'Red Rosa' Luxemburg and the making of a revolutionary icon Revolutionary socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered 100 years ago in Berlin. The ‘spontaneous’ character of the German revolution was evident in November 1918. Rosa Luxemburg confronted a different objective situation to that facing the Bolsheviks in Russia. For her theoretical contribution alone, Rosa Luxemburg deserves to stand alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. This putsch lasted for a grand total of 100 hours! We are pleased to republish this article by Peter Taaffe written on the 90th anniversary of their deaths. Indeed, when Lenin was presented with an issue of the SPD paper, ‘Vorwärts’, supporting war credits, he first of all considered it a ‘forgery’ of the German military general staff. The Socialist Party gets no financial support from big business. It is a profoundly interesting analysis of the role of the masses as the driving force, of their ‘spontaneous’ character in the process of revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots or ‘anarchy’ that the agents of capitalism claim.” This is an answer to those who seek to distort the idea of Karl Marx when he spoke about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which in today’s terms, as Luxemburg pointed out, means workers’ democracy. This, unfortunately, includes the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which can be construed as connected to Stalinism. But Rosa Luxemburg, on this anniversary, deserves special attention because of the colossal contribution she made to the understanding of Marxist ideas, theory and their application to the real movement of the working class. Indeed, many revolutions have been made in the teeth of opposition and even sabotage of the leaders of the workers’ own organisations. This proved not to be so, unfortunately, because the initiatives from below by the working class, and the opportunities they generated, were squandered. That month the November Revolution broke out as a working-class response to the horrors of war inflicted upon the world by the Kaiser’s government. Today marks the passing of 100 years since the murders of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919). It was as if both Lenin and Trotsky had been assassinated in Russia in July 1917. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. She continued with possibly the most famous of her quotes: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”. In Lenin’s work of that period and for a number of years following, one does not find a trace of criticism in principle directed against the Bebel-Kautsky tendency.” Indeed, Lenin thought that Luxemburg’s increasing criticisms of Kautsky and the SPD leadership were somewhat exaggerated. This hard-won lesson has still not been embraced by some purists on the “ultra-left” who, for example, failed to draw any distinction whatsoever between the “two capitalists” running for president in 2016 and either stayed home or cast their votes for third, “revolutionary” parties. 3, 18 January 1941, p.3. Others claim Rosa Luxemburg as their own because of her emphasis on the ‘spontaneous role of the working class’ that seems to correspond to an ‘anti-party mood’, particularly amongst the younger generation, which is, in turn, a product of the feeling of revulsion at the bureaucratic heritage of Stalinism and its echoes in the ex-social democratic parties. Like France in 1968, the government “could not get a single poster printed” as the working class paralysed the government and the state. ( Log Out /  Many have attacked Rosa Luxemburg for her ‘false methods’, particularly her alleged lack of understanding of the need for a ‘revolutionary party’ and organisation. Liebknecht achieved fame immediately after the war by leading, with Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacists in the so-called German Revolution against the government of Friedrich Ebert. Moreover, Luxemburg was amongst the very few who recognised the ideological atrophy of German social democracy prior to the First World War. This week marks the centennial of the Jan. 15, 1919, murders of German communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Disgrace of over 4 million children in poverty. Spartakusbund was the anti-war Spartacus League established by Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht after German’s participation in the First World War was supported by Social Democratic Party in1915. ( Log Out /  A ‘constituent assembly’ was posed as an alternative to Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s ideas of a national council of soviets to initiate a workers and farmers’ government. On January 15, 1919, the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by a gang of right-wing army officers. Connected to Rosa Luxemburg’s emphasis on ‘spontaneity’ was the issue of the general strike. They have invariably been indistinguishable politically from the reformist or centrist leaders. The leaders of the French Communist Party and the ‘Socialist’ Federation, rather than seeking victory through a revolutionary programme of workers’ councils and a workers and farmers’ government, lent all their efforts to derailing this magnificent movement. … The complete unanimity of international revolutionary Social Democracy on all major questions of programme and tactics is a most incontrovertible fact.”. IT IS ONLY appropriate, of course, that Klaus Gietinger’s The Murder of Karl Liebknecht. Rosa Luxemburg, as had Lenin and Trotsky, not only refuted Bernstein’s ideas but in an incisive analysis adds to our understanding of capitalism then, and to some extent today, the relationship between reform and revolution (which should not be counterposed to each other from a Marxist point of view) and many other issues. Socialists and communists commemorate them yearly on the second Sunday of January at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin, where they are buried. On this important anniversary, it is vital to look at Luxemburg’s inspirational, revolutionary legacy. For instance, her pamphlet ‘Reform and Revolution’ is not just a simple exposition of the general ideas of Marxism counterposed to reformist, incremental changes to effect socialist change. In opposition to the slogan ‘All power to the soviets’ – the slogan of the Russian revolution – the reaction led by Noske’s Social Democrats mobilised behind the idea of “All power to the people”. There were at least 15,000 full-time officials under the sway of the SPD in the trade unions. This was, in the words of Ruth Fischer, a future leader of the Communist Party of Germany, a “way of life… The individual worker lived in his party, the party penetrated into the workers’ everyday habits. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht continues to play an important role among the German far-left. Lenin conceded that this was a “splendid Marxist work” although he argued against confusing opposition to the First World War, which was imperialist in character, and legitimate wars of national liberation. Wilhelm Canaris, the naval officer who assisted the escape of one of Rosa’s murderers, 20 years later was to command the Abwehr, German military intelligence, under the Nazis. Because of its connotations with Stalinism however, Marxists today, in trying to reach the best workers, do not use language which can give a false idea of what they intend for the future. This led in 1975 to the expropriation of the majority of industry. Such was the approach of Militant, now the Socialist Party, when it worked successfully within the Labour Party, in the 1980s, in Britain. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps(paramilitary units formed of World War I veteran… / She told the poor what life is about, / And so the rich have rubbed her out. So should say the best workers and young people today who have occasion to study her works in preparation for the struggle for socialism. Lenin’s approach was vindicated in the Russian revolution, with the Mensheviks ending up on the other side of the barricades. This was the situation following the Belgian general strike in 1893, called by the Belgian Labour Party with 300,000 workers participating, including left-wing Catholic groups. Apart from in 1907, the SPD seemed to progress remorselessly in electoral contests. Although she was a naturalised German citizen, Luxemburg was considered an ‘outsider’, particularly when she came into conflict with the SPD leadership. Lenin, the great genius of revolution, the man who with Trotsky led the monumental revolution in 1917, died in January 1924 after a long illness. She made mistakes: “Show me someone who never makes a mistake and I will show you a fool.” Yet here is a body of work of which, read even today almost 100 years later, is fresh and relevant – particularly when contrasted to the stale ideas of the tops of the ‘modern’ labour movement. A Marxist Utopian between East and West: Karl Schmückle A Place for Polemic: Audacity, Implosion, and the Politics of Transition A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry This itself is an indication of the speed of events that developed in Germany at this stage. Rosa Luxemburg wurde am 5. Numerous monuments to Luxemburg and Liebknecht have been erected, also streets, schools and public institutions named for them. The issue of leadership and the need for a party is central to an estimation of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work. She wrote: “What proves best the falseness of Bernstein’s theory is that it is in the countries having the greatest development of the famous “means of adaptation” – credit, perfected communications and trusts – that the last crisis (1907-1908) was most violent.” Shades of today’s world economic crisis, particularly as it affects the most debt-soaked economies of the US and Britain? The opportunity of following the example of the Bolsheviks was posed but lost because of the hesitation of the KPD leaders, who were supported in this wrong policy by, among others, Stalin. Im Januar demonstrieren jedes Jahr in Berlin 20.000 Menschen zum Todestag von Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht. On Nov. 9, 1918, Liebknecht proclaimed the “Free Socialist Republic” in Berlin. There were some criticisms both at the time and later that suggested that Luxemburg and her ‘Sparticist’ followers should have immediately split with the SPD leaders, certainly following their betrayal at the outset of the First World War. She wrote that it was necessary “to act on progressives and possibly even liberals, than to act with them”. Main Menu. General Wilhelm Groener, who led the German army, admitted later on: “The officer corps could only cooperate with a government which undertook the struggle against Bolshevism … Ebert [the social-democrat leader] had made his mind up on this … We made an alliance against Bolshevism … There existed no other party which had enough influence upon the masses to enable the re-establishment of a governmental power with the help of the army.” Gradually, concessions to the workers were undermined and a vitriolic campaign against the ‘Bolshevik terror’, chaos, the Jews, and particularly, “bloody Rosa” was unleashed. Trotsky sums up her dilemma: “The most that can be said is that in her historical-philosophical evaluation of the labour movement, the preparatory selection of the vanguard, in comparison with the mass actions that were to be expected, fell too short with Rosa; whereas Lenin – without consoling himself with the miracles of future actions – took the advanced workers and constantly and tirelessly welded them together into firm nuclei, illegally or legally, in the mass organisations or underground, by means of a sharply defined programme.” However, Luxemburg did begin after the revolution of November 1918 her “ardent labour” of assembling such a cadre. On 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the finest brains of the German working class and its most heroic figures, were brutally murdered by the bloodthirsty, defeated German military, backed to the hilt by the cowardly social-democratic leaders Noske and Scheidemann. This was consolidated when he became the first SPD MP to vote against the war. Lenin recognised that there would be opportunist trends within mass parties of the working class but he compared the Mensheviks in Russia not with Kautskyism but with the right-wing revisionism of Bernstein. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed Jan. 15, 1919, by right-wing militiamen. Zwischen 1905 und 1910 verbreiterte sich die Kluf… Title: Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and and Karl Liebknecht Author: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Location: Berlin, Germany Year complete: 1926, destroyed 1933 In 1926, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was commissioned by communist art historian and collector Eduard Fuchs to build a monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two Marxist revolutionaries murdered by right-wing reactionary … His famous aphorism, “The movement is everything, the final goal nothing,” represented an attempt to reconcile the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) with what was an expanding capitalism at that stage.