Luxemburg, Rosa

Luxemburg, Rosa (rō`zä lk`səmbrk), 1871–1919, German revolutionary, b. Russian Poland. Her revolutionary activities forced her to flee to Switzerland in 1889, where she became a Marxist. One of the founders of the Polish Socialist party (1892), she formed (1894) a splinter group (later known as the Social Democratic party of Poland and Lithuania). Acquiring German citizenship through marriage, after 1898 she was a leader in the German Social Democratic party (SPD). She opposed Bernstein's moderate socialism, insisting on the overthrow of capitalism. However, she disagreed with Lenin on the composition of the revolutionary classes, while anticipating his formulation on imperialism. She participated in the revolution of 1905 in Russian Poland and was active in the Second International, working with Lenin to demand socialist opposition to war, while using it for revolution. Opposing the SPD's support for the war, she formed the German Spartacus party with Karl Liebknecht. In protective custody during much of the war and released in 1918 upon the outbreak of the German revolution, she aided in the transformation of the Spartacists into the German Communist party and edited its organ, Rote Fahne. Critical of Lenin in his triumph, she foresaw his dictatorship over the proletariat becoming permanent. For their part in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, she and Liebknecht were arrested (Jan., 1919). While being taken to prison they were killed by soldiers.

Bibliography

See her Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. with an introd. by M. A. Waters (1970) and The National Question, ed. and tr. by H. B. Davis (1976); and biographies by J. P. Nettl (1966, abr. ed. 1989), P. Frölich (tr. 1970), S. Bonner (1987), and E. Ettinger (1987).

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Luxemburg, Rosa

Rosa Luxemburg.

(credit: Interfoto/Friedrich Rauch, Munich)

(born March 5, 1871, Zamosc, Pol., Russian Empire—died Jan. 15, 1919, Berlin, Ger.) Polish-born German political radical, intellectual, and author. As a Jew in Russian-controlled Poland, she was drawn early into underground political activism. In 1889 she fled to Zürich, Switz., where she obtained her doctorate. Having become involved in the international socialist movement, in 1892 she cofounded what would become the Polish Communist Party. The Russian Revolution of 1905 convinced her that the world revolution would originate in Russia. She advocated the mass strike as the proletariat's most important tool. Imprisoned in Warsaw for agitation, she then moved to Berlin to teach and write (1907–14). Early in World War I she cofounded the Spartacus League (see Spartacists), and in 1918 she oversaw its transformation into the German Communist Party; she was murdered during the Spartacus Revolt less than a month later. She believed in a democratic path to socialism after a world revolution to overthrow capitalism and opposed what she recognized as Vladimir Ilich Lenin's emerging dictatorship.