Dr. Rosa Luxemburg Extended Biography
Dr. Rosa LuxemburgExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 to a small Jewish family in Russian-ruled Poland. She was born to a position of poverty and suffering. Poor in a highly unequal society. Polish under Russian rule. Jewish during a time of growing anti-Semitism. A woman during a period of great gender disparities. She was also born disabled, with a condition that left her with a permanent limp throughout her life.Don’t pity Rosa, however. She was also one of the most exceptional people of her era. Through hard work and force of will, she won her way into the second-best school for women in Warsaw, alongside the daughters of wealthy men of the Catholic majority. She was the best student at the school, although she did not get to receive her award because she was considered a ‘troublemaker’ (and probably because she was Jewish). As she grew up, she discovered left-wing politics. Rosa was inspired by the idea that women, Jews, and the poor should have all of the rights of the wealthy men who ran Russia and all of the other countries of Europe. She slowly gravitated towards socialism, but at a time when the Russian Tsars and local authorities were cracking down. After a number of her colleagues were put to death, Rosa escaped to Switzerland where she attended the University of Zurich.Switzerland in the 1880s and 1890s was a haven for socialists in exile, including Leo Jogiches, a man who fell in love with Rosa and became her long-time companion. But Rosa was mostly focused on completing her dissertation on “The Industrial Development of Poland”, for which she got her doctorate and which is probably the most important work on Polish economics before the Second World War.Now Dr. Luxemburg, Rosa became an important socialist leader and addressed the Socialist International several times, becoming in important member and engaging in many debates. In general, she was a proponent of immediate, radical change and the creation of worker-led republics. While the Russians were crushing socialism in their Polish territories, the movement was growing in Germany. Therefore, Rosa moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1897. She married an old friend to get citizenship there, although the marriage was strictly for legal reasons. She became a leader of the women’s section of the German Social Democratic movement, and called for a ‘permanent revolution’ against what she saw as oppression. She also pushed, throughout her life, for an international revolution, rather than nationalism.It was Dr. Rosa Luxemburg’s belief in the international unity of workers that led her to oppose the First World War. We all know that in general, the big powers rushed to war, with lots of popular support. However, the socialists in all countries were generally anti-war. At an international meeting of socialists, they passed a resolution in 1907 and again in 1912 that read:“If war is declared, the working classes in the countries affected... have the duty to mobilize their forces to prevent hostilities breaking out.... If, in spite of their efforts, war should break out, their duty is to struggle actively for a speedy end to the fighting and make every effort to use the economic and political crisis which the war causes to rouse the people and hasten the abolition of the capitalist class.”1In other words, socialists generally saw the war as a crime committed by the ruling classes, in which the workers would suffer. Yet when war actually broke out in 1914, many socialists ended up supporting their national effort. 1 Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, 1907, unanimously re-affirmed at its Basle Congress in 1912.
2Dr. Rosa Luxemburg - Extended BiographyThis included the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The 111 men of this party in the German parliament ultimately voted for war Unlike these men, however, Rosa did not support the war. In fact, Rosa published papers and made speeches attacking the suffering caused by the war. She believed that only big companies were profiting from the war, while people suffered. She wrote:“The cannon fodder [everyday soldiers] that was loaded onto the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields... while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead. Business is flourishing upon the ruins.... Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, capitalist society stands... as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity.”2Eventually, in 1918, an exhausted Germany could not carry on the war. German soldiers and sailors mutinied, and workers’ and soldiers’ councils seized control from the monarchy. Rosa was freed from jail on 8 November 1918, three days before the end of the war. She and fellow socialist Karl Leibknecht proclaimed a free socialist republic. But their forces were crushed by a conservative militia known as the friekorps. Dr. Rosa Luxemburg was captured by soldiers in January 1919. She was shot in the head and her body thrown into a canal.2 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy”, in Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, New York: Monthly Review, 2004.