Unity

From Unity, 28 February 2009

The eagle

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)

by Marion Baur

During the lively debate which followed my talk on Rosa Luxemburg at the Belfast Central Branch’s last meeting, the participants asked for an article in Unity about the founder-member of the German Communist Party who was brutally murdered (beaten to death) by German “elite soldiers” on 15 January 1919.
     I wouldn’t even attempt any kind of detailed biography of Rosa Luxemburg, given the space in this paper; even books of 300 and more pages didn’t do this task justice.
     Here are some key dates and an introduction to a few of the questions asked and answers found or attempted in Belfast last week.
     We opened the evening asking:
     • Who was the woman the German establishment and the Social Democratic leadership feared so much that they had her beaten to death after her arrest?
     • Who was she whose dead body, found four months later in the canal, put the head of police and the Minister of Internal Affairs into such a panic that they went straight to the Social Democratic leader Noske, the “bloodhound against the revolution,” to ask advice on whether to hide her body or to alert the army in order to prevent unrest?
     • Who was the woman whose question “socialism or barbarism?” is one of the most used quotations by revolutionaries today, ninety years after her murder?
     • Who was the woman whose grave in East Berlin was visited by 80,000 people on 15 January 2009, ninety years after her death, sixty years after the end of the barbarism of Nazi Germany, and twenty years after the counter-revolution, the so-called “end of communism”?

Who was Rosa Luxemburg?

She was born on 5 March 1871 in Zamość, Poland (the Russian-occupied part of it at the time). Her father was a Jewish merchant. Both of her parents spoke German as their first language, thus she grew up Polish-speaking and German-speaking, unusual at a time when most Jews used Yiddish.
     A long illness during childhood left her bed-bound for a year, during which she taught herself to read and write and the Russian language.
     In 1884, now living in Warsaw, she was admitted to grammar school. An exceptional pupil, the only criticism her teachers had to voice was that of “a rebellious attitude towards the authorities.” Jewish kids were an absolute rarity at an upper-class grammar school in Poland during those days.
     Her school days were the time of first contact to the illegal group “Proletariat II.” One of the organisation’s leaders, Martin Kasprzak, saw the massive potential of the young woman and introduced her to the writings of Marx and Engels.
     Proletariat II was uncovered by the security forces in 1888, and most of its leaders—Kasprzak included—were slaughtered. Rosa Luxemburg managed to escape, hidden inside a load of hay. She left Poland and went to Zürich, where many revolutionaries from Russia and Poland had taken refuge.
     In 1890 she was delegated to the International Socialist Congress in Paris, where she put before the delegates her famous “no money for militarism and war” resolution. Her opposition against the reformist leaders of the movement, especially Eduard Bernstein, sharpened from this time on.
     1904 was the year of Rosa’s first imprisonment. Many were to follow, when she had to serve three months for her anti-monarchist publications. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1905 she became editor of the daily Red Flag. Back in prison in 1906, her comrades bailed her out, but the authorities put a “restriction on movements” order on her. She ignored this travel ban and went to Finland. There she met Lenin. They tried to analyse the reasons for the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia. From 1907 to the beginning of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg taught at the SPD party school.
     Being one of the few Social Democrats who saw—and campaigned against—war looming, she kept emphasising the need to fight militarism and the warmongering of the German bourgeoisie. This radical attitude, along with her numerous publications against the decay of the SPD into a pro-bourgeois reform party, led to a leading role within the revolutionary wing of the movement, the split in which became inevitable around that time.
     The establishment saw Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck (the first president of the GDR after the Second World War) as the most dangerous revolutionaries during the war. Whilst Social Democrats like Noske were welcome helpers to hold the working class down, Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades were hardly ever out of jail.
     In 1918 the defeat of German imperialism, which came just months after the victorious October Revolution in Russia, and the sharpening class contradictions led to a revolutionary situation. Rosa Luxemburg, just out of prison, took a leading role in the November Revolution. The murderous betrayal of the uprising by the SPD, the incapability of the “independent” Social Democrats to take leadership, made a new revolutionary party a necessity.
     Rosa Luxemburg was one of the delegates at the founding congress of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany).“Now we are back with Marx” was her famous comments after it.
     From this point on, prison was no longer good enough; the hunt for Luxemburg, Pieck (who managed to escape) and Liebknecht began. Rosa Luxemburg was beaten to death after her arrest by members of the elite unit “Kavallerieschützendivision” just two weeks after the founding of the Communist Party of Germany; Karl Liebknecht was killed on the same day.
     One of the complicated questions at the Belfast meeting was that about Rosa Luxemburg being “claimed” by various political forces today. Indeed, both Social Democrats and people who are or were close to the “Fourth International” or were in one or the other way influenced by Leo Trotsky’s theories refer to her.
     The answer isn’t an easy one. I think what matters most to Communists is that, despite her disagreements with Lenin and many other revolutionaries of the time—including Trotsky—Rosa Luxemburg was totally clear about the need for a revolutionary avant-garde of the working class. She left the Social Democrats when it had become obvious that the party was lost for revolution and revolutionaries and helped found the Communist Party. That makes her part of our heritage, not that of people who were and still are trying to doctor the symptoms of a system which is condemned to death.

Lenin on Rosa Luxemburg

“An eagle can dive lower down than a chicken, but never can the chicken reach the heights the eagle reaches. Rosa Luxemburg was wrong on the question of the independence of Poland. She was wrong in 1903 when judging Menshevism, she was wrong on the theory of the accumulation of capital. She was wrong in July 1914 when she supported the unification of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks; she made mistakes in her prison writings in early 1918, though she corrected many of them later. But despite all these mistakes, she was and she will remain an eagle.”

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