Rosa Luxemburg cheered the Russian Revolution, then warned against its authoritarianism
A Marxist who defended democracy against fellow revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg argued with reformists, nationalists and Bolsheviks alike. She coined the slogan socialism or barbarism in a prison cell, co-founded Germany's Communist Party, and was killed in 1919. Stalinists later branded her ideas a heresy, while the New Left embraced them.
Born on 5 March 1871 in Zamość, in Russian-ruled Poland, Rozalia Luksenburg grew up in a secular, assimilated Jewish family that spoke Polish and German at home. A hip problem misdiagnosed as tuberculosis kept her in a cast for a year at age five, during which she taught herself to read, and left her with a lifelong limp. At her Warsaw girls' school, where Polish was banned and Jewish places were capped, she joined clandestine socialist circles and was denied the gold medal her marks deserved. In 1889, facing arrest, she was smuggled over the border, reportedly under straw in a cart.
Zurich gave her an education on equal terms with men. She moved from science to law and political economy, and in 1897 earned one of the world's first doctorates in the subject awarded to a woman, with a thesis on Poland's industrial development. There she also met Leo Jogiches, her partner of fifteen years. Together they founded a Polish party that rejected national independence in favour of joint revolution across the Russian Empire, a stance she once defended at an international congress by climbing onto a chair to be heard.
A marriage of convenience gave her German citizenship, and in May 1898 she moved to Berlin. Her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? attacked Eduard Bernstein's case for abandoning revolutionary aims. The 1905 upheaval in Russia inspired her theory of the mass strike, and The Accumulation of Capital of 1913 argued that imperialism grew from capitalism's need to expand into non-capitalist regions.
Opposing the First World War put her in prison for most of it; there she wrote the Junius Pamphlet. A manuscript published after her death praised the 1917 revolution yet criticised the Bolsheviks' curbs on democratic freedom, which some later read as a forecast of Stalinism. Freed in the German Revolution, she helped launch the Communist Party of Germany. After the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin was crushed by the Freikorps, she and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered.
Source: Rosa Luxemburg
