Rosa Luxemburg

Polish-German Marxist theorist and revolutionary (1871–1919), born in Zamość, in Russian-ruled Poland, into a bourgeois Jewish family, holding a doctorate in economics and law from Zurich — one of the few university options open to women and Jews in Central Europe at the time — with a thesis on Polish industrial development, and, despite a congenital limp that marked her for life, one of the most brilliant and feared Marxist intellectuals and orators of her time. Settled in Berlin, she became a central figure of the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), fiercely confronting both Eduard Bernstein's revisionism, which proposed abandoning revolution for gradual reform, and later the party's support for Germany's entry into the First World War in 1914, a rupture that led her to co-found the Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht. Her most ambitious economic work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), expands and critiques Marxist capitalist theory, arguing that capitalism must continuously expand into non-capitalist economies — through colonial imperialism — to absorb its surplus production and avoid collapse, anticipating in many respects later theories of imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism. In the pamphlet Reform or Revolution? (1899) she argued incisively that gradual reforms within the capitalist system, however useful for improving working-class life, could not by themselves lead to socialism, which required a revolutionary transformation of property relations. At the same time, she maintained a critical and independent stance both toward Leninism — she warned, with unsettling foresight, that the Bolsheviks' suppression of internal democracy would end up generating bureaucratism and tyranny — and toward nationalism, always championing proletarian internationalism. Arrested after the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919, she was brutally murdered by members of the paramilitary Freikorps, her body thrown into a Berlin canal, becoming ever since a martyred symbol of both revolutionary Marxism and socialist feminism.

24 works

• Bericht an den III. Internationalen Sozialistischen Arbeiterkongress
• Briefe aus dem Gefängnis
• Der Achtstundentag auf dem Parteitag
• Die Akkumulation des Kapitals
• Die Revolution in Russland
• Die Theorie und die Praxis
• Die zwei Methoden der Gewerkschaftspolitik
• Eine taktische Frage
• Ermattung oder Kampf?
• Kirche und Sozialismus
• Marokko
• Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften
• Miliz und Militarismus
• Possibilismus und Opportunismus
• Reden auf dem Parteitag der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands zu Hannover
• Reden auf dem Stuttgarter Parteitag der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands
• Rosa Luxemburg An anti-clerical policy of Socialism (1903)
• Rosa Luxemburg Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (1904)
• Rosa Luxemburg Peace Utopias (1911)
• Rosa Luxemburg Riot and Revolution (1906)
• Rosa Luxemburg Stagnation and Progress of Marxism (1903)
• Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus
• Wie entstand die Maifeier?
• Wie weiter?