Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the leading Marxist thinkers and revolutionary activists of her era, first in Russian Poland and then in Germany. Born in Zamość in Russian Poland (today in Poland) to an assimilated merchant family, Luxemburg studied at a Russian gymnasium and was fluent in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German. Turning to revolutionary activism in her teens in the ranks of Russian Poland’s first socialist party Proletariat, Luxemburg fled a police crackdown to Zurich, where she enrolled in the university and completed her doctorate in 1898. She returned to Poland from Germany to play an important role in Polish Marxist mobilization during the 1905 Revolution. In Germany once again at the outbreak of World War I, Luxemburg organized the Spartacus League to draw together internationalist socialists resisting army service and the descent into war. Across these peregrinations, she emerged as an important theorist of how capitalism’s need to find new markets and resources provoked imperial expansion. She also elaborated a conception of revolutionary socialism that attempted to hold together commitment to immediate and violent proletarian revolution with an insistence that revolutionary socialism could and must be an internally democratic form allowing dissent and driven by worker spontaneity rather than a vanguard party; she became an early and insightful critic of Lenin’s one-party dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Identifying personally with Polish culture to a considerable degree, Luxemburg had deep sympathies for the Polish national cause, though she rejected the idea of creating a Polish nation-state. By contrast, she had no interest in Jewish life nor any sympathy for the East European Jewish plight or Jewish efforts to redress it outside internationalist socialism. Along with fellow Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg was killed by right-wing militia in Berlin in 1919 amid an abortive effort at revolutionary takeover and violent repression by the German right and the fledgling Weimar state.