The Adventures of Red Rosa
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa was the youngest of five children, born to a Jewish family on the 5th of March 1871 in Poland, which was under the control of Tsarists Russia at the time. Rosa became politicised at an early age — when she was 10, after the Russian Tsar was assassinated, the Jewish population were falsely blamed leading to Pogroms — widespread attacks on Jewish people — across Poland.
She became politically active at the age of 15, when she joined the Polish Proletariat Party — one of her first actions was to help organise a general strike of workers — this was illegal and the Tsarist Authorities came down hard, sentencing four of the leaders to death and making the party illegal, but Rosa and the other party members kept meeting in secret. She was a very smart girl and an avid reader. She did very well in her studies at school, but her school refused to give her the “gold medal for achievement” because of her “rebellious tendencies”!
When Rosa was 19 she had to flee Poland to avoid being arrested for her political activities with underground revolutionary groups. She also wanted to continue her studies at University, and at that time in the Russian Empire this was forbidden for women, so she persuaded a priest to smuggle her to Switzerland, hidden under straw on the back of a cart, by telling him a story that she was running away from home to marry a Catholic man, and that her parents didn’t approve!
At Zurich University she studied philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics — her time there gave her the opportunity to meet other thinkers and radicals, as well as travelling to Paris and Berlin, where she attended socialist political meetings and conferences. Berlin seemed to be the center of political activity at the time, so she decided that was where she could have an influence. When Rosa lived there, women were not permitted to vote or hold political office, so in order to affect change she had to use her writing, her public speaking and her organizing to influence people — she became known as a prolific writer and a convincing public speaker. She believed that everyone — workers, women, all minorities, should have equal rights in society, but that the only way to bring this about was through getting rid of the existing order. But she also believed that it was impossibly to control and dictate the outcome of such a revolution, and in attempting to do so would crush it. She believed that revolution had to be both spontaneous and continuous.
“It’s the form of my writing that no longer satisfies me. In my “soul” a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions. It breaks them by the power of ideas and strong conviction. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.”
Her outspoken radicalism made her a number of enemies among the more moderate Socialists in the Social Democratic party of Germany, who wanted to effect change through electoral politics, but she also made some life long friends and allies — one of her closest was fellow revolutionary and suffragette, Clara Zetkin. She was staunchly anti-war — when the outbreak of war looked increasingly likely leading up to World War 1, she called for various direct actions to try and prevent it, including a general strike — this again put her at odds with the centrist party establishment that had agreed a truce — Burgfrieden — with the Imperial government of Germany, where they promised not to strike during the war. This was too much for Rosa and Clara. After getting arrested and jailed for anti war activism and campaigning, they formed the Spartacus League (named after the famous slave-liberating Thracian gladiator who opposed the Romans) a Marxist revolutionary group that was militantly anti-war. They produced and distributed anti war pamphlets, which was illegal under the Empire’s anti-sedition laws. Rosa was in prison for much of this time for again trying to organise a general strike to end the war, but her friends and comrades managed to help smuggle out her articles and publish them illegally. While in prison, she wrote prolifically — as well as her producing some of her more famous political polemics in this period, her letters reveal an equal empathy and love for humanity and nature alike. Once, looking out her cell window, she saw some Romanian buffalo, being used as beast of burden by the German Army. Writing to her good friend Sophie Liebknecht, describing their sorry and abused state, she wrote “I found myself weeping their tears”. In another letter to her friend, fellow activist and journalist, Mathilde Wurm, berating her for appealing to identity politics, she wrote:
I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. … Oh that “sublime stillness of eternity,” in which so many cries of anguish have faded away unheard, they resound within me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.
The war for Germany did come to an end in November 1918, when, following a mutiny of sailors in the German High Seas Fleet, a general strike did spread across Germany, eventually ending the German Empire, to be replaced by the Wiemar Republic when Rosa’s old political party, the Social Democratic Party, formed Government. The new government was an electoral parliamentary democracy, but Rosa’s group, the Spartacus League, felt that they had sold out their revolutionary principles by not going far enough — they wanted a further decentralisation and distribution of democracy in the form of workers councils, a transformation of the economic system, and a much broader redistribution of property. As such, the Spartacus League continues to agitate against the new government, trying to destabilize them, culminating in an uprising and attempted overthrow of the government in January 1919. While Rosa didn’t initially agree with this action, once it was underway she put her full support behind it.
“the most revolutionary act is and forever remains ‘to say loudly what is’”
The uprising failed, and was crushed by government forces. On January 14th 1919, Rosa, along Karl Liebknecht, another leader of the Spartacus League, were captured by members of an anti-revolutionary peoples militia, and handed over to the Freicorps — a far right ultra-nationalist paramilitary group, many of whom would eventually form the core of the Nazi party. The Freicorps conspired to make sure that Rosa and Karl would never make it to trial — when they left the hotel they were being held in before transportation to the jail, members of the Freicorps assaulted Rosa and Karl — Karl survived the beating but was shot later trying to escape, but Rosa was killed during the assault, her assailants then dumped her body in the river.
“Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!
Many of the causes that Rosa fought for started to be realised during her lifetime — at the time of her death, women were given the vote and the right to hold political office in Germany, with similar gains occurring across the globe — Europe was becoming more democratic post WW1, with significant progress achieved with regards to workers rights. For a moment it seemed as if her dream of democratic socialism in Europe was on the cusp of being achieved, a decentralized democratization of society, work and the economy. In her writings she showed remarkable prescience — as well as anticipating the slide into Totalitarianism and Autocracy of the Soviet Union and later, China, she also predicted the rise of far right reactionary movements, she wrote that economic growth based on speculation was unstable and would lead to the destruction of credit and increased job precarity — which is what occured in 2008, and she wrote that the need of capitalism to expand and find new markets would result in the inevitable absorption and destruction of non-capitalist societies, and environmental degradation and collapse. In her view, humanity had a choice — Socialism or Barbarism.
And now Red Rosa has disappeared,
Where she lies nobody knows.
To the poor the truth she taught
The rich hunted and out of this world she was brought.
Bertholt Brecht — Epitaph
