Facing oppression early on

Rosa Luxemburg addressing a crowd on a platform with banners and images of Lasalle and Marx during the International Socialist Congress, Stuttgart 1907, by Herbert Hoffmann. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Jewish revolutionary who brought democracy to the crux of Marxist thinking. She wrote and agitated from the end of the 19th century until the early 20th century.

Rosa was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Poland. She was three times an oppressed citizen: first, she was a Jew; second, she was a woman; third, she was a Polish citizen under the Russian Empire. From birth, she encountered inequality and oppression first-hand.

The Polish question

In Rosa’s time, it was fashionable in both left- and right-wing circles to support Polish independence as a way to bring down the Russian Empire. However, Rosa belonged to a very small strand of thinking that saw nationalism of any kind as wrong, as something that would strengthen the rich rather than empower the poor. When she was a teenager, she joined a party that opposed Polish nationalism, although it was a Polish party. In so doing, she joined a wave of dissent against prominent left-wing thinkers of her time such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both of whom thought that Polish independence would be a way to strengthen international solidarity and to bring the revolution forward.

As a young woman, Rosa went to study in Zurich. She initially pursued a PhD in the natural sciences, but she switched to law because she was interested in how the natural world responds to the human world, and the interactions between them. Her supervisor said that when she arrived, she was already a fully-fledged Marxist – Marxism being a theory in which we think about how economics structure human experience. She wrote her thesis on Polish nationalism, and this was her first point of entry into political thinking.

Insisting on revolution

When Rosa Luxemburg was 26, she decided to enter the larger circles of socialist thinking of her time. In 1898, she wrote a response to Friedrich Engels’s most famous student, Eduard Bernstein, in which she took down his argument that revolution could not be achieved in their time. In her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, she wrote that one has to simultaneously insist on revolution while endorsing social reforms.

Rosa, like all good revolutionaries, understood that reforms are part and parcel of any revolutionary process. But, once again in the minority, she defended the idea that you cannot put the revolution aside; you have to insist on revolutionary goals throughout the process of political agitation.

This pamphlet made her famous in socialist circles around the world. Rosa decided to move to Germany, which is where the largest socialist circles of her time were active. She positioned herself as the left-wing dissenter of her party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), where she continued to push against the move of the party to the centre and the right.

A revolutionary time

Rosa Luxemburg lived in a uniquely revolutionary time. Local uprisings were taking place in both Poland and in Russia, in what became known as the 1905 Revolution. Though not as well-known as the 1917 Revolution, this was an important attempt to dismantle the Russian Empire.

At the same time, Marx and Engels had died, and there was no one to sustain and inspire the worldwide socialist movement. Rosa sees both the void left by the lack of a major personality who would be part of the canon, behind the most important text that everyone would read, and the uprising of people all around the world. People were dissenting against power held by the bourgeoisie and the nation-state. They were trying to dismantle Empires. There were uprisings in Russia as well as South Africa – what was then called the Boer War, now referred to as the South African War.

Throughout her life, Rosa was very attentive to these uprisings and made her signature advocating socialism from the ground up. Instead of advocacy from above, from someone who writes a key text and tells everyone how to create an uprising, she advocated for a push from below, often starting with worker strikes.

An outsider’s identity

Visit of the party executive at the Reichsparteischule of the SPD in 1907. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Rosa left Poland as a very young woman. She had to hide in a cart of hay to escape to Switzerland and pursue her PhD, because she wasn’t legally allowed to cross the border. Women weren’t allowed to pursue further study in Poland, and she was insistent on expanding her knowledge.

Rosa lived all her life as an outsider, although she always felt a very strong affinity to Poland and to her Jewish roots. She wasn’t a self-hating Jew, even though some people like to position her such. She knew Yiddish and she wrote in Yiddish fairly fluently. She spoke Polish at home, although Polish was not allowed at school during her childhood. But she spent her entire political career organising outside Poland.

However, she did sustain some political connections with Poland, and she returned to observe what was going on in the revolution. She also maintained connections with her family, although she was a dangerous person to know because she was such a strong dissenter, so the family kept in touch whenever they could. But her Polish identity made her very different to the people she organised with, especially in Germany.

