Rosa Luxemburg was born on 5 March 1870, at Zamosc, a little town of
Russian Poland, not far from the city of Lublin. She came from a fairly
well-to-do family of Jewish merchants, and soon showed the two
outstanding traits which were to characterise all her life and work: a
high degree of intelligence, and a burning thirst for social justice
which led her, while still a schoolgirl, into the revolutionary camp.
Partly to escape the Russian police, partly to complete her education,
she went to Zurich and studied there the sciences of law and economics.
Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the industrial development of
Poland and showed up the vital integration of Polish industry with the
wider economic system of metropolitan Russia. It was a work not only of
considerable promise, but already of solid and substantial achievement.
Her doctorate won, Rosa Luxemburg looked around for a promising field of
work and decided to go to Germany, whose working-class movement seemed
destined to play a leading part in the future history of international
socialism. She settled there in 1896, and two years later contracted a
formal marriage with a German subject which secured her against the
danger of forcible deportation to Russia. Now, at that moment the German
Social-Democratic Party was in the throes of a serious crisis. In 1899,
Eduard Bernstein published his well-known work _Die Voraussetzungen des
Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie_, which urged the
party to drop its revolutionary jargon and to work henceforth for
tangible social reforms within the given economic set-up, instead of
trying to bring about its final and forcible overthrow. This 'reformism'
or 'revisionism' seemed to Rosa Luxemburg a base as well as a foolish
doctrine, and she published in the same year a pamphlet _Sozialreform
oder Revolution?_ which dealt with Bernstein's ideas in no uncertain
fashion. From this moment onward, she was and remained one of the
acknowledged leaders of the left wing within the German working-class
movement.
The events of the year 1905 gave Rosa Luxemburg a welcome opportunity
to demonstrate that revolution was to her more than a subject of purely
academic interest. As soon as the Russian masses began to move, she
hurried to Warsaw and threw herself into the fray. There followed a
short span of feverish activity, half a year's imprisonment, and,
finally, a return journey to Berlin. The experiences of the Warsaw
rising are reflected in a book entitled _Massenstreik, Partei und
Gewerkschaften_, which was published in 1906. It recommends the general
strike as the most effective weapon in the struggle of the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie.
The International Socialist Congress which met at Stuttgart in 1907
prepared and foreshadowed the sorry history of Rosa Luxemburg's later
life. On that occasion she drafted, together with Lenin, a resolution
which demanded that the workers of the world should make any future war
an opportunity for the destruction of the capitalist system. Unlike so
many others, she stuck to her resolution when, seven years later, the
time of testing came. The result was that she had to spend nearly the
whole of the first World War in jail, either under punishment or in
protective custody. But imprisonment did not mean inactivity. In 1916,
there appeared in Switzerland her book _Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie_,
which assailed the leaders of the German labour party for their
patriotic attitude and called the masses to revolutionary action. The
foundation of the Spartacus League in 1917, the germ cell out of which
the Communist Party of Germany was soon to develop, was vitally
connected with the dissemination of Rosa Luxemburg's aggressive
sentiments.
The collapse of the _Kaiserreich_ on 11 November 1918, gave Rosa
Luxemburg her freedom and an undreamt-of range of opportunities. The two
months that followed must have been more crowded and more colourful than
all her previous life taken together. But the end of her career was
imminent. The fatal Spartacus week, an abortive rising of the Berlin
workers, led on 15 January 1919, to her arrest by a government composed
of former party comrades. During her removal to prison she was attacked
and severely beaten by soldiers belonging to the extreme right, a
treatment which she did not survive. Her body was recovered days later
from a canal.
A type not unlike Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg had her tender and
sentimental side, which comes to the surface in her correspondence,
especially in the _Briefe aus dem Gefaengnis_ printed in 1922. As a
thinker she showed considerable honesty and independence of mind. _The
Accumulation of Capital_, first published in 1913, which is undoubtedly
her finest achievement, reveals her as that rarest of all rare
phenomena--a Marxist critical of Karl Marx.