While the workers of Madrid initially demonstrated for arms and their socialist leaders refused to supply them, the workers of Barcelona – freed from the inhibitions towards ‘leaders’ – rose ‘spontaneously and smashed Franco’s forces within 48 hours. 'Red Rosa' Luxemburg and the making of a revolutionary icon Revolutionary socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered 100 years ago in Berlin. 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. Numerous monuments to Luxemburg and Liebknecht have been erected, also streets, schools and public institutions named for them. 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. The issue of leadership and the need for a party is central to an estimation of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work. Moreover, Luxemburg posed very clearly the ideological tasks: “The choice today is not between democracy and dictatorship. “Karl, Rosa and Co., “Not one of them is there, “Proletarians.” (Cited in Nettl, p. 484) Although they were aware of the danger, Luxemburg and Liebknecht refused to leave Berlin and go into hiding. Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht - commemorating 100 years. Moreover, she herself built up a very ‘rigid, independent organisation’, that is a party, with her co-worker Leo Jogiches in Poland. Become a People's World sustainer today. Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht (* 13. 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. Luxemburg spent much of World War I in prison, meanwhile writing her 'Spartakusbriefe' and 'Die Russisce Revolution', where she welcomed the October Revolution as a precursor of world revolution. Not only that the structure was never built, but also that it was never built in Berlin, confronts us with a double absence of which we are reminded on the centenary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; the radical promises of a communism beyond what the USSR became and the as-of-yet-unsuccessful 1918/1919 German revolutionary movement. August 1871 in Leipzig; † 15. 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 … In this sense, she was more farsighted even than Lenin, who passionately absorbed in Russian affairs and who saw the SPD as the ‘model’ for all the parties of the Second International, and its leaders, such as Kautsky, as teachers. Karl Liebknecht. However, her revulsion at the ossified character of the SPD and its ‘centralism’ meant that she did, on occasion, ‘bend the stick too far’ the other way. Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht (German: [ˈliːpknɛçt] (); 13 August 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a German socialist politician and theorist, originally of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and later a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany, which split from the SPD after World War I. It was as if both Lenin and Trotsky had been assassinated in Russia in July 1917. ( Log Out /  The question which history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy for the dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy in a socialist sense of the term. Lenin’s approach was vindicated in the Russian revolution, with the Mensheviks ending up on the other side of the barricades. She wrote that it was necessary “to act on progressives and possibly even liberals, than to act with them”. Rosa Luxemburg war die bedeutendste unter den Sozialisten, die in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung wirkten. In fact, the erstwhile followers of Luxemburg in the newly-formed Communist Party made ultra-left mistakes in not initially supporting and strengthening the mass actions against Kapp. At one stage, accompanied by Clara Zetkin, she said to Bebel: “Yes, you can write our epitaph: ‘Here lie the last two men of German social democracy’.” She castigated the SPD’s trailing after middle-class leaders in an excellent aphorism appropriate to those who support coalitionism today. Luxemburg wrote: “It was always possible to walk out of small sects or small coteries, and, if one does not want to stay there, to apply oneself to building new sects and new coteries. Luxemburg hatte am 7. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Among them were Stalin and Stalinists in the past. This was their means of undermining the German ‘soviets’. Even the creation before this of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which came from a split in the SPD in 1917, arose not from any conscious policy of its leaders – including Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, as well as the arch-revisionist Bernstein. Von Anfang an war Proletariat der revolutionären Bewegung in Russland voraus. On the railways, in the factories and offices, the workers assisted the uprising to overthrow capitalism and establish a democratic workers’ state. Moreover, Luxemburg was amongst the very few who recognised the ideological atrophy of German social democracy prior to the First World War. Spartacist leaders and KPD pioneers, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The growing opposition to the war, however, widened the circle of support and contacts for Luxemburg and the Sparticist group. It was virtually “a state within a state”, with over one million members in 1914, 90 daily newspapers, 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, managers, commercial directors and representatives. Socialists and