Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German revolutionary and agitator who played a key role in the founding of the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League, which grew into the Communist Party of Germany. As a political theoretician, Luxemburg developed a humanitarian theory of Marxism, stressing democracy and revolutionary mass action to achieve international socialism. She became involved in underground activities while still in high school and emigrated to Zürich in 1889. There she studied law and political economy, receiving a doctorate in 1898. She challenged both the Russian and the Polish socialist movements because of their support of national independence, which she regarded as a bourgeois diversion from the class struggle. She moved to Berlin in 1898 and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), becoming one of its most prominent and radical leaders. She opposed the revisionist trend within the SPD led by Eduard Bernstein, who advocated a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism. She also criticized the party's parliamentary and trade-union tactics, calling for more militant and spontaneous forms of mass action. She was a fierce opponent of World War I and the SPD's support for it. She co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht and other left-wing socialists. She was imprisoned several times for her anti-war activities and wrote some of her most influential works in jail, such as The Accumulation of Capital (1913), a critique of capitalism as a system of perpetual growth and expansion, and The Russian Revolution (1918), a defense of the Bolsheviks against their critics, but also a warning against their authoritarian tendencies. After the German Revolution of November 1918, she co-founded the Communist Party of Germany and the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). She supported the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, but considered it a blunder. She was captured, tortured and executed by the Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary group, on January 15, 1919. Her body was dumped into the Landwehr Canal and only recovered months later. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential and inspiring figures of the socialist movement and a martyr of the communist cause.