Revolutionary texts

Rosa wrote several important books, pamphlets, articles and speeches that became very important in the revolutionary canon. First and foremost, she wrote Social Reform or Revolution, her first intervention into the political sphere, in which she argued that we need to agitate for worker reforms, be it the eight-hour day or the abolition of child labour, but also that we must insist on revolution.

In 1913, she published another major work called The Accumulation of Capital. In this work, she tied together the causes of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. That wasn’t a very prominent position at the time, and she was a leftist outlier even in her own party, the SPD. Rosa argued that capitalism sustains imperialism, and vice versa, and that capitalism will seek non-capitalist markets to expand into. Hence, imperialism is what prevents a worldwide revolution of all workers from happening.

Rosa also edited the work of Korolenko, a famous Russian author of her time. She was interested in culture, and she understood the connection between culture, politics and social affairs. She also wrote a number of agitation fliers and pamphlets.

She was incredibly short, and yet her force in language was very strong, so she was a captivating speaker and managed to hold the crowd’s attention through her talent. One of her most famous texts is a text she wrote a day before she was murdered, called Order Prevails in Berlin. In these final words, she wrote: ‘Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!’

Defending democracy

Rosa sustained the hope for revolution her entire life. Peter Hudis, who is General Editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, positions her as the foremost thinker of democracy within the Marxist canon. She argued that the democratic process is not to be removed from the revolutionary process, and we must insist on democracy at every stage of the revolutionary process.

In 1917, Rosa wrote a pamphlet that was not published during her lifetime, which she did not want published, but in which she started criticising the beginning of the anti-democratic trends she saw pursued by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Although she was thrilled that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a massive grassroots uprising initiated by a strike of women garment workers, something that she always saw as the beginning of any true revolutionary process, she was critical of the way that the Bolsheviks had started to abolish democratic institutions in order to sustain their revolutionary rule. And in that pamphlet, she wrote: ‘Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.’ This sentence became synonymous with her thinking and showed what kind of person she was. She was a free thinker and an outsider, and throughout her life, she defended the right to be a free thinker and an outsider.

The murder of Rosa Luxemburg

The funeral of Rosa Luxemburg on June 13, 1919. German Federal Archives. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on 15 January 1919, in response to the German Revolution of 1918–1919. In this revolution, the SPD, the party to which Rosa belonged to most of her life, started gaining power, becoming closer to a position of authority. At the same time, the SPD joined forces with right-wing, proto-fascist forces that would later become some of the most central organising forces under Hitler. As a result, dissent was silenced in Germany.

The revolution wasn’t as widespread and as widely supported as the Russian Revolution, and it was ultimately unsuccessful. But for the centrist and right-wing forces, Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades, who were against this centralised version of revolution, were dangerous.

Rosa and one of her closest comrades, Karl Liebknecht, were murdered on the night of 15 January. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, because it was feared that she would become a martyr of the movement – which, in many ways, she did.

Rosa’s legacy

Rosa Luxemburg teaches us many important lessons about protest. She is an exemplar of integrity and standing up for what you think is right. She never conceded her principles. Rosa also believed in the power of democracy, and she continued to insist on the democratic process, even when it did not work in her favour.

That’s something that we must remember when we protest: democracy is a fragile institution that Rosa, and women and men like her, fought for to give us as we know it today. Rosa was an outsider. She never fully belonged in the circles in which she worked, but she always saw the world at large. She said she felt at home in the entire world. And she teaches us a lot of very important lessons on empathy and the ability to see the world from the point of view of another person, and not just focus on the oppressions that we ourselves might be up against.

Discover more about

Rosa Luxemburg and revolution

Mills, D. (2020). Rosa Luxemburg. Reaktion Books.

Mills, D. (2021). Rosa Luxemburg and Her Comrade Sisters: The Woman Question in Rosa Luxemburg’s Life and Work. In F. Jabob, A. Scharenberg, & J. Schütrumpf (Eds.), Rosa Luxemburg: Band 1: Leben und Wirken (pp. 17–45). Büchner-Verlag.

Rosa Luxemburg: revolution and the power of democracy