Germany was making in the war, Luxembourg would return to prison in 1915, already known as "the Red Rose".

Despite her seclusion, Luxembourg continued to greatly influence writing from prison. During the time she remained in the shadows, Rosa Luxemburg wrote along with other party members critical of her the so-called "Letters of Spartacus", pamphlets opposing the armed conflict signed in the name of the mythical gladiator Thracian.

These letters ended up becoming the bases of the Spartacist movement, also known as the "Spartacist League" founded in 1918, the year in which Luxembourg would be released from prison. A year later, this league would definitively split from the SPD and would become the German Communist Party (KPD).

But despite having been the intellectual founder of the German Communist Party, Luxembourg 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, Luxembourg rebuked the Bolsheviks for dissolving the elected Constituent Assembly and eliminating rival parties. She herself said:

"Freedom only for government supporters, only for party members, no matter how numerous, is not freedom at all.

And he defended:

"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for those who think differently."

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Last years and death

At the end of the First World War and Germany was defeated, Luxembourg advocated participating in the Assembly that would eventually give rise to the Weimar Republic, something that her fellow communists who decided to organize an insurrectional movement did not support. They were post-war times, a dark time for Germany that had just seen its emperor Wilhelm II being forced to abdicate.

In 1919 Luxembourg, together with his colleague Liebknecht, decided to launch the Spartacist Revolution. From January 5 to 12, 1919, Berlin became the scene of a large-scale general strike. The protesters dreamed of replicating on German soil the same thing that had happened in Russia, ending the tyranny of a few and giving the decision to rule all. It was the first step for a proletarian society.

These strikes in the German capital would become known as the Spartacist Uprising, although in reality the Spartacist League did not call or lead it. However, and given the great importance that the movement was acquiring, the League ended up cooperating, albeit with its reluctance. In fact, Rosa Luxemburg herself pointed out that the situation in Germany in 1919 and in Russia in 1917 was not the same, and that the people did not have what they needed to overthrow the government.

And indeed, she was right. Everything was against her, this insurrection being what would mark the end of the Polish-German leader. The President of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, who would have been a ward of Luxembourg, ordered the Freikorps to stop the rebellion. This paramilitary group, considered a kind of proto-Nazis, arrested Rosa Luxemburg along with Karl Liebnecht on January 15, 1919.

They beat, tortured and humiliated her. One of her paramilitaries broke her skull by hitting him with the butt of her rifle. With blood gushing from her wound, Rosa Luxemburg was put into a car where she would be shot dead and thrown into the Landwehr canal in Berlin. She was 47 years old.

Four and a half months later A body was found that was concluded to be Rosa Luxemburg's, judging by her gloves and the remains of her dress. Although it cannot be affirmed that these were her true remains, her discovery and subsequent burial of her 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 so that the world would know that she was a great leader.

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

“In Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist idea was a dominant and powerful passion of the heart and 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 the influential Marxist leader wrote were:

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