Life
Poland
Rosa Luxemburg was natural Rosalia Luxenburg in March 5, 1870 or 1871 in Zamość near Lublin in the then Russian-controlled Congress Poland. She was natural to the Jewish family. Sources differ in the month of her birth - she gave her birth month when 1871 on her CV for Zürich University, however her 1887 Abitur certificate says she was 17, where outbreak she was natural around 1870. She was a fifth tyke of the Jewish wood trader/timber trader Eliasz Luxemburg III & his married woman Line (maiden title: Löwenstein). Genus rosthe experienced a incubation defect & was physically disabled everthing her life.

Fallowing her personal moved to Warsaw, Rosthe attended a girl's Gymnasium there from 1880. Possibly around people early times she was the member of the "Proletariat", the left-wing Polish person, from either 1886. A Working class experienced been founded inside 1882, twenty years before a Russian workers' parties, & began polish off by organising the general strike. Following, quadruplet of its leaders were kill & a person was broken higher. Occasionally of its members managed to meet secretly; Genus rosa joined one of these groups.

Around 1887 Rosa passed her Abitur with flying colours. When fleeing to Switzerland from imminent detention inside 1889, she attended Zurich University, along with more socialist numbers like Anatoli Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches. She exposed philosophy, history, politics, economics and mathematics simultaneously. Her specialised cases were Staatswissenschaft (a science of forms of state), the Middle Ages and economic and stock index exchange crises.

Around 1890, Bismarck's laws against social democracy were annulled and a SPD was legally able to benefit seats in the Reichstag. However despite their radical talk, a socialist parliamentarian focused extra & supplementary in gaining farther parliamentary rights & in poop wealth.

Rosa Luxemburg, to the contrary, stuck to her radical Marxist lesson. Within 1893, along with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski (alias Julius Karski), she founded a newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza ("The Workers' Cause"), con to the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland may exclusively occur across revolutions within Germany, Austria, and Russia. She maintained that a struggle should become against capitalism itself, and non for an independent Poland. Luxemburg denied the right of self-determination for nations under socialism, which later driven tensions by having Vladimir Lenin.

By owning Leo Jogiches, she co-founded the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which was later to get a Socialist Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) by merging with Lithuania's social popular organisation. Despite sleep around Germany for virtually all of her fully grown life, Luxemburg was to remain the chief theorist of a Polish Social Democrats, & led the person in a partnership by having Jogiches, its main organiser.

Germany
Within 1898, Luxemburg obtained German citizenship by her marriage to Gustav Lübeck, and moved to Berlin. She became active in the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), where she sharply defined a border between her faction & a Revisionism Theory of Eduard Bernstein, attacking him in 1899 in a folder entitled "Social reform or revolution?". Luxemburg's grasp of rhetoric soon made her the leading interpreter for the person. Overall, she denounced a more and more conforming parliamentary course of the SPD in the face of the progressively perceptible likeliness of war. Luxemburg insisted that a critical difference between capital and labour could only become countered whenever a working class took above power & radical changes in the wholly environment of production methods occurred. She wanted a Revisionists to leave a SPD. This did non choose place, however at least Karl Kautsky's person leadership saved Marxism on a programme, possibly whenever his independent aim was to improve a total of seats the party held in the Reichstag.

From either 1900, Rosa Luxemburg voiced her opinions on todays economic & social problems within various news story tons on top Europe. Her attacks in German militarism and imperialism became heftier as she foresaw a approach of war, & she tried to persuade a SPD to steer in the paired counsel. Luxemburg wanted to organise the general strike to rouse a workers into solidarity & block war, however the person leadership refused, & within 1910 she split off from either Kautsky.

Between 1904 and 1906 her work was interrupted by trey sentence for political activities.

Even so, Luxemburg saved higher her political activities; within 1907 she took part in the Russian Social Democrats' Fifth Person Day inside London, where she met Vladimir Lenin. At the 2nd International (Socialist) Congress, within Stuttgart, she suggested a guide, which was accepted, that totally European workers' parties should unite in their tries to prevent a war.

At this period, Luxemburg began teaching Marxism & Economics at the SPD person expert training videos centre around Berlin. One of her students was a in a future leader of the SPD, the 1st president of the Weimar Republic Friedrich Ebert.

Within 1912 her position as a representative of the SPD took Luxemburg to European Socialists congresses such as that inside Paris. Along sustaining a French socialist Jean Jaurès, she ensured that in case of war breaking out, a European workers' parties were committed to the general strike. Whilst a crisis in the Balkans came to a head within 1914, war seemed even other inevitable & she organised demonstrations (e.g. inside Frankfurt) calling for conscientious objection to military service & refusal to obey orders. Because of this, she was accused of "enciting to disobedience against the authorities' law and order" and sentenced to a year within prison. Her detention did non lead off directly, nonetheless, thus she was breathe to participate witharound the meeting of the Socialist Professional in July. She was devastated to recognise there that a workers' parties' nationalism was stronger than their class consciousness.

