Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist and revolutionary who argued for mass democracy against Lenin and was murdered by soldiers under a Social Democratic government. Born in Zamość in Russian Poland in 1871 into a Jewish family, she had a hip condition from childhood that left her with a limp. She was politically active at school, fled to Zurich at eighteen to avoid arrest, and took a doctorate in economics there in 1897, one of the first women anywhere to do so. She co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, arguing against Polish independence on the grounds that it would divide the working class — a position that made her enemies among Polish socialists permanently. She moved to Germany in 1898 through a marriage of convenience, and became a leading figure in the SPD. Against Eduard Bernstein she argued in Reform or Revolution that gradual improvement could not by itself end capitalism, and after the Russian revolution of 1905 she wrote The Mass Strike, holding that revolutionary consciousness comes from workers' own spontaneous action rather than from a party directing them. She broke with Lenin over organisation, writing that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently, and warning in 1918 that rule by a party clique would end in dictatorship. She opposed the war from 1914 and spent most of it in prison, founding the Spartacus League from her cell with Karl Liebknecht. In the January 1919 Berlin rising, which she thought premature and joined anyway, Freikorps troops acting under the SPD government arrested her, beat her with rifle butts, shot her and threw her into the Landwehr Canal. Her body was not recovered until June, and her killers received almost no punishment.

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