INTRODUCTION TO ROSA LUXEMBURG

Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc

Perhaps more than any other Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg has been remembered in various and diverse works of art: in lithographs by Conrad Felixmüller and Käthe Kollwitz; poems by Bertolt Brecht and Oskar Kahnel; fiction by Alfred Döblin; film by Margaretha von Trotta; painting by Diego Rivera and R. B. Kitaj; and more recently in a novel by Jonathan Rabb and music by the British 'post-punk' bands Ludus and The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Possibly this is because although her life was short – she was only 48 when she was killed – she had a profound impact on world history. In fact, thousands gather in Berlin on the anniversary of her death, bringing red carnations to honour her memory.

Nor is Luxemburg simply a focal-point for the European avant-garde. In 2003 Dr Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, South Africa's then Minister of Arts and Culture and prominent in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), commemorated the anniversary of the assassination of South African Communist Chris Hani with a speech highlighting Luxemburg's famous remarks on socialist democracy: 'Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege.' In the following year, a remarkable gathering of radical students and township activists well to the left of the ANC placed Red Rosa at the centre of a 2004 Conference on War and Imperialism. The People's Republic of China has hosted more than one international conference on Rosa Luxemburg in recent years. In an Indian political context in which the left is overwhelmingly dominated by Communist parties largely influenced by traditions associated with Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, one of the most important left-wing scholars, Dr Sobhanlal Datta Gupta of the University of Calcutta, has presented a remarkable volume interweaving Luxemburg's writings with those of V. I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Lukács.

Rosa Luxemburg was the product of an age of change and instability, when socialism was central to a mass labour movement, and worldwide socialist revolution was a concrete possibility. Her premature death also marks a turning point in history. Close analysis of this moment, as in Pierre Broué's monumental history of the German Revolution, for example, brings to mind an alternative reality, one in which Luxemburg was not murdered; socialist revolution succeeded in Germany, rescued Soviet Russia and spread across the globe; and the twentieth century was spared Stalinism, fascism, and World War II.

But while such speculation may be tempting, it is more fruitful to look instead at the tangible legacy left to us by Rosa Luxemburg, which is both inspiring and instructive to those seeking progressive social change. Her clear sighted contributions to Marxism offer much that is relevant today: elaboration of the destructive and anarchic process of capitalist accumulation, inherently prone to militarism, imperialism, and crises; recognition of the impossibility of gradually reforming away these negatives, and therefore of the necessity of a revolutionary strategy; and an understanding of the world's working class as the vibrant force capable both of winning reforms and of forging a humane and sane alternative.

Early Life in Poland

Rosa Luxemburg grew up in Russian occupied Poland at a time of rapid economic and social transformation. She was born in 1871 (shortly before the insurgency of the French workers that led to the Paris Commune) in the Lublin border district, where many of the privations of serfdom were intact, even while young capitalist development brought new hardships. The Luxemburg family was relatively well off – her father managed a timber business – but nonetheless experienced periods of financial hardship, and of course faced the particular discrimination against Jews in Poland. Her parents were literate and cultured, and the children were encouraged to read broadly and achieve a rounded education. The family moved to Warsaw, which offered more opportunities even for those who suffered the triple 'yoke of oppression' in the words of Rosa's main biographer, Paul Frölich: '[Rosa Luxemburg] belonged to the Russian people enchained by tsarism, the Polish people suppressed by foreign rule, and to the down trodden Jewish minority.' She was also female in a patriarchal society, and, due to a mistreated hip disease in childhood, suffered a physical disability. These personal experiences, and the suffering she saw around her – in addition to pervasive and brutal class inequality, at the age of ten she witnessed a violent pogrom – must surely have contributed to her lifelong abhorrence of oppression. While still at school she wrote a poem containing the line 'I want to burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden, bitter tears.' At the end of the nineteenth century the confluence of democratic revolution and industrial capitalist transformation was galvanising the global socialist movement. Luxemburg was part of this development in Poland: as a teenager she joined the underground party, Proletariat, that was engaged in organising trade unions and strikes, and running illegal factory circles around illicit Marxist literature. When that organisation was crushed by a series of mass arrests and executions, Luxemburg, like many of the other surviving members, went into exile.

The next period of her life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland, where she acquired a formal education at the university – she was awarded her doctorate in Public Law and Political Science in 1898 – and also became immersed in the exile Marxist networks that thrived there. Even at this young age she showed the political independence and courage that were to become her trademarks; she was never afraid to challenge the established authorities whether in the University or the Marxist movement. She soon started to make an impact in the Second Socialist International, the federation of parties from different nations that succeeded...