In July 28, World War I started when Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. In August 3 1914 the German Empire declared war against Russia. A below day, a Reichstag nem con agreed to finance a war by war bonds. Whole SPD representatives voted in favour this bill & the person as well agreed to a cease-fire ("Burgfrieden") sustaining a food and drug administration, promising to avoid any strikes in the period of the war. For Luxemburg, this was the home catastrophe which possibly led her to briefly contemplate suicide: Revisionism, which she had fought against since 1899, had triumphed, & war get on its way.

Together using Karl Liebknecht and some others like Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, Luxemburg created the Internationale group on 5 August 1914. This became a Spartacist League on January 1, 1916. It produced the total of illegal pamphlets sign-language "Spartacus" after the Thracian gladiator who tried to yours free! slaves from either a Romans. Luxemburg herself took on the title "Junius" fallowing Lucius Junius Brutus, who was said to keep around founded a Roman Republic.

A class action rejected a SPD's 'ceasefire' sustaining a German government under Kaiser Wilhelm II in the question of endorsing Globe War We, & fought against it vehemently, trying to lead back towards the general strike. Following, every bit early when 28 June 1916 Luxemburg was sentenced to two and a half years' imprisonment, at virtually a equivalent instance when Karl Liebknecht. When you took her stay in the pen she was resettled twice, 1st to Poznań and then to Wrócław. In the period of this instance she wrote many articles, using the title "Junius", which her friends smuggled out & published illicitly. These involved The Russian Revolution, which criticised a Bolsheviks on the total of scores, & cannily warned of the danger that a dictatorship would develop under Bolshevik rule. (She withal continued to require the "dictatorship of the proletariat" on the Bolshevik model.) It was in this context that she famously wrote ""Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" (Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.) Another publication, in June 1916, was Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie (The crisis of social democracy).

In 1917, when the USA joined the war, the Spartacist League affiliated to the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), another group of anti-war ex-SPD members, founded by Karl Kautsky. On 9 November 1918 the USPD were catapulted into power as rulers of the new republic alongside the SPD, after the abdication of the Kaiser. This followed an uprising (the German revolution) which had begun in Kiel on 4 November 1918, when forty thousand sailors and marines took over the port in protest at a proposed engagement with the British Navy by German Naval Command, despite the fact it was clear that the war had been lost. By 8 November, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils had seized most of western Germany, laying the foundations for the so-called Räterepublik ("Council Republic"), modelled on the system of Soviets seen in Russia in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Luxemburg was released from prison in Wrócław on 8 November and Liebknecht had also recently been freed and reorganised the Spartacus League. Together they now produced Die rote Fahne (the Red Flag) newspaper. In one of the first articles she wrote, Luxemburg demanded an amnesty for all political prisoners and called for an end to capital punishment.

However, the united front disintegrated in late December 1918 as the USPD left the coalition in protest at perceived SPD compromises with the (capitalist) status quo. On 1 January 1919 the Spartacus League together with other socialist and communist groups (including the International Communists of Germany, IKD) created the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), above all on the initiative of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg supported the KPD's involvement in the national constitutional assembly which ultimately was to found the Weimar Republic; but she was outvoted. In January a second revolutionary wave swept Germany, which some of the KPD leadership, including Luxemburg, was reluctant to encourage, foreseeing it ending badly (though others sought to exploit it). In response, the Social Democratic leader, Friedrich Ebert employed nationalist militia, the Freikorps, to suppress the uprising. Both Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured in Berlin by the Freikorps on 15 January 1919 and murdered on the same day. Luxemburg was battered to death with rifle butts and thrown into a nearby river and Liebknecht was shot in the back of the head then deposited as an unknown body in a nearby mortuary. Hundreds of KPD members were similarly killed, and the councils suppressed.

Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization
The central feature of her thought was the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, in which spontaneity can be considered akin to a "grass roots" (or even anarchistic) approach, and organisation to a more bureaucratic or party-institutional approach to the class struggle. According to this Dialectic, spontaneity and organization are not two separable or even separate things, but rather different moments of the same process, so that one cannot exist without the other. These theoretical insights arise from the elementary and spontaneous class struggle; and through these insights, the class struggle develops to a higher level.

"A working classes within each united states simply study to fight in the course of their struggles... Social democracy.. is lone a advance guard of the proletariat, a little piece of the aggregate working people; blood from either either their blood, & flesh from their flesh. Social democracy tries & finds a ways, & particular catchword, of the workers' struggle lone in the course of the development of this struggle, & profits directions for the way send on across this struggle alone." (In a Revolutionary Hour: What Next?, Collected Works 1.2, p. 554)

Spontaneity is always mediated by organization, just as organization must be mediated by spontaneity. Nothing could be more wrong than to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of holding the idea of an abstract "spontaneism".

She developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization under the influence of a wave of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unlike the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International, she did not regard organization as the product of scientific-theoretic insight into historical imperatives, but rather as the product of the struggles of the working classes.

"Social democracy is only a embodiment of the modern working class's class war, the struggle which is caused by the consciousness of its have historic results. A people come actually their have leaders, dialectically creating their have development run. A thomas thomas more that social democracy develops, grows, & becomes stronger, a more a enlightened people of workers might require their have destinies, a leadership of their movement, & a determination of its counsel into their have mitts. & when a entire social democracy movement is sole a conscious advance guard of the propertyless class movement, which in the words of the Communist Manifesto represent in each lone moment of a struggle a lasting interests of liberation & the unfair class action interests of the men vis à vis a interests of a movement when whole, then inside a social democracy its leaders come a thomas sir thomas sir thomas more mighty, a more influential, a more clearly & consciously it produce themselves just a mouthpiece of the might & strain of the enlightened people, but the offices of the objective laws of the class movement." (The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, p. 280)

and:

"A modern propertyless class doesn't carry out its struggle based on data from a project placed call at occasionally book or even theory; the modern workers' struggle occurs as the portion of history, a a portion of social progress, & midmost of history, midmost of progress, midmost of the fight, i personally see how else i personally must fight... That's exactly what is commendable all about it, that's exactly how come this prodigious piece of culture, inside a modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that a neat population of a working people 1st forge from either either either their have consciousness, from their have belief, & potentially from their have understanding the weapons of their have liberation." (The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions, Collected Works 2, p. 465)

Criticism of the October Revolution
In an article published just before the October Revolution, Luxemburg characterized the Russian February Revolution of 1917 as a revolution of the proletariat, and said that the liberal bourgeois were pushed to movement by the display of proletarian power. The task of the Russian proletariat was now to end the imperialist world war, in addition to struggling against the imperialist bourgeois. The imperialist world war made Russia ripe for a socialist revolution. Therefore "a German labour come besides ... posed the wonder of honour, & the super fateful wonder." (ibid., p. 245)

Her sharp criticism of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks was lessened insofar as she explained the errors of the revolution and of the Bolsheviks with the "complete failure of the international labor" (On the Russian Revolution, GW 4, p. 334). Despite all the criticism, it remains to the Bolsheviks' credit that they dared to execute the revolution at all.

"In that erupting of a sociable divide in the super lap of bourgeois society, in that international deepening & heightening of class antagonism lies the historical merit of Sovietism, & by using this deed — as universally within heavy historic modems — a particular mistakes & errors of the Bolsheviks disappear while forgoing trace. (Fragment in War, National Questions, & Revolution, Collected Works Four, p. 366)

When a October Revolution, it becomes a "historic responsibility" of a German workers to carry out the revolution for themselves, & thereby prevent the war (A Historic Responsibility, GW Four, p. 374). After a revolution also broke out in Germany in November, of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg immediately began agitating for a social revolution:

"The abolition of the rule of capital, the realization of a socialist social order — this, and nothing less, is the historical theme of the present revolution. It is a formidable undertaking, and one that will not be accomplished in the blink of an eye just by the issuing of a few decrees from above. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port." (A Beginning, Collected Works Four, p. 397)

A social revolution demands that power is in the mitts of the people, in the mitts of the workers' & soldiers' councils. This is the program of the revolution. These are, still, an extended way from either either soldier — from the "Guards of the Reaction" (Gendarmen five hundred Reaktion) — to todays proletarian.

The Role of the Party
A person, a advance guard of a working class, has exclusively to give a people of workers a insight that socialism is the means to yours free! themselves from either exploitation, & put forth river the socialist revolution. A internal contradictions of capitalist economy, a antagonism between capital & labor, might keep a revolution occupied. A revolution may, still, educate a people, & will make subversive away from the children:

"History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat. They will ensure that the "little horde" of the most slandered and persecuted becomes, step by step, that which their world view destines them: the struggling and victorious mass of the revolutionary, socialist proletariat." (A National Conference of the Spartacist League, Collected Works Four, p. 478)

A project of a person is just to educate the backwards people towards independence, to enable the children to require across power themselves. These are a teaching of a subjective element of the Revolution, that is the consciousness of the working class of their historic mission, which the Person might achieve. A revolution itself may merely become caused through the working class. The Person that speaks for the workers, 'is' the two - for instance around Parliaments - & acts instead of the babies, might make their way bogged down & itself get an instrument of the Counterrevolution.

Last words: belief in the revolution
Rosa Luxemburg's go known words, written on the evening of her execution, were all about her belief in the people, & in the inevitableness of revolution:

"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I will be!"
(Choose reigns inside Berlin, Collected Works Four, p. 536)

Quotes

Probably her best known quotation is "Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters" (Freiheit ist immer Freiheit 500 Andersdenkenden, unremarkably cited when "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently"). This is the portion of a big quote: "Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken." "Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations. Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength."

Memorials

A East German government named Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz & its U-Bahn station on the U2 line in Berlin's historic city center, Mitte, after her. A Volksbühne (''People's Theatre) sits in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. A title has been left unchanged when reunion.

An poetic Memorial for Rosa Luxemburg (Epitaph (1919)) was written by Bertolt Brecht, and placed to music by Kurt Weill in 1928 (The Berlin Requiem):

Works
Gesammelte Werke ("Collected Works"), Fivesome volumes, Berlin 1970–1975. Gesammelte Briefe ("Collected Letters"), Sise volumes, Berlin 1982–1997. Politische Schriften ("Political Writings"''), emended & foreword by Ossip K. Flechtheim, Three volumes, Frankfurt am Main 1966 ff.