Rosa Luxemburg Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Born in Zamosc, Poland, to assimilated Jewish middle-class parents, activist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) demonstrated remarkable intellectual achievement and a highly rebellious nature from an early age. As a teenager she joined Proletariat, one of the first Polish Marxist groups. Forced to leave Poland in 1889, she enrolled at the University of Zurich and earned a doctorate in political science in 1897. Throughout her career Luxemburg opposed independence for Poland and other countries on the grounds that it was a diversion from the struggle for socialism.

Upon moving to Berlin in 1898, Luxemburg became the leading critic of Eduard Bernstein, leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Marx’s literary executor, over his effort to “revise” Marxism. Although she endured underhanded attacks by some SPD leaders because of her gender and ethnicity, her Reform or Revolution (1900) was soon heralded as a Marxist classic for arguing that the apparent stability of capitalism was a temporary phenomenon. The height of her influence in the Second International (a federation of socialist parties and trade unions) was reached in 1904, when she was closely associated with August Bebel and Karl Kautsky in formulating policy.

Luxemburg followed up her involvement in the 1905 Russian Revolution by applying its lessons to western Europe in The Mass Strike, the Party, and the Trade Unions (1906). This led to her estrangement from the SPD, which became lukewarm about her enthusiasm for revolutionary spontaneity. She openly broke from Kautsky in 1910, when he declined to risk losing electoral support by forcefully opposing imperialism. She also played a central role in debates within Russian Marxism, critiquing Vladimir Lenin’s organizational centralism while supporting the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks when it came to emphasizing the leading role of the proletariat in any forthcoming revolution.

Luxemburg held that imperialism was an inevitable result of capitalism’s tendency toward limitless production regardless of the amount of surplus product that could be consumed by the market. Her Introduction to Political Economy (1907) and The Accumulation of Capital (1913) attempted to show that continued capital accumulation depends on the exploitation of noncapitalist strata. Her detailed analyses in both works of the destruction of precapitalist communal formations in Australia, India, South America, and southern Africa are unique among Marxists of the period.

Luxemburg was actively engaged in the German women’s movement and wrote for several of its publications. Jailed for opposing World War I (1914–1918), she helped organize the antiwar Spartakusbund political group and wrote The Crisis of European Social-democracy (1916) and The Russian Revolution (1922).The latter contained a sharp critique of Lenin and Leon Trotsky for dismissing democracy as a “cumbersome mechanism.” After being freed from jail, she helped found the German Communist Party in December 1918. On January 12, 1919, she was murdered following a failed left-wing revolt against the SPD-led government. Her declaration, as stated in The Russian Revolution, that “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” has made her a beacon for those defending political and economic liberty.

Bibliography:

Hudis, Peter, and Kevin B. Anderson, eds. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader. New York: Monthly Review, 2004.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968.
The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Reform or Revolution? London: Bookmarks, 1989.
The Russian Revolution, and, Lenin or Marxism? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

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