18 December 2006: who was Rosa Luxemburg?

Karl Marx taught that workers can take over the running of society. Frederick Engels turned Marx's ideas into a system. Of the next generation, Rosa Luxemburg did more than anyone else to apply their ideas in the rapidly-developing societies of Western Europe. 

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, to a Jewish family living in small-town Poland. Aged just sixteen, she joined a Marxist party called Proletariat. In 1889, she fled into exile. She then spent most of her adult life in Germany, the home of the world's largest socialist party, the Social Democratic Party or SPD.

Following Engels' death in 1893, the SPD was divided by an argument, which called into question the most basic ideas of Marxism. Already by this time, the party was growing rapidly and had many representatives elected to parliament. The party also had the backing of the unions. It was possible to see a time when the SPD would have a majority of the vote. So could the party bring socialism into power without a revolution?

One of Engels' former allies, a man called Edward Bernstein, began to argue that Marx had been wrong. Capitalism was not prone to crisis, he said, it was a peaceful system. The working class was tending to become richer and more content. There would be no more wars. Marx had been wrong to oppose imperialism, he argued. If Britain possessed an empire, then Germany should capture colonies of her own. From Bernstein comes the tradition of parliamentary socialism, which is so powerful today. 

Luxemburg's response to Bernstein was published in the form of a pamphlet Reform or Revolution? She denied that capitalism could carry on forever without breaking down. She rejected the idea that social change could be passed through parliament, like other laws. Economic processes were laying the basis for a different society. Yet political change took place more slowly. Capital was becoming more aggressive. Competition was intensified: the competition between workers and bosses, and also the competition between states, which was pushing the world towards war.

Bernstein had said that even though he no longer believed in revolution he was still a socialist: the movement was the only thing that mattered to him. Luxemburg replied that without a desire to prepare the working-class for power, then even the largest number of socialist MPs would find themselves protecting not challenging the system. Without the goal of socialism, the movement would achieve nothing.

Luxemburg and her allies won the debate, but only temporarily. Bernstein remained a leading member of the SPD. Luxemburg knew that her party was becoming more cautious and more bureaucratic. She looked for new forces to change the balance of the argument. The year 1902 saw a general strike in Belgium. Three years later, the first Russian Revolution began, when troops fired on a march of loyal workers.

Rosa Luxemburg arrived in Warsaw to take part in the revolutionary movement. She was jailed there but escaped, returning to Germany to describe her experiences in another pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Unions.

Luxemburg's message was that workers will always fight, and at times they will fight in huge numbers. Mass strikes are neither fought just for political goals (against dictatorship), nor just for economic goals (for something like increased wages). In any revolutionary movement, the distance between the two types of demand would recede. Workers needed both bread and freedom. In a revolution, the two sets of demands would interact, strengthening each other along the way.

Because the general strike raised both economic and political demands, Luxemburg argued, so this was the best tactic to revive the SPD and restore it to its original revolutionary ideals.

In 1907, Rosa Luxemburg took part in the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International. One motion was tabled expressing opposition to war. Luxemburg moved an amendment that if the efforts to save peace failed, and war broke out, then it would be the duty of the workers to rise against the system. The socialist parties voted that the only alternative to war was revolution. But in their deeds, the great majority of the socialist parties were moving towards an acceptance of the coming war.

Europe was increasingly divided into two great blocs: with France and Russia supporting England, and Austria and Turkey allied to Germany. War did break out, in 1914. Far from opposing the war, the majority of the socialist parties backed it. Rosa Luxemburg was jailed for inciting soldiers to mutiny. She spent most of the next four years in prison.

The outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1917 transformed the political situation across Europe. Luxemburg was liberated from jail by the revolution, and she founded a German Communist Party.

November 1918 witnessed the outbreak of revolution in Berlin. The socialists declared a Republic. In the capital city, the revolution was based on an alliance of Communists, revolutionary trade unionists, and some Independent Socialists. The socialists succeeded in having one of their number appointed to clean up the police force.

In January 1919 the socialist police chief of Berlin was sacked. The left, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, responded with insurrection. The government, led by members of the SPD, put down the revolt. Their soldiers killed the leaders of the revolt and dumped Luxemburg's body in a canal.

For all her adult life, Luxemburg had fought for working-class power. When the chance came, she did everything to make it real. In the final moments, as she had predicted, the parliamentary socialists did not support the revolution, not partially, even cautiously. They hated the revolution. They fought it, bathing it in blood.

Rosa Luxemburg lived fighting for revolution. She died in its service.