Inspirational Quotes by Rosa Luxemburg (German Socialist, Revolutionary)

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919,) born Róza Luksemburg, was a Polish-born German Marxist intellectual and left-wing revolutionary. Also an economist and anti-war activist, she was the figurehead of the failed German workers’ uprisings that followed World War I. Known as ‘Red Rosa,’ Luxemburg was one of the foremost activists and martyrs of the international Communist movement.

Born into a Jewish family in Zamość in Russian Poland, Luxemburg adopted Communism in 1890. She took part in Poland’s underground activities and founded the Polish Social Democratic Party (SPD; later the Polish Communist Party) with the Marxist revolutionary Leo Jogiches.

A German citizen by marriage from 1895, Luxemburg immigrated to Zürich in 1898, where she studied law and political economy. As a political theoretician, she developed a humanitarian Marxist theory and stressing democracy and revolutionary mass action to achieve international socialism. Her primary theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913,) argued that imperialist expansion was necessitated by capitalism’s dependence on a non-capitalist ‘third market.’

Luxemburg moved to Berlin in 1898 and became a leader of the left-wing movement, writing illegally distributed tracts such as Sozialreform Oder Revolution. During World War I, she formed, with the German socialists Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin, the radical left-wing Spartakusbund (Spartacus League,) which grew into the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD, German Communist Party,) and was in prison during most of the war.

After Luxemburg’s release in 1919, she took part in an abortive uprising. By order of the SPD chancellor Friedrich Ebert, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were tortured and murdered by the right-wing militia Freikorps. Her body remained missing for four months until it was found floating in a canal.

University of Leeds’s John Peter Nettl wrote Rosa Luxemburg (2 vols., 1966.)

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