Rosa Luxembourg
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Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg, a female Marxist and Polish-Jew, was a key player in the socialist movement in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. She played a role in the movements in Russia, Poland, and Germany. She was a political theorist, economist, teacher, and a philosopher. She held her beliefs close to her, and was not afraid to share them with anyone. This paper will discuss her life as well as some of the publications that made her an international icon and social reformer.
Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870 in Russian Poland. Her parents were both Jewish and she grew up the youngest of five children in the town of Warsaw. She was smart and ambitious; only a select amount of Jews were allowed into the Catholic high school that she attended, and they had to pass a difficult entrance exam to get in. Although she was handicapped by a limp that was caused by poor treatment of a dislocated hip at the age of five, she still remained active and played sports. Through these experiences, she gained a sympathy with the oppressed which would be the basis of her political and economic beliefs.
At the age of sixteen, Rosa became interested in politics and joined the Socialist Proletariat party. When she joined, in 1886, the Proletariat was only four years old and already outlawed due to a general strike they had organized. As a result of the strike, four of the leaders were put to death and the party was broken up; however, a few members managed to keep the organization alive and Rosa joined one of these groups. She felt very strongly about socialism, believing that if workers had a say in their working conditions and wages this would lead to each person achieving their own full potential. However, her beliefs were considered rebellious and kept her from receiving a gold medal in academic achievement which she qualified for as a senior in high school.
She left Poland in 1889, and there are many different stories as to how and why she left. One story, possibly made up by Luxemburg herself, has her being smuggled out of Poland by a priest in a peasants cart under some straw. However, this story is false; she had a valid passport, and used it to leave Poland legally. She fled to Zurich, Switzerland because Russian police imprisoned most of the leaders of the Proletariat; a fate she would have shared if she remained in the country. At nineteen she enrolled in Zurich University, where she studied botany, mathematics and politics.
After college, she and Leo Jorgisches, a fellow socialist and her longtime lover, started their own Socialist newspaper in Paris. They started the newspaper as a reaction to nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. In 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany and married a Gentile to gain German citizenship. Already a leader in the international Socialist movement, Rosa joined Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany. However, she did not join the SPD in search of power; in fact, she was very suspicious of the Germans and believed they were suspicious of her as well. Instead, she aimed at making a career for herself, and was more interested in influence. She wanted to influence people, and she wanted people to influence her as well. She had already founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) in 1893 with Jorgisches, and felt more connected to that party rather than the SPD due to her nationality.
During her membership in the SPD, she feuded with Eduard Bernstein and his Revisionism Theory. Revisionists, like Bernstein, believed that through more democratic rights and better parliamentary needs, socialism would eventually be achieved without the need of revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, believed that this idea missed the struggle for social reforms which is needed for the goal of social revolution. In her essay “Social Reform or Revolution?” she states:
“The practical daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class struggle and working in the direction of the final goal–the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labor. For Socialist Democracy, there is an indissoluble tie between social reforms and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. (Luxemburg 1899: 52)”
Overall, Luxemburg believed that legislative reform would not gradually lead to fall of capitalism, but rather that suppression of capitalism and the abuses that it entails should be the goal of social reform. While Bernstein and the other revisionists believed that trade unions and electoral reform would eventually evolve into socialism, Luxemburg believed that those trade unions should be used as tools for reform.
After joining the SPD, Luxemburg was reluctantly