Rosa Luxemburg (1871 - 1919)
Sun Mar 05, 1871
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Rosa Luxemburg, born on this day in 1871, was a revolutionary Polish Marxist philosopher and economist who was assassinated by the right-wing Freikorps paramilitary alongside her collaborator, Karl Liebknecht.
Luxemburg was born to a Jewish family living in the Russian sector of Poland after the country was partitioned a century earlier. While enrolled in an all-girls' gymnasium in Warsaw, Rosa studied banned Polish texts and was a member of the illegal, leftist Proletariat Party.
Luxemburg was very politically active, and an influential member of many political parties. In succession, she served as a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and, finally, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which she co-founded with Liebknecht.
Among Luxemburg's noted works are "Social Reform or Revolution?" (1900), "The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions" (1906), and "The Accumulation of Capital" (1913).
In 1918-19, Luxemberg publicly supported a violent rebellion against the German state, organizing through the KPD and the Spartacist League. She was captured and summarily executed by the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of World War I veterans. Her body was thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.
Due to her pointed criticism of both Leninist and more moderate social democratic schools of socialism, Luxemburg's legacy is a revolutionary school of socialist thought that exists outside of either tradition.
"Without general elections, without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, without the free battle of opinions, life in every public institution withers away, becomes a caricature of itself, and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor."
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Date: 1871-03-05
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, spartacus-educational.com, www.marxists.org.
- Tags: #Socialism, #Labor, #Marxism, #Birthdays.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org