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
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) became a revolutionary activist while still a schoolgirl in Warsaw. At that time Poland was divided into three parts, ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria. Warsaw was Russian-ruled. In 1889, Luxemburg left Poland to avoid imprisonment, and went to study in Zurich (Switzerland), one of the few universities in Europe which then offered equal opportunities to women. Many other revolutionary-minded Russian and Polish students were in Zurich. In 1893 Luxemburg and three comrades – Leo Jogiches, Julian Marchlewski, and Adolf Warszawski – founded a new Polish Marxist party there, splitting from the main Polish Socialist Party (PPS) because of its nationalist ideas. Luxemburg’s party, initially tiny, would eventually win over a big part of the PPS, after 1917, to become the Communist Party of Poland, while PPS leader Josef Pilsudski evolved into a bourgeois dictator. In 1898 Luxemburg moved to Germany. She quickly became a well-known leader of the German socialist p