communists commemorate them yearly on the second Sunday of January at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin, where they are buried. This proved not to be so, unfortunately, because the initiatives from below by the working class, and the opportunities they generated, were squandered. This led in 1975 to the expropriation of the majority of industry. Together with Karl Liebknecht, Luxem-burg published Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), campaigned for social revolution, and, at the turn of 1918/1919, became one of the founding members of the KPD. The same idea is expressed in our call for a socialist, planned economy, organised on the basis of workers’ democracy. They were both born in the same year, 1871, and died on the same day, their names necessarily linked in history. In Berlin, thousands of people have taken part in commemorations of the life and work of the German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. There was also the tumultuous history of the Marxist and workers’ movement in Russia, conditioned by the experience of the struggle against Narodya Volya (People’s Will), the ideas of terrorism, the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the first world war, etc. Other luminaries of the Nazi regime were similarly ‘blooded’ at this time for the future murderous activities in their own country and throughout Europe. Their murders, carried out by the soldier Otto Runge, were decisive in the defeat of the German revolution but were also indissolubly linked to the victory of Hitler and the Nazis 14 years later. She hailed the work of Lenin and Trotsky. But this was combined with the smothering of this very power, an underestimation by the SPD leaders, indeed a growing hostility to the revolutionary possibilities which would inevitability break out at some future date. The German revolution not only overthrew the Kaiser but posed the germ of a workers government through the institution of a network of workers and sailors’ councils on the lines of the Russian revolution. She was critical of Lenin’s attempt to create in Russia a democratic party but one that was ‘centralised’. 90th anniversary of murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Her book written in prison in 1918 – in which she criticised the Bolshevik regime – was a product of isolation, which she was persuaded not to publish and did not pursue later when released from prison. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht Workers Power - Monday, June 09, 2014 95 years ago, on the night of January 15 1919, two great socialist revolutionaries died. Given the isolation of Berlin from the rest of the country at that stage, a setback or a defeat was inevitable. With the initial exception of Liebknecht and later Otto Rühle, they were the only two out of 110 SPD deputies who voted against. They were both born in the same year, 1871, and died on the same day, their names necessarily linked in history. There have been struck down from our ranks two leaders whose names will be for ever entered in the great book of the proletarian revolution: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin organised for future battles, including the revolution. Yet even with this stunning display of the power of the working class, it did not lead to a socialist overturn, precisely because of the absence of a mass party and leadership capable of mobilising the masses and establishing an alternative democratic workers’ state. In her writings, Luxemburg leveled pointed critiques not only at moderate socialism but also at the new Leninist revolutionary model in Bolshevik Russia. Emotion Coaching; Free Resources; Blog; Contact Only the day before, Noske and Liebknecht, Ebert and Rosa Luxemburg, were still members of the one and only “united” German Social-Democratic Party. The leaders of the SPD, along with the trade union leaders, had become accustomed to compromise and negotiations within the framework of rising capitalism. Together with other Spartacists Liebknecht campaigned openly for revolution, forming the German Communist Party at the end of December 1918. She continued with possibly the most famous of her quotes: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”. 2017 – The 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, No the capitalist EU – Yes to a Socialist Europe, Don’t give taxpayers’ money to UKIP and Tory EU campaigners, An Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, Eight billionaires own as much wealth as half the planet – the real face of capitalism, Discussing Biden Win With American Socialists, #EndSARSCov Solidarity Protest In Coventry, Solidarity with NUJ Strike at Bullivant Media. / She told the poor what life is about, / And so the rich have rubbed her out. Basing herself on the mass strikes of the Russian revolution, she nevertheless adopted a certain passive and fatalistic approach on this issue. Even Lenin, while proposing a split from the Second International and the formation of the Third International, following the August 1914 debacle, was even prepared to amend his position if events did not work out as he envisaged. Rosa Luxemburg increasingly came into collision with the SPD machine, whose stultifying conservative effect she contrasted to the social explosions in the first Russian revolution of 1905-07. Lenin systematically trained and organised the best workers in Russia in implacable opposition to capitalism and its shadows in the labour movement. Margarethe von Trotha’s outstanding 1986 film ‘Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg’ is available online with English subtitles. Karl Liebknecht was born in August 1871 and died in January 1919. Rosa Luxemburg and Jogiches could not be faulted for seeking to organise within the social democracy for as long as possible and, for that matter, the USPD later. Karl Liebknecht studied law and political economy in Leipzig. This spontaneous eruption of the masses, moreover, flew in the face of everything that the social-democratic leaders wanted or desired. We honour Karl and Rosa, like all of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in trying to get rid of this capitalist system which offers us nothing but war, poverty and destruction. We do not have a fetish about the general strike. 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. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were both murdered by soldiers after the Spartacist uprising was crushed in 1919. Zwischen 1905 und 1910 verbreiterte sich die Kluf… Socialist Appeal, 18 January 1941 Eugene Varlin Karl Liebknecht: Revolutionist The “Democrats” Murdered Him – And Opened the Road to Hitler . The organisational conclusion from this was of a tactical rather than a principled character. Luxembourg, who fled as a Teenager because of their socialist activities from the Russian-occupied Poland, had a doctorate in Zurich, before 1898 moved to Berlin, where she is … This was seen in the revolutionary events of 1936 in Spain. She criticised the “clinging mists of parliamentary cretinism”, what would be called “electoralism” at the present time. Communists will lead a march to the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in the east of the city and … Today in history – the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. ( Log Out /  It was this aspect that Lenin subjected to criticism in his comments on Rosa Luxemburg’s’ Junius’ pamphlet, published in 1915. That lasted right up to the German social democrats’ infamous vote in favour of war credits on 4 August 1914. In today’s era, a general strike, ‘generally’, is an ‘either-or’ issue where an alternative workers’ government is implicit in the situation. She sought unity between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia. Many have attacked Rosa Luxemburg for her ‘false methods’, particularly her alleged lack of understanding of the need for a ‘revolutionary party’ and organisation. On this important anniversary, it is vital to look at Luxemburg’s inspirational, revolutionary legacy. Today marks the passing of 100 years since the murders of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919). Trotsky pointed out: “Lenin considered Kautsky as his teacher and stressed this everywhere he could. If the Social Democratic-ordained murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg were not tragedy enough, the lessons learned were poorly applied. 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. angetreten war, das Proletariat auf Grundlage eines Marxistischen Programms zu organisieren und eine sozialistische Gesellschaft gegen die Interessen der Großgrundbesitzer und Kapit… In this period, there were instances where governments took fright at the general strike at its very outset, without provoking the masses to open class conflict, and made concessions. Wenige Tage nach der blutigen Niederschlagung des Januaraufstands verhafteten am 15. Heiko Khoo is a columnist with China.org.cn. Rosa Luxemburg confronted a different objective situation to that facing the Bolsheviks in Russia. 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. This week marks the anniversary of the Jan. 15, 1919, murders of German communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. 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. With the collapse of the German government in October 1918 Liebknecht was granted political amnesty by Max von Baden. 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. Indeed, many revolutions have been made in the teeth of opposition and even sabotage of the leaders of the workers’ own organisations. Home; About; Services Menu Toggle. Jhd. Rosa Luxemburg was the youngest of five children of a lower middle-class Jewish family in Russian-ruled Poland. 90th anniversary of murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Following the 1917 Russian revolution, Rosa Luxemburg did come close to Bolshevism subsequently and became part of its international trend, as did Trotsky. In 1915, they broke from the SPD and co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League (Spartakusbund). Indeed, her whole life within the SPD was bent towards rescuing the revolutionary kernel within this organisation from reformism and centrism. This would prove fatal. A second revolutionary wave, called the Spartacist uprising, swept Berlin that month. Das heutige Polen wurde damals vom russischen Zaren beherrscht. Luxemburg and Liebknecht had previously founded and led the Spartacist League – a Marxist revolutionary movement established toward the end of WWI which would lay the roots of the establishment of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on January 1, 1919. The German revolution of 1918-1924 also witnessed general strikes and partial attempts in this direction. This culminated in the catastrophe of the SPD deputies in the Reichstag (parliament) – with the original single exception of Karl Liebknecht – voting for war credits for German imperialism. But this became all the greater for the working class with the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. This was partly conditioned by historical experience until then, in which ‘partial general strike action’ featured in the struggles of the working class in the decades prior to the First World War. They were both born in the same year, 1871, and died on the same day, their names necessarily linked in history. Although she was a naturalised German citizen, Luxemburg was considered an ‘outsider’, particularly when she came into conflict with the SPD leadership. This putsch lasted for a grand total of 100 hours! The issue of the general strike is of exceptional importance for Marxists. This split was neither prepared nor desired by these ‘oppositionists’. Take control of the means of news production. Unfortunately, the muddled centrist lefts, whose party grew enormously as the social-democratic leaders lost support, let slip the opportunity to create an all-Germany council movement. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were true revolutionary heroes, and their ideas and legacy will be remembered down the ages. This was a summing up of the first Russian revolution from which Luxemburg drew both political and organisational conclusions. Apart from in 1907, the SPD seemed to progress remorselessly in electoral contests. She was also wrong on the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (even in July 1914 supporting the opportunists who stood for the ‘unity’ between them) and, as Lenin pointed out, also on the economic ‘theory of accumulation’. Indeed, despite this, Luxemburg’s courage and fortitude shines through when one reads the speeches and criticisms that she made of the party leadership over years. Their Spartacus League published The Red Flag (Die Rote Fahne) newspaper, demanding amnesty for all political prisoners and the abolition of capital punishment. Freikorps troops captured Luxemburg and Liebknecht without an arrest warrant and summarily executed them. People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. Despite the urging of those like Paul Levi to leave Berlin, both Luxemburg and Liebknecht remained in the city, with the terrible consequences that followed. So starben Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg In der Nacht vom 15. auf den 16. But a firmly-organised nucleus is essential in preparing for the future. Here lie some of the differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist politician and theorist, originally of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and later a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany, which split from the SPD after World War I. The murders unleash a wave of violent protests throughout the country which lasted until May 1919, and whose repression by the military resulted in several thousand deaths. Such stages are reached in all revolutions when the working class sees its gains snatched back by the capitalists and comes out onto the streets; the Russian workers in the July Days of 1917 and the May Days in Catalonia in 1937 during the Spanish revolution. The SWP’s German organisation (Linksruck, now Marx 21) pursues a similar policy within Die Linke (the Left party) today as the left boot of the party and consequently will not gain substantially. 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. 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. Luxemburg was shot and her body thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. This was because there was no coherent and sufficiently influential mass party and leadership capable of drawing all the threads together and establishing a democratic workers’ state. Januar 1919 ermordeten Freikorps-Soldaten die Anführer des Spartakus-Aufstandes. Liebknecht was killed in the Spartacus Revolt of January Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed Jan. 15, 1919, by right-wing militiamen. For instance, on the issue of the Third International he wrote: “The immediate future will show whether conditions have already ripened for the formation of a new, Marxist International… If they have not, it will show that a more or less prolonged evolution is needed for this purging. The same charge – only with more justification – could be levelled at those left and even Marxist currents that work or have worked in broad formations, sometimes in new parties. Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg, die beiden Köpfe der KPD, hingegen entzogen sich der Festnahme zunächst. This week marks the centennial of the Jan. 15, 1919, murders of German communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He is best known for his opposition to the war in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919. The SPD particularly feared the impact of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. 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. Only malicious enemies of the heroic traditions of the Bolshevik party circulated this material after her death in an attempt to divide Luxemburg from Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the great work of the Russian revolution. Luxemburg and Liebknecht are in the pantheon of the Marxists greats. This ignited a social revolution which swept through Catalonia and Aragon to the gates of Madrid, with four fifths of Spain initially in the hands of the working class. Liebknecht, the son of one of the SPD’s central founders, had a prominent position as a left and anti-militarist before 1914. Doch beide blieben bei ihrer aufrührerischen Propaganda. But if the German revolution had triumphed then history would not, in all probability, have known these figures or the horrors of fascism. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps(paramilitary units formed of World War I veteran… The Kapp putsch in March 1920, when the director of agriculture of Prussia, who represented the Junkers and highly-placed imperial civil servants, took power with the support of the generals, was met with one of the most complete general strikes in history. The opposite was the case in 1923 in Germany. If we are to successfully change society then we need to study previous socialist movements to understand the lessons for today. The situation following the First World War – a period of revolution and counter-revolution – was entirely different to this, with the general strike posing more sharply the question of power. The main charge that can be made against Luxemburg, however, is that she did not sufficiently organise a clearly delineated trend against both the right of the SPD and the centrists of Kautsky. “It is probable that Gustav Noske had a hand in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,” she told the party faithful in November at an event to discuss the 1919 revolt. On this day (15th Jan) in 1919 the two main leaders of the revolutionary movement in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered. Though she and Liebknecht considered it premature, they felt duty-bound to support it and through their newspaper urged the rebels to occupy offices of the liberal (but counterrevolutionary) press. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Wilhelm Pieck; the leaders of the German Communist Party, were arrested and taken in for questioning at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. Moreover, hindsight is wonderful when dealing with real historical problems. They have invariably been indistinguishable politically from the reformist or centrist leaders. His continuing opposition, and that of Rosa, who also insisted that working people should never massacre each other, meant imprisonment for both till they were freed by the revolution. Similarly, in Portugal, in 1974, a revolution not only swept away the Caetano dictatorship but meant that, in its first period, an absolute majority of votes to those standing in elections under a socialist or communist banner. (Image: Permission given by Alexander Fiebrandt, grandchild of the photographer Herbert Fiebrandt/Public domain) For her theoretical contribution alone, Rosa Luxemburg deserves to stand alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Indeed, Lenin, in his eagerness to create mass communist parties in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, was sometimes a little impatient and premature in his suggestions for splitting from social-democratic organisations. Facts about Rosa Luxemburg 2: Spartakusbund. Significant labor actions and uprisings took place in several German cities and states, where temporary “Soviet republics” were established, but the last of them, in Bavaria, was put down in early May 1919. The events of the German revolution were dealt with in Socialism Today (Issue 123, November 2008) and The Socialist (Issue 555, 4 November 2008). Liebknecht came from a political background in that his father was a leading socialist in Germany … Rosa Luxemburg confronted an entirely different situation, as a minority, and somewhat isolated in a ‘legal’ mass party with all the attributes described above. A general strike, on a much bigger scale, took place in Russia, in October 1905, on which Rosa Luxemburg comments. Rosa Luxemburg was released from prison on 9 November 1918 and immediately did all she could to support the No-vember Revolution. Die SPD war eine sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, die im 19. Karl Liebknecht, German Social Democrat, who, with Rosa Luxemburg and other radicals, founded the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a Berlin underground group that became the Communist Party of Germany, dedicated to a socialist revolution. Such was the approach of Militant, now the Socialist Party, when it worked successfully within the Labour Party, in the 1980s, in Britain. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and her co-leader Karl Liebknecht are killed in Berlin by soldiers who were suppressing the uprising, and their bodies were thrown into a canal. He proposed a rapid split of the communists from the French Socialist Party in 1920 but changed his mind after Alfred Rosmer, in Moscow during that year, suggested that the Marxists would need more time to bring over the majority to the stand of the Communist (Third) International. From December 29-31, 1918, they took part in a joint congress of the Spartacus League, independent socialists, and the International Communists of Germany (IKD), that led to the foundation on January 1, 1919, of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) under their leadership. This itself is an indication of the speed of events that developed in Germany at this stage. If the opportunity is lost, it may not recur for a long time, and the working class can suffer a defeat.