Rosa Luxemburg

Biography

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in Zamość, in Russian-ruled Poland, into a secular, assimilated Jewish family that soon moved to Warsaw. As a schoolgirl she joined clandestine socialist circles linked to the Proletariat party, and in 1889, threatened with arrest, she was smuggled out of the country to Zurich. She studied at the University of Zurich, first natural sciences and then law and political economy, and in 1897 took a doctorate with a thesis on the industrial development of Poland. With Leo Jogiches and other exiles she founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland in 1893, a party that rejected Polish independence in favour of a common revolution with Russian workers.

A marriage of convenience gave her German citizenship, and in 1898 she moved to Berlin and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? made her the leading critic of Eduard Bernstein's reformism on the party's left. During the 1905 Russian Revolution she travelled to Warsaw on false papers, was arrested in March 1906 and held for four months, an experience that shaped her theory of the mass strike. From 1907 to 1914 she taught political economy at the SPD's party school in Berlin, and in 1913 she published The Accumulation of Capital, her account of imperialism.

When the SPD voted for war credits in August 1914, she and Karl Liebknecht organised the opposition group that became the Spartacus League. She spent most of the war in prison, where she wrote the Junius Pamphlet and a critique of Bolshevik rule. Released in November 1918 during the German Revolution, she edited Die Rote Fahne and helped found the Communist Party of Germany at the turn of 1919. After the Spartacist uprising in Berlin was crushed, she and Liebknecht were captured on 15 January 1919 and murdered by soldiers of a government-backed Freikorps unit, and her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal.