.ltRosa LuxemburgTimes Library Supplement,9 November 1951ROSA LUXEMBURG, whose main theoretical treatise, The Accumulation of Capital, has just appeared for the first time in an English translation, is by common consent an outstanding figure in the history of revolutionary socialism. Her position is, however, difficult to classify. No single country can claim her; no party - not even the German Communist Party which she helped to found - pays unqualified homage to her memory; her status in the corpus of socialist writers as a Marxist who challenged Marx on a point of economic theory is anomalous. Yet the strength of the impression which she made on her contemporaries and fellow-workers is universally attested. Her unique success lay perhaps in her capacity to combine the spirit of compassion, of indignation at the unmerited sufferings inflicted by a callous social system, which was the ultimate force behind socialism as a crusading doctrine, with a cool and rigorous intellectual analysis of the conditions in which that system flourished and through which it would eventually perish. The fundamental humanitarianism of Rosa Luxemburg's outlook was the source of her strength. In one sense, too, it may have been a source of weakness. For while Rosa Luxemburg reached early in life an intellectual conviction that revolution was necessary and justifiable, and acted on that conviction throughout her career, she never fully faced the element of ruthlessness which seems to enter into every revolution in action. Rosa Luxemburg was the child of a middle-class Jewish family in a small Polish town, where she was born in 1871. She was never physically strong, and some hip disease in childhood left her slightly lame. Her assets, apart from her quick and powerful intelligence, were a beautiful voice and capacity to hold and sway a large audience. She had her schooling in Warsaw - naturally in Russian; and, having become early involved in revolutionary activities, she was smuggled out of Poland at the age of 18 to continue her studies in the university of Zurich. For the next 10 years she led the life of the young international revolutionary in exile. So long as the Tsar reigned, Poland was a barren and dangerous ground for revolutionaries; and from 1898 onwards Rosa Luxemburg was active in Germany, going through a formal marriage ceremony with a German in order to avoid the risk of expulsion. It was the moment when the German Social-Democratic Party was being torn by the controversy over "revisionism" - the campaign of Bernstein and others to "revise" Marxism in the sense of admitting that the aims of the workers could be achieved by reform more effectively than by revolution, by using the machinery of the bourgeois State rather than by seeking to destroy it. Rosa threw herself heart and soul into the defence of Marxism, whole and undefiled by compromise; no other path but revolution could lead the proletariat to its goal. Bourgeois democracy could never become the instrument for the achievement of socialism. Rosa Luxemburg's first important book, Social Reform or Revolution?, which originally appeared as articles in the party Press, was the outcome of this controversy. It was not, however, Rosa Luxemburg's theories which gave her her outstanding place in the socialist movement or accounted for the veneration in which her name was held by a whole generation of German workers. These things she owed to her fervent opposition to war - and, in particular, to the war of 1914. Before Rosa Luxemburg appeared on the scene, the Second International and the parties forming it had never seriously had to face the question of war. At the Paris congress of the International in 1900, Rosa Luxemburg moved a resolution condemning militarism, which was carried unanimously perhaps without much realization of its importance. This was the resolution which first committed "socialist members of parliament" to vote against budgets "for military or naval purposes or for colonial expeditions." It was at that time directed mainly against the French, and was prompted in fact by the recent scandal of Millerand's entry into a bourgeois government. It was, however, already clear that, sooner or later, social-democratic parties would be compelled to define their attitude to wars in which their countries were engaged. It still seemed unthinkable to Rosa Luxemburg and to most consistent and sincere socialists that that attitude could be other than negative. But by the year 1907, when the Second International held its congress in Stuttgart, and war in Europe was already more than a theoretical possibility, the embarrassments of the question had become plain enough. Luxemburg offered an amendment which, after some rather shamefaced opposition from the Germans, was accepted by the congress, and thus became the accepted doctrine of the International. Under this resolution social-democrats were not only to employ every means to prevent war but, should war none the less occur, they were to do their utmost to "utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war" in order to bring about the overthrow of the capitalist order - in everything but name a call to civil war. This drastic resolution was re-voted by each subsequent congress of the Second International down to 1914. Rosa Luxemburg continued to conduct an active campaign on the platform and in the party Press till, early in 1914, she was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for incitement to mutiny. In December, 1914, a single member of the Social-Democratic group in the Reichstag, Karl Liebknecht, registered the first solitary vote against the war budget, and courageously repeated his gesture of protest on several occasions down to 1917 when he was arrested and imprisoned. In 1915 Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and a handful of Left-wing intellectuals began to issue a series of occasional and illicit anti-war pamphlets which they called "the Spartacus letters," and from this the group came to be known as the Spartakusbund. The success of these leaflets revealed the strength of the latent opposition to the war, which increased as the slaughter dragged on without prospect of end or result. In 1916 there was a breakaway within the Social-Democratic Party and the Independent Social-Democratic Party was formed with a programme of bringing the war to an end. The Spartakusbund was a group within the Independent party. But the real difference was that the Spartakists were revolutionaries who, like Lenin, wished to use the war as a means to social revolution, whereas the majority of the Independents were merely opposed to the war, some through revolutionary conviction, some through pacifism, and some through sheer war-weariness - a variety of moods similar to that which inspire the Independent Labour Party in Great Britain. The distinction between Spartakists and Independents mattered little so long as the war continued, but became vital immediately after the armistice. Karl Liebknecht was released in October, 1918, when the armistice negotiations began. Rosa Luxemburg remained in prison till the armistice was actually signed. By that time Germany was in the full flood of revolution. Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies sprang up in all the large centres; and the supreme authority was a Council of People's Commissars, consisting of three Social-Democrats and three Independent Social-Democrats. The creation of a German Communist Party to clinch the proletarian revolution in Germany and join hands with the Russian revolution at once became a burning question. In the mind of that ardent and uncritical tribune of the people, Liebknecht, no shadow of doubt on this question could arise. Rosa Luxemburg seems to have hesitated and wondered whether the mass of the German workers were yet ripe for revolution. But she, too, was carried along with the tide, drafted the programme for the new German Communist Party and was the principal orator at its founding congress in Berlin on the last day of the year 1918. By this time other forces had begun to assert themselves. In the anarchy of the first weeks after the armistice, when rival groups of armed men were constantly clashing and sometimes fighting pitched battles in the streets of Berlin, the Social-Democratic leaders, with the tacit - or not so tacit - support of what was left of the Army command, were gradually asserting their authority; their programme was to restore order, to break the Soviets and hold elections to a national assembly. By the end of the year they had edged the Independents out of the Council of People's Commissars. By this time it had become uncertain who was in real authority - the generals or the commissars. After the end of the year the street fighting grew more intense and concentrated, and gradually changed its character. The Army and the police had regained their confidence; the initiative was in their hands, no longer in that of the revolutionaries; they were out not merely to restore order but to crush their enemies. Among these the Communists were the first, though not the only, victims. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested and murdered a few hours later by their captors in circumstances of the utmost brutality. Their memory was long celebrated by revolutionaries of many countries as martyrs of the revolution. The military and police officers who killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht - and not only they, but the hooligans of more than one party who had clamoured for the blood of the Communist leaders - were the forerunners of the thugs who found the final fulfilment of their mission in Hitler's Germany.
.lc.llWar and Peace: Second world warPower: Revolution.ll.lsWR08:WR08_02SWR10:WR10_03S.ls
