A hero for our time: Rosa Luxemburg
She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, who ended her life in the violent and extreme world born from the chaos and massacres of the first world war. A revolutionary, she was also a sharp and lucid critique of the rising bolshevik dictatorship in Russia. Born in 1871 in Zanosc, in the Polish area of Russia, “at sixteen, when she graduated at the top of her class from the girls’ gymnasium in Warsaw, she was denied the gold medal because of “an oppositional attitude toward the authorities.”” She was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Poland, and witnessed the failed revolution of 1905 in Russia. With Karl Liebknecht, the only deputy in the Reichstag to vote against German participation to the war in 1914, she became one of the leaders of the socialist movement in Germany, from 1898 until her murder in 1919 during the suppression of the Spartakusbund uprising in Berlin.
In “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals”, first published in 1913, and her most important theoretical book, Rosa deconstructed the mechanism of reproduction and survival of capitalism, from its origins to the present. Her work is one of a handful of reliable guides for those who wish to understand how and why we are where we are, and what really leads to economic crises, financial collapse and misery for a majority of us.
In January 1919, on the orders of the new chancellor Friedrich Ebert, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested, and brutally murdered while in police custody by the lost soldiers of the Freikorps, who were soon to form the backbone of the National-Socialist party, the Nazis.
On the evening of her murder she wrote:
“The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this ‘defeat’ into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this ‘defeat’.
‘Order reigns in Berlin!’ You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I shall be!”
Clara Zetkin wrote: “In Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both mind and heart, a consuming and creative passion. To prepare for the revolution, to pave the way for socialism – this was the task and the one great ambition of this exceptional woman. To experience the revolution, to fight in its battles – this was her highest happiness. With will-power, selflessness and devotion, for which words are too weak, she engaged her whole being and everything she had to offer for socialism. She sacrificed herself to the cause, not only in her death, but daily and hourly in the work and the struggle of many years. She was the sword, the flame of revolution.”
Related Articles
- Radical Heroes: Rosa Luxemburg (prolecenter.wordpress.com)
- Count Harry Kressler Liveblogs the Suppression of the Spartikists (delong.typepad.com)
- Karl Liebknecht in the German Reichstag, 1914, on World War I (delong.typepad.com)
