Luxemburg grew up in Warsaw.' She was an intelligent and academically successful girl of independent spirit and, rebelling against the restrictive regime then prevalent in the schools of Russian Poland, she became involved in socialist political activity from early youth. In 1889 she had in consequence to leave Poland to avoid arrest and went to Zurich. Here she enrolled in the university, studying first mathematics and natural sciences, then political economy; and at length completed a doctoral dissertaion on Poland's industrial deve-
Active at the same time in the political life of the revolutionary emigrés from the Russian Empire and opposing the nationalism of Socialist Party, in 1894 she took the lead Jogiches, a comrade similarly engaged, in creating the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland: he was its main organizer, she its ablest intellect and voice.
The two of them had formed what was to be a long and intense relationship, the close political tie between them surviving a later personal estrangement. In 1896, wanting a wider political stage tor her energies, Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany.
Henceforth she was prominent in the important debates within European socialism. She made her mark at once during the revisionist controversy with her Social Reform or Revolu-
still perhaps the best general Marxist riposte to reformism. While capitalism endured, she contended, its crises and contradictions could not be subdued and to suggest otherwise, as Bernstein had, was to cut the very heart out of Marxism, denying the objective foundations of the socialist project and turning it into an abstract ethical utopia. The workers' movement had indeed to struggle for reforms through trade union and parliamentary activity. But as these would never suffice to abolish capitalist relations of production, it must not lose sight of its ultimate goal: the conquest ot power tor revolution.
In 1904, in Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, Luxemburg intervened in the dispute between Lenin and the Mensheviks, criticizing the former for his conception of a tightly centralized vanguard party; an attempt, as she saw it, to play guardian to the working Her themes here — characteristic of all her work — were the independent
initiative, the self-activity of the workers, their capacity to learn through their own experience and their own mistakes, the need accordingly for a broadly based democratic organization.
She had other disagreements with Lenin in these years. Although she Poland or, more generally, the slogan of a right of nations
However, their common response ROSA LUXEMBURG Hid from view
From Norman Geras Literature of Revolution to the 1905 revolution drew them closer; they both envisaged for Russia a bourgeois revolution, to be carried through under the leadership, and by the methods of struggle, of the proletariat. In the mass actions of the Russian workers Luxemburg thought to have discovered, in addition, a strategic idea of international relevance and began to urge it upon German Social Democracy, speaking in this as in other things for the left of the orga-
In her Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions, she proposed the mass strike as the form par excellence of proletaran revolution. Spontaneous expression of the creative power of the broaureaucratic inertia, it linked politica
vith economic struggles, and imme diate with far-reaching demands, in what was potentially a global challenge to the capitalist order.
In 1910 this view led to her break with Kautsky, when he rallied to the cautious, purely electoralist policy of the party leadership. Another of her preoccupations was imperialism, with its threat of war, and in 1913 in her major theoretical work, The AccumuLation of Capital, she set out to explain its underlying cause. A closed capitalist economy, she argued, without ac cess to non-capitalist social formations, must break down through inability to absorb all the surplus-value produced by it.
competitive struggle between capitalist nations for what remained of the non-capitalist environment but, by eroding the latter, it led towards the universal INTERNATIONAL No 7 November/December 1986
sway of capitalist relations and inevitable collapse of the system.
Luxemburg led the opposition to the First World War in Germany. Intellectual standard-bearer of the revolutionary internationalists gathererd in the Spartacus League, in her Junius Pamphlet and other writings she
enounced Social Democracy's p
riotic stance as a betrayal. She had spend most of the war in prison and there she wrote The Russian Revolution, in solidarity and sympathy with Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, endorsing their attempt at socialist
revolution; yet critical of their land and nationalities policy, above all of their curtailment of socialist democracy, and of their tendency in this connec tion to make a virtue out ol unfortunate necessities. Freed in late 1918 to participate in the German revolution, was brutally murdered by right-wing officers after the crushing of an abortive rising
Rosa Luxemburg's work has sometimes been interpreted as a species of political fatalism, on account of her theory of inevitable capitalist breakdown; and as displaying a boundless faith in the spontaneity of the masses. However this is to misunderstand or caricature her. The collapse of capitalism presented the proletariat with alternatives: on the one side, crisis, reaction, war, finally catastrophe and barbarism; on the other side, social-
Active struggle for socialism was therefore necessary and urgent. For her, true to a central Marxist theme, the substance of this struggle was indeed provided by the spontaneous, self-emancipatory working class. But she did not deny the need for organization, nor the importance of Marxist theory and able leadership. The division between her and Lenin has often been exaggerated. They were united by Luxemburg's lifelong concern for democracy and liberty was unambiguously that of a revolutionary Marxist and should not be confused with the criticisms of this tradition by other traditions — liberal, reformist, or anarchist — completely alien to 1 Born 5 March 1871, Zamość, Poland; died 15 January 1919, Berlin. 2 For Luxemburg's works directly referred to here, see Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York 1970, and Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, London 1963.
Pictures from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht: revolution, remembrance, representation John A. Walker Pentonville Gallery, 1986. R.B. Kitaj The murder of Rosa Luxemburg 1960 George Grosz Cheers Noske! The workers have been disarmed pen and ink 1919 L. Mies van der Rohe Monument to Karl Leibknecht and other Spartacists Berlin 1926. Destroyed by the Nazis in
1933.
ROSP LUXEMBURG+ A. Raderscheidt (a Rhenish artist) Rosa Luxemburg woodcut 1919 Epitaph 1919 Red Rosa now has vanished too. Where she lives is hid from view She told the poor what life is about And so the rich have rubbed her out. BRECHT
Rosa Luxemburg c. 1907
The campaign in the Labour
Party against British participation in NATO is gaining strength. But, argues OLIVER MACDONALD, the Labour left and the peace movement must advance its own alternative